The Demolishers (19 page)

“I wanted to kill them. That big creep with the nasty blue eyes, and the little rat with the wandering hands.”

“I know,” I said, “but the whole point of the exercise was to get them off our backs without killing them. My chief’s got enough homicide-related public-relations problems with this assignment already, without my handing him a pickup-truck load of defunct presidential drug agents to explain away.”

Sandra made a wry face, and said, “Of course you know I’m just talking big. Even if you’d put my gun into my hand with a cartridge in the chamber and the safety off, I couldn’t have pulled the trigger.” She shrugged. “You did get that tape to where it would do the most good, I ought to be satisfied with that. I'guess I just overreacted. Little Miss Modesty, that’s me. Dumb! So I’ve got a body and some men saw it, big deal!” She giggled abruptly. “But you’re really a devious monster, aren’t you?”

“Meaning what?”

“Your men all knew perfectly well who was in that room with us. They didn’t think for a minute we’d been taken prisoner by the Caribbean Legion, like you told Mr. Tallman.”

I said, “Sure they knew; they’re the ones who identified Tallman’s people in the first place, when I spotted them following us. But Tallman would have thought I was bluffing if he’d been aware of that. He wouldn’t have believed my men would attack if they knew whom they were attacking.”

“Would they have?”

I said, “Hell, yes. Trask wouldn’t have cared. He’ll take on anybody he’s told to take on: he doesn’t give a damn whether it’s the KGB or the CIA or points in between. His boys are trained to go for any throat they’re aimed at, without hesitation. Does a Doberman stop to ask silly questions when he gets the eat-’em-up command? ’ ’

Sandra shivered a little. “And they look like such nice boys—all except the fat man, he looked tough. And you look like such a nice man, too!” She gave me a sideways glance. “Matt, why did you bring me along, really?”

It was a complete change of subject, and it seemed to surprise Sandra as much as it did me.

I said, “Hell, we went all through that a couple of nights ago. You’re bait for the trap.”

“But Tallman spoiled the trap yesterday, and it seems unlikely they’ll fall for it again very soon. That’s what you told Mr. Trask last night. But you haven’t said anything about sending me home. Sure, you kind of promised to take me along when you interview those people in Newport, but you’re not running a guided tour for young ladies, and I’d probably let you out of your promise if you asked nicely.”

I said, “Maybe I don’t want to send you home because I don’t think you’d be very safe at home.”

She was watching me closely. “But why should you care, Matt? I mean, you’re not in the bodyguard business, you’ve got important work to do, and there’s no real blood relationship or anything. If they blow me up again, or shoot me down, what’s it to you, really?”

I glanced at her. “What are you plugging for, small fry, a declaration of undying love?”

She made an impatient gesture. “Please stop that. I get a very strong impression, not a very flattering impression, that you have no designs on my ... my affections or my young white body, even though you weren’t above ogling it when you got the chance. It’s some kind of a lousy sense of responsibility, isn’t it, although there’s absolutely no reason why you should feel responsible for
me.

“You’re wrong there,” I said. Then I said, “Oh, God, here we go again. Another detour.”

We were silent while I guided the car into the proper lane, as the freeway traffic piled up for another bumper-to-bumper procession between the big red plastic hats indicating the part of the roadway we were permitted to use while they beat the other part to death with jackhammers. The vehicle ahead was a large motor home the rear of which let us know that it was the rolling residence of Dot and Harry from Duluth. There was also a sticker reading:
god save America—and he’d better hurry up!

“How am I wrong?” Sandra asked. “Ex-father-in-law isn’t much of a relationship. There’s no real obligation, Matt.”

“Maybe not to you,” I said. “But I have an obligation to my son. I didn’t do much for him when he was alive. From what you tell me about him, he wouldn’t have appreciated being avenged, so that’s something I’m doing just for myself. But he loved you very much, and I can do one thing for him that I’m sure he would have liked:

I can do my best to see that you make it okay, that nobody kills you, and that you get all the help you need to see you through to a good life, even though it has to be a life without him. You’re an independent kind of girl, and I didn’t tell you this before because you might have objected to having a nursemaid; but I hope very much that you’ll accept me as a kind of beat-up guardian angel until things settle down.”

She was silent for a little, and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. ‘‘Some guardian,” she murmured at last. “Some angel! The first thing he does is let me in for an involuntary striptease!”

Then she grinned at me, and I knew everything was all right. We made it through the detour, and some other detours, and spent that night in Richmond, Virginia. The following day we battled our way past Washington, D.C., and made an end run around New York, taking the Garden State Parkway to one of the upper bridges crossing the Hudson, and then cutting east and south to pick up the Connecticut Turnpike which is no longer a true pay-as-you-go turnpike. The big trucks kept misjudging their brakes and crashing into the cars lined up at the toll-booths and killing people. You’d think they’d do something about the trucks; instead they tore down the tollbooths. Who says we aren’t a permissive society?

“Old Saybrook ahead,” I said at last.

“What?” Sandra sat up beside me, making the standard feminine gesture of pushing her hair into place, even though she still didn’t have enough hair to worry about. “Oh. I must have been asleep. You must be dead after all this driving. Old Saybrook?”

“Next exit.”

“Do you mind just taking me past the house? It’s not very far.”

I switched on the turn signal and cut over to the right; a few minutes later, under her direction, we were driving along a shady street—well, it would have been shady in the summer. We were far enough north now, in New England, that most of the leaves were off the trees. The houses were smallish and set back from the roadway on grassy lots; there were no sidewalks.

“The white cottage on the right. Can we stop?” “Better not,” I said.

“I know, it’s getting late.”

“It’s not that. Somebody may have found out that you own it. They could have figured you’d be checking it out about now if you were heading for this area. They could have prepared a welcome for you.”

“Yes, of course. It’s hard to remember that we’re at war. Thanks for letting me look at it. We ... we were very happy thefe.” After a moment Sandra cleared her throat. “I’ll have to get somebody to tie down that boat cover and clean up the lawn.”

Just before dinner time we checked into a large frame hostelry overlooking Newport Harbor. We’d had to cross a couple of bridges, one quite high, to get there, since Rhode Island is cut up by lot of water and Newport is on a large island—bearing the same name as the state, incidentally. There was a small marina on the seaward side of the hotel and a large parking lot to landward. Our rooms were on the second floor looking down on the parked cars.

While Sandra did whatever girls do before going out to eat, I made a reservation for dinner; then I called the control number. I got hold of Trask for a change—usually I did my daily talking to the phone watch—and learned that we’d picked up a flea when we drove past the house in Old Saybrook; a human flea, as yet unidentified, in a green Toyota two-door. Smart people. Scared off by Tail-man in Savannah, they’d figured out where we were going, as I’d thought they might. They’d waited for us to come to them rather than chase us along hundreds of miles of freeway.

I said, “That’s fine. I was hoping they’d reestablish contact. Observe but don’t disturb. That won’t leave you much manpower for us, so concentrate on keeping the Porsche free of loud presents. I’ll try to survive without a chaperone, away from the car. Anything else?”

“Yes. Have you read any Florida papers recently?” “No, why?”

“Vicious drug wars. Two pushers executed gangland style in Pompano Beach for trespassing on the wrong territory. At least that’s the public version. Actually, the cops have pretty well established that the victims were the two men involved in the Mariposa bombing. They’re not pursuing the murder investigation too energetically, on advice from Washington.”

“So Varek’s people got the men; what about the Angela girl?”

“It didn’t work out quite the way it had been planned. The Delgado woman in our office came up with some new information; that gal wields a mean computer. She had the two men pinpointed. Varek was supposed to hold off to give their female accomplice a chance to join them; but I guess he’s the impatient type. He moved too soon and all he got were the men. He’s still looking for the blonde. However, Louis reports that, with help from Washington, his team has located Arthur Galvez and Howard Koenig; the boys are waiting for the word to close in.”

“Good enough. We do seem to be gaining on it a little. . . . Just a minute, somebody’s at the door.”

“That’s the report. Watch your ass, hero. Trask out.” Replacing the phone, I heard the knock again and realized it was Sandra at the connecting door. “Come in, I’m respectable,” I said. “Well as respectable as . . . Hey, what’s the matter?”

I jumped to my feet and hurried to her, where she stood in the doorway a little uncertainly. She was wearing high-heeled white sandals and clean white slacks, a change from the scuffed jogging shoes and grubby jeans in which she’d been traveling today. She was wearing nothing else except the Colt .380 automatic.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t know if I’m making a big fuss about nothing.”

‘‘Tell me!”

‘‘Maybe I’m overreacting, but when I came out of the bathroom a maid was putting some flowers on the dresser. The crazy thing is, she looked just like. ... I’m almost sure she was the girl outside the Mariposa. . . . Matt!”

I guess I’d grabbed her hard enough to hurt a little. I kicked the door closed behind her. I hauled her across the room and shoved her down behind the farthest of the two beds, and held her there, lying flat beside her. Nothing happened.

Sandra started to raise her head. “I guess I did overreact. Sorry to be so chicken. ...”

I pushed her down again as the room she’d just left exploded with a flat, hard bang that blew the connecting door open again and shook a picture off the common wall. A little whitish smoke drifted in through the open doorway. I held Sandra long enough to make sure she wasn’t going to break down; but Matthew had picked a good unhysterical type.

‘‘We’d better find you a shirt,” I said. “It looks as if we might have company. ’ ’

He was moderately tall, a lean, sandy man in tweeds with a thin, sandy moustache that he liked to stroke with the middle knuckle of his right forefinger. He was doing it now.

“Beautiful!” he said. “Simply beautiful!”

Well, there’s no accounting for tastes. I’ve seen a number of wrecked rooms and I found nothing in this mess that made it lovelier than any of the others. But the local blast genius, whose name was Colonel Farnham, was studying the holes in the walls and ceiling with admiration.

“Note the even distribution,” he said. “A really fine little antipersonnel device employing number four buckshot.”

“Yes, well, what do you think, Colonel?”

This question came from the uniformed gent who’d brought us the tweedy bomb specialist. He was standing by the splintered hall door. High-ranking policemen have the same look of bulletproof perfection as high-ranking military men; you can’t imagine them bleeding on those immaculate, snug-fitting cop suits, or soldier suits, even assuming there’s human blood inside them. This one carried all the right cop hardware in all the right places and you knew you’d never find a speck of rust or dust on it anywhere. He was a stocky character with a square brown face and thick, glossy, black hair—not a strand out of place, of course.

He spoke again, when the man addressed didn’t answer immediately: “Just a preliminary opinion, Colonel?”

Famham turned to face him. “I can tell you nothing with certainty, of course, until I’ve had time to examine all the evidence. But the signature is the same, if you know what I mean.”

“The signature?”

“The technique. The approach. What we sometimes call the handwriting. Yes, the people who constructed this device could very well be those responsible for the bomb employed at the Silver Conch Restaurant a few months ago. That was a different type, of course, designed to be effective over a larger area; but like this one it was no bigger than necessary. Economical. Usually they go for overkill in a big way. They have fifty-megaton dreams even when it’s merely a question of blowing up a small hotel room.”

Waiting beside Sandra for the top cop to get around to us, I put in my dime’s worth. “There have been t\£o other bombings that might interest you, Colonel. The restaurant La Mariposa in West Palm Beach, Florida; and the Howard Johnson Restaurant in San Juan, Puerto Rico. If you’d like to compare some more signatures.”

The uniformed man by the door gave a short bark of laughter. “Who’d blow up a Howard Johnson? That’s kind of like staging a full-scale SWAT operation to shoot Smokey the Bear.”