The Frighteners (38 page)

I opened my eyes to look at her. There was an angry-looking round bum on her cheek and another on her hand; I couldn’t see the rest of her the way I was lying. I licked my dry lips.

“ ‘Darling’ is a word I didn’t expect to hear,” I whispered.

She said, “So you
can
talk, good. Did you think I was going to hate you because you behaved like the callous bastard I always knew you were? Female people who poke around where they’re not invited can expect to get clobbered. What they shouldn’t expect, what they shouldn’t even want, is for male people to drop all business on the spot and stop the world just so the ittle bittle girlie won’t get her footsies fried. . . . Ha, I won’t even need your shirt. I’d forgotten that big, phony bandage I put on you last night. I’ll just move it down about a foot.”

“Jo.”

“Yes?”

I whispered, “There’s a little gun in my right boot, inside.” It served them right. If they’d lifted me carefully and carried me the normal way by the arms and legs when they loaded me into the jeep, they couldn’t have missed it, but they’d been too happy dragging and bumping me around, trying to make me hurt. Of course, they’d also found enough firearms on me elsewhere, not to mention my little knife, to keep them from searching further. I went on with an effort: “If nobody’s looking, and if you think you can bring yourself to use it when the time comes, slip it out and hide it on you somewhere, please.’’ When she didn’t speak, I added: “Incidentally, if you do decide to shoot the bastard, go for the head. I think he’s wearing some kind of body armor.”

I heard her breath catch. She made no answer but continued dismantling the bulky bandage around my chest.

At last she asked, “Is there anything else you need to tell me?”

“Yes.” I'd debated whether or not to put the responsibility on her, but I had a hunch Sigma was leaving us alone deliberately to let us talk. When he returned, he’d simply assume I’d shared any information I carried and go to work on us both, so keeping her in ignorance would give her no protection. I whispered, “If I don’t make it and you do, find a man with the
Fuerza Especial
of the Mexican Army named Ramón Solana-Ruiz. They call him
El Cacique
. Tell him that the place he wants is the Rincon de la Aguila. Got it?”

“Rincon de la Aguila. Solana-Ruiz.” She’d unfastened my trousers; now she was fussing with the boots as if to pull them off first since the pants wouldn’t come off over them. I gave a yelp of pain. She said, “Sorry. I guess I can just leave everything on. Let me just slip your trousers down a bit so I can see what I’m doing here.” She lowered her voice. “Incidentally, I got the pistol. It’s in my boot now.”

‘‘Left or right? In case I have to get it off your dead body in a hurry.”

“Left, you creep. They took the other one off so they could roast me, remember? Or maybe you didn’t hear . . .”

“I heard. How bad is it?”

Jo laughed shortly. “Just a little blister the size of a dinner plate,” she said bravely. “Well, would you believe a silver dollar? As for you, my friend, you have a couple of very neat perforations, back and front. I thought bullets were supposed to expand and make dreadful exit wounds.”

“He was shooting at extreme range. The slug had lost a lot of its velocity and didn’t hit any bone.”

“It must be nice to command such a specialized field of knowledge. You and your guns. Not to mention your girls.” She was wrapping me up as she talked, lifting me frequently to slip the bandage under me, an operation that wasn’t totally painless. She continued to speak: “What happened to the little Indian girl in the blanket and the ridiculous red shoes? The last I saw of her, she was heading off to find you.”

I whispered, “She could be around somewhere, so let’s not talk about her, huh? And she carried a pair of moccasins for rough work, if it matters. What brought you here, Jo?”

“We had a little hassle back there in Kino Bay. That man, Greer, whom you left to protect Mr. Cody, he and his men caught a thug snooping around the house. They took him inside to question him. That was the moment the old man chose to come marching into the living room complaining that his everlasting bandage was leaking and a man could bleed to death around the place shouting himself hoarse for help—I guess we’d been too preoccupied with the intruder to hear him. And the prisoner took advantage of the distraction to dive through a window and run. One of Greer’s men was about to shoot, but Greer told him to hold his fire, we couldn’t afford to arouse the town with gunshots except in a real emergency.”

“He was right,” I said.

Jo went on: “But the spy definitely saw Mr. Cody with his pajama top off and a bandage around his torso with blood on it. That would let the man know he’d seen the real Cody, the one who had the bullet hole in the body, and that the fugitive his friends were chasing up here was the wrong one, the one with the hole in the head. After I’d patched up the old man again—it wasn’t a serious hemorrhage—I didn’t have anything else to do there. Actually, Greer’s been through a first aid course and can take care of him perfectly well. So I thought maybe it would be a good idea for me to take your car and try to find you and let you know your phony identity had been compromised. But I guess I’ve had better ideas in my life. . . . Careful now. Mr. Sigma is coming back. Three men with him. The big-one, Rutherford, is helping a couple who were just brought in by jeep. They seem to’ve been wounded, one in the leg and the other in the face.”

Footsteps stopped nearby. Sigma’s voice said, “Take care of this man first, Doctor, he was hit in the eye by some rock fragments. . . . No, my dear, I will not take the cuffs off you, please stop trying to play me for a fool!” He spoke to someone else: “Sit down on that rock so she can take a look at you, Trautman. You can talk while she’s doing it. What happened?”

There was a pause, and I heard a man protest, “Señor Sabádo, I bleed very bad!”

Sigma said, “The doctor will get to you shortly, just sit down and wait. What’s your name?”

“Hernando, señor. That
muchacha
shoot me, shoot everybody, much angry.”

Sigma’s voice said, “Trautman, I asked you what happened.”

He got no answer; but a male voice I hadn’t heard before said, “Oh, Christ, it hurts. How does it look, Doctor? Is it bad?”

“I can’t tell yet. Hold still.”

“I’d like your report, Trautman!” Sigma’s voice was sharp.

After a moment, Trautman’s voice spoke again, stiffly resentful: “The General’s dead, sir, and I don’t know how many got out of the van, that bitch hosed it down with 5.56mm stuff like she was watering a lawn. .. . ."

“From the beginning, please.”

Trautman cleared his throat. “Well, after I reported that Mondragon was pulling out and got the word from you to stick with him, liaisonlike, I went back to driving the little pickup for him like I’d been doing. The rest of his strike team, or whatever he called it, that gang of big-hat bandits, was in the van, following behind. Our brave liberator was practically pissing his pants, and I won’t say I wasn’t kinda nervous myself. Hell, why shouldn’t I be, with four of the boys down already and no telling where those crazy killers were going to hit next? But then we were out of those lousy rocks and through the slot and heading down into the valley toward the main road, if you want to call that a main road. Everybody started breathing again. She was waiting in the brush to the right of the track. First thing I knew, Mondragon’s head came off, practically, blood and brains all over the pickup cab, the windshield going all starry, and I just took a dive out the door and let the heap go on without me. The van went past me, almost hitting me, trying to swerve away from her; she was already working it over with that fucking M-16. Men were trying to dive out the rear, and she was knocking them off like they were clay pigeons thrown from a trap house. A half-pint Indian kid in pants and a blanket, with long black hair, no wild Rambo hipshooting, just kneeling there in the brush with the gun to her shoulder firing careful little bursts and switching magazines and grinning like she was having the most fun ever. How the hell did we get mixed up with these crazies, anyway, sir?”

“Never mind that. Did the girl say anything?”

“Ow, that hurts, Doctor. . . . A name,” Trautman said. “She called out a name, sir. ‘Medina,’ she shouted. ‘Remember Jorge Medina.’ Come to think of it, I guess she yelled it in Spanish first and then repeated it in English, maybe for my benefit. Who the hell’s Medina? Anyway, I took a shot at her with my .38, long range for a pistol, but I think it registered, but not hard enough. She turned that M-16 on me, and a slug hit the rock I was using for cover and sprayed stuff all over my face, I thought I was blind. When I could see a little out of my left eye, it was all over. The girl was gone. There was some moaning and groaning from the men still alive on the ground and inside the van—it was leaking red out all the doors—but if any of them had been left ambulatory, as we used to say in the Army, they’d ambulated. This one was sitting in the road watching his leg bleed. I got on the walkie-talkie and asked for a pickup. . . . Doctor, what about my eye?”

Jo’s voice said, “Ophthalmology is not my field. . . . All right, I can say that there’s probably some damage to the cornea, but I can’t tell you how serious it is. I’ve removed as much of the foreign matter as I dare; I don’t really know much about eyes, and I don’t want to make things worse. I’ve bandaged it and you should keep it covered until you get to a specialist, and for heaven’s sake don’t rub it. .. . ."

Sigma interrupted: “All right, all right, never mind the bedside manner. Take him along to the other casualties, Rutherford. Oh, just a minute. . . . Trautman, you’re
quite
sure General Carlos Mondragon is dead?”

The wounded man snorted. “The Generalissimo wasn’t all that great with a whole head; I shouldn’t think he’d be much use with just half of one. Sir.”

“All right, take him away.” I heard the man leaving with Rutherford’s help. I heard Jo ask the wounded Mexican to pull up his pants leg. Then Sigma’s boot hit me in the side again; I was happy he wasn’t masquerading as a mountain climber or a lumberjack with footgear to match. The desert boots were bad enough. “Lying there with your eyes closed trying to make me believe you’re at death’s door! What do you think I am, a fool? Maybe you’ll die of peritonitis eventually, if you live that long, which seems unlikely, but in the meantime . . . Who is this homicidal Indian girl, and who’s Medina?”

It was no state secret. I said, “Her name is Antonia Sisneros and Jorge Medina was her lover, the cautious gent working for Will Pierce who was supposed to bring four truckloads of weapons to a certain rendezvous but arrived with empty trucks since he didn’t trust friend Mondragon, I can’t imagine why not. Mondragon tried to get the location of the arms from him, but Medina died under interrogation.”

“Yes, yes, of course I heard all about that; I’d merely forgotten the name of the Mexican go-between, if I ever knew it. Naturally I held my contacts with Pierce to a minimum and asked him not to burden me with the operational details. And I certainly didn’t know this Medina had a girlfriend.”

I said, “Señorita Sisneros is slightly upset about his death; upset enough that she’s making a project of taking revenge on everyone responsible. She was terribly disappointed that you had Will Pierce killed before she could catch up with him; she was bound she was going to get Mondragon herself. She seems to come from good vendetta stock; she takes her blood feuds seriously.”

Sigma was looking down at me shrewdly. “If she was that close to Medina, she undoubtedly knows where he hid the arms. And since you seem to have got along very well with her, she probably told you. And I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if you shared the information with the handsome lady doctor just now, giving me two people to interrogate instead of one. Meaning that if Rutherford, who likes that sort of thing, gets too rough with you, or you have the bad taste to die of your wound, we don’t lose the information irretrievably, since we still have the handsome lady doctor to work on.”

He raised his arm to make a beckoning signal, and I heard the heavy footsteps of Tunk Rutherford returning. I wondered if this large young man was doing Sabádo’s dirty work now as a reaction to having been teased about his innocent boyish face as a kid, but psychiatry was Jo’s department. All I had to do was endure.

The sun was shining fairly straight down on us from the area of blue visible between the black rocks; it didn’t seem to be making much progress across the sky today. I’d have appreciated having Cody’s big white hat to shield my eyes, but it had fallen off and got left somewhere. The little sheltered hole in the rocks seemed crowded with men and vehicles. Actually, there were only six or eight men and three or four cars—flat on my back and trying not to seem too interested, I couldn’t take an exact census—but penned in by the steep walls they seemed like more of both. Mostly it was a barren clearing, but there were a couple of sizeable mesquites at our end and some scraggly grass and brush. An armed sentry, smoking a cigarette, squatted on his heels comfortably on top of one of the rocks overlooking the scene.

“Take our friend Hernando away; Dr. Becker has him all patched up,” Sigma said as Rutherford reached us. “Come right back, Tunk. I have a little work for you here.”

I wondered just how he decided when to employ the real name and when the Greek-letter code; there didn’t seem to be any real consistency about it. However, it was a minor problem; I had more serious things to worry about, including the big young man who was marching back to us smartly. I was aware that Jo was trying to get the Mexican’s blood, and maybe some of mine, off her hands.

“Set Helm up against that rock, I think he’s had enough of a nap, don’t you?” Sigma said when Rutherford reached us. “I’m disappointed in you, Tunk. I thought you were a better shot than that. Almost a foot low and six inches to the left!” He laughed quickly. “Don’t mind me, my dear boy, I’m only joking. Let’s get this unpleasant business done. There may be some numbness in the left leg due to the wound, and we want him to feel this, don’t we? So please be so good as to pull off his right boot and sock and proceed with the treatment.”