The young man in the bushes stiffened suddenly, watching something out in front of him. He put his face to the stock of the rifle once more, peering through the big telescopic sight. I looked where he was aiming, and there came the black pup, loping across the hillside straight toward us, pausing every so often to check his radar. I mean, he wasn't tracking me; he wasn't following the roundabout way I'd come. He was no ground-sniffing hound. He had his nose in the air, as a bird-dog should, and he was reading my scent on the gentle breeze, and making straight for the source of it.
A foot and a half of chewed-off leash dangled from his collar. Well, nobody'd told him not to chew his leash in two. Nobody'd really told him to stay put, either. Orders, he might have obeyed, but a little leather string had been only a momentary hindrance to be disposed of with the nice, sharp, adult dental equipment that had recently replaced his puppy teeth. A couple of good chomps, and he'd been on his way to find the boss.
I looked bleakly at the boy in the brush below me: he had the rifle ready, he was preparing to shoot. I remembered that the real Hank had been shot, we still didn't know why. I knew a funny little stirring of anger: the juvenile son-of-a-bitch was going to shoot my dog. This was sentimental and irrelevant, but professionally I was just as concerned, because the pup was essential to my Grant Nystrom cover. It occurred to me that I might have got hold of an important idea here, but I had no time to develop it.
I just recocked the.357 and brought it back into line and put gentle pressure on the trigger. The drop-your-gun-and-stand-up-with-your-hands-above-your-head routine looks great on TV, but with a pistol at eighty yards I needed my target perfectly still. If I started shouting silly orders and gave him a chance to roll aside, I'd probably muff the shot, and that would give him a crack at me with his high-powered rifle. At this range, with that outfit, he couldn't possibly miss. So I just steadied the coarse revolver sights on the widest point of the target and increased the trigger pressure until the piece fired.
The.357 made an ear-splitting racket, rearing up in recoil in spite of the two-handed grip I had on the skimpy butt. For a moment, it blotted out the man in the bushes. When I got it recocked and lined up once more, he was lying exactly where he had been. The only difference was that all the sharpshooting tension had gone out of his body, and his head had dropped slightly, resting peacefully on the rifle stock as if on a pillow.
6
THE ADDRESS I'D BEEN GIVEN FOR the afternoon rendezvous, to be used if the morning contact should fail for any reason, was out at the edge of the town's business district, in the middle of an incompletely developed block containing several vacant lots. Diagonally down the street from a convenient corner drugstore- well, convenient for me-it stood by itself: a flat-roofed one-story building that wasn't very wide across the front, but ran back some distance from the street. There was a neat sign above the door:
PASCO ANIMAL CLINIC ARTHUR WATTS, D.V.M. OFFICE HOURS 9:00-5:00 (Weekdays) 8:30-12:00 (Saturdays)
I couldn't actually read the sign from the drugstore telephone booth in which I waited, but I'd got a good look at it, driving past. As I watched through the front window of the drugstore, a big yellow Cadillac convertible with California plates drew up in front of the building. A dark-haired woman with a figure that was youthful but not really young, if you know what I mean, got out deliberately.
It was quite a production. She was wearing a yellow silk pantsuit-tailored jacket and slim trousers-plus yellow sandals and a white blouse with a million ruffles. At least that was the impression I got from a distance. A white froth of lace encircled her neck, spilled down her bosom, and dripped from her wrists. It was quite a tourist costume to spring on a backward little town like Pasco; or any town for that matter.
She walked around to open the curb door of the Cadillac and brought out a big, gray poodle, clipped and brushed to perfection. They disappeared into the veterinarian's office together.
"Yes, sir," I said into the phone. "It was a big disappointment. No Holz."
"There was no reason for you to expect him, Eric." Mac's voice lost no crispness traveling three thousand miles from Washington, D. C. "Not yet. Who was the man you shot?"
"Just a fuzzy-faced punk with a fancy rifle. He's not in our files, I'm pretty sure. Oregon driver's license issued to Michael P. Bird."
"Bird?"
"Like with feathers." I said. "He was using a heavy Douglas barrel on one of the good Mauser actions with a custom stock. Mesquite or some such light wood with caps and inlays of horn or dark plastic. A three-to-nine power variable scope cranked up to maximum magnification. I guess he wanted to see which button of my shirt he was going to perforate."
Mac's voice was dry: "The young man seems to have gone to a lot of trouble with his murder weapon."
"I doubt that it was originally designed as a murder weapon, sir," I said. "With its small caliber and that big telescopic sight, it's the kind of outfit you'd have made up for varmint-shooting, as they call it: accurate long-range popping at nuisance rodents like groundhogs and prairie dogs. It's a hobby with some people, and most farmers and ranchers are all for getting rid of the little pests and the holes they dig. Our lad just switched to a heavy big-game bullet instead of the light varmint type. So loaded, he could take anything up to deer easily, not to mention man. Hell, a.243 is considered heavy artillery these days. They've been using a lousy little twenty-two in Vietnam."
"Very well, Eric. What about the girl?"
"You have the description and the name she's going under and the car she's driving. Mr. Smith's boys have been checking her out, but I should have known all about her from the start-all I needed to know, anyway. Any girl who has an automatic transmission handle masquerading as a sports-car gearshift lever, and stick-on hubcaps pretending to be instant wire wheels, is bound to be kind of a fake herself."
"Still, it seems her trap didn't catch you totally by surprise."
"I can't take the credit for that, sir," I admitted. "She had me pretty well convinced she was on the level; she's a very convincing young lady. If the pup hadn't tipped me off, I'd probably have walked right into it."
"You haven't made it clear just how he tipped you off."
I said, "Why, he's a retriever, sir. A good nose is part of the package. Also he's a male dog; a little young but very definitely masculine. And still he sat there calmly grinning at me within three feet of an enclosure that was supposed to have held a bitch in heat! Discipline or no discipline, if there'd recently been a receptive lady dog in that kennel, he'd have made some kind of an attempt to investigate those fascinating female smells, wouldn't he? When he took off with me into the brush without even a sniff in that direction, I knew our Pat was lying like hell."
Pausing, I grimaced at the Cadillac half a block away, wondering if it had anything to do with my problems. I hoped not. One woman in pants was plenty for one assignment.
When Mac didn't speak, I said into the phone: "Well, it's too bad the girl didn't return to the scene of her unsuccessful crime. I'd like to ask her a few questions, and doing it over her partner's dead body might have given me a certain psychological advantage. I waited up there to the last minute that would still let me down here with a little time to spare, but she didn't show."