Authors: Donald Hamilton
Nobody tailed us. We had a hamburger at a drive-in, and headed out into the desert, where I’d earlier scouted an arroyo where we could improvise a private hundred-yard rifle range with a high dirt bank for a backstop. I set up some targets and had Sheila bring down the rifle and fire a few rounds at short range to see where the gun was shooting. We got the telescopic sight roughly centered, so the shots would at least go on the paper at a hundred yards, before we backed off and started shooting for group with the various loads I’d brought along.
“You’re going to have to do most of the work, Skinny,” I said. “My shoulder’s in no condition to take a pounding. Give me five with each bullet weight. Hold as close as you can, exactly the same way every time.”
Watching her shoot, I was glad I hadn’t bought a Magnum. Even a standard .30-06 is a lot of gun for a small girl to shoot from rest, prone, where the body can’t rock back with the recoil but has to stay and take the punishment. I squatted behind her with a pair of binoculars I’d picked up. They weren’t bad glasses, but they weren’t strong enough to really distinguish bullet-holes at that range; and I was more interested in watching the girl, anyway.
The sun was bright on her short-cut hair as she lay there, firing steadily. I could remember when it had been even shorter, hacked and ragged. Well, that had nothing to do with sighting in a rifle, or with her marksmanship in general. What was important was that she seemed to know that she was doing. They all get rifle training, but it doesn’t always take. After she’d finished, we went down to inspect the targets. I put my pocket ruler across the best group.
“Four and a quarter inches with the 150-grain load,” I said. “A bolt-action rifle that won’t group within two inches at a hundred yards isn’t worth having, and we ought to get one and a half even with factory ammunition. Is that as close as you can hold?”
“They all felt good,” she said. “They should all have been right together.”
“You don’t mind if I check you?”
“No,” she said stiffly. “No, of course I don’t mind.”
“Don’t get mad, Skinny,” I said. “I’ve got to know if it’s you or the gun that’s spreading them out like that. Just because you’re swell in bed doesn’t necessarily mean you’re hell on the rifle range, too.”
She stared at me, startled and indignant; then she laughed. We went back to a hundred yards and I fired five. It was no fun at all. The burn was in exactly the wrong place. My group beat hers by only a quarter of an inch, good enough for the male ego but no prize in the accuracy department. After checking, and putting up fresh targets, I got out the tools and took the gun apart. She sat on the ground beside me to watch.
“I think the stock has warped a little,” I said. “They often do on these light rifles. It’s supposed to be a free-floating barrel without any wood contact, but I think we’re getting some pressure here that’s throwing it off. We’ll just ream out the barrel channel a bit and put in a few cardboard shims to free things up around the action. The magazine isn’t supposed to bind like this, either.” I glanced at her. “They didn’t teach you anything about this, did they?”
“No,” she said. “All they did was make us shoot.”
“As a matter of fact, I picked it up as a kid,” I said. “I always used to be crazy about guns. And knives and swords and all the rest of the stuff that tickles a kid’s bloodthirsty imagination. That was before World War II, of course. They picked me out of the Army after a couple of months of that and put me into this outfit. We had us quite a war.”
“And afterward?” she asked.
“I said the hell with it and got married, but it didn’t take. Well, that isn’t quite right. I wasn’t allowed to tell the girl my wartime experiences, and everything was swell for a good many years, until one day she discovered what kind of a monster was sharing the master bedroom with her. She’s out in Nevada now, married to a rancher.”
“She must be a fool,” Sheila said.
I looked up and grinned. “Watch that transference, Skinny.” I shook my head. “It wasn’t a question of brains but of stomach. Beth’s a bright enough girl. She’s just allergic to gore, is all. I guess she felt, too, that I’d been holding out on her, and of course I had, under orders.” I started putting the rifle back together. “Well, that ought to improve things slightly.”
“Eric.”
“Yes,” I said.
Sheila’s voice was low. “Have you ever thought of marrying again? Somebody... somebody who knows all about you and doesn’t care?”
I looked at her sitting in the sunshine with a lot of desert behind her. “Don’t go off half-cocked,” I said. “It’s a simple psychological phenomenon. You’ll get over it. You said so yourself.”
She hesitated. “Have you... have you got a girl?”
“There’s a nice lady in Texas. Pretty, too. We sometimes get together when I’m on leave.”
“Does
she
know the kind of work you do?”
I said, “I met her on a job. She was kind of accidentally involved. She knows. But she’s had four husbands and isn’t looking for a fifth, if that’s what you’re driving at.”
“Is she... really good-looking?”
“And young. And rich,” I said. “She’s also a pretty swell person, in a cool, sophisticated sort of way. What do you want me to say, that I go around with a real creep?”
Sheila laughed and stopped laughing. “Do you love her?” she asked.
I said, “Hold this while I try to match up... Hold it steady. Thanks. I thought we weren’t going to talk any nonsense about love.”
Sheila said, “Don’t keep throwing my words back at me. I had a husband once. He was a beast. A louse. Any word you can think of. I mean, really a beast, physically, mentally, and morally, only it didn’t show up until after we were married, or maybe I was just too damn innocent to know the symptoms. I mean the kind of man that... that makes you want to wipe all men off the face of the earth, if you’re a woman. So I divorced him and joined this organization, hoping they could give me some work along those lines. Extermination was for me. I’d been very much in love, you understand. I was terribly disillusioned and very bitter.”
I said, “Dr. Tommy has a theory about you that goes something like that. Of course, he’s got a fancy sexual angle, like all headshrinkers. They’re afraid Papa Freud will disown them if they don’t.”
She glanced at me warily. “What did Dr. Stern tell you about me?”
“Well, there was something about a childhood trauma—of a sexual nature, of course. Tommy apparently didn’t have it treed yet, but he was baying on the trail. He thinks it’s the secret key to all your personality difficulties.”
She laughed. “I had a perfectly normal childhood, thanks. I was never followed through the park by a scary man who exposed himself, or molested in the stairwell by the janitor. Honest.”
“You’ll break Tommy’s heart,” I said. “Then there was your unsatisfactory marriage. He says it broke up with charges of brutality on one side and frigidity on the other.”
She grimaced. “Don’t you know that any time a man wants to hurt a woman publicly, he calls her frigid? How does Dr. Stern reconcile my supposed frigidity with the fact that I went down to Costa Verde deliberately to... to seduce a bearded bandit I’d never seen?”
“You were trying to prove something by putting yourself on a spot, says Tommy. You wanted to demonstrate, to yourself and everybody else, that your husband was a damn liar. And Dr. Tommy’s theory is that you proved something, all right: the wrong thing. He thinks that what happened is that you panicked when El Fuerte started making amorous advances and gave yourself and the show away.”
Sheila didn’t look at me. “And what do you think?”
I said, “Don’t be silly. This is Mr. Henry Evans, honey, the guy you spent the night with, remember? We’ll consider the frigidity theory disproved. But that still leaves the question of just what happened down there to trip you up.”
“Why, I simply goofed,” she said, frankly. “Maybe I
was
a little scared. Not of El Fuerte’s amorous advances. Just of being caught and killed.”
“It’s normal,” I said. “What was the goof?”
“I got the gun, all right,” she said. “His gun. After inviting me into his hut as we’d planned for him to do, he’d chivalrously taken off his belt and holster so I wouldn’t get bruised by all the buckles and hardware. I got the pistol, all right, but you know the grip safety on that big .45 automatic. If you don’t hold the gun just right, that spring-loaded gizmo doesn’t release, and nothing happens when you pull the trigger even though the thumb-safety is off. I have a small hand and, as I say, maybe I was a little nervous. And he was fast, faster than you’d expect such a big man to be. After that initial delay, I never had a chance.”
It was a good story, a plausible story. There isn’t anybody working with firearms who hasn’t, at some time in his career, fumbled a safety device and missed a shot. The only trouble was that I’d heard a lot of good, plausible stories: I knew she was lying. Something had happened down there that she was ashamed or afraid to tell me, probably just that she’d lost her nerve at the critical moment much more drastically than she cared to admit.
Well, it happens. I just wished she hadn’t felt compelled to lie, as if I gave a damn how brave she had or had not been. I slipped the bolt back into the rifle and passed the weapon over.
“Let’s finish the job and get out of this sun,” I said. “Give me another five with the 150-grain load to see how she’s grouping now and where she’s putting them on the paper. Then we’ll sight her in three inches high at a hundred yards. That’ll put her just about on the button at two-fifty. How’s your shoulder holding up?”
“It’s all right,” she said. “Eric, I—”
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Five shots, you said?”
“Five,” I said.
“One day,” she said brightly, “one day I’ll fall for a man who’ll settle for three-shot groups or do his own damn shooting.”
On the way back to the motel, I stopped at a public phone booth to make a phone call. I had to get the number from the operator, as it was a new installation not yet listed in the book. After dialing, I let the ringing continue for a long time, but no one answered. Apparently neither Catherine Smith nor her alleged father were at home. Well, they wouldn’t be if they were behaving as I hoped and expected them to.
When I reached the motel, Sheila’s car was already parked in front of her unit. I hesitated, but there wasn’t anything I had to say to her, and if she had anything to say to me, she’d had plenty of opportunity. To hell with her and her dark secrets, anyway. As I entered my room, the phone started to ring. I closed the door, picked up the instrument, and heard her voice on the line.
“Mr. Evans?” she said. “I’m sorry to interrupt you, Mr. Evans, you’re probably busy, but—”
I stood perfectly still, holding the instrument tightly. There were three words she could have used: disturb, bother, and interrupt. I’d always thought interrupt was a bad one, hard to fit naturally into an ordinary greeting, but that was the trouble code we were using, regardless.
I said slowly, repeating the word so she’d know I’d got it, “You’re not interrupting anything, Miss Summerton. I just came in the door; I haven’t started on my paper work yet. What can I do for you?”
She started to speak. Her voice sounded perfectly steady. I listened, thinking hard. The three code words are variations on the same theme. The first means,
I’m in trouble, save yourself.
The second means,
I’m in trouble, help me.
And the third, the one she’d used, means,
I’m in trouble, give me a diversion so I can handle it.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, Miss Summerton. I have an extra instruction booklet. I’ll bring it right over.”
I put the phone down and stared at the wall, but there was really nothing to think about. The emergency drill gave me no discretion. The agent in trouble calls the signals. Of course, as her senior, it was my prerogative to disregard her call entirely and leave her to the wolves if I thought the operation required it; but if I took action, it had to be the type of action she’d requested.
She’d asked for a diversion, not active help. Whatever the trouble was in there, she was going to handle it herself, all one hundred pounds of her. I thought of the smooth-working team of Catherine and Max, and the ruthless professional way they’d cooperated in slipping that needle into my neck...
I looked at my watch. Ten minutes should be about right, I decided, long enough so whoever had her covered—as somebody presumably did—would start to get tense and nervous, but not so long that they’d know for sure something was wrong. I spent the time sticking a few things into my pockets that might come in handy. The low sun hit me hard as I left my room, carrying the yellow instruction booklet that had accompanied the questionnaires.
Around the corner, the swimming pool patio was full of half-naked kids. Some grown-ups lounged in long chairs by the pool, but it was the kids who were doing the splashing and yelling. I waited until the space around Sheila’s door was clear for a moment, and walked up quickly and hammered on it hard with my fist.
“Open up!” I called as loudly as I dared. “Open up. This is the police!”
It wasn’t what you’d call really clever; in fact it was pretty corny. Well, most diversions are. You start a fight or set fire to a wastebasket or shoot off a gun or a firecracker. The rest is up to the other person, the person in trouble, and he had better move fast—or she had.
I heard a sudden scuffle behind the door. A small-caliber gun went off in there. The crack of it was unmistakable to me, but nobody around seemed to notice, perhaps because of the kid-noises around the pool. There was a long, long pause. I fought back the impulse to shout silly questions or break down the door. Then it opened and Sheila looked out. She was holding a slim-barreled .22 automatic pistol I’d never seen before.
“I had to break his finger with the trigger-guard before he’d let go,” she said calmly. “Otherwise no damage except a hole in the ceiling. Did anybody hear the shot?”
I shook my head. I wanted to take her in my arms and kiss her hard for being unharmed, and the hell with her little white lies. But it was hardly the time for a sentimental clinch.