The Ravagers Read online

  “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.

  3

  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 dri
nk 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.

  4

  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.

  I asked, “Do I call you by a name or do you answer to any loud noise?”

  She said without turning her head, “I’m registered as Elaine Harms. If you’ve got to call me something, that’ll do.”

  “Sure.”

  “I hope you like Scotch. It’s as cheap as anything up here, which isn’t cheap.”

  “Scotch is fine.”

  Normally I’m a bourbon-and-martini man, but I don’t consider it a principle worth fighting for at three in the morning in a strange girl’s hotel room. Anyway, I was less interested in her liquor than in the face she was being so careful to hide from me. When she turned, there was something deliberate and challenging in the movement that would have warned me, had I needed warning. She came forward with a drink in each hand and a rather malicious gleam in her eyes, watching me for signs of shock. To hell with her. I’ve played poker since I was a boy; and I’ve seen plenty of men—and women, too— with damaged faces. Only a couple of hours back I’d seen a man with no face at all. She couldn’t scare me.

  I took the glass she held out and said, “Thanks. You’re a lifesaver, Miss Harms.”

  “I hope your sandwich is all right, Mr. Clevenger.”

  “Swell,” I said. “Two more like it would just about bring my day’s intake up to the subsistence level.”

  It wasn’t really very shocking. I mean, she’d had smallpox as a kid, that was all. It had left her skin with a general over-all roughness. It was too bad, of course, but not as bad as if she’d had the fragile type of good looks to which a rose-petal complexion is essential.

  Instead, she had a kind of street-urchin face with a good big mouth and a small upturned nose. With a smooth skin, she’d merely have looked cute; now she looked both cute and tough. The smallpox scars did for her what a dueling scar does for a man; they gave her a hard and dangerous look. In her pants and silk shirt, she resembled one of the deadly, often similarly pockmarked, sword-packing young dandies of centuries past, who’d skewer you as soon as look at you.

  She said, “You sound as if you’d come a long way fast, without taking time to stop and eat.”

  “I was down in South Dakota at noon today. Well, yesterday.”

  “What brought you up here?”

  “A phone call,” I said. “A phone call about a stupid jerk who might have got himself into trouble.” I had worked out some kind of a story, driving over here, utilizing as much of the truth as I safely could. “I was supposed to wipe his nose and send him home to daddy.”

  “Who and where is daddy?”

  I shook my head. “You want a lot for a roast beef sandwich, Miss Harms.”

  She persisted: “What was your connection with Mike?”

  I didn’t know what she’d been told by Greg. I gambled and said, “We were in the same line of business.”

  “He claimed to be an insurance man from Napa, California. He said he was on vacation, just a tourist.”

  I said, “I’ve got a card somewhere that says I sell insurance in Trinidad, Colorado. If you believe it, you’re dumber than I think. If you believed Mike, you’re dumber than I think.”

  “But you aren’t saying what you really do?” When I didn’t answer, she said, “We aren’t getting very far, are we?”

  “I’ve got no place to get,” I said. “I’m just here because I was invited.”

  She studied me thoughtfully. After a little, she said, “The redcoats are attacking Bunker Hill, Mr. Clevenger.”

  I don’t suppose that makes much sense to you, in the context, but it made a few things clear to me. It was her way of telling me who she was and asking me to identify myself similarly, if I could. From time to time somebody makes a hopeful attempt to correlate all the various undercover activities of our vast and unwieldy government, to make sure that they synchronize properly, and that nobody unwittingly sticks a thumb in a colleague’s eye. It doesn’t work out very well, for several reasons, one being that no cynical and experienced agent is going to be happy entrusting his life and mission to the irresponsible cretins working for some other department. Half the time we don’t even trust the people in our own outfit.

  This girl was not one of ours. Mac would have told me if there was someone around I could call upon for assistance. That made her a member of another agency, and now I was supposed to give her a brotherly kiss of recognition and say something about waiting till we saw the whites of their eyes—that isn’t the countersign we were actually using, of course; but the real one was on about the same level of corniness. They all are.

  According to official theory, Miss Harms and I would then sit down and compare notes about the Drilling operation in an atmosphere of mutual trust and confidence, and work out a plan for a joint campaign. You can see how the idea might appeal to a bunch of Washington efficiency experts who’d never been asked to stake their lives on some unknown character’s reliability, on the strength of a widely distributed phrase that could easily have been compromised.

  I said, “You’ve lost me, doll. Anyway, it was really Breed’s Hill, wasn’t it?”

  I won’t say whether, under other circumstances, I would have given the correct response. Normally, we’re told to cooperate within reason, but it’s left to the discretion of the agent on the spot and it’s always a ticklish diplomatic question. In this particular case, of course, I had my orders. Mac had put it quite plainly: Other agencies have not been informed of our participation, and are not to be informed.

  Elaine laughed quickly. “I’m sorry. I guess my mind was wandering.” She hesitated. “Well, would you mind just telling me what you’re doing here?”

  I said, “Sure I’d mind.” She started to speak, and I interrupted: “Now don’t go threatening me again with the Regina cops, Miss Harms. I bet you don’t want cops any more than I do. If you want to know about me and my business, tell me who’s asking. If you were to show me a little gold badge, for instance, my attitude could change very suddenly.”

  She frowned. “What makes you think I—”

  I said, “Why don’t we try operating on the assumption that we’re both reasonably bright people, for a change? That was a password or something you just tried on me, wasn’t it? That Bunker Hill crap. So, since you seem to want a lot of questions answered, suppose you first tell me who you are, and why you’ve been watching a room that’s got a dead man in it, and following people who entered that room, and checking them out with corny countersigns. If it’s Uncle Whiskers who wants information, I might oblige. If it’s Little Red Riding Hood, or Smokey the Bear, to hell with them.”

  She smiled faintly. “You’re getting very tough all of a sudden, Mr. Clevenger.”

  I regarded her for a moment longer; then I swallowed the last of the sandwich and washed it down with the last of the drink and set the glass on the television set. I took two Canadian dollar bills from my wa
llet and laid them beside the glass.

  “There you are,” I said. “Nobody’s obligated to nobody. If there’s any change, give it to your home town Community Chest. I see you’ve got a phone, so you’ll have no trouble calling the cops after I’m gone.” I grinned at her and headed for the door. “See you in jail.”

  “Mr. Clevenger.”

  I stopped with my hand on the knob. “If it’s got a question mark at the end of it, you’re wasting your breath.”

  “I am working for the United States government, Mr. Clevenger. Uncle Whiskers, if you prefer.”

  I turned around. She had seated herself on the big double bed. As I came back across the room, she watched me closely for clues to what my reaction would be.

  I went to stand over her and said grimly, “Well, I sure had to put on a big act to get that out of you, doll. Now show me something that says it besides you, and we’re in business.”

  She shook her head. “We don’t all carry little gold badges, Mr. Clevenger.”

  “I’m supposed to take your word for it?” I let her brace herself for an argument; then I shrugged. “Well, okay. I’m not hard to get along with. You come part way, I’ll come part way. Maybe we’ll get together eventually. I work for Western Investigation Services, 3001 Palomas Drive, Denver, Colorado.”

  She looked surprised. “A private detective?”

  “That’s right. Private investigator, private op, private eye, shamus, snooper, you name it.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  I said, “You give proof, honey, you get proof. If your word’s good, so’s mine.”

  She laughed. “That doesn’t necessarily follow.”

  I said, “Hell, it’s easy enough to check, if you’re really a government girl. All you have to do is pick up that phone and ask for long distance. Washington will have the dope back for you in the time it takes us to have another drink, if your bureaucracy’s halfway on the ball.”