Operation Whiplash

I stood inside the barroom phone booth and listened to the long distance operator’s Ozark twang inquire if she was speaking to the Lazy Susan Motel, in Hudson, Florida. A honey-and-molasses Southern drawl, male, replied that indeed, ma’am, she was.

“I have a person-to-person call for Mrs. Hazel Andrews,” the operator said.

There was a brief pause. “We have no Mrs. Andrews registered,” the drawl said.

“Sir—” the operator began to say to me.

“She was registered two days ago,” I cut in.

“One moment, please,” the Florida drawl said. There was an empty humming sound on the line. “Ahhh, yes. Mrs. Andrews checked out day before yesterday, sir.”

“Then why the hell wasn’t I told that when I called the motel the day before yesterday?” I demanded heatedly.

“Sir, this is a person-to-person call,” the operator warned.

“I’ll talk to this man,” I said. “You, there, at the Lazy Susan. Why wasn’t I told day before yesterday that Mrs. Andrews had checked out?”

“I’m sure I don’t know, sir.” The voice was gently tolerant of human frailty. “I wasn’t on duty at the time.”

“Do you have the check-out card in your hand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What time did Mrs. Andrews leave?”

“Four thirty-eight
P.M
., sir.”

I had called at seven
P.M
., the same hour I was calling now. “Let me speak to the manager,” I said.

“I’m sorry, but he won’t be back until nine in the morning.”

Frustration sharpened my tone. “Is there anyone there who knows what’s going on?”

“We have quite a few guest check-outs every day, sir,” the drawl apologized. “There’s really no reason anyone would—”

“Listen,” I broke in again. “Mrs. Andrews is a six-foot redhead with a figure you wish your wife had, if you’ve got a wife. She’s probably—”

“Oh, her!” The drawl not only quickened, it warmed appreciably. “Yes, sir, I did see that guest several times the first part of the week, but not—let’s see, now—not for the past three or four days.”

Not for the past three or four days?

Today was Friday.

I’d called Monday night, and hadn’t been able to speak to Hazel.

I’d called Wednesday night, and hadn’t been told that she’d checked out Wednesday afternoon.

And now that she wasn’t at the motel, I didn’t know where to call her.

“All right, operator,” I said finally. “Give me the charges.”

“I’ll call you back, sir,” she replied.

I hung up but remained in the booth waiting for the call-back. Hazel had gone to Florida two weeks ago, and we had agreed I’d call her at the Lazy Susan every other night. The first week we connected three times, the second week not at all. There was something damn peculiar about it. There was something—

The phone rang, and I picked it up. “That will be three twenty-five, sir,” the operator’s voice said.

I pumped quarters into the coin slot, swept the rest of my prepared change into a jacket pocket, hung up again, and left the phone booth. I returned to my table at the far end of the bar, sat down, and morosely contemplated my freshly replenished Jim Beam on the rocks.

I couldn’t understand it.

It wasn’t at all like Hazel to go off without leaving a message as to how I could get in touch with her. I could call Nate Pepperman’s office in Hudson, of course, but that would have to wait until morning. Pepperman was Hazel’s financial consultant and property manager. Nate would know where she had gone. It had been a phone call from Hazel to Nate two weeks ago that initiated her trip to Florida.

Ordinarily Nate did the calling, but after returning from Spain a month ago, Hazel and I had rented an in-place trailer on Lake Peckerwood, north of Stuttgart, Arkansas, to do some fishing. Everyone thinks the name’s a joke—the lake’s name—but it actually is Lake Peckerwood. There were no phones at our end of the lake, so we used to drive to Stuttgart a couple of times a week for supplies and to allow Hazel to catch up on her various business affairs via telephone.

I’d made a good touch in Spain, but in doing so I’d lost the safe haven I’d been using previously, Hazel’s ranch in Ely, Nevada. Too many people had learned how to find me there. Hazel had put the place up for sale, and now that I thought about it, some legal aspect of that situation could have been why Pepperman wanted her in Florida.

Although it could have been almost anything. Twice widowed, Hazel had inherited chunks of cash, real estate, stocks, and bonds from both husbands. Telephone calls to and from Florida as to the disposition or acquisition of this, that, or the other asset or liability had been commonplace. I’d never paid much attention.

But I had been reluctant to see her go back to Hudson. I’d met her there while I was running down a crooked deputy sheriff who had killed my partner and tried to make off with a score my partner and I had taken from a bank in Phoenix. Hazel and I had hit it off almost immediately. But in settling with the deputy I wound up with most of my face burned off. That came from the gas-tank explosion of a car from under which I was engaging in a roadblock shoot-out with the deputy’s legitimate cohorts. I had scragged the deputy before the roadblock situation developed, but my style had attracted attention.

Hazel and I had been separated for two years while I acquired a new face through the skill and greed of a little Pakistani plastic surgeon in the prison hospital where I was jugged. When the facial surgery was completed, but before anyone had seen my new face, I acquired a gun and took off. There were bound to be more than a few people around Hudson, Florida, who would never forget my departure.

Hazel had never been connected with any of my activities in Hudson, and I had never permitted her to visit me while I was in the prison hospital. So there was really no reason why she couldn’t go back to Hudson. It was different for me, of course, even with a new face. If I went back and was identified—although, as I’d told Hazel, I didn’t see how it was possible now—there were still enough open charges against me to create an overrun on a court calendar. I’d mentioned going with her, but she’d said firmly it was much better to let sleeping dogs lie, and off she’d gone.

Which was why I was sitting in a bar in Stuttgart, Arkansas, staring down into Jim Beam on the rocks.

I picked up the drink and took a meditative swallow.

Could a police reaction have developed to Hazel’s presence in Hudson? It seemed highly unlikely, but
something
had provoked her into leaving the Lazy Susan without letting me know how to keep in touch with her. Something must have happened that—

A burst of noise, near the center of the large barroom, distracted me. Three loud-talking farmer-types in barn-stained overalls were seated at a table there. They all had stubble-bearded, weatherbeaten faces as red as the backs of their necks. I saw the bartender looking in their direction, too.

Beyond their table, movement caught my eye. A girl had entered the bar and was peering intently around. She brightened suddenly when she looked in my direction, then waved. I stared, and she smiled. Even before my acquisition of a new face, with its inherent stiffness of expression, girls had never been noted for smiling at the old one. I looked at the tables on either side of me to see if I had misjudged the direction of her interest, but both were empty.

I looked toward the girl once more. She baffled me additionally by waving again. She had a pretty face, with dark hair cut short in what used to be called boyish fashion, before the boys started letting it grow down their backs. Black-rimmed, harlequin-style glasses gave the girl’s face a piquant expression. She had on dark slacks and a form-fitting blue jersey, and the jersey emphasized a firmly jutting shelf of bosom.

The girl shook her head as though impatient with my slowness. She started across the floor toward me. Her route took her past the table containing the bleary-eyed, loud-talking rednecks, and one of them reached out and grabbed her wrist, throwing her off-stride. An undeniably plump hip bumped a corner of the table, and the beer glasses jumped into the air, spilling part of their contents.

The redneck said something to the girl in a leering undertone.

His wordage didn’t carry to me, but his message did to everyone in the barroom. I didn’t even see what the girl did. The next second, her wrist was free, and the redneck was rubbing his arm. The girl hadn’t even seemed to look at him. She started toward my table again, but the man jumped up and lunged at her, mouthing curses.

I got to my feet, but the girl removed and folded her glasses, then thrust them, in a single quick movement, inside her jersey into the ample cleavage between her breasts. The redneck’s bulk obscured the girl from me, so again I didn’t see what she did. While the farmer-type was still moving toward her, he soared into the air above her sleek-looking dark head. He landed on his back on the hard pine flooring with a crash that rattled the bottles on the back bar. He didn’t get up. I could see him blinking at the ceiling.

His two companions were on their feet, shouting drunken threats. The girl’s left arm swung across the table in a casual-looking, level arc. Her bladed palm took the nearer man full in the throat. He doubled up and fell back onto his chair, then rolled onto the floor. The girl stood above him and her knee flashed up and down. Even across the room I winced as she stomped him in the groin.

The furious-faced third man kicked the table partly out of his way and launched a roundhouse swing. The girl stepped inside it and jabbed extended fingers into his face. He grabbed at his eyes with both hands, then spun away from her with his arms shielding his face. The girl picked up a beer bottle and broke it off against the back of his neck with a full-armed swing of the bottle.

The bartender arrived on the run, bungstarter in hand. He surveyed the human carnage littering the floor with a foolish look on his round face. The girl looked him over as though deciding whose side he was on, then dismissed him as a creature of no importance. A hand dipped into her cleavage, she extracted her glasses, then put them on again. It was like watching a lioness clean the fur from her claws after breaking a gazelle’s neck. The girl continued across the room and seated herself at the table. I was still standing beside it, with what I was sure was a foolish look on my own face.

“I’m Robin Ford,” she said calmly. “And you’re Earl Drake.”

The bartender had enlisted assistance in removing the bewildered-looking, staggering rednecks from the tavern. The large room was quiet. My table was getting a lot of attention, more than I liked. I sat down. “Glad to meet you, Robin,” I said. “I think.”

The bartender appeared beside our table. “You tend to overdo things, lady,” he said.

She eyed him coolly. “I don’t ask to be loved,” she replied.

He shrugged, then went back behind the bar.

“What do you do for a living?” I asked the girl. Not a single jet-black hair appeared to be out of place, despite her activity.

“I’m a stunt girl in the movies,” she said. “When they’re making movies. Falling off horses, jumping from burning buildings.”

“And cleaning out bars,” I suggested.

“Oh, sure,” she agreed. “I tuck my hair up under a sombrero and relieve a few frustrations.”

The former hubbub in the large room had gradually resumed. Robin Ford and her semi-lethal response to harassment had been a five-minute wonder, but people were returning to their own preoccupations. It was time I got down to business myself. Not too many people know me as Earl Drake. If a girl could cross a barroom floor in Stuttgart, Arkansas, and lay the name on me, maybe it was time to change it.

“What makes you think my name is Earl Drake, Robin?” I asked.

She smiled, an odd-looking little smile with no real warmth. She wasn’t as young as I’d first thought. Late twenties, probably. A ripened peach. Certainly no vestal virgin. Sophistication showed. If she hadn’t moved so gracefully, her figure could almost be called stocky. “Hazel described you,” she answered me.

“When did you see Hazel?” I rapped at her.

She looked surprised at my vehemence. “Day before yesterday. Why?”

“What time?”

“Ten in the morning. Maybe ten-thirty. I flew to St. Louis that afternoon, and to Little Rock yesterday. I hired a car and drove here. Hazel couldn’t remember the name of this bar, but she remembered the street. I found you in the third bar I tried. If I hadn’t, I’d have looked for the trailer out at the lake.”

I was still digesting that load of information when she hit me with a real twister.

“Hazel wants you to come to Hudson,” she added.

My brain was churning at a thousand miles an hour. Hazel knew all about the possible involvements for me in Hudson, Florida. If she wanted me there, it added up to only one thing: trouble.

Robin’s cool-looking blue eyes studied me. “Hazel couldn’t telephone you,” she continued. “So she sent me to find you.”

“Where did you meet Hazel?”

“At a motel south of Hudson called the Lazy Susan. I was visiting an aunt nearby, but I don’t like staying with relatives. Hazel and I were both alone at the motel, so we had dinner together one night and a couple of drinks another. She knew I was at a loose end—we’d talked about my Hollywood career, or ex-career, the way the movie situation looks now—so Wednesday morning she called me at the motel and asked me to meet her in town at the office of a man named Pepperman. When I got there, Hazel said—”

“Was Nate Pepperman there, too?”

“Yes. A dapper-looking little man. But Hazel did most of the talking. And that’s how I became a paid messenger girl.”

“No indication why she wanted me to come?”

“None. I got the impression she seemed to think you’d know.”

I didn’t know.

Not that it made all that much difference.

Mentally I’d been on my way to Hudson before Robin Ford had halfway finished her story. “What about you?” I asked. “Do you cut out here?”

“Hazel said I should come back with you,” she answered. Just for an instant I received a fleeting impression of curiosity in her blue eyes. Or speculation. “If you’re going.”