Hamilton, Donald - Matt Helm 14 by The Intriguers (v1.1) Page B

necessarily in the right direction, until, at a certain specified
point, I passed a parked ear. The car would indicate, by its open door, that my
clearance had been confirmed and I was free to head for my destination in the
desolate country west of town. If the door of the vehicle was closed, I'd have
to spend a day trying to shake whoever had been spotted tailing me, and call
again tomorrow.
                When I reached it, it wasn't a car
but a pickup truck, but that was a permissible variation. Its hood was up and
the driver was performing an invisible and probably unnecessary operation on
its insides. The door on the driver's side was open. 1 drove past and kept
going.
                At last Martha stirred uneasily and
glanced at me. "This isn't the way to the ranch, is it?" she said.
"I've never been there, but it's west of Tucson , isn't it? We're heading kind of south and
east, aren't we?"
                "That's right," I said.
"Have you had any training, Borden?"
                "Why . . . why, not very much,
yet. Why do you ask?"
                "There's a mirror on your door
but you haven't even glanced at it once. We've had a tall since about twenty
miles north of Nogales ." When she started to turn her head to look back, I said,
"That's pretty poor technique, too. Not that it matters here, you can't
see out the rear window and they can't see in due to that junior-grade ocean
liner we have rolling along behind, but it's best to get in the habit of doing
things right. Use the mirror if you want to look."
                "But who is it? Who'd want to
follow us?"
                "Who'd want to shoot at me
yesterday?" I asked dryly. "All I know is that it's a white Ford
Falcon with Arizona plates, kind of old and nondescript, the sort of car nobody looks at
twice. Let's hope it's just what it seems, and nobody's stuffed any surprises
under the hood. They probably haven't. They probably figure anything with four
wheels and a rubber band can keep up with us, the load we're dragging. We
hope."
                "I.. . don't understand."
                I glanced at her impatiently; she
was really pretty slow. I said, "Look, doll, that pickup truck gave us the
all-clear, right? He sent us on through to the ranch, in spite of the fact that
we've got a tail on us nobody who was really looking could have missed!"
                "I still don't
understand!" she protested. "What are you driving at?"
                "It smells," I said.
"If you've got company trailing along behind, you just don't get cleared
to that place. Hell, that's exactly what all the monkey business is supposed to
prevent. But we were cleared, tail and all. 1 think we'd better go on the
assumption that something's awfully wrong inside that fancy fence, out there
west of Tucson , that's all wired up with bells and
whistles and closed-circuit TV. I think we'd better figure that there's a
reception committee waiting for us, and that it's not just a bunch of friendly
doctors and nurses and trainers concerned with nothing but our welfare. And the
boys astern, well, I think we'd better assume they're a pair of sheepdogs
assigned to herd us into the right pen and make sure we don't go astray between
here and there."
                The girl beside me shook her head
sharply. "You're imagining things; you must be! From what I've heard, the
ranch is the last place in the world where anybody could-"
                "The last," I said,
"or the first. The one spot I might drive up to, dumb and happy and
unprepared for trouble."
                "You mean . . . you mean you
really think somebody has gone so far as to take the place over, just to set a
trap for you?" She shook her head once more, unbelievingly. "Aren't
you getting delusions of grandeur? Why would anybody consider you that
important?"
                I said, "We don't know what
came