“We working tonight?” Cowboy said.
“No. He’s stalling. I don’t know what’s going on.”
Cowboy shrugged.
“I’m screwing this up somehow,” I said. “I can’t move him off high center.”
“It ain’t you,” Cowboy said, “it’s him. Amateurs ain’t never nothing but trouble.”
“Words to live by,” I said.
Hilda woke up in the night with a convulsive jerk and a sharp intake of breath. Then she slumped and lay still, breathing heavily.
I reached for her; she rolled into my arms. “Firebomb dream?” I said.
She nodded; her chin bumped on my shoulder. She trembled. “Scary,” she said. “Hold me for a minute.” She wriggled tighter against me.
I could feel her heart banging away. She shivered again. I patted her back and murmured there-there noises. I felt useless and guilty. “Hil, I’m sorry. I didn’t figure anything like that would happen. I took you right into the middle of it.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said. Her heartbeat was just beginning to slow down.
“I attract that kind of trouble,” I said. “By being around me, you—”
She dug her nails into my side. “Stop that. Being without you would be worse. I’d lose more than a few hours of sleep. Besides, they’re getting easier to handle. Last night’s dream was … well, it was worse.”
“Do you want to see anybody about it? A counselor, a shrink, anybody like that?”
“No.” Hilda’s voice was firm. Her heart rate was noticeably slower now. “I’m not ready to join the couch brigade, thank you.”
“It’s okay, babe. Lots of people have therapy.”
She eased away and rolled onto her back beside me. We held hands. “I know there’s no stigma attached to psychoanalysis,” she said, “but I don’t need a hired confidant to tell me what my problem is. I know the problem. I had a frightening experience. It’s over now. There is nothing I can do about it except worry, which would be irrational and harmful. So I don’t worry.”
“Maybe it’s me. If I—”
“Shut up. That is not an acceptable alternative. Believe me, I’m okay. I don’t walk around all day in abject terror; you know that. I guess it sneaks up on me at night, that’s all.”
“Two nights, two nightmares. You’re batting a thousand.”
“Yes, but I think tonight was only because of that phone call. And honestly, it wasn’t as bad. I woke up sooner, and I calmed down much faster.”
I thought of her last night, ripped out of her sleep by her nightmare, waking alone and frightened. I squeezed her hand; she squeezed back. “I feel lousy, Hil. What can I do for you?”
“You love me, and you make me laugh, and I feel good when I’m with you. What else could there be?”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Hilda said, “We are talking about it, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, sure, but I meant about the nightmare itself. Only if you want to, though.”
After a moment she said, “I really don’t know whether talking would erase it or plant it more firmly in my mind.”
“I could affect a disinterested manner and say things like ‘And how did that make you feel?’”
Hilda laughed briefly. It didn’t sound like she had to force it much. Some, maybe, but not much.
I said, “I could go with ‘Und how did dot make you veel?’ if you prefer a more traditional approach.”
“Actually,” she said, “I thought I might talk to a cabdriver. That way I’d be dealing with a professional, but it wouldn’t cost me ninety dollars an hour.”
“You’d be better off with a bartender,” I said. “Great ambience.”
“No,” she said, “A cabdriver. That way you know where you stand, because the meter’s right out there where you can see it.”
After that we invented work-o-meters and installed them on people like airline pilots and typists and whoever puts the pimentos in olives. As we babbled on, I could feel Hilda relax.
After we’d run out of work-o-meter candidates, she said muzzily, “Willoo beer morra?”
“I’ll be here in the morning,” I said. “Then Cowboy and I are leaving again. Gotta go catch the guy on the phone.”
No response; she was asleep. Her breathing had changed and slowed. Soon she began to make the softest of bubbling sounds.
“I still don’t know who he is,” I whispered to the darkness, “but I know how to find the son of a bitch.”
Chapter 29
“Here ya go,” Cowboy said. “Listen to this one. ‘Ex-platoon leader Vietnam wants high-risk, high-pay job.’ It’s got a Shreveport address. You want it on the list or not?”
“I guess so. Shreveport is only three or four hours away. For the kind of money Dresden offered, four hours of travel time is nothing.”
Cowboy looked over the edge of the magazine he held. “By car, yeah, that’s about right,” he said. “Thing of it is, though, if we’re talking about airlines, then San Francisco is only three or four hours away. Chicago, too. New York, maybe. Whole bunch of places, come to that.”
“Put ’em all down, then,” I said. “Damn it.”
“Whoops, here’s one from Australia. Some town called Wagga Wagga, of all things. I don’t expect you want that one though.”
“This is your captain speaking,” I said. “No Australian ads. Also no Peruvian, Fijian, English, or Sri Lankan ads. No foreign ads at all.”
Cowboy grinned at me. “Canada?”
“Where the hell are you finding these things? I’ve only got two so far.”
“Well, I don’t actually have a Canadian one yet. I’m just asking, in case I should run across one.”
“Canada, yes. Also Mexico. Aside from that, American ads only.”
“Ain’t no need for you to get all bitter and twisted,” Cowboy said. “This secret agent crap is your line of work, not mine.”
It was nine-thirty the next morning; Cowboy and I sat in my living room, with magazines all around our feet on the coffee table. We’d left Hilda’s house after she went to work. Mimi went with her. That was my idea. If Hilda felt safe during the day, maybe she’d sleep better at night. Thinking about her nightmares made me feel bad all over again.
“Not that you ain’t good at this secret-agent crap,” Cowboy said, picking up another magazine.
The “secret-agent crap” that annoyed Cowboy came from my belated realization that Dresden must have found the hitter through the classified sections of the magazines I’d found in his garage.
“This here’s a damn good idea, if the truth be known,” Cowboy said. “It fits with this dude being so squirrelly.”
I went to the kitchen for more coffee and to see if the cat had shown up for its bowl of milk on the back step. It hadn’t. I hoped it hadn’t run away or been hit by a car.
Back in the living room, as I put the coffee mugs down, Cowboy said, “Hey now, here’s another one. This old boy says he’s been everything from a Green Beret to military intelligence. Wants work as a bounty hunter, mercenary, bodyguard, undercover agent, or private investigator. Got him a phone number listed here, then ‘weekends only.’”
“Some wannabee who sweeps out the local hardware store during the week,” I said. “Doesn’t like the idea of his wife taking messages from all those South American generals.”
“Hell,” Cowboy said. He pronounced it hay-ell. “All these guys is amateurs. Ain’t no pro gonna buy an ad in here, like they was selling a used Chevy.”
It was discouraging work, sifting through Dresden’s magazines. I knew we wouldn’t find a classified ad saying, “Hired Killer. Grocery Stores My Speciality. Phone …” but I had hoped there would be only two or three likely ads. Instead we found twice that many in the first two magazines. It was going to be a long day.
Although there were no specific hired-killer ads, the magazines had almost everything else for sale. You could buy almost anything that would shoot, for example, f
rom tiny .25-caliber automatics to assault rifles and combat shotguns. And there were lockpicks and compasses and dehydrated food and books with titles like Private Investigation Made Easy and How to Build a Bomb with Only Three Toothpicks and a Jar of Mayonnaise. Well, okay, I’m exaggerating about the book titles. But only a little bit.
There were dozens of ads for military-style packs, belts, and camouflage clothing. The buzzword was cammies. I had forgotten there were so many versions of it.
Knives were popular, too. Articles compared knives and knife-fighting techniques; ads offered every edged weapon I could think of except, perhaps, a broadsword. The trend was mostly toward what I’d always called hunting knives. Apparently they had become “survival” knives when I wasn’t looking. One ad, though, bucked the trend. It touted old-fashioned switchblades, like you used to see in 1950s juvenile-delinquent movies. The ad called the switchblades “Genuine European Stilettos.”
And there was a gadget that converted a pair of .22 rifles into a hand-cranked machine gun—a Gatling gun, actually, complete with tripod and magazine boxes. “Up to 500 rounds a minute,” the ad claimed. I showed it to Cowboy. “But the shoulder holster costs three thousand dollars,” I said.
“Humph,” he grunted. “Some of these old boys sure do like play soldier, don’t they?”
That was a pretty good overview; the magazines would appeal to guys who liked to play soldier. The magazines varied. Some were mostly trash; blatant, pandering articles and poorly composed ads for obvious rip-offs.
But some weren’t bad at all, especially the specialized articles and features. Some of the topics would have whipped a pacifist to a blind fury, but they were solid red meat for detail-hungry military-trivia buffs and gun enthusiasts. There was a field report on the new Galil, for example, that Israeli adaptation of the Kalashnikov assault rifle. And a think piece about the handguns preferred by various SWAT teams. And a short item … Well, anyway, it took longer to get through those magazines than I’d expected.
Even so, by one-thirty we’d been through the whole stack, cover to cover. Over sandwiches and beer, we boiled it down.
“Okay,” I said. “We have seventeen possible ads, any one of which might have been placed by Dresden’s hired hitter. None of the seventeen seem any more likely than any other. You agree with that?”
Cowboy swallowed a mouthful of ham and cheese and grunted. “Goddamned amateurs, every one of ’em.”
“So what? Point two, and a possible problem. Most of the ads came from the oldest magazines. In fact, the current issues don’t have any personal ads like that at all.”
“They musta changed the law or something,” Cowboy said.
“Maybe. But the ads are, what, four or five years out of date? Some are even older. It is not going to be easy to find these people.”
Cowboy shook his head. “That don’t matter. You and me, we’re a whole bunch better at finding folks than this Dresden fella. Ain’t nothing surer than that. So, if we can’t find ’em then he couldn’t have found ’em, either.”
“Oh, hell, yes! Of course. That’s why Dresden had so many of these magazines,” I said. “When he didn’t find what he wanted in the current issues, he went to one of those used-book-and-magazine places and bought the back issues, hoping to find at least one ad that was still good.”
“Thought you’d have seen that right off,” Cowboy said. He gave me a deadpan look.
“Still, even though we’re superheroes, this could be a long and dirty job. At least half of these ads only have cities and post office box numbers listed. Or phone numbers. And look at the names these guys use: Dagger. Striker. Archer.”
“You see the one with Occupant? That guy used to be a company clerk, I bet.”
“Whatever he was, he’s sure as hell not listed in the phone book under the Os. Hell, Cowboy, there’s only one of these ads with a full name given, and that’s probably not legitimate.”
“If it is,” Cowboy said, “he’s too honest or too dumb to be the dude we want.” He took a big bite of sandwich and chewed contentedly.
“You got that right. I guess we can con the information out of post offices and phone companies, but …”
Cowboy said, “Get your cop buddy to help,” or something close to that. Coming from around the sandwich, it was hard to tell.
“If I have to. Another thing. These ads cover a lot of territory.” Cowboy, still chewing methodically, began to shake his head. “But that isn’t as important as I first thought it was”—Cowboy changed to nodding—“because any of those people might have moved. Closer or farther doesn’t count. What counts is whether they left forwarding addresses.”
Cowboy swallowed and said, “Damn right.”
“So, forget that point,” I said. “It’ll solve itself. The next thing is to not go off half-cocked. We might already have a line on this guy and not know it. The fact that he might have moved doesn’t mean he really did. Maybe one of the phone numbers from an ad is also in Dresden’s telephone index gadget. And we can check the addresses—well, the three Texas addresses anyway—against that list of Ford Tempo registrations.”
Cowboy looked like his stomach hurt. “More secret-agent crap? What ever happened to the good old days when we just thumped the bad guys?”
“Progress,” I said. “Modern technology. Onward and upward.”
“Bullshit,” Cowboy said.
“That, too,” I said. “Especially that.”
Chapter 30
“Hello?”
“This is Colonel Sankowski,” I said. “Put Archer on.”
“Archer?” the voice said. “You must have—uh, wait a minute there. Right, Colonel. This is Archer.”
“Are you available for work?”
“Archer,” he said. “I nearly forgot, it’s been so long. You get my name from that old ad?”
“Never mind that. Are you available or not?” Leave the sweet-talk to the IBM recruiters; we mercenary colonels are hard as nails. Rusty nails. Aarrgh.
The man who’d called himself Archer waited a moment, then said. “Maybe. Where?”
“Here. Domestic.”
“Umm,” he said.
“It’s a solo penetration job,” I said. “Not quite what you’d asked for, but—”
“Tell you what. If you want a soldier, I’m your man. Give me a platoon in El Sal, or Nicaragua, or anyplace else they got commies to kill, and I’ll give you the highest body counts in the company. But don’t try to blow smoke up my ass with this solo penetration shit. I don’t do office burglaries. I don’t break legs, either.”
Then it was my turn to say, “Umm.”
“So, Colonel, you got a platoon for me to lead? Or troops to train? I do weapons training, too.”
“No,” I said.
He hung up.
“I think we can take Archer off the list,” I said to Cowboy.
Chapter 31
Over the next few days I talked to eight of the seventeen possible hitters. Most of them seemed to be like Archer, former grunts who’d found they liked military life but were bored by peacetime soldiering.
They were surprisingly picky about the work they would accept. They all wanted overseas assignments. What they did was more important to them than what they got paid for doing it. They would fight for a government or for a revolutionary group, that didn’t matter, but the politics of the conflict had to be correct. None of the men would, for any amount of money, contract with a procommunist regime or rebel group.
One of the eight, an explosives guy in Oklahoma, wasn’t interested in mercenary work of any kind. “Shit, man,” he said, “I ain’t into that bullshit no more.”
“This is domestic,” I said. “No travel. And the pay’s good.”
“Naw, Colonel, I’m right out of it now.”
“All the way out?”
“Depends on how you look at it, I s’pose.” He laughed. It wasn’t a particularly jolly laugh. “I left both hands and one eye in fuckin’ Angola, man. But
what’s left of me is all the way out.” He laughed again, and he was still laughing when the phone clattered and went dead.
I scratched him off the list. Two down; cooking right along there, Rafferty. But they were the easy ones. They were still at their old phone numbers; all I had to do was call when they were home. In between those simple calls, I talked to other people. Oh, boy, did I talk to other people.
“Telephone company, subscriber records, may I help you?”
“Sure hope so. This is Dave Howdiston, at the Baton Rouge business office. Listen, I got a problem with a subscriber’s records. New account for us, but he says he was one of yours a few years back.”
“Yes?”
“Do you have this variable deposit plan up there? Well, we do, and I mean to tell you it is the … Anyway, the thing of it is, we have to get a telephone subscription credit history on all new accounts, right? So I had all that information for the subscriber I was telling you about, but the computer burped, or I pushed the wrong button or something. I don’t know for sure it was my fault, but it probably was. I’m not too good with this thing. Anyway, almost everything is gone. Now all I can get on the screen is the old number up there in your neck of the woods. I can’t even get the subscriber’s name up, and I can’t remember it, and he’s supposed to have a touch-tone and three-way service, two extra jacks, and an extension bell installed by tomorrow. I’m in big trouble here.”
“But I don t see what I can—”
“Way l figure it, your computer might show where the subscriber went after his service was terminated with you. Where you sent the final bill, right? Then I can check there and see what records they have and keep doing that until I track him right back to the other side of my counter here.”
“Well, I suppose that would work.”
“I’ll put you on my Christmas card list. Promise.”
She chuckled. Nice chuckle. “Okay, okay. What was the subscriber’s former number here?”
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