The Frighteners (11 page)

Where the track ran briefly parallel to the highway, an X marked the location of the car that awaited us. However, we’d spent too much time on that ridge, not that I’d had a choice. I’d had to make sure they accepted the false trail I’d laid for them and weren’t coming after us; I’d been warned to shed all fleas and ticks before I picked up the car. Now I glanced at our position on the aerial shot and at the sun. It had been a long day for me, starting at a lake up in some other mountains almost five hundred miles away in another country; and there was some of it left, but not much. Say at most an hour before it became too dark to walk without risking a broken leg or neck.

“What’s the matter, are we lost again?” Gloria’s voice was tart, if a little shaky from her exertions. “Buffalo Bill, ha! It’s a good thing you don’t have to make a living as a sightseeing guide; I’m sure you’d wind up showing your busload of tourists the wrong city.”

It was no time to let her pick a fight with me. I said mildly, “The car should be a little over a mile that way.”

“How do you know?” she snapped. “How could you arrange to have a car put in just the right place when you didn’t know where the ambush was going to be? And what was that other map you had?”

I said, “If it was in just the right place, you wouldn’t be griping your head off about having to hike several miles through the boonies, would you? We figured, going this way, west, they wouldn’t want to operate too close to Cananea; they’d want us to get beyond the pass before they took us. But they’d want to catch us while we were still in this rugged country, and there’s open farmland not too far ahead, so we kind of split the distance between the pass and the end of the rough stuff.”

“And the other map?”

“Shows where the other car is located, the one we didn’t need, as it turned out, about five miles east of Cananea, in case they laid for us before the rendezvous, or sent us back instead of forward. Or sabotaged our transportation so we’d need new wheels. Satisfactory, Mrs. Cody?” When she didn’t speak, I went on: “If this photo is correct, there’s a mean arroyo over that ridge ahead. The light’s going to start fading on us any minute now, and we want to be out of that hole while we can still see, so we’d better keep moving.”

She said, “No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

She said sharply, “I mean, I’ve had it, Mister Secret Agent! I’m totally bushed, I look like the wreck of the Hesperus, I’m full of thorns like a pincushion, and my feet hurt. You can play in your damned arroyo if you want to. This is as far as I go, damn you; I don’t care if it means spending the night sitting on a rock!”

I looked at her. Badly winded, she’d flopped on the ground beside me when I stopped, heedless of her clothes and dignity. Her grubby skirt was bunched up immodestly, showing a remarkable expanse of lovely, scratched legs more or less covered by tattered pantyhose that hadn’t been exactly opaque even before they got tom. I found myself studying this display longer than I should have. It was a very odd thing. Back when she’d been a regal vision of perfumed, immaculate loveliness, she’d affected me no more than an expensive Barbie doll. I still didn’t like her very much but, perversely, I found her more desirable with her fragile feminine armor in disrepair. I reminded myself that I was here to protect the dame, not rape her; and that a gentleman never, never takes advantage of a lady in distress who’s totally dependent upon him. . . .

I rose. “Come on, let’s go.”

She didn’t move. Her jaw was set stubbornly. “I won’t resist if you want to pick me up and carry me as you did before. I won’t give you the satisfaction of demonstrating your superior masculine strength. But you can’t make me walk one step farther!”

I thought of the gun. It had worked before, but I hadn’t liked waving it at her then and, tired and disgusted as she was now, she might call my bluff. I stood looking at her a moment longer, wondering what the hell she was up to. I mean, even if she was exhausted after hiking less than two miles, which I doubted, she wasn’t a girl to take eagerly to sleeping on the desert without benefit of bed or plumbing. But I was tired of trying to understand her perverse ways. I drew a long breath and hauled her to her feet and tried to drag her along, but she refused to walk, she just allowed herself to collapse into an untidy heap at my feet. I reached down for her again, and stood her up again, and slapped her hard.

“Come on, you stupid bitch, start walking, or I’ll knock you out from under what’s left of that fancy hairdo!”

It was a mistake. Slapping people around just because you’re mad at them is always a mistake, particularly when the people are women. I don’t mean that I have an overpowering sense of chivalry. If they come at me with knives, I’ll gut them just as fast as if they were men; if they shoot at me, I’ll shoot back without hesitation; but somehow that’s different from knocking one around angrily, a girl who’d had a rough time already, a girl for whom I was kind of responsible, a girl who—let’s face it— attracted me sexually, just to make her walk somewhere, even for her own safety. We glared at each other for a moment. I saw two tears make dark tracks down her cheeks, bearing some of her remaining mascara.

“Damn you!” she whispered. “I should have known it was coming! You’ve done everything else to me, haven’t you? Threatened me with a gun, scared me to death, rolled me in the dirt, dragged me through rocks and brush. . . . But you aren’t satisfied with turning me into a walking scarecrow, you dirty sadist, you’ve got to beat me up, too. Well, go ahead, hit me again, knock me down, kick me. . . . Come on, come on, finish the job, beat me to a pulp . . . !” She took a step forward and slapped me hard. “There! What more excuse do you need? The dangerous wench attacked you, 'didn’t she? So slug her again, defend yourself . . . !”

She swung at me again, and she had a couple of shots coming, so I stood there and took it; but then the last thin thread of control snapped, and she lunged at me hysterically, clawing for my eyes with chipped red nails. I turned aside and gave her a shoulder to work on while I disposed of my gun before she thought of trying for it. To be sure, she’d told me she hated them; but my experience has been that they hate them only until they find use for them. I couldn’t help remembering that the last girl gun-hater I’d known had wound up emptying my own weapon at me, missing with all five, but you can’t count on that.

With the .38 safely laid aside I turned back to deal with Gloria. She was sobbing as she clawed at me, and she’d already managed to rip the shoulder of my jacket and draw blood from my ear; she’d have pulled out a lot of my hair if I hadn’t been wearing it pretty bald thanks to Arthur, so there wasn’t much for her to grab up there. As it was she wasn’t doing my scalp a bit of good. I got one wrist and then the other. She was still doing her best to annihilate me. She knew where a knee would hurt and tried to put one there. She attempted to drive a spike heel through my instep. I parried those attacks successfully, but then she butted me in the face and hurt my nose, so I hooked a foot behind her ankle, threw her down, and pinned her.

Her eyes stared up at me wildly out of her tear-wet face. Gradually she relaxed under me. I released her. An odd gleam came into the blue eyes, and she reached up with both hands and grabbed my head and pulled my face down to hers, kissing me hard enough to hurt, while her body moved fiercely against mine. There was no word spoken. We dealt with the clothing problem breathlessly and got the job down without tenderness. Lying there afterwards, I was aware of her freeing herself from my arms and sitting up beside me. A choked sound made me open my eyes, but she wasn’t crying. She was looking down at me and laughing harshly.

“The big hero!” she sneered. “The great guide who can’t find his way through a simple little Mexican village. The tough, experienced secret agent who falls like a ton of bricks for the old careless-skirt trick and a little physical contact. It’s a good thing you never met the real Mata Hari, darling. Susceptible as you are, she’d have had you jumping through hoops as well as betraying your country!”

Well, I’d known she had something in mind when she stopped like that. So she’d taken revenge for the humiliations she felt she’d suffered at my hands by seducing me. I rolled over and closed my eyes again, feeling pleasantly relaxed and spent. It wasn’t the worst vengeance I’d ever endured.

I awoke in full darkness to find her still stirring around. You’d think, having fixed it so that we had to spend the night here, she’d at least take advantage of the stop to get some rest; but she was sitting on a nearby rock making sounds of annoyance. It took me a moment to realize what she was doing: she was trying to put her pantyhose back on by moonlight, having a hell of a time because the illumination was poor and the garment was so badly damaged that her toes kept coming out the holes.

I glanced at my watch and saw that I’d had a couple of hours sleep, all I was entitled to under these conditions. Actually, I thought we were pretty safe at the moment; but that’s what the gents with all die gold braid thought at Pearl Harbor. I got up and pulled myself together and brushed myself off a bit, checked the gun I’d retrieved, and went to stand beside her. She didn’t look up.

I asked, “What’s the point? There isn’t enough left of them to keep you warm, if they ever did.”

Still without looking at me, she said, “My mother always said that nice little girls wear panties. Or pantyhose.”

“If you want to be a nice little girl, you go about it in funny ways.”

“Please don’t!” she said. “I was just so scared and tired and dirty and fed up with being dragged around and ordered around. I. . . I just got mad and used the only weapon I had, the weapon any girl has. . . . Oh, shit!” Frustrated, she yanked off the shredded tights, wadded them up, and hurled them into the night.

She fumbled in her purse, brought out a comb, and started fighting her hair savagely, pausing to say, “I thought, if I got my stockings and shoes back on and my clothes brushed off a little and my hair combed out, I’d stop feeling so goddamn
primitive
, like a battered cave girl sleeping happily by the fire in her greasy furs after having a wild old time out in the bushes with the tough boyfriend with the club. At least she didn’t have to brood about the runs in her nylons, lucky girl. Well, neither do I, now. . . . Matt?”

“Yes?”

“Tell me what we’re doing here. Tell me what it’s all about.” I said, “When I find out, you’ll be the first to know.”

She tugged irritably at the comb. “Ouch, that hurts!” she said. “No, don’t give me that bullshit. You know. You knew kilometer ninety-five was a trap. You knew there’d be other men waiting farther on in case we didn’t stop there. You even knew that they’d be coming by to check on us after the first bunch had left.”

“I’ve had some experience with traps,” I said. “Once we were in it, I knew pretty well how it had to function. As for how I knew it was there, all contacts are potential traps; but Mason Charles gave me the final word on this one.”

“I didn’t hear . . ."

“Oh, it wasn’t what he said. It was the simple fact that he was there. That he knew where to come to waylay us. We discussed it earlier, remember?”

“We didn’t come to any conclusions.”

“We decided that he couldn’t have tailed us to Cananea. Somebody must have told him where to go so he could make a fast run by a shorter route and beat us there. And there’s really only one man who could have. The one who was so careful to make sure that nobody—well, nobody significant—saw Horace Hosmer Cody Number One, the genuine article, being replaced by Horace Hosmer Cody Number Two, the phony, me, in that Safeway parking lot. From things I overheard, I knew that somebody’d been spotted following you and Cody from the wedding chapel, and that he’d been picked up to get him out of our hair. Obviously it was young Mason Charles trailing the man he suspected of being responsible for his mother’s murder. And obviously after we’d taken off for points west, Mr. Mason Charles was turned loose again with the names
Cananea
and
Mr. Green’s Restaurant
burned into his vengeful little brain. Sure, there was already a deathtrap set west of town; but you don’t turn down gifts from the gods. I was wanted dead and here was a boy eager to do the job, so send him along and let him take a crack at me first. If he didn’t manage it quite right, there were undoubtedly men standing by to fix things properly, like using his gun to blow my face off after he’d shot me down. As good as a machete job and just the thing a maddened son might do to avenge his raped and mutilated mother, emptying his piece into the bastard’s head. A very neat solution, and they’d have themselves a dead, unrecognizable Cody to bury without upsetting the authorities with another
bandido
job.” I grimaced. “A couple of dead Codys, since they could hardly leave you alive to talk. A stray bullet wouldn’t be implausible with all the shooting.”

Gloria shivered slightly. “Only it didn’t work.”

“So back to Plan One. Grab a hunk of soap, quick, and write
KM95
on the Cadillac’s mirror and radio the boys to stand by, the mark is on his way after all.”

She was silent for a moment, then she said, “Mr. Somerset.’’ “That’s right. It has to be Somerset, doesn’t it?”

“But it’s impossible. He works for the United States Government.”

“Ha ha,” I said. “Say something else funny.”

“But it doesn’t make sense,” she said. “He told me that, while he had no suitable agents available, the head of another government agency had offered him a man who could handle the impersonation, a competent man who’d pretend to be my husband and protect me. That sounds as if there had been a consultation, doesn’t it; as if your mysterious organization, whatever it may be, was in on the plot, too. Either that, or your boss was badly deceived.”

“My boss doesn’t deceive easy.”

“Then . . . then you have to face up to the fact that he, well, offered you as a human sacrifice.’’

I grinned in the semidarkness that gave our bleak surroundings a very eerie look. It takes a lot of moonlight to really brighten things up, and the fractional heavenly body above didn’t give it to us.