Matt Helm--The Interlopers (6 page)

“Then, when he sees the tall individual inside the clinic, he will know it’s not the same man. Or the same dog. He will know there are two Grant Nystroms competing for the information he is about to deliver.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If your Miss Bellman is in charge of the independent operation that conflicts with ours, she should have anticipated this.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “I didn’t know those other fisherman had anything to do with the job; probably Pat Bellman didn’t either. It’s apparently a favorite fishing spot for a lot of local people. What probably happened is that Bellman and her impostor arrived at the river just a little late and found me there ahead of them. She had to think fast. Obviously there was no sense in putting two phony Nystroms on the beach; that way neither of us would get anything. The only thing she could do was pray that the other party to the morning contact simply wouldn’t show up, giving her a chance to make friends with me and get rid of me before the afternoon appointment.”

“It was a long gamble to take,” Mac said.

“What else could she do?” I asked. “Sure, she knew the two guys with the station wagon
might
be the people for whom we were waiting, the people with the stolen information. In that case they’d seen me and my dog and she was out of luck. But as long as there was a faint possibility that they were just innocent fishermen, and that the real contact had overslept or had a flat tire, she had to act on it. Hell, her impostor and dog were ready, she’d come a long way to use them, she might as well shove them into the action and hope for the best. Even if it meant having me and Hank murdered to give them a clear field.”

“I doubt that killing a dog is murder in the eyes of the law, Eric.”

“Sure,” I said. “Sometimes I get the impression that killing an agent is just a minor misdemeanor. But then, there’s a theory to the effect that we’re not quite human, either.”

He ignored this. “Can you stop the man, Eric?” he asked.

“Are you sure I should, sir? Suppose he does go in and learns that there are two Grant Nystroms; he still won’t know which is the right one. But he’ll most likely assume that one of us is. It probably won’t occur to him that both of us are phonies. With a little luck, I can work it for me instead of against me.”

“What do you have in mind?”

I said, “Suppose I take a crack at selling myself as Nystrom Number One, the real thing, victimized by these other characters who’re trying to impersonate me. We’ve got a little time. The guy isn’t going to pass the stuff over yet, whatever it is; not until he gets us sorted out.”

Mac thought it over for a moment. “Use your judgment. Maybe it’s worth a try. But before you hang up: do you still want me to take care of the body and the rifle you left out at that ranch?”

“Not yet, sir. Hold off for a little. I may need that death scene, undisturbed, to corroborate the story I’m going to tell… Well, he’s inside. Here I go. Eric, signing off.”

I hung up and slipped out of the drugstore and around the corner. I made a circle of the block, back in the direction from which the last man had come. It didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for: a white Plymouth station wagon that had seen better days. It seemed to be empty.

There was nothing to be gained by being tricky. I just walked up to the car, opened the right front door, and got in. I didn’t have long to wait. A shadow moved at the edge of my field of vision, outside the car. A gun barrel touched the side of my head through the open window.

“Don’t move,” said a man’s voice. That would be the second fisherman of the morning.

“Cut it out,” I said without turning my head. “You know who I am. You saw me at the river less than ten hours ago.”

“Maybe I saw you. That doesn’t mean I know who you are.” There was a pause. “If you are who you’re supposed to be, you should be in that office down the block.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “At four-thirty sharp. But the damn office was getting crowded. I figured two gents six-feet-four with black dogs would be overdoing it.” The man with the gun didn’t speak or move. I went on angrily: “What the hell is going on around this town of yours, anyway? I burn up the roads getting here to make contact on a certain hour of a certain day and nobody shows up with the right words, just a female making ga-ga noises about my pretty dog—a female who sets me up for murder. I manage to get out of that and head for the alternate rendezvous and damned if a double doesn’t show up complete with pooch… I hope your pal has eyes in his head and doesn’t slip anything to the wrong person just because the guy is towing a mutt behind him.”

“Mr. Stottman knows what he’s doing.”

“Well, I’m glad somebody does, because by this time I sure as hell don’t. And neither do you, or you wouldn’t be waving guns at me. Do you have to keep massaging my scalp with that thing?”

“We’ll wait,” said the man, getting into the back seat cautiously. “We’ll wait until Mr. Stottman gets back here. He’ll know what to do with you.”

Neither his voice and words, nor the gun at my head, were particularly reassuring. We waited. Presently the plump man came out of the clinic, carrying the same or another brown glass bottle containing, presumably, some kind of dog medicine. He looked our way, hesitated at the sight of two men in the car, dropped his right hand casually into his coat pocket, and walked deliberately toward us.

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 mutt-vitamins 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.”