The Frighteners (36 page)

“How you know he leave?”

“I’ve seen him in action, sweetie. He gets nervous. When things go wrong, he pulls out his men at the first excuse and takes off flying. I’m about to make a few more things go wrong. . . . Let them come in close and hose them down good for me, baby.”

She studied me for a long moment; then her lips formed a smile. “Hear this man!
Guapa
, sweetie, baby! Maybe he like Antonia a little. Good man, fight good, drive good, shoot good. Love lousy, I bet. Antonia teach some time. What you say,
Americano
, see you in
igl
é
sia?
"

“That’s right, honey. See you in church. . . . Oh, Antonia?” She’d started to move away. She stopped and looked over her shoulder. "S
í
?”

“Where is it?”

She regarded me without expression for a moment. “You ask?”

“You know what I ask. Medina might not have taken you on the man’s work of loading and hiding the arms, but he’d certainly have consulted you beforehand about where was the best place for them.”

“So you afraid Antonia be kill and never tell.”

“Sure. Goddamn nuisance, Antonia, good riddance. But I must know where those weapons are concealed. So tell me, and then you can go get yourself blasted with my blessing, goodbye.”

She was watching me carefully. “So cold the blood, hey, no like Antonia one little bit, just want stupid guns, okay?”

“You said it, baby.”

She gave me her wonderful big grin. “Very mean fellow, this man. Look for the Rincon de la Aguila, hey. Maybe there, maybe not. Antonia terrible liar. Now I go kill a general, con su per-misoT’

She leaned forward and kissed me lightly on the lips and was gone with the black assault rifle slung across her back, muzzle down. Alone I felt a strange sense of loss—strange because I usually prefer to operate alone, but I was going to miss working with this pretty, ruthless little hunting partner.

Waiting, holding the M-77 ready, I thought about what Antonia had told me, but the name meant nothing to me. The Rincon de la Aguila, the Cave of the Eagle. Well, if it existed, and I thought it did, even though she’d had to kid me about it a little in her fashion, somebody could undoubtedly find it. And if they could, one of my goals in Mexico, the guns that were wanted by everybody, had been achieved. She was attending to the second, Mondragon, wanted by Ramón. I merely had to achieve the third, Sabádo, wanted by Mac. . . . But there was no point in thinking about that, I’d done all the necessary thinking, and my approach was working.

I’d had some luck, of course. The fact that old Cody had been smart and tough enough to get away in El Paso after I’d escaped death near Cananea, leaving a lot of elaborate cover-up plans in ruins, had driven my subject to this all-out effort to save himself by exterminating us both, even coming to Mexico with a full team to make sure that this time the job got done properly—as he’d made clear, the fact that he was here dealing with me instead of Cody, whom he’d expected, only meant that he’d take care of Cody instead of me later, and to hell with the bodyguards around the house in Kino Bay, he had enough manpower to overwhelm any bodyguards. But that had been the luck of it, getting him to Mexico, and particularly to this desolate part of it, where I didn’t have to be too careful about the way I dealt with him. Tackling him on his home grounds would have been a much more delicate operation; I could hardly have used this direct, homicidal approach back there. But as I said, it was working. I’d already got him mad enough to reveal himself over the air instead of remaining silent in the background the way he liked. Just a little more pressure and I’d have him in the open where I could finish the damn job.

So there was really nothing to be gained by thinking about it; from now on it was merely a matter of taking the breaks as they came. I reflected instead upon the interesting feet that the eagle, which has always seemed to me the most masculine of birds, is feminine in Spanish.

Then a woman’s half-choked cry of pain came over the radio, followed by the voice of Sigma: “Last chance, Helm. Just another little cigarette bum, on the cheek this time, but I have a very good butane lighter here, a miniature blowtorch. I’ll give you another sixty seconds. If I don’t have a sighting report from one of my men within that time, the lady will find that this is indeed a very bad day at the Black Rocks. . . ."

They all seem to work from the same corny script by the same lousy writer. This Sigma character seemed to be reading his part from a Xerox copy lent him by Ramón’s executive officer, Captain Luis Alemán, who’d played the same Torquemada role opposite a different leading lady a week or two back. The only change, hardly demonstrating great creative originality, was that Sigma, or Saturday, or Sabádo, was using fire with his threats, while the brave captain had employed steel.

I found the rifleman in the telescopic sight. I waited until he leaned a bit to the right to look at something below. I added pressure to the trigger, gradually, the way you do, until the rifle fired. Although the report was sharp, the recoil of the .243 was surprisingly light; I guess there’s something to be said for the smaller calibers. I only lost my target out of the scope for an instant, the time it took me to work the bolt and chamber a fresh round, but it wasn’t needed. I was aware that, at the shot, the sharpshooter—well, the would-be sharpshooter—had lurched up and out of his brushy place of concealment. Now he was standing unsteadily among the rocks below it, still holding his rifle; then he dropped the weapon and stumbled away down the open slope in an odd, aimless fashion. I could have put another one into him, but the second shot would have located me definitely for anybody still uncertain as to the source of the first, and I was fairly sure that the first had been good enough. I saw that his camouflage cap was missing.

I knew him now; that is, I’d seen him once before, in that Safeway parking lot in El Paso. He was the other half, the smaller half, of the Mutt-and-Jeff team that had arrested Horace Cody. After three uncertain steps, his knees folded and he pitched forward and rolled a few yards down the hillside and lay sprawled there, unmoving. I noted that his pants carried the same camouflage pattern as the shirt and the missing cap. The cap worried me a little, since its disappearance could indicate that I’d made a head shot, and I’d aimed considerably lower than that.

A voice I didn’t recognize spoke without expression: “Sigma, Sigma, this is Delta Five. We just lost Georgie Peterson, I mean Lambda. At least he looks dead from here. A long rifle shot from somewhere on the ridge above and behind him.”

“Helm, you murdering maniac . . . !” It was a screech in the little walkie-talkie. Sigma must have continued to hold down the transmit button in his fury although the next words were not addressed to me, or maybe they were in a way: “Pull her boots off, Rutherford. . . . All right, all right, just the right one will do. And the sock. Now, hold her like that!”

I told myself that lots of people had had their tootsies toasted; it had even happened to me. A scar or two down there wasn’t a lifelong trauma. Nevertheless, it was with a certain vengeful satisfaction that I swung around to pick up the man below me in the scope; I could hurt people, too. He made it simple for me; he’d stepped out from his cottonwood to look up at the ridge, trying to figure out exactly where my first shot had come from, but it isn’t easy to locate the source of a single reverberating report in rocky terrain. I centered the crosshairs low, about six inches above his belt, and held a little to the right since I was now shooting across the wind. I waited for the radio to transmit Jo’s next cry. When it came, as my answer, I pressed the trigger gently and the .243 fired again.

The man below responded in a very satisfactory manner; he let out a strange bubbling howl that was clearly audible even three hundred yards away. He clapped his hands to his face and fell forward, rolling back and forth on the ground, still shrieking with gradually diminishing vigor. Under normal circumstances, I prefer a clean and instant execution; but here, as I say, the gruesome result of my shot was satisfactory—it should impress the troops—except for the fact that it indicated that the rifle was, as I’d guessed, shooting much higher than I’d figured, even taking into account the fact that downhill shots always tend to go high.

Sigma’s voice screeched tinnily: “Helm, you madman, I’ll make this bitch wish she’d never met you.”

She was undoubtedly wishing that already, but you can’t run an outfit like ours if you’re going to be at the orders of every creep with a prisoner and a butane lighter. I took the walkie-talkie from my belt at last. I pressed the transmit button and spoke into the mike, slowly and clearly.

“Mondragon, Mondragon. This is Matthew Helm calling General Carlos Mondragon. Don’t bother to answer, sir, just listen. We don’t want you or your men, and there are certain people coming who’d hate to find you here and have to figure out what to do with you. Get your boys to hell away, right now, please, while we’re closing out this rogue Yankee agency that’s been using you for its own purposes. In other words, sir, please be so good as to vamos pronto, or as we say in America, haul ass soonest. Understood?”

I thought it was a pretty good speech, hinting at limitless forces at my disposal.

“
Yo comprendo
,” the radio said softly. Whether it was Mondragon himself or a spokesman, I didn’t know, since I’d never been closer to the self-styled general than a quarter of a mile or heard him speak.

Sigma’s voice came out of the little speaker: “General Mondragon, don’t be stupid, your revolution hasn’t got a chance without our help. Sit tight, we’ll have this little problem solved in a minute.”

There was no answer from the revolutionary camp. I could no longer hear anything from the last man I’d shot; a glance that way told me he’d stopped thrashing around and lay quite still, facedown in the dirt down there, with a dark area surrounding his head.
Forbearance is not a virtue
, Mac had said. It was time to depart. I’d almost left it too late. As I slipped away, crouching, there was a chatter of automatic fire from up the ridge, and a single bullet glanced off the stony hillside to my left and headed off into space with the nasty wavering sound of a ricochet. Somebody’d cut loose with an M-16 burst at several hundred yards, probably not even hoping for a hit, just letting his friends know he’d seen something to shoot at. I heard a faraway shout.

“There he goes! Heading down the east slope. Cut him off below!”

After all the scratchy electronic verbiage I’d been listening to, it was kind of nice to hear an honest-to-God human voice for a change. I let the man above catch a few glimpses of me as I slipped and slid down the slope—once I showed myself long enough for him to try another burst that took some leaves off a nearby bush—then I went flat in the brush and crawled back upward again by a slightly different route. It took me five careful but breathless minutes to return to the friendly rock from which I’d done my previous shooting, making it on my belly where the cover was poor and on hands and knees when it was better.

As I hid myself where I’d have a clear shot at him as he passed, I saw movement far off across the basin; a small blue pickup truck nosed out of a cleft in the jumbled black rocks followed by a brown van that I recognized: Mondragon was pulling out. I’d thought he wouldn’t stick, not with people dying all around him. Well, he was no business of mine now; Antonia was on her own, which undoubtedly suited her just fine. Vengeance isn’t something to be shared. I set the Ruger in a safe place. It was going to be close work here, too close for a telescopic sight. I took out one of the revolvers I’d liberated. I knew just about where the man would have to be taken, and with a four-inch barrel, the liberated .38 was a little better suited to the range than my own two-incher.

I heard him coming; he was taking few precautions and making no real effort to be silent. After all, there was no danger, he’d seen me running away, down the side of the ridge; I was probably close to the bottom by now. Of course, there was supposed to be a girl with me, and he didn’t have her located; but either he’d forgotten her, or he was chauvinist enough to figure he could handle any dames dumb enough to get in his way. Crouching in the brush, I saw him stop to check his bearings: yes, this was the spot. He approached my rock and bent over to pick up something that glinted in the sunshine: an empty .243 cartridge case, confirming the fact that he’d found the right trail. Sticking it into his pocket, he studied my tracks briefly and started downhill after them.

I had the confiscated revolver cocked, waiting. He was in canvas combat boots, jeans, and a camouflage shirt and hunting cap; a stocky gent with a round, red face and a scraggly red beard. He made it easy for me again; everybody was cooperating very nicely. First, he bent over to pick up and pocket a second cartridge case; then he straightened up and stood quite still, listening. The sound of automatic rifle fire reached us from the other side of the ridge; apparently Antonia had seen her man—I hoped she’d let him come well within range—and opened up. My man was a perfect target, standing there; he was dead, and it was time to go on to the next, only the damn gun hadn’t fired and wouldn’t fire. I don’t mean there was anything wrong with the mechanism. There was something wrong with me. That week-old crack on the head, I suppose. But it was getting to be too much, dammit. I don’t mind a little killing in the line of business—you might even say it is my business—but this was getting ridiculous, if I may use the word in such a gory connection.

I’d taken the precaution of turning off my walkie-talkie so it wouldn’t betray my presence; but I heard the one on Redbeard’s belt clear its throat.

“Kappa, Kappa, this is Theta. I think I’m just about below you. What’s that shooting I hear? Over.”

Redbeard freed the radio and held it to his mouth, speaking softly but not inaudibly. “It’s on the west side of the ridge, I don’t know what the fuck it is.”

“Somebody’s surely raising hell with an M-16. Over.”