“How are you feeling?” Lisa asked after a moment, her concern for him growing appreciably as she looked over at him. He really did look awful, she thought with dismay. His head was resting limply back against the tree; his eyes were closed, and his mouth was a tight, bloodless line. His skin was more gray now than white; the scar on his cheek stood out in stark relief. At her words, his blue eyes flickered open to stare into hers. Uneasily Lisa saw that they seemed almost unnaturally bright.
“I have felt better,” he admitted slowly. “But I don’t think I’m in any immediate danger of dying. What about you?”
“I’m just tired, mostly,” Lisa answered, striving for a light tone. “How does your shoulder feel?”
Sam favored her with a long, wry look. “How do you think it feels? It hurts like hell.”
“I’m sorry,” was all Lisa could think of to say. She felt hopelessly inadequate. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Since you’re not a doctor or a magician, no.”
After that unpromising answer, they lapsed into silence. Sam withdrew a package of sodden cigarettes and some matches from his pants pocket. As drops of rain blown toward them by the wind put out his first match, Sam cursed under his breath. He was more careful with the second, cupping his hand around it protectively and at last managing to light his cigarette. Taking a long drag from it, he offered it wordlessly to Lisa. She shook her head. He knew she didn’t smoke. . . . Maybe he thought she needed something to calm her nerves. If a cigarette could do that, she thought wryly, she would gladly smoke a whole pack. But she was afraid her nerves were too far gone to be helped by a fix of nicotine. . . .
Her stomach growled loudly, reminding her that it hadn’t been fed for almost twenty-four hours. With anyone except Sam, she would have been embarrassed by this uncouth evidence of her body’s needs. But Sam was thoroughly familiar with every aspect of her person, including her dratted stomach’s propensity for demanding food in a voice clearly meant to be heard.
“You’re hungry.” It was a statement, not a question, and it was both amused and resigned. Lisa glanced over at Sam to see a faint smile curving his pale lips.
“Yes.”
“See those yellowish things hanging up there?” He pointed negligently above his head.
Lisa obediently looked up to see what appeared to be gourds nestled among the dark green leaves of the trees sheltering them.
“Yes.”
“They’re fruit, believe it or not. Quite good, in fact. If you can get one down, you can eat it.”
Lisa looked from him to the fruit dangling tauntingly high out of reach.
“Very funny.”
Sam grinned. “All right. If you don’t feel up to climbing trees, there should be some packets of beef jerky in the pack. I guess you can eat one.”
“Thanks very much. You’re too kind.” The glance Lisa cast at him was sour. She certainly wasn’t in the mood to be teased! But she lost no time in rooting through the pack and extracting the beef jerky. There were two sticks of the spicy meat to a packet, and Lisa passed one to Sam. Despite his kidding around, she noticed with a little sniff, he fell upon his strip of beef just as eagerly as she did hers.
“Sam,” she said in a small voice after her appetite was partly appeased.
“Hmmm?”
“What are we going to do?”
“After we eat? Keep walking.”
“I mean—how are we going to get out of here? Where are we going?”
“I’d say we’re a little to the west of Tuli right now—which is a town, in case you’re not up on Rhodesia’s geography. The South African border is probably about fifty miles to the south. We should be able to walk it in three, maybe four, days. Once we’re across the border, we’ll be safe.”
“Oh.” If possible, Lisa’s voice was even smaller than before. Fifty miles had always sounded like such a short distance—when she’d had a car. On foot, it could just as well have been halfway around the world.
“I’d steal us some sort of vehicle,” Sam went on carelessly, as if stealing vehicles was the most natural thing in the world, “but they’ll be expecting that. I bet they have roadblocks out everywhere.”
“Who’s they?” Lisa had meant to match his carelessness, but she succeeded only in sounding thoroughly scared.
“The guys chasing us.”
“I know that.” She threw him an exasperated look. “But who are they? What on earth did you do to them to make them want us so badly? If I’m going to lay down my life on the altar of some cause or another, I’d sure as hell like to know what it is!”
Sam sent her a sideways, considering look.
“You’re better off not knowing. At least they can’t get you to confess to anything you don’t know—and you might live longer. If—and I say if, so don’t look so scared—they should pick us up, they’ll be after information ahead of anything else: Who hired us, and why.”
“Well, who did?” she demanded impatiently. She was sick and tired of his patronizing attitude. Dyed-in-the-wool male chauvinist pig, she accused him inwardly for what must have been the hundredth time.
“I told you, you’re better off not knowing.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Despite her tiredness, Lisa sat bolt upright, turning to glare at him. That the effect was somewhat spoiled by the sodden tails of hair hanging around her neck and the dirty streaks on her face, she neither knew nor cared.
“You really want to know?” Sam had shifted so that he could look squarely into her eyes. Lisa thought, You’re enjoying this, aren’t you, you devil?
“Yes, I do!”
“Okay.” His voice was suddenly expressionless. The teasing grin died. “You asked for it. Don’t blame me if you don’t like what you hear. The soldiers hunting us are rebels under the direction of Thomas Kimo—I presume you’ve heard of him?” Lisa nodded. “Apparently they got wind of what we came here to do. They were waiting. We walked into a trap.”
“But what did you come here to do?” This was the crucial bit, Lisa knew. The part Sam didn’t want to tell her.
Sam closed his eyes, resting his head back against the tree. Lisa, watching him as he leaned heavily against the trunk, his black hair glistening with water and curling in absurd little ringlets around his head, his face white as a corpse’s, thought he looked indescribably weary. She bit her lip, on the verge of telling him that she didn’t want to know after all, if it was going to bother him that much to tell her, when those blue eyes opened to fix on her steadily.
“We came here to kill Thomas Kimo.” His voice was flat. Lisa’s eyes widened on his tense face.
“Murder?” she squeaked.
“If you want to call it that. The actual term is, I believe, assassination.”
His eyes met hers without expression. Lisa, staring into those fathomless blue depths, felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. It was suddenly being brought home to her with a vengeance that she knew absolutely nothing about this man, who he was, where he came from, what he did. All she knew was that he was fantastic in bed, and he could, on occasion, be kind. But he could also be brutal, and by his own admission he was fully prepared to commit cold-blooded murder. She shivered convulsively.
“But—why?” It was a shocked whisper.
“Because I needed the money,” he said. His eyes never left her face. Lisa knew that the revulsion she was feeling must be clearly visible there, but she couldn’t help it.
“You were going to kill a man—for money?”
“Yes, I was going to kill a man—for money. Now, are you satisfied?” His voice was suddenly vicious. Lisa recoiled.
Sam studied her for a moment, his eyes unreadable, then his brows snapped together to form a straight black line. Bracing his good arm against the tree, he pushed himself upright.
“Come on, let’s go,” he said harshly. He started walking again, striding briskly out into the rain, without even looking behind him to see if she followed.
Tw
ilight had fallen. The rain was still coming down with no sign of letting up when they came across a small village. It was composed of about two dozen circular, thatched-roofed huts—called rondavels, Sam informed her brusquely—surrounding a much larger one, perhaps fifty feet in diameter. A wide, fairly deep-looking stream rushed nearby, its banks nearly flooded by the rain. Mopani and red syringa trees with their brilliantly colored, drenched flowers formed a sort of barrier between the plain and the village.
Sam stopped at the edge of the trees. Lisa nearly ran into his broad back.
“Why are you stopping?” All she could think of was the lovely shelter the huts would give them. Anything to get out of the rain . . .
“I want to make sure this place is as deserted as it looks. It probably is; most of the tribes that used to live in villages like this were driven out by one side or the other in the war. But you never can tell.”
“Sam—can we stay here overnight?” Lisa’s eyes were unconsciously pleading as they met his. They had not exchanged more than half-a-dozen words since that unhappy conversation hours earlier. Now, Lisa was too tired and cold and wet to care if he was angry with her, or if he killed people for a living, or about anything else except their immediate situation. All she wanted to do was rest—preferably somewhere dry.
“All right,” he conceded slowly after studying her for a moment. “I doubt if anybody’s going to be searching for us too hard until the rain lets up. You stay here while I go make sure we don’t have any company.”
Lisa felt her knees sag with relief. They were actually going to stop—to sleep. And eat. She thought longingly of the C-rations in Sam’s pack. Suddenly they were as appealing as dinner at a five-star restaurant.
“Here.” He took the smaller pistol—the one he usually wore in his shoulder holster—from where he had thrust it into his belt and handed it to her. “It’s on safety. All you have to do is flick it off and pull the trigger.”
Lisa took the pistol automatically, then stared down at it with loathing.
“I don’t want it,” she said with conviction, and tried to hand it back to him.
“Keep it,” he advised sparely. “What would you do if I didn’t come back—if you were stranded out here all by your lonesome? I admit, you’re a lousy shot, but you just might be able to hit a bull elephant if you tried hard enough. Or, who knows, that pistol might just keep you from winding up as a boomslang’s dinner.”
Lisa shuddered at the picture this conjured up. A boomslang, as Sam had told her some days previously, was a large green tree snake three times as poisonous as the king cobra. Ever since he had described it to her, with loving detail, she had felt shivers run up and down her spine whenever she walked under overhanging branches. Grinning, he had said that it just dropped down on you, without any kind of warning. . . . Lisa was still shuddering as Sam moved off toward the huts, his .45 at the ready in his hand.
While he was gone, between glancing nervously around and shifting the pistol from hand to hand, Lisa did some serious thinking. All right, maybe Sam was a cold-blooded killer—but weren’t all soldiers, really? What was the difference between murdering one enemy for money and murdering dozens on the battlefield? Was there a difference? So far, Sam had shown no disposition to harm her in any way—in fact, he’d been extremely kind and patient, under the circumstances. And he had saved her life more than once. She’d been unconscious after the jeep turned over, and she realized that Sam must have carried her to safety at considerable cost to himself. He had even been wounded while doing it. And without him, now, she would be as good as dead. For her own sake, if for no other reason, she would be well advised to save any moral judgments about him until they reached civilization. If they ever did.
“For God’s sake, are you deaf? I’ve been calling you for five minutes!” Sam’s voice hissing in her ear made Lisa jump a good two feet in the air. She came back to earth with a jolt to find him already heading back toward the village, his movements rather jerky. With a small shake of her head to clear it, she followed him.
The hut he led her to was not the larger one as she had expected, but one of the smaller rondavels on the periphery of the village. Anyone looking for them would undoubtedly check the larger hut first, he explained when she asked him; by the time they got around to this particular hut, he and she would be long gone. He hoped.
Once inside the surprisingly sturdy structure, Sam pulled a flashlight from the A.L.I.C.E. pack, which he had taken from her and dropped to the floor. By its light, Lisa could see that the hut was no more than twelve feet across and perfectly round. The walls were made of mud and wattle and were as solid as brick. The roof was thatched, supported by interwoven, thin poles. The floor was of tightly packed dirt overlaid with a few dusty rushes. There were no windows, and the single small door was made from the same material as the walls. Sam had closed it behind them and bolted it with a large stripped branch wedged through woven loops at either side of the opening. The whole place smelled musty. As Sam pointed the flashlight upward, its beam arcing over walls and roof, Lisa screamed instinctively at the enormous spider that sat regarding them from its intricate web in the cone of the roof. Sam laughed unfeelingly at her choked-off cry.
“What’s the matter?” he taunted, knowing perfectly well.
Lisa shuddered. “I hate spiders.”
“You hate spiders, you hate guns, you hate soldiers—what the hell are you doing here? You should have stayed at home in Granddaddy’s mansion where you belong.”
Lisa was taken aback at the unexpected venom in his voice. She stared at him, trying vainly to see his expression through the gloom. Even as she peered at him, the flashlight beam cut an arcing swath through the darkness as he used the flashlight to brush down the spider web.
“Thank you,” she said in a subdued voice. He made no reply, but Lisa could almost feel his silent jeer.
Sam handed Lisa the flashlight. “Here, go find yourself a spot where there aren’t any spiders and I’ll open up our supper. Then we can grab a couple hours’ sleep.”
Lisa accepted the flashlight silently, turning to do as he’d directed. Then she remembered his wound, and her conscience smote her.
“I’ll open up the cans. You go sit down. You must be exhausted.”
Lisa could feel him staring at her through the darkness. She knew it was a measure of his tiredness that he did as she suggested.
Shining the flashlight on the contents, Lisa rummaged through the pack. There were a few cans of C-rations and a few more packets of the dried beef and other items—enough perhaps to last them a week if they ate sparingly. She extracted a can of pork and beans from the pack and then searched vainly for a can opener.
“What am I supposed to open this can with? My teeth?” she turned to demand irritably of Sam. Her eyes were accustomed to the darkness now, and she could see him sprawled on the floor nearby, his head resting back against the wall and his long legs bent slightly at the knees as they stretched in front of him. His eyes were closed; he appeared not to have heard her.
“Sam!” she demanded impatiently, raising her voice. Still no reply, by word or gesture. With an exasperated snort, she crossed to lean over him.
“Sam!” Ordinarily she would have let him sleep—he must have been even more exhausted than she had realized to just drop off like that—but she was starving and he had to know some way of opening the blasted can.
“Sam!” He didn’t move. She reached down to nudge his good shoulder. When she did so, to her horror, he slumped sideways to the floor. Quickly she dropped to her knees beside him, her heart in her throat. Clearly, he had passed out again. Her hands went over him frantically, checking to make sure he still breathed. As she pressed one hand against his wounded shoulder, her breath caught. The back of his shirt was soaking wet—and not just from the rain. This wet was sticky as well. . . . She pulled back her hand and stared down at the palm. Even through the darkness, she could see that it was black with blood.
X
LISA turned the flashlight on him. By its strong light she saw that his face was very pale, his lips almost bloodless. Holding her breath, she turned the beam on his back. As she had suspected, fresh blood soaked the whole left side of his rain-wet shirt. Lisa bit down on her lower lip so hard that she could taste blood as it seeped into her mouth. He must have been bleeding for hours. . . . Propping the flashlight on the ground to give herself some light to work by while still leaving her hands free, she began to unbutton Sam’s shirt with fingers that shook. She had to try to bandage up that wound again. Left like this, he could bleed to death.
Sam came around almost as suddenly as he had fainted. One moment he was lying on his side on the dirt floor, his big body limp and still, and the next his eyes were flickering open and he was trying to heave himself into a sitting position.
“Stay still.” Lisa’s hands on his waist beseeched him. He looked up at her owlishly for just a moment, then groaned and subsided. Once she was sure he would not try again to get up, she resumed unbuttoning his shirt.
“God, did I faint again?” His voice was weak.
“Yes.” Lisa continued to work his shirt buttons loose until the garment was open to the waist. With businesslike efficiency, she pulled the tails from his waistband, baring his chest. Then she gently began to ease his left arm, which was uppermost, out of its sleeve.
“I don’t need your help to take off my shirt.” His tone was almost hostile. Lisa glanced down at his face to find his eyes glittering up at her resentfully. It was a measure of his weakness, she realized, that he was making no physical attempt to stop her ministrations, instead making do with barbed words.
“Yes, you do,” she replied with what patience she could muster. Had no one ever shown him any tenderness, taken care of him in any way? she wondered. Clearly he was not accustomed to needing or accepting help from anyone—not even when he was ill.
To Love a Man Page 15
