The Poisoners (21 page)

I lay there and waited while the trio disappeared from sight; and then I waited some more while the two men left behind worked at jacking and brush-cutting—I mean, why should I do the work when I could let them do it for me? When it looked as if they had the big car almost ready to go, I moved in on them.

The edge of the wash, a perpendicular three-foot cut-bank, caused me a little trouble. I had to wiggle downstream a ways to find a low place where I could slither down it without making any noise. They weren’t expecting trouble, however, and I caught them just the way I wanted them: bending over, one man with both hands on the jack handle, the other with an armload of brush he was just about to stuff under the rising wheel.

“Hold it, boys!” I said from the bushes behind them. “There’s a .38 looking right up your rear elevations. If either of you would like an extra hole back there, I’ll be happy to oblige.”

“Who—”

“Never mind who,” I said, rising. “Just call me a man with a gun. No, don’t straighten up. Just stay bent over like that, turn around slowly, and stretch out flat on the ground, faces in the sand. Swell. Now, where the hell do you keep the light switch on this limousine…”

I’d hardly cut the lights for the required five seconds and switched them back on, when there was a muffled cry and a heavy thump behind me. I stepped aside quickly to where I could cover the new threat as well as the men on the ground, but it was merely Bobbie Prince picking herself out of the soft sand at the base of the bank off which she’d fallen. She got up, brushing off her jeans and straightening her floppy hat—the sarape had apparently been left behind as excess baggage. She came forward, limping a bit, a slim, pale, boyish shape in the night.

“Why didn’t you warn me there was a precipice there?” she asked resentfully.

“You’re supposed to be waiting back at the station wagon,” I said.

“You and your deerstalking!” she said. “You didn’t hear me, did you? And neither did they. I didn’t make any noise at all, did I?”

I said, “Sure, you’re great like Hiawatha and you damn near got yourself shot. Do you know how to work a hypodermic?”

“Naturally, but don’t ask me how I learned. Why?”

“There’s a kit in my left coat pocket. Use the vial marked Injection C. The other two are lethal, and I see no need to kill anybody, at the moment. The dose is a half cc, cubic centimeter to you. Put the boys to sleep for me while I keep them covered. Then we’ll get this heap out of here and get after their friends.”

It wasn’t quite as easy as that, of course, mainly because, once our prisoners were safely unconscious, I made the mistake of putting Bobbie behind the wheel of the Chrysler. I told her to send it forward very cautiously while I stood by to lend a shoulder if required. Unfortunately, it turned out that he had the same lead-foot, sand-driving technique as the man who’d got it stuck in the first place.

It came off the piled-up brush nicely, moving well—I didn’t even have to push to get it started—but the tires started to slip as she got eager and fed it more power. She felt them dig in and, instead of easing off, she gunned it hard. If I hadn’t sworn at her in a loud, ungentlemanly way, she’d have sunk it out of sight once more.

“I’m sorry!” she said, cutting the switch. Her voice said she was actually more mad than sorry. “I couldn’t help it! It’s just too damn soft. You didn’t have to get nasty about it!”

I said, “It was coming fine, sweetheart. I told you to take it
easy
, didn’t I? What the hell do they teach you kids in Yuma, Arizona? A lot of crap about defensive driving, I bet, and not a damn thing useful like how to get a car out of a sandy arroyo. Well, come along if you’re coming.”

She started to open the door, but hesitated. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going after them, naturally.”

“But what about the car?”

“To hell with the car. We’ve got our own transportation all set to go. I thought we might ride this one down a ways and save some walking, but we can’t waste any more time on the heap. If anybody wants to use the road, they’ll just have to drag it out themselves, if they can’t get around it somehow.”

Bobbie said coldly, “I think the simple fact is that you can’t get it out of here, either, in spite of all the expert noises you’ve been making. Isn’t it?”

I regarded her for a moment. I’m not in the habit of doing things just because pretty girls tell me I can’t, but my instinct is always to tidy up as I go along—which was why I’d taken time to deal with the two men who might have threatened our retreat, later. Now I had the uneasy feeling that leaving the Chrysler stuck there was untidy and might just possibly cause us trouble eventually, although I couldn’t see how. I sighed, studied the near rear wheel for a moment, and squatted down beside it. Bobbie got out and stood over me.

“What are you doing?”

“Letting some air out of the tires,” I said. “It’s an emergency measure, and I probably wouldn’t have had to do it if certain people hadn’t dug us such a deep hole to get out of.”

“Lay off, Helm,” she said. “We can’t all be great boondocks drivers like you, if you are one. What’s accomplished by letting the air out, anyway?”

“It’s simple physics,” I said. “With half the air pressure, it takes twice the tire surface to support the car, right? And with twice the amount of rubber on the sand, you’re half as likely to sink in. Check the glove compartment, will you, and see if by a miracle these boys carry a tire gauge.”

They didn’t, of course, so I had to estimate the pressure by eye—if you get it too low, these newfangled tubeless tires will come away from the rim and let all the air out, leaving you in worse shape than before. When I’d lowered the pressures all around as far as seemed safe, I told Bobbie to stand by to push, if necessary. Then I got behind the wheel, started the engine, and tested it cautiously in reverse. The big sedan lifted slightly before the wheels began to slip, and I slapped it into drive and caught it as it rolled forward again, and kept it coming, very gently, out of the hole and on across the wash to solid ground. I cut the lights and waited for Bobbie to catch up and get in beside me.

“Well,” she said, “well,
that
doesn’t prove anything! Probably I could have done it, too, if I’d known about the soft-tire trick.”

I grinned. “There’s what we call a good loser! Crank down your window and use your eyes and ears. I don’t want to overrun Tillery’s bunch by mistake.”

But they had close to a forty-five-minute start on us, and we never caught a glimpse of them ahead as we picked our way slowly along the rudimentary road, in the dark, until the ruts started to swing left to pass inland of some dark hills, presumably the high ground guarding the north end of San Agustin Bay. Here I turned the big car off the road to the right and took it several hundred yards across country into a bunch of scraggly trees with one dead giant spreading bare white limbs against the sky, a good landmark. I parked the Chrysler facing back along its own tracks.

“Now you wait here,” I said. “And I mean
here
. If I jump somebody up there, I don’t want to have to worry that it’s you playing Indian again. I’d better take the drug kit, and where the hell did the handle of that jack get to…”

“Matt?”

“Yes?”

“Be careful, darling.”

I looked at her for a moment. The long blonde hair shone dully in the darkness of the car, but her face and expression couldn’t be seen beneath the wide brim of her hippie-hat.

“Sure,” I said. “Hell, there are only three of them, aren’t there? Sure, I’ll be careful.”

Half a mile from the car, I stopped to catch my breath and look and listen. From up here I could see the ocean shining faintly off to my right. I got the impression that over in that direction—westward—the ground dropped off steeply to the shore, or maybe straight to the water. Well, that’s what the aerial shot had indicated.

Ahead of me, the top of the brushy, rocky ridge I was climbing was jagged against the sky, coming to a kind of peak to the left. If I remembered correctly, that rudimentary peak stood watch over the head of San Agustin Bay; and beyond it the ground sloped down to the dunes along the shore and the road curving in from the south.

Behind and below me, I could no longer make out the gaunt tree skeleton marking the Chrysler’s hiding place. The curvature of the hillside blocked it from sight I drew a long breath and started to resume my cautious climb, but checked myself, smelling tobacco smoke. It annoyed me slightly. I mean, after all, I’ve got my professional pride. Hunting three armed men in the dark was a challenge. Hunting any number of men, armed or unarmed, who were stupid enough to reveal where they were hiding by smoking on the job, was like stalking sheep in a pasture, hardly sporting.

There was a moderate breeze from the direction of the sea. I worked into it slowly until I’d spotted the guy, squatting in the shadow of a small tree. I couldn’t tell much about him until, presently, he straightened up to stretch his cramped muscles. He tossed aside the glowing cigarette, his heedless gesture indicating that he’d grown up in fireproof surroundings of asphalt and concrete.

After a minute or two, he got a fresh smoke from his shirt pocket and lit it. He tried to shield the flame by turning towards the tree and cupping the match in his hands, but I got a glimpse of his face in the brief flare of light. He wasn’t one of Sapio’s bunch. That made him, presumably, one of Warfel’s.

Well, I’d kind of expected Frankie to station some guards to cover his landing operation, whatever its purpose might be, but this man seemed like a pretty poor sentry in a pretty useless spot. However, I reflected, it was probably unreasonable of me to judge a bunch of Los Angeles hoods by strict military standards of strategy and discipline.

I considered putting the guy out of action—still cleaning up as I went along—but Warfel would probably miss him if he didn’t return to the beach at some prearranged time; and we were supposed to be operating on the principle that Mr. Warfel was not to be warned or worried in any way. He was supposed to reach U.S. waters with his happy-dust in a peaceful and unsuspicious frame of mind, to meet Charlie Devlin and her skin diver and her arrest warrant.

I couldn’t help thinking that I seemed to be spending more time, and taking bigger risks, solving Charlie’s problems than my own, which was kind of ironic, since she’d originally been assigned to help me. However, I still had a hunch our problems were intimately related in some way, although I would have hated to try to explain the precise relationship to a critical audience, say a gentleman known as Mac…

I didn’t like bypassing the sentry and leaving him behind me, but doing it was no trouble at all. He never looked up from his satisfying carcinogens. Fifteen minutes later I was on top of the ridge, discovering that whatever its actual geological origin might have been, it looked kind of like the remnant of a round volcanic crater, the south and west sides of which had crumbled and washed away over the centuries. Below me was Bahia San Agustin in the weak moonlight: a pretty little bay with a pretty little beach, on which were parked a small white Jeepster and a big, dark, covered, six-wheeled truck.

I’d apparently made it just in time: the guest of honor had already arrived at the party. A few hundred yards off the beach lay a white-painted ketch sixty or seventy feet long, quite a sizeable yacht—a ketch is the one with two masts, the shorter aft, but not so far aft as to make it a yawl. In case you’re interested, if the shorter mast is forward, it’s a schooner, and if there’s only one mast, it’s a sloop or cutter, but please don’t ask me to explain the difference. It’s a fairly delicate distinction, I gather, and seafaring men have been known to come to blows over the subject.

The
Fleetwind
, despite her racy name, was a rather chunky-looking, stubby-masted tub that looked as if she’d have to depend on her diesel in anything but a strong and favorable wind. I’d wondered from the start why Warfel had got himself a motorsailer, always a relatively slow type of craft, instead of picking up a jazzy twin-screw cruiser that would have had more glamor and could have made the Ensenada run in half the time. But obviously he’d had a reason, and now I was learning what it was. He had a cargo to handle that rested easily on the low flush deck of the big ketch, but would have been awkward or impossible to manage on the high, flimsy cabin top of a cruiser-type vessel. Besides, in this deserted anchorage, with no dockside crane available, the motorsailer’s spars and rigging were needed to get the thing over the side.

It was a giant metal cylinder that fitted between the masts with only a little to spare. A missile came to mind—people are always mislaying the things nowadays, or letting them go astray—but this object didn’t look as if it were intended to move under its own power. Slightly rounded at both ends, it looked just like a big cylindrical tank for water or liquefied gas, except that if it had been full of any kind of liquid, big as it was, it would probably have rolled the boat over. It just couldn’t be that heavy or they couldn’t have managed it.

On the other hand, it was heavy enough that the crew was making elaborate preparations for unloading it. The main boom, sail removed, had been angled high into the air for use as a cargo boom, and there seemed to be considerable shipboard activity with ropes and slings and tackles.

On shore, work was also being done. A couple of long cylindrical pontoons with pointed ends, and considerable lumber, had been unloaded from the six-wheeler, and men were assembling these ingredients into a raft of sorts, at the water’s edge. Other men were laying planks behind the wheels of the truck to keep it from getting stuck in the sand. As I watched, the big vehicle backed cautiously closer to the water. Some planks were transferred from front to rear; and the truck moved another few feet down the beach and stopped, apparently located to everybody’s satisfaction. Obviously; I’d been wrong about it. It hadn’t come to Bahia San Agustin to deliver a mysterious load for Warfel’s boat to pick up, quite the contrary.

Off to one side, by the jeep, stood two men watching critically. One, roughly dressed, seemed to be Willi Keim alias Willy Hansen, although I couldn’t be absolutely certain at that distance. The other, taller and much stouter, in neat city clothes, didn’t have the right shape to be Frank Warfel. I thought I could detect a mustache on a bland Oriental face, even in the poor light, but that could have been because I was kind of expecting to see a mustached Oriental. I was expecting the Chinese, Charlie Chan-type character with whom, I’d heard, Beverly Blaine had made contact in San Francisco—at the meeting that had been watched by Jake and his assistants, who’d lost the man afterwards in the streets of Chinatown.