My fingers unzipped the jumpsuit, let it fall, then unsnapped her bra. She shrugged out of that too, letting herself sink to the edge of the bed. I pushed her back gently and pulled the covers up round her. “Good night, Tiger,” I said.
There was no answer. She was already asleep.
I went back to the living room and sat in a wooden rocker. The news on TV was nothing spectacular. I tried CNN and caught a flurry of national stuff and the day’s sports. There was nothing about a billion-dollar drug bust. I pulled a blanket off the other bed, turned off the TV, stretched out in the La-Z-Boy recliner and went to sleep with the .45 in my hand.
The sun came up the east slope, and I threw the window curtains open. The whole area was clear outside, and I picked up the walkie-talkie and said, “Either of you guys want breakfast?”
One said, “You go first, Eddie. I still have some coffee left.”
There was no answer, but I saw some movement beside the clump of rocks and the one called Eddie started to trot toward the house, the rifle slung over his shoulder. Everything was real military double time with those two.
I held the door open, let him through and locked it behind him.
“You got hot water? I need a quick shower.”
“Try the bathroom. They told me it all works.”
I went to the kitchen and started the coffee going. There were eggs, bacon and precooked biscuits in the refrigerator, and I got them all out, cooked them up just as Eddie came out of the bathroom dressed, with damp hair, and still carrying the rifle. He ate, said thanks and went to the door. “I’ll send Tunney down,” he told me over his shoulder.
Tunney needed a shower too. He ate, had a second cup of coffee and said it had been a quiet night. During the day he and Eddie would each grab some sleep while the other stood guard. At suppertime they would come up one at a time, grab a bite before dark, refill their thermoses and canteens and get set for the night’s watch.
The phone rang. I picked it up and Ferguson’s voice said, “Everything all right?”
I said, “Great.”
He said, “Fine,” and hung up.
From Velda’s bedroom I heard the sound of a shower running. I went back to the stove again. This morning I had the feeling Velda was going to have her old appetite back. The bacon strips were almost done. I made a square of them in the pan and cracked two eggs into the opening. I basted the eggs the way she liked them and they were done just as she came to the table. I laid out the biscuits and poured us coffee.
“Don’t say it,” I told her.
“You’ll make a great wife, Mike.”
“I told you not to say it.”
“So punch me in the mouth with your lips,” she told me.
“Wait till you swallow your egg,” I told her.
We sat through another day and watched a steady stream of television block out hours and half hours. The news had nothing at all. The weather channel said a cold front was moving into our area and we could expect an early frost this year.
At ten minutes to four the phone rang again. Pat said, “The front car was confirmed.”
“How soon you going in?”
“On the way, pal.”
“Any problems?”
“Only political. B. B. will smooth things out.”
I heard a click and a small lessening in the volume of Pat’s voice. “Fine,” I said, “see you,” and hung up. I wanted to say something else to the party on the line, but I didn’t bother.
Velda was sitting on the edge of her chair. “It’s going down?”
“Bradley and Candace Amory have located the site. Pat said there’s a political problem.”
“What kind?”
“He didn’t say, but it sounds like an interagency squabble. Bennett Bradley is going to handle it, and he damn well better be a good diplomat on this one. A hit like this is so big everybody wants a cut of it.”
“Damn,” she said, “can they mess it up?”
“They can mess up a headhunter’s picnic.”
“What do we do?”
“Wait ... and hope they can keep a lid on this.”
She looked at me very seriously, her lower lip clenched between her teeth. “This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be, is it?”
“No.”
“There’s trouble. You can feel it too, can’t you?”
I nodded. It was like that first Saturday when it all started. It was the way the big city so far away was able to swallow its victims and make them disappear without anyone knowing or caring.
The mountain shadow was coming down again.
I fixed coffee and sandwiches for the guys outside, gave them a fast call and Eddie came in, picked up supper for them both and went back to his vigil. Velda and I had a snack and went back to TV, staying on the local New York channel. So far nothing had happened.
At nine o‘clock the weather predictions came true. The cold front had come in on schedule and was making itself felt. Velda pulled the blanket up to her neck and shivered.
“Want me to make a fire?”
“That would be nice.”
I got the logs together and laid them up on the firedogs, stuffing some loose kindling under them, making a nice neat arrangement. “This is stupid,” I said.
“Why?”
“Trying to keep comfortable while a damn killer’s playing a game with us.”
“It was his game, Mike.”
“The slob didn’t have to leave that note.”
“Yes, he did.”
“Why? Explain that. Why?”
“Mike ... how did you kill him?”
I stood up and looked around the mantelpiece. “You see a can of fire starter around?”
“No. You didn’t answer me.”
“Screw it.” I looked on both sides of the fireplace.
“Use the newspapers,” she told me.
They were neatly stacked against the wall, about two weeks’ worth of
The New York Times.
I grabbed a handful, squatted down and began stripping the pages out, twisting them into cylinders to go under the kindling.
I used up one day’s edition and pulled the second one over and nearly ripped the front page off when the thing popped right off the page at me, a two-column photo of a face I hadn’t seen in four years and an accompanying article headlined FRANCISCO DUVALLE DIES TONIGHT.
And now, Francisco DuValle was already dead.
“What is it, Mike?”
“They finally executed DuValle,” I said.
She took the paper from my hand and read the article. “He had appealed the death sentence for four years. They just came to an end.”
“It was my testimony that decided the case. Remember?”
“The verdict was justified. He was a deliberate murderer.”
I took the page back and stared at the photo. The face seemed expressionless unless you knew him, because behind the black mask of a heavy, pointed Vandyke beard and an unruly mop of hair that swept forward across his forehead, there was anger and hatred that had erupted into fourteen murders. The eyes appeared flat, but in court they glistened and burned at anybody who had accused him.
When I was on the stand identifying him, they tried to eat me alive. He sat there, tight with controlled anger, not caring that what I said was true, but that his pleasure in the death act had been taken from him. I should have shot him instead of coldcocking him when he made that last attack on the girl, but I hadn’t realized who I was taking out.
As I left the stand he said very softly, “You’ll die, Hammer. I’ll kill you.” The guys in the press box heard it and a couple even reported it.
Velda was watching my face as I studied the picture. I could feel myself getting tight as DuValle’s soft voice came back to me. My teeth were clenched so tight my jaws ached and she said, “What is it, Mike?”
I turned the page toward her. “Familiar?”
“Only from the court. I was there at the sentencing.”
I frowned and said, “Of course ... how could you see a connection? You only had a short contact and that under stress.”
She still didn’t get it. “With whom?”
“Have you got any of that makeup they use to cover up your black eye?”
“Erase? It’s in my pocketbook.”
“Get it.”
She brought the tube over and uncapped it. It was a soft white creamy stick, and I laid the paper on the floor and used it on the photo. Carefully, I wiped off the Van Dyke, then took off the mop of hair. Now Duvalle was bald-headed, clean-shaven, and when I trimmed back the ends of the droopy adornment on his upper lip to form a conservative-style mustache, Velda saw the incredible similarity too.
She said, “It’s Bennett Bradley.”
“No,” I told her. “It’s Francisco DuValle. They’re brothers.”
“Mike ... you’d better be sure.”
“I’m sure, doll.” I took another long look at the doctored photograph and said, “Penta. I finally got that bastard on the surface.”
Francisco DuValle had said it, and Bradley had heard of it, and how he had to do it.
You die for killing me.
All this time I had played myself for being the innocent bystander when I was the prime target. I had gone off on a wild-assed goose chase, putting Tony DiCica in the middle and getting one hell of a haul of coke and a possible presidential candidate when all the time the slob I wanted who damn near wiped out Velda was standing right there in front of me.
Stupid. I was stupid. And Bradley-Penta loved the chase. It got everybody involved and took all the heat off him. He could operate any way he wanted and all the blame would go in a different direction.
“How could it happen, Mike?”
“Maybe there was a genetic similarity, kitten. Both of them were cold killers. They made a damn study of the subject and killing became part of their lives. They just had different targets, that’s all. DuValle went for the pleasure of killing. It was a sensual thing with him. He got off on each murder, enjoying the entire, senseless act. He was hard to run down because there was no motive except pleasure, like so many of the other serial killers.
“But Bradley, he made a profession out of it. Imagine the audacity of a man like that who could promote himself through the ranks to a position in the State Department. Damn!”
Velda couldn’t quite comprehend it. She said, “But State would run a check on him, Mike, they don’t simply—”
“Kid, his name most likely
is
Bradley. His early background could pass inspection, and no one knew about his current activities. He came in as an expert on Penta. Certainly he knew all about him. He could make his case histories look great, almost coming down on the guy, nearly nailing him and missing so closely they couldn’t afford to let him go.”
“You said he had a replacement coming in.”
“Sure. He even arranged his own transfer as part of his cover. He was given an assignment to assassinate the vice president of the United States by an unfriendly nation because in his position he could work in those circles. He accepted the contract, probably made some deliberate errors on the Penta job that made State recall him, and got reassigned here.”
“There was no attempt made on the vice president’s life, Mike.”
“No, because before he could lay the groundwork, they executed his brother and his mind went into one of those crazy turns that comes with being out of balance. He flipped, really flipped.
“For the first time he acted out of context. He was going to make his brother’s promise come true. He knew about me, knew where I lived and where I worked. He had the whole scenario planned out and made arrangements to meet me that Saturday. His loose point was that he didn’t know what I looked like. All he had to do was check a newspaper morgue, and he wouldn’t have missed. My photo files are an inch thick. All that expertise he had developed went down the drain because he got emotional about a kill.”
While I was telling’ her, I had jammed more paper under the logs. The matches were in a small cast-iron box on the mantel. I lit one and touched the papers off and we watched the fire take hold.
“Funny,” I said. “In a way it didn’t matter at all. That super ego trip he went on in leaving the Penta note got him right back in the business again. He was the only expert on Penta that State had and he was here, on the spot.
Now
he knew me.
Now
he wouldn’t be careless again.
“What Bradley didn’t realize was that his bosses overseas had a different way of thinking. They’re fanatically nationalistic and had paid him for a political hit and instead he had opened himself up to a possible capture and interrogation which would disclose their scheme, and they wanted him dead.”
She picked up the poker and stirred the fire. It was starting to catch, the dry logs beginning to crackle.
“There’s no love lost in this crime business. Fells and Bern were old contemporaries of his. He had probably used them on his jobs, so they had a close-knit deal going for them for years. They were bound to know a lot about each other during those years. Now suddenly Bern and Fells get a contract offered them to hit Bradley for not going after his primary target.”
“How would they know where to find him?”
“All they knew was what the newspapers mentioned about the note, but that was enough. I was their lead to Penta. They thought I would
have
to know something about him, thus the snatch.”
“They could have killed you.”
“No. They had too much professional in them. That would bring too much heat down anyway.”
“They killed Smiley,” she reminded me.
“Honey, those two were real jellybeans. They were in a hurry and used their old contacts on the job. When they got done with Smiley, they didn’t want to leave any witness around so they snuffed him. Stupidly, they used an old place that was a safe house once without realizing Penta ... or Bradley, knew about it too. Even Bradley’s timing was great. He was always presumed to be doing something else.” “Scratch Fells and Bern,” she mused.
“Two quick, accurate shots and gone. Too bad he didn’t have time to shake the place down. Maybe he tried, but that house was set up by experts and those two had a clever hiding place.” I let out a laugh. “I wonder if it’s still owned by the government.”