Operation Stranglehold (2 page)

“We were told to come and ask around for you.” The big man was still watching me warily. For a man of his size he acted as mild as cheddar cheese. “The boss thought you’d be around.”

“Who knows you came?”

“Just the boss. He said not to tell anyone.”

“Winters is the boss?”

“That’s right.”

Bruno shifted position on the couch with a half-stifled groan. “I’m gonna sue you—an’ that stupid bitch—for a million each!” he muttered in a thick-sounding voice.

My face never changes expression.

That’s because it took two years and a couple dozen skin grafts to make me a new one. Here’s what happened: the gas tank exploded while I was under a car, exchanging shots with a few irate sheriff’s deputies.

Smitty was acute enough to feel something of my reaction to his partner’s threat, though. The big man sounded anxious. “Shut up, damn you!” he squeaked in his high-pitched voice. I had reholstered my gun when we came inside, but Smitty kept watching my right hand as though expecting to see it reappear.

“Who you tellin’ to—” Bruno began indignantly.

“Shut UP!” Smitty cut him off.

He was on the correct wave-length. If it had been just me, I’d have buried the pair of them behind the cattle pond. That route meant questions for Hazel to answer eventually, though. I had to finesse the situation that had been dropped into my lap.

I motioned Smitty toward the telephone on the walnut coffee table. “Call your boss,” I told him. “Tell him you couldn’t find us. That the neighbors think we’re in Alaska.”

He blinked. “Alaska?” Smitty was not a fast take.

I remembered a prospectus Hazel had received from Nate Pepperman, her financial adviser who managed her scattered interests. Pepperman’s office was in Hudson, Florida, where I’d first met Hazel. “Skagway,” I specified. “To check out a new process for recovering ore from supposedly worked-out mines.”

The big man’s lips moved silently as he repeated it to himself. Then he surprised me. He took out his wallet and removed a telephone credit card from it. I moved around behind the couch so Bruno couldn’t see what I was doing. I kept my back to Smitty.

When he dialed, I marked off the clicks on the palm of my hand with a ballpoint pen. The area code was 202. That’s Washington, D.C. I call there once in a while myself. The rest of the number that Smitty dialed was 224-3020.

I turned around and faced the big man as he spoke. He reeled off the numbers on his credit card, then waited. “Yeah, Al, it’s Smitty,” he said finally. “Let me talk to Ed.” I took out the automatic and showed it to him in case he had any notion of saying anything other than what I’d specified. He almost dropped the telephone.

“No, I won’t talk to you!” he half shouted, his voice cracking. He sounded glad to be able to take his frustration out on someone. “Let me talk to the senator, damn it!” There was a short silence. “This is Smitty, chief,” he said. The big man sounded tired. “The guy’s not here. The neighbors say—” A resonant-sounding voice I could hear all the way across the room crackled in the receiver, cutting Smitty off.

“—say he’s in Alaska,” Smitty went on when he could get a word in. He repeated the story I’d given him. “Yes, sir, I admit it don’t sound likely, but that’s what we keep gettin’.”

Hazel entered the living room, distracting me. She was carrying a first aid kit. “Take off your coat and shirt,” she told Bruno. He sneered at her, but stood up awkwardly and began to comply.

Smitty had hung up when I returned my attention to him. “What’d he say?” I demanded.

“To keep on lookin’,” he responded gloomily. “In Alaska.”

I’d have asked more questions if Hazel hadn’t been there. Senator? If the title wasn’t honorary, it spelled real trouble. I’d felt things couldn’t get worse when I thought I’d shot a government man, but if he turned out to be a bigshot politician’s courier—

“The plane’s all set to go,” Hazel said to me. She was dressing Bruno’s flesh wound competently. He kept flinching away from the antiseptic she daubed on his arm. Hazel has had practice patching up people. She’s worked on me a time or two when it took more than a butterfly bandage. “What do we do now?” she queried when she finished with Bruno.

“Get them off the ranch,” I answered. We couldn’t let them talk to anyone. A gunshot wound tends to get a lot of questions asked about it.

I took out my automatic again and handed it to Hazel. “Ride herd on our guests,” I said. “I’m going to make a phone call from the upstairs extension.” Hazel was balancing the weapon in her hand with easy familiarity when I left the room. Neither Bruno nor Smitty looked as though he was thinking seriously about going anywhere.

Upstairs, I went into our bedroom and dialed an unlisted number in Kansas City, Missouri. “This is the hard metals man from the north woods, Doc,” I said when I had the connection. “Still taking boarders?”

“Are you one of them?” the familiar smooth voice inquired.

“Not this time.”

“Then I might consider it. Too much heat goes with your ugly carcass. Although you’ve been out of the underground news lately, come to think of it.”

“My usual good management. What’s the nearest private airstrip to your hospital?”

“Fairfax Municipal Airport. Why?”

“I’ve got two patients for you.”

“The rate is five hundred a week each. Inflation, you know.” The tone was silky.

If Doc’s rates sound unreasonable, it’s because he runs the kind of private hospital that keeps patients whether or not the patients want to be kept. I wanted Bruno and Smitty out of circulation while I sorted things out.

“Have an ambulance at Fairfax Airport in—let’s see, two hours time differential—make it six hours on your clock, Doc. Be prepared to sedate the patients.”

“My men will be prepared.”

I hung up the phone and went downstairs. “File a flight plan for somewhere in Colorado,” I told Hazel. “We’ll change it in the air.”

We moved fast after that. I drove the unwilling but submissive Bruno and Smitty to the ranch airstrip. I tied the unhappy-looking pair into the rear seats of the six-seat Cessna. It left a pair of empty seats between them and us up front.

“Couple more chores at the house,” I said to Hazel. We rode back to the ranch yard. I got into the rental car in which Bruno and Smitty had arrived. Hazel followed me in her MG while I drove the rental job to the cattle pond. I eased it up the sloping west bank, climbed out, and pushed it down the slope into the deepest water. The car floated for a couple of minutes before it sank out of sight. The pond was so muddy it wouldn’t have been visible if it had been hung with floodlights.

“Call the sheriff’s office and ask about road conditions east over the passes,” I told Hazel when I climbed into her MG. “Anyone checking later will get the word and figure the pair disappeared while on the road after us.”

It only took her five minutes, and then we rode back to the plane. I’m not an air-travel enthusiast, but I feel most comfortable in a plane with Hazel’s competent hands at the controls, especially when I’m in the copilot’s seat next to her. I can not only see what’s going on, but it gives me a chance to be useful once in a while.

The Cessna’s twin propellers churned up a huge cloud of dust behind us as we started down the strip. The takeoff run was bumpy until the weight on the nosewheel eased off. I snapped up the landing gear retracting lever at Hazel’s hand signal, then relieved her of managing the throttles so she could keep both hands on the flight controls.

Hazel always remains silent until she completes her check-in radio calls and reaches cruising level, which for us at the moment meant an 8000-foot climb above Ely’s 6500-foot ground altitude. Between Ely and Colorado Springs, the destination Hazel had given on the flight plan, the Rockies peaked above 14,000 feet, so I knew we’d be climbing higher when we reached the Utah-Colorado border.

The redhead stretched out our climb because we had plenty of room ahead of us before we ran into any sizable hills. When we leveled off, and she adjusted the throttle and mixture controls for fast cruising power, I could see the lava outcroppings that dotted the salt-bleached sand of the desert south of Salt Lake City. Hazel made some final trim corrections, then took a compact from her handbag and inspected her makeup critically.

It was now permissible to talk. “Does the name Edwin Winters mean anything to you, baby?” I asked.

“Not a thing,” she replied promptly.

“How about Senator Ed Winters?”

She half turned to took at me. “Of course. ‘Cotton’ Ed Winters. Although he made his money in oil. Why?”

“What about him?”

She shrugged. “A wheel-and-a-half in the Senate.” She thought about it for a moment. “And just about everywhere else, too, I guess. What’s your interest in Senator Winters?”

“Would you believe that the pair of ward heelers in the rear seats were sent by him?”

“And you
shot
one!” she exclaimed. She pushed on at once to the jackpot question. “Why would Senator Winters send anyone to see you, Earl?”

“Damned if I know,” I said ruefully.

Silence settled down in the plane’s cabin.

Hazel retuned the radio, turning to the frequency of a navigation aid some distance ahead of us. She watched the radio compass needle settle on a new heading, then made a slight course correction. The ground reeled backward beneath us. Hazel pointed ahead, then indicated the mouth of the Grand River Valley on the map she had spread on her lap. “Coming up on Grand Junction, Colorado,” she announced.

“Can we make it to Kansas City, Missouri, nonstop?”

She glanced at the fuel gauges. “With this 40-knot tail wind, no problem.”

“File it, baby. Fairfax Municipal Airport. The sooner we get rid of the two sandbags in the back seat, the better.”

She started to say something, then broke off as she changed the propeller pitch and added power. We climbed another 4000 feet, and for the next forty-five minutes we gazed down upon the immensity of the snow-capped Colorado Rockies. The mountains disappeared abruptly at the eastern front range, and flat, unimpressive-looking prairie stretched to the horizon.

Hazel turned to me again. “What was in the note the men brought to the ranch? It couldn’t have said much. It only took you a second to read it.”

I’d been expecting the question, but still I hesitated. I told her, finally.

“But that’s dreadful, Earl!” She sounded horrified. “We’ve got to do something!”

“Baby, if we don’t put this pair on ice, we’re not likely to be doing anything for quite a while.”

“They deserved every bit of what they got, the way they acted,” she said loyally. “Especially that—that little beast, Bruno.” She wrinkled her pert nose at the memory.

“I’m not planning to try to convince a judge that they deserved it. Push this scow along a little faster, will you?”

We fell silent again.

The dry-looking, strawlike ground cover beneath us began to turn dark with greener vegetation as Kansas fell behind us. The sun was well to our rear by this time, and dusk began to close in, hastened by a canopy of thick cloud forming overhead. Hazel had pulled back the throttles some time ago, and we had gradually lost altitude until we were down to 5000 feet, homing in on Kansas City radio.

I’d had nothing to eat all day except for the half cup of morning coffee and a share of a thermos bottle of soup that Hazel had thoughtfully brought aboard. My stomach was making noises that at times seemed to equal the rumble from the starboard engine next to me. My tailbone ached from sitting, and my sensitive facial skin had received a little too much sun. I was ready to get back on the ground.

“There’s the field,” Hazel said.

I couldn’t see it.

The city spread out ahead of us, but I couldn’t pick out anything that looked like runways. The area was blotchy with heavy shadows from the lowering clouds, and it was already speckled with pinpoints of light turned on against the approaching night. A good deal of the city’s center was obscured by a pall of wreathed industrial smoke.

I was startled by a sudden buffeting of the plane, followed by a sharp rattling sound as if an unseen giant were flinging handfuls of rice at the windshield.

“Rain squall!” Hazel grunted. “Tighten your seat belt!”

Her knuckles whitened on the controls as she tried to maintain close to an even keel. The Cessna surged in irregular leaps. I took a look over my shoulder. Our silent passengers’ faces were a light green in hue. “Drop the wheels and give me half flaps!” Hazel commanded. “We’ve got to get down before this wind and rain moves across the field. It could be a little hairy.”

It was more than a little hairy.

I couldn’t tell if it was the strength of the sudden storm or Hazel’s hasty, jockeying reactions that tossed our bouncing Cessna around. I couldn’t see much outside. It looked as if we were flying through a waterfall. Raindrops thick as gelatin covered the windows. “Full flaps!” Hazel bugled at me. She was handling the control wheel like a kid steering a dodge-em car at a carnival.

“Full flaps!” I reported. I barely had the words out of my mouth when I felt a sickening feeling as the plane’s seat dropped out from under me. The next second my spine buckled from a sudden impact below.

“Damn!” Hazel exploded. “Ran out of air six feet too high!”

But we were on the ground, in one piece although shaken up.

I started to say something expressing my relief, but Hazel’s uplifted palm cut me off. She was listening to the control tower’s taxiing instructions. She guided the plane to the end of the rain-glistening runway and pulled off to one side. Blinking red lights approached us through the increasing murk. Behind the lights was the long, sleek body of a white ambulance.

Two white-jacketed attendants who looked like overweight members of the Kansas City Chiefs’ taxi squad sprang from the ambulance and boarded the Cessna as I swung open the door on my side. There was no conversation. The attendants took charge of Bruno and Smitty. That pair of worthies looked almost relieved at our parting, though they flinched from the hypodermic shots expertly administered to them.