“Well, you waited long enough,” Hale complained.
“There were other matters claiming attention,” I told him. “Why don’t we go outside where we can talk? Bring your beer along and perhaps you can give me some information and perhaps I can give you some information.”
“Perhaps,” Hale said, but he picked up the bottle and glass of beer and carried them along with him.
He was a suspicious individual. He didn’t wear a hat and had a shock of wavy, dark hair. I estimated him at about a hundred and eighty pounds, about five foot eleven or so.
The guy had surely been in trouble. In addition to his black eye he had evidently had a bloody nose and some of the blood was still on his shirt.
He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days and his skin had that oily look which comes from extreme fatigue.
We sat down at a table in the outdoor dining room.” There was no one else ill the place. I ordered a couple of bottles of ice-cold beer.
“You seem to have had a beating.” I told Hale.
He said, ruefully, “I thought I was smart, but I was dealing with people who were smarter than I was.”
“Who gave you the beating?”
“Puggy.”
“Who’s Puggy?”
“Hell, I don’t know his last name. All they called him was Puggy.”
“And how did Puggy happen to meet you?”
“I was following a dope shipment.”
“We know an about that,” I said.
“No, you don’t,” he said. “Nanncie may have told you, what she knows, but she doesn’t know all the details. The—”
“She does now,” I said. “The little houseboat on pontoons that makes regular trips up and down from San Felipe on a trailer drawn by a Ford pickup. The pontoons are made with a removable cap on the rear, so cunningly fitted that it looks like a welded job. But the cap slides off and the interior of the pontoon is filled with dried marijuana.”
“And how do you know all this?” Hale asked.
“The authorities know it now,” I said.
“The hell they do! Then my story has gone out the window.”
“Perhaps not,” I said. “There are other angles which may make your story newsworthy, provided it’s drama enough.”
“Well, it’s dramatic enough,” he said.
“What happened?”
He said, “Nanncie got, wind of what was happening. She tipped me off to the dope smuggling and the people who were doing it, but I needed to have some firsthand information. I couldn’t do it all on hearsay. I had to know just how the stuff came across.
“Anyhow, I got pretty much of the first part of the story together and was typing’ it like mad when Nanncie got in touch with me late at night and told me we had to run for cover fast.”
“Why?”
“The beauty operator who had told her had let the cat out of the bag and Nanncie was in danger, and if she was in danger, I would be, too. They had followed me when I was tailing them.”
“So what did you do?”
“I didn’t want to have a bunch of dope runners on my trail. These men are desperate. I decided to move and not leave any back trail. I also decided to bust that gang of dope runners and not disclose my identity until after they had been captured and were serving a term in prison.
“So I packed up everything in my apartment. I got a friend of mine to help me and we moved out, stored my stuff, and I drove to Mexicali where I knew that these dope runners made their rendezvous.”
“Go on,” I said.
“I knew who was doing the dope running and I knew they were smuggling it in at Calexico, but I didn’t know all of the details and I wanted to get a story based on firsthand observation.
“Anyhow, I picked up this dope runner, a man they called Eddie. If he’s got another name I don’t know what it is. He was driving a Ford pickup. I thought at first the stuff came up in that pickup, but I followed him down to San Felipe and saw that he hitched onto a houseboat that was mounted on a trailer, a small houseboat on pontoons.
“I knew that the shipment was due to cross the border at seven o’clock last night. I knew that much because I heard Eddie talking about the second car that was to pick him up at Calexico.”
“The second car?” I asked.
“The second car,” he said, “equipped with Citizen’s Band radio. That’s the way they work. After the stuff gets across the border at Calexico, they send a scout car on ahead. The scout car is absolutely clean. Anybody could search it all day and couldn’t find even a cigarette stub that had any pot in it.
“That car goes on ahead, quite a ways ahead. If there’s a roadblock of any kind, or if the border patrol has a station where they watch the road, this scout car sends a message back to the car with the dope by Citizen’s Band radio. So they the dope car turns off or may turn clean around and go back.
“You understand, Lam, I’m telling you this in confidence. I want the exclusive story rights to it. You also understand that we’re dealing with something big here. This isn’t any little two-bit dope-smuggling outfit that brings in a few pounds at a time. This is big stuff. They’re dealing with many thousands of dollars.”
“Go ahead,” I told him.
“Well,” Hale said, “I knew that the scout car with the Citizen’s Band radio was to be waiting just north of the border so that it could pick up the dope car, but I didn’t know it was being followed by a muscle car that was to come along behind. I suppose I should have. I guess I was dumb.”
“What happened?”
“I started trailing that Ford pickup with the houseboat on the trailer from San Felipe. I didn’t have any trouble until we got almost up here, then suddenly the muscle car closed in on me.”
“What happened?”
“Some fellow wanted to know who I was following the hell I thought I was. He was abusive and the first thing I knew he’d slugged me.”
“What did you do?”
“I slugged him back, and that was the mistake of my life. This guy was evidently an ex-pugilist. I think that’s where he got the name of Puggy. The driver of the car called him Puggy, anyway.”
“And what did they do?”
“I took a shellacking,” Hale said, “and then I had a gun and I made up my mind. I wasn’t going to take any more. I jumped back and pulled the gun, and that’s where I made my second mistake, I found myself looking down the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun that the driver of the pickup had produced out of nowhere.”
“So what?”
“So,” Hale said, “they took my gun away from me. They put me back in my own car which Puggy proceeded to drive. They went down a side road which they knew and they tied me up good and tight, stuck a gag in my face, and warned me that the next time I wouldn’t get off with just a beating. In fact, the driver of the car wanted to kill me, but Puggy said the Mexican drug ring didn’t like murders and they wouldn’t commit one unless they had to.”
“Go on,” I said.
“I stayed trussed up in that confounded car all night,” Hale said. “Then this morning about eight o’clock a fellow driving along the side road from some ranch saw the car parked there, stopped to look it over, and found me, bound and gagged in the rear of the car. By that time my circulation had stopped. I was a stiff as a poker and so sore from the beating I’d taken I could hardly move.”
“Keep talking,” I said.
“Well, he was shocked, of course, but he untied the ropes and...”
“Untied them?”
“That’s right.”
“Go ahead.”
“He untied the ropes and took the gag out of m mouth, put me in his car, took me to a ranch house, he and his wife gave me hot coffee, then some kind of Mexican dish of chile and meat, some tortillas, and native kind of white cheese and some sort of fish.