Donald Hamilton - The Interlopers

"Sure," I said. "Everything except why this particular woman gives a damn whether I go for her or not."

She said, smiling again, "I guess I underestimated you. I thought you'd just put it down to your personal magnetism. Most men would."

"In my line of work," I said, "those who overestimate their personal magnetism tend to die very young. Come on, Libby, give. You want something, and it isn't me. What is it?"

"Oh, I don't mind you," she murmured. "In fact, I rather like you."

"Thanks."

She hesitated. "Tell me something. That young punk with the gun, the one you shot-that would probably be the one who killed Grant, wouldn't it?"

"Probably," I said. "Why?"

She reached out and took me by the arms, drawing me closer, so close that our bodies touched here and there. The contact obviously wasn't accidental; very little about this girl was accidental, I warned myself. She looked up at me searchingly for a moment.

She said, "Because I want you to get the rest of them, too."

I was just as conscious of the fact that there was nothing but Libby under the thin pants and blouse as she wanted me to be; but this was beside the point.

"Sure," I said. "Will just the scalps do, or do you want the ears, too? Or should I bring you the heads in a basket, individually wrapped like fancy oranges?"

"Don't be funny," she said quietly. "I'm not joking. I want you to get the remaining two we know about-the girl and the tall man with the dog-and any others that may be working with them; I want them all. Dead." Her eyes were steady on my face. When I didn't speak, she went on: "I just paid you, last night, for the one you've already taken care of. Please don't think I fall into bed with every man I meet. I owed you a debt, and I paid it. Do you understand?"

I said, "Libby, I'm afraid you're a screwball. I don't like working with screwballs."

"That's too bad," she said calmly, "that's too bad, because you're stuck with me just as I'm stuck with you. And I'm telling you that for every additional one you get, you can collect the same fee. Me." She waited again for me to speak. When I didn't, she continued in the same cold, steady voice: "Of course, if you'd rather have money, I've got that, too. Name your price. But get them for me. Kill them for me. All of them."

HANK WAS SO GLAD TO SEE ME that he tongue-washed my face all over before darting off to take care of his business in the bushes. He was really a pretty good pup. In spite of having been locked up all night, he'd made no mess in the camper. He hadn't chewed up anything, either, although there was plenty of gear in there for him to exercise his teeth on if he got the notion.

I should have played with him a bit-at least tossed him something to retrieve as a reward for good behavior- but at the moment human considerations took precedence in my mind over matters canine. I whistled him back, therefore, as soon as he'd concluded his rendezvous with nature, locked him up again, got into the cab of the truck, and hesitated, feeling for the bottle of vitamins in my pocket.

It was still there, and whatever it contained besides dog pills was presumably intact since I was in a good position to swear that Libby Meredith had had no chance to get at it and, in spite of distractions, I was fairly sure nobody else had entered the room all night. I don't sleep that soundly, particularly when I'm not alone in bed. There were certain things I was supposed to do now to make Mr. Smith happy, but they didn't weigh on me very heavily. I had other things on my mind; I could play secret agent later.

I started the truck and drove out of there fast, heading north. What I really wanted was a telephone, but I didn't want to be seen using one, since I preferred not to be asked, later, whom I'd been calling. Of course I'd used one in Pasco, but then I'd been following Mr. Smith's childish instructions to the letter, since there had seemed to be no good reason not to. Now the situation had changed rather spectacularly, and I figured I'd better be a little more careful until I'd heard Mac's ideas on the new developments.

All the way up through Seattle, the freeway traffic was too heavy for me to determine whether or not I was being tailed. Even after I'd left the city limits behind, I still had enough company to make it look as if half the population of the state of Washington had decided to move up to British Columbia, but apparently most of these northbound emigrants were making for Vancouver, on the coast. When I turned off the big coastal highway and headed slantingly inland on a smaller road that crossed the Canadian border near a little town called Sumas, I had more privacy, but I decided to wait a little longer to be quite sure I was safe from observation.

The border ritual was no trouble at all. I told the man I had a sporting rifle and shotgun, and he said fine, just keep the weapons unloaded and cased while in Canada. He didn't even ask me about sidearms as they generally do, so I didn't have to lie about Grant Nystrom's.357 which was chafing my hipbone. He just checked on Hank's rabies inoculation and waved me on.

Pretty soon I was rolling eastward along a four-lane highway more or less paralleling the border. The day was bright and warm and windless, and the truck ran straight and true down the smooth pavement, like a locomotive on tracks. It's one of the mysteries of the automotive business, how few people really appreciate the virtues of the ordinary American half-ton truck. On the highway it'll keep up with the fastest traffic, and off the road it'll go just about anywhere you'd care to take a jeep. Please understand, I'm talking about the real truck now, not about all the dressed-up little bastard delivery vans that are sold under sporty names to people too proud to be seen in an honest, work-horse commercial vehicle with the engine Out front.

The vehicle Nystrom had bequeathed me was a fast, powerful, and rugged machine. I wouldn't have matched it against a Ferrari on a twisty road-race circuit, but I thought it would probably run down any ordinary car on any ordinary back-country road, particularly one that was paved badly or not at all. For the sparsely populated areas of the continent toward which my mission was leading me, I couldn't have asked for better transportation.

Since angling was still part of my act, I stopped to buy a fishing license at a tourist-bureau office set up along the highway to make such purchases convenient for visitors to the province. Afterwards, I turned north again, according to instructions, on a two-lane blacktop road leading up the Frazer River-a historic waterway, I'd been told: the ancient gateway to the interior. No single car had made the whole route behind me. Of course, somebody could have assigned me a surveillance team, two or three different cars taking turns, and probably Mr. Smith's people were using just this technique to watch over me, since I'd detected no signs of them. As for the opposition, the people in whom we were interested, if they were going to that much trouble it meant that my cover was blown anyway and a phone call more or less wouldn't make much difference.

I wasn't really worrying about the whole west coast Communist spy apparat ganging up on me. What concerned me was the possibility that a single gent with a suspicious nature-say a guy named Stottman-might be running an unofficial check on my activities in the hope of catching me doing something Grant Nystrom wouldn't, like telephoning Washington, D.C.

By now I'd taken as many precautions as the possibility would seem to merit, but just to be on the safe side, rather than be seen standing in a roadside booth, I stopped for lunch at a small-town restaurant that boasted an inside pay phone. As a final precaution, I made my report to Mac by way of our relay man in Vancouver, insuring that there'd be no incriminating record of a long-distance call across the border.