Operation Stranglehold (3 page)

Hazel gave orders to service the plane.

Thirty minutes later, with the Cessna safely refueled and hangared, Hazel and I were in a hotel room—with our damp, wrinkled clothes and a five-dollar bill in the hands of the hotel’s valet.

It hadn’t been the least eventful day of my life.

We ate dinner in the hotel dining room. Hazel seemed
preoccupied all during the meal. “I keep wondering what you feel you’ve accomplished by having those men held,” she said at last.

“Two things, maybe three,” I answered. “First, there’s going to be no million dollar lawsuit à la Bruno while they’re on ice. Second, it’s going to slow down any follow up by their boss while he tries to figure out what happened to his lovebirds. And third, if it comes to a crunch, they’ll make trading material.”

She quirked an eyebrow. “Trading material?”

“Sure. I turn them loose for a guarantee of immunity.”

She shook her head slowly. “From what I’ve read about him, Senator ‘Cotton’ Ed Winters isn’t noted for his largesse with guarantees of immunity.”

“Then he must not care very much what happens to his men.”

That kept her quiet through the dessert course. She refused a brandy afterward. I had an Armagnac, then stopped at the cigar stand in the lobby and picked up three A&C Grenadiers. “Let me see the note those men brought,” Hazel said without further preliminary when we were back in our room.

I lit a cigar before I handed it over.

I was almost sure what was coming.

“I don’t like it,” she pronounced following a two-minute brooding silence. “ ‘Badly injured’ … I don’t like it.”

“It might not even be true,” I tried to soothe her. “Every time I’ve heard from Washington before, it’s been from Erikson himself.”

“Then how did those—those roughnecks of Winters’ know how to find us?”

“I’d really like to know the answer to that,” I admitted.

“You could call Senator Winters and find out.”

That’s my redheaded girl friend; always in favor of direct action.

“What do I tell the senator about wing-shooting his man?”

She bit her lip. “You could kind of gloss it over.”

“Baby, that’s a hogshead of gloss.”

But she had already charged on. “No, tell him Bruno deserved shooting.” Some of her former indignation had returned to her voice. “Which he did. I’ve never
seen
anyone so—so callously rude.”

I didn’t say anything.

The last time I checked they still hadn’t gotten around to issuing hunting licenses for callously rude individuals.

“You should do something about Karl Erikson,” Hazel continued.

I’d been expecting that approach. “Why should I do anything?”

“Why because—because—” she floundered momentarily, then picked up speed “—he’d do it for you!”

“Negative, baby. The hell he would.” I raised my voice above hers when she tried to interrupt me. “Unless there was something I could do for him that nobody else could do.”

“But you’re
friends!
”

“No,” I corrected her. “We worked together.”

“That’s the most—the most inhuman statement I ever heard!” she fumed.

“Not inhuman. Practical. If you want to know the truth, right now I’m unhappy with Karl Erikson. He must have blown my cover at the ranch, and that wasn’t in the game plan. Once he did that, he released me from any obligation.”

“Oh, it’s—it’s hopeless to—to try to make you see reason,” Hazel sputtered.

“Nobody ever called me a reasonable man,” I agreed.

That concluded the conversation.

We went to bed in a profound silence.

Hazel kept a substantial distance between us in the kip.

Her annoyed exasperation was like an extra blanket over us.

I wasn’t feeling quite as sanguine as I’d tried to make myself sound.

I drifted off to sleep still wondering how I was going to square myself for shooting the personal emissary of a United States senator, even if the little wart needed it.

To say nothing of loosening his front teeth.

• • •

Dawn found me wide awake.

I’d dozed during the night, but had never attained sound sleep. Beside me in the hotel bed Hazel snored lightly. The big girl lets nothing interfere with her sack time. I’m geared differently.

I picked up the phone and dialed Room Service. The disembodied voice at the other end of the line took my order for two large orange juices, two orders of scrambled eggs with sausage, and two pots of coffee.

The sound of my voice disturbed Hazel. She flung off the covers and rolled over in bed, shielding her eyes from the daylight. “Wha’ time is it?” she husked sleepily.

“Time to be up and doing, Lady Godiva.”

Hazel sleeps naked as a needle, and her appearance on the bed was spectacular. I went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth. In the mirror the scars on my manufactured face showed plainly. They always do early in the morning until I apply makeup. I always carry a complete makeup kit, and I have half a dozen hairpieces. I’ve always believed in making a virtue of a necessity. With a different wig and a change in makeup, I can be several different people when it pleases me. Practice has made me more adept with facial makeup than a lot of actors.

I went back into the bedroom while Hazel took her turn in the bath. Her progress across the hotel room was a delightful symphony of jiggling, sleep-warmed amplitudes. It was distracting to my train of thought.

It was even more distracting when she reappeared. Her silky-looking pelt was glistening damply, with her coral-colored nipples and flaming-bronze bush the only breaks in the symmetry of her pearly-white flesh. “What are you going to—” She was just starting to say when the buzzer sounded at the door. She leaped for the bed and flowed under its covers like a rabbit startled into its hole. I opened the door and admitted a young Room Service waiter who pushed a table-on-wheels into the room.

Hazel’s bright red hair emerged from under the covers when the waiter departed after setting up. “You should’ve stayed out’ve bed and given the kid a treat,” I suggested, wheeling the cart over to the bed.

“We are not amused,” Hazel declared, but she was smiling.

She sat on the edge of the bed while I pulled a chair up to my side of the table. She ate with her usual healthy, longshoreman’s appetite. Neither of us said anything more until we’d finished and I’d lighted cigarettes for us both while Hazel poured herself a second cup of coffee.

She leaned back upon a plumped-up pillow, unconscious of the all-star display, her cigarette cocked upward as she drew upon it. “I speak Spanish very well,” she announced.

If some of Hazel’s remarks sound disjointed, it’s because she has a habit of ignoring preliminaries and cutting right to the bone. I knew she was declaring herself ready for a rescue expedition in Spain, but I wasn’t having any. “Spanish or Swahili,” I countered, “forget it.”

“Can your doctor friend hold Senator Winters’ men forever?” she demanded. “Is it going to be any easier to get the senator to lay off six months from now than it is now?”

She was right about that, anyway; nothing was going to change. Time wasn’t going to be on my side in approaching Edwin Winters to call off his dogs. All I could offer at any time was to send back his men in return for a promise to forget me. If I approached Winters at all, it might as well be right now. But still I hesitated. I hadn’t retained my mobility for so many years by ramming my head into lions’ mouths.

“If you telephone him, you’ll at least find out what he wanted,” Hazel remarked with her customary practicality.

I had a feeling I knew what he wanted, and that it wasn’t so very much different from what Hazel wanted. No other reason that I could see made sense of the senator’s effort to contact me. But I still wasn’t having any; I’d been down that road too many times before with Karl Erikson. I might be a chipped pitcher, but I was still unbroken, and I’d just as soon keep it that way. The minute I called Winters I was dealing myself into a hand with well-hidden hole cards.

Hazel has an unnerving knack of reading my mind. “You could call him, and if you didn’t like what he has to say, we could disappear,” she prodded me.

“Disappear from the highpowered posse a man like that could turn loose?”

“He’ll turn it loose anyway if his men don’t show up soon,” she predicted. “He’ll start at the ranch, trace the route of the plane, show pictures around, the whole bit.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “Until he lands in our laps.”

“But we’re not staying here, baby.”

“You just said it yourself, Earl; moving will only slow down a man like Winters.”

“Don’t try to confuse me,” I growled.

But she had a point. Hazel, certainly, was highly noticeable. I had no wish to subject her to a life-style of hiding out, either. I’d been that route too many times myself.

I counted to ten, backed up, and counted to twenty, then reached for the push-button telephone. I punched the number I’d picked up counting dial clicks when the blubbery Smitty called it from the ranch. “Senator Ed Winters,” I said to the feminine voice that responded.

“Your name and business, please?”

“Put me through to the senator, young lady.”

“The senator insists upon knowing to whom he’s speaking, sir,” the receptionist informed me.

“It’s very important that I speak to Senator Winters,” I tried to bull my way past the line of scrimmage.

A man came on the line. We went through the same routine. Another man was summoned, and the performance was repeated. I maintained that my business was personal. The man maintained that the senator spoke to no unknowns.

“Tell him it’s about Bruno and Smitty,” I said finally when it began to appear like a total stalemate.

That brought action.

A moment later a resonant voice, obviously the product of years of wagon-bed oratorical projection, reverberated in my ear. “What’s this about Bruno and Smitty?” the voice demanded. “And who are you?”

If a voice could be said to sound like a tidal wave, Senator Winters qualified. Bristling energy radiated from every syllable. “I’m Earl Drake,” I said.

“Drake?” There was a loud snort. “Hell, man, I’ve got people looking for you and Bruno and Smitty right now. Where are you?”

“I hope the people you’ve got looking for me now have better manners than Bruno and Smitty,” I countered.

Winters’ tone sharpened. “Where are they, damn it! Are they all right?”

“Except for a couple of nicks.”

“Exactly what the hell is that supposed to mean?” Winters demanded belligerently.

“What I said: What’s your business with me, Senator?”

“It’s not a subject for a telephone conversation, Drake. Tell me where you are and I’ll have a man standing in front of you in thirty minutes who’ll tell you all about it.”

“No sale.
You
tell me. Or I’m gone.”

“Why, you damned meathead!” the senatorial voice rasped. Winters paused while he plainly sought to control his senatorial choler. “It’s a
sensitive
subject, Drake! Do you know the meaning of the word?”

I tried another tack. “How did you know where to find me?”

“A highly recommended government employee was released to me by a Washington agency to undertake a delicate political mission,” the imperious voice declared. “The mission failed, and I went back to the agency. They suggested you.”

I’d been trying to get a reading on the man from his voice. Winters sounded dignified but not pompous. Then the meaning of what he’d said got through to me. “You mean the agency blew my cover to a goddam tinhorn politician?” I raged.

There was a momentary silence. “Young man, it’s been quite a few years since I’ve heard myself called a goddam tinhorn politician,” Winters said drily.

I was getting madder by the minute. I was just beginning to realize I couldn’t ever go back to the ranch which had been a real asylum to me. Hazel and I had had a lot of good times there. “Whatever your package is, the hell with it!” I barked. “All I want is to be left alone! All I want—”

“Are you a wealthy man, Mr. Drake?” Winter’s crackling voice overrode mine.

“Wealthy? Hell, no. What’s that—”

“Then I suggest you come to see me. In Washington. Go to the nearest city serviced by United Air Lines and tell them you’re flying at my expense. They’ll accept it. Since I seem to have disrupted your life in some manner I don’t at the moment understand, the least you can do is make me pay for it,” Winters continued suavely. “And for the mission.”

“You could be singing my song, Senator,” I admitted as my temperature cooled. The subject of money has a soothing effect upon me. “Depending upon—”

“No telephone discussion,” Winters interrupted me again. “Come and see me.” There was a click in my ear, and the connection was gone.

“You were terribly hostile,” Hazel said as I replaced the receiver in the phone cradle.

I didn’t debate it. “He’s out of his mind if he thinks I’m going to walk into his office where he can bag me,” I said firmly.

“You’ve got Bruno and Smitty to trade,” Hazel pointed out. “What did you mean when you said he could be singing your song?”

“He said he’d pay for service rendered. Type of service and type of payment unspecified.”

“If it’s helping Karl Erikson, I’m for it, Earl.”

“Get dressed and let’s start moving,” I returned. “A man like Winters is having that call traced right now.”

Hazel moved toward her clothes. “When we get to Washington, we can try to find out—”

“Who said we were going to Washington?”

But we were, of course.

It didn’t make sense to try to stay hidden from a man like Senator “Cotton” Ed Winters forever.

Plus I have a natural share of curiosity.

And money still talks.

But the thought that Winters had been able to reach out and find me at the ranch still rankled.

“How do you like that?” I said angrily to Hazel, pulling my pants on. “The second Erikson isn’t in Washington to hold the lid on, his office peddles me two-for-a-penny. No more protection than a schoolgirl’s bare behind from her mother’s hairbrush. I’ll guarantee you they never get a chance to do it to me again.”

“You didn’t ask how Karl was,” Hazel said, combing her shining red hair before the boudoir mirror.

“I doubt if Winters knows—or cares. He pulls the strings; he doesn’t care what happens to the puppets. Look how easily he conscripted Karl’s services through the connivance of Erikson’s agency, and now he’s confident he’s going to do the same with me. Damn all politicians, anyway.”