The Frighteners (24 page)

“I had my dog with me.”

“What kind of dog?”

“Labrador. Yellow.”

“We always had dogs when I was girl but somehow, with college and med school and everything, I got out of the habit.”

I said, “Jo.”

“Yes, Horace.”

“What did you have in mind, research or therapy?”

There was a little silence. I didn’t look at her. The fire snapped sharply as the new wood blazed up.

The woman beside me gave a strained little laugh. “You’re a real bastard, aren’t you?”

“It’s the majority opinion.”

“Was I that obvious?”

I said, “You forget, while you were studying anatomy and psychology, or a little before that, I was majoring in assassination with a minor in seduction.”

“You mean, other girls have wined you and dined you and snuggled up to you afterwards in front of the fire with motives strictly immoral?”

I said, “Sad to relate, ma’am, I have actually met deadly ladies who employed sex as a professional weapon, if you’ll believe such wickedness.”

Jo said stiffly, “I assure you, vengeance was not on the evening’s program; I have no knife for your back. For one thing, Junior really is getting well although you have only my word for it, and for another, as I’ve told you, even if he wasn’t, I’m not the vengeful type.’’

“I know. I wasn’t worrying about that. I just thought I’d save you some playacting.”

“Thanks loads!” She drew a long breath. “All right, I guess I was pretty stupid to try the old Mata Hari routine on a pro, but it just seemed . . . well, as you said, therapy. You’ve been lying around here like a zombie, no interest, no curiosity. A blow on the head will do that sometimes, cause a certain amount of dissociation, but I couldn’t turn you loose like that, to do what you’ll probably have to do; you’d get yourself killed. You needed to be waked up, shaken up. . . . Well, maybe I’m not sexpot enough to get the job done, if it can be done that way, but it would have been an interesting medical experiment. Oh, don’t think I was being altogether scientific, or unselfish. Ever since the divorce . . . Messing around with married colleagues isn’t for me, and there aren’t all that many good unmarried ones around. And celibacy gets old after a while. And doesn’t every woman, particularly one with psychiatric pretensions, want to know what it’s like to sleep with a dangerous man who carries a gun and even uses it upon occasion? As you said, research.” She’d been talking at the fire. Now she turned to look at me. “I’m sorry. It was a crazy idea. But taking care of a man for a week does tend to put crazy ideas into a woman’s head. If he isn’t completely revolting and she isn’t ready to murder him by the end of that time ...” She shrugged and got to her feet, standing over me. “Well, I’d better go do the dishes. Thanks for not letting me make a complete damn fool of myself.”

I said, “It’s not too late.”

She looked startled; then she laughed shortly. “Now you’re the one who’s crazy! If there was ever any little flickering flame of romance around here, you just did a good job of blowing it out.”

I said, “Romance, shomance. It was a nice buildup, but it was as phony as the name I’m wearing; wine and firelight and love. Do you really have to have it dressed up like in the paperback romances our queen-sized landlady reads? Can’t we just be two adults who, after spending a certain amount of time together, find each other interesting and acceptable, even though there’s no great emotional involvement and may never be?”

She licked her lips. “You’re a cold-blooded bastard, aren’t you?” Then she laughed softly. “But an honest one. I guess it’s a relief not to have to go through the slaves-of-breathless-passion routine. Well, you call it. Your bedroom or mine? I don’t recommend mine, it’s kind of a boys’ dormitory, and two people are apt to fall off one of those lousy little cots.”

“And I’m pretty tired of mine; but this is a nice big sofa. If you get rid of all that priceless hardware and I discard my .38, I think we can manage on it. ”

We did.

The crash awoke me. Instinctively I freed myself from the warm arms holding me and threw myself off the sofa, raked up the Smith and Wesson I’d placed ready on the floor, and rolled clear, aware of Jo sitting up behind me. Her black dress was almost invisible but her white face and bare legs showed clearly in the red glow of the dying fire. There was another crash outside; I realized that somebody had blundered into the woodpile a second time. Then he was at the door, knocking. Midnight assassins don’t normally knock. As a rule they don’t lurch noisily against woodpiles either. I drew a long breath and moved that way cautiously.

I could see him through the glass door, waiting out there, steadying himself against the doorjamb. He was a tall man in a dirty white suit and a grimy white Stetson hat and scuffed white cowboy boots; a tall old man with a short gray beard. When he took off the hat to peer in through the glass, I saw that his hair was also gray, and he didn’t have much on top.

I heard Jo whisper, “My God, it’s you! I mean, it’s Cody, the real Cody!”

Gun ready, I unlocked the door and pulled it open. Horace

Hosmer Cody stood there for a moment, hat in hand; then he fell forward across the threshold. I saw that the back of his soiled white jacket was soaked with blood that looked black in the night.

I checked him for weapons first and found nothing. I was aware of Jo coming over to help me as I pulled him inside. I retrieved the hat he’d dropped on the terrace; then I rolled the door closed and locked it. I found the right pull cord and covered the expanse of glass with the threadbare brown drapes I hadn’t bothered with earlier, trusting, wrongly as it had turned out, to the privacy afforded by the high patio walls outside. I turned on the living room light. Jo was kneeling beside Cody. She’d shoved the sleeves of her black dress above her elbows, and there was blood on her hands.

‘‘It looks as if he was shot in the back two or three days ago,’’ she said, looking up at me. “The wound seems to have been bleeding intermittently ever since. He’s got an amateurish bandage under his shirt; he probably strapped it around himself. Apparently he got the hemorrhage stopped several times, but he always managed to start it up again, the last time probably within the hour. I think he just fainted from cumulative loss of blood, although he also seems to be running a temperature. I can’t find any broken bones; I’d say it’s safe for us to move him, at least as far as the bedroom.”

“Try to work on him right there for the moment,” I said. “I’ve got to get outside and scout the neighborhood; see how he got here, and if he brought company with him. Has he got any keys on him?”

Jo protested, “The man is badly hurt! We can’t just leave him lying . . . !”

“Hell, he makes you a better patient on that tile floor than bleeding all over the Schonfelds’ bed; we’ll tuck him in after you get him patched up. And youd better change before you get blood all over your dress.”

“To hell with my dress. . . . Oh, all right, if you’re so worried about my wardrobe, get that damned apron from the kitchen and put it on me.” When I returned, she stood up and, holding her reddened hands away from her, let me wrap her in the out-sized apron belonging to our landlady. She looked at me and grinned abruptly. “Talking about clothes, darling, I hope you aren’t planning to carry out this reconnaissance mission outdoors wearing nothing but a shirt and a revolver.”

I realized that I’d charged off to repel boarders in a strictly bare-ass condition, which still remained. We regarded each other for a moment. A little color came to her face. What had started out as a polite exercise in practical biology had become considerably more passionate than planned. By the time I’d disposed of my gun and shoes and socks and pants and shorts, and she’d removed her jewelry and shoes and pantyhose and called me over to give assistance with her dress, the sensible and unromantic attitude with which we’d embarked upon this experiment had become difficult to maintain. Unhooking the top of her dress in back and trying to work the long, rebellious zipper—I always wonder how they get themselves undressed without my help— I’d found myself kissing the nape of her neck instead and realizing that it was quite a nice, long, slender neck, and that I’d been wanting to do that for several days, in a vague sort of way. But there was no vagueness about my present desires. They were sharp and urgent. She’d made a small, purring sound of pleasure and turned in my arms to be kissed properly.

“Ah, to hell with it!” she’d breathed, when I started to undress her again after some time had passed. “We’ll just give it the sex test, darling; check on how unwrinkleable it really is. . ."

Now, by the time I had my clothes back on, Jo had removed the unconscious man’s stained jacket and was peeling off his bloody shirt. She looked up as I came to stand over her.

“There are his keys,” she said, jerking her head toward a nearby chair. “You have a pocketknife; I saw it when I washed your clothes. Leave it with me, please, if you can spare it. I may have to cut the bandage off him; it seems to be stuck pretty badly in places. Be careful, darling.”

I put my knife on the chair and picked up the keys. “I’ll be back as soon as I can, but don’t panic if it takes a while. Is there a patio gate? Well, there’s got to be; he got in.”

“Yes, it’s to the left as you come out on the terrace.”

“Lock the door behind me. If he comes to, hit him on the head with something. Remember who you’ve got there.”

She looked startled. Seeing a hurt man, functioning instinctively as a trained healer, she clearly hadn’t given a thought to the feet that the warm body on which she worked belonged to the enemy, the man responsible for her mother’s death, the man her kid brother had come to Mexico to find and kill. I gathered up the keys and examined them. The split-ring carried the blue plastic tag of an El Paso auto dealer: Herrera Oldsmobile-Cadillac. However, the keys did not come from a passenger car but a GMC truck, presumably something Mr. Herrera or one of his Cadillac salesmen had taken in trade. Well, at least it gave me a notion of what I was looking for.

But I didn’t go after it right away. With a gallant gesture toward Jo, like any brave knight riding out to dispose of a few dragons, I slid behind the draperies, unlocked the glass door again, eased it open far enough to let me slip through the crack, and rolled it shut again cautiously. I had to avoid, not only the woodpile, but the logs Cody had knocked off as he stumbled weakly against it. The gate was the hairy bit. If somebody was waiting out there with a gun I’d be moving right into his sights when I came out, but there was no painless way of going over the broken-glass-protected wall, and I wasn’t in very good condition for wall-climbing, anyway. I eased the gate open, slipped through fast, and met no blinding muzzle flash, deafening report, or shocking bullet.

A concrete driveway ran along the side of the house. Ahead of me was a small, weedy, vacant lot and another house about the size of the Schonfeld vacation mansion. To my left was the dull, vaguely silvery shape of the Subaru station wagon parked in front of the kitchen door; to my right was the beach drive and, beyond some larger houses over there, the water. This late at night—well, it was only eleven-fifteen but that’s late for rural Mexico—there was hardly anybody around. I watched a lonely set of headlights pass along the beach road. I moved in the other direction, past the Subaru, toward the open ground Id seen from the rear bedroom window. I took fifteen minutes to check around the house; then it was time to determine where Cody had left his transportation.

I found it easily enough, on my first cast to the north. There were few vehicles parked on the street in this community and it stood alone, no Japanese toy truck but a husky U.S. three-quarter-ton pickup with four-wheel drive, dark red in color. Texas plates. Having located it, I still had to determine if someone else was interested in it. Hunkered down in some bushes up the street, I gave it an hour. It remained an ordinary, slightly beat-up pickup truck parked on one of the small side streets off the main beach road. At last I said to hell with it and stepped out of hiding and walked over there boldly. No bells, horns, or whistles sounded when I unlocked and opened the door; no lights flashed; no bombs went off. Inside the cab there was dried blood everywhere and fresh blood on the tan vinyl seatback as if, at the wheel, Cody had hit a bad bump or been forced to make a violent maneuver not many miles back up the highway and had started his wound leaking again. There was a bag containing three apples, a six-pack of beer with two cans remaining—Coors, if it matters—an open bag of potato chips, half a package of Oreo cookies, and a lot of trash like empty beer cans and candy wrappers and the debris from drive-in hamburgers. A cheap black raincoat shared the floor with the garbage; presumably hed used it to cover his blood-stained suit when he had to appear in public. Otherwise, aside from the food and drink, there were no personal belongings of any kind, either inside the cab or in the truck bed.

Well, unless you count guns as personal belongings. They were in a paper bag tucked into the narrow space behind the pickup’s seat, three of them, all standard Colt .38 Special revolvers with four-inch barrels. Two were fully loaded and unfired. The third was also fully loaded, but the barrel and four chambers of the cylinder were dirty. There were four fired cartridge cases in the bag, and two loose, loaded rounds; plus one empty six-shot speedy-loader and two full ones. Apparently the old man had managed to separate three guns and loaders from their owners somehow. He'd got into a firefight and got off four shots with one of the liberated weapons. Before hiding all the guns away, he'd dumped the cylinder of the one he'd used and slapped in a full load of six. Good firearms discipline for a gent with a hole in the back. Where he'd obtained all the weapons and spare ammo was an interesting question, and I had a hunch the answer would be equally interesting. However, at the moment the important thing for me to keep in mind was that, although he'd had weapons and ammunition readily available, he'd come to the house unarmed, indicating that his intentions had probably not been hostile.