The Favor (17 page)

And Guinness, who didn’t believe in doing
these things by halves, had five pounds of raw steak along with him
in a canvas knapsack. What the hell, the United States government
was paying for it, and he didn’t want Flycatcher’s Praetorian Guard
to think he wasn’t a high roller.

. . . . .

“Nice puppy, good puppy, yes yes yes, that’s
a nice little doggy, yes it is. . .”

There were three of them, each one with a set
of dental work that obviously hadn’t been designed for service
against moist Ken-L Ration. But you didn’t kill your meal ticket,
so by the fifth night, when Guinness had finally worked himself up
to joining them on the other side of the chain link fence, they
stood around him, cringing and whimpering like poodle whelps,
licking the beef juice from his fingers while he cooed sweet words
into their pointed ears and tried to persuade himself that they
really weren’t going to have him for a hot midnight snack.

He hadn’t even brought a butter knife. He
hadn’t wanted to tempt himself; the idea was just to have a look
around—to make sure of the dogs and see how Flycatcher’s domain was
laid out. Tomorrow—or the next night—when he wouldn’t have to
stumble around blind, was plenty of time. For the moment, it was
enough simply to have breached the walls.

In the beginning, he stuck to the protected
borders, a dark fringe of palm trees and broad-leafed plants with
loose, gaudy clusters of flowers. It was good cover, and at one
point it came very near the house, which was a single story affair,
probably large enough to accommodate half a dozen people quite
comfortably—well, it hardly figured that Flycatcher would stay up
here by himself. He would need his bodyguards to make him feel
important and secure.

The area behind the house consisted of three
contiguous areas: a stone patio, a large rectangular swimming
pool—the lights of which were off but that still glistened dimly in
the lamplight from over the rear door—and the lawn, very well cared
for, that stretched into the darkness for a couple of hundred yards
in every direction. There were arc lights on two places on the
roof, and atop poles at the very back of the lawn; they weren’t
turned on, but all anyone would have to do was touch a switch and
that whole open area could be made bright as day. It was a little
reminder—these people weren’t fooling either.

The dogs followed him around for a while,
sniffing tentatively at the cuffs of his trousers, but when they
figured out that he wasn’t carrying any more goodies they lost
interest and wandered away to look for intruders, a category into
which, it appeared, Guinness no longer fitted.

Everything was dark, except for the single
light over the back door. Apparently Flycatcher didn’t keep late
hours—or perhaps he wasn’t even in residence, a thought that had
been gnawing at Guinness ever since his arrival in Puerto Vallarta.
After all, Ernie’s best information was already close to two weeks
old. There weren’t any guarantees that Flycatcher had intended a
long stay, and men in his line of work were prone to sudden
emergencies that called them away from their hours of leisure.

The house, of course, was where he was going
to find out. He edged along through the border until he came to a
spot where the dark corner of what was probably a bedroom jutted
out to within twenty-five feet of him. He crossed over,
disentangling himself as quietly as possible from the undergrowth,
half expecting the floodlights to go on the second his foot touched
the lawn. They didn’t, but somehow he doubted he would have felt
much more exposed if they had.

Apparently Flycatcher supposed that his chain
link fence and his man eating dogs were enough, because the house
was a very ordinary structure, not at all designed to withstand
siege. The walls were stucco and the windows were enormous—it might
have been lifted bodily out of some poshy housing development in
the States and transported here by magic. If Flycatcher hadn’t
bought it from some other owner, and perhaps even if he had, it
revealed an unexpectedly middle class side of his character;
perhaps all he really wanted in the world was the life of a retired
stockbroker in Scarsdale, complete with Olympic size swimming
pool.

And then, just when he was beginning to be
comfortably contemptuous, Guinness noticed the alarm system. There
was a little knob sticking unobtrusively out from one corner of the
back wall; he nearly put his hand over it before he saw the
shielding around the photoelectric cell. Doubtless the windows were
also wired—probably double wired, so you couldn’t jimmy them open
and you couldn’t break them without setting off the end of the
world. Leave it to Flycatcher.

All the curtains were drawn tight, so there
wasn’t a chance of getting a look inside. In all likelihood, there
were a dozen men sitting around in the front room playing gin
rummy, with Thompsons at the ready. Obviously, these people simply
weren’t prepared to cooperate at all.

In front, parked out in the open, were three
cars, one of them a large black Mercedes that Guinness was willing
to stake almost anything on was Flycatcher’s personal chariot—the
side and rear windows were smoked glass, and probably half an inch
thick, and it wouldn’t have surprised him to hear that the doors
were reinforced with armor plating. The thing had that low to the
ground look of a car upon which certain “security modifications”
have been made; it probably weighed seven or eight hundred pounds
more now than on the day it had come out of the factory.

There was no garage, so perhaps Flycatcher
hadn’t gotten around to having one put up. It had been careless of
him; it meant he had to cross about forty feet of open ground to
get from the house to his car.

It was time to leave. Guinness knew he wasn’t
going to find out anything more, and every minute he spent hanging
around there increased the chances of somebody casually glancing
out a window and seeing a bush move.

And, besides, the dogs were back—they were
still friendly, reasonably friendly, but he imagined there were
limits to how long his welcome would last now that he was out of
Grade A choice sirloin. It wasn’t something he wanted to put to the
test.

They followed him back to the fence, their
huge red tongues rolling out over the teeth they seemed to be
displaying for his particular benefit. They watched him climb up
the fence, tensing expectantly, as if they were waiting for him to
fall back to the ground—as if they were hoping that would happen so
they could repair any recent derelictions of duty by tearing his
throat out, with no hard feelings, of course.

Probably, Guinness reflected, he was merely
yielding to unjust suspicion, but he didn’t like the way they kept
making tentative little jumps at him, as if they were nerving
themselves up for something more than just a goodbye kiss. He made
a point of coming down well clear of the fence on the other side.
It wasn’t a world in which friendship counted for much.

. . . . .

So, back in his cantina, listening to the
rain on the tin roof, Guinness tried to ponder the thing out. And
it all came down to that forty feet between Flycatcher’s car and
his front door. You either got him right there, or you didn’t get
him.

The waiter, an amiable, brown faced man of
about fifty, brought over a small plate of smoked tuna, the local
hors d’oeuvre, and withdrew himself, showing his large square teeth
in a smile as he backed away. He had been particularly attentive on
each of the three previous occasions Guinness had come there to
wait out the afternoon rain—perhaps he entertained hopes that his
place was beginning to catch on with the Americans, although there
didn’t seem to be any others around. Perhaps he was just a nice,
friendly Mexican who took pity on middle aged men who sat by
themselves drinking margaritas on his veranda. It could even have
been that he liked Guinness because Guinness was a big tipper. In
any case, the smoked tuna was good enough to eat by the handful,
and it constituted the only invasion of one’s privacy. For the
rest, you were left alone to watch the water stream down from the
awning and to consider your sins.

By four fifteen—rather later than usual—the
rain had ceased, and Guinness got out of his chair and dropped
three or four hundred peso notes down next to his empty cocktail
glass. Regardless of how things turned out that night, he doubted
he would ever be back, and if things turned out so that he would
never be back anywhere, he would just as soon leave the waiter rich
as have Flycatcher’s goons find all that money when they went
through his pockets.

Distinct as that possibility was, Guinness
felt pretty good as he went back to his room to get ready for
dinner. After all, even if they sent him to perdition, there was at
least an even chance he could manage to take Flycatcher along for
the ride. Under any circumstances, it was nice to have a plan.

. . . . .

At three fifteen the next morning, he
discovered that the dogs were no longer quite sure how they felt
about him. They seemed to be having trouble making up their
minds—they didn’t bark, which Guinness took as a positive sign, but
they pressed their noses against the fence, growling if he
approached any closer than they absolutely fancied.

The sight of them like that, their bodies
rigid as springs and their noses wrinkled slightly to reveal their
glistening front teeth, made him glad all over again that he had
taken certain precautions. In a very short time there was going to
be a great deal of noise and excitement—and probably considerable
quantities of blood on the ground—and it would be just as well if
the Praetorian Guard weren’t in a position to feel the discomforts
of conflicting loyalties. Probably another sackful of meat would
cement their friendship. Maybe.

Part of regular United States government
issue to all agents in Guinness’s category was a small flat leather
case containing a hypodermic syringe and four little numbered vials
of clear fluid. Number Four was guaranteed to ensure that you never
opened your eyes again, but Number Two, from which Guinness had
extracted the full dose, only put you down for about five hours.
Number Two was injected into the meat that Guinness began throwing
over the fence in thick strips, spreading the bounty so that each
dog got his fair share. He figured on about ten ounces apiece—he
didn’t want them getting sated. He wanted them to eat every
bite.

When they had finished everything, including
their quarrels over a few disputed chunks, all three dogs came back
to the fence in expectation of more. They whined and wagged their
stubby tails and jumped up on the chain link with their front paws
in a perfect ecstasy of welcoming affection. And while they waited
for more goodies, Guinness waited for Number Two to begin taking
hold, not even sure that it would—after all, it was supposed to be
given intravenously; he had never tried it this way.

And, indeed, it was close to four minutes
before the first dog folded up. He simply lay down, stretched out
his muzzle on the ground, and closed his eyes with a weary sigh.
The others followed within a few seconds.

Fine. Guinness unrolled his heavy Mexican
blanket, leaving it double, and tossed it up over the angled top of
the fence so that it fell just exactly over one of the poles—he
didn’t know why people bothered with those three strands of barbed
wire; they were so easy to get past, it hardly seemed worth the
trouble of putting them up.

When he had climbed to the top of the fence
and was perched uneasily on his blanket, he hauled the rest of his
equipment up after him—his canvas pack, secured by a length of rope
around both shoulder straps, with his shotgun tied to the rope’s
other end. First he brought up the pack, and then the shotgun, and
then he lowered them both down on the other side and jumped down
himself.

He pressed his fingers into one of the dogs’
throats, feeling for the carotid artery. Its pulse was still strong
and steady, although the poor beast was so out of it that you could
pry open its jaws and its tongue merely lolled out at the corner of
its mouth, like a dead snake. It would probably be morning before
any of these particular beasties woke up—and then they would feel
like hell for the rest of the day—but they would, in fact, wake up.
No matter who else died there that night, at least the dogs
wouldn’t. Guinness was glad it hadn’t proved necessary to kill
them. They were savage enough creatures—as was he, as were the men
he hunted—but they were also innocent. Only men, it seemed, were
capable of evil.

He had no way of knowing how many men were
inside with Flycatcher—or even if Flycatcher was there at all,
although the presence of so many cars in front of the house
suggested that he probably would be—and he had no idea how they
would be armed. Probably pretty well; Flycatcher was hardly
anybody’s idea of a pacifist. Guinness knew that his only chance of
success and survival was surprise, and so he had come equipped with
the instruments of confusion.

His .357—a single action revolver that, for
this sort of guerilla warfare, he regarded as more dependable than
any automatic—was wrapped in a towel in his knapsack; he took it
out and stuck it in his belt, just over his left kidney, where he
could get at it easily but where it wouldn’t get in the way. His
shotgun was an automatic feed with the magazine block removed, so
that it would hold about eight shells. He loaded it and distributed
another half dozen shells through the pockets of his
windbreaker.

But all you could do with guns was kill
people. What he was counting on were the gallon and a half of
gasoline and the five empty tequila bottles with the rag stoppers,
the makings of his Molotov cocktails. Surprise and terror, and
there was something about fire that scared the hell out of
everybody. Especially at four o’clock in the morning.