The Frighteners (26 page)

He didn’t speak at once; he just lay there watching me slyly. Because he knew, damn him. He knew that, now that we had talked, although we might wind up killing each other eventually, we were bound together by certain ties. For one thing, we had a lady in common, legally his lady, at least for the moment. Apparently he didn’t hold it against me; but it was a debt I owed him, and he’d be the man to keep count. And for another thing, we were both survivors; and regardless of his morals, regardless of his crimes, I couldn’t work up too big a hate against a sexagenarian smart and tough enough to deceive a bunch of trained young agents into thinking him harmless, shoot his way clear of them, and drive several hundred miles with his life running out of a ragged hole in his back. And the gray old fox knew that, too.

He whispered, “Maybe friendship’s too strong a word, son, but we’ve got enemies in common. Amounts to practically the same thing. Same fellers trying to kill us both. I figured if I could find you down here, we could work together.”

“How did you find us?”

“Man in my business has got to have connections,” he said. “I left a trail of bloody phone booths clear across the U.S. Southwest tracking you down. No trouble learning you’d got as far as Hermosillo; then there’d been some kind of a shooting. Word was you’d been hurt, and you and a Mrs. Beckman, Dr. Beckman, had disappeared. Maiden name Charles. Has a brother, Mason Charles, now in the Hermosillo hospital, who seems to’ve shot you for me by mistake, and who’s probably still fixing to kill me when he gets out, or so those chatty fellers said while I was listening harder than I let on, all the time complaining how my rheumatiz hurt something awful and keeping an old man shackled up like that was downright wicked cruel— I’ll be damned if they didn’t take pity on the poor old codger and take the bracelets off after awhile. They thought it was real comical, the way they’d set that angry boy on my trail. Or yours. And the mother he was trying to avenge was Millie Charles, who was my partner’s fancy lady, and purely hated my guts because I didn’t appreciate how sweet and pretty and innocent she was; and who got herself murdered with Will a few hundred miles south of here. Probably by those same Mex outlaws who was all set to kill you—if you believe in those busy
bandidos
.’’

Jo, beside me, made a small sound of anger. “We know who those murderers are, Mr. Cody, the revolutionaries to whom you were selling arms. And we know who arranged for them to kill my mother and Will Pierce!” She swallowed hard. “And she wasn’t anybody’s fancy lady, damn you; she loved your partner and was going to marry him! And now you’d better shut up and get some rest. . . . Well, since you’re conscious, I want to get some liquid into you first, to replace what ran out of you. Probably straight whiskey!’’

“Beer, ma’am,” he whispered. “Just good Coors beer.” She made a face. “As far as I’m concerned, they can pour that lousy stuff right back into the horse. Stay quiet now, while I warm some bouillon for you. If you start yourself bleeding again after all I went through to patch you up, I’ll shoot you!”

We watched her march out, closing the bedroom door firmly behind her. The man in the bed chuckled.

“That’s a lot of woman.”

I said, “You still haven’t said how you found us.”

“Had somebody find out where she worked and got somebody in Tucson to check the Desert Pines Clinic. Dr. Joanna Beckman was taking a week’s vacation in a place in Kino Bay lent to her by some folks named Schonfeld. ‘Seaview Cottage,’ half a mile up the beach road on the right-hand side, name on wall, can’t miss it. Kino Bay isn’t a full seventy miles from Hermosillo; seemed likely that, with a wounded man on her hands, she’d head right here. My only trouble was lasting this far. With no load in the bed, that damn truck Herrera got me—that’s my car-dealing primo— bounced me around like the old plowhorse I learnt to ride on; kept knocking things open back there. Not that it was likely to heal over, anyway, with the bullet still in there.”

He grinned at me. “And to save you asking, Art Herrera owes me a few, beyond the high-priced Caddies he’s sold me; and I just happen to know some folks who cross the border regular without checking in and out, who had reason to oblige me and fix me up with stickers and papers. Wouldn’t hold up if anybody really looked; but I didn’t figure I could make it through the legal tourist-permit routine, the way my back was.”

I said, “I’d think, with your connections, the first thing you’d do was find a discreet doctor to patch you up. ”

“That’s what you’d think, and that’s what those fellers would think who was after me. They have pretty good connections themselves—you’d know more about that than I do—and they’d have every doctor I knew covered, discreet or indiscreet; probably every doctor in this whole damn border country. Didn’t figure it was worth the risk. With two dead and maybe a couple more wounded, they’d be coming after me hard. Wasn’t as if I had a bullet in the lungs or the guts; I could feel it sitting right there under the skin. If worse came to worst, I’d have bought myself some razor blades and got in front of a mirror and tried slicing it out of there myself, even though it was a hell of a place to reach.”

I said, “And now for the sixty-four-dollar question, Mr. Cody: just what the hell do you want me for?”

He grinned at me wolfishly from the pillow. ‘ ‘I want you for doing your job, son.”

“And what do you think my job is?”

“I figure it’s finding a bunch of weapons that got kinda mislaid here in northern Mexico. You want them and I want them, so why don’t we just pool our resources, like the man says, and find them together? Once we got them, we can fight over what’s to be done with them.’’

I looked down at his drawn, whiskery face for a moment and reminded myself not to let the faded eyes and the gray hairs fool me. That mistake had been made quite recently by other men who thought they were smart and tough; and a couple of them had died. They probably weren’t the first.

I said, “Do you really think I’d work with you, you old prairie rattler?”

He gave me his best smile to date; I’ve seen a more trustworthy grin on a trained killer Doberman.

“Now that I see you, boy, I think you’d work with the devil himself if he could help you get what you was sent for. And figure on outsmarting him once you got it.”

The trouble was, he was perfectly right.

Standing in front of the fire, bare to the waist—I seemed to be forever exposing one end of me or the other here in Kino Bay—I held up my arms so Jo could wrap the long strip of cloth, tom from a bed sheet, around my chest.

“Tighter,” I said.

“You won’t be able to breathe.”

“Don’t argue with the patient, doctor; there isn’t time. The sizzling señorita isn’t going to wait out in the cold forever, and there are a few more things that need to be cleared up before she comes barging in.” I gestured impatiently. “Go on! I want it bulky enough to show a little under my coat and shirt and tight enough to remind me that I’m a poor, feverish, wounded old man. . . . Swell.” I waited for her to fasten the cloth in place with safety pins. “Now take that cheesecloth coronet off my head and replace it with just enough tape so my brains don’t leak out. I want to be able to get that lousy Stetson on. Fortunately he’s the kind of guy who practically wears his hat in the shower.”

“Brains?” she said. “What brains?”

She replaced my head bandage with a small, taped dressing and watched while I buttoned Buff Cody’s fancy wedding shirt over the chest wrappings and pulled on his white suit jacket. After getting the bloodstained garments off him, Jo had run them through the washer-dryer in the kitchen figuring that they couldn’t look worse than they already did. Not being wash-and-wear, the pants and jacket hadn’t taken kindly to the treatment, but Jo had mashed them into some kind of shape with Ziggy

Schonfeld’s electric iron, and I wasn’t planning on exposing them to any more fancy wedding receptions anyway. At least the blood had washed out, and the bullet hole in the back of the jacket wasn’t conspicuous. In return, I was leaving the old man the windbreaker with the bullet-torn shoulder; it should make him feel right at home. I tried on the battered white hat cautiously. The pressure on the partly healed furrow in my scalp wasn’t comfortable, but I could live with it. The revolver holstered inside my waistband wasn’t an authentic part of the disguise. I buttoned the jacket to cover it.

“How do I look?” I asked.

“You are crazy,” she said. “Absolutely nuts!”

“Well, you’re the psycho expert; you should know.”

“He’s sending you into a trap.”

“That’s how I make my living, being sent into traps.”

“What makes you think you can trust him?”

“For one thing, the fact that he’s in bed weak as a kitten and you’ve got a gun.”

“Well, you’re not in such red-hot shape yourself, buster.”

I said, “Gosh, and here I thought I was doing pretty well.” I saw a little color come to her face, and I grinned. “Medically speaking, I’d say the treatment was a success, Doctor. It might even catch on. Beats electroshock all to hell.”

She said rather stiffly, “I don’t know. I still think you’re suffering from something, the way you accept everything that man tells you. . . . My God, darling, that’s Cody in there, Buffalo Bill Cody, Horace Hosmer Cody! The man responsible for my mother’s death, and Will Pierce’s; the old man who was going to marry a young girl who trusted him and then have her murdered in cold blood so he could have all her money!”

I said, “That’s what everybody seems to think.”

She stared at me. “Can there be any doubts, after all we’ve been told?” She hesitated. “You must have talked it over with Gloria. What did she tell you about Buff Cody?”

“That he was a wicked old gent who’d deliberately arranged to frighten her into marrying him with eventual murder in mind.” I shrugged. “Oh, she believes it, sure. And your brother is sincere in his hate, and the evidence is overwhelming. Buff Cody is a sinister, scheming, murdering, gunrunning old son of a bitch who should be strung up to the nearest cottonwood with no prayer for his rotten soul since he obviously doesn’t have one. Just the same . . .”I stopped.

“What’s the problem?”

I said, “The problem is simply that none of that, none of what we’ve heard, fits the old man in the bedroom. Now that I’ve seen him up close, I just don’t believe it.”

She shook her head sympathetically. “Like I said, my well-considered professional diagnosis is: nuts. That’ll be a hundred and fifty dollars, please; you can pay the receptionist as you go out.”

I said, “Something’s very haywire here. I don’t say the gent in my bed is an angel. I’d hate to play poker with him, and if I had an oil deal going with him I’d want a regiment of high-priced lawyers on my side. And I don’t say he wouldn’t run a few illegal guns in a worthy cause or even just a profitable one. But there are two things he’d never do. He’d never raise a hand against his partner of many years, the man who shared his march to success, unless that man betrayed him unforgivably; and even then he’d take the necessary action himself and not turn the job over to a bunch of machete-wielding revolutionaries. . . ."

“And the second thing?” Jo asked when I paused.

I said, “That Horace Cody in there would never, ever harm a young girl who depended on him, the orphan daughter of his dead partner, a kid he’d known since her childhood.”

“But you just told me she’s convinced he did. Or was planning to.”

I said dryly, “What convinces Gloria isn’t something I take too seriously.”

“But she’s known Cody all her life. You’ve talked to him for about ten minutes. Yet you think you know him better than she does.”

I said, “Sure. Why not? We’re both westerners, but she was brought up in the big white house on the hill with the dull rich folks and the polite servants, while I grew up around the corrals where the interesting characters hung out. I’ve known several tough old gents like that one in there. I know they’ll skin you in a horse trade as soon as look at you and give you their last dime if they like you and apologize because it isn’t a quarter. And Gloria has never had to gamble her life on her judgment of people. I have.”

Jo said, “I’m supposed to be a pro at judging people, and I don’t trust that old goat one little bit.”

I grinned. “Your trouble is that you’ve been trained to draw your conclusions from the clinical data. But there are times when you have to throw the numbers out the window and go on instinct. My instinct says our Mr. Cody, the one in there, had nothing whatever to do with the machete slaughter down on the Mazatlan-Durango road and never had the slightest intention of murdering his child bride. And if he’s not guilty of either of those things, maybe he didn’t even run any guns, although, as I said, he’s probably quite capable of that.”

“But he’s asking you to help him find them.”

“Everybody wants those damned arms; that doesn’t mean everybody was involved in bringing them into Mexico. I want them and I wasn’t. I don’t know what the old goat is up to; I just have a hunch that my best bet is to play along with him.’’ I drew a long breath, glanced uneasily toward the kitchen door through which Antonia could be expected to come any minute, and settled my borrowed hat on my head. “Well, we’re running out of time; let’s see if he’s thought of anything else to help me.”

“Help!” Jo snorted. “All he’ll help you to is a bullet. Maybe the next one will hit you in the ass and really hurt you. I’m told the dinosaurs kept their brains down there, and you’re pretty prehistoric in some respects.”

I grinned and went to the bedroom door, opened it gently, and slipped inside. The old man in the bed opened his eyes and reached up weakly to feel the spectacular new head bandage we’d given him.

“Fool thing,” he said. “If they find this place and get in here, what difference does it make if they think I’m you or me? They’re out to kill the both of us.”

I shrugged. “It’s probably a waste of time, but I was trained to be thorough. If I’m out there impersonating you as well as possible, you might as well be in here impersonating me as well as possible. It probably won’t buy us anything, but you never can tell in this business and, hell, all it cost is a little surgical gauze. ” After a moment I went on: “I’m going to get you some protection here; but they’ll supposedly be protecting me and my damaged skull, now that this safe house seems to be pretty well compromised. If you and Antonia could find it, somebody else can. Remember that you’re a guy suffering from a bad concussion. Meanwhile, Buff Cody, with his clothes hastily washed and his wound patched up, will be heading out into the desert in his trusty red truck.” I posed before him. “Think I’ll pass?”