Red Heroin

by Jerry Pournelle

  I shook my head. "Where did Dick Wahlke and his girl, Nancy Snow, fit in?"

  "Since I was on to you even if I couldn't get anybody else to believe it, I put Wahlke on to get the junk out. Then all you'd have was the films. What with them and the Black Power literature, nobody would ever figure out who wanted you out of the way. No junk, no agent, no nothing. But we saw the cops go into your place while we were waiting for you. Then you came screaming up in that car and got inside before we could do anything. Too many in there to go in after you. Figured to get you, cops and all, when you came out. Grab the films, leave you dead with the cops and the literature around. Cops go looking for Negroes, maybe they'd shoot one, really get some action. I thought you were in that car. I thought so until I saw you back there. How in hell are you alive? You weren't in that car, everybody in it was croaked."

  "No, I wasn't in it. What about Wahlke and the girl? How'd you think they'd get clean away?"

  "How would anybody know they had anything to do with it? The girl's clean anyway. She thinks she's delivering LSD. Dick Wahlke's never been near us for years. No reason for anybody to think anything about them. No way for you to tell anybody about them until it was too late. He's got rid of the stuff now. You couldn't even prove a damn thing on him." He looked worse, so I put on some speed. We got to the highway and turned out toward Bothell. His voice was becoming weaker all the time.

  "They knew about Wahlke before he ever got off that boat," I told him. "You didn't know that? They watched him get off the boat, been following him ever since."

  "How could they know?" Murray asked. "You don't have a radio on that boat, and Wahlke would have blown your head off if you tried to talk to anybody or became suspicious." He was wiggling around on the seat, holding his leg. It must have been painful, but he hadn't yelled since I shot him.

  But I had no intention of telling him about the lock papers, and how I'd put Wahlke and the girl's names on them and marked them so the tenders would call the FBI. He was looking worse all the time.

  We reached the turnoff Janie indicated, and wound around the farm and residential area near Bothell. Then we turned up a secondary road, and off on to a gravel road, and there was a little private sanitorium. It was all fenced in, with a uniformed private guard at the gate. He looked at something Janie showed him and let us through.

  Janie went inside to get an attendant, and I turned back to Murray. "One more thing. How did you know I was an agent? You said Carole didn't think so, but you knew. How?"

  In spite of how much it hurt him, he laughed. It wasn't a very pretty laugh because it ended with a groan. "I saw you. At Richmond Landing. Wouldn't have recognized you if I hadn't just been talking about you in Eileen's earlier. What else would you be doing with Ackerman?"

  They brought a wheelchair and hustled him into it, and as I watched them take him away I remembered the little man who'd had his throat cut that night Danny was killed.

  Chapter Ten

  When Janie came out I told her about what he'd said. "This could blow our whole operation up, and your cover too. He's had plenty of time to report that."

  She went back inside, and I waited. I found that sitting alone with nothing to do was pretty bad, but I didn't want to talk to Murray anymore. Maybe they wouldn't let me. I hadn't been asked inside. I walked around the grounds inside the wall. Over at one side there was a little creek with a pool in it, and willow trees. I sat and stared at the water and tried to concentrate on watching the little waterfall until Janie came out.

  "I think it's okay," she said. "They've put him under to get the bullet out, but before they did he said he hadn't reported you because he wasn't supposed to be near that Richmond Landing operation. He said he got worried about it, and went out to see if the stuff got in all right, but he had orders not to so he never could report seeing you. Then when they got the idea of having you carry the stuff into the country for them, he couldn't tell them why they shouldn't. It was too late, then, to bring out the Richmond Landing business. So he put Wahlke and the girl on your boat to get the heroin off, and sent his man to finish you and Carole. He was going to say he was really after Carole because she fell in love with you and sold out."

  "You believe that?" I asked her.

  "Yes. It's about the only reasonable explanation of how they got this so fouled up. He's not a real professional agent, Paul. He was agitprop with the Russian group, and when he took China's side they must have promoted him fast. We didn't pull him in because Shearing thought he wasn't good enough to be much more than agitprop here, but it looks like they used him as a hatchet man. He has the main qualifications for it, anyway. He'll kill. Most of these amateurs they have to work with won't."

  I drove us out of the hospital grounds and back toward Seattle. There wasn't any traffic on those back country roads, and I didn't have a wounded man in case I got a ticket, so I really let her out, shifting down to corner and letting the back-end break loose in the gravel. It gave me a few minutes without thinking, and Janie was quiet. I don't think she was worried after the first couple of turns, but maybe she didn't want to distract me. As we pulled onto the highway and I had to go back to normal driving, I said, "Yeah, it's amateur night in the spy business. Murray throws grenades to straighten his mess out with his people, and I shoot them down for you to worry about. Everything's in a mess. I suppose you pros just want to sit back and laugh."

  Janie sat up very straight and looked at me while she told me, "I'm not all that much of a professional and you ought to know I don't have ice water for blood. This is my first independent big assignment, and I get just as nervous as you do."

  "Sure," I said. "But it's a matter of attitude, isn't it? Like shooting people. I suppose you'd do it if they told you to?"

  "I don't know, Paul." She was speaking very softly, saying each word slowly, and she was thinking about it while she talked. "I've never had to. Most of us haven't, you know. You're farther along that way than almost anybody I know, two people in one assignment."

  "Yeah. That's my problem, I guess. But both times I was mad at somebody. I didn't have much choice in the matter. But then here's Murray with his professional attitude. Need to get some people out of the way so he sends a guy with a grenade and some hate literature to do it. Carole hadn't done him a damn bit of harm. She wasn't dangerous. But she had to go. That's professional. It scares hell out of me. Do we have professionals like that on our side? I mean, it's one thing to pull the trigger when a man-mountain is bearing down on you, but it's something else to send out a guy with a grenade."

  "What do you suggest we do, Paul? What do you want us to do with John Murray? He'll never be convicted in court. What he told you can't even be mentioned in a courtroom. You don't have one bit of evidence against him, in fact if he gets to the police he could have you charged with kidnapping and assault. Or murder."

  I thought about it as I turned off onto Roosevelt Way. Things had happened so fast I hadn't really considered that in a real sense I was in rebellion against the United States. Oh, sure, I was acting as an agent for one of the departments of government, but the whole government was set up to keep people like us out of it. I could hear King George telling one of his men about how that rabble-rouser Thomas Paine had to be stopped, and there wasn't any law . . . . But Carole was dead. Maybe John Murray hadn't thrown the grenade, but he'd killed her just as sure as if he'd put a rattlesnake in her bed. And there wasn't a way in the world he could be made to pay for it except the way I'd done it.

  And there was more to it than that, too. What the hell use were all the laws and rights and the rest of it when, if you tried to cash in on one of them, you were told that the government couldn't help you? Where would any of these fine things be if John Murray and his boys got their way? We could all have fun discussing it wherever they put us before they liquidated us bourgeois degenerates. The hell with it. My job was about over, but I remembered Carole, and the pictures of those kids Harry Shearing had showed me, and I decided I wanted to
finish it if I could. They'd let me out now, if I wanted out, but that didn't seem as important as it had. It came to me that somebody had to do this job, and I really wasn't going to be much good for anything until it was done. It was funny, because a couple of days ago I had been ready to take Carole on a long sail down the coast and forget the whole damn thing.

  I pulled up in front of a phone booth and told Janie, "Better call the office and see how they're coming on the clean-up job. I'd just as soon not be wanted for murder." She went off to the phone booth, and I slumped back in the seat. It was after two a.m. and I was dead tired. It had been tiring on the boat, and then came all the emotional shocks, action, driving around, and I was beat. Janie was on the phone for a minute or two, then she motioned for me to come take it.

  "Larry here," I told it. I didn't recognize the voice on the other end. Why should I, I thought. Shearing, George, and Janie are all I know of this outfit. I filled them in on what had happened and where we took Murray, and I was told that the hospital people took patients and kept their mouths shut, but weren't supposed to know any more than we had to tell them, which was why Janie hadn't invited me in. They didn't need to know who I was.

  The guy also let on that Shearing was pretty sure the book George found had the underlings of the dope rackets in it, including some intermediates they wouldn't get in the raid, but probably not the important information on the espionage section. There wasn't any reason why anybody as minor as Roger would have that, although he might have served as liaison with a few. They still hadn't cracked the code in the book, but the experts were hopeful.

  "Fine," I told them. "But what interests me is, am I wanted by the homicide squad?"

  "No. Nobody called the police, and they won't get it for a while. We've got people going over the place to see if they left anything behind. When they're finished, the Seattle police will be looking for John Murray for the murder of his partner. I doubt that they'll find him. There's no reason for you and your partner to be involved." There was a pause, then the voice said, "Wait one."

  It was getting chilly, which isn't surprising for Seattle. A couple of cars drove by the filling station, but nobody paid any attention to a guy and a girl using the telephone. Then Shearing came on the line.

  "Larry, it won't be long before Louis and the Treasury boys get their little show on, so we haven't much time before our man hears about it. We may never get him then. You're the only one of my people who knew him. If we do think of something, what part of town is it likely to be in? Out your way?"

  "Yeah. He's a District character, so he'd know more places here than anywhere else."

  "I thought so," Shearing said. "I'm not doing anything here. Let's have a conference. We might as well make it out there as here, so your place in fifteen minutes. Bring your partner."

  I hung up and drove us to my house. What with the grenadier waiting the last time I came home, I was a little worried about going in the place, and left the car a couple of blocks away in a parking lot. We walked around the block, didn't see anything, and got inside fast. Nobody was there, and of course if Murray told it to us straight there wouldn't be, but I made sure the blinds were drawn and the windows locked before I turned on the lights. That would stop a sharpshooter from having a target. There didn't seem to be anything to do about a grenade if the guy didn't mind breaking glass.

  Shearing came to the back door a few minutes later. He made some noise opening the porch screen door before he knocked, and I turned out the kitchen lights to see out before I let him in. No question about it, the strain was getting to me. Maybe Janie was feeling something too, because she hadn't said ten words since we got there.

  "Still got that Scotch?" he asked. While I was getting it, he said, "Kind of careful coming in, weren't you? Not that I blame you."

  "Who's outside?" Janie asked him.

  "Doug. I've had him on since before we cleared out last time. That's why I suggested this place to talk; we looked it over before Paul got back and it hasn't been out of sight since. I'm pretty sure it's clean."

  "Why watch my house?"

  "Somebody else might show up and lead us somewhere. It was as good as having him cruise all over in the hopes he'd see a man he never met, wasn't it? Oh, by the way, here." He handed us each three copies of a photograph of Roger. "Found one in his place and had these made up. Might help. I'll have to turn him in to Louis in the morning anyway, I guess. Can't take a chance on him blowing out and nobody getting him. Wish we could, though."

  We sat around my dining room table. Janie had discovered my beer cooler, and Shearing and I started on a second Scotch. He took out a little notebook and began ticking off points as he talked.

  "Let's see what we've got. Paul tells us he's an egotistical incompetent, no friends, bores people stiff. He shows up to inspect Paul after John Murray got the idea of using him, and ends up suggesting that the girl go on the trip. No evidence that the girl knew he was one of theirs, but none that she didn't either. He didn't let her see him in Victoria, but he did stay in the terminal while she made the pickup. From where he was, he could watch her go back to your boat, right? You can see the visitors' dock from the observation deck of the terminal?" I nodded, and he went on. "That's the last we know of him. The records show he didn't take a car into Canada, so he went on the ferry. He may not have stayed at all, just come right back after the pickup. He won't leave Vancouver Island by any normal means now; they kept copies of those pictures and they're looking for him now that he's identified. The point is, is there any reason he would know we're looking for him?"

  "Not if Murray was telling the truth," Janie told him. "But would he have known what Murray was planning with the grenade? Would hearing about an explosion this close to Paul's house have scared him into hiding?"

  "We'll keep that as a suggestion to come back to."

  Shearing made a note in his book and started a doodle. This one resembled a map of an island with fortifications that kept becoming more and more elaborate. He drew in a gun emplacement and said, "According to Murray, everybody else in the organization who knew about it approved the idea of Paul's bringing the stuff in for them. You can figure why it would be perfect material for blackmail after it was safe. Murray knew Paul was something more than he seemed to be, so he had to arrange a stunt. He sends a man who just came up from L.A. a week before Murray got here which indicates that he was one of Murray's people rather than part of the local organization. Do both of you buy that story?"

  I thought about it for a minute. "Yeah, I think I do. John's tough and when I knew him he was reasonably sharp, but he never thought about lock papers. He hadn't been here for so long he forgot about them, if he ever knew. So he figures Wahlke can keep watch on me and scrub me if he thinks I'm wise to anything. After I drop them off the grenade gets me, and nobody ever finds anything that indicates heroin was involved. Yeah, it's just the kind of damn fool desperate stunt he might try if he got rattled. But that means Roger thinks he's safe. Unless he's just playing it smart and keeping out of sight until he gets word the stunt came off. Maybe he's watching to see that the distribution gang gets the stuff before he goes home. I think I would."

  "Sure," Janie said. "Lots of pushers are on the junk themselves. They don't know anything about China and wouldn't care anyway, but if they ran short they'd start looking for their supplier. But they wouldn't know Balsinger, so why should he hide from them?"

  "Maybe that's it, and maybe it's the explosion," Shearing said. "The pushers wouldn't know him, but this thing's not that deep and Balsinger's not that big. One or two of them might know somebody who does know Balsinger, and if he's running scared he might keep out of the way for a day or so until he knows it worked. So it may not be us he's hiding from, and then he might not be hiding at all. He may just be out of town. But I don't think so, not with this operation going on. He'd want to be somewhere he could keep an eye on things, get messages from maybe one man, things like that. Now where would that be?"

 
; "His office?" I suggested. Shearing shook his head. "I've had that gone over already," he told us. We thought about it some more, and I got myself a glass of beer. Three Scotches in my condition would finish me off. I tried to think where Roger would go. Someplace he'd be safe, and where he could come back from if everything was all right. It had to be someplace he'd go normally.

  "Did anybody check out Balsinger's folks?" I asked.

  "Not directly. We can't go bothering people like that on Sunday night. Louis could, but he'd want to know why. We called their house and asked for Roger, but whoever answered the phone said he hadn't been there for a month. I thought you said his parents had disowned him."

  "Just with money," I told them. "Roger's still their only kid, and they keep hoping he'll grow up. He goes out to be nice to them five or six times a year."

  "How do we know," Janie asked, "that he isn't spending the night with some girl?"

  "If you knew Roger you wouldn't ask. The only way he ever gets a girl to go out with him is to impress her with his car and his beach house." I broke it off as I thought about it. "The damn beach house! He's got the use of a place his folks own out on the Sound. It's not too far, either. Maybe that's it."