The Frighteners (23 page)

There had long been a Mexican village here, now called Old Kino; then
gringos
had discovered the lovely white beach and the fine fishing. A transient settlement of trailers and campers and motorhomes had grown up, but gradually it had been replaced by more permanent vacation homes, strung out for a mile or two along the beach road, starting above the old native village to the south and ending at the bluff that terminated the beach and halted further development to the north. From Jo’s conversation, as the days passed, I got the impression, although I wasn’t interested enough to ask, that the relatively new community of Kino Bay supported a motel or two and a few restaurants as well as extensive facilities for recreational vehicles.

On the fifth or sixth or seventh day—I hadn’t kept very good track of the time—she came back from one of her daily shopping expeditions with her bag a little heavier with loot than usual. I sensed an air of excitement about her, but I wasn’t curious enough to ask. After checking on me, she headed into the kitchen to start her dinner preparations a little earlier than usual; then she came back into the master bedroom and threw some clothes onto the bed.

“Get dressed,” she said. “I’m tired of looking at you horizontal. Let’s see what you look like vertical.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“First take a bath and trim that beard a bit, or at least scrape the fuzz along the edges.”

“Wow, are you sure my heart can stand the excitement, Doctor?”

“Never mind your heart. Your head is my concern; cardiology isn’t my field. I haven’t a bit of worry about your heart anyway; I know it’s made of stone. So it probably won’t make you jump up and down with joy to hear that Junior’s going to make it. I just got through to the hospital in Hermosillo again. It’s been close, but he’s going to be all right.”

I said, “I’m glad for your sake, Jo.”

She said coolly, “Do I gather that it isn’t a great load off your mind? When you shoot people you’d just as soon they’d stay shot, is that right?” When I didn’t speak, because she was quite correct, and I didn’t owe her brother a damn thing except a headache, she shrugged. “Like I said, solid granite. Get yourself cleaned up and dressed while I see to the chicken. I thought we could use a change from all the fish we’ve been eating, even though it’s very good and fresh here.”

It felt strange to be moving around pretending to be a more-or-less normal human being for a change instead of an invalid. Taking care to keep my head bandage dry, I showered and then scraped my face a bit with the Schick razor, complete with blades, that had been left in the medicine chest by my unknown host, the man with the size 38 undershirt. The tall, gray-bearded character confronting me in the mirror looked like a dull and tired fellow, hardly the type to get into the kind of bullet trouble indicated by the rakish bandage on his head. If the truth were known, he’d probably just cracked his head on a low door.

My supernurse had washed the blood out of my clothes. I dressed myself in the blue denim shirt and pants provided by a grateful nation. The jogging shoes that had also been put into the Subaru were a little tight, and the socks were those lousy one-size-fits-all numbers that invariably cramp the toes of anyone with feet at the upper end of the size scale like mine. After fingering the small bullet-tear in the shoulder of the wind-breaker, I put that on, too. It was still early enough spring to be chilly in the evenings, even at sea level this far south. It was kind of like leaving the nest and learning to fly again. Properly clad for the first time in almost a week, if you want to call jeans proper, I ventured out of the room, savoring the reckless thrill of exploration.

Except for the master bedroom and the bath, I had up to now seen nothing of the house to remember—I hadn’t been very interested in houses when I arrived. I found myself in a living-dining room with a table set for two to my left and a sofa, a cocktail table, and a couple of big chairs grouped around a good-sized fireplace to my right. A fire burned in the fireplace, giving the whole place a cozy look although the furniture was cheap and rather shabby. The burning wood gave out occasional cracks and snaps. It seemed to be the hard, heavy, local stuff called ironwood that comes in such nice twisty shapes that it always seems a pity to bum them since a sculptor should be able to make something of them; and many local sculptors do. I noted a sideboard on which stood a small ice bucket, a couple of glasses, a bottle of soda, and another bottle I recognized; Greer must have tucked it into my bag before sending me off with the medical lady.

I could hear Jo Beckman working in the kitchen behind the closed door to my left. I poured myself a drink of J&B and stood sipping it, feeling light-headed and strangely dissociated from my surroundings. The room had glass doors looking out onto a patio that was protected from the street by a man-high wall. There was a small rock garden featuring local shrubs and cacti. Somebody’d been working in it recently, weeding and raking, and it pretty well had to be Jo since there had been nobody else around. For a child specialist the girl had unexpected talents. There was also a tiled terrace out there equipped with some black-iron furniture: a round table, and four chairs that looked more comfortable than the hard, wooden, veranda stuff in the bedroom.

“Oh, there you are!” Jo came in carrying a bottle of wine, which she set on the sideboard. “You can make yourself useful and open that. It’s supposed to breathe a little, isn’t it, or is that the red? I never can remember. Corkscrew in the top drawer. Then make me a drink, not too stiff. Let me get this fucking apron off; it makes me feel like a goddamn housewife, but I’m a slob in the kitchen and I didn’t want to spot my dress. Back in a minute.”

I wrestled the wine cork out and got her Scotch prepared, remembering that she’d taken it straight with just a couple of ice cubes the last time I’d served her, in Hermosillo. She came out to accept the glass from my hand and sip the contents gratefully. She was actually wearing a dress, as she’d said, the first time I’d seen her in one. It was a simple, long-sleeved sheath of fluid black jersey that clung to her in interesting ways. It was held in at the waist by the heavy concha belt I’d seen before. The squash-blossom necklace was also very much in evidence. The gleaming silver looked very dramatic against the matte black dress.

I whistled softly. “May I call you Slinky, ma’am?”

“It does make me look a little like a femme fatale, within my limitations, doesn’t it?” She laughed. “But it’s very practical, unwrinkleable, totally washable, and packs like a dream. Let’s not let the fire go to waste, I’m very proud of it. One match. Generally I need a blowtorch to start the damn things.”

We took our drinks over to the two big chairs. When she was seated, I noted that she was wearing nylons and black pumps with moderate heels; like most tall girls, she didn’t go in for real stilts. Even so, they did nice things for her ankles, and I found myself thinking of her, for the first time since I’d been shot, as woman instead of doctor or nurse. Maybe that was the idea.

“Tell me about the little man with the big wife,” I said. “The people who own this place.”

“How did you . . . ?”

“I’m a detective of sorts, remember?” I grinned. “Size 34 shorts, queen-size pantyhose.”

Jo laughed. “Hal isn’t really so small, just skinny. He’s a doctor at the clinic, a dermatologist. Harold Schonfeld. I’ll admit Ziggy is fairly substantial, a massive German hausfrau type, but nice.”

“The clinic, is that where you’ve got your office or whatever a child psychiatrist works out of?” I asked. When she nodded, I asked, “Where is it?”

“Tucson, Arizona. The Desert Pines Clinic.”

“And what does one do around here when one hasn’t got a cracked head?”

“If you mean the Schonfelds, mostly they fish. They bring their two boys down several times a year, with the boat on a trailer; it’s only a day’s drive. That is, Hal and the boys fish; Ziggy hates boats and doesn’t think much of catching fish although she’s great at cooking them. She putters around the house and garden and gets a tan on the beach. Between visits they lend the place to friends, like me. It was my official excuse for coming down. R and R as they say in the Army; and don’t think my work isn’t a real battle at times.” She grimaced. “I could hardly tell them at the clinic that I was taking a week off to make sure my baby brother killed the right man and not the wrong one.” She shook her head ruefully. “I really thought we’d convinced him you weren’t Buff Cody.”

“He didn’t want to be convinced,” I said. “We’d all been giving him a hard time. Back in Cananea, I’d left him standing there holding his gun and feeling foolish—in front of a pretty girl, no less. So Big Sister Jo comes down to make sure he wipes his nose and changes his socks, as if he were still a little boy; and in Hermosillo another pretty girl takes die gun away from him and hog-ties him, right in front of said B.S.J., who later makes casual remarks about a wetnosed kid with a toy pistol! By this time, he’s ready to kill somebody, anybody, just to make people take him seriously. Along comes the big guy called Tunk, who treats him and his vengeance mission with great respect, I’m sure, and tells him he’s been perfectly right all along: ‘Don’t let them kid you, Mr. Charles, he’s Cody all right, your mother’s murderer; give me a hand with this feisty Latin wench and we’ll go get him for you!’ So he did.”

Jo sipped her drink, regarding me thoughtfully. There was red evening sunlight at the westward-facing glass doors behind her; we’d had fine weather all the time we’d been here, not that it had done me much good, confined to the big bed with an adamant jailer to see I stayed there. Jo drained her glass and rose.

“Maybe we’d better tackle that chicken. I’ve had enough Scotch for now, since there’s wine coming; and I think you have, too.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

At the table, she made me carve, took a bite of chicken and nodded her acceptance.

“Well, it’s edible,” she said. She glanced at me across the little table. “I don’t understand you, really. You seem to be reasonably intelligent, not too obnoxious, and quite brave. . . .”

I sighed. “I know that approach; I’ve heard it before. After telling me what a swell person I am, you spring the big question: ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a wicked house like this?’ Right?”

A little color came to her face. “I suppose so. Well, what are you?”

I grinned. “Exactly the same thing you are, Doctor Beckman.”

“Oh, no!” She looked up quickly, shocked. “No, that’s a ridiculous thing to say!”

“Is it? You deal with the ones the parents and the schools and the cops can’t handle. Am I right? Well, we deal with the ones the other undercover services and the cops can’t handle. You have your tools and techniques; we have ours. What’s the big difference?”

She licked her lips. “The difference between life and death, I should think.”

I touched the bandage on my head. “And that’s often just one hundred and fifty-eight grains of lead, if the guy is using the standard .38 caliber police load.” I shook my head. “Now we’re just talking words. But the fact is that I do what I’m good at just as you do what you’re good at. At least I hope you do. If you do, that makes us both lucky. The world is full of people stuck in jobs that don’t suit them at all. ”

She said, “I know what the rewards of my work are, but what satisfaction can there be in your. . . profession? Is it the danger that drew you to it? And keeps you in it?”

I shrugged. “To some extent. I never gamble with money, because neither winning nor losing money means a hell of a lot to me. But when I gamble my life, that’s something else again. The biggest goddamn crap game in the world. It’s a compulsive thing, and very few women seem to have it. Maybe that makes

them more sensible than men, I don’t know; but I can tell them they’re missing something.”

“And that’s all it is, just the thrill of danger?” She was watching me curiously across the table. “You don’t say anything about patriotism and risking your life for your country.”

I said irritably, “If we’re going to talk a lot of bull about patriotism, I’m going to need another drink.”

She laughed. “As a psychiatrist, I’ve observed that the only people who like to talk about how patriotic they are, are the ones who aren’t. We may as well have our coffee comfortably by the fire; and an after-dinner drink sounds good. Why don’t you bring in a few more logs and fix our drinks while I set the coffee? The wood is just outside the door to the left.”

Out on the terrace, away from the warmth of the fireplace, there was a little bite to the night air, and the stars were very bright although not as bright as they’d been by that mountain lake in New Mexico where I’d been nine thousand feet closer to them. I gathered up an armload of wood and managed to close and lock the sliding glass door behind me as I carried it inside. The fire had burned down while we were eating. I arranged some fresh wood on the glowing coals, according to my private theory of fire building. Every man has his own. I poured our drinks and brought them to the cocktail table; then I returned to the fire to make sure it was taking hold all right. I stood there for a little, watching the small blue-and-yellow flames spring up around the new wood. I heard Jo come into the room behind me.

“It looks as if you know something about building fires, unlike some people. Come drink your coffee.”

“I’ve spent a lot of time cooking over campfires,” I said. “Hell, they pulled me out of a mountain camp for this operation.”

She’d arranged herself comfortably at the end of the big sofa. She patted the space beside her and leaned forward to pick up a steaming mug that had a Disney figure on it.

“Cream or sugar?”

“Both, please.”

I sat down and she placed the mug into my hands. We sipped our coffee in silence for a while, watching the rapidly reviving fire. I was much more aware of the woman sitting decorously beside me on the sofa, both of us fully dressed, than I had been in bed with her, skimpily clad in shorts and tank top, bending over me sponging my naked back.

Jo spoke lazily: “Were you camping alone?”