The Frighteners (21 page)

The window across the room to my left crashed in. A man’s voice I didn’t know yelled in standard Hollywood cop-show English: “Drop the gun! Freeze!”

I didn’t even take time to look. I just gave him the standard response: I pulled the trigger and threw myself to the floor. The crash of the short-barreled S. and W. was deafening in the closed room—well, not quite closed, I guess, now that the glass was broken. A gun roared over there, and something togged at the shoulder of the windbreaker that had been among the clothes I’d found in the Subaru to replace my grimy and ragged wedding costume. I rolled desperately, knowing that I had no chance to beat his second bullet, whoever he was; but against expectations I got myself pointed in the right direction without being shot. When I tried to pick him up over the sights, his face and his revolver were no longer staring at me over there. He was hanging in the window frame with his head and shoulders inside the room, and his gun was lying on the carpet below his dangling hand. There was enough glass left in the frame to do him no good at all, wedged there, but he seemed to be in no condition to object. Behind him was a face I knew.

“Easy, it’s me!” Greer said quickly. He was holding a revolver of his own, gripped for striking rather than shooting. “This one should be out for a while; how about yours?”

“She should be dead. I didn’t have time for any fancy marksmanship.”

Greer looked, and said judiciously, “Well, I’d say she wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry.”

There was broken glass all over the carpet, and the unconscious man was bleeding on the windowsill and down the wall where I’d been so careful to camouflage Antonia’s little .22-caliber bullet hole after conscientiously picking up the tiny cartridge case, but nobody was going to return this room to normal now without calling in the redecorators. I remembered that I’d also been trying to avoid harming any Mexican nationals, but the phony motel maid, sitting on the floor limply with her back and head supported by the big chair favored by Antonia, didn’t look good.

Getting to my feet cautiously, keeping her covered just in case, I said, “What about the rear. . . . Hey, Antonia, are you okay?”

The Mexican girl answered from the bedroom cheerfully: “I

am very okay, and Señor Charles is very okay also; but we have a very pretty man here. He behave him good now. Do you want?”

“Bring him in.” I remembered Jo Beckman. She was still standing where I’d left her, still holding the drink I’d given her. As far as I could see, she hadn’t spilled a drop. “What about you?” I asked.

She licked her lips. “I’m all right, but I think that woman is badly hurt.”

“Well, curb your Florence Nightingale instincts until I’ve checked her out.”

She made a wry face. “You flatter me, sir. At the moment I’m too grateful for not having wet my pants to worry too much about anybody else’s problems.” She drew a long, shuddering breath, and took a drink from her glass. She rubbed her left ear, which had been aimed toward the gun in the window. “So that’s a gunfight! All I can say is that it’s a damned noisy business!”

I stepped over to examine the seated woman, but the front of her gray shirt wasn’t gray any longer; and her brown eyes were staring across the room at a stylized motel-type picture of a little brown Indian boy and a little brown Indian girl—I always wondered who paints those things—and seeing nothing. Well, I had my answer. She’d been a pro all right. I suppose it was as good an epitaph as any.

“Dead?” It was Jo Beckman’s voice. When I nodded, she asked, “Did you have to?”

I said bitterly, “Hell, no, I’m an antifeminist, I just knock them off any time I get the chance, like vermin.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean . . ."

I grimaced. “If I hadn’t shot her, what the hell do you think she’d have been doing while I was ducking her partner’s bullets? You saw that lethal kick she unleashed. She’d just have stepped over to where I was crawling around on the floor, taken one fancy karate chop at me, and cracked my neck like a broomstick.” I shook my head grimly. “I wish to God these jerks would stop watching TV and forget that idiot
freeze-drop-the-gun
routine!”

Greer, waiting outside the broken window, wasn’t interested in the oratory for the defense. He said, “Whatever you want to do, Mr. Horace Cody, you’d better do it fast, before the shooting brings out the Mex marines.”

I said, “First let’s get that specimen out of the glass before he slices himself in two.” I was working things out in my head as I crossed the room toward the unconscious man. I went on: “We’re going to have to get a little political pressure working here or we’ll all wind up in the c
á
rcel. If you get to a phone before I do, the contact is 17-45-55 and ask for
El Cacique
. The number has some kind of priority, so you shouldn’t have any trouble getting through. Use my code name for ID. . .” I stooped abruptly, realizing that, preoccupied with the casualties, I was overlooking the fact that something that should have happened, hadn’t: the backroom boys and girls hadn’t appeared. I stepped back from the window. “Antonia, what’s the problem back there?”

“No problem.” It was the boy’s voice. “Our guest tried to get tough, but we gentled him. ” There was the sound of a blow. “Come on, you! Behave yourself good, don’t make a liar of the lady.”

I watched them appear. The prisoner was of Superbowl proportions, big in every direction. He was no taller than my six-four, but he must have weighed close to three hundred against my two, with shoulders that would have split my windbreaker right down the back if he’d been silly enough to try it on. An unfashionably short haircut made him look bullet-headed, and his nose had been broken at least once, but the odd thing was that he was obviously by no means a brainless bruiser. In fact, in his early twenties, with clear blue, guileless eyes, he looked like kind of a nice boy. A nice
big
boy. He was dressed in jeans, like everybody else in the room, with a light blue jersey topping things off. On the front of the outsized jersey was stenciled: LOVE! I suppose it was a disguise.

I knew him, of course; I’d seen him through the little telescope a short time before I’d seen the woman I’d just shot. He’d been playing driver and bodyguard for General Carlos Mondragon.

Big Boy Blue. Behind him, covering him with her little .22, came Antonia. Mason Charles followed along, holding a .38 revolver with a four-inch barrel like the one the unconscious man had dropped on the floor, clearly the standard weapon for that organization. The boy gave me a challenging glance: if I wouldn’t give him back his own gun he’d damn well get a gun somewhere else, and did I want to make something of it? I backed up to give them room, letting the challenge pass. The big young man in the lead spotted the dead pseudomaid on the floor.

“Oh, Christ, did you have to kill her? She was just doing her patriotic Mexican duty by giving us a hand.”

“Hand, hell, it was a foot that almost did me in,” I said. I holstered my own gun and scooped up the revolver belonging to the man in the window. I laid it, with Mason Charles’s Beretta, on the bar. I said, “Maybe you’d like to give my friend some help getting your friend out of the window before he comes to and thrashes around in all that glass and guts himself like a herring.”

Concerned about the dead woman, the big guy hadn’t even noticed the unconscious man. Now he stared, shocked, and started to speak angrily but controlled himself. He stepped forward and studied the situation briefly.

“Lift him straight up,” he said to Greer. “Now ease him this way gently, keep his legs high, let me take the weight. . . ."

I left them to it. I always like to keep track of all the local artillery, and I remembered that there was still one firearm unaccounted for, buried in the disorderly pile of towels that had been dumped by the front door.

“Watch him, keep him covered,” I said over my shoulder to Antonia and Charles as I moved that way.

“Not to worry, we’ve got him,” the boy said.

I kicked around a bit and located the piece. As I bent over to pick it up, there was a warning cry from the Mexican girl. I turned to see Mason Charles’s weapon aimed straight at me, and Antonia throwing herself that way in an attempt to knock the revolver aside, but the big young man whose name I still did not know, who’d just placed his unconscious associate tenderly on the floor, leaped like a great cat from that position and swept her aside. I was making my dive for the carpet for the second time that evening; but this time I wasn’t fast enough. The left side of my head received a violent blow that filled my vision with a white glare and drove a strange, tingling sensation through my whole body. I was still hearing the crash of the gun as I fell and a triumphant, boyish voice saying:

“Good-bye, Mr. Horace Hosmer Cody!”

I felt unconsciousness sweeping over me and receding and washing back over me again, like waves attacking a beach on an incoming tide, but I hung on grimly. There was something I had to do, something I’d been trained to do, something that had been hammered into me ruthlessly:
We give no freebies!
Nobody’s immortal. They can take any of us any time they want us, but they have to pay. They damn well have to pay.

He came, of course, to gloat over his first kill. Afterwards, no doubt, he’d rush to the bathroom to puke like the lousy little amateur he was—well, I wouldn’t have been jackass enough to turn my back on a pro. At that, it had been a piss-poor performance on my part; after all, I’d sensed that the mother-fixated young avenger was strictly unreliable.

“No!” That was the voice of a woman whose name I’d been told, now forgotten. “No, not again, Junior! Damn you, you’ve shot the wrong man!”

I felt his foot turn me over. There was no feeling in my right side and no strength in my right hand, but it didn’t matter. That’s why we use cross-draw holsters worn over the left hip so they’re available to either hand. I let myself roll with his nudge and saw him above me, not just one of him but two, a symptom of anything from a mild concussion to a bullet in the brain and to hell with it. I simply closed one eye to get rid of one target and put my bullet into the middle of the other. The crash and recoil of the snub-nosed Smith and Wesson was too much to bear. I let the surging black tide carry me away.

I woke up strapped into a vibrating projectile hurtling through an endless blackness. I was frightened because I didn’t know whether the blackness was inside or outside me—didn’t know whether there was nothing to see or whether something was out there, and I was just incapable of seeing it. The thundering pain in my head made the second seem a likely theory. Then a wonderful blaze of light filled the world for a moment and was gone with a blast of sound.

“Fucking semis think they own the road,” said the woman driving the car softly, without any real anger. She was clearly speaking to herself.

I recognized her voice. She was the one whose name wasn’t Josephine. I had no idea what she was doing there or, for that matter, what I was. Where we were was another problem that would have to be solved eventually. I’d left myself lying dead on the bloodstained carpet of a motel room in a Mexican town called . . . called . . . Anyway, after surviving the best homicidal efforts of the best and brightest professionals in the business, I’d let a vengeful young amateur take me by mistake. Dumb, dumb, dumb! I’d died and somebody had raised me from the grave, presumably the woman beside me. The way my head ached, I wished she hadn’t bothered.

Somebody’d tucked my S. and W. back into its hidden holster inside my waistband. I seemed to have a bulky bandage on my head. The straps I’d been aware of weren’t really doing much of a job; most safety harnesses don’t function well with the seat fully reclined. The car was my Subaru wagon—well, it was mine for the moment, unless the lady had decided to take possession. I was in no condition to contest any claim she cared to make. But I could see now and recognize the dimly lighted dashboard and be grateful that there was only one of them. I remembered having had double vision earlier, although I had no idea how much earlier. I also remembered a numbness in my right side, and it was still present as the curious tingling sensation you get after a cold day in the duck blind or on the ski slopes when the half-frozen flesh gradually thaws out in front of the fire in the warm lodge. The toes and fingers on that side seemed to be back in operation, although I wouldn’t have wanted to present them with any demanding tasks like kicking a football or playing a Mozart piano sonata. Not that I’d ever been expert at either chore, at the best of times.

“Did I get him?”

The words surprised me; I hadn’t been aware that I was going to speak or even that I remembered how.

The woman turned her head briefly. “So you’re back. If you’re going to be sick again, let me know so you can do it outside the car.”

“Did I get him?”

She gave an angry little snort. “You keep asking that, you bloodthirsty bastard. How many people do you have to kill a night to keep you happy?”

I said, “I can’t remember your name. Something like Josephine . . . Okay, I’ve got it. Joanna. Joanna Beckman.”

“Can you remember yours?”

“Sure. Helm. Matthew Helm.”

She laughed shortly. “Well, at least we’ve got that out of you even if we had to practically blow your head off to do it. Can you remember the name you were going under in Hermosillo?’’

There were warning signals flashing in my aching brain; maybe I shouldn’t have been so ready with my name, since I apparently hadn’t given it to her before. I must have had a reason, or must I? Maybe I just hadn’t got around to it when I got shot. Maybe she’d never asked. Anyway, my memory was still very hazy in spots, I needed information to clear it up, and I wasn’t going to get some without giving some.

I said, as much to myself as to her, “Hermosillo. I was groping for that name, thanks. I was going under the name of Cody there, Horace Hosmer Cody. And the name of the young man who shot me was Mason Charles, Junior. You called him Junior. I turned my back on his gun twice, and it was once too many. Now tell me, did I get him?”