The Ambushers (13 page)

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, doll. A vigorous massage is not indicated. This town seems to be just crawling with sadistic females.” The pressure eased somewhat. I 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 notalk 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.”

“Sure.”

“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.”

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...”