The Ravagers (2 page)

Mac said, “There is always the possibility of a frameup, but in this case it is unlikely.”

“Well, you know more about the over-all situation than I do, sir.”

“You will take over,” Mac said. “The woman with whom we’re dealing is five feet seven and a fraction inches tall, not an Amazon, but big enough to be eligible, I should think, as the advertising gentlemen would say, glove-wise. I can think of no other female candidate at the moment. She is heading east, accompanied by a young girl, her daughter. She is driving a pickup truck, pulling a house trailer.”

I said, “That makes her a Westerner, born or transplanted. No delicate eastern flower would be caught dead in a truck.”

“She has been living in the state of Washington for several years—at the White Falls Project on the Columbia River. You may have heard of it. Her husband is an eminent scientist attached to the project.”

I said, “The picture is becoming clearer. Slowly.”

“Gregory was supposed to make her acquaintance on the road and gain her confidence. However, she was on her guard and his reports indicate that beyond a speaking acquaintance he had so far got nowhere.”

“If he’d got nowhere, why was he killed?” I asked. “That is a very good question,” Mac said dryly. “Perhaps you can find an answer.”

“There’s one catch, sir. My instructions emphasized speed. Secrecy was not, I gathered, of primary importance. You wanted to know why he hadn’t called on schedule, as soon as possible. To find out, I had to enter the motel room. There was no way of doing it without being seen, if anyone was watching. And if anyone was, he’s probably got his eye on me now. Or she has. At least a connection between Greg and me may have been established.”

Mac said, “If it has, it’s unfortunate, but perhaps you can work out a cover story to account for it. Did I remember to ask you to bring along the camping equipment you were using in the Black Hills?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, you will find your subject a few miles east of Regina on the Trans-Canada Highway, in a campground provided by the state—that is, the Province. Check trailer space number twenty-three. It should contain a blue Ford truck and a silver trailer. Here are the vehicle license numbers, state of Washington.” He read them off. “If they are still there, have yourself assigned a camping space and stay the night. Check with me in the morning for further instructions.”

“And if they’re gone?”

“Report back immediately. We may be able to relocate them for you. Incidentally, the woman’s name is Drilling. Genevieve Drilling.”

I said, “Nobody’s named Drilling. That’s making a hole where there wasn’t any. Or it’s a special kind of three-barreled gun.”

Mac ignored my feeble attempt at levity. “The daughter’s name is Penelope. She is fifteen years old and wears glasses for myopia and has braces on her teeth. Apparently mother and daughter were staying over a day in Regina to see a dentist for some minor adjustments.”

“Um,” I said. “Spectacles and orthodontal braces. A real little Lolita.”

“The husband and father is Dr. Herbert Drilling, physicist. Mrs. Drilling has left his bed and board, and is presumed to be joining, sooner or later, a man of considerable physical attraction and questionable political affiliations calling himself Hans Ruyter. We have encountered Mr. Ruyter before under other names. Not really first-team material, but competent.”

I sighed. “Don’t tell me. Let me guess. Could it be that Mrs. Drilling just happened to latch onto a few scientific documents of national importance belonging to hubby, as she went out the door to meet her lover?”

“I’m afraid it could be and is.”

I said, “My God! The old secret-formula routine. How corny can we get? I suppose it deals with some kind of nuclear-power super-gizmo? That’s what they’re doing up there on the Columbia, as I recall.”

Mac said, “As a matter of fact, Dr. Drilling’s specialty is lasers, if you know what that is.”

I whistled softly. “Laser-maser. The latter-day death ray; disciplined light waves or something. Okay, so it’s important, but how did we get roped into this one, sir? We’re not the national lost-and-found agency. J. Edgar Hoover’s boys are real sharp on stolen documents, I’m told, and so are the members of several other agencies. What’s so special about this particular batch of misplaced cellulose that they have to call on the wrecking crew, the hit-them-below-the-belt department, to find it?”

Mac said, “You are jumping to conclusions, Eric. Have I instructed you to find any documents?”

“Oh. Pardon me.”

“There are some rather tricky matters involved,” Mac said. “It seems to be a large and complex operation, only part of which concerns us. After you’ve looked over the ground and the people, I will give you the details, as far as they’ve been entrusted to us. Right now you had better get out there and check the campground while I get on the telephone and try to pull a few international strings to make sure Gregory’s body is discovered by somebody discreet and official.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Study the woman, and at the same time determine whether or not you are in the clear. If not, try to learn who is watching you. Do nothing hasty, however. Unfortunately we are not alone in this, if you know what I mean.”

“I know,” I said. “I hope they know it, too. There’s nothing I hate like being shot by my friends.”

“It’s a chance you will have to take,” Mac said. “As a matter of fact, other agencies have not been informed of our participation, and are not to be informed. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, because it was the easiest thing to say, not because it was the truth.

I lay in the campground bushes for over an hour, gaining patience from the fact that somebody in the silver trailer had insomnia, indigestion, or a guilty conscience. I could hear a person moving around in there restlessly, from time to time. It was two in the morning by now, late to hope to see anything, but finally the trailer door opened and the shadowy figure of a woman appeared.

Her face was only a vague blur in the darkness. Her figure was even less discernible, being camouflaged by some kind of an elaborate, voluminous robe or housecoat. Once on the ground, she had to stop and get a fresh grip on the long skirts to keep them from dragging. While she was doing this, a small voice called to her from inside the trailer. It seemed to paralyze her for a moment. She stood perfectly still; then she replied without looking back.

“It’s all right, Penny,” she said clearly. “I’m just closing the car windows. It’s starting to rain. You go back to sleep, darling.”

She moved over to the Ford pickup, got in, pulled the tail of her garment in after her, closed the door, and cranked up the windows. She sat there for a while. The truck was parked looking my way. The night was too dark for me to make out her features through the windshield glass, let alone her expression, but I could see enough to know when she suddenly buried her face in her hands and bent over the steering wheel, obviously crying. Well, anybody can cry, and a woman who had recently committed a brutal murder might well want to have her reaction out where her child couldn’t see her and ask why.

I reminded myself that it wasn’t proved that Mrs. Genevieve Drilling had killed anybody, and that I wasn’t here to prove it. From Mac’s instructions, I deduced that I was supposed to gain the lady’s trust and confidence for some altogether different purpose, as yet undisclosed. The fact that she could break down and cry was a promising sign. It indicated that an absorbent male shoulder might not be altogether unwelcome, if properly presented.

I suppose this was a coldblooded way of regarding a fellow-human in distress, a woman in tears. If I hadn’t been cold and damp and cramped, lying there, I might have been ashamed of myself. As it was, I just wished she’d blow her nose and switch on a light so I could get a real look at her, and then climb back into her little tin box on wheels so I could leave without being spotted...

A sound behind me drove these unprofessional thoughts from my mind. There was a faint rustling and scuffling back there, indicating that I no longer had this part of the grove to myself. Somebody else was crawling up to take a peek. Then that person was suddenly quiet, as Mrs. Drilling got out of the truck and moved back to the trailer. She drew a sleeve across her eyes, reached up to pat her hair smoothed, squared her shoulders, opened the door, and made her way inside, leaving me still without a clear impression of her face and figure.

I lay very still. She’d said it was starting to rain. It hadn’t been when she said it, but it was now. The sound of raindrops was a murmur all through the woods, but I could hear the man behind me get up and move away. Cautiously, I turned myself around and squirmed after him. The rain helped, making the dead leaves soft and silent and helping to cover any noise I made, but after a little of it I wasn’t so sure I wouldn’t have preferred to crawl on dry ground and take my chances.

The man ahead of me seemed to be fairly tall, and he moved like a reasonably young man, but he was either bald or very blond and crewcut: I could see his bare head gleaming faintly in the darkness even when I couldn’t distinguish the outlines of his body. He wasn’t much good in the woods. He made plenty of noise and he didn’t seem to be quite sure where he was going. After a while he stopped in a baffled way, looking around. He whistled softly.

Another man spoke up from some bushes to the left. “Over here, Larry. Well?”

“Christ, I’m soaked. This is a cold damn country.”

“Who cares about you? What about the woman?”

“She’s still with us. I guess she’s too smart to attract attention by pulling out after paying to stay the night. She was sitting out in the truck for some reason. Looked like she was crying.” The tall man laughed scornfully. “Remorse, do you figure? Jeez, what a job she did on that poor guy’s face, if it was she.”

“If you hadn’t let them slip away from you we’d know for sure.”

“Hell, they were at the dentist! Who ever got away from a dentist in less than an hour?”

The unseen man said, “I wonder where the dead guy fits in, hanging around her. Well, fit. I guess he fits in nothing but a coffin, now. A closed coffin.” I heard him get up. “Now that we’ve put her to bed, we’d better get on the phone and let them know the party’s getting rough. Come on.”

I gave the pair plenty of time to get clear. That made me thoroughly drenched by the time I’d crept back to check on the trailer again. Apparently Mrs. Drilling had found the crying jag relaxing. She wasn’t moving around in there any more. I decided it was safe to leave her until morning, while I dried myself off and tried to find something to eat. My last meal had been a drive-in hamburger a couple of hundred miles south. My last sleep had been further away than that, but sleep, of course, means nothing to us iron men of the undercover professions. At least that’s the theory on which we’re supposed to operate.

It was a segregated campground: the peasants with tents were separated from the aristocrats with trailers. I’d been assigned a space pretty well over to the other side of the wooded area, and I’d pitched my tent to establish my claim before sneaking off to play Indian in the brush. The little Volkswagen was parked facing the front of the tent. From a distance it looked very good to me: it looked like dry clothes and a chocolate bar to ward off starvation until something more substantial could be obtained.

As I moved closer, however, the car suddenly began to look less good. There was somebody in it, a woman, by the hair. My first thought was that somehow the woman I’d been watching had beat me here—after all, I knew of no other woman in the case. Then she saw me coming and got out to meet me, and I saw that she was considerably smaller and wirier than Genevieve Drilling.

She stood by the car, waiting for me to reach her. I could make out that she was wearing dark pants and a light trench coat and light gloves. Her hair seemed to be black or very dark. Waiting, she pulled up a kind of hood to protect it from the rain.

“You’re Clevenger?” she said as I stopped in front of her. “That’s what it says on the registration. David P. Clevenger, of Denver, Colorado.”

“That’s me,” I said. “Now let’s talk about you.”

“Not here,” she said. “The Victoria Hotel, room four-eleven. Just as soon as you get cleaned up. You can’t go through the lobby that muddy.”

“The Victoria Hotel,” I said. “What makes you think I’ll come?”

She smiled. She seemed to have nice white teeth; they showed up well in the darkness. I had the impression she might look quite attractive if I could see her clearly.

“Oh, you’ll come,” she said. “Or would you rather tell the Regina police what you were doing in a room at The Plainsman Motel with a dead body? Of course, the body had been dead for quite a while before you sneaked up and picked the lock to get in, but I don’t really think you want to be called upon to explain your behavior officially, in a foreign country. Room four-eleven, Mr. Clevenger.”

I said, “Throw in a drink and a roast beef sandwich and it’s a deal.”

She laughed and turned away. It was a break of sorts, I thought wryly, watching her walk off. Without expending any effort, I’d learned that I had, after all, been observed earlier. I was now taking steps to identify the observer, as I’d been instructed to do.

She was standing at the dresser in the corner, operating on the cap of an interesting-looking bottle, when I entered the hotel room after knocking on the door and being told it was unlocked, come in.

“Your sandwich is over on the TV,” she said without looking around. “Help yourself, Mr. Clevenger. I’m sorry, they didn’t bring up any mustard or catsup.”

I said, “Who needs it? At the moment I could eat the damn cow with the hair on.”

I went over and took a couple of bites and felt stirrings of returning strength and intelligence. I swung around to look at the small, wiry girl across the room. She was wearing slim black pants, a long-sleeved white silk shirt, and a little open black vest. What the costume was supposed to represent wasn’t immediately clear to me, but then there’s a lot about women’s fashions I don’t dig.