Kiss and Kill (13 page)

“Did Talbot come back with the identical suitcase he took with him behind the wall?”

“I can't say. I didn't really notice. It seemed logical enough. We all figured he had some medicine in the suitcase.”

“If it was urgent, he wouldn't have come back for it. And why would he have to take his medicine behind a wall?”

“I don't know. It's not the kind of thing you explore mentally.”

Barney got out and went over to the wall. There was no sign that it had been visited recently. A thicket of prickly pear grew behind the ruins, large enough to have hidden a car. Barney tried to imagine the scene: some kind of signal alongside the road, maybe a rag hung on a cactus … Johnny going into his act … a man, or men, waiting behind the wall here, either to accept delivery or to hand something over. But there was nothing now except cactus, thornbush, and mesquite.

Barney returned to the car.

Saltillo sprawled in an amphitheater of dun mountains. The sun was a low gold glow. Barney stopped at a Pemex station to inquire about a black 1964 Buick, but the attendant shrugged.

The city itself offered no leads: Johnny had gone to the market here with Rodney Aiken. Both were dead now, their actions lost forever.

They bought groceries and drove west across the high northern plateau. Claire fixed sandwiches in the car and they ate without stopping. Ed took the wheel as darkness fell and they rolled up the windows against the chill of the night air. Claire curled up on the back seat like a kitten, her skirt pulled down over her legs and her arms hugging her chest. Barney stayed awake and checked Claire's map against the landscape.

Two spots had been marked, one a crossroads restaurant, the other an adobe village. Both were dark and locked up for the night. Neither could have concealed a black Buick.

Barney folded the map, squirmed into a moderately comfortable position, and sued for sleep. The luminous dial on his watch read 2
A
.
M
.

The sun was high when he awoke. The car had stopped. Ed was leaning on the wheel smoking, hollowed by fatigue. The rear seat was empty.

“Where's Claire?”

“Nature called.”

Barney looked out at fields and a few cottages, blue smoke rising from their roofs. A river cut a green path through the brown plateau.

“Where are we?”

“Went through Torreón half an hour ago. Not a damned thing moved. We combed the streets for a parked black Buick, but no luck.”

Barney growled, “You should have waked me up.”

“Why?”

“Not many tourists travel through here. The kidnapers are more conspicuous, but so are we. Suppose they spotted us and got behind us?”

“Hell, they don't know us,” Ed protested.

“But a car, prowling up and down streets at dawn, obviously searching …” He shook his head. “Can't be helped now. But don't do it again, Ed.”

Barney lit a cigarette and irritably waited; he was stiff and sore. Finally he grunted: “That broad must have located a beauty parlor.” He climbed out of the car, stretched, and started toward a clump of pepper trees beside the river. The rocky bed was a hundred yards across, but the stream followed a meandering channel not more than twenty feet wide. He found Claire where the water curved under the trees. Her clothes were heaped on the shore. She was kneeling in the calf-deep water, staring at nothing.

“Your car is waiting, Madame.”

She jumped and let out a squeak. “I must have been daydreaming.” Then she remembered that she was naked. Barney was rewarded with a sudden pinkness all over her body; she made a frantic attempt to cover herself with her hands, turning her back to him.

“You look like September Morn,” Barney said.

“Damn you! Bring me my clothes!”

“Aren't you forgetting that this is where I came in? We've been all through this before, even including the water.”

“All right, then, get out of here!”

“Look, baby,” Barney growled, “I've seen raw buff before. If you want me to leave, I'll leave.”

“You're a grump!” Then she got the giggles. “Barney, I got so hot and smelly in the car yesterday … and I'm used to bathing every day, really I am.”

Barney sat down on a rock, pulled off his shoes and socks, and waded out with her clothes. She remained with her back to him in a curiously attractive pose of submission.

“Which do you want first?”

“Don't you know?”

“I knew a girl once who put her hat on first. Another one—”

“Never mind. The panties, please.”

He handed them to her over her shoulder, letting his fingers linger on her cool skin. She stepped into the garment in a fluid way and let the elastic snap softly around her waist.

“Now what?” he asked.

“You sound as if you're enjoying yourself. The shorts.”

He held them out to her. She stepped into them, staggered, and would have fallen if he had not grabbed her arm.

“Now the brassiere. Right?”

“Expert,” she said, smiling.

She slid her arms through the straps and reached back to the hooks and eyes.

“I'll do it,” Barney said.

She dropped her hands and stood still while he fumbled. He whirled her around and she went rigid.

“Barney … it's too soon.”

“It's never too soon. But it's often too late.”

“I was thinking just now about Johnny and me in the jungle pool. I'm all burned out, Barney.”

Barney shook her. “Damn it, he's dead! And you're alive!”

“More or less.”

“You want to be dead?”

“Sometimes.”

He shook her again. “Don't give me that. His death didn't keep you from working. It didn't keep you from running all over the Midwest trying to save your life. You almost shot me doing it. You want to live as much as anybody.”

She raised her face to him, sighing. Her green eyes were flat and empty. “Want to bet?”

He pulled her to him and stooped to her lips. That was all it was, a touching of lips. She did nothing either to hinder or to help.

He pushed her away.

“You see, Barney?”

“I won't bother you again.”

He waded ashore, dried himself with his handkerchief, pulled on his socks and shoes, and strode back to the car. He waited until Claire appeared and climbed into the back, then drove away without looking at her.

An hour later, Barney spotted a trio of vultures. They flapped away as the car passed.

Ed cried: “Bogus!”

“Who?”

“Liz's dog!”

Barney managed to stop the car a hundred feet down the road. He backed up, and Ed jumped out. Desiccation had set in rapidly in the hot dry air; the vultures had been at it. Ed did not touch the dog. He nudged it with his foot. When he returned to the car, he looked as dead as the dog.

“Blew his head half off. Looks as if it went in the back of the skull. Like the driver in St. Louis.” He made a slow, defeated gesture. “Let's go, Barney. No point in burying what's left.”

Barney drove on in silence. After five minutes, Ed shouted, “What the hell does it
mean
?”

There was no way of breaking it to him gently. “It means they no longer need her good will, now that they've crossed the border,” Barney muttered. “What else?”

“Yes,” Ed said in an anguished tone. “What else?”

Barney realized that Ed had mistaken his meaning. What else were they doing to Liz? Poor schmo.

“At least,” Barney said, “we know we're on the right trail.”

A half hour later he pulled into a Pemex station in the village of Cuencamé, halfway between Torreón and Durango. The attendant was short and swarthy, with a stringy moustache trailing down the sides of his mouth.

“¿
Tres hombres
?”

“
Sĺ
.”

“
¿Una mujer
?”

“
Sí
.”

“
¿Buick, negro? ¿Sesenta y cuatro
?”

“
Sí
.”

“
Entonces, sí. Pasaron por aquí ayer
.”

“
¿Ayer? ¿A qué hora
?” He turned to Ed, who was having trouble standing still. “They were here yesterday,” Barney told him. “I'm trying to find out what time.” He turned back to the attendant. “
¿A qué hora pasaron
?”

The attendant pondered and thought it had been around two in the afternoon. He remembered it well because of the strange way the men had acted. First the Buick had pulled up to the pumps, and two of the men had gone to the men's room. When they returned, the third man went. The woman did not get out; they brought a bottle of Coca Cola to the car. The attendant had assumed she was sick, for she had been bundled up in a blanket despite the hot weather. A scarf had covered her face.

They've got her bound and gagged, thought Barney.

He gave the attendant ten
pesos
and returned to the car, saying nothing to Ed about his conclusion.

“They're still treating her okay,” he said when they were back on the road. “Brought her a cold drink.”

“So she won't die of thirst,” said Ed bitterly, “before they rape her and cut her throat.”

Barney kept his eyes on the road. The only consolation he could offer was that they were closing the time gap. The other car was only eighteen hours ahead of them.

Claire said she remembered well the former trip between Durango and Mazatlán; during that period, Johnny Talbot had not been out of her sight. They drove quickly through Durango, sped down to El Salto, and surmounted the breathtaking hump of the Sierra Madre range by mid-afternoon. At sunset they pulled into a crossroads gas station where the mountain route intersected the coast road. To the north lay Mazatlán, to the south San Blas.

“We can save time,” said Barney to Claire, who was taking a turn at the wheel, “if this guy saw which way they went.”

Barney and Ed went inside. The manager was surly. He had seen many black Buicks with California plates; this was, after all, the main coastal route between California and Mexico City. Did the
señores
wish gas? If not, perhaps they would move away from the pumps so that another car might be serviced.

“Snotty bastard,” growled Ed as he slid into the front seat beside Claire.

Barney grunted and got in beside him. He swung the door shut and looked at Claire. She was staring ahead as if she were in a trance.

“What's the matter?”

A male voice spoke from the floor between the seats.

“Don't turn around. I've got a forty-five aimed at the little lady's back.”

7

The voice expressed no emotion whatever. This man was a pro. He would kill on the slightest excuse.

“Everything understood? Nobody moves, nobody talks.” He cleared his throat “All right, lady. Start the car and pull onto the highway.”

Claire moved in slow motion. She turned on the switch, pulled the car into gear. As she let out the clutch the car jumped.

“No more of that,” said the voice. “I've got my finger on this trigger. If you jerk, it goes off and you get it in the back. Understand?” When Claire said nothing, he said: “Answer me.”

“Yes,” she said. Her voice creaked like a rusty hinge.

“Then get moving.”

She drove with her hands tight on the wheel. At the intersection she slowed and ran her tongue over her lips. “Which way?”

“South. Push it to forty and hold it there. I'll tell you where to turn off.”

Claire got up to forty and held it there.

The man laughed.

Barney thought: If his trigger pull is as light as the hood says, any sudden movement might kill Claire and wreck them all, including himself. Undoubtedly, he was planning to dump his captives in the first side road. So when Claire turned off … He had nothing to lose in facing the gun at the last instant.

He heard a rustle as their captor hitched up in the back seat. Barney raised his eyes to the rearview mirror. The man had a big round head; mouse-colored hair began far back on his head. His skin looked like wax fruit. He was young, under thirty. Barney decided he must be Garner. His silver-rimmed eyeglasses conveyed a roundness to gray eyes that held no more expression than a clock. For an instant their eyes met.

A roar filled the car and the mirror exploded. Pain pricked Barney's forehead and cheek. He shot a glance at his companions: Ed Tollman was staring straight ahead, quivering like a dog on a leash. Claire was struggling with the wheel.

The voice said, “Keep your eyes pointed straight ahead, handsome. Next time you get nosy I'll shoot an ear off.”

Barney felt warm blood trickling into a corner of his mouth. It collected between his lips, then ran down and dripped off his chin. Barney made no move to wipe it off. The hood was trigger-happy.

The car stank of gunpowder and nervous sweat. Claire had regained control and was keeping the speedometer at exactly forty. She had held up well under the gun, Barney thought. He envied her. She at least had something to do.

“Neat, the way I pulled it, wasn't it?” laughed the man. “Any idea who I am?”

“Garner,” Barney said.

“Well, I'll be damned! So you're the smart one. That's right, buddy. I'm Garner. Easy!”

Barney stiffened as Garner reached over and shoved his hand inside Barney's jacket. He pulled out Barney's gun and wallet with a flourish. Then he probed Ed Tollman's pockets, and took Claire's purse from between her and Ed.

“You folks pack a lot of hardware,” Garner said. “Like you were out hunting?” He chortled as if at a private joke. “Well. Claire English! That makes it cosy. We thought you'd gone underground, Claire. Also Edward Tollman, Liz's faithful husband, and Barney Burgess, private eye, out on his last case. Anybody else on this safari? Don't bother to answer.”

They were now on a lofty causeway crossing flat brush country. The setting sun painted the clouds a hellish red. Barney heard the creak of springs as the man leaned back.