Hamilton, Donald - Matt Helm 14 (7 page)

           
I said, "Only now he seems to
have resigned and headed for
Oklahoma
on a private mission of his own. What
happened recently in
Fort Adams
,
Oklahoma
, Borden?"

           
"You must have heard-"

           
"Why make me say it again? I
haven't read a paper or listened to a radio for three weeks on purpose. Tell
me."

           
"Well," she said,
"well, it was another of those riots, at a small educational institution
called
Fort
Adams
State
University
. The police and deputies opened fire, and
three students were killed."

           
"I see," I said slowly.

           
"Why did you want to
know?" Martha asked curiously. "Has it got something to do with
Carl?"

           
"It's got a lot to do with
Carl. One of the kids who got shot was his and he's running amok.

           
My current orders are to do
something about it, immediately if not instantly." I frowned at the
four-lane highway sliding towards me in the bright
Arizona
sunshine. "However, I think since
we're so close to the ranch, we'd better go have a talk with Lorna first."

           
The ranch is supposed to be
absolutely safe, a place where even the most unpopular agent, sought by
platoons of professional rub-out men of assorted hostile nationalities, can
relax and rest, secure in the knowledge that nobody can reach him. This means,
of course, that you don't just drive up to the gate and blow your horn when you
want in.

           
I stopped in
Tucson
to make the necessary phone call. I got the
conditional all-clear, meaning that I could proceed along a specified route out
of town, not necessarily in the right direction, until, at a certain specified
point, I passed a parked ear. The car would indicate, by its open door, that my
clearance had been confirmed and I was free to head for my destination in the
desolate country west of town. If the door of the vehicle was closed, I'd have
to spend a day trying to shake whoever had been spotted tailing me, and call
again tomorrow.

           
When I reached it, it wasn't a car
but a pickup truck, but that was a permissible variation. Its hood was up and
the driver was performing an invisible and probably unnecessary operation on
its insides. The door on the driver's side was open. 1 drove past and kept
going.

           
At last Martha stirred uneasily and
glanced at me. "This isn't the way to the ranch, is it?" she said.
"I've never been there, but it's west of
Tucson
, isn't it? We're heading kind of south and
east, aren't we?"

           
"That's right," I said.
"Have you had any training, Borden?"

           
"Why . . . why, not very much,
yet. Why do you ask?"

           
"There's a mirror on your door
but you haven't even glanced at it once. We've had a tall since about twenty
miles north of
Nogales
." When she started to turn her head to look back, I said,
"That's pretty poor technique, too. Not that it matters here, you can't
see out the rear window and they can't see in due to that junior-grade ocean
liner we have rolling along behind, but it's best to get in the habit of doing
things right. Use the mirror if you want to look."

           
"But who is it? Who'd want to
follow us?"

           
"Who'd want to shoot at me
yesterday?" I asked dryly. "All I know is that it's a white Ford
Falcon with
Arizona
plates, kind of old and nondescript, the sort of car nobody looks at
twice. Let's hope it's just what it seems, and nobody's stuffed any surprises
under the hood. They probably haven't. They probably figure anything with four
wheels and a rubber band can keep up with us, the load we're dragging. We
hope."

           
"I.. . don't understand."

           
I glanced at her impatiently; she
was really pretty slow. I said, "Look, doll, that pickup truck gave us the
all-clear, right? He sent us on through to the ranch, in spite of the fact that
we've got a tail on us nobody who was really looking could have missed!"

           
"I still don't
understand!" she protested. "What are you driving at?"

           
"It smells," I said.
"If you've got company trailing along behind, you just don't get cleared
to that place. Hell, that's exactly what all the monkey business is supposed to
prevent. But we were cleared, tail and all. 1 think we'd better go on the
assumption that something's awfully wrong inside that fancy fence, out there
west of
Tucson
, that's all wired up with bells and
whistles and closed-circuit TV. I think we'd better figure that there's a
reception committee waiting for us, and that it's not just a bunch of friendly
doctors and nurses and trainers concerned with nothing but our welfare. And the
boys astern, well, I think we'd better assume they're a pair of sheepdogs
assigned to herd us into the right pen and make sure we don't go astray between
here and there."

           
The girl beside me shook her head
sharply. "You're imagining things; you must be! From what I've heard, the
ranch is the last place in the world where anybody could-"

           
"The last," I said,
"or the first. The one spot I might drive up to, dumb and happy and
unprepared for trouble."

           
"You mean . . . you mean you
really think somebody has gone so far as to take the place over, just to set a
trap for you?" She shook her head once more, unbelievingly. "Aren't
you getting delusions of grandeur? Why would anybody consider you that
important?"

           
I said, "We don't know what
came first, the takeover or the trap. Maybe they'd already moved in on the
ranch for other reasons-maybe they were after Lorna-and when I called, they
just decided to let me walk into their arms, a kind of bonus. As for my
importance, a certain gent in
Washington
considered me important enough to send you
to me with passwords and secret lists and stuff, remember? And somebody
considers me important enough to be shot, and I've got a pair of very
persistent shadows astern. Until I find out why all this is happening, I'm
going to be the most paranoid character you ever met, seeing murderers amid
conspirators behind every greasewood bush in Arizona..

           
"What is it?"

           
I was watching the left-hand mirror
as I drove. I said, "It looks as if our friends back there figure I've
gone far enough in the wrong direction. Obviously, I'm planning to pass up the
opportunity to attend their ranch barbecue as the guest of honor. Now, since
I'm being so unsociable, something
drastic's
got to
be done about me and they're just the boys to do it. At least they seem to
think they are." We were pretty far out of the city now, and you lose
civilization fast in that part of the country. I looked approvingly at the
endless, empty landscape studded with sinister-looking dark rocks and weirdly
shaped cacti. I said, "Isn't that a lovely hunk of real estate, for people
in our situation?"

           
"What do you mean? It's so
bleak and barren it scares me. There's absolutely nothing there."

           
"That," I said, "is
exactly what I mean, doll. Hang on, now. Here they come. Let's see what they
want."

           
It was a dirt road, but reasonably
wide, as they are out there where all it takes to make a road is a bulldozer or
grader and a man to run it. When it washes out, the once or twice a year it
rains, they just call the guy with the blade and he runs the route again. The
little white car was coming up fast in the mirror. I had plenty of room to give
it plenty of room, and I did.

           
"Kneel beside me facing aft,
Borden," I said. "Watch them for me. We'll see what they have in
mind. We'll give them the benefit of the doubt, first, but if you see a gun
aimed this way, holler and duck."

           
They were pretty childish about it.
I mean, I was tooling damn near forty feet of rig, at least three tons total,
along that primitive road at a good clip. They put their little compact right
alongside that onrushing mass of metal and fiberglass, just as if they didn't
have good sense....

           
"The man in the right hand seat
has a gun!"

           
"Here we go," I said.
"Hang on."

           
I put my right foot all the way
down. The big, lazy, 454-cubic-inch engine kicked into second gear and went
sluggishly to work, like a sleepy elephant. It didn't have any sudden, exciting
urges, but it did have some power if you were willing to wait for it. The
little white car stopped gaining and just hung there, approximately level with
my trailer hitch.

           
In the mirror, I could see the
strained face of the driver. I knew he was doing his best to push the pedal
through the firewall, as the sickening realization came to him that a lifetime
of TV-watching had just led him badly astray. On TV, the guys with the guns
just drive up alongside the guys without and start shooting. If they hit, the
other car obligingly goes off the road in a harmless direction, but some
telepathy-or just plain common sense-was telling the driver behind me that this
wasn't going to happen here. First of all, he wasn't going to make it
alongside; and if a bullet did hit me, he sensed I was fully prepared to use my
last second of consciousness and my last ounce of strength to dump my whole big
outfit right into his lap.

           
The man beside him raised the gun
but didn't shoot. At least he was that bright. It was an ordinary .38, as far
as I could make out in the mirror, and the ballistics of that cartridge aren't
sufficient to drive a bullet through car metal and safety glass at the sharp
angle I was carefully maintaining. We thundered down the wide dirt road side by
side. The driver got the little Ford up to sixty-five, and then seventy, at
which point either his nerve or his power ran out. I held the big rig steady
right beside him. I saw him give up and glance over his shoulder to see what
his chances were of braking hard and getting out from under.

           
"Matt, slow down, there's a
curve. . . ."

           
"I see it," I said.

           
It was what I'd been waiting for. It
was a nice, sweeping right-hander with a bunch of the jagged lava rocks out in
the desert beyond it. I held the speed to the last possible moment and hit the
brakes when the other man did, staying right with him. Nobody was going to do
any violent braking in that dirt. The curve was on top of us. I let up on the
brakes and got onto the accelerator once more, judiciously, powering through
the bend and taking the whole road to do it, sliding left and shutting the door
on the little sedan.

           
I was too busy to see what happened
to it.

           
The station wagon and trailer came
around reluctantly. At the last moment the trailer swung out and hooked a wheel
in the shallow outside ditch and I thought I'd lost it, but it came back again,
slashing back and forth across the road behind us like the tail of a giant dog.
Then it was rolling straight once more, and we had it made.

           
"Report," I said, letting
the speed drop gradually to safer levels. I got no answer. "Damn it,
Borden, report!" I snapped, still too busy to look around.

           
"You. . . you killed
them!"

           
"Details, damn it!"

           
"They went off the road and hit
a rock and flipped. The last I saw they were still rolling and bouncing. it was
horrible!"

           
"Any fire?"

           
"I . . . I couldn't see
any."

           
"Okay," I said. "I
guess we can go back and take a look, as long as there isn't a lot of smoke and
flame to bring spectators."

           
"But you killed them!" she
breathed. "You just . . . just ran them off the road in cold blood and
killed them!"

           
I glanced at her. Her face was white
and her eyes were wide and accusing. I drew a long breath, and said, "I
didn't ask them to come charging after me with waving pistols, did I, Borden?
What was 1 supposed to do, just sit there and let them shoot me? And you, too,
for that matter?"

           
"Don't try to justify it by
claiming that you were protecting me, Mr. Helm!"

           
I was struggling to get turned
around. At one time in the distant past, I'd got pretty handy with a horse
trailer, but although those two-horse jobs are surprisingly heavy, particularly
when loaded, they aren't very long, and I still had a little trouble backing a
fifteen-foot boat on a seventeen-foot trailer.

           
"Justify, hell," I said,
when we were headed back the way we'd come. "The world is a big and
dangerous place, sweetheart. I can't make it any smaller, but I can make it
slightly less dangerous, for me, by making damned certain that anybody who
tries to kill me gets only one crack at it. Maybe whoever's behind this
get-Helm routine will get tired of sending out a fresh murder crew every
twenty-four hours. . . . Here we are. If you're coming, you'd better put some
shoes on.
Arizona
is a hell of a prickly place to go
barefooted."

           
The little Ford was a total loss,
lying upside down among the rocks. The driver seemed to be suspended inside by
his seat belt; his gun-wielding companion wasn't visible. I found that one on
the ground where he'd been thrown, off to one side. His neck was broken and his
face was pretty badly cut up, but I could see that lie was-or had been-another
young and eager character, clean-cut and square, like the handsome rifleman I'd
drowned. It made me feel old and wicked, as if 1 were waging war against the
Cub Scouts of America.