The Interlopers

7

THE RANCH LOOKED AS BLEAK AND deserted as it had the last time I'd driven into the yard, with Pat Bellman. The pickup with the flat tire stood exactly where it had been, and there was no other vehicle around. I stopped the camper rig in the same place as before, and the station wagon pulled alongside, driven by the surly gent whose name I still did not know, who'd turned out to be a chunky, dark individual with flat Indian features and coarse black hair.

The man called Stottman, who shared the truck seat with me, opened the door on his side and backed out cautiously, keeping me covered.

"All right, slide out this way," he said. "Careful, now."

He wasn't so pretty, either, with a round white face, mean little eyes, and an unattractive pug nose that had a kind of a lump at the end. But I wasn't concerned with his unprepossessing appearance at the moment, but with the gun he held: a.25 caliber automatic so small that it practically disappeared in his pudgy hand. The.25 isn't much of a gun-it has less power than a kid's.22-but people have been killed by it, and I preferred not to join their company. I got out carefully and turned toward the rear of the camper.

"Where are you going?" Stottman demanded.

"I just thought I'd let the pup out. He's been cooped up in there quite a while."

"Never mind that. Leave him where he is."

I grinned. "Very few people have been torn to bloody shreds by savage retriever puppies, if that's what you're afraid of," I said, seizing the opportunity to polish my image as Grant Nystrom, dog expert. "Well, you might get yourself bitten by a Chesapeake if you really work at it, but a Lab's more likely to lick you to death in a burst of affection."

"Never mind the pup." Stottman's voice was flat and unamused. "We've seen your pup. Now show us this man you claim to have shot."

"Right up on that point to the left," I said, waving my hand in that direction. "Like I just told you, the girl sent me off across that open hillside to look for a nonexistent dog-well, bitch, if you want to be technical. I spotted the rifleman lying in wait for me up there, and sneaked around behind him with my trusty.357…"

"Show us."

There was a certain amount of suspense as we worked our way up the hill through the brush. I could think of several good reasons why Pat Bellman might want to remove the body of her accomplice, but apparently they weren't as good as they seemed. Or maybe I've seen too many movies with disappearing corpses. Anyway, when we got there the fuzzy-faced young marksman lay exactly where I'd left him on top of his fancy weapon.

"There he is," I said. "You've got my gun. I haven't had a chance to reload; there's an empty shell in the cylinder. Smell it and you'll know it was fired within the last few hours. Take a look at the bullet hole and you'll see that the calibers match."

"Keep him covered, Pete."

Stottman put his little gun away, and bent down to examine the wound. He straightened up, rubbing his hands together. "One bullet hole looks pretty much like another, Mr. Nystrom. But say you did shoot this man, what does it prove?"

"Well, you can see it was a trap. They were trying to put me out of the way so they could ring in that substitute you saw at the clinic with his dog-although who could mistake a shaggy, ill-bred, badly trained mongrel like that for a real Labrador, I can't imagine."

"We're not all experienced dog men, Mr. Nystrom." Stottman studied my face for a moment, showing no expression. Then he glanced down and kicked the body hard, so that it rolled over on its back. I made a quick sound of protest. Stottman said blandly: "What's the matter? The punk's been dead for hours; he's not feeling anything."

He was obviously testing me, checking me against what he'd been told of the courier he was to meet. Grant Nystrom, I reminded myself, had been just a politically minded sportsman type-a dilettante at intrigue-not a hardened killer.

I made a show of swallowing. "Okay, be hard-boiled," I said irritably. "Maybe you're used to dead bodies. It happens to be my first."

Apparently it was the right response. At least it disappointed him slightly. He asked, "Where'd you shoot him from?"

"Up there," I said with a jerk of my head. "That clump of grass up there."

"Check it, Pete."

The man with the Indian face went off up the hill. Stottman frowned at the dead youth on the ground. "Anybody you know?" he asked me.

"Never saw him before in my life."

"Why'd you shoot him?"

"I told you. He was waiting to murder me."

"You could have slipped away and left him waiting for nothing."

I said, "All right, it was the pup. I had him tied, but he broke loose, caught my scent, and came loping this way. This creep saw him coming and got ready to shoot. He was going to kill my dog!" I put indignation into my voice. "So I just let him have it with the.357. Anybody who'd shoot a good hunting dog in cold blood, well, there's just no damn reason for him to keep on living, the way I see it."

Stottman said, "Unfortunately, dead men cause more trouble than dead dogs. Now you've killed this fellow, just what are you planning to do with him, dry him out for jerky?"

I let myself look kind of sick at the suggestion; then I recovered and said angrily, "That's your problem, isn't it, Mr. Stottman?".

"How do you figure?"

"This is your territory. I'm just a messenger boy traveling through. You were supposed to have things under control around here. Instead you let me walk into an ambush I had to shoot my way out of. Now, if you're satisfied with my credentials, just give me what I was sent here to get, and I'll be on my way. Cleaning up the premises is your job, not mine. And you'd damn well better be sure the body gets buried deep so nobody bothers me about it on my way north. Otherwise I think our mutual employers will have a few harsh things to say about the way things are being run here in Pasco."

Stottman didn't seem particularly intimidated. He was still watching me in an appraising, calculating sort of way; he might not have heard what I'd said. He turned as the man Pete came back.

"Well?"

"Somebody was up there, all right, and fired through the grass."

The plump man studied the distant clump of grass thoughtfully. He glanced at me.

"That's pretty good shooting. How come you're wasting your time as a lousy courier when you can shoot like that? It isn't everybody who can cut a man's spine in two with a handgun bullet at a hundred yards."

I said, "That's no hundred yards, and firearms have been my hobby for years. I'm a courier because I like the job, because I've done enough traveling so that nobody asks questions about it any longer, and because certain people trust me and figure I know enough about guns so that in an emergency, like this, I can take care of myself and make sure the mail gets through. But I've got no ambitions to be a professional assassin."

"They trust you, do they?" Stottman grimaced, and spat on the ground beside the corpse. "I don't like it, Pete," he said. "I don't like this character. He's too damn cool, and that's too neat a job of stalking and shooting for an amateur messenger boy like he claims to be. It's got a pro smell to it. What do you think?"

The dark-faced man said, "I don't know, Mr. Stottman. What happened in the vet's office?"

"Another guy was there. Tall, like this one. With a dog, like this one. But he wasn't the right man. When I got the negative sign, I just walked out again with my muttvitamins without making the switch."

"Well, if he wasn't the one, this one's got to be, doesn't he?"

"Logic is not your strong suit, I'm afraid, Pete. Just because one man isn't, it doesn't follow that another man is. I wish I'd asked Meredith to stick around."

He said this very casually, as if it were a remark of no importance. He was carefully not looking my way when he said it. You'd have thought that whether I caught the name or not didn't matter the slightest.

Fortunately, I'd heard it before, during the briefing. I'd had to dig for it, and for what little I knew about it, but I'd finally got it, from one of Mr. Smith's fresh-faced young men, pink and sweating as they always get-those well-tailored, well-educated young agents-whenever you crowd them on matters relating to sex or security. This matter, apparently, had involved both.

It had started very innocently, I'd thought. I'd simply asked, "What about girlfriends?"

"What do you mean, Mr. Helm?"

I'd said, "Here's a healthy, tanned, virile-looking outdoors character I'm supposed to impersonate and you've told me everything about him except the most important thing: whom does he sleep with? Does he like the girls, or the boys, or does he just take the damn dog to bed with him?"

That was when the young guy had turned pink. He'd said stiffly and rather disapprovingly, "As far as we know, Nystrom's sex life was perfectly normal."

"Fine, fine," I'd said. "In other words, he liked girls. What girls? Since he was so damn normal, by your standards, he was probably concentrating on one, currently, so let me rephrase the question: what girl?"

"It doesn't matter, Mr. Helm. You won't meet her up north where you're going, so there's no sense in cluttering up your mind with irrelevant…"

I'd said, "Who's doing this impersonation, you or I? Suppose you let me decide which irrelevancies I want to clutter up my mind with and which I don't. Who's the girl in Grant Nystrom's life-my life, now?"

"Well," he'd said very reluctantly, "well, there seems to be a wealthy society lady with radical inclinations, named Elizabeth Meredith…"

Stottman was waiting. I could feel him waiting. He was waiting for me to ignore the name he'd mentioned. It would have been a mark against me, since no man, under these circumstances, would be likely to let pass even a casual reference to his lady love. Or he was waiting for me to betray myself completely by asking who Meredith was, or by referring to the possessor of the name as masculine instead of feminine. He was a bright guy, for all his piggy looks, and he had the instinct for something wrong that makes a good agent.

"Meredith? Libby Meredith?" I said quickly. "Is she here? Where'd you see her?"

Stottman turned to me slowly. If he was disappointed again, he didn't let it show. He said, "You ought to know where I saw her. Even if you didn't get there in time to spot her going into the clinic, her car was parked right in front. I'm surprised you didn't recognize it, Mr. Nystrom."

My mind was working fast. "That yellow Caddy? Hell, Libby trades Cadillacs like some people trade stamps; I'd never seen this particular boat before. You mean that was hers? What's she doing here, anyway? I left her down in San Francisco, and she didn't say anything about coming up this way. Where is she now?"

"By this time, I suppose she's well on her way back to Seattle. At least that's where she came from, when I called Command and asked if there wasn't somebody handy who'd check your identification for me. After watching you play footsie with that blond girl on the beach this morning, when you should have kept yourself available to take delivery, I wanted to be absolutely sure before I handed you the stuff."

"You made absolutely sure, all right!" I said sourly. "You gave me a hell of a check. You never even let Libby see me! If you had, she'd have told you right away-"

"How did I know there was going to be a ringer waiting in the clinic, instead of you? We just set it up that she'd borrow a fancy dog to make it look good and be there when you came. She'd give me the signal, one way or the other, and go on back to her business in Seattle, whatever it is. There was no need for us to take the risk of talking together, or I didn't think there was. By the time I realized there were two guys to identify, she'd got back into her car and driven off."

I hesitated, frowned, and said, "Well, there's an obvious way to settle this. How far is it to Seattle? Do you know where she's staying?"

"She was at the Holiday Inn. At least that's where I called her, setting it up over the phone. Room twenty-seven." He hesitated. "It's a couple of hundred miles to Seattle. But..

I said, "If Libby gives me the okay, will you condescend to make delivery like you're supposed to, and let me get on with my route. Or will you just think up a bunch of new reasons for not following orders?"

The dark-faced man called Pete said unhappily: "It's a long drive, Mr. Stottman, and it's getting late. Hell, he's all right, he knows about Miss Meredith, he knows about everything. He's got to be the right man. Can't you just turn it over to him and-"

"Nobody's got to be anything," said Stottman coldly. "You take care of this stiff, Pete. Take care of it good, and then join me at the Holiday Inn, in Seattle. I'll ride along with this guy." His small, suspicious eyes studied my face. "I think he's bluffing, Pete. I think he's bluffing like hell."

The trouble was, he was perfectly right.