The Filthy Five (KM 029), page 4
part #29 of Killmaster Series
only with a knife, while a plane or helicopter sprayed machine gun bullets at him.
Three hours later he pulled himself up on the sand, crawled to just beyond the surf line and collapsed. Even for a man in his excellent condition that last hour had been rugged. He turned on his back and lay panting, his great chest heaving, staring at the low, lead-bellied clouds. The wind was still low keyed, but insistent, moving sand about him. Nick felt at his trunks, felt the hard outline of the waterproofed book-shape he had been given by Monica Drake. He found himself hoping that it was worth all this—his danger and exhaustion, and the woman’s death. It was one hell of a way to shuffle off this coil, he told himself. A mass of bloody tissue in the belly of a shark!
He rested for five minutes, then forced himself up. It was dark enough now to cover him. To the south he could see lights that could only be Mayaguez. It was going to be a good long hike back to his car. Nick kicked off the flippers, thinking about that. It was taking a risk, of sorts, to return to the car. At least a possible risk. It depended on factors which he had no way of assessing at true value—the jeep patrol, for one, and that Aussie bastard.
If the Aussie had made a report—as he should have done—it was possible that someone would put two and two together and come up with a beachcomber. They might start a search of the coastal area as well as the sea, and if they found the car, they would set a trap, waiting for him to return.
On the other hand, and Killmaster admitted that he was weary and out of temper—and that this influenced his thinking—on the other hand the Aussie had not appeared suspicious that Nick was anything more than a casual trespasser, simply another beach bum to be warned off. And the man was a drunk, or at least a heavy drinker. The chances were good that he had made no mention of the incident.
Nick rubbed a hand through his close-cropped hair, trying to scrub some of the salt out of it, and glanced again at the distant lights of Mayaguez. Too far, damn it! And not good, anyway, because if a man does not wish to attract attention he does not stroll into town clad only in swimming trunks and a knife sheath. Nick set off down the beach, heading north, back to where he had left his car.
It took him an hour and a half to walk it. He met no one on the beach and only an occasional car passed on the coastal highway. Each time he was careful to flatten himself on the sand to avoid being picked up by car lights.
At last he recognized the stand of cocoa palms and almond trees that marked his enclave. He crossed the highway and circled around in the brush to approach the car from the far side. It was a waste of time. The old car waited, alone in desuetude, a darker silhouette against the darkness, and nothing but the wind stirred in the little clearing.
Nick dressed quickly. He put the waterproofed package and the film in the false compartment under the seat and screwed down the top. Anything that might in any way connect him with the beachcomber he took down and clumped into the pool, including the machete. He kept the scuba knife in its sheath on his leg.
He had to crank the old wreck to get her going, but at last she chuffed and puffed and began to shake with ague. He turned on the lone head light and took her cautiously out to the highway, where he turned south. The battered car would never get him to San Juan, that he knew, but Ponce might be possible. From there he could get a plane to San Juan. There was a missile tracking station near Mayaguez, and Hawk had said that if he got badly jammed up to appeal to them for help. Hawk was sending an AXE field agent to the tracking station on a standby basis.
Nick lit one of his long cigarettes as the car rattled and quivered along. The smoke tasted delicious. He smiled. He didn’t need the standby man at the tracking station. He had what he had gone after the mysterious little package, and soon now he would turn it over to Hawk and get the usual curt “well done.”
Nick frowned a bit. Maybe now Hawk would tell him something of what was going on, explain matters a bit. It wasn’t exactly fun working in the dark.
Nick tossed the cigarette stub away and frowned again. The trouble was—he had the idea that even Hawk, at this stage, didn’t know a hell of a lot more than Nick himself! That made it all very cozy—
She came screaming out of the undergrowth lining the road. She ran into the wavering light of the single headlamp, her red mouth open in a scream, her slim arms raised imploringly.
She ran toward the car as Nick jammed on the brakes. She was looking behind her now and pointing, still screaming. He could hear her voice, thin and hysterical, over the laboring engine of the car.
“Help! Help me— Oh, help me—help me!”
She kept repeating the words as she ran toward the car. Nick leaped from the seat and ran toward her, remembering to avoid the light, knowing that it might be a trap of some sort and knowing also that it was better to act, to move, than freeze like a sitting duck.
The one thing that inclined him to think that it might not be a trap was that the girl was naked. But for a tiny pair of black panties—and they were ripped—she was stark naked.
She made no attempt to cover her nudity. Still screaming she ran into Nick Carter’s arms, ramming her deep, full breasts against his hard chest and screaming, “Help me—please help me—t-they tried to r-rape me!”
Chapter 3
NASTY AND SUSPICIOUS thoughts crawled through Nick Carter’s mind, like toads in a dank cellar. He was thinking on the run, on the move, as always, and his chief thought was that they were trying the old, old sex gambit on him.
All this ran through his mind as he pushed the naked girl away from him, down into the shadows beside the car, muttering, “Stay down!”
Nick ducked under the weak headlight beam, plucking the scuba knife from its sheath—wishing he had taken along the machete—and plunged toward the sounds he heard coming from the edge of a cane field. He was sure it was a setup—at least ninety per cent sure—and that he was intended to see, and hear, the men involved. This would cement the girl’s story. If he were wrong about matters—he would get notice of it any second now in the form of a bullet
Somewhere in front of him a man shouted hoarsely: “Corra, Jose! Corra!”
A sibilant whisper answered: “La policia?” Killmaster played the game. He let out a gruff bellow. “Alto—alto! Policia! I will fire!”
He squatted, burrowed his way into a mass of jacaranda, and waited. Waited until he could no longer hear their clumsy crashing in the underbrush. Then he went back to the car, a cold little smile playing about his firm mouth. He would now proceed to find out who the sucker was.
He decided to play it a bit more subtly than they had—it would be hard to do otherwise, considering the crudity of the gambit—and see if he could hook the girl, and play her, while she thought she was playing him. He would pick up the beachcomber guise again, since he wasn’t supposed to know that it was blown.
She was just where he had left her beside the car, still making no effort to conceal her magnificent breasts and slim, narrow-waisted body. She did, however, deign to cross her hands over a long rip in the front of the black panties. He had to admit that the thing had been well staged, as far as it went. It was only the basic premise that was wrong—that he was a boob who could be fooled by so obvious a ploy.
The girl shrank from him a bit as he approached. Very good, he applauded silently. She was a lovely, terrified little girl who had just been the victim of a brutal rape attempt.
“They are gone, Senor? You have chase them away?” Her English was good enough, liquid and undulant, with the machine gun spate of the island.
Nick nodded, silent for the moment. He let his eyes rove over her from head to toe, not missing an inch of tawny naked flesh. She was a fairly tall girl with thick black hair that fell to her shoulders. Nick reached suddenly, grasped a slim wrist and pulled her into the pale beam of the headlamp. He never prided himself on being an actor, but he did his best to register lechery and a building lust. Let her think she had leaped from the frying pan into the fire.
When she tried to hang back he gave her a brutal tug. “Come on, honey! Let me have a look at you. I saved you, didn’t I?” Nick did his best to leer.
She let her hands fall away from the black panties and stood quiescent as he inspected her like a slave on a block. She did say: “Cannot we get away from this place, Senor? Those men, the men who tried to rape me, they might come back.”
Nick was hard put to repress a smile at that. No danger. They would be watching all right, but they wouldn’t be coming back.
“We’ll go in a minute,” he told her. “Just as soon as I have a good look at you, Senorita. Or is it Senora?”
She had a piquant little heart-shaped face with a wide mouth, very scarlet, and gleaming white teeth. Her eyes were her best feature, well set apart and of a large and luminous dark hue. They sparked at him now.
“It is senorita—a senora would not find herself in this bad business, I think.”
She turned from him and covered herself with her hands. She flung the long dark hair at him with a petulant shake of her head and frowned. “I think you have stared long enough, Senor! Too long. I hope you are not going to be like those others—those animals who tried to rape me. It would be too much.”
Nick walked to the car and flung her a blanket, watched her wrap herself in it gratefully. It was colder now and a fine rain had started to fall, so fine and thready that as yet it was little more than a mist. The first edge of the coming hurricane, he knew. Soon the squalls would begin to build at sea, and the rain would grow steadily heavier.
He pointed to the car. “Get in. And do not worry. I don’t rape women. I don’t have to.”
She huddled in the blanket in the front seat as Nick got the old wreck coughing again. As he put the car in gear and crawled away, conscious of the watching eyes in the undergrowth, he saw that she was frowning. A bit puzzled, maybe? The old car was a good prop. He could read her thinking fairly well—if he went with the car then he was indeed a beachcomber, a poor beach bum of no importance, and all the planning and histrionics were wasted. But that, of course, was exactly what they had to know. And didn’t. Not yet.
Neither of them spoke for half a mile. The car panted along at thirty, rattling and shaking. The single headlight was loose again and gazed off to one side like a cocked eye. Luckily there was no other traffic on the road.
Killmaster could hear the whir of the machinery in that pretty little head as she assessed and reassessed the situation. He kept silent, wanting her to do the leading. He had a little time now, free of danger, while she went about her play-acting.
The girl turned to look at him. “Where do you go, Senor?”
Nick shrugged, the careless epitome of all beachcombers. “I don’t know. Don’t really care. I just bum around, you know. One place is as good as another for me. Where do you want to go, Senorita?. .
He thought he knew the answer to that one. She wanted, had indeed been ordered, to go with him until death did them part. His death! If the dice fell that way, of course, and he was more than a beachcomber. In that instant he found himself evincing a little more respect for that damned Aussie—the guy had made a report, obviously, and had put two and two together. Someone had! So all loose ends were to be tidied up—and he was definitely a loose end. He wondered if they had found the gear he had thrown in the pool. That alone was enough to damn him; a beachcomber didn’t throw things away.
The girl decided how to play it. She moved a bit closer to him on the seat. Her tone was friendly, lighter. “I would like to go to San Juan, please. I have friends there who will help me. Who will give me clothes and money and help me get back to New York.”
Nick gave her a friendly, open grin. One of his best open grins—of the type that Hawk contended could charm a lost soul away from the devil.
“I am glad you have friends, Senorita. It always helps. I would like to oblige you, take you to San Juan, but there is one little thing that you overlook.”
She wriggled a little closer to him. He could smell the clean scent of her body. He smiled faintly. It was the sex gambit, all right. And, as a simple gambit, there was nothing wrong with it. It worked more times that it failed.
“I do not understand. What do I overlook, Senor?”
Nick pointed to the hood of the laboring car. “This! This junk heap. Listen.” He declutched and raced the engine slightly, letting her hear the unmistakable clatter of a rod that was on the verge of letting go. He doubted she knew anything about cars, but the noise was very convincing, taken along with tappet sounds and various pings and knocks, plus the hoarse growl of a differential that was about to fall out.
She scrunched her pretty face in a gesture of understanding and disgust, mixed with new puzzlement. She was wondering what in hell to do if he was genuine, just a bum, and she got stranded with him in a junk car amid a rising hurricane.
Nick would just have to help her out a little; but gently, easily, letting her continue to lead.
He gave her a smile which contained just enough of lechery and reached to squeeze her soft thigh beneath the blanket. “Don’t worry about it, honey. Everything’s all right now, so let’s have some fun, huh? I haven’t got much money, but I got a little, and maybe this old can will get us as far as Ponce if we take it easy. I got friends in Ponce, same as you got in New York. I think they’ll lend me some money—maybe even enough so we can fly to San Juan. You think you’d like that, sugar?”
She had not moved away when he touched her leg. But now she frowned at him. “I do not like to be called ‘honey’ and ‘sugar,’ Senor! Maybe it is better if you call me Dona, si? That is my name—Dona Lanzos. What is yours, Senor?”
The AXEman shrugged. He had seen it often. People were funny—no matter how low in the human scale they were, they still had quirks.
“Anyway you want it, Dona. My name is Jim. Jim Talbot.” It was the name on all his phony papers. Jim Talbot. Occupation, drifter.
Dona shivered and moved a bit closer to him. “Maybe I will go with you to San Juan on the plane, Jeem, if you can get the money. Maybe not. I do not know yet. But I do know I am cold—muy frio! Do you have anything to drink in this catastrofe of a car?”
Nick was already regretting the miniatures of scotch he had tossed into the pool. But then it was precisely such small matters that gave an agent away. Not many beach bums could afford expensive scotch.
“Sorry,” he told her. “This is going to have to be a dry run—at least until we get to Mayaguez. We’ll stop there and get some wine. I reckon I can afford that.”
The girl was close beside him now. She touched his arm. “You are very poor, Jeem?” Her interest sounded genuine.
Nick indicated the car and his clothes with a gesture. “What do you think, Dona? Do I look like one of the Rockefellers?”
She laughed, a spontaneous burst of liquid warm sound that caused Nick, for an incautious moment, to detest the game they were playing. She was a very pretty girl and built like a million. Had the circumstances been different he knew he would be enjoying himself. As it was—and he had to force the cold part of his brain to take over—as it was he was having far too good a time. Hawk would never have approved of such shenanigans in the line of duty. But then his boss wasn’t here. It wasn’t Hawk who was being tampered with so expertly.
Nick sighed and, smiling at his own hypocrisy, told himself that it was just one of those erotic interludes that every agent had to endure now and again. Nothing to do but grin and bear it.
The girl said: “I think I like you, Jeem. Very much.”
Nick Carter, who was having a little difficulty with his breathing, said, “I think so too, Dona. I mean—you aren’t exactly acting like a girl who hates me!”
“You do not like? You wish me to stop?”
Killmaster had a sort of rule. Not hard and fast, but sort of a rule—if it in no way interfered with his work, did not endanger a mission, and the lady of the moment was both comely and compliant, then he believed in letting nature take its course.
“I do like,” he told her. “And I do not wish you to stop. At least not until we get into Mayaguez. That might be a little embarrassing—la policia can be pretty stuffy sometimes.”
She laughed. But her next words carried a warning, a warning that he noted even in his rapidly efflorescing condition. It told him that he had already slipped, perhaps just a bit too much.
“You talk funny,” she said. “Peculiar, raro! You do not speak the same all the time, I mean. At times you sound of education, sometimes not. That is strange, si?”
He made the best recovery he could. “That is strange, no! I went to college, Dona. A long time ago. I have tried to forget it, but it is not so easy. Sometimes I talk like a—like a gentleman in spite of myself. Why? Por que? Does it bother you?”
He felt rather than saw her shrug. He knew that she was puzzled again now, not knowing what to think or how to proceed. He guessed, correctly, at what she would do.
She moved real close, her fingers avid at his body. It occurred to him that she, like himself, was something of an opportunist and did not mind a pleasant interlude as long as it did not interfere with her work. Why not, indeed? There was that old saw about the goose and the gander.
Her next effort did not particularly surprise him. She had decided to try on a new set of lies for size. New lies for old.
Dona leaned toward him. “I told you a beeg lie back there,” she said. “Those men did not try to rape me. It was something different, something worse—they tried to cheat me! They did not wish to pay me after I—I had been with them. Both of them! Bastardos! They would not pay me and we got into a fight and they tore off all my clothes. Do you understand, Jeem? I am a puta, a prostituta! In New York I am also in la vida, but there I am a call girl and I make a lot of money. Sometimes as much as fifty dollars a night. But down here—I was staying with a cousin in Mayaguez, but I do not wish to see her again— down here I was not going to work. I was going to rest only. But my cousin introduced me to these men and they asked me to go fishing with them. Fishing and also, well, you will understand. I did not really want to, Jeem, but money is money, si? But then the bastardos only laughed at me and would not pay. I like you, Jeem! Will you not be angry with me for lying to you?”
