Operation Fireball

CHAPTER FIVE

Hazel called me two nights later.

“I’m flying back tomorrow or the day after,” she announced. “Everything’s all set. I found a place on Margaret Street within whistling distance of the shrimp boat fleet. That’s the clientele at this time of the year. It’s a tourist shop later in the season. I insisted on a paint job inside before I signed the lease.”

“It sounds good.”

“You’ll like it,” she said confidently. “I’m having the air conditioning beefed up, too. You wouldn’t believe how hot it is down here.”

“You sound as if you’re planning to stay for fifty years. You should be able to stand a little heat for the length of time we’ll be there.”

“Heat like this I can’t stand for fifteen minutes without some relief. You won’t be able to, either. I feel like a sponge just standing in this phone booth.”

I let it go. “How many rooms?”

“Six. There were two permanents, clerks at nearby motels, but I rousted them.”

“Fine. Having the place painted will give you an excuse to keep it empty until we get there. After you come back to the ranch, how long will it take you to wind things up and get back to Key West?”

“A week. Maybe less. Does that fit the schedule?”

“It does. We’ll begin arriving the second week.”

“Will you be a stranger? Act like one, I mean?”

“Only in public.”

I could hear her snicker. “It sounds like a better deal all the time. Except”—she hesitated—“you really don’t have to stick your head in the lion’s mouth, you know. The living is good without the heroic exploit complex.”

“There’s no heroic exploit complex.”

“You could just—”

“We’ve been through that,” I cut her off.

“Yes, we have,” she sighed. “Well, shouldn’t you arrive in Key West first, since I won’t know the others?”

“I’m planning on it.”

“I’ve already given the orders for the redecoration of one room,” she said complacently.

“Painting, air conditioning, redecorating. You’re supposed to be leasing the place, remember?”

“I can’t stand having things cruddy. Even if I’m only here a month. I guess that’s all I have to say for now. Unless there’s a last-minute hitch in the morning, I’ll drive my rental car back to Miami and catch a plane to Vegas.”

“Good night, big stuff.”

“Good night. See you soonest.”

“Hey! I almost forgot. What’s the name of the place?”

“The Castaways,” she said. My silence must have echoed along 3,500 miles of telephone line. “You’re not superstitious about the name?”

“We could always change it.”

“Except that it has about two thousand dollars’ worth of neon out in front spelling it out. Does it really bother you?”

“If it does when I get there, I’ll shoot out the neon some dark night,” I promised. “Take care, now.”

The Castaways, I thought as I hung up the phone.

The place might be all that Hazel claimed for it, but the name itself gritted on my teeth like unwashed spinach.

So I had time to kill while I waited for the arrival of the registered package of money from Hazel.

I killed a lot of it at Curly’s. I half-expected to run into Slater there, but he didn’t show. Either he was staying out of sight voluntarily or Erikson was keeping him out of sight. It looked, in fact, as though Erikson was calling most of the shots for the pair.

Not that I minded. Even as little as I knew about Erikson, I had no reason to prefer Slater’s judgment to Erikson’s. I preferred my own to either, for that matter. Erikson’s seeming dominance of Slater, though, was so different from the Slater I remembered that it didn’t ring true. When I could manage another tête-à-tête with Slater, it was worth probing.

I returned to the Aztec from Curly’s one night about two thirty A.M. I let myself into my room with my key and turned on the light. Two steps inside the door I stopped short. A mounded-up heap of bedclothes shocked me into the realization that someone was in my bed.

I wasn’t wearing my gun. I took a quick step in the direction of the bureau under which it was taped. Then the bedclothes heaved to one side and Hazel sat up in the bed, yawning and stretching. “ ‘S about time you came home, horseman,” she complained drowsily. “Thought I’d had my little trip for nothing.”

I went over and sat down beside her on the edge of the bed. I couldn’t think of anything to say for a moment while confronted with this fresh evidence that people simply will not do what you expect them to do. Or what they should do. “Did you come to the hotel directly from the ranch?”

“Sure did. Soon’s I picked up the cash. Decided to fly down and s’prise you.”

“How’d you get into the room?”

She chuckled sleepily. “I found a young-looking assistant manager and laid a bill on him. Told him I was your best girl and wanted to s’prise you.”

He must have been young, I thought. I stared at Hazel in the off-center slip that was her only garment. A hotel old-timer would never have gone for her story, bill or no bill. A veteran would have suspected a private detective with a photographer in tow trying to get evidence in a divorce case.

What bothered me was that if there had been time enough for the sheriff’s report on the shooting affair at the ranch to reach certain interested parties, there could have been a tail waiting at the ranch to pick Hazel up upon her return from her trip south. If so, she had led the tail directly to the Aztec. That was bad, but to make things worse, her story to an impressionable young assistant manager called attention to both herself and me. If confronted with a badge, he wouldn’t need much persuasion to talk about us.

Even half-asleep, Hazel could see that my reaction wasn’t what she expected. “You’re not glad to see me,” she said in an injured tone.

“It’s a nice surprise, but—” I didn’t finish it. Nothing would come of her indiscretion, probably, so why spoil her pleasure? She should have stuck to the script and mailed me the cash, but I could hardly expect her to act like someone who hadn’t made a move in twenty years without considering every possible consequence. “Okay,” I conceded. “Move over and make room.”

She did so with alacrity. I shed clothing and joined her in the bed. “That’s more like it, horseman,” she breathed in my ear. “For a minute there you had me thinking you’d thrown a shoe.”

I tipped her onto her back and wrestled the slip up out of the way. She grunted inelegantly as I plunged the coupling pin into its slot. Her hands cradled my shoulders firmly as I set out to make it last as long as possible. She was a noisy partner. Even in three-quarter time, her breath came in hissing jets.

Her legs crept up and tightened around me. “Whooo-EEEE!” she gasped. Her excitement fed my own. I reached beneath her when the bugles sounded the charge, filled my hands, and pulled her tightly against me. She yipped encouragingly until like a boxer’s one-two punch the double explosion threw us sideways on the bed.

“Was it a good one?” she murmured after several silent moments.

“You know it was.”

A short time later we showered together in the bathroom’s ceramic-tile cubicle. My ribs were discolored from the pressure of her thighs, while she had sets of fingerprint impressions in her buttocks. We soaped and rinsed each other several times while clouds of steam billowed around the bathroom. In a previous incarnation we must have been whales together. A lot of our Florida good times were embedded in my memory in connection with shower rooms.

Back in the bedroom, Hazel padded naked to her handbag on the bureau and removed from it a wrapped- and-tied package that she handed to me. “It’s in fifties,” she said. “I was afraid anything smaller would be too bulky.”

I hefted the package on my palm. “Quite a stud fee,” I said. “Maybe I should get myself syndicated?”

“Why, you egotistical—!” She aimed a punch at me. I blocked it and slapped her firmly in her bare belly. She went “Whuff!!” and staggered to the bed and sat down.

I put the package into the top bureau drawer. “You should get back to the ranch in the morning and then get down to Key West as soon as you can,” I told her.

“See?” she pouted. “Already he wants to get rid of me.” I went to the phone and placed a six A.M. awakening call with the front desk. When I returned to Hazel, she was smiling. “Any impressions of life in California you’d like me to take to Florida with me?” she asked archly.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but I produced a few fresh impressions for Hazel to take along on her trip.

“See you in a week, horseman,” was the last thing I remembered hearing her say before sleep moved in relentlessly.