The Silencers mh-5

by Donald Hamilton

  I found a ranch road leading off to the right. The unbroken snow indicated that nobody'd been over it since the storm started. I turned off the highway and headed in. Progress was slow, and coming out again would be a problem if the weather held, but on the other hand, nobody was going to follow us through that stuff in an ordinary passenger car, with or without chains. I had no intention of standing guard all night. I'd worry about getting out when the time came.

  The road turned down into a gully containing clumps of desert evergreens. I had the lights on, but the visibility was terrible, and I had trouble deciding where I was supposed to go from there. It was all snow. I said to hell with it, stopped, rocked the pickup back and forth a bit when it wouldn't come loose at once, and backed it in among the nearest trees. I cut the lights and windshield wipers, leaving the engine and heater running.

  "I hope you know what you're doing," Gail said, beside me. Her voice sounded rusty from disuse.

  I said, "A guy tried to run us off a cliff, remember? He may be a hundred miles away by now, but I'd rather not bank on it. Those tracks will be drifted over in half an hour, enough so in the dark nobody'll know we're here."

  "That's nice," she said. "I suppose somebody'll find our bodies, come spring."

  I said, "You must lead a hell of a life, glamor girl, terrorized by every little snowflake. Look the highway is only about a mile due west. If we can't get the truck out in the morning, we'll just dress up warmly and walk out for help. Okay? Now take your shoes off and make yourself comfortable… Oh, and you can take that wary look off your face, too."

  "I wasn't-"

  "The arrangements," I said, "will be simple and virtuous. You'll sleep up front here in the cab. The seat's a little short, but you'll come a lot closer to fitting in than I would. I'll bed down in back. Now, with that great load off your mind, suppose you tell me whether you prefer gin or tequila with your ham sandwich…

  I brought the refreshments out of the rear, switched on the interior light, and we had a kind of picnic there in the cab while the storm-lashed twilight outside gradually turned black with premature night. Over the rumble of the motor and the whir of the heater keeping us warm, we could hear the wind screaming through the nearby trees.

  It was cozy enough in the truck, but it was kind of like being alone in space, hurtling along a predetermined orbit in a sealed capsule. I saw the attractive woman at the other end of the seat wince as the truck rocked on its springs, feeling the blast. I reached out and poured a couple of fingers of tequila into her plastic cup.

  "Didn't you ever sit out a blue norther before?" I asked. "I thought you told me you were born on a ranch;"

  She shrugged. "I never was any more of an outdoors girl than I had to be." Her eyes narrowed. "Come to think of it, darling, I never told you anything of the sort. Have you been checking up on me?"

  "Did you think we wouldn't? The dope came through just before breakfast. Just a brief summary."

  She laughed shortly. "It must have made interesting reading."

  As a matter of fact, it hadn't. It had been the usual story of a girl with too much beauty, too much money and too many husbands.

  "I must say," she said, "that the idea of people snooping around and asking questions-"

  She stopped, as a violent gust swept through our sheltering hollow. A branch beat against the side of the metal canopy. Snow peppered the windshield like thrown gravel. From inside, the glass looked crystallized and opaque. Gail's knuckles were white, gripping the cup.

  "Relax," I said. "The end of the world should still be a few days off, if my guess is correct."

  She said, "Damn you, we can't all be great pioneer heroes… What did you mean by that?"

  "I've been thinking," I said, "about Sarah-your sister Janie, and what made her do it, go over, as we call it. Mac isn't often so wrong about the people he picks. Screwy as we are, we don't usually let him down for reasons of simple biological attraction. She wasn't a school kid, after all. She'd had training and a couple of years experience in a tough racket."

  "Yes," Gail said. "One day I'm going to find out exactly how tough this racket of yours is, darling." It could have been a veiled threat, although her face showed no hint of it.

  I said, "I figure he must have pulled the old doomsday pitch on her. It's the one they usually drag out when it's a question of nuclear weapons and they need a few misguided idealists to throw sand in the works. It explains what she said to you when she was dying."

  "You mean, about her only missing a few days?"

  I nodded. "That's the way I read it. The world is going to end December thirteenth, she'd been told, presumably due to this underground test in the Manzanitas, if she didn't do something about it quick or get you to do it for her… Well, they've pulled that line before and the world's still here, so I'm not going to brood about it. I'll get you a sleeping bag. Which suitcase do you want?"

  She hesitated, started to ask a question then changed her mind. "The small one has my nightie-"

  "Nightie?" I said. "What do you think this is, a June honeymoon at Niagara Falls? You'll freeze to death in a nylon nightie. You'd better sleep in those clothes or pull on some warm slacks if you've got them; you may even have to keep your coat on. It'll get cold in here when we shut down the motor. If you haven't got wool socks, I'll lend you a pair."

  She said, rather stiffly, I'll wear my own things, thank you."

  "Suit yourself," I said. "Sleep well."

  XII

  It took her more than an hour to make up her mind and then having made it up, to do something about it.

  Lying in back, I saw the cab light come on, illuminating the window above my head. A lot of activity followed- when a greenhorn gets involved with a sleeping bag, you'd think a boa constrictor had got into the act.

  At last the light went out and the cab door opened- and closed noisily, slammed shut by the wind. Seconds later, she was knocking at the rear door of the canopy. I let her wait a little. It wouldn't do to let her think I'd been expecting her. Finally, I made a grudging sound and crawled back to raise the door which was hinged at the top and swung up like a station-wagon transom.

  "Here," she said, pushing an armload of bedding at me. I disposed of the stuff behind me and reached down to help her inside. "Watch your head," I said. "This isn't the lobby of the Hotel Paso del Norte. What's the matter?"

  "I'm freezing up there," she gasped, scrambling in beside me. "And scared."

  "I offered you warm socks. And I told you to wear your coat."

  "There wasn't room for it inside that damn zipper bag. And when I spread it over me, it kept falling off. Anyway, you can't talk to a damn coat."

  I closed and latched the door, shutting out the snow and wind. I switched on the electric lantern I kept back there, got her sleeping bag open like a blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders. She drew it tight about her, shivering realistically. I found the tequila bottle and the plastic cups.

  "We're going to die!" she moaned tragically, taking the cup I offered her. "We're never going to get out of this dreadful place alive!"

  I laughed. "Cut it out. Now if we'd counted on staying in a motel, we'd be in real trouble. There aren't many along this highway, and they'll all be full of stranded travelers, tonight."

  "My feet!" she said. "They're frozen absolutely solid."

  "Sure," I said. "Gangrene will set in any minute." I made an examination. She'd come around the truck in her stocking feet, rather than ruin her shoes in the snow. "You'd better take off those wet nylons," I said.

  She hesitated then unwrapped herself enough to get her skirt up and one garter disengaged; then she began to shake uncontrollably and hugged the robe about her again. Well, she probably was kind of cold. I wouldn't have wanted to run around out there practically barefoot.

  "You d-do it," she gasped.

  I glanced at her. She had the grace to blush. It was pretty damn corny. I mean, I hadn't been sure until then-not absolutely sure-but the please-hel
p-me-off -with-my-stockings gambit was a dead give-away. No adult woman who didn't plan on getting laid was going to start that routine-alone with a man in a cramped refuge on a stormy night.

  "Sure," I said. "Anything to oblige, ma'am."

  I got on my knees and arranged the lantern for better visibility. I prepared the patient for the operation. After a little, she laughed softly, watching me work.

  "Does it bother you, undressing a woman, Matt?" She didn't seem to be shivering so much any more. "No, that's right, you're the iron man, aren't you? The unfeeling brute who strips them and searches them without a thought for anything but duty and country." There was malice in her voice.

  I shook out a transparent nylon stocking and draped it over a pile of stuff at the side. "Would it have made you feel better if I'd raped you?" I asked.

  She laughed again. "In a way, of course it would. It would have meant you were looking at me as a woman instead of as a suspicious character." She watched me work the other stocking down and slip it off her foot. When she spoke, her voice was quite different, very soft, very gentle. "You don't have to stop with the stockings, darling. You know that."

  "Yes," I said. "I know it."

  There was a little silence inside the canopy, while outside the storm whistled and howled. For some reason I was stalling. I drew a long breath and looked at my watch.

  "What's the matter?" she asked, rather sharply. "What are you doing?"

  "Just checking the time," I said. "I've got a bet riding on this." I didn't but it seemed like a good line. I don't like sex under false pretenses. Sometimes you have to do it that way, in the business, but tonight I couldn't see that it was necessary. "Five bucks," I said.

  There was another little silence. When she spoke, her voice was absolutely flat. "Five bucks?" she said, "on what?"

  "On whether or not we're making love by nine o'clock,"

  I said, which was another lie. We'd discussed the probability, Mac and I, but no time had been mentioned. "It's all right," I said. "My money's safe. We've still got forty minutes to go."

  There was another stretch of silence, but it didn't last long. I was ready for her when she came at me, striking at my face with her nails. I got her wrists, as I had once before. She was strong enough, for a woman, but she had no conception of the use of leverage.

  "Easy now," I said. "Take it easy, glamor girl. You'll only hurt yourself."

  "You beast!" she gasped. "You… you creature! You contemptible-"

  "Sure," I said. "There wasn't any bet, Gail. I was just kidding." She didn't speak, breathing heavily, and I said, "You were pretty corny, you know, with that stocking routine. I had to shake you up a bit."

  "You louse! You stinking, miserable-" She stopped abruptly and spoke in that perfectly flat voice: "I don't understand."

  "Truce?" I said, still holding her.

  After a moment, she nodded. I released her wrists, and she sat there rubbing them, not looking at me, while the truck rocked on its spring and hard little pellets of wind-driven snow rattled against the aluminum canopy. I thought the weather would probably break by morning. That hard buckshot snow generally comes with the end of the storm.

  "I don't understand," Gail said again.

  "You shouldn't try to seduce a man my age with such obvious tricks, glamor girl," I said. "It hurts his pride. Also, there was a matter of principle. There wasn't any bet, but, last night my chief and I did discuss your possible reactions. The consensus was that you'd probably try this. I thought you ought to know that we'd talked about it."

  She licked her lips. "You discussed… You actually talked about whether or not I'd… What in the world made you think…?"

  "Cut it out," I said. "Can't you see I'm trying to keep this on a reasonably honest basis? Don't go hypocritical on me, Gail."

  She hesitated, then said in a different voice: "Did I give myself away that badly?"

  "You didn't have to. It was obvious that you hated us, me in particular. God knows, you had plenty of reason. It seemed inevitable that somewhere on this trip you'd try to get even, somehow. And how is a woman going to get even with a man who's too big for her to beat up and has all the resources of the U.S. Government behind him?"

  She started to speak, then stopped. Presently she said, "You're a funny person. All right, and where are we now?"

  "In the back of a truck in a blizzard," I said, "slowly turning ~ solid ice while you make up your mind where and how you're going to spend the night."

  Her head came up. She stared at me. "You're not really conceited enough, are you, to think I'd still consider…?" I didn't say anything, and presently she laughed. It was a real laugh, soft and warm and kind of nice. "Oh, hell," she said, "I'm certainly not going to wade back through three feet of snow to that cast-iron front seat, and if I stay here you'll probably ravish me before morning, anyway."

  I said, "Damn, I hate women who think they're irresistible. Do you want me to sleep in the cab, just to prove something?"

  She said, "No, darling, I think you've proved quite enough for one night. Well, almost quite enough…"

  XIII

  The first thing I noticed, waking, was the silence. There wasn't a sound anywhere, inside or outside the truck, except for the quiet breathing of the woman in my arms.

  Gail stirred sleepily and burrowed closer. The temperature must have dropped twenty degrees during the night- as it often does out there right after a storm. I stuck my head out of the covers and saw there was light under the canopy. The windows were white with frost. I summoned my courage and squirmed out from under the sleeping bag and blankets piled on top of us, tucking them back around Gail. I put on coat, hat, and boots, and opened my suitcase to find a pair of gloves.

  I found them all right and stopped in the middle of pulling them on, looking at a small, unfamiliar, paper-wrapped package tucked in among my belongings. The printing on the wrapper said: RODRIGUEZ CURIOS, JUAREZ, MEXICO. I hesitated, pulled off the gloves again, opened the package and looked at the rolled-up belt inside-obviously a farewell gift from Mac, something he thought I might be needing on this job.

  It looked innocent enough, just a handcarved leather belt with a heavy, ornate buckle. It was, I knew, almost as innocent as it looked. There were no secret compartments, no razor blades concealed between strips of leather, no steel spring knives or saws. The only gimmick was the buckle, carefully designed to serve a number of purposes, some quite lethal. It was a grim reminder that I hadn't come here to play amorous games in the snow.

  "Good morning, darling," Gail's voice said behind me.

  "Is it as cold as I think it is?"

  "Colder," I said. "You stay wrapped up until I get the cab warm. How's the glamor girl this morning?"

  "She never felt less glamorous," Gail laughed. "I'd make a terrible Eskimo; I like to take my clothes off when I go to bed… What have you got there?"

  "Just something I picked up in Juarez."

  The falsehood was a little harder to manage convincingly, I noticed, than it would have been the previous day. I dropped the open package in front of her.

  "Oh, a belt," she said, and let it lie rather than expose herself to the cold by reaching out to investigate. "I don't like those damn big fancy cowboy belts. I think a man looks much smarter in a plain, narrow belt."

  "I'll remember that," I said, "the next time I want to look smart."

  Outside, I warmed myself quickly by shoveling the snow clear of the truck's exhaust pipe. Then I shoveled a path forward and started the motor to warm it up. The pickup rocked a little to indicate that Gail was moving around in back. I went back to investigate and found her sitting up with a blanket over her shoulders, pulling on a fresh pair of nylons. The snow was still frozen on the ones she'd had on the night before.

  I said, "I told you to stay put."

  She made a face at me. "It's not so cold."

  Her breath made a misty plume on the still air. Her legs, in those sheer stockings, looked colder than anything on eart
h. I reached out and pinched one of her toes through the nylon.

  "Can you feel that?"

  She looked startled. "Why, no, I-"

  "You," I said, "are a lovely dope."

  I grabbed her by the ankles and pulled her towards me, disregarding her squeals of protest. I gathered her up in my arms, carried her around to the cab and shoved her inside.

  "It'll start to get warm as soon as the sun rises, but in the meantime," I said, "you put that coat on and stay in there all covered up if you want to get out of this with a full complement of toes and noses, not to mention fingers and ears. What do they teach you Texas girls, anyway?"

  She gave me a grin. "After last night, darling, need you ask?"

  I started to close the door and stopped, looking at her. Something had changed in her face. It wasn't just that the hardships of the night had inflicted serious damage on the smooth, hard polish with which she'd embarked on this journey-that her elaborate hairdo was a tousled mess and her careful make-up mostly missing. She didn't even have much lipstick on. Then I realized that it was the mouth itself that had changed. It was softer and prettier than I remembered it.

  "What's the matter, darling?" she asked.

  "Nothing," he said, "but you'd better comb your hair. You look like a sheep dog."

  I went back to melt some snow for coffee on the Coleman stove and told myself that a woman always looks more beautiful after you've made love to her, but I was suddenly a little scared. I didn't want her to turn into a nice girl with a sweet warm mouth. It didn't fit in with my calculations at all.

  We had no trouble getting back to the highway, and it didn't take us long after that to reach Carrizozo. For some reason I found myself remembering the time I was working for an Albuquerque newspaper before the war- before Mac got hold of me and taught me a different profession-and had driven through Carrizozo in the spring when the cottonwoods were pale green and the tamarisk hedges were just turning pink. There were no pale new leaves on the cottonwoods today, and no feathery sprays of color on the tamarisks. There were just bare branches and tracked-up snow.