Operation Deathmaker

by Dan J. Marlowe

  “Okay,” the driver said indifferently. “That’ll be twenty-five cents.”

  I paid him, reflecting meanwhile upon Cottonmouth’s trickiness. I had passed the Pearlblossom intersection no more than ten minutes ago. One of Cottonmouth’s team had probably been posted there to make sure I was alone.

  I moved to the rear of the bus despite the shortness of the one-mile ride. I took a good look at each passenger as I passed. One of them almost had to be the courier who intended to pick up the ransom money after I left the bus. Cottonmouth’s careful planning wouldn’t permit one of the gang getting on at the next stop to retrieve the briefcase. Suppose someone on the bus noticed it and picked it up in the meantime?

  But the weatherbeaten faces revealed nothing. The majority of the men appeared to be of Mexican descent. I thought of the Spanish-speaking radio station to which the car radio of the gray sedan had been tuned. I took another look at the women. It would be a switch worthy of Cottonmouth if the pickup person were a woman instead of a man, but the housewives looked more innocent than the laborers. And I hadn’t time to study any of the bus riders in detail to try to ferret out Cottonmouth’s messenger.

  I pushed the money-laden briefcase into the shady corner of the rear seat.

  But of one thing I was sure: I wasn’t abandoning it there until I saw Melissa.

  The bus slowed. I remained in the rear seat. The pimply driver turned to look in my direction after he braked to a stop. “Here y’are mister,” he called.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I made a production of redraping my jacket over my arm while I stared through the bus window at the vacant, dilapidated general store, which was the only break in the surrounding wasteland except for two outbuildings behind it. If I had ever seen a dead end, this certainly looked like it.

  I had just made up my mind to stay on the bus with the money when I saw the bright-yellow flash of Melissa’s travel dress.

  She was inside the abandoned store, seated with her back to me in front of a dirt-smeared, multi-paned display window that occupied most of the store’s front wall under a sagging porch roof. I could see her head and shoulders clearly.

  I switched decisions in midstream.

  I couldn’t jeopardize Melissa by trying to retrieve her while still holding onto the cash.

  Cottonmouth’s careful planning was a sure indication that he would have provided a rebuttal against such an attempt.

  I picked up my makeup kit and walked down the aisle of the bus. None of the passengers appeared to pay the slightest attention to me. The driver opened the door, and I stepped down to the ground. The bus rumbled away, leaving me standing at the side of the road.

  Once again the merciless sun beat down upon me. I reached inside my jacket pocket and wrapped my hand around the checkered walnut grips of my automatic. If Cottonmouth could wipe out both Melissa and me now, he was home free. But there was no getaway car visible. There was nothing in sight except the deserted old store and Melissa seated in its front window with her back to me.

  When the sound of the bus died away, the silence was as profound as the sun was hot. I angled across the road, exposing myself to the front window as little as possible. I made a quick circuit of the building to make sure there was no car parked in back. Then I stepped up on the porch. When my sun-dazzled eyes adjusted, I could see Melissa again.

  The back of the rocking chair she was seated in concealed most of her, but I could see that her wrists were tied to its arms. Her head was bent forward. I couldn’t tell if she was gagged.

  I tapped on the window, but Melissa didn’t raise her head.

  I tapped again, louder.

  She didn’t move at all.

  I wanted to believe she had been drugged.

  I hoped fervently that she had been drugged.

  I abandoned the window and turned toward the door. I don’t know why I felt the time for subtlety was gone. I battered the wooden door partly open with a fusillade of kicks, then rammed my way inside. I stumbled into the dry-smelling, dust-disturbed interior, pulled up short, and turned to Melissa.

  One look was enough.

  The yellow dress I had seen from the bus was draped carelessly around her neck. The rest of her was nude. Her body was covered with red welts and dark bruises. Her breasts and belly were discolored from cigarette burns. Her nose was broken, one eye was closed completely, and her mouth was a shapeless red smear.

  I moved close enough to touch her on the arm. She was cold, and her flesh retained the indentation made by my finger. She had been dead for some time. Long enough that the message I had supposedly received from her had been beyond a doubt taped.

  The savagery of the beating inflicted upon the helpless girl knocked me off stride. She had no precious information the kidnappers needed to obtain from her. It was sheer, wanton, obscene brutality. The formerly pretty face was almost unrecognizable. Even the set of her head upon her slender shoulders looked odd. A closer inspection showed why. The girl’s slim neck had been broken.

  I stood there with a welling tide of fury surging through me.

  No innocent human being deserved to die like this, least of all a laughing, lighthearted, vivacious girl like Melissa.

  For an instant I wondered if I had been wrong about the mental image I had built up of Stan Kirkman staging the kidnapping with the aid of several accomplices. Could the college student have permitted these things to be done to Melissa, his girlfriend? Or allowed them to be done?

  No, I was sure I wasn’t wrong.

  Too many things pointed toward Stan Kirkman.

  The would-be actor was going to have another role to play soon.

  Because I was going to find him.

  I tried to subdue my rage while I considered what had to be done. I couldn’t cut Melissa’s body free from the wrist and ankle bonds which fastened her to the rocking chair. It went against the grain, but I’d have to leave her to be found by the inevitable authorities. When I reached civilization again, I’d have Val Cooper telephone the police anonymously and tell them where to find Melissa.

  I stepped forward to remove the girl’s yellow dress from around her neck and drape it over her body. Even that slight movement caused her head to fall sideways upon one shoulder with a grisly, plopping sound. The rocking chair moved with the weight change, and a barely audible creaking noise reached my ears.

  Almost too late I saw the artfully concealed cord that ran from a rocking-chair rung to a shelf above my head.

  The creaking noise had come from the shelf.

  I looked upward and jumped backward in the same movement.

  The collapsing overhead shelf was dumping a load of wooden packing boxes upon me.

  The sharp edge of a crate struck me a glancing blow between wrist and elbow as I held up an arm instinctively to shield my head. The crates must have contained lead. I could feel the overpowering weight of the packing box as it scraped along my arm. It took shirt and skin with it before it gouged a deep hole in the wooden flooring. Other boxes burst through the worn planking as though the boards had been made of papier-maché.

  I was supposed to be buried beneath them.

  If I had tried to remove Melissa’s body from the rocking chair, my bent-over position would have contributed to two bodies being found in the abandoned store.

  The rocking chair had been cleverly rigged as a booby trap.

  It was an unpleasant reminder that once more I was completely expendable so far as Cottonmouth and Company were concerned.

  The thought of Cottonmouth put me into motion. It would be in line with his cunningly warped thinking to call the police himself and direct them to Perkin’s Junction. It would be a natural backup to his lethal booby trap. Even if it missed, and I were found there by the police, he would have accomplished his purpose of immobilizing me.

  Almost surely he would include among his details to the authorities the presence of the gray, black-vinyl-roofed sedan at the other crossing.

  It
meant that I didn’t dare go back to it, and that I was without transportation.

  The sharp pain in my scraped arm had diminished to a steady throbbing. I worked my fingers, bent my wrist, and finally raised my elbow tentatively. Ribbons of pain shot through the arm, but there were no broken bones. Tiny droplets of clear lymph were oozing from the exposed surface of the raw-looking scrape that extended from my elbow to mid-forearm.

  I ripped off the remnant of my torn shirt sleeve and wound it around the scrape as a temporary dressing. If it stayed on too long it would adhere to the wound, making its removal both messy and painful. I needed better first aid than I was able to give myself in this emergency situation.

  I went outside on the rotting porch to pick up the jacket and makeup kit I had dropped when I smashed in the door. Nothing was moving on the road in either direction as far as I could see. I went back inside and opened the kit. I worked swiftly in the dry heat to change my facial appearance from that I had been using at the Miramar Motel. Then I changed wigs, substituting a red one for the dark brown one I had been wearing. If Cottonmouth had any more booby traps rigged along my return route, he was going to have trouble recognizing his intended victim.

  I didn’t look in Melissa’s direction again.

  I’d rather remember her as she had been during the pleasant first few days of her visit before her confrontation with Hazel. She had been a sunny, sweet-dispositioned girl, whom it was almost impossible to imagine ending up like this.

  I shrugged into my jacket despite the heat, knowing I had to do it before my arm stiffened up. The roughly bandaged arm, blook-soaked as the crude sleeve wrapping was, would call too much attention to me if it were visible.

  I stepped out onto the porch again. I needed a ride at least as far as the nearest telephone, preferably in a direction away from the gray sedan. But I couldn’t be too fussy about it. The main thing was to get away from Perkin’s Junction.

  A dot appeared upon the highway to my right. A moving dot. It was a car, and it was moving in the right direction. I stepped down from the porch, walked across the road, and held up my thumb.

  The vehicle was almost on top of me before I recognized it as the same paint-flaked, battered pickup truck that had passed me earlier at the other intersection.

  The pickup overshot me by twenty yards before the old man hunched over the wheel reacted to my thumb. It was probably due as much to worn, squeaky brakes as the driver’s rheumy, nearsighted eyes. The old man leaned across the front seat and opened the passenger-side door as I walked rapidly toward the pickup.

  “You’re the second salesman I’ve seen out in these parts this mornin’,” he remarked as I climbed in. I was sure that I had been the first one, too, and that the old man had seen me at the other intersection where I’d left the gray sedan. “You fellas are really coverin’ the territory when you get way the hell-’n-gone out here.” His voice was hoarse and he chuckled scratchily.

  “I’m headed for the Dempseys’ place,” I improvised.

  “Dempseys? I don’t know no folks around here by that name, an’ I been livin’ here seventy years.”

  “They’re new. The bus driver had the same problem you have. He dropped me off at the wrong stop. Actually, I just want to get to a phone so I can call them and have them pick me up.”

  The old man nodded. “Nothin’ easier. I’ll just drop you off up ahead at the Wiggins’ place. They’ve got a phone.”

  “I sure appreciate this,” I told him.

  The old man had loose, clicking dentures, but they didn’t slow down his talking. In the few moments it took to reach the small, neatly kept Wiggins’ house, the old-timer vocalized lengthily upon the number of people leaving the city and beginning to crowd into previously open country.

  He insisted upon accompanying me to the Wiggins’ front door and vouching for me to Mrs. Wiggins, a hefty housewife. The woman led me inside to the phone. From the rear of the house the appetizing aroma of fresh-baking bread almost made me forget the pain in my arm. The tantalizing odor started juices gurgling in my stomach, reminding me that it had been too much neglected recently.

  I called the Miramar Motel collect and asked for Mrs. Catherine Vernon, the alias I had given Val Cooper. I didn’t want the long-distance call appearing on the Wiggins’ phone bill. I listened while Val assured the operator she would accept the charge. “It’s me,” I said when the operator cut herself out of the circuit. “I need a ride back to town.”

  Surprisingly, she didn’t ask any questions. “How do I find you?” she asked.

  I gave her specific directions.

  I knew she had at least an hour’s drive ahead of her, so I went in search of Mrs. Wiggins and asked for the use of her bathroom. She showed me the way. Inside, I found a jar of Vaseline and some adhesive tape in the medicine closet. When I emerged, I had a much more practical bandage under the sleeve of my jacket.

  I told Mrs. Wiggins I had about an hour’s wait before I would be picked up. She insisted that I sit in the backyard where it would be cooler. Through the kitchen window I could see that the backyard would be fine because clusters of lilac bushes shielded it from anyone passing by on the road. I went outside and moved a canvas folding chair into the shade of a lime tree. The tree seemed stricken with malnutrition due to the acidity of the soil, but its small leaves were sufficient to keep the sun off me.

  Mrs. Wiggins brought me a tray on which were three thick slices of her homemade bread, a glass of cold buttermilk, homemade strawberry jam, and apricot preserves. She pulled a chair over beside mine, then sat and chatted. She asked a few seemingly artless questions that I fended off in what I hoped was the same seemingly artless manner.

  When she left me, I sat back and tried to organize my thoughts.

  The peaceful nature of the bucolic scene in which I was presently immersed was in such stark contrast to the one I had left behind in the abandoned store at Perkin’s Junction that I had difficulty in adjusting.

  I thought about Val Cooper.

  Most women receiving a telephone call like mine in the circumstances would have flooded me with eighteen questions. The fact that she hadn’t reconfirmed my feeling about her good sense.

  I thought about whether Melissa’s kidnapping had been a carefully orchestrated event from the beginning, or whether it had grown from some sudden, almost uncontrolled happening. The way events had taken place suggested that it contained some elements of both.

  Not that it really mattered.

  I still believed that the girl’s failure to break loose a sizable chunk of her trust fund via an appeal to Hazel had sparked the situation.

  And if that were true, there was no question that Stan Kirkman was involved.

  Whether Melissa herself had been originally involved was now, most unfortunately, a moot point.

  Buttermilk glass in hand, I sat in the shade of the lime tree trying to formulate a plan of action. I didn’t know where to find Stan Kirkman, but I knew where to find Roger Kirkman, the attorney who was Stan’s uncle. If Roger Kirkman knew anything at all about the whereabouts of his nephew, very shortly I was due to know it, too. The still vivid image of Melissa Andrews’s young body infuriated me to a point that I wasn’t going to allow Roger Kirkman to stand me off on anything he knew about his nephew.

  The more I considered it the more sure I became that the kidnappers had operated behind a basically well-planned scheme. They had had to advance it a day when Melissa announced her earlier-than-first-planned departure for the East Coast. And they had had to cope with me when I appeared.

  They had been both clever and fortunate in overcoming obstacles. From their viewpoint, they’d done remarkably well. The services of the technician who’d managed the bomb blast and the deadfall at the abandoned store had been chillingly efficient.

  Most important of all, they had the ransom money.

  I looked at my watch. Almost an hour had passed. I left the shade of the lime tree for a vantage point from which I could obse
rve the roadway. Another ten minutes passed before Val’s car drew up in front of the house. I went inside to thank Mrs. Wiggins for her hospitality.

  Val looked at me quizzically when I joined her in the car and placed my makeup kit in the seat between us. “Thou man of many faces,” she commented. I had forgotten that I had changed my appearance again at the abandoned store.

  A black-and-white sheriff’s cruiser with its red light flashing and siren wailing rushed by in the direction of Perkin’s Junction. Val saw me watching it. “What is it?” she asked.

  I saw no need to mince matters. “Melissa is dead a mile back down the road. I think she’s been dead since a few hours after the kidnapping. I hope so.”

  Val had started the car. She cut her eyes toward me from her driving, but I didn’t elaborate. “The poor girl,” she said softly. “It’s such a waste.”

  “The bastards planned things very well. They got the money from me before I found-out about Melissa.” Talking about it was raising my temperature again. “How’s Hazel?”

  “Fine with me, not so well with anyone else,” Val answered.

  So the big redhead still had all her smarts.

  She knew I’d get her out of the hospital.

  She’d find a way to refuse to answer questions until that happened.

  “The morning papers are full of the robbery at the brokerage office,” Val said. “The police suspect an inside tipoff because of the unusually large amount of money on hand, most of it left by a single client.”

  The police probably knew already that the client who had left the large amount of cash with the broker and the hospitalized victim of the bomb blast were one and the same. The police weren’t willingly going to let Hazel leave the hospital before they questioned her. They just weren’t going to know about her departure until it was too late.

  “I made a couple of more calls this morning about Roger Kirkman,” Val said.

  That returned my attention to the center court of the match. “Did you find out anything?”

  “Yes. You certainly showed foresight when you asked about a technician associated with Kirkman. I spoke to Wade Tarkington, another lawyer friend of my ex-husband. He didn’t know Kirkman very well, except by reputation, but he knew the other man, Martin Swope.”