Operation Breakthrough (13 page)

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Mrs. McLaren said. “Jock left for Miami this morning, and I know he’s going on beyond that, but I don’t know where.”

Hazel looked at me. “Hang up,” I whispered.

“Thanks very much, Mrs. McLaren,” she said smoothly. “We’ll follow through on that.” She hung up. “Well?” she said to me.

“I’ll bet McLaren is going on to Nassau. I can think of a sequence that might have brought it about, too. If he came back into the New York office after I was there and the office manager type told him about the joker trying to unload a briefcase for Erikson and described me, McLaren might have checked back with his people and found out that Erikson was overdue and unreported. Then he might have been sent to Nassau to monitor the situation and see what was needed to be done. In which case anything we tried to do would just be interference or plain spinning our wheels.”

“You’re not really buying that selling job you just did on yourself, are you?” Hazel asked scornfully.

I fixed her with my beadiest eye. “Woman, if you think well of the twenty-one-carat, mint condition of your prodigiously bare ass, don’t bug me. I’m going to sleep.”

And I did.

I
N THE
cold light of morning, of course, I found myself going all over it again in my mind. I slipped out of bed without waking Hazel, then went down to the kitchen and heated up the coffee that remained in the percolater. I carried a steaming cup to the kitchen window, and not even the battery-acid taste of the coffee could detract from a sky so incredibly blue as to be unbelievable anywhere else except in the high country.

My thoughts kept running in the same worn channel: there must be
something
I could do to break through the official barrier of government silence surrounding Karl Erikson. The real problem was that a lot of avenues open to the average individual were closed to me. I couldn’t call the nearest FBI office and tell them to come and get an item vital to the national security. With my background, when they got through asking questions about how I’d acquired it plus a few assorted queries about my past, it wouldn’t take a judge and jury long to decide that I owed Uncle a lot of time. And they’d be right, not that I had any intention of queuing up to pay that piper.

It was such a beautiful morning that I decided to do something I’d had in the back of my mind for some time, ever since the wasted trip to New York, and that was to sight in the Smith & Wesson .38 police special I’d lifted from Erikson’s old office. On the ranch property a mile away there was a gravel pit used to repair the ravages of wind erosion, rain, and snow on the ranch road, and it made an excellent backstop I’d used before.

I left the ranch house via the kitchen door and went down the path to the barn, a low, sprawling, added-onto structure behind which were the head-high, split-rail corrals used at branding time. I started up the Jeep and let it idle, then walked to a corner of the barn where an open trailer was loaded with old tires. I ripped up a few cardboard cartons, rounded off the rough sections, and stuffed them into the tire centers to serve as targets.

I backed the Jeep to the trailer and hitched up to the load of tires. The last thing I did before taking off along the pine-bordered road to the gravel pit was toss three boxes of ammunition into the front seat of the Jeep.

I drove around the pit to its unscalped side, the side farthest removed from the ranch house. The hillside would serve as a sound baffle. Hazel never likes to hear my target practice. She always construes it as an indication I’ll be leaving the ranch again shortly.

I stopped the jeep at the foot of the hillside and took a tire from the trailer and set it up on a high bank. I drew a rough circle in the center of the cardboard disk serving as a target, then backed off across the road. Balance and feel is everything in a hand gun, and this one felt right. I sighted in carefully on the circled target, using the right-hand-crossed-over-the-bracing-left-wrist method, and squeezed off five shots.

The grouping was high and slightly to the right when I crossed the road and examined the target. I turned the tire around and went back across the road. The second grouping followed the same pattern. So this .38 shot slightly high and to the right. Later I’d do something about its sight, but for now it was enough to know it and adjust for it.

Shooting a hand gun well is not something everyone can do. A lot of people can target shoot as I’d just done, sighting in the .38, but that’s not real shooting. Wing shooting is the payoff. I’d learned this years before in an Oregon logging camp where I was avoiding the attention of a couple of irate police departments. I practiced in the woods every day for eighteen months, and when I came back to civilization, I could do things with a .38 that equaled the best I’d ever seen as a kid in the traveling Wild West shows.

Accessories are important to the hand-gun user. I’ve had people who are supposed to know tell me they’d never consider using a shoulder holster, which they call the slowest and most awkward place from which to get at a gun in a hurry. But a man has to go with what he knows, and I knew and reacted to my own shoulder holster as if it were a part of my flesh. The fact I was still walking around was fair testimony that a shoulder holster couldn’t be all bad. I’d never been seriously tempted to find an alternative.

I tossed the target tire aboard the trailer, climbed back into the Jeep, and inched my way in four-wheel drive up a hillside trail slashed out of scrub oak and juniper with my ax and perspiration. At the top I pulled over to one side where I’d constructed a long, wooden, inclined chute which tilted downward over the rocky, brush-filled terrain. I loaded the tires aboard the trailer into the chute one behind the other. Way down below was a dangling rope which operated a bar gate in the chute and permitted me to release one tire at a time to go bounding down the craggy hillside.

I drove to the bottom of the hill and parked, then walked to the release rope, hefting the .38 balanced in my palm. When I pulled on the rope, a tire rolled from the chute and started down the hillside. It ran low through the brush with only an occasional little bounce into the air until it hit a rock and jumped in a twenty-foot arc. It landed and swerved off at an angle only to hit another rock and zoom skyward again.

I had set self-imposed limits to a shooting area for these free-running targets, and when they reached it, I never knew whether the tires would be high, low, left, right, or coming right at me. The idea was to let go three shots at each tire-target and score with two. This was wing shooting, and I’d learned it from an old hunter in Saskatchewan, but he was using a deer rifle and my effective range was only a fraction of his.

For twenty minutes I pulled the rope, released tires, and popped targets. When the chute was empty, I scoured the wooded area at the foot of the hill for the downed tires. I loaded them back onto the trailer. A gratifying number of the cardboard centers contained bullet punctures, some clean from wide-angle shots and others with long, ragged tears from almost head-on snapshots.

But slogging through the brush, searching for tires, swatting at gnats, I was aware that my subconscious was still at work on the problem of Karl Erikson. I drove back up the hillside in a somber mood and reloaded the chute. When I returned to the house, I was planning to get out another hairpiece and do some experimenting with my makeup kit until I didn’t resemble a war-scarred Vietnam veteran. Not that the syndicate could trace me to the ranch anyway.

I paused with the last tire in my hands, ready to insert it into the chute. The syndicate couldn’t trace me to the ranch? Hermione had seen my scars and described them to her boy friend. Her description had been detailed enough so that the syndicate had tortured and killed Vietnam veteran William Long who must, in fact, have resembled me. And if Hermione had overheard Candy or Chen Yi mention my partner in a Nassau jail, she had undoubtedly reported that, too.

If the syndicate could get at Erikson in his jail cell or somehow remove him from it, the whole damned equation was changed.

Nobody stands up under torture forever. If the syndicate got their hands on Erikson, my connection with the ranch wouldn’t remain a secret from the syndicate forever. Which meant that if the syndicate got the chance to bear down on Erikson, I had not only led them to the ranch, I had led them to Hazel.

It didn’t seem a critical possibility. Or at least standing on a Nevada hillside in the bright, clean, morning sunlight, I didn’t think it seemed a critical possibility. Time was the essential item. It would take time for the syndicate to get at Erikson, assuming they didn’t have someone already bought and paid for in the Nassau detention setup.

Erikson would assume that I had delivered the papers and they were safely in channels. He wouldn’t deliberately turn the dogs on me, but in syndicate hands it was only a matter of time before his partner’s name and likely hiding place became syndicate property. When a man cracks under torture, he tells what he knows and makes up what he thinks his torturers want to hear.

Time …

All of a sudden my options were reduced to one. I merely had to get Karl Erikson out of that Nassau jug before the syndicate did.

I dropped the tire still in my hands to the ground, left the loaded chute as it was, and drove down the hill again. Hazel was in the kitchen at the ranchhouse. “Ham and eggs?” she greeted me.

“Okay,” I agreed. She moved toward the stove. “How’d you like to take a trip to Nassau?”

She turned, her expression the wide, beaming Hazel smile that makes the sun look like it’s under a cloud. “Before or after breakfast?”

“After. How soon can you get someone in to look after things here?”

“I can call Jim Dodman. He’s a retired career Army man and the handiest person I know looking after things and fixing things. I’m sure he could be here this afternoon.”

“Call him.”

Hazel started for the telephone in the front room, then stopped. “Why did you change your mind?”

“You converted me.”

She snorted. “A likely story. Do you think Erikson is in danger?”

Hazel has a native shrewdness that is disconcertingly on target at times. “I think he wants to get out of there. Go make your phone call. What time does the mail get here?”

“The mail truck usually drops it off at the box out on the highway around noon. Why? Oh. The laundry case.” She was silent for a moment. “What will you do with the material in it?”

“Get rid of it.”

She started to ask another question, then changed her mind. She went into the front room, and I could hear her speaking on the phone. “He’ll be here right after lunch,” she reported upon her return to the kitchen.

I sat down at the table and watched her prepare a meal. We both worked our way through gorilla-sized portions of ham, eggs, toast, and coffee. “I’ll be out in the barn,” I told Hazel after my second cup of coffee.

She nodded. “I’ll drive out to the highway for the mail as soon as I think it’s here,” she said.

I knew what I was going to do with the material in the briefcase. In the barn I rummaged through the stock of new and scrap lumber that had been accumulated by Hazel’s deceased stepfather. The old man had been a crackerjack carpenter, which I was a long way from being, but I felt sure I could put together a box that would look like the crates I’d seen in the corridor of the Fifth Avenue office in New York.

I took saw and hammer down from the pegboard array of tools on one wall and set to work. Hazel’s stepfather would have been horrified by the amount of lumber I wasted by measuring incorrectly twice, but I finally got the job done.

I searched around in the catchall drawers of the work-bench until I found a half-empty can of encrusted black paint. I skimmed the crud from the surface, added some thinner, stirred the concoction with a stick, found a two-fingers-wide brush, and began lettering the crate. I didn’t have a stencil, but had no difficulty in printing clearly.

I also had no difficulty in remembering the address. I lettered one side of the crate Lambert Warehouse and Storage Company, 28 Pendleton Street, Alexandria, Virginia. In smaller letters in one corner I put GSA — for Government Services Administration — 1234510. Then I repeated the performance on the crate’s other side. I wrote the fake order number down on a slip of paper and put the paper carefully into my wallet so I could use it to identify the crate when the time came.

When the crate was delivered to Lambert’s with the fake order number, I figured that governmental obstinacy would ensure that it be set aside and held until the presumably missing waybill showed up. And held and held and held. Not until hell froze over, perhaps, but surely until I could interest someone in government in taking a look at a crate bearing GSA 1234510.

Hazel had come out to the barn to get the Jeep while I was still lettering. She returned with the mail, including the laundry case, while I was still admiring my handiwork. I took the case from Hazel, paused only to destroy the label with the local address, placed it in the crate without bothering to remove the briefcase from it, put the top of the crate on, and screwed it down with three-quarter-inch wood screws. “There,” I said with satisfaction. “That thing’s never going to come open by accident.”

“Who’s the Lambert Warehouse and Storage Company?” Hazel wanted to know.

“One of Erikson’s blind pigs. The equivalent of a dead letter office for spook supplies in transit from one area to another. Or part of it is. The damned place is so big I don’t really know what all they do there. Erikson probably — ”

A bell began ringing loudly. “That’s the house phone,” Hazel said. “I don’t know why I’ve always been too cheap to have an extension put out here.” She sprinted up the path to the house with all her moving parts jiggling pleasantly.

She was back in three minutes. I was bending over the crate again, making sure the paint had soaked into the wood and was dry. It had and it was.

“Earl,” Hazel said.

I spun around at the tension in her voice. “What is it?”

“Bud just called from Ashworth’s Chevron station in town. Two men in a rented Chevrolet were just there asking directions to the Rancho Dolorosa. They wouldn’t state their business, although Bud said he hinted around. He thought I’d want to know.”

“He thought right,” I said emphatically. “Put the man on your Christmas list.”

“Who are the men, Earl?”

“I haven’t the foggiest.” Syndicate henchmen, who else? Although how had they gotten to Erikson this quickly? “But we’re not waiting around to find out. D’you have any cash in the house?”

“Yes.”

It had been a rhetorical question anyway. Hazel always had cash in the house and not just change in a teacup, either. Every once in a while we’d pack up on the spur of the moment and fly down to Tijuana and take a belt at the Caliente racetrack’s 5-10. “Bring all of it. Don’t pack anything, not even a toothbrush. We’ll outfit in Miami. Move it!”

Hazel headed for the ranchhouse again while I picked up the crate and loaded it into the back of the Corvette. Then I changed my mind and transferred it to the Jeep. Those two types at the service station might have inquired what kind of car Hazel drove, and what the people in town usually saw was the Corvette.