Run Lethal p-8, page 12
part #8 of Parker Series
No, no, that was wrong, too, that was German. In his confusion and haste, backing away from English, he had switched automatically to his native tongue.
Spanish, that was what he wanted, Spanish, but for just a second there was none of it in his head. He floundered, then the Spanish word for road came to him camino and the rest of the language followed.
So now he said, in Spanish, ‘I beg your pardon, I did not mean to startle you. I have been walking, looking for the road.’
‘Road? You want the road?’ The old man spoke a dialect full of clicks and gutturals, so Baron could barely understand him.
Baron nodded. ‘Yes. I want to continue my journey.’
The old man waved his hand. ‘This is the road,’ he said.
Baron looked. There was almost no light left, but now he could make out the ruts, the hump in the middle, the swath across this land cleared of stones and pebbles. This was the road, he was standing on the road, the old man had been sitting beside the road.
He said, ‘Where does this road go?’
The old man pointed south. ‘Aldama,’ he said. He pointed north. ‘Soto la Marina.’ .
Neither name meant anything to Baron. He said, ‘Which way leads to a bigger road, with automobiles and trucks?’
The old man pointed north again, towards Soto la Marina. ‘At the village,’ he said, ‘you must take the road west. To Casas. To Petaqueno. To Ciudad Victoria, which is a great city.’
Ciudad Victoria. That was the first name Baron knew. He said. ‘How far is that, Ciudad Victoria?’
‘From the village, perhaps more than one hundred kilometres.’
One hundred kilometres. Sixty miles, a little more. Baron said, ‘No cars before there?’
‘Sometimes at Casas. Or Petaqueno, very often.’
‘And how far to your village, to Soto la Marina?’
The old man shrugged. ‘Five kilometres.’
Three miles. ‘Is there somewhere I could sleep there tonight?’ Because another three miles was the most Baron could walk without sleep and food and water.
The old man said, ‘In my house, near the village. I am going home now, come with me.’
‘Good.’
They started walking along the dimly seen track, and the old man said, ‘The suitcases are heavy?’
‘No. Not too heavy.’
‘They have valuable things inside them?’
Baron turned to look at him. Was this old fool thinking of robbing him? But he was too old, too frail, there couldn’t be anything to fear from him. Baron said, ‘Just some clothing and things like that. Nothing valuable.’
‘Perhaps an electric razor,’ said the old man.
‘No.’
The old man was a moron. He did plan to rob Baron tonight, while Baron slept, but he was too stupid to keep his mouth shut and so he’d given the game away.
The only thing to do was take care of the old man as soon as they got to his house, hut, hovel, whatever he lived in. Knock him out, tie him up, so Baron would be able to sleep unworriedly all night.
They walked the rest of the way in silence, each full of his own thoughts, and the last of the evening’s light faded away, leaving a world so dark Baron had only the sound of the old man’s sandals to keep him from straying off the road. He couldn’t see a thing and couldn’t understand how the old man could see. Although it probably wasn’t seeing after all but simply knowing the road for all of his life.
Ahead of them, the smallest of lights flickered, an anaemic yellow. The old man said, ‘My house.’
As they got closer, Baron saw that the light was a candle inside a small dirt hut. The window through which the light gleamed was simply a square hole in the thick dirt wall, with neither frame nor glass.
‘A poor place,’ the old man said, apologizing.
‘No matter,’ Baron said, and it was true. What did it matter where he slept tonight? Tomorrow night he would sleep in the Mexico City Hilton.
The door was made of various grey pieces of wood haphazardly nailed together, the final result hung from cloth hinges embedded in the wall on the left side. The old man pushed this door open cautiously, as though it had fallen apart more than once before, and motioned to Baron to precede him. ‘My house,’ he said again.
Baron went in.
The old man came after him, crowding him in the doorway, saying, ‘I wish you to meet my son.’
The man rising from the wooden table in the middle of the room was not old, not frail, not small. He was huge, and he was smiling beneath his moustache.
Behind Baron, the old man was saying, ‘This gentleman has many valuable things in his suitcase
‘
Baron turned for the doorway, but it was too late.
9
EARLY morning sunlight tugged at Grofield’s eyelids, urging him awake. Reluctantly, mistrustfully, he allowed his eyes to open, he allowed his mind to begin to question where he was.
The boat. He remembered.
What time was it? What day was it? Not yet midnight when he’d left the island, and he could vaguely remember sunlight as he’d lain on the open unmattressed bed, and he could remember even more vaguely crawling from that bed in darkness onto the far more comfortable carpeting of the floor, and now there was sunlight again, and he was still lying on the floor, and he couldn’t begin to work out how much time had passed or what day it was supposed to be.
Or where Baron was. Where was Baron?
He moved, tentatively, and was pleased to find that nearly everything worked fine. Everything but the left arm. That didn’t want to work at all. It felt like the Tin Woodman’s left arm, in need of oiling.
He wondered about himself, how sick or healthy he was, how weak or strong. He kept testing, trying this and venturing that, and the first thing he knew he was on his feet. He felt shaky, a little dizzy, and hungrier than he could ever remember being, but he was on his feet.
He could even walk, if he was careful. Being careful, he moved around the open bed and over to the kitchen area of the cabin, and there he found some food and drink. He ate three cans of soup, cold and undiluted, spooning the stuff straight out of the can, mixing it with crackers and spoonfuls of cheese spread and long swallows of whisky. He sat in the chair by the formica counter and ate everything in reach, and when he was done he felt as though he might survive.
He was feeling good enough now to begin to think, to try to figure out what had happened. The boat was grounded, in close to shore. He was obviously the only one aboard her, so it figured Baron had gone ashore and taken off with the suitcases full of loot. What he couldn’t figure was why Baron had never bothered to look for him, why he’d left this loose string untied behind him.
In any case, the situation was bad. He’d been unconscious at least one day and night, making it probably Monday and maybe even Tuesday. The island had been demolished according to plan, but the plan had been demolished too. Parker and Salsa and Ross were all dead, Baron had the money and the diamonds, and Grofield was stuck God knew where with a bullet in his back.
He shook his head, thinking about how bad the situation was, and then he went slowly and carefully up on deck. The body of Ross was gone, too, he saw, and looked the other way, towards shore.
Bad. Desert type of place, nothing in sight.
Still, Baron must have known what he was doing, must have had some reason to stop here. Maybe just out of sight there was a city. Monterey. Or Corpus Christi. Or Eldorado.
A stray idea occurred to him. Was there any chance he might catch up with Baron, get the handle back? He didn’t know how much of a lead Baron had on him, maybe a full day’s worth, but was there nevertheless a chance it could be done?
The background music began, floating around his head. Arabic, partly, with threads of international intrigue. Foreign Legion, decidedly. A very Gary Cooper sort of role.
He felt his pockets and found a crumpled pack of cigarettes and some matches. It was good the cigarette he lit was rumpled and bent, it added a dash of Humphrey Bogart to the blend. The cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he leaned on the rail at the bow and gazed towards shore.
What the hell, he’d have to go that way in any case. He couldn’t stay here. If he were to get the medical attention he needed, he had to find civilization, and that inevitably meant following in Baron’s footsteps. If, in so doing, he caught up with Baron, so much the better.
He’d have to prepare. He had no idea how far a town or city might be, or how much trouble he’d have reaching it. What might be a simple walk for Baron, hale and healthy, could be rough for Grofield the way he was right now.
He went back down into the cabin, in search of food. He’d left a few crackers, and these he stuffed in his shirt pocket. An empty Jack Daniels bottle would serve to carry water, and a half-full Jack Daniels bottle would serve to carry Jack Daniels. A wedge of American cheese went into his trouser pocket.
In a closet in the fore cabin he found a yachting cap. A hat would be good protection from the sun; he put it on and went up on deck, carrying the two bottles with him.
On deck, he changed his mind about one detail and decided it was foolish to carry two bottles, it would just weigh him down. He took three or four swigs from the bottle with the whisky in it, then tossed it overboard. Water would be more useful this time.
He clambered with difficulty over the side, waded through the shallow water, having trouble keeping his balance with all the rocks and stones underfoot, and made his first rest stop when he reached dry land.
The morning sun was still low on the horizon, making the sea gleam like a shield. To walk away from the sea. Grofield should head due west, and this meant keeping his back to the sun. Simple.
A halo of music. It was a martial air now, with a muted touch of wistfulness in it, a minor key. There’ll always be an England, a France, some damn place. Grofield moved out in time to the music, walking on his shadow stretched out in front of him, a thin elongated El Greco silhouette of himself.
He was somewhat unsteady, both because of the wound and because of the whisky. Still, he kept due west and he made fairly good time. The shadow of himself he walked on slowly shrank as the sun rose higher in the sky behind him, and when the shadow was no taller than the original he became aware of the heat.
It was building slowly but steadily. The early morning had been pleasant, if not cool, but now heat was massing on the floor of the world, stacked like woolly invisible blankets through which he had to walk. The sun beat on the back of his neck, and he knew for sure he already had a bad burn there. His left shoulder ached, but not badly.
He tried to make the water last, but he kept being thirsty, very thirsty. He hummed silently as he walked, and dreamed of other things, different times and places, the faces of people he knew and once had known.
He found he was walking towardsthe sun.
‘No,’ he said aloud. He turned around, very carefully. The shadow was a dwarf now, bunched up before his feet on the rock-bedraggled ground. He walked again.
‘This was very stupid,’ he whispered, and realized he was thirsty again, and held up the bottle to see it was empty. He grimaced at it, disappointed with the behaviour of the damn thing, and let it fall. It shattered on a rock.
He fell, not too badly, and got up again. He walked on, and fell again, and this time he didn’t get up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered into the ground, apologizing to himself. ‘I shouldn’t have left the boat.’
He had been asleep, or unconscious, he couldn’t tell which, and then suddenly he was awake again. He rolled over on his back, unmindful of the stones, regardless of the sun’s light, and stared into the sky, and he thought he saw Parker coming down out of the sky on a cloud.
‘Sacrilege, Parker,’ he said aloud, and smiled, and closed his eyes.
FOUR
1
PARKER said, ‘There’s something there.’ He pointed down at the ground.
‘I see it,’ said the pilot.
England said, ‘If that’s our man, and he’s alive, we have no legal right to take him off Mexican soil.’
Parker had no time for England’s worries. He was staring towards the ground, trying to see suitcases. The helicopter lowered, and he could see it was a man down there, but no suitcases. Then the man rolled over on his back, staring up at the helicopter with its bulging transparent front bubble, the three men in it staring down at him, and Parker saw it wasn’t Baron. It was Grofield, and that was impossible.
Parker had last seen Grofield on the dock by the boathouses back at the island, just before he’d been shot. The bullet had hit him high on the right leg, spinning him around and throwing him to the ground, knocking him cold, but that was the second bullet. The first bullet had hit Grofield; Parker had seen him jerk forward.
When he’d come out of it, back there on the flaming island, the boat and the suitcases were gone, and a raging petulant England was standing over him, shaking him, shouting that Baron had got away. Parker had had no time nor inclination to look for Grofield’s body. There had been so many there, he’d just assumed one of them had to belong to Grofield.
The important thing was the money, and it figured the money was with Baron. According to England, Baron was on the boat, headed south.
Parker couldn’t stand then, though he kept trying. ‘Where?’ he said. ‘Are you on him?’
‘No. In all this wreckage you people caused, we lost him. We know he was heading south, it makes sense he’d try to get to Mexico, Cuba’s too far for him to reach, he must know that.’
‘Get on him,’ Parker said. ‘Find him.’ He was still trying to stand, still falling back. ‘And fix this leg,’ he said. ‘Fix it. Fix it. I can’t stand on it, fix it.’
They took him out to a Navy ship on a launch, where a guy in white cut off his trouser leg and somebody else in white, who said he was a doctor, probed around and took out the bullet. ‘You ought to stay off this,’ he said.
‘I can’t,’ Parker told him. England was still hanging around, yapping in his ear, wanting to know where he’d been the last week, why he’d ditched his tail, why Grofield and Salsa had suddenly turned on the men assigned to watch them at the island. Instead of getting on Baron, England stood around talking about ancient history.
When Parker told him to shut up and find Baron, England said, ‘We can’t look now, it’s the middle of the night, everywhere but on that damn island. It’s still burning, do you know that?’
‘When?’ Parker asked him.
‘When? Right now. Look at the red on the porthole, that’s fire,man.’
‘When do you look for Baron?’
‘When it gets light. In the morning.’
Parker said, ‘Nobody goes to him but me. They don’t go to him without me, that’s got to be part of it.’
The doctor said, ‘Quit moving around. Do you want me to patch you up or don’t you?’
England said, ‘Why? Why should we take you along. Your part is finished, Parker, don’t you know that?’
Parker told him, ‘He isn’t anywhere you can put a legal collar on him, not yet. That’s where you want him, isn’t it? Where you can put a legal collar on him. You still need me, to take him from where he is and put him where you can grab him.’
England didn’t like it. He chewed it like a cow chewing its cud, and finally he nodded and said, ‘We’ll see,’ and Parker knew that was that. He told the doctor, ‘I’ll sleep till morning if you’ll get off me.’
The doctor was irritated. He left without saying anything.
In the morning, other people did the searching. ‘We could do nothing by ourselves,’ England said. ‘We have a hundred men doing the searching.’
Carey was back with England now, the two of them sitting with Parker on the deck of the Navy ship. Carey said, ‘All they’ll do is find Baron, let us know where he is. Then we’ll go get him.’
Parker still had trouble standing, and almost as much trouble sitting. He was stretched out on his side on a cot set up on deck. He felt like a fool, and he felt impatient. He said, ‘Your hundred men better be good.’
But they didn’t find anything, not all day long, and after dark they had to quit again. Parker was up by now, limping up and down the metal corridors, raging. ‘You need a hundred men to zip your fly, you people. You and Karns’ crowd, you’re all alike. No one of you can do a damn thing, so you figure a whole crowd of you can do everything.’
Carey had gone away, and only England was around to listen to it. ‘We’ll find him,’ he kept saying. ‘He must have gone to shore by now, and tomorrow that’s where the search will concentrate. Every possible inch of Gulf coastline he could have reached.’
‘They’ll lose their planes by morning,’ Parker said.
But in the morning they found the boat, run aground on a barren stretch of Mexican coastline about two hundred miles down from the border. ‘They saw the boat,’ England told Parker, ‘but they didn’t see Baron.’
‘The question is, did Baron see them?’
‘They said the boat looked abandoned,’ England said. ‘It looked to them as though he’d run out of gas.’
‘Do we go look?’
‘Surely.’ England nodded his head, showing he was sure. ‘They’re getting a chopper ready for us now.’
A chopper turned out to be a helicopter, a rickety-looking thing like a cross between a Sten gun and a beanie, with a plexiglass bubble in front where the pilot and passengers sat. Only three of them were going, Parker and England and the pilot. England didn’t say anything to the pilot about who Parker was, and the pilot didn’t ask.
The ship they’d been on had been moving south all night and lay now off the Mexican coast, about forty miles from where the boat had been sighted. Parker and England got there in the helicopter in less than half an hour. The pilot landed near the beach, and waited at his controls while Parker and England went over to the boat.
Parker could walk on the leg now, but stiffly; he was bruised on that side from hip to knee. A bullet from a Colt .45 punches more than it cuts, and the one that had hit Parker had left him with a leg that operated all right but that ached as though it had been worked over with a baseball bat.
