'There's really no need for you to involve yourself,' Hazel pointed out. 'You were my agent on the trip to New York with Larkin's money, and I feel responsible for any loss you had.'
I didn't even bother to answer that one. The whole crazy expedition to Cuba had come about because I wasn't about to use Hazel's money. 'How long was I asleep?'
'Twelve hours.'
'Damned if I don't feel I could do it all over again.'
She arched an eyebrow. 'Including the preliminaries?'
'Given similar provocation,' I agreed. 'But first I could stand a shot of bourbon and some food.'
I put on a robe and we went downstairs. Hazel fed me a steak, and then I watched the last half of a ball game on television. Hazel had a tower stretching up into the cobalt blue of the Nevada sky that was higher than some cable-company antennas I'd seen. It pulled in a signal from everything this side of the Continental Divide.
We went back upstairs and sacked in again. I'd been a little doubtful about performance, but when I turned my palomino loose at the watering hole it was hip, hip, and hooray. We reached the quarter pole in.24, breezing, and worked out the mile in 35 and change.
'How'd you like to take a ride down to Tucson tomorrow?' I asked Hazel when she came out of the shower.
'Oh, man, have you ever got a one-track mind. Why don't you just forget the whole thing?'
I thought of a bronzed, high-cheekboned, eagle-beaked face peering at me along the barrel of a machine gun while I crouched on the wing of the 727. 'I'd like to meet up with the one who got away, that's all. One more time.'
'Why hasn't there been anything about it in the papers?'
'Because a man named Neal Harris decided there wasn't going to be anything about it in the papers.'
'I still don't see why you feel-'
'Quit stalling. You want to go to Tucson?'
'Oh, all right, all right!'
So the next morning I was gassing Hazel's Corvette at the pump in front of the barn when she hailed me from the kitchen doorway. 'Someone's driving in from the highway, Earl!' she called.
I stared in the direction of the dust devils swirling above the dirt road that led from the highway to the ranch property. I started for my own car instinctively before I remembered that my.38 wasn't in the glove compartment but buried in the sand near the abandoned airstrip where the hijacked plane had been forced down. There was no real reason I should need it, anyway. There was an umbrella now over my presence at Hazel's place, a by-product of the Cuban expedition.
The incoming car was only a hundred yards away when I recognized the driver. Hazel recognized him, too. 'Earl, it's Karl Erikson!' she said. She sounded pleased.
I wasn't nearly so pleased myself.
Erikson was a government man who had suckered me into the Cuban caper I mentioned. I had no idea he was a government man at the time I was recruited, although in hindsight I should probably have realized it from his authoritative manner and take-charge personality.
So instead of a big bundle of cash I thought I was shooting for in Havana, it turned out I was working on a piddling per diem basis for the government. Wholly involuntarily, I might add. And once I found out, I had to go through with it in order to get out of Cuba with my neck intact. And this damn Erikson had backdoored me with Hazel who had aided and abetted the entire deception. 'You said you were sick and tired of sitting around listening to the rust harden on yourself,' she defended herself afterwards. 'And I was afraid you'd take off on a bank job or something and get caught. This way I figured you were safe.'
Which was a hell of an argument when you consider that four of us went down into Cuba and only Karl Erikson and I made it back. And that the last time I'd seen him he'd been flat on his back in Bethesda Naval Hospital with machine-gun holes and wooden splinters as big as railroad spikes in him from the boat that had been shot out from under us by Cuban Migs.
I walked across the yard to Erikson's car as he got out from under the wheel. He's a big, blond, rough-hewn type, possibly the strongest man I'd ever known. His movements were stiff, and I realized he hadn't fully recovered from his recent hospitalization. 'I'm so glad you could come, Karl,' Hazel greeted him warmly as she joined us. Erikson and I shook hands. 'I hoped you'd accept my invitation to visit us here, but I really didn't expect you'd be able to manage it this soon.'
'Didn't I tell you I'd come?' Erikson said easily. He eyed me up and down, the familiar cynical expression on his hard-bitten features. 'How's the Shoot-'Em-Up Kid?'
'Great. Did they get all the lead out of your ugly carcass?'
'Enough to get me perpendicular again.'
'Let's go inside and have coffee,' Hazel urged.
We trooped into the ranch house. 'I'm just leaving for Tucson,' I told Erikson as he setded himself carefully at the kitchen table. 'But I'll be back in a couple of days, and Hazel will make you comfortable here in the meantime.'
'I'm just on my way down to Tucson, too,' Erikson said. He accepted a cup of steaming black coffee from Hazel and regarded me over its rim as he sipped. 'To the Colonial Airport. Why don't we ride down together?'
I tried to hold my face together since he was obviously enjoying my surprise. 'The Colonial Airport,' I repeated while I tried to get my brain in gear. How in hell could this big moose know about the Colonial Airport?
'I hope you can spend some time with us, Karl,' Hazel said. I knew she was attempting a diversion while I pulled myself together. 'You're not fit to be working again so soon.'
'Something came up that my boss decided needed my delicate touch,' Erikson said.
'You're about as delicate as a man lighting a cigarette with a blow torch,' I snorted. 'Now what's this about a Colonial Airport?'
His eyes were riveted on mine. 'You're onto something that fits into my assignment. I want to know what it is.'
'D'you mind starting at the beginning?' I inquired.
He glanced at Hazel as if about to ask her to leave the room, then changed his mind. Karl Erikson knew where he stood with Hazel Andrews. Did I say that Hazel piloted the boat to Cuba that picked us up, and was in the drink with us when the Mig-jockeys were circling our blazing cruiser?
'I'll keep it brief,' Erikson said. 'I'm on temporary loan to two government agencies who have overlapping intelligence interests. The names don't matter. I'm supposed to act as liaison between them and a special group of Israeli intelligence people who have been warning the State Department about Arab fedayeen operations in this country, operations aimed at pulling coups to raise money in the U.S. to finance their guerilla activities in the Middle East. Up to now, I'm afraid, no one took their warnings seriously enough.'
He sipped at his coffee again. 'We have feelers out all over the country, of course, and when we heard a rumor about a supposed hijack of an airliner near Las Vegas, I started to check into it. I found that powerful influences in the state had clamped such a tight lid on the affair that no one could produce a proper list of the plane passengers for me to follow up on.'
He accepted Hazel's offer of a cigarette. 'It looked like a dead end, but we always have ways and means to widen a crack. We came up with a tip finally that the hijackers used a private plane to make their getaway, so we took a look at all FAA flight-plan records for that particular day, looking for nonscheduled flights within a thousand miles of the scene. And we found that all flight plans had been closed out except one from the Colonial Airport near Tucson.'
Erikson set down his coffee cup. 'That was enough to bring me out here yesterday morning. Last night I learned that the missing private plane had been found with the pilot alone in it. He'd been shot in the back of the head. Then I learned that an inquiry had been made of the White Pine County's law enforcement office about a plane with the registration number NR eight-one-three-three-two, the number of the dead pilot's plane. Imagine my surprise when I found that the inquiry had been initiated from the Rancho Dolorosa in Ely, Nevada. Naturally I thought of my old friend, the Shoot-'Em-Up Kid.'
