The Ambushers

XIV

WHEN I REACHED the motel, I saw that the blue Volkswagen had beat me home. I hadn't felt up to any fancy driving. Besides, I'd had to stop at a pay phone and put in a long-distance call to Washington asking for full reports on •a woman who called herself Catherine Smith, a man who called himself Max, and a couple of married people locally known as Mr. And Mrs. Ernest Head, who'd in the past gone by other names, specified. I'd paid for all those names.

I figured I might as well go through the motions of feeding them into the machinery, although I had doubts whether the information would get out to me in time to be of much use.

I saw Sheila get out of her little car as I turned in off the street. She came up beside me as I parked the station wagon.

"Are you all right?" she whispered. "When you didn't arrive right behind me, I got worried. Come on. I'd better look after those burns."

She opened the car door and started to help me out, but she remembered her neurosis about heterosexual contacts and checked herself short of touching me. Or perhaps she just realized that a two-hundred-pound man has to be in pretty bad shape before he takes kindly to being helped out of a car by a hundred-pound girl. She did take the motel key out of my hand and open that door for me and close it behind me.

I said, "What the hell are you bucking for, Skinny? The title of little mother of the year? Hell, I've singed myself worse than this lighting a cigarette."

She looked startled and injured; then she laughed. "All right. Be brave. Be heroic. Do you want a drink?"

"Sure."

"Ice?"

"If there's any left."

"It's all melted," she said, investigating. "I'll get some snore. I'll be right back."

I started to register a gentlemanly protest, but she'd already taken the cardboard bucket and slipped out of the room. I sat down on the bed and took off my shirt. After examining the battlefield, I came to the conclusion that regardless of how it felt, it wasn't really the scene of a major catastrophe.

The only burn that went deep was on the shoulder. Elsewhere I'd merely lost a little skin. The fact that it hurt like hell was, to a tough undercover operative of my courageous and stoical nature, irrelevant. At least it was supposed to be.

I took from my pocket the tube of ointment Catherine Smith had given me. I was sitting there reading the label and feeling sorry for myself when Sheila let herself back in quietly. She put the ice bucket on the dresser, came over to look, and snatched the tube from my hand.

"You're not going to use that?"

"Why not?"

"I wouldn't trust her to give me anything but syphilis!"

I said, "That's probably the one thing she can't give you, Skinny. At least I'm under the impression VD doesn't work like that."

"You know what I mean!"

"Sure," I said. "She's a terrible person. Okay? Now may

I have that drink?"

Sheila tossed the ointment on the bed and marched off across the room. She was still wearing the summery print dress with a good deal of skirt and not much bodice, but she'd exchanged her high-heeled shoes for a pair of white sneakers more suitable for playing detective. They made her look like a high-school girl. I watched her fix my drink and wondered why looking at her gave me a funny tight feeling in the throat that the sexy Miss Smith in her black lingerie hadn't elicited at all. Well, not much. I decided that I was getting old and paternal and protective-or real expert at kidding myself.

I spoke to her back. "I haven't thanked you for the timely help."

To my surprise, I saw her wince as if I'd said something harsh and cruel. She turned swiftly to look at me.

"Don't!" she breathed. "Don't make fun of me!"

"I wasn't-"

"I know I made a fool of myself!" Her voice was low. "Don't you think I know it? You'd have done better to pick a green kid to help you. He'd have remembered how to come through a door with a gun. That's what you're thinking, isn't it? I don't blame you! But you don't have to be sarcastic!"

I said, "No sarcasm was intended. As it happened, everything turned out for the best. There are no shots to explain, no dead bodies to dispose of. And you did turn up right on the dot. I was wondering how the hell to talk myself out of there, when you barged in." After a little pause, I said, "Of course, you're not supposed to shadow me without instructions, doll."

She came over with a glass and put it into my hand. "And you're not supposed to send me to bed like a child because you think I look tired. If I'd been a man, husky and healthy, you'd have had me covering you tonight, wouldn't you? It would have been routine. So I did." After a moment, she picked up the ointment tube, punched a hole in the end, squeezed out a little of the salve, and smelled it suspiciously. "I suppose this stuff really is all right to use.

How do you feel?"

"I'm all right," I said. "You can't hurt us seasoned veterans of the hush-hush service. We're all made of rhinoceros hide and old iron… Ouch!"

She'd started to apply the stuff to the burn on my shoulder just as if she were an ordinary girl instead of a mental case with a thing about being touched by, or touching, men. A little startled, I couldn't help stealing a look at her face. It looked kind of pink and white and determined. She was concentrating very hard on what she was doing and not meeting my eyes at all. The only trouble was, she wasn't very gentle.

I said, "Hey, take it easy."

"You!" she said softly. "You and that overdeveloped bitch in her little peekaboo foundation garment. Black! And stockings, sheer black nylon stockings, at this time of year! How obvious can you get?" She started on my chest. "Lean back a little."

"Why, Skinny," I said, "you're a peeping Tom, that's what you are."

"The window was open. Did you have to kiss her?"

I said, "It says on the label a light application, do1~. A vigorous massage is not indicated. This town seems to be just crawling with sadistic females." The pressure eased somewhat. 1 glanced at her again. "What was I supposed to do, carry on an intellectual conversation with the dame in her underwear while I waited for her partner to fight his way out of the bedroom and clobber me? And what's it to you, anyway?"

It was meant to be light and casual, but my casual touch didn't seem to be functioning tonight. Her hand stopped moving abruptly. After a moment she stepped back and stared at me oddly. Her eyes were wide and yellow. She looked down at the sticky fingers of her right hand, and at the tube in her left hand, also sticky. She looked around for something to wipe them on and didn't find anything. She dropped the tube, and whirled, and ran for the door.

I was on my feet by this time, but she'd have beat me out if the doorknob hadn't been reluctant and her hands hadn't been slippery; that gave me a chance to get across the room.

I caught her by the bare shoulders and shoved the door shut with my foot. She became perfectly still.

"Don't touch me!"

"Cut it out," I said. "We're all through with that don't-touch-me routine, remember? It's gone the way of the no-talk bit."

"Let me go," she whispered. "Please!"

I let her go. She turned to face me, holding her sticky hands away from her dress.

"I'm sorry," she breathed. "I was… just being silly and melodramatic. I'm all right now."

"Dr. Stern explained it to me," she said. "He called it a transference, I think. That's all it is. Just a transference."

"Sure," I said. "Just a transference."

"It's perfectly natural," she said. "I mean, it isn't your fault. After all, you saved my life."

"Me and twenty-three other people."

"They didn't all get blisters on their hands carrying me to safety. They didn't… didn't feed me milkshakes clear across the continent and talk to me as if I were a person and not a shattered wreck. They didn't get me out of that place where those ghouls were going to take my mind apart like a broken clock and put in all kinds of bright new springs and wheels I didn't want… Let me go to my room, Eric," she whispered. "Please."

"Sure," I said.

She didn't move. "Damn you," she whispered, "you're just an ordinary man, a little taller than average. You're not really very nice. I mean, you aren't even above arranging things so you can make a pass at a woman in the line of duty. Duty! I saw you! And you're not very brave, you wiggle and groan like anybody else when it hurts. I heard you. I don't know why I… I mean, there's nothing special about you. I don't know why any woman would want… Eric."

"Yes."

"Kick me out. Make me go. It's just a transference. A simple psychological phenomenon. It isn't fair to let me stand here making a spectacle of myself. It isn't fair to laugh."

"I'm not laughing," I said.

The room was suddenly very quiet. She shook her head minutely, looking up at me. Then she was coming forward, or I was, I forget how it happened. Then we stopped. There were the practical aspects to consider.

One of us laughed, maybe both, I forget; and Sheila turned quickly, presenting her back to me. "If you're not going to kick me out," she breathed, "if you're not, then I think you'd better help me off with my dress before… before we get that stuff all over it."

xv

I woke up SCARED. I couldn't at first remember what I'd done, only that it was unforgivable. Then I sat up quickly and looked around. I was alone in the room. There wasn't a sign of Sheila. She'd gone during the night, leaving none of her belongings behind.

I pulled on my pants and crossed the room and looked at myself in the mirror. The only satisfactory part of the image was the pattern of burns and blisters, which were all right as far as they went, but they didn't go half far enough. A heel like you, I told myself, should be trussed hand and foot and revolved slowly over a bed of glowing charcoal, like a roast pig. Any creep who'd take advantage of the irrational hero-worship and gratitude of a sick and confused little girl for whom he'd been made responsible.

A knock on the door made me jump. "Mr. Evans?"

It was Sheila's voice. I got over there and pulled the door open. She was standing outside with a paper cup of coffee in each hand, looking remarkably healthy and unconfused in the shortsleeved white shirt and tan cotton pants in which she'd crossed the country with me some weeks earlier, now crisp and clean again. Despite the pants, which are my least favorite feminine garment, she looked more like a woman and less like a disturbed child than any time since I'd known her.

She stepped past me. I closed the door. She was looking at me hard when I turned. "What's the matter, darling?" she asked. "You look awful. Are you having some kind of a shock reaction? Let me look at that shoulder."

"The hell with the shoulder," I said. "Are you all right?"

She frowned slightly. "Why shouldn't I be all right.

Oh." She looked up at me and laughed. "Heavens, have you been having an attack of conscience, or something?"

"Or something," I said grimly.

She said, "Here. Drink your coffee and try to be sensible."

I said, "I'm sensible as hell, now. But Dr. Tommy would have me shot, and quite justifiably, if he knew-"

"Don't be ridiculous," she said. "Dr. Stern is an idiot if he thinks… What does he think?"

"Well, I'd say seduction is the last medicine in the world he'd prescribe for this particular patient."

"That's what I said," she murmured, "he's an idiot! I've been married, darling. I've been… Well, it's not as if I were an innocent virgin, is it? On the record, that's the one thing in the world I'm not. Why should it hurt me to go to bed with a man I like, for a change?" She laughed. "Anyway, who seduced whom?"

I looked down at her, reflecting that things and people never seemed to turn out quite the way you expected, particularly people.

"You're a shameless wench, Skinny," I said.

"Of course," she said calmly. 'What did you think I was?

All you had to do was look at the file and you'd know that after all that I had to be a shameless wench, or dead." A little hardness had come into her voice. "Don't worry about hurting me, darling. It's been tried by experts, and I don't mean just the ones in Costa Verde. I'll tell you about my marriage sometime. It was a dilly. I'm not really fragile, you know. Just because I'm not built like a… like a brick outhouse doesn't mean…" She stopped.

I grinned. "Here we go again."

She laughed and said, "Honest, I wasn't really thinking of Catherine Smith when I said that. Well, maybe I was.

•.. Eric?"

"Yes."

"Last night I… I said a lot of silly things, didn't I? Don't take them seriously, please."

I regarded her for a moment. "Sure," I said.

She went on quickly, "I mean, we're not going to be silly and talk a lot of nonsense about love. After all those weeks of being an animal in a cage, I was ready to… to attach myself to the first person who treated me as a human being. You don't have to feel, well, obligated. I'll get over it." She gulped her coffee and glanced at her watch. "Well, I'd better get going."

"Where?"

She looked surprised. 'Why, one of us has to get over to Saguaro Heights and relieve Max, remember."

"That's right, I'd almost forgotten." I hesitated. "Okay, But watch yourself."

"What do you mean?"

"They're probably playing us for suckers," I said. "Catherine and Max. That's all right. That's what we want. For one thing, it cancels the mutual-assistance pact, and I'd much rather have the other party pull the doublecross. It's a matter of principle. I'm a very high-principled guy. Sometimes."

She smiled and stopped smiling. "You're being clever," she said. "And you don't want to tell me."

"I hope I'm being clever," I said. "And I'm not telling you because not knowing will save you some acting. Besides, I could be absolutely wrong."

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, "Of course, these people do have a legitimate claim to von Sachs, if you want to put it like that."

"They are entitled to have him arrested legally and extradited legally, if they can. They have no legitimate right to kidnap him for his past crimes, any more than we have to kill him for what he's cooking up for the future. We're all operating equally far outside the law." I looked down at her small, scrubbed, neatly lipsticked face. "And just keep in mind that even if their motives are perfectly wonderful, they aren't really very nice people. Keep your eyes open."

Sheila checked in a couple of times during the morning.

When I drove by at noon to find her, she was sitting in her little blue car watching the automobile agency where Ernest Head worked. It was a busy, bright street near the center of Tucson. I tapped my horn lightly as I passed and turned the next corner and found a vacant meter at which to park.

Presently Sheila got into the station wagon beside me. I moved some packages to give her room.

"Nothing," she said. "As I told you on the phone, he drove to work right after I got on the job. He's been in there all morning. He'll probably go out for lunch pretty soon, or maybe he'll go home. It's Saturday. Maybe he only works half a day." She paused. "I was followed earlier this morning."

"Who? Max?"

She nodded. "I think he was just checking up on me. White Falcon station wagon, Arizona plates. Regular tires in front, mud-and-snow treads behind."

"Sounds like they're ready for some tough driving. Or think they are."

Sheila glanced at me curiously. 'Why did you tell Miss Smith the road was good?"

"That's not what you told me." I said, "If she gets herself a jeep, she'll have no trouble, and we'll need a jeep to keep up with her. If she goes in her own car, she may run into difficulties that we can take advantage of. At least she'll have to take it very slow and easy. It'll be a lot harder for her to pull a fast one. I don't want her in a jeep. Okay?"

Sheila laughed. "It must be nice to be so clever," she murmured.

"Is Max around now?" I asked.

"No. I'm almost certain, anyway. What's all this stuff?"

She looked curiously at the packages on the seat.

"Just some things we may need later. I've been laying in supplies," I said. "We're ready to roll as soon as we know where we're going and get the rifle sighted in. It's in back. I thought we'd grab a hamburger and go take care of that little chore."

"What about Ernest?" she asked.

"He'll keep," I said. "Don't worry about Ernest."

She studied my face for a moment. "I suppose you know what you're doing."

"Sure," I said. "Making you curious as hell, that's what

I'm doing. Go back to your car and drive straight ahead, but give me a couple of minutes first to get around the block behind you. I want to make sure Max doesn't see us taking off; it might worry him. I'll pass you when I'm satisfied we're in the clear…"

Nobody tailed us. We had a hamburger at a drive-in, and headed out into the desert, where I'd earlier scouted an arroyo where we could improvise a private hundred-yard rifle range with a high dirt bank for a backstop. I set up some targets and had Sheila bring down the rifle and fire a few rounds at short range to see where the gun was shooting.

We got the telescopic sight roughly centered, so the shots would at least go on the paper at a hundred yards, before we backed off and started shooting for group with the various loads I'd brought along.

"You're going to have to do most of the work, Skinny," I said. "My shoulder's in no condition to take a pounding. Give me five with each bullet weight. Hold as close as you can, exactly the same way every time."

Watching her shoot, I was glad I hadn't bought a Magnum.

Even a standard.30-06 is a lot of gun for a small girl to shoot from rest, prone, where the body can't rock back with the recoil but has to stay and take the punishment. I squatted behind her with a pair of binoculars I'd picked up.

They weren't bad glasses, but they weren't strong enough to really distinguish bullet holes at that range; and I was more interested in watching the girl, anyway.

The sun was bright on her short-cut hair as she lay there, firing steadily. I could remember when it had been even shorter, hacked and ragged. Well, that had nothing to do with sighting in a rifle, or with her marksmanship in general. What was important was that she seemed to know that she was doing. They all get rifle training, but it doesn't always take. After she'd finished, we went down to inspect the targets. I put my pocket ruler across the best group.

"Four and a quarter inches with the 150-grain load," I said. "A bolt-action rifle that won't group within two inches at a hundred yards isn't worth having, and we ought to get one and a half even with factory ammunition. Is that as close as you can hold?"

"They all felt good," she said. "They should all have been right together."

"You don't mind if I check you?'

"No," she said stiffly. "No, of course I don't mind."

"Don't get mad, Skinny," I said. "I've got to know if it's you or the gun that's spreading them out like that. Just because you're swell in bed doesn't necessarily mean you're hell on the rifle range, too."

She stared at me, startled and indignant; then she laughed.

We went back to a hundred yards and I fired five. It was no fun at all. The burn was in exactly the wrong place. My group beat hers by only a quarter of an inch, good enough for the male ego but no prize in the accuracy department.

After checking, and putting up fresh targets, I got out the tools and took the gun apart. She sat on the ground beside me to watch.

"I think the stock has warped a little," I said. "They often do on these light rifles. It's supposed to be a free-floating barrel without any wood contact, but I think we're getting some pressure here that's throwing it off. We'll just ream out the barrel channel a bit and put in a few cardboard shims to free things up around the action. The magazine isn't supposed to bind like this, either." 1 glanced at her. "They didn't teach you anything about this, did they?"

"No," she said. "All they did was make us shoot."

"As a matter of fact, I picked it up as a kid," I said. "I always used to be crazy about guns. And knives and swords and all the rest of the stuff that tickles a kid's bloodthirsty imagination. That was before World War II, of course. They picked me out of the Army after a couple of months of that and put me into this outfit. We had us quite a war."

"And afterward?" she asked.

"I said the hell with it and got married, but it didn't take. Well, that isn't quite right. I wasn't allowed to tell the girl my wartime experiences, and everything was swell for a good many years, until one day she discovered what kind of a monster was sharing the master bedroom with her. She's out in Nevada now, married to a rancher."

"She must be a fool," Sheila said.

I looked up and grinned. 'Watch that transference, Skinny." I shook my head. "It wasn't a question of brains but of stomach. Beth's a bright enough girl. She's just allergic to gore, is all. I guess she felt, too, that I'd been holding out on her, and of course I had, under orders." I started putting the rifle back together. "Well, that ought to improve things slightly."

"Yes," I said.

Sheila's voice was low. "Have you ever thought of marrying again? Somebody… somebody who knows all about you and doesn't care?"

I looked at her sitting in the sunshine with a lot of desert behind her. "Don't go off half-cocked," I said. "It's a simple psychological phenomenon. You'll get over it. You said so yourself."

She hesitated. "Have you… have you got a girl?"

"There's a nice lady in Texas. Pretty, too. We sometimes get together when I'm on leave."

"Does she know the kind of work you do?'

I said, "I met her on a job. She was kind of accidentally involved. She knows. But she's had four husbands and isn't looking for a fifth, if that's what you're driving at."

"Is she… really good-looking?"

"And young. And rich," I said. "She's also a pretty swell person, in a cool, sophisticated sort of way. What do you want me to say, that I go around with a real creep?"

Sheila laughed and stopped laughing. "Do you love her?" she asked.

I said, "Hold this while I try to match up… Hold it steady. Thanks. I thought we weren't going to talk any nonsense about love."

Sheila said, "Don't keep throwing my words back at me. I had a husband once. He was a beast. A louse. Any word you can think of. I mean, really a beast, physically, mentally, and morally, only it didn't show up until after we were married, or maybe I was just too damn innocent to know the symptoms. I mean the kind of man that… that makes you want to wipe all men off the face of the earth, if you're a woman. So I divorced him and joined this organization, hoping they could give me some work along those lines. Extermination was for me. I'd been very much in love, you understand. I was terribly disillusioned and very bitter."

I said, "Dr. Tommy has a theory about you that goes something like that. Of course, he's got a fancy sexual angle, like all headshrinkers. They're afraid Papa Freud will disown them if they don't."

She glanced at me warily. "What did Dr. Stern tell you about me?"

"Well, there was something about a childhood trauma- of a sexual nature, of course. Tommy apparently didn't have it treed yet, but he was baying on the trail. He thinks it's the secret key to all your personality difficulties."

She laughed. "I had a perfectly normal childhood, thanks. I was never followed through the park by a scary man who exposed himself, or molested in the stairwell by the janitor. Honest."

"You'll break Tommy's heart," I said. "Then there was your unsatisfactory marriage. He says it broke up with charges of brutality on one side and frigidity on the other."

She grimaced. "Don't you know that any time a man wants to hurt a woman publicly, he calls her frigid? How does Dr. Stem reconcile my supposed frigidity with the fact that I went down to Costa Verde deliberately to… to seduce a bearded bandit I'd never seen?"

"You were trying to prove something by putting yourself on a spot, says Tommy. You wanted to demonstrate, to yourself and everybody else, that your husband was a damn liar. And Dr. Tommy's theory is that you proved something, all right: the wrong thing. He thinks that what happened is that you panicked when El Fuerte started making amorous advances and gave yourself and the show away."

Sheila didn't look at me. "And what do you think?"

I said, "Don't be silly. This is Mr. Henry Evans, honey, the guy you spent the night with, remember? We'll consider the frigidity theory disproved. But that still leaves the question of just what happened down there to trip you up."

"Why, I simply goofed," she said, frankly. "Maybe I was a little scared. Not of El Fuerte's amorous advances. Just of being caught and killed."

"It's normal," I said. "What was the goof?'

"I got the gun, all right," she said. "His gun. After inviting me into his hut as we'd planned for him to do, he'd chivalrously taken off his belt and holster so I wouldn't get bruised by all the buckles and hardware. I got the pistol, all right, but you know the grip safety on that big.45 automatic. If you don't hold the gun just right, that spring-loaded gizmo doesn't release, and nothing happens when you pull the trigger even though the thumb-safety is off. I have a small hand and, as I say, maybe I was a little nervous. And he was fast, faster than you'd expect such a big man to be. After that initial delay, I never had a chance."

It was a good story, a plausible story. There isn't anybody working with firearms who hasn't, at some time in his career, fumbled a safety device and missed a shot. The only trouble was that I'd heard a lot of good, plausible stories:

I knew she was lying. Something had happened down there that she was., ashamed or afraid to tell me, probably just that she'd lost her nerve at the critical moment much more drastically than she cared to admit.

Well, it happens. I just wished she hadn't felt compelled to lie, as if I gave a damn how brave she had or had not been. I slipped the bolt back into the rifle and passed the weapon over.

"Let's finish the job and get out of this sun," I said. "Give me another five with the 150-grain load to see how she's grouping now and where she's putting them on the paper.

Then we'll sight her in three inches high at a hundred yards. That'll put her just about on the button at two-fifty. How's your shoulder holding up?"

"It's all right," she said. "Eric, I-"

"What is it?"

"Nothing," she said. "Five shots, you said?"

"Five," I said.

"One day," she said brightly, "one day I'll fall for a man who'll settle for three-shot groups or do his own damn shooting."