May There Be a Road (Ss) (2001) (28 page)

Ponga Jim broke loose. He smashed the German's nose with a short right. Then he hooked a left to the head, took a smashing right, and landed with both hands to the body.

The German seemed to have limitless strength. He kept coming, boxing skillfully at times, then dropping his skill to fight like a demon.

Yet Ponga Jim was learning. He was surer of himself now. He began to push the fight more and more. He caught the hardest blows on his shoulders and pushed his way ahead. Years of rugged living, of fresh sea air, hard work, and clean living had left him hard as nails. He drove on in now, slugging in a kind of bloody haze, confident of only one thing, that he was going to win. Busch set himself and feinting, threw a hard right.

This was the chance Jim had been waiting for. He put everything he had in his own right. It landed with a thud like an ax striking a log, and Hugo packed ground.

Drunkenly, Mayo almost collided with the plane.

Ponga Jim started the plane forward in a groggy haze. Guiding it by instinct, he paused at the end of the field. Juan Peligro, Armando Fontes, and Carisa came running. Jim took off, circled, then headed back over the flying field.

His mind was clearing, and though his body was hurt, felt better than he had expected. He had taken all the big German had been able to give, and he had won.

The amphibian, he noticed, had been loaded with bombs. It was carrying six. He let one go as he swung in toward the field, another over the sheds, then he swung around, and in a rattle of machine-gun fire, let go two more over Casfillo Norden. As the plane circled away, they could look back and see flames leaping high.

Peligro was at the plane's radio, and now his eyes brightened.

"They are coming!" he said excitedly. "Your Navy is coming!"

They landed once more on the small lake near Fortaleza and started back toward the city.

Ponga Jim Mayo's face was cut and swollen. Peligro looked tired, and Carisa Montoya walked almost in a dream. Only Armando Fontes looked the same; his round, fat face was sullen, his eyes somber when they passed the light of a window.

The streets were empty. Two bodies lay in the gutter where they had fallen earlier, and the sidewalks were littered with broken glass. A heavy smell of smoke from the explosion and fire tainted the air, and the waters of the bay were littered with wreckage. It was almost day, but the moon was still bright.

In the vague light the streets looked like those of a long deserted city. Yet as they rounded a corner, a file of soldiers in Brazilian uniforms turned into the street from the opposite direction. They marched past, stepping briskly along, a cool, efficient, soldierly body of men. "That means that Vargas acted," Ponga Jim said. "Everything will be over soon enough."

They reached the steps of the hotel and started in when two men came out. One was Major Wagnalls from Natal. The other was Slug Brophy, Jim's chief mate.

The major smiled and held out a hand. "So you made it! One of our boys just radioed word that Castillo Norden was in flames, the hangars destroyed, and three planes burning on the field.

"A transport landed there a few minutes ago from Rio. Von Hardt has been arrested by Major Palmer, and they found Hugo Busch beaten unconscious. A mechanic said you did it."

Wagnalls looked at Jim. "I didn't think anybody could do that."

"Neither did L" Mayo said simply. "I guess I was lucky."

"What about Don Pedro?" Peligro interrupted. "He is the one we want."

Wagnalls's brow creased. "That's the missing item. He escaped. It doesn't matter, for the government will confiscate his holdings here, so his power is broken. But I dislike to see him free.

"Especially," he added, "since Senorita Montoya will soon be known as a government agent .... President Vargas was suspicious, and Miss Montoya knowing Don Pedro, volunteered to investigate."

"What I want to know," Mayo demanded, "is how they captured my ship?"

Brophy grinned sheepishly. "Duro, the port captain, Du Silva, and an army officer came out. They had three girls along, so we didn't expect trouble.

"They came aboard, and Duro said he had to search my cabin for dope. We started for the cabin.

No sooner had we left the deck than men came up the ladder and deployed about the deck."

"There's still some fighting going on but all the principal plotters are taken care of but Don Pedro," Wagnalls said. "But we'll have him soon."

"I don't think so."

Ponga Jim Mayo felt himself turn cold.

His back was to the speaker, but he needed no more than those few words to tell him who it was. The voice had been low, but heavy with menace. He turned.

Thirty feet away, Don Pedro Norden stood in the street near the mouth of a narrow alleyway. In his hands he held a submachine gun. His brilliantly conceived plot had fallen to pieces, the men he hated had won. Yet he had a gun, and the little group before the hotel were covered, helpless.

Norden's clothing was torn and bloody, his face looked thinner, harder, more brutal. If ever a man was seething with hate, it was this one. Never in his life, Jim knew, had he been so close to death. The man was fairly trembling with triumph and killing fury. The architects of his defeat--Juan Peligro, Major Wagnalls, Brophy, Carisa, and Ponga Jim--were all in range.

He could in one burst of fire wipe the slate clean of his enemies.

Norden's teeth bared in a grimace of hate, and when he spoke his voice was choked with emotion.

"Perhaps I will be captured, but not yet .... his The submachine gun lifted, and Jim thought that even at that distance he could see the man's finger tighten.

A gun roared, and the submachine gun began to chatter, but the muzzle had fallen, and the bullets merely bit against the stones of the street and ripped the dust into little fountains of fury.

Don Pedro Norden, a great black hole between his eyes, the back of his head blown away, fell slowly on his face.

Turning, they saw Armando Fontes, the big pistol clutched in his right hand, leaning nonchalantly against a corner. With a match in his cupped left hand, he was lighting a cigarette.

For a long moment, they stared, relief soaking through them. Ponga Jim looked at the disreputable little man.

"All right, Armando," he asked. "Tell us.

Who are you agent for? What's your part in this?"

Fontes shrugged, his eyes lidded. He drew on his cigarette and took the occasion to slip the big gun back into his waistband.

"I, se fior I am but a little man. A little man who likes his government."

He turned, andwitha deprecating wave of his hand, walked down the street, and away.

*

Only one light showed in the ramshackle old house, a dim light from a front window. Neil Shannon hunched his shoulders inside the trench coat and looked up and down the street. There was only darkness and the slanting rain. He stepped out of the doorway of the empty building and crossed the street.

There was a short walk up to the unpainted house, and he went along the walkway and up the steps. Through the pocket of the trench coat, he could easily reach his .380 Colt automatic, and it felt good.

He touched the doorbell with his left forefinger and waited. Twice more he pressed it before he heard footsteps along the hall, and then the door opened a crack and Shannon put his shoulder against it. The slatternly woman stepped back and he went in.

Down the hall, a man in undershirt and suspenders stared at him. He was a big man, bigger than Neil Shannon, and he looked mean.

"I've some questions I want to ask," Shannon said to the man. "I'm a detective."

The woman caught her breath, and the man walked slowly forward. "Private or Headquarters?" the man asked.

"Private."

"Then we're not answering. Beat it."

"Look, friend," Shannon said quietly, "you can talk to me or the DA. Personally, I'm not expecting to create a lot of publicity unless you force my hand. Now you tell me what I want to know, or you're in trouble."

"What d'you mean, trouble?" The man stopped in front of Shannon. He was big, all right, and he was both dirty and unshaven. "You don't look tough to me."

Shannon could see the man was not heeled, so he let go of the gun and took his hand from his pocket.

"Get out!" The big man's hand shot out.

Shannon brushed it aside and clipped him. It was a jarring punch and caught the big fellow with his mouth open. His teeth clicked like a steel trap and he staggered. Then Shannon hit him in the wind and the big fellow went down, his hoarse gasps making great, empty sounds in the dank hallway.

"Where do we talk?" Shannon asked the woman.

She gestured toward a door, then opened it and walked ahead of him into a lighted room beyond.

Shannon grabbed the big man by his collar and dragged him into the room.

"I want to ask about a woman," he said, his eyes sharp. "A very good-looking blonde."

The woman's face did not change. "Nobody like that around here," she said sullenly. "Nobody around here very much at all."

"This wasn't Yesterday," Shannon replied.

"It was a couple of years ago. Maybe more."

He saw her fingers tighten on the chair's back and she looked up. He thought there was fear in her eyes.

"Don't recall any such girl," she insisted.

"I think you're wrong." He sat down. "I'm going to wait until you do." He was on uncertain ground, for he had no idea when the girl had arrived, nor how, nor when she had left. He was feeling his way in the dark.

The man pulled himself to a sitting position and stared at Shannon, his eyes ugly.

"I'll kill you for that!" he said, his voice shaking with passion.

"Forget it," Shannon said. "You tried already."

His eyes lifted to the woman. "Look, you can be rid of me right away. Tell me the whole story from beginning to end, every detail of it. I'll leave then, and if you tell me the truth, I won't be back."

"Don't recall no such girl." The woman pushed a strand of mouse-colored hair from her face.

Her cheeks were sallow and her skin was oily. The dress she wore was not ragged from poverty, merely dirty, and she herself was unclean.

Disgusted, Shannon stared around the room. How could a girl, such as he knew Darcy Lane to be, have come to such a place? What could have happened to her?

He had looked at her picture until the amused expression of her eyes seemed only for him, and although he told himself no man could fall in love with a picture, and that of a girl who was probably dead, he knew he was doing a fair job of it.

Right now he knew more about her than any woman he had ever known. He knew what she liked to eat and the clothes she wore and the perfume she preferred. had read, with wry humor, her diary and its comments on men, women, and life. He had studied the books she read, and was amazed at their range and quantity.

He had sat in the same booth where she had formerly come to eat breakfast and drink coffee, and in the same bar where she had drunk Burgundy and eaten Roquefort cheese and crackers. Yet despite all the reality she had once been, she had vanished like a puff of smoke.

Alive, beautiful, talented, intelligent, filled with laughter and friendship, liked by both men and women, Darcy Lane had dropped from sight at the age of twenty-four as mysteriously as though she had never been, leaving behind her an apartment with the rent paid up, a closet full of beautiful clothes, and even groceries and liquor.

"Find her," Attorney Watt Braith had said. "You've three months to do it, and she has a half million dollars coming. You will get twenty-five dollars a day and expenses, with a five-hundred-dollar bonus if you succeed."

Whatever happened to Darcy Lane had happened suddenly and without preliminaries. Nothing in all her effects gave any hint as to what such a girl would be doing in a place like this. Yet it was his only lead, flimsy, strange, yet a lead nonetheless.

The police had failed to find her. Then their attention had been distracted by more immediate crimes; the disappearance of one girl who, it was hinted, had probably run off with a lover, was forgotten. Now, he had a tip, just a casual mention by a man he met in Tilford's Coffee Shop, to the effect that he had once seen the beautiful blonde, who used to eat there, living in a ramshackle dump in the worst part of town. The description fit Darcy Lane.

Six months after she disappeared, prospector Jim Buckle was killed in a rock slide that overturned his jeep and partially buried him, and Darcy Lane sprang into the news once more when it turned out that Buckle had two million dollars' worth of mineral holdings and that he had left it to four people, of whom Miss Lane was one.

"Talk," Neil Shannon said now to the disreputable looking pair before him, "and you might get something out of it. Keep your mouths shut and you're in trouble. You see," he smiled, "I've a witness.

He places the girl in your place, and you both were seen with her. You'mhe pointed a finger at the man--

"forced her back into a room when she wanted to come out."