Hamilton, Donald - Matt Helm 14 (5 page)

           
"Staying where?"

           
"With sonic kids. You saw them.
I was coming alone, but when I heard they were heading down here I kind of
invited myself along, it made a better cover. They've got a converted panel
truck to sleep in, over at the trailer court, amid one of the boys borrowed his
daddy's boat. Sometimes we take our blankets in the boat and sleep on a beach
somewhere. Smoke pot. Shoot speed and drop acid. Sniff cocaine. Get high on
heroin. Copulate like animals. Real orgies, man." She grimaced. "Actually
all they really use, besides a little marijuana, is beer."

           
"How much do they know?" I
asked.

           
"Nothing."

           
"How did you work that?"

           
"I'm an ecological nut, man.
Specifically, I'm a bird-watcher concerned about the fate of our feathered
friends in this polluted world. I flip over frigate birds and blue-footed
boobies and cormorants and pelicans and stuff. Did you know that the brown
pelican is an endangered species, just like the hawks and eagles, all because
of DDT? The eggs get so fragile they squash or something." She drew a long
breath. "I shouldn't try to be funny about it. It isn't funny."

           
"No," I said. "So
you're a birdwatcher. What does it get you?"

           
"The privilege of crawling
around rocks with binoculars-I was on a hill across the bay when you went
racing out to. . . to meet him. I saw the whole thing through the glasses. And
sometime I get this terrible compulsion to go out in the roughest weather to
see what the birds are up to-"

           
"At night?"

           
"Tonight I talked them into
going out to one of the bird islands. You know, those big rocks covered with
guano just outside the harbor. We shone the boat's spotlight on it so I could
see the birds roosting there. Actually. . . actually I figured that if he'd
managed to stay afloat, with the wind the way it was, that's where he'd most
likely come ashore. But he wasn't there."

           
I said, "With a partner like
you, I might as well give up homicide as a career. I drown them; you give them
artificial respiration. 'What's the use?"

           
"That isn't very funny,
either," she said coldly. "Anyway, he wasn't there. And I'm not your
partner, Mr. Helm. I'm just a messenger girl."

           
I nodded slowly.
"Armageddon," I said. "
Götterdammerung
.
At the time he switched the identification signals, just recently, I thought
Mac was just getting fancy with the vocabulary, but it could be he was trying
to tell us something. Like that there's something big and desperate going
on." I hesitated. "And the gent who's making like a fish out there
was sent by somebody who wanted me put out of action-me and how many others,
Nicki
? And how many messengers like you have been waiting
around to deliver Mac's word to the guys like me whom that mysterious somebody
would like to have eliminated?"

           
Martha Borden licked her pale lips.
"You underrate yourself, Mr. Helm."

           
"What does that mean?"

           
"As I said, for some reason he
has a lot of faith in you. There are some others, yes, but I have the only
action message, to be delivered to you. You're supposed to take it from there,
once you've been in touch by phone. It all depends on you."

           
"What does?"

           
"I wish I knew," she said.
"I wish I knew; and I wish I could believe he'd picked the right man for
the job, whatever it is!"

           
In the morning, I got over to the
marina about nine to find that I'd missed all the excitement-which was exactly
what I'd hoped for and why I'd taken my time packing and eating. I'd figured
that with daylight and a calm sea something might be found, and I preferred not
to be around when it was.

           
Now I learned that an early-rising
fisherman, leaving the harbor at dawn, had spotted an object washed up on one
of the guano-covered rocks off the entrance, and had swung over to investigate.
He'd come racing back to report a dead man. The police had brought in the body,
sent it into
Guaymas
, and interrogated its discoverer
at considerable length. A khaki-clad officer was waiting to talk with me,
although I wasn't considered particularly important. All I'd found was a boat.

           
Once again, I told where I'd found
it, and how I'd done my best to search for the owner in spite of the lousy
weather conditions. I was thanked for my trouble and instructed to go on about
my business, so I drove over to the trailer parked in the nearby lot, hitched
it onto the station wagon, and backed it down the launching ramp into the
water. Then I got my boat and ran it over there. With the help of a couple of
dockside characters, who earned a US buck apiece for their labors, I eventually
got it onto the trailer. The main trouble, I guess, was that I wasn't used to
cranking boats onto trailers; but there was also the problem caused by the
complicated design of the little craft's bottom: a puzzle of grooves, ridges,
and
sponsons
. You had to get her placed exactly right
or the various rollers and supports just wouldn't fit.

           
After lashing things down, I drove
over to the nearby freshwater hose. I was rinsing the salt off the motor when
Martha Borden appeared from the direction of the trailer court, dressed as she
had been the night before, except that she was barefooted. Apparently the
ragged sneakers had been a concession to the formality of the Posada San
Carlos. She was carrying a bulging rucksack and a pair of big Japanese
binoculars-at least I figured they were Japanese from the beat-up,
cardboard-looking case. They've licked the problem of optical glass over there,
but they still have a lot to learn about leather.

           
I said, "Well, they found him,
just about where you guessed he'd wind up. He must have drifted a little more
slowly than you figured, that's all."

           
She looked at me for a moment and
licked her unpainted lips. "Dead?"

           
"Very."

           
"And it doesn't bother you a
bit?"

           
I said, "Sure, it bothers me. I
get the shakes every time I think about how it could have been me."

           
"Damn you," she said.
"Where do you want me to put this junk?"

           
"You're coming with me?"

           
"You know I am."

           
I guess I had known it, at that.
"Toss your gear in the back of the station wagon," I said.

           
"Then, if you want to be
helpful, you can climb up into the boat-use the trailer fender for a step-amid
grab this hose and rinse things oil a bit, particularly the aluminum trim, so
it won't corrode. I was going to have a professional job done, but it's getting
late and we'd better not waste the time. You'll find a sponge up forward. I've
got to go up to the office and take care of the bill."

           
Twenty minutes later we were on our
way, with the official blessings of the marina lady and the police. The paved
two-lane road followed the coast for a few miles to an intersection, where a
right turn would have taken us to
Guaymas
and points
south. I turned left instead, towards
Hermosillo
,
Nogales
, and the
US
border.

           
There's not much between
Guaymas
and
Hermosillo
, and for that matter there's only a little
more between
Hermosillo
and
Nogales
. As we gathered speed across the empty,
semi-desert landscape, the girl beside me squirmed a bit, tugged at her pants,
and adjusted her jersey over her unconfined breasts in a gingerly sort of way:
she'd managed to get herself pretty wet, hosing down the boat. Not that it
mattered.' In that climate she'd be dry shortly, and it wasn't as if she had a
pair of sharply creased slacks to worry about, or a crisply ironed blouse, or
an expensive, nicely waved hairdo. I suppose in a way it was a relief to get
away from such conventional concerns.

           
"Too much
air-conditioning?" I asked politely.

           
"No, it feels good." She
hesitated. "I've got a list for you, you know."

           
"I figured you had something.
Where is it?"

           
"It's memorized. He didn't want
me carrying anything on paper. That's why I had to come along."

           
"Sure," I said. "When
do I get a reading?"

           
"I can tell you the first name
now. There's a woman called Lorna staying at the ranch temporarily. Ostensibly
she's resting up between assignments; actually she's there for protection,
waiting for word from you."

           
"And just what am I supposed to
do with the lady once I've got her?"

           
"I don't know," Martha
said. "That will be up to you, after you've talked with
Washington
."

           
I made a face. "God, aren't we
mysterious! Lorna. She's a tough one, I've heard. Won't take orders from any
man. Except Mac."

           
"Why should she? Why should a
woman have to work under a man if she's as good as a man?"

           
I said, "Well, it's the
customary reproductive position, but I understand there are others."

           
Martha gave me a withering glance.
"Funny!"

           
I grinned. "There you sit,
wearing a man's zip-up-the-front pants and a man's hairdo, giving me that
poor-downtrodden-women line. Just what do you think would happen to me if I
started wandering around the countryside in a woman's skirt with my hair clear
down my back? What would happen to any man who tried it? You know damn well
we'd be locked up as transvestite perverts so fast it would make your head
swim. Hell, we poor men can't let our hair grow even a little without half the
cops in the country trying to bash in our heads, but you ladies can cut it all
off any time you feel like it and nobody bats an eye. Which sex was it you said
was being discriminated against?" She gave me another scorching look,
obviously unimpressed by my argument. Well, maybe it wasn't much of an
argument. I asked, "What's Lorna's real name?"

           
"I don't know if it's her real
name or not, but she's calling herself Helen Holt."

           
"And judging by her reputation,
I don't guess we'll get to call her Nellie for short," I said wryly.
"What does she look like?"

           
"About my height, five-eight,
but thinner, say one-twenty. About thirty. She's supposed to be kind of
handsome, if you like the lean and bony type. Brown hair, greenish eyes."
Martha glanced at me sideways. "You really don't know? You're not just
testing me again?"

           
"That's right," I said.
"We're normally kept apart as much as possible, and told as little as
possible about each other. That way nobody betrays anybody."

           
I kept the heavy rig rolling
northwards as fast as the narrow highway permitted. It got a little tricky
meeting or passing the big Mexican trucks, mostly christened in the local
fashion.

           
One trucker with a literary turn of
mind had named his big diesel tractor Moby Dick; another had painted Adios
Amor
across his massive front bumper, presumably after a
traumatic affair of the heart. We stopped for lunch in
Hermosillo
and reached the border early in the
afternoon.

           
Here, everything came to a stop
while our friendly customs people welcomed us back to our native land with an
interminable search of both the station wagon and the boat. At last, they even
got a dog and boosted him into the boat-all eighty pounds of him-to sniff out
whatever they might have overlooked, which turned out to be nothing at all. The
dog looked as if he didn't appreciate the vital importance of his task and
would rather have been sleeping in the sun or chasing rabbits. Well, dogs have
a lot of sense.

           
As we drove away from there, I
glanced at my watch. It read a few minutes after three-thirty. I passed up
three public telephones and settled for the fourth, at a filling station where
I also took the opportunity to tank up with
US
gas.

           
"Here I go," I said to the
girl.

           
"Remember, call the office, not
the special number."

           
"Yes, ma'am," I said.
"I may be senior as hell, but my memory isn't failing me quite yet."

           
At that, it took me a second or two,
once I was in the booth, to remember the office number.

           
Agents of my stratospheric seniority
don't use it very often. We generally call Mac direct when we need
instructions. I finally dredged the figures out of the sludge at the bottom of
my mind, gave them to the operator, and fed enough coins into the machine to play
the right music for her. Normally, I'd have reversed the charges, but in this
case I had a hunch it was better not to announce who was calling. Mac had
wanted to demonstrate something, and I figured I had better find out what it
was before I started tossing around names and identifications.

           
I stood there waiting for the
circuits to operate, and watching the girl get out of the car and head for the
restroom. Suddenly a voice was speaking in my ear, a female voice with a
professional telephone-girl lilt.

           
"
Federal
Information
Center
," the voice said. I said nothing for a
moment, and the girl spoke a little less liltingly, almost sharply: "
Federal
Information
Center
!"

           
I hung up slowly. I needed a moment
to digest what I'd just heard.