The Ravagers

by Donald Hamilton

  I guess I should have felt smart. After all, I’d just said blackmail to Mac, on no more than a hunch, and blackmail it was. I turned slowly and looked at the weapon she was holding less than a foot from my face. This didn’t make me feel smart, because I’d seen it before in the trailer, in a drawer of toys—seen it and passed it by without interest. It was a child’s water pistol made of transparent plastic. That was the first impression. On closer examination— and I was plenty close—I could see that the supposed plastic was actually glass. The gadget was actually a cunningly made and ingeniously disguised syringe. The handle or grip was full of colorless liquid, and a little bead of the stuff had formed at the tiny orifice in what would have been the muzzle, had it been a real gun.

  The kid said, “If I squeeze this trigger, Mr. Clevenger, you will never see again.”

  I said, “Sure, honey, sure. Just go easy. A guy without eyes isn’t going to drive you very far.” I shook my head wonderingly. “So that’s what happened to Mike Green. Is it out of line to ask why?”

  “Mr. Green had wandering hands,” the cold young voice said. “Even very juvenile females were not safe from Mr. Green’s casual, seemingly accidental, attentions. One day Mr. Green’s exploring hands discovered... well, shall we say, indications that the child he thought to be Penelope Drilling was abnormally well-developed for her age, although she generally took pains to conceal the fact. At first the discovery merely intrigued him; then it made him think. Thinking, for Mr. Green, was a slow process, but I could see where it was leading him.”

  I glanced at the small, rather pretty white face, strange without the glasses and the innocent, childlike expression I’d come to know.

  “Just how old are you, anyway?” I asked.

  “I’m a little over twenty, Mr. Clevenger. Not that it’s any of your business.”

  “And you left a glove behind in Mike’s motel room that didn’t belong to you.”

  She made a wry face. “As a measure of self-protection. I thought it was a reasonable precaution, but Hans was very angry. He said it was an error that could jeopardize the whole mission. He took steps to rectify it.”

  I said, “Yeah. I heard about those steps. Have you got a name?”

  “You can call me Naomi.”

  “Naomi,” I said. “Very pretty. One question, Naomi.”

  “Yes, Mr. Clevenger?”

  “Why are you pointing that thing at me?”

  That shook her a little. She blinked and said, “Why, I couldn’t be sure how you’d react.”

  “How did you think I’d react?”

  “I thought... well, that you’d be angry because of the way you’d been fooled.”

  I said, “Okay, I’ll be angry tomorrow, or some other day when my conscience hurts me about the kid I was supposed to protect. That I never even got to see. Right now I’m tickled pink. Hell, I thought I was going to have to go clear to Nova Scotia and find this Gaston Muir character to make a deal about getting out of the country.”

  She hesitated. “And now you think you can make your deal with me?”

  “Why, sure,” I said. “With Ruyter gone, you’re running this show, aren’t you? I don’t see anybody else in the picture, aside from this Muir, and I gather all he really does is run a boat.”

  “Yes, I’m running the show,” Naomi said coolly. “And I may be dense, but I fail to see what you have to deal with, Mr. Clevenger. We’ve known all along the town where the documents are waiting; we told Mummy-dear to send them there. All I didn’t know was the name of the fictitious person to whom they are addressed—she held out on us to that extent—but you’ve just given it to me. Thank you very much, Mr. Clevenger, and thank you in advance for the use of your car, and now if you and Mummy-dear will just get out... Keep your hands in sight, Mr. Clevenger!”

  “Hell, I was just putting my hanky away... Okay, okay. Be careful with that damn thing!” I faced her over the back of the seat. “Listen, you can’t just leave us here...”

  I had the handkerchief ready. I shoved it up against the muzzle of the acid-gun, and got her wrist with my left hand, in a way that made her fingers open before she realized what was happening. Then I reversed the weapon and aimed it at her left-handed. She stared at me wordlessly, with hate in her eyes.

  “Stay still if you want to stay pretty!” I snapped. “Irish!”

  “Yes?”

  I flung the damp handkerchief away from me, out of the car. I thought I could feel the flesh peeling from my hand, but it could be just imagination. I didn’t take my eyes off Naomi.

  “On the double, Irish. Take the keys, open the trunk—up front, remember. There’s a two-gallon canteen full of water. Come around to my side and rinse off my hand, real quick.”

  I stuck my hand out the open window and waited until I could feel cold water running over it. I still seemed to have four fingers and a thumb.

  “I think I’ve got it all off,” Jenny said. “I don’t think you got much on you. The handkerchief must have caught most of it.”

  I brought my hand back inside, under the light. A glance told me she was right. There wasn’t even a blister visible. I looked at the girl in the back seat.

  “Does that metal scaffolding come off your teeth?” I asked. She nodded silently. I said, “Well, take it off, then. Let’s see what you really look like.”

  She put her hands to her mouth and worked for a moment, and took them down. She was really quite attractive, in a diminutive, fragile way. Well, so is a coral snake. I remembered what Greg had looked like after she’d got through with him. It occurred to me that Hans Ruyter’s death might not have been entirely due to inefficiency on her part. He’d bawled her out; he was the boss. Now he was dead and she was the boss. Perhaps she had wanted it to happen that way. I didn’t put it past her.

  I said, “Let us reconsider, doll. Would you still say I have nothing to deal with?”

  She looked at me for a moment, and at the glass gun I held. Then she smiled slowly. “You are a very resourceful man, Mr. Clevenger.”

  “I can be a very useful man,” I said. “I want out of the country. A little money would come in handy, too, but I won’t be greedy about it. Do we have a deal, Naomi?” I heard Jenny, still standing outside the car, give an indignant little gasp of surprise and protest. To hell with her. She’d made her contribution. It was between the kid and me now.

  Naomi’s smile widened. “We have a deal... Dave.”

  I did one of the hardest things I’ve done in my life. I turned the vicious acid pistol around once more and gave it back to her butt first.

  20

  Jenny and I waited in the car outside the lone general store in a small town named after some saint or other. I suppose it was a kind of loyalty test. If we waited obediently where Naomi had put us, we proved one thing. If we drove off and left her, we proved something else, and she’d get on the phone and prepare a suitable reception for us at the Nova Scotia end of the line. She might do that anyway. In fact, I didn’t think there was much chance she wouldn’t.

  Waiting, I amused myself by reading the various metal signs nailed up around the place. It was better than, for instance, worrying about cops and corpses and what Mac might or might not have been able to accomplish in the way of clearing trail for us. If anything can make Madison Avenue’s cigarette and soft-drink slogans seem even cornier, it’s being translated literally into French. Jenny stirred beside me.

  “Dave.”

  “What is it, Irish?”

  “You’re not really going to... I mean, you can’t possibly trust her!”

  I glanced at my companion. She looked pretty good for having spent a hectic night in her clothes—well, mostly in her clothes. She looked attractive and resilient and, for an amateur, reasonably competent. It was a relief not to have to think of her in connection with a jug of acid. It was an association that had never seemed very plausible.

  I told myself that mother love excused, or at least explained, most of her far-out behavi
or to date. I even considered trying to enlist her as a working ally. Acting together, systematically, we were much more likely to get the job done and get out alive afterward, than if we struggled along independently, hoping for individual breaks.

  I was tempted. There’s always the risk, in the business, that you’ll get so damn wary and smart and suspicious that you won’t take a chance on anybody, not even when it may mean the difference between failure and success. It was a mistake I didn’t want to make here. On the other hand, I had my orders. Security was paramount. I was not allowed to take anybody into my confidence; I couldn’t tell Jenny enough of the truth to sound convincing and persuasive after everything that had happened. And there was a conflict of interest. She was presumably concerned most of all with the safety of her daughter, while I had strict instructions to strangle any young girls who got in my way.

  I said, as Clevenger, “Have I got a choice? Who else is going to get me out of this now? You?”

  “She’s a vicious, sadistic little monster,” Jenny said. “You don’t know what it’s been like, driving with her all that way, living with her, pretending to be her mother, for God’s sake! If I had a child like that, I’d dump it out of the crib and squash it underfoot! Like a tarantula!”

  “Sure,” I said. “What’s the story on Penny, the real Penny?”

  Jenny’s expression changed. “They’re holding her somewhere, somewhere out where we were a couple of weeks back. A mean-looking, farmer-type couple took her away. That’s all I know. I could go crazy thinking about it, Dave. She’s kind of a sensitive kid. Not a typical teenager at all. A shy, bright, studious fifteen-year-old, not really very pretty but awfully sweet. I suppose I should have left her home, as you keep saying, but my husband... well, it takes a special kind of man to make a reasonable home for a child all by himself. I knew Howard wouldn’t even try. He’d be too busy with his light rays. I thought she’d be better off with me.” Jenny moved her shoulders jerkily. “The way it turned out, I guess I was wrong. I was brought up too civilized. I didn’t expect all this violence. Dave?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you try to help? Hans was supposed to call long distance after I’d turned over the papers and... and he’d made sure they were okay. He was supposed to call and have Penny set free. Naomi knows how to get in touch with them back there. Maybe you can persuade her... Oh, hell, here comes the little bitch now. What do you bet she didn’t get anything for me to wear, just for herself.” Jenny hesitated, seemed to go through a mental struggle, and said very quickly in a low voice, “Dave, there’s something you’d better know. Don’t count too much on what we’ll find in Inverness.”

  I looked at her, startled. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  She shook her head. She was watching Naomi approach, carrying a big package, looking like a sweet little thing in the morning sunshine, with her plain blue jumper and ruffled blouse and piled-up hair. Jenny whispered, “There isn’t time now... Just be careful. There, I’ve done you a favor. You will try to help Penny, won’t you?”

  “I’ll try.”

  I spoke mechanically. I was wondering what she was holding back that could louse us up. If, after all this, the stuff wasn’t waiting in the Inverness post office, or if there was something wrong with it... well, I could worry about that when it happened. The present had enough worries without my borrowing from the future. I leaned forward so Naomi could squeeze into the back seat of the Volkswagen.

  “Do you know they don’t have any jeans in this forsaken country?” she asked brightly. “Why, it’s practically subversive. All right, Dave, let’s go. Stop in the first patch of woods. I want to get out of this droopy teenage outfit before I’m picked up for playing hooky from junior high.”

  She sounded brisk and cheerful. You’d never know, listening to her, that she’d committed murder and had a few other crimes in mind. I drove out of town and found a track running down into a stand of pines and stopped when we were out of sight of the highway.

  “Your dressing room, ma’am,” I said, and got out so she could tilt the seat forward. She reached back for her package and straightened up beside me.

  “Come with me, Dave. I want to talk with you.”

  “Sure.”

  “Take the keys. We wouldn’t want Mummy-dear driving a car all by herself. She might hurt herself.”

  I took the keys and followed Naomi. She moved off a little ways but stopped where we could still see, and be seen from, the car. She put her package on the ground and turned her back to me.

  “I’m told you’re a great button-and-zipper man. Demonstrate.”

  “Always happy to oblige.”

  I got to work on the familiar fastenings, reflecting that I was getting in a rut. If I wasn’t bullying them for information, I was helping them take their damn clothes off.

  “I’ll just bet you’re happy.” Naomi’s voice was tart. “Is she any good in bed?”

  “Who, Jenny? You never gave me a chance to find out!”

  “She’s an awful pill, really. She was going to chicken out, you know. But Hans was way ahead of her. He never really expected her to go through with it all the way, voluntarily. That’s why he had me ready to step into the kid’s shoes, so he’d have something on Mummy-dear that would keep her in line until we got out of the country.”

  She pulled her dress and blouse off her shoulders and let them drop at her feet. Then she kicked off her shoes, peeled off her stockings, whipped her slip off over her head, and stood before me in nothing but a little pantie-girdle and a very tight, flat brassiere.

  “Unhook me,” she said, and when I’d done so she pulled the brassiere off and threw it as far as she could, and drew a long breath, turning to face me. “God, it’s nice to breathe again. And eat. Did you ever try chewing a steak with a mouth full of stainless steel? There’s another bra in the package. Get it out for me, will you? The next brat I impersonate, I hope she won’t be so damn flat chested. Dave.”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you like it?”

  “What?”

  “What you see, stupid!” She laughed. “What I mean is, we can have a lot of fun together, but first we’ve got to get rid of Mummy-dear. I mean, once we’ve made sure she isn’t playing any tricks. I called Gaston Muir from that store back there. I told him to expect two passengers on his boat. Just two.”

  It was no time to act shocked or high-principled. And it was no time to act curious about where the proposed boat ride might end. I merely shrugged.

  “Very cozy,” I said. “Just so it’s the right two passengers, doll. Don’t you try any tricks. I wasn’t born yesterday.”

  She smiled up at me approvingly. “What a suspicious tall man it is! Don’t worry, darling. We’re going to have a swell time together. We’ll have a million kicks, a million laughs. Hand me that shirt, will you?”

  I handed her a dark print shirt and a pair of tight black pants and she put on a pair of sandals all by herself and we went back to the car where Jenny was sitting with a disinterested, disdainful look on her pretty, freckled, adult face, that was supposed to tell us she hadn’t even noticed the striptease that had been performed under her nose, and mine. Fourteen hours later we were in Inverness, having stopped for no policemen—we’d hardly seen any; I wondered if Mac had somehow managed to get them clear off the roads—and for nothing else, either, except food and gas.

  21

  It was as easy as... well, as getting mail from General Delivery usually is. First, of course, we had to wait hours for the post office to open next morning, but once that ordeal was over, it was a breeze. There wasn’t even anybody in line ahead of us. Jenny went up to the window, gave the fictitious name to the clerk, and turned back to us holding a big manila envelope bound with heavy cord. We closed in on her, Naomi and I, and escorted her back to the car. Naomi snatched the envelope and scrambled into the back seat.

  “I saw a pay phone back on the main street by the gas station,” she said breathles
sly. “Drive us there while I see what Mummy-dear has for us. Damn. She’s got it all tied up with string like she was afraid it would jump out and run away. Lend me your knife, Dave.”

  “To hell with you, doll,” I said, driving. “You want my knife, you know how to get it. First you call in six strong friends to help you. You keep your toy gun. I’ll keep my knife.”

  She made an impatient sound. “All right, you open it, damn you!”

  I parked the car by the phone booth, took the envelope, cut the strings, and slit it open for her. She grabbed it back and pulled out the papers far enough for a look. I heard her breath go out in a long sigh of satisfaction as she saw the big red stamp on the top sheet. I could only read the one glaring word SECRET from where I sat, but I found it a great relief.

  Jenny said quietly. “There’s a policeman.”

  We looked up. An unmistakable officer of the law was strolling up the main street toward us. He wasn’t a local cop, but a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—in riding breeches, no less. I didn’t see a horse. He didn’t seem to be looking for any murderers or seeing any. Behind me, I heard Naomi stuff the documents hastily back into the envelope.

  “What are you waiting for?” she breathed. “Drive!”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “You want us all to spit on him as we go by, so he’ll be sure to notice us? He’s just getting a bite to eat. Go make your phone call.”

  The Mountie turned into a restaurant a block away. Naomi drew a shaky breath, squeezed out of the car, and entered the phone booth, clutching her envelope. When she was busy talking, I glanced at Jenny, beside me.

  “Okay, Irish,” I said. “What was that all about? That scare talk you gave me back while she was buying clothes?”

  Jenny shook her head quickly. “Never mind,” she breathed. “It’s all right. Whom do you think she’s calling?”

  “A gent called Gaston Muir, I presume,” I said. “But don’t ask me what I think she’s telling him. I could be wrong, and I wouldn’t want to slander a sweet girl by mistake.” Jenny glanced at me, studied my face for a moment, but did not speak. Then Naomi was coming back to the car. I leaned forward to let her in.