The Removers (17 page)

Young Logan was still talking. There was no end to his supply of brilliant, dramatic lines. “You with the gun! I’m not fooling! Quick or I’ll shoot!” And the click of the drawn-back hammer to punctuate the command.

Martell sighed and dropped his pistol, muzzle-first, so that if it discharged—which possibility didn’t seem to have occurred to the boy, I suppose because they’re always dropping guns harmlessly on TV—the bullet would go into the floor. Nothing happened. The weapon just bounced on the rug and lay still.

I had that terrible nightmare feeling you get when you see a very badly performed play or movie. Even when it’s nothing to you if the performers make jackasses of themselves, it still hurts. I started to speak, to advise the boy but checked myself. All he had to do was pull a trigger, but that’s something a kid’s got to learn for himself, somehow.

They all think there’s a kind of magic property in firearms, some hypnotic emanation that causes people to do your bidding. There isn’t. The one thing a gun can do is shoot, and it isn’t supposed to do even that without being told. But you can’t explain it to them. They simply don’t understand.

Joey was already moving now, very cautiously, increasing the distance between himself and Martell. I was going to have to decide very quickly whether or not to risk taking a hand.

“You there! I told you to stay put...!”

More words. Martell was moving. They were already far enough apart so that young Logan was having trouble keeping them both covered. The waving gun-barrel decided me. I wanted no part of this suicidal, sentimental foolishness. He wasn’t really a bad kid, however, and I couldn’t help pleading with him silently, for his own good:
You’re going to have to shoot, you stupid little bastard. Why the hell don’t you shoot now, while it will still do some good...?

But he couldn’t do it, of course. It probably didn’t even occur to him, really. He’d learned better, watching the 21-inch screen. You don’t just up and kill a man standing there with his hands empty simply because he’s moving his feet a little, for God’s sake! Why, that’s murder. It was murder, all right. They whipsawed him expertly. I didn’t see it all. When Joey set it off by lunging aside and going for his armpit gun, I threw a fast body-block into Beth and brought her down on the floor.

Then the boy was firing his silly carbine at Joey, in motion—now that he no longer had a stationary target, he was firing it!—and Martell was bringing my little .38 out of his pocket and shooting twice, and Joey, unscathed, was putting a third bullet into the boy, just out of meanness, as he hit the floor.

Beth scrambled out from under me and ran forward. Martell knocked her aside, thinking she was going for the fallen rifle, and maybe she was, but I doubt it. She wasn’t weapons-oriented, if you know what I mean. He picked up the gun. She got up again and ran past him and went to her knees beside Peter Logan.

“He’s still alive!” she gasped after a moment. “He’s still breathing. Please, can’t you do something?”

“Fenn,” Joey said pleadingly, “Fenn, can’t you hear? The damn phone’s ringing again!”

Joey shoved Beth forward, after dragging her out of the living room. She started to protest again, thought better of it, and picked up the phone.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, this is Mrs. Logan.” A surprised look came to her face. “Who? Mr. Fredericks.”

Martell reached out and took the instrument from her. “This is Fenn, Mr. Fredericks,” he said and listened briefly. His gun, well out of reach from where I stood, never wavered. “We had some things to take care of before we could answer,” he said. “Yes, Mr. Fredericks. Yes, everything is under control. Sure, Mr. Fredericks, I’m listening.”

He listened. Once, he laughed. Then he listened some more.

“I’ve got it,” he said at last. “Four or five hours, you figure. Sure, Mr. Fredericks, we’ll be ready for him. No, you don’t have to draw a diagram, he won’t give you any more trouble. What? Yes, we’ll get that information for you, too. Sure, Mr. Fredericks. You can count on us. Yes, Mr. Fredericks, I understand. Yes, Mr. Fredericks. There won’t be an ounce missing, I promise you. Yes, we’ll let you know as soon as. Yes, Mr. Fredericks.”

He hung up the phone and spat deliberately on the rug. His face was ugly. He swore fervently in a language I didn’t understand. Then he remembered that he was supposed to be a guy named Fenn.

“Sonofabitch!” he said, with a quick glance at Joey. “I should have told him to take his lousy H and ram it up his. Where the hell do you think you’re going, Duchess?”

She looked at him over her shoulder. “Somebody’s got to—”

“Nobody’s got to nothing,” Martell said. The lapse into foreign obscenity seemed to have shaken him; now he was playing Fenn to the hilt. I was interested to see this. It meant that he wasn’t too sure of how Joey would react to his real identity. He gave me a shove. “You get out to the car, quick, both of you, and watch yourselves. You, Shorty, particularly! You aren’t fooling me with that dumb and innocent look!”

I liked that. Whether as Fenn or Martell, he was having to remind himself, now, that he knew all about me, and that I was a potentially dangerous person. He’d taken me too easily, and Paul had probably been easy, too, and when I’d had a chance to act, just now, I’d taken shelter on the floor instead. It had been a long time since he’d had to deal with anything but policemen and hoodlums. It had been a long time since he’d had to deal with any of us, and then he’d done all right, in Berlin. His brain was warning him not to underestimate the enemy, but his ego was telling him these American agents weren’t so much.

Beth said, horrified, “But you can’t just leave the boy—”

Martell grinned at her. “No, I guess you’re right. Joey, take your gun and go in there and finish him off. That’s what you meant, wasn’t it, Duchess?”

She stared at the two of them, pale and wide-eyed; then she gave a little gasp and ran towards the front door. Martell laughed.

“After her, Joey. Keep an eye on her. I’ll watch this one.”

“But you said—” Joey had his gun out.

“Ah, the hell with the kid. He’s not going anywhere. Let’s get out of here.” Martell gestured with the foreign automatic. “All right, Shorty. Slow and easy.” He grinned at me as I moved past. “Just because The Man wants some information out of you doesn’t mean you’re bulletproof. There’s a lot of places I can shoot you where you’ll live long enough to talk.”

That answered one question: why I was still alive. It looked as if the day ahead might be long and eventful, not to say painful. Joey had disappeared outside. I walked slowly towards the door, and spoke without turning my head.

“Having fun, Vladimir?”

I heard him chuckle. “I make a very fine American gangster, do I not, Eric?”

“That foreign gun’s a little out of character.”

“Not at all. They are very popular among the people who are hep, as the saying goes. You must be new. I do not recall seeing your dossier, and I have a good memory.”

I could have told him he just hadn’t checked recently enough, or far enough back—they might still have something on me from the war, although we were supposed to be allies at the time—but it wasn’t the place to boast of my vast and varied experience.

“I’ve seen yours,” I said.

“That’s very good,” he said. “Then you know I do not fool when I tell you to be careful, very careful. No false moves. And no conversation with my Neanderthal assistant. If you should be thinking of trying to play on his patriotic sentiments by revealing me as a subversive person—”

“Has he got any sentiments, patriotic or otherwise? I saw no signs of them.”

“You do him an injustice. I’m sure Joey is full of nice American sentiments about country and motherhood. If you try to talk with him, I will have to shoot you, even if it means that the objectionable Mr. Fredericks never finds his enchanting daughter. Where is she, by the way?”

“She’s safe, for the time being.”

He laughed. “So. Well, we have lots of time, Eric. It will give us something to do while we wait, finding out.”

In passing, I glanced into the living room where young Logan lay near the fireplace. Well, I’d left better men in worse places. He seemed to be still breathing. You never know. One man will die from an infected hangnail, and the next will survive a machine-gun burst you’d think would kill a rhino.

Outside, Joey and Beth were waiting by a big Chrysler sedan that looked familiar. It was the same car in which I’d been brought to Fredericks the day before.

“She’ll drive us,” Martell said, jerking his head towards Beth. “You know the Buckman cabin, Duchess?” He was Fenn again. “Well, take us there. Joey, you watch her close. I’ll ride in back with Shorty.”

We drove off in pale daylight. Twenty-four hours ago, I recalled, I’d been standing on a hill in the desert with a girl and a pair of binoculars, watching a dog catch a rabbit. Now the dog was dead, the girl hated me, and I was watching the sun come up in another place, waiting for some men to catch a man. The cast was different, but the script didn’t seem to vary much. I heard Martell laugh softly to himself.

“That Duke must be quite a character,” he said in Fenn’s best voice. “You’ve got to hand it to him, cool as a breeze. The Man was telling me; he just got word from a spotter down on the border who saw him go through earlier. They stopped him at customs in that damned imported hot-rod and asked him if he had anything to declare. ‘Why, certainly,’ said the Duke, ‘two quarts of tequila and a gallon of rum.’ ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said the customs guy, ‘you’re only entitled to bring in one gallon of alcoholic beverage; we’ll have to ask you to take back the excess or pour it out.’ ‘I say, old chap, that does seem a pity, but the law is the law,’ says the Duke, and he gets out and opens up the trunk and pours out the tequila casually—standing there with the trunk wide open and God knows how much horse in the spare tire! The spotter almost flipped, but the Duke never turned a hair. He closed the trunk, got back into that bomb of his, gave the guy a jaunty salute, and drove off smiling.”

Joey said, “The spare tire? That’s a hell of a corny place to hide it.”

“Maybe, but he made it, didn’t he? The Man says he should be here in four-five hours, the way he’s pushing... Keep your eyes on the road, Duchess.”

Beth asked breathlessly, “What are you going to do to him?”

“Just drive, Gorgeous,” Martell said. “You know what they say; ask a silly question, get a silly answer. That was a hell of a silly question, now, wasn’t it?”

The old Buckman cabin was off the road a little ways, and the low Chrysler had a hard time making it over the ruts. Pretty soon they’ll start building cars that you can’t even get over the hump where your driveway meets the street. Beth stalled twice, braking hard for rocks and bumps.

Martell said, “Just goose it, Duchess. It’s not your car, what the hell do you care what happens to The Man’s muffler?”

We crashed and thrashed up to the place and went out and went inside. It wasn’t much of a house, even for back in the mountains. Whoever the Buckmans had been, they’d moved out long ago. There was a cot, a table, and some wooden chairs in various stages of decay, in the largest room, the one we entered. There was a bedroom of sorts with a built-in double bunk visible through one door, and a kitchen with an old, wood-burning range visible through the other. There’s nothing deader-looking than one of those old iron stoves rusting away from disuse.

“Over here, Duchess,” Martell said, dusting off a chair with a flourish and taking her arm to seat her. His hand stayed a little longer and covered a little more territory than absolutely necessary. “Sit here and stay put.”

Beth sat down, trying to ignore his touch. She had the prissy, head-high, eyes-forward look a certain kind of nice girl gets when she hears a wolf-whistle on the street. I hoped she didn’t mean it. I hoped to God she didn’t mean it. I was going to need her badly, soon.

Martell turned to me. “You,” he said, “way over here. Now let’s hear you talk. Where’s Miss Fredericks? Where are you keeping her?” He looked down at me and sighed, and drew a pair of pigskin gloves from his pocket and started pulling them on. “Keep them covered, Joey,” he said without turning his head. “This one wants it the hard way.”

It was a long, rough morning, but I’ve known rougher. Martell’s heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t really give a damn where I was hiding Moira Fredericks, and he wasn’t in any hurry to find out—not yet, at least. He was just enjoying himself and incidentally, I noticed with hope, trying to impress Beth with what a big, tough, mean, irresistible man he was. I hadn’t forgotten his record with the three black marks for falling down on the job on account of women.

I tried to signal her. It shouldn’t have been necessary. A good female agent would have got to work on him as a matter of course. Even the Fredericks girl would have seen where her duty lay and done it without prompting, I was sure. But Beth continued to ignore Martell, deliberately and kind of desperately. I couldn’t even catch her attention at first. She was doing her best not to watch the proceedings at all, which seemed fairly stupid. How did she expect us to get out of this if we didn’t cooperate, and how were we going to cooperate if she wouldn’t look my way for possible messages?

Finally I managed to establish communications and get the idea across. I saw her eyes widen incredulously. She glanced at Martell, and back at me, to be sure I really meant to ask this of her. Then, after a long pause, I saw her pull back her shoulders bravely, and, after another pause, raise her hands to her hair, which had become more than slightly disheveled during the course of the night and morning.

The next time he looked her way, she answered with a brief slanting glance, quickly withdrawn. There’s nothing that beats, for pure coquettishness, that sidelong glance they give you while busy with their hair. I drew a sigh of relief. It looked as if I might make a soldier of her yet. I even took courage from the fact that Martell was returning to the fray with renewed energy. Apparently, like many other men, he believed wholeheartedly in the theory that nothing made him bigger, in the eyes of a woman, than beating up another man in front of her.