Crobey began to lift it toward the muzzle but then he paused.
The shooting had stopped. She heard somebody yelling in Spanish. Crobey slowly lowered the shell to the ground and reached for the submachine gun on the stone beside him. He was scowling, listening to the voice.
“What’s he saying?”
“I can’t make it out.”
“Harry Crobey! Hold your goddamn fire a minute. Want to talk!”
She reached for a grenade and put her finger through the pin ring. “Don’t trust the bastard, Harry.”
“Nothing to lose,” he replied. Then he let his call sing out: “Come ahead and talk!”
She saw the man emerge from the smoke dragging something heavy along the ground. The man had a weapon in his free hand but it was down at his side and not aimed anywhere in particular. He had a wild hard face, very primitive, huge cheekbones, a look of savagery.
“Is that him?” she whispered. “Rodriguez?”
“Yeah.” Crobey didn’t lift his weapon. He only watched Rodriguez struggle upslope, dragging whatever it was.
“Maybe they want to make a deal,” Crobey said sotto voce.
“Don’t listen to him, Harry.”
Rodriguez was halfway between the trees and the cave—perhaps forty feet away from them. He stopped there, out in the open. With powerful effort he lifted the object he’d been dragging. She saw it was a man—then she recognized Emil Draga. Rodriguez propped Emil Draga more or less upright, holding him in both arms, the submachine gun loose on its sling over his elbow.
Rodriguez shouted, “We’ve got Glenn Anders. They just brought him in.”
Crobey gave her a long look. She had nothing to say; she felt helpless. Crobey looked at the heaped ordnance and then lifted his voice: “No trades, Rodrigo.”
“The hell with trades. This is the one who killed the Lundquist boy.” Rodriguez dropped Emil and Emil fell like a stone, quite obviously dead by the way he collapsed. “I guess we’ve had enough of this, Harry,” Rodriguez shouted. He flung his submachine gun away into the mud and shoved both hands in his pockets. His stance was defiant. He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the smoke that poured up from the camp. “That’s my goddamn fishing boat you just burned up, you know that, Harry?”
She said, “What’s he raving about?”
“Shush a minute, ducks.”
“Listen, Harry—you hear me?”
“I hear you fine, Rodrigo.”
“You can have Anders, you’ll find him back in the trees there. And you can keep that stuff in the cave, Harry, it’s a gift from me to you. We’re taking both Jeeps. You’ll have a long walk down and you’ll have to backpack Anders but I need a half day’s jump on you. Time to get my wife and my girls out. All right?”
She murmured suspiciously, “It’s too easy.”
Crobey shook his head. He yelled, “Fair enough. Go on, Rodrigo, beat it.”
Rodriguez turned around and walked away, head down, hands in his pockets, kicking at stones in the mud. He disappeared into the trees. There were voices—a bit of argument, possibly—and then she heard movement in the woods down there. Silence after that, and she sat tense with her hands on the grenade ready to arm it; Crobey watched the trees unblinkingly. Then after a time they heard the Jeep engines roar, and growl away.
After that they heard nothing and Crobey slowly sagged back on his haunches.
She shook her head in disbelief. “It’s a trick, Harry.”
“No.” Then he leered at her. “You look like hell, ducks.”
“So do you.” His cheek had stopped bleeding but he was a mess.
“Can you walk?”
“I guess. But what if he’s left somebody out there with a rifle?”
“He hasn’t.” He took her arm. She had no resources left—only the fear that somebody out there was waiting to snipe at them when they exposed themselves. Harry cocked the Uzzi and held it one-handed, ready to shoot, and helped her walk out into the hazy dripping twilight.
Below the cave the fires were dying. She brooded for a while at Emil Draga’s corpse.
They went down slowly, Harry half carrying her, limping. “He’s not a bad bloke,” Harry said. At first she didn’t know who he was talking about. Then he said, “Mostly I guess it’s a mistake to get to know your enemy. You might turn out to like the bastard. I think you’d like Rodrigo.”
“Maybe.”
“Ducks—”
“What, Harry?”
“Thanks.”
She began to smile a little. She looked down at the wreckage of her clothing and the bruised patches of exposed skin. “I am a lovely sight for you, aren’t I,” she murmured. “I’d like to get cleaned up and then I’d like to get into a nice cool bar. With you.”
“Right, ducks. Let’s find Glenn, now.”
“Ah, Harry, I hate to admit such a ghastly cornball thing but I do love you. Without reservation. And I guess that will do,” she mused in surprise, “for openers.”
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1979 by John Ives
cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
This edition published in 2011 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media
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