Nick Carter

The Aztec Avenger

CHAPTER ONE

What happened to me several months ago was what a psychologist would call an identity crisis. The symptoms were easy to identify. First, I began to lose interest in my work. Then it turned into a gnawing discontent, and finally into an outright dislike for what I was doing. I began to get a feeling of being trapped and was faced with the fact that I was well into my life and what the hell had I accomplished?

I asked myself the crucial question.

“Who are you?”

And the answer was, “I’m a killer.”

I didn’t like the answer.

So I walked away from AXE, from Hawk, from Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., and swore that I’d never do another job for them as long as I lived.

Wilhelmina, the 9mm. Luger that was almost like an extension of my right hand, was packed away along with Hugo and Pierre. I had run my fingers lovingly over the deadly, honed steel of the stiletto before I laid it down and wrapped the gun, the knife, and the tiny gas bomb into a chamois lining. All three went into my safe deposit box. The next day I was gone,

Since then, I’d hidden myself in half a dozen countries under twice that many assumed names. I wanted peace and serenity. I wanted to be left alone, to have the security of knowing that I would live through each day to enjoy the next

I’d had exactly six months and two days of it before the telephone rang in my hotel room. At nine-thirty in the morning.

I hadn’t been expecting a telephone call. I’d thought that no one knew that I. was in El Paso. The ringing of the bell meant that someone knew something about me that they weren’t supposed to know. I didn’t like the idea one damned bit because it meant that Td gotten careless, and carelessness could get me killed.

The telephone on the night table beside my bed shrilled insistently at me. I reached over and picked up the receiver.

“Yes?”

“Your taxi is here, Mr. Stephans,” said the overly polite voice of the desk clerk.

I hadn’t ordered a taxi. Someone was letting me know that he knew I was in town, and that he also knew the alias I’d registered under.

It did no good to wonder who it was. There was only one way to find out.

“Tell him I’ll be down in a few minutes,” I said and hung up.

Deliberately, I took my time. Td been lying sprawled on the large double bed, my head propped up on the bunched pillows when the phone had rung. Now, I locked my hands behind my head and stared across the room at my reflection in the large row of minors above the long, walnut-veneered triple chest of drawers.

What I saw was a lean, lithe body with a face of indeterminate age. It was a face that just missed being handsome, but that wasn’t the important thing about it. It was a face that reflected coldness with eyes that had seen too much in one lifetime. Too much death. Too much killing. Too much torture and maiming and more bloodshed than any one man should see.

I remembered once, a few years back, in a room in a small pensione in a not too elegant section of Rome, a girl had flared up at me and called me an arrogant, cold-blooded son-of-a-bitch.

“You just don’t give a damn! Not about me or about anything!” she’d screamed at me. “You don’t have any feelings! I thought I meant something to you but I was wrong! You’re nothing but a bastard! Doesn’t it mean anything to you — what we’ve been doing for the last hour?”

I had had no answer for her. I had lain there, naked on the rumpled bed and watched her finish getting dressed without a flicker of emotion showing on my face.

She had grabbed up her purse and turned at the door.

“What makes you the way you are?” she had asked me almost plaintively. “Why can’t you be reached? Is it me? Don’t I have any importance for you? Am I absolutely nothing to you?”

“I’ll call for you tonight at seven,” I’d said curtly, ignoring her angry demands.

She had spun around stiffly and stepped out the door, slamming it behind her, I’d watched her go, knowing that by evening she would learn in one fast moment, that she wasn’t yet ‘absolutely nothing’ to me. I hadn’t allowed my feelings to make any difference, because from the start of our affair she had been one in a cast of many who’d played a part in my AXE assignment. Her role ended that night. She’d found out too much, and at seven that evening, I’d rung down her final curtain with my stiletto.

Now, several years later, I lay on another bed in a hotel room in El Paso and examined my face in the mirror. It was a face that accused me of being everything she had called me — tired, cynical, arrogant, cold.

I realized I could lie on that bed for hours, but there was someone waiting for me in a taxi and he wouldn’t go away. And if I wanted to find out who had penetrated my anonymity, there was only one way to do it. Go down and face him.

So I swung my legs off the bed, stood up and straightened my clothes, and stepped from my room, wishing that I had the security of Wilhelmina tucked under my armpit — or even the cold deadliness of Hugo’s pencil-thin, sharpened steel attached to my arm.

In the lobby, I nodded to the desk clerk as I passed by and went out through the revolving doors. After the air-conditioned chill of the hotel, the moist heat of El Paso’s early summer morning wrapped itself around me like a damp embrace.

The taxi was idling by the curb.

I walked slowly toward the cab, my eyes flicking automatically around it.

There was nothing suspicious in the quiet street or the faces of the few people strolling casually down the sidewalk.

The driver came around from the far side of the taxi.

“Mr. Stephans?”

I nodded.

“My name’s Jiminez,” he said. I caught the flash of white teeth set in a dark, solid face. The man was stocky and powerfully built He wore an open-necked sport shirt over light blue slacks.

Jiminez opened the rear door for me. I could see that there was no one else in the taxi.

He caught my glance. “You satisfied?”

I didn’t answer him. I got into the back and Jiminez closed the door and went around to the driver’s side. He slipped into the front seat and pulled the car out into the light stream of traffic.

I edged further to the left until I was sitting almost directly behind the stocky man. As I did so, I leaned forward, my muscles tensing, the fingers of my right hand curling under so that the knuckles stiffened, making a lethal weapon of my fist.

Jiminez looked up into the rear-view mirror.

“Why don’t you sit back and relax?” he suggested easily. “Nothing’s going to happen. He just wants to talk to you.”

“Who?”

Jiminez shrugged his powerful shoulders. “I don’t know. All I’m supposed to tell you is that the word came down from Hawk for you to follow instructions. Whatever that means.”

It meant a lot. It meant that Hawk had been letting me have my little vacation. It meant that Hawk had always known how to get in touch with me. It meant that I was still working for Hawk and for AXE, America’s super-secret intelligence agency.

“All right,” I said, wearily, “what are the instructions?”

“I’m to take you out to the airport,” Jiminez said. “Rent a light plane. Be sure the tanks are full. Once you’ve cleared the area, take up a course of sixty degrees. And tune your communications radio to Unicom. You’ll get further instructions in the air.”

“Apparently, I’m going to meet someone,” I said, probing for more information. “You know who it is?”

Jiminez nodded.

“Gregorius.”

He dropped the name into the air between us and it was as if he dropped a bomb.

* * *

By ten-thirty, I was at 6,500 feet, on a course of 60° with my radio tuned to 122.8 megacycles, which is the Unicom frequency for talk between planes.

The sky was clear, with only a faint smudge of haze near the horizon. I held the Cessna 210 steadily on course at slow cruise. I kept looking, from side to side, scanning the skies around me.

I saw the other plane on an intercept course when it was still so far away that it looked like a small dot that could have been anything, even an optical illusion. I reduced the speed of my own aircraft even more, pulling back the throttle and resetting the trim tab. In a few minutes, the other plane took on shape. Presently, it swung in a wide arc, circling to come in beside me, flying wingtip to wingtip. The plane was a Bonanza. There was only one man in it. The pilot of the Bonanza picked up his mike. I heard a rough baritone voice crackle in my earphones.

“Five… niner… Alpha. Is that you, Carter?”

I picked up my own mike.

“Affirmative.”

“Follow me,” he said, and the Bonanza swung smoothly away on a northerly course, sliding in ahead of my aircraft, slightly to my left and just above me where I could easily keep it in sight I turned the Cessna 210 to follow it, pushing the throttle ahead, picking up speed to keep it in sight.

Almost an hour later, the Bonanza slowed, let down its flaps and gear, and turned in a tight bank to let down for a landing on a strip bulldozed in the floor of a valley.

As I followed the Bonanza in, I saw that there was a Learjet parked at the far end of the runway, and I knew that Gregorius was waiting for me.

Inside the plush interior of the Learjet, I sat across from Gregorius, almost enfolded by the rich leather of the armchair.

“I know you are angry,” Gregorius said calmly, his voice smooth and polished. “However, please don’t let your emotions get in the way of your thinking. It wouldn’t be like you at all.”

“I told you that I’d never do another job for you again, Gregorius. I told that to Hawk, too.”

I watched the big man intently.

“So you did,” admitted Gregorius. He took a sip of his drink. “But then, nothing in this world is ever final — except death.”

He smiled at me out of a large, rubbery face of oversized features. Large mouth, large eyes that bulged codlike under thick gray eyebrows, a huge, protuberant nose with heavy nostrils, coarse pores in a sallow skin— Gregorius’ face was like a sculptor’s rough, clay head molded in heroic size to match the rest of his gross body.

“Besides,” he said smoothly, “Hawk has lent you to me, so you’re really working for him, you see.”

“Prove it.”

Gregorius pulled a folded sheet of onion skin paper out of his pocket. He reached over and handed it to me.

The message was in code. Not too difficult to decipher, either. Decoded, it read simply, “N3 on lend-lease to Gregorius. No AXE until job completed. Hawk.”

I lifted my head and stared coldly at Gregorius.

“It could be a fake,” I said.

“Here’s the proof that it’s genuine,” he answered, and handed me a package.

I looked down into my hands. The package was wrapped in paper, and when I tore that off, I found another wrapping underneath of chamois. And swaddled in the chamois was my 9mm Luger, the pencil-slim knife that I had carried in its sheath strapped to my right forearm, and Pierre, the tiny gas bomb.

I’d put them away — safely, I thought — six months ago. How Hawk had found my safe deposit box or had gotten its contents I’ll never know. But then, Hawk was able to do many things no one knew about. I nodded my head.

“You’ve proved your point,” I told Gregorius. “The message is genuine.”

“So you will listen to me now?”

“Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll listen.”

CHAPTER TWO

I refused Gregorius’ offer of lunch, but I did have coffee while he put away a huge meal. He didn’t talk while he ate, concentrating on his food with almost total dedication. It gave me a chance to examine him while I smoked and sipped at my coffee.

Alexander Gregorius was one of the world’s richest and most secretive men. I think I knew more about him than anyone else because I had set up his incredible information network when Hawk had put me out on loan to him before.

As Hawk had said, “We can use him. A man with his power and his money can be a valuable help to us. There’s just one thing for you to remember, Nick. Whatever he knows, I want to know, too.”

I’d set up the fantastic information system that was to work, for Gregorius and then tested it by ordering information gathered on Gregorius himself. I passed that information on to AXE’s files.

There was damned little hard information about his early years. Most of it was unconfirmed. Rumor had it that he’d been born somewhere in the Balkans or Asia Minor. Rumor had it that he was part Cypriot and part Lebanese. Or Syrian and Turk. Nothing was completely definitive.

But I’d discovered his real name was not Alexander Gregorius, something which a very few people knew. But even I couldn’t learn where he’d really come from or what he’d done during the first twenty-five years of his life.

He emerged from nowhere right after World War II. He appeared on an immigration record in Athens as having come from Ankara, but his passport was Lebanese.

By the end of the 50s, he was deep in Greek shipping, Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian oil, Lebanese banking, French import-export, South American copper, manganese, tungsten — you name it. It was almost impossible to pin down all his activities even from an insider’s seat.

It would be an accountant’s nightmare to uncover his exact holdings. He’d hidden them by incorporating in Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Panama — countries where corporate secrecy is virtually unbreachable. That’s because the S.A. after the names of European and South American companies stands for Societe Anonyme. No one knows who the stockholders are.

I don’t think that even Gregorius himself could pin down the exact extent of his wealth. He no longer measured it in terms of dollars, but in terms of power and influence — and he had plenty of both.

What I’d done for him, on that first assignment from Hawk, was to set up an information gathering service that consisted of an insurance company, a credit checking organization, and a news magazine with foreign bureaus in more than thirty countries and well over a hundred correspondents and stringers. Add to that an electronic data processing firm and a market research business. Their combined investigative resources were staggering.

I showed Gregorius how we could put all this data together, compiling completely detailed dossiers about several hundred thousand people. Especially those who worked for companies he had an interest in or that he owned outright. Or who worked for his competition.

The information flowed in from correspondents, from credit investigators, from insurance records, from his market research people, from the files of his news-magazine. It was all fed into a bank of IBM 360 computers at the EDP company located in Denver.

In less than sixty seconds I could have a printout on any one of these people packed with such thorough information that it would scare the hell out of them.

It would be complete from the time they were born, the schools they went to, the grades they got, the exact salaries earned on every job they ever held, the loans they ever took out and the payments they have to make. It can even compute their estimated annual income taxes for every year they worked.

It knows the affairs they’re having or have had. Right down to the names and addresses of their lovers. And it included information on their sexual proclivities and perversions.

There’s also one special reel of tape, containing some two thousand or more dossiers with both input and output, handled only by a few carefully selected ex-FBI men. That’s because the information is too secret and too dangerous to be seen by anyone else.

Any U.S. District Attorney would sell his soul to get his hands on the data reel on the Mafia families and Syndicate members that had been compiled.

Only Gregorius or myself could authorize a printout from this special reel.

* * *

Gregorius finally finished eating. He pushed away his tray and leaned back in his armchair, dabbing at his lips with the linen napkin.

“The problem is Carmine Stocelli,” he said abruptly. “You know who he is?”

I nodded. “That’s like asking me who owns Getty Oil. Carmine runs the biggest Mafia family in New York. Numbers and dope are his specialty. How are you mixed up with him?”

Gregorius frowned. “Stocelli’s trying to muscle in on one of my new enterprises. I want no part of him.”

“Give me the details.”

Tin in the middle of building a number of resorts. One in each of six countries. Imagine an enclave consisting of a luxury hotel, several low-rise condominium apartment buildings adjacent to the hotel, and some thirty to forty private villas surrounding the entire package.”

“And restricted to millionaires, right?” I grinned at him.

“Right.”

I did a quick estimate in my head. “That’s an investment of some eight hundred million dollars,” I remarked. “Who’s financing it?”

“I am,” said Gregorius, “Every penny going into it is my own money.”

“That’s a mistake. You’ve always used borrowed money. How come it’s your own this time?”

“Because I’ve borrowed to my limit on a couple of ventures in oil,” Gregorius said. “North Sea drilling is goddamned expensive.”

“Eight hundred million.” I thought about it for a minute. “Knowing how you operate, Gregorius, I’d say you expect a return on your investment of about five to seven times that amount when you’re finished.”

Gregorius looked at me sharply. “Very close to it, Carter. I see you haven’t lost your touch. The trouble is that until these projects are completed, I can’t collect a penny.”

“And Stocelli wants his fingers in your pie?”

“In a nutshell, yes.”

“How?”

“Stocelli wants to put a gambling casino in each of these resorts. His gambling casino. I’d have no part of it.”

“Tell him to go to hell.”

Gregorius shook his head. “It could cost my life.”

I cocked my head and questioned him with a lifted eyebrow.

“He can do it,” said Gregorius. “He’s got the men.”

“He told you that?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“At the time he outlined his proposition to me.”

“And you expect me to get Stocelli off your back?”

Gregorius nodded. “Exactly.”

“By killing him?”

He shook his head. “That would be the easy way. But Stocelli told me point-blank that if I tried anything so foolish, his men had orders to get me at any cost. There’s got to be another way.”

“And it’s up to me to find it, is that it?” I smiled cynically.

“If anyone can, you can,” Gregorius said. “That’s why I asked Hawk for you again.”

For a moment, I wondered what could have made Hawk lend me out. AXE doesn’t work for private individuals. AXE works for no one but the American government — even if ninety-nine percent of the American government was ignorant of its existence.

“You really have that much confidence in my ability?” I asked.

“Hawk does,” said Gregorius, and that was the end of that.

I stood up. My head almost touched the ceiling of the Learjet cabin.

“Is that all, Gregorius?”

Gregorius looked up at me. “Every one else says Mr. Gregorius,” he commented.

“Is that all?” I asked again. I looked down on him. The chill I felt, the dislike came out in my voice.

“I should think that would be enough of a task even for you.”

I made my way out of the Learjet, down the steps to the desert floor, feeling the sudden heat of the day strike me, a heat almost as intense as the anger that was beginning to build up inside me.

What the hell was Hawk doing to me? N3, killmaster, forbidden to kill? Carter to go up against a top Mafia boss who was surrounded with button men— and when I got to him, I wasn’t supposed to touch him?

Christ, was Hawk trying to get me killed?

CHAPTER THREE

By the time I flew the Cessna 210 back to the EI Paso airport, turned in the key, and paid my bill, it was midafternoon. I had to walk about two hundred yards from the flight shack to the main airport terminal building.

In the lobby, I headed directly for the bank of telephones. I stepped into a booth, closed the door of the booth behind me, and emptied a pocketful of coins onto the small, stainless steel shelf. I put a dime in the slot, dialed zero and then direct-dialed the rest of the Denver number.

The operator came on.

“Collect call,” I told her. “My name is Carter.” I had to spell it out for her.

I waited impatiently while the chimes pulsed in my ear until I heard the telephone ringing. After the third ring someone answered.

“International Data.”

The operator said, “This is the El Paso operator. I have a collect call from a Mr. Carter. Will you accept?”

“One moment, please.” There was a click and in a moment a man’s voice came on.

“Well accept,” he said

“Go ahead, sir.” I waited until I heard the operator disconnect

“Carter here,” I said. “Have you heard from Gregorius yet?”

“Welcome back,” said Denver. “We got the word.”

“Am I switched on?”

“You’re switched on and being recorded. Go ahead.”

“I want a printout on Carmine Stocelli,” I said. “Everything you’ve got on him and his organization. Personal data first, including a telephone number I can reach him at.”

“Coming up,” said Denver. There was another short pause. “Ready to copy?”

“Go ahead.”

Denver gave me the telephone number. “There’s also a code you have to use to get him,” said Denver, and explained it to me.

I hung up on Denver, then dialed the New York number.

The telephone rang only once before it was picked up.

“Yeah?”

“My name is Carter. I want to talk to Stocelli.”

“You got the wrong number, feller. There ain’t nobody here by that name.”

“Tell him I can be reached at this number,” I said, ignoring the voice. I read off the El Paso phone booth number. “It’s a pay phone. I want to hear from him in ten minutes.”

“Bug off, Charlie,” growled the voice. “I told you, you got the wrong number.” He hung up.

I put the telephone back on the hook and sat back, trying to make myself comfortable in the cramped enclosure. I took out one of my gold-tipped cigarettes and lit it Time seemed to creep by. I played with the coins on the shelf. I smoked the cigarette almost down to the filter before I dropped it on the floor and crushed it out with my shoe.

The telephone rang. I looked at my watch and saw that only eight minutes had gone by from the time I had hung up. I picked up the receiver and immediately put it back on the hook without saying a word. I watched the second hand of my wristwatch tick around in spasmodic jerks. Exactly two minutes went by before the phone rang again. Ten minutes from the time I’d hung up on New York.

I picked up the receiver and said, “Carter here.”

“All right,” said the heavy, rasping voice that I recognized as Stocelli’s. “I got your message.”

“You know who I am?”

“Gregorius told me to expect a call from you. What do you want?”

“To meet with you.”

There was a long pause. “Gregorius gonna agree to my proposition?” Stocelli asked.

“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” I said. “Where and when can we meet?”

Stocelli chuckled. “Well, you’re halfway there now. I’ll meet you in Acapulco tomorrow.”

“Acapulco?”

“Yeah. I’m in Montreal now. I’m going down to Acapulco from here. I’ll see you down there. You check into the Hotel Matamoros. You got that name? My boys will get in touch with you and we’ll get together.”

“Good enough.”

Stocelli hesitated and then growled, “Listen, Carter, I heard things about you. So I’m warning you. Don’t play no games with me!”

“I’ll see you in Acapulco,” I said and hung up on him.

I fished another dime out of my pocket and called Denver again.

“Carter,” I said, identifying myself. “I want a printout on the operation out of Acapulco. Who’s tied in with Stocelli down there? How big is it? How does it operate? Everything you can pull out on them. Names, places, dates.”

“Got it.”

“How long will it take?”

“You’ll have the information by the time you get to Acapulco, along with the other material you asked for. Is that soon enough? Anything else?”

“Yeah. I want a Telecopier air-shipped to me at the Hotel Matamoros. And I want it waiting for me when I arrive.”

Denver began to protest, but I cut him off. “Goddamn it, charter a small jet if you have to,” I said brusquely. “Don’t try to save pennies. It’s Gregorius’ money, not yours!”

I hung up and went outside to hail a cab from the rank. My next stop was the Mexican Tourist Bureau for a visitor’s permit, and from there I headed across the border to Juarez and the airport I barely had time to catch the Aeromexico DC-9 to Chihuahua, Torreon, Mexico City, and Acapulco.

CHAPTER FOUR

Denver had been a good boy. The Telecopier was waiting for me in my suite when I checked in to the Hotel Matamoros. It wasn’t time for the report yet, so I went down to the broad, flagstone terrace that overlooked the bay, sat down in a wide, wicker armchair and ordered a rum drink. I sipped it slowly as I looked out across the bay at the lights of the town that were just coming on, and at the dark indistinct hills rising above the town to the north.

I sat there for a long time, enjoying the evening and the silence and the lights of the town and the cool sweetness of the rum.

When I finally got up I went inside for a long, leisurely dinner, so it wasn’t until almost midnight that I got the call from Denver. I took it in my room.

I set the Telecopier up and put the handset in it Paper began coming out of the machine.

I scanned it as it slid out, until finally I had a small stack of paper in front of me. The machine stopped. I picked up the receiver again.

“That’s it,” said Denver. “I hope it’ll be of help to you. Anything else?”

“Not for the time being.”

“Then I have something for you. We just got the information in from one of our contacts in New York. Last night, three Frenchmen were picked up by Customs agents at Kennedy airport. They were caught trying to smuggle in a load of heroin. Their names are Andrè Michaud, Maurice Berthier and Etienne Duprè. Recognize them?”

“Yes,” I said, “They’re tied in with Stocelli on the French end of his narcotics operations.”

“You’ve been scanning the report as it came through,” Denver accused me.

I thought for a moment and then said, “It doesn’t make sense. These men are too big to carry the mer-chandise themselves. Why didn’t they use a courier?”

“We can’t figure that out, either. According to the report we got, the plane came in from Orly. Michaud picked up his bags at the luggage turntable and carried them over to the customs counter just as if he had nothing to hide. Three bags, but one of them was crammed with ten kilos of pure heroin.”

“How much did you say?” I interrupted.

“You heard me correctly. Ten kilos. You know what that’s worth?”

“Street value? About two million dollars. Wholesale? It’ll run about a hundred ten to a hundred twenty thousand for the importer. That’s why it’s so hard to believe.”

“You’d better believe it. Now comes the funny part. Michaud claimed he knew nothing about the heroin. He denied the bag was his.”

“Was it?”

“Well, it was an attaché case — one of the larger ones — and it had his initials stamped into it. And his name tag was fastened onto the handle.”

“What about the other two?”

“Same thing. Berthier was carrying twelve kilos in an overnight bag, and Duprè was carrying eight kilos. All together, it adds up to some thirty kilos of the purest heroin Customs has come across yet.”

“And they all say the same thing?”

“You guessed it. Each one puts his bag on the inspection counter bold as brass, just like there’s nothing in it but shirts and socks. They’re yelling it’s a frame-up.”

“It could be,” I said, reflecting, “except for one thing. You don’t have to blow some three hundred fifty thousand dollars’ worth of drugs to set up a frame. Half a kilo — hell, even a few ounces — is enough.”

“That’s the way Customs has it figured.”

“Was there a tip-off?”

“Not a word. They got the full search treatment because Customs knows about their operation in Marseille and has their names on the special list. And that’s what makes it even stranger. They knew they were on that list. They knew they’d get thoroughly examined by Customs, so how could they figure on getting away with it?”

I made no comment. Denver went on. “You’ll find it even more interesting when you put it together with another piece of information in the file we just transmitted to you. Last week, Stocelli was in Marseille. Guess whom he met with while he was there?”

“Michaud, Berthier, and Duprè,” I said. “Smart boy.” I was silent for a moment “You think it’s a coincidence?” Denver asked. “I don’t believe in coincidences,” I said flatly. “Neither do we.”

“Is that all?” I asked, and Denver said yes, wished me luck, and hung up. I went down and had another drink.

Two hours later, I was back in my room undressing when the phone rang again.

“I’ve been trying to reach you for a couple of hours,” Denver said with a touch of irritation in his voice.

“What’s up?”

“It’s hit the fan,” Denver said. “We’ve been getting reports in all day long from our men. So far, the tally is Duttoit, Torregrossa, Vignale, Gambetta, Maxie Klein and Solly Webber!”

I whistled in amazement Denver had just named six of the top narcotics racket men associated with Stocelli in his East Coast operations. “Give me the details.”

Denver took a deep breath. “This morning, at La-Guardia airport, the FBI arrested Raymond Duttoit Duttoit had come in on a flight from Montreal. Duttoit was searched and they found an airport locker key in his overcoat pocket. The suitcase in the locker was packed with twenty kilos of pure heroin.”

“Go on.”

“Early this afternoon, Vinnie Torregrossa received a carton at his home in Westchester. It was delivered by a regular United Parcel Service van. He barely had time to open it when he was raided by agents from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs who were acting on a tip. The carton held fifteen kilos of horse!

“Gambetta and Vignale were arrested this evening around seven o’clock by New York narco squad police,” he continued.

“They’d been tipped off by telephone. They picked those two up in Gambetta’s car in mid town Manhattan and found twenty-two kilos of heroin packed into the spare tire compartment in the trunk.”

I said nothing while Denver went on with his recital.

“About ten o’clock tonight, the Feds walked in on Maxie Klein’s hotel penthouse apartment in Miami Beach. Klein and his partner, Webber, had just finished eating dinner. The agents found fifteen kilos of horse in the compartment of the dining table, which the waiter had brought up with dinner less than an hour before.”

Denver paused, waiting for me to say something.

“It’s pretty obvious that they’ve been set up,” I mused.

“Sure,” Denver agreed. “Not only were the Feds and the local police tipped off, but so were the newspapers. We had one of our news bureau reporters at every one of these pick-ups. The story will be a page-one lead in every paper in the country tomorrow. It’s already on the air.”

“Will the arrests stick?

“I think so,” said Denver after a moment’s thought. “They’re all screaming frame-up, but the Feds and the local cops “have been waiting a long time to nail these guys. Yes, I think they’ll make it stick.”

I did some mental arithmetic. “That’s a total of one hundred and two kilos of heroin,” I said, “if you include what they picked up from Michaud Berthier, and Duprè two days ago.”

“Right on the nose,” said Denver. “With the stuff having a street value of between two hundred and two hundred twenty thousand dollars a kilo, it adds up to well over twenty-one million dollars. Hell, even at Stocelli’s cost of ten to twelve thousand a kilo when he imports it from Marseille, that’s more than a million one hundred thousand dollars, and that’s a lot of scratch!”

“Someone got hurt,” I commented

“Want to hear the rest of it?”

“Go ahead.”

“Did you know that Stocelli was in Montreal yesterday?”

“Yes. I talked to him there.”

“Did you know that he met with Raymond Duttoit while he was there?”

“No.” But with the information Denver had just given me, I didn’t find that too surprising.

“Or that the day before he met with Duttoit, Stocelli was in Miami Beach meeting with Maxie Klein and Solly Webber?”

“No.”

“Or that the week after he came back from France, he met with both Torregrossa in Westchester and with Vignale and Gambetta in Brooklyn?”

“How the hell do you know all this about Stocelli?”

I asked.

“Gregorius had us put a tail on Stocelli about three weeks ago,” Denver explained. “We’ve had two-and three-man teams tailing him twenty-four hours a day since then.” He chuckled. “I can tell you how many times a day he went to the john and how many pieces of paper he used.”

“Quit bragging,” I told him. “I know how good the information service is.”

“All right,” said Denver. “Now, here’s one I’ve been saving for you. Just before he was picked up by the Feds, Maxie Klein talked to Hugo Donati in Cleveland. Maxie asked the Commission to put out a contract on Stocelli. He was told it was already in the works.”

“Why?”

“Because Maxie was worried that Stocelli had framed Michaud, Berthier, and Duprè. He heard about Torregrossa, Vignale and Gambetta on the radio. He figured that Stocelli had set them up and that he was next.”

With good-humored sarcasm I said, “I suppose Maxie Klein called and told you personally what he’d said to Donati?”

“Just about,” said Denver with a laugh. “Ever since Maxie met with Stocelli, we’ve been tapping his phones.”

“Maxie’s not stupid enough to use the telephones in his hotel suite for a call like that,” I pointed out. “He’d have used.an outside paybooth.”

“He did,” said Denver, “but he’s careless enough to use the same paybooth more than once. We put taps on half a dozen booths that we found him using steadily in the last couple of days. It paid off tonight.”

I couldn’t blame Denver for feeling smug. His men had done a damned fine job.

“How do you figure it?” I asked, “You think Stocelli’s been fingering his own associates?”

“It sure looks that way, doesn’t it? And the Commission seems to think that way, too, since they’ve put out a contract on him. Stocelli’s a dead man.”

“Maybe,” I said, noncomittally. “He also heads one of the biggest families in the country. It’s not going to be easy for them to get to him. Anything else?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“I guess so,” I said. “If anything else breaks, let me know.”

I put down the telephone thoughtfully and sat in the armchair on the small balcony outside my window. I lit a cigarette, staring into the darkness of the soft Mexican night and reviewing the information that had been dropped on me so suddenly.

If what Denver had said was true — if there was a contract out on Stocelli — then he’d have his hands full for months to come. So much that he wouldn’t have time to bother Gregorius. In that case, my job was done.

Yet it seemed too simple, too fortuitous a solution to Gregorius’ problem.

I went over the facts again. And doubts began creeping into my mind.

If Stocelli really had set up the frames, he would have known that his own life was in danger. He’d have known that he’d have to go to ground until the heat disappeared. Certainly, he’d never come down here to Acapulco so openly.

It didn’t make sense.

Question: Where the hell would he go to get a hundred and two kilos of horse? That’s a lot of heroin. He wouldn’t get it from his Marseille friends — not if he was going to use it to frame them. And if he went to other sources, they’d have heard about so big a buy.

Question: Where would he lay his hands on more than a million dollars in cash to make the buy? Even in the underworld of the Mafia and the Syndicate, that kind of cash is hard to come by in one lump sum and in small, untraceable bills. No one takes checks and no one offers credit!

Question: Where would he have stored the stuff? Why hadn’t word gotten around about the stuff before it had been planted? Interpol, the French narcotics bureau — L’Office Central Pour la Suppression du traffic des Stupefiants — our own U.S. Department of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs — all should have heard about it beforehand from their vast networks of paid informers.

Another thought: If Stocelli could write off that large an amount of heroin, did it mean that he could lay his hands on even larger quantities?

Now, that was really something to produce chills in a person’s spinel.

Those questions and their numerous possible answers went around and around in my mind, like a riderless carousel with the wooden horses prancing up and down on their steel poles, and as fast as I reached for one idea, another would pop up that seemed more logical.

I finally became lost in a maze of frustration.

The biggest question of all was why Hawk had lent me to Gregorius? The clue lay in the. phrase, “lend-lease.” I was being lent, and Hawk was going to get something in return for my services. What?

And more than that. “No AXE” meant I couldn’t call on AXE’s facilities or manpower. This was strictly a private venture. Hawk was telling me that I was on my own!

Okay. I could understand that. AXE is a U.S. government super-secret agency, and this was definitely not a government job. So, no calls to Washington. No back-up men. Nobody to clean up the mess after me.

Just me, Wilhelmina, Hugo, and, of course, Pierre.

I finally said to hell with it and went downstairs to enjoy one last, pleasant drink on the terrace before I turned in for the night.

CHAPTER FIVE

I awoke in the darkness of my room to some atavistic, primordial sense of danger. Nude beneath the light blanket and sheet, I lay without moving, careful not to open my eyes or to indicate in any way that I was now awake. I even continued to breathe in the slow, regular pattern of sleep. I was aware that something had awakened me, a sound that did not belong in the room had touched my sleeping mind and thrust me into wakefulness.

I tuned my ears to catch anything that was different from the normal night sounds. I heard the slight rustle of the curtains in the breeze of the air conditioner. I heard the faint ticking of the small travelers’ alarm clock that I’d set up on the night table beside my bed. I even heard a drop of water that fell from the bathroom faucet. None of these sounds had drawn me from sleep.

Whatever was different spelled danger to me. An interminable minute went by before I heard it again— the slow, cautious slide of shoe across the carpet nap followed by a thin exhalation of breath that had been too tensely held.

Still without moving or changing the rhythm of my breathing, I opened my eyes the merest slit, watching the shadows in the room out of the corners of my eyes. There were three that didn’t belong. Two of them moved toward my bed.

In spite of every impulse, I forced myself to remain motionless. I knew that in a moment there would be no time for deliberately planned action. Survival would depend on the sheer speed of my instinctive, physical reaction.

The shadows moved closer. They separated, one moving to each side of my bed.

As they leaned over me, I exploded. My torso snapped erect, my hands swept out and caught them by their necks to smash their heads together.

I was too slow by a fraction of a second. My right hand caught one man, but the other pulled out of my grasp.

He made an angry sound and swung his arm down. The blow caught me on the left side of my neck at the shoulder. He’d hit me with more than just his fist; I almost passed out from the sudden pain.

I tried to throw myself out of bed. I got as far as the floor when the third shadow came diving at me, slamming me back against the bed. I knocked him away with my knee, driving it hard up into his groin. He screamed and doubled over, and I stabbed my fingers into his face, just missing his eyes.

For a moment, I was free. My left arm was numb from the blow on my collarbone. I tried to ignore it, dropping to the floor in a crouch just long enough to get the leverage to spring up into the air. My right foot slammed out horizontally in a flat-footed kick. It caught one of the men high on his chest, sending him smashing into the wall. He let out a grunt of pain.

I spun toward the third man, the edge of my hand sweeping out toward him in a short, sideways chop that should have broken his neck.

I wasn’t quite fast enough. I can remember starting the blow and seeing his hand swinging at me with a sap in it, and realizing, in that fraction of a second, that I wasn’t going to be able to get my head out of the way in time.

I was right. Everything went all at once. I dropped into the deepest, blackest hole I’ve ever been in. It took me forever to fall down and hit the floor. And then, for a long time, there was no more.

* * *

I came to and found myself lying on the bed. The lights had been turned on. Two of the men were sitting in armchairs near the window. The third man stood at the foot of my bed. He held a big, Spanish-made, Gabilondo Llama .45 calibre automatic pistol pointed at me. One of the men in the armchairs held a Colt .38 with a nasty looking two-inch barrel. The other tapped a spring-loaded sap into the palm of his left hand.

My head ached. My neck and shoulder ached. I looked from one to the other of them. Finally, I asked, “What the hell is all this about?”

The big man at the foot of my bed said, “Stocelli wants to see you. He sent us to bring you.”

“A telephone call would have done it,” I commented sourly.

He shrugged indifferently. “You mighta run.”

“Why should I run? I came down here just to meet with him.”

No answer. Only a shrug of a meaty shoulder.

“Where’s Stocelli now?”

“Upstairs in the penthouse. Get dressed.”

Wearily, I got off the bed. They watched me carefully while I pulled on my clothes. Every time I reached with my left arm, my shoulder muscles ached. I swore under my breath. The six months I’d been away from AXE had taken its toll. I hadn’t kept up with my daily yoga exercises. I’d let my body go slack. Not by much, but that little bit made the difference. My reactions were no longer as fast as they once had been. The fraction of a second delay had been enough for Stocelli’s three thugs. Once, I’d have been able to catch the two of them leaning over my bed and smash their heads together. The third would never have gotten off the floor after I’d kicked him.

“Let’s go,” I said, rubbing my aching collarbone. “We don’t want to keep Carmine Stocelli waiting, do we?”

* * *

Carmine Stocelli was seated in a low, deeply upholstered leather arm chair at the far end of an enormous living room in his penthouse quarters. His burly figure was wrapped in a silk lounging robe.

He was drinking coffee as we came in. He put down the cup and looked me over carefully. His small eyes peered out of a round, darkly jowled face filled with animosity and suspicion.

Stocelli was in his late fifties. His head was almost bald except for a monk’s tonsure of oily, black hair that he let grow long and combed in scanty wisps over a polished, bare skull. As he eyed me up and down, an aura of ruthless strength radiated from him so strongly that I could feel it.

“Sit down,” he growled. I sat on the couch across from him, rubbing my aching shoulder.

He looked up and saw his three boys standing nearby. A frown crossed his face.

“Out!” he snapped, gesturing with his thumb. “I don’t need you no more right now.”

“You gonna be okay?” asked the big one.

Stocelli looked at me. I nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m gonna be okay. Beat it.”

They left us. Stocelli looked me over again and then shook his head.

“I’m surprised they got you so easy, Carter,” he said. “I heard you were a lot tougher.”

I met his gaze. “Don’t believe everything you hear,” I said. “I just let myself get a little careless.”

Stocelli said nothing, waiting for me to continue. I reached into my pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one.

“I came down here,” I said, “to tell you that Gregorius wants you out of his hair. What do I have to do to convince you that it would be bad for you to move in on him?”

Stocelli’s small, tough eyes never left my face. “I think you already begun to try to convince me,” he growled coldly. “And I don’t like what you been doing. Michaud, Berthier, Duprè—you framed them good. It’s gonna be damned hard for me to set up another source as good as them.”

Stocelli went on in his angry, rasping voice.

“Okay, I’m gonna give you the benefit of my doubt. Let’s say you set them up before you talked to me, okay? Like you had to show me you had balls and you could do me a lot of damage. I don’t grudge you that. But, when I talked to you from Montreal, I made it a point to tell you, no more games. Right? Didn’t I tell you no more games? So what happens?”

He ticked them off on his fingers.

“Torregrossa! Vignale! Gambetta! Three of my biggest customers. They got families I don’t want to fight with. You got your message across to me, all right. Now it’s my turn. I’m telling you — your boss is gonna be sorry he turned you loose on me! You hear me?”

Stocelli’s face was red with anger. I could see the effort it cost him to remain seated in his armchair. He wanted to get up and use his heavy fists on me.

“I had nothing to do with it!” I snapped the words into his face.

“Bullshit!” he exploded.

“Think about it. Where would I lay my hands on more than a hundred kilos of horse?”

It took a moment for that to sink in. Slowly, disbelief registered on his face. “A hundred kilos?”

“One hundred and two, to be exact. That’s what it added up to when they picked up Maxie Klein and Solly Webber—”

“—they picked up Maxie?” he interrupted.

“Tonight. Around ten o’clock. Along with fifteen kilos of the stuff.”

Stocelli didn’t bother to ask for the details. He was like a man stunned.

“Keep talking,” he said

“They’ve put out a contract on you.”

I let the words fall on him, but the only reaction I could see was a tightening of Stocelli’s jaw muscles under his heavy jowls. Nothing else showed on his face.

“Who?” he demanded. “Who put out the contract?”

“Cleveland.”

“Donati? Hugo Donati put out a contract on me? What the hell for?”

“They think you’re trying to take over the whole East Coast. They think you set up your friends.”

“Come on!” growled Stocelli, angrily. “What kind of shit is this?” He glared at me, and then he saw I wasn’t joking with him. His tone changed. “You serious? You really serious?”

“It’s the truth.”

Stocelli rubbed one thick hand across the rough bristles on his jaw.

“Goddamn it! It still don’t make sense. I know it wasn’t me.”

“Then you’ve got another headache,” I told him bluntly. “You could be the next on the list to be set up.”

“Me?” Stocelli was incredulous.

“You. Why not? If you’re not behind what’s going on, then someone else is trying to take over. And he’s going to have to get rid of you, Stocelli. Who would it be?”

Stocelli continued to rub his jowls with an angry gesture. His mouth twisted in a grimace of irritation. He lit a cigarette. He poured himself another cup of coffee. Finally, he said, grudgingly, “Okay, then. I’m gonna sit it out here. I took the penthouse. All four suites. Nobody comes in or goes out, except my boys. They can send down anybody they want, but I’m protected as long as I park my ass up here. I can stay for months if I have to.”

“And what happens in the meantime?” I asked.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Suspicion beetled his brows.

“While you sit here, Donati’ll be trying to take over your organization in New York. You’ll sweat out every day, wondering if Donati got to one of your button men here to set you up for a hit. You’ll live with a gun in your hand. You won’t eat because they might poison your food. You won’t sleep. You’ll he awake wondering if someone hasn’t planted a stick of dynamite in the rooms below you. No, Stocelli, face it. You can’t stay here safely. Not for long.”

Stocelli listened to me without saying a word. His swarthy face was gravely impassive. He didn’t move his little black eyes from mine. When I was through, he nodded his round head somberly.

Then he put down his coffee cup and suddenly grinned at me. It was like being smiled at by a fat vulture, his thin lips in his round face twisting themselves into a humorless parody of friendliness.

“I just hired you,” he announced, pleased with himself.

“You just what?”

“What’s the matter? You didn’t hear me? I said I just hired you,” Stocelli repeated. “You. You’re gonna get me off the hook with the Commission and with Donati. And you’re gonna prove to them that I didn’t have nothing to do with what happened.”

We glared at each other.

“Why should I do you a favor like that?”

“Because”—again Stocelli grinned at me—”I’m gonna make a deal with you. You get me off the hook with Donati, and I leave Gregorius alone.”

He leaned forward toward me, the thin, humorless smile sliding off his face.

“You know how many millions I can make on those gambling casinos in Gregorius’ projects? You ever stop to figure it out? Well, that’s what it’s worth to me for you to do this job?”

“What’s to stop me from letting the Commission take care of you?” I asked him, bluntly. “You wouldn’t be around to bother Gregorius then.”

“Because I send my boys after him if I don’t get my deal with you. I don’t think he’d like that.”

Stocelli paused, his little black button eyes boring into me.

“Quit screwing around, Carter. Is it a deal?”

I nodded. “It’s a deal.”

“Okay,” Stocelli growled, leaning back on the couch. He gestured rudely with his thumb. “On your way. Get going.”

“Not just yet.” I went over to the desk and found a pad of hotel stationery and a ballpoint pen. I sat down again.

“I want some information,” I said and began to make notes while Stocelli talked.

* * *

Back in my own room, I picked up the telephone and, after arguing with the hotel operator and then the long-distance operator, I finally-got Denver on the line.

Without preamble, I asked, “How quickly can you get me a check on half a dozen airline passenger manifest lists?”

“How old are they?”

“Not more than a couple of weeks. Some just the other day.”

“Domestic or international flights?”

“Both.”

“Give us a day or two.”

“I need them sooner than that.”

I could hear Denver sigh unhappily. “We’ll do our best. What is it you want?”

I told him. “Stocelli was on the following flights. Air France from JFK to Orly on the twentieth of last month. Air France, Orly to Marseille on the same date. TWA from Orly to JFK on the twenty-sixth. National Airlines, New York to Miami on the twenty-eighth—”

“Hold on a second. You know how many flights a day they run?”

“I’m just interested in the one that Stocelli was on. The same goes for Air Canada, New York to Montreal on the fourth, Eastern to New York on the fifth, and Aeromexico to Acapulco the same day.”

“Just the flights Stocelli was on?”

“That’s right. It shouldn’t be too hard. I’d also like you to get the passenger manifest of the flight Duttoit was on from Montreal to New York.”

“It would save us a lot of time if we had the flight numbers.”

“You’ve got most of them if your men were tailing him,” I pointed out.

“You want copies of these manifests sent to you?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, reflectively. “Your computers can do the job faster than I can. I want the lists checked out to see if there’s any name that comes up on two or more of those flights. Especially on the international runs. You’ve got to show a passport or tourist permit on them, so it’s more difficult to get away with using a false name.”

“Let me see if I have those flights correctly.”

“Pick it up from the tape,” I told him. I was becoming tired and impatient. “You’ve been recording me, I hope?”

“Right,” said Denver.

“I’d appreciate getting the information as fast as you can dig it up. And one other thing — if you do run across a name that’s been on more than one of these flights with Stocelli, I want a complete rundown on who the man is. Everything you can find out about him. The full treatment. Put as many men on it as you have to. And keep feeding me the information as it comes in. Don’t wait to get it all together.”

“Will do,” said Denver. “Anything else?”

I thought a moment. “I guess not,” I said, and hung up. I stretched out on the bed, and in a moment I was fast asleep in spite of my throbbing head and my aching shoulder.

CHAPTER SIX

I slept late. When I awoke, my mouth was dry from having smoked too much the night before. I showered and put on swim trunks and a lightweight beach shirt. I donned a pair of dark glasses and went down to the pool, carrying a camera slung around my neck and an equipment bag hanging from my shoulder.

The camera equipment and the dark glasses, together with a loud, patterned sport shirt make a pretty good disguise if you don’t want people to notice you. You’re just another tourist in a town full of them. Who’s going to look at another gringo?

At the pool, I ordered huevos rancheros for breakfast. There were only a few people around the pool. There were a couple of cute young English women. Slim, blonde and with cool, clear English voices emerging from lips that barely moved. The tone was lilting, with vowels as liquid as the water still beading on their suntanned bodies.

There were two other women in the pool, splashing around with a muscular character who looked like he was in his late twenties. You’ve seen the type. All bulging pectorals and biceps overdeveloped from constant weight lifting.

He made a pain in the ass of himself. He wasn’t satisfied with the two girls in the water. He wanted the English women, but they made a special point of ignoring him.

Something about him antagonized me. Or maybe I wanted to prove I could do it. I waited until the English women were looking in my direction and smiled at them. They smiled back at me.

“Hello.” The long-haired blonde waved at me.

I motioned for them to come over and join me and they did, dripping water, standing hip-slung and casual.

“When did you get in?” asked the other.

“Last night.”

“Thought so,” she said. “We haven’t noticed you here before. There aren’t many guests at all. Did you know that?”

“My name’s Margaret,” the first girl said.

“And I’m Linda…”

“I’m Paul Stephans,” I said, giving my cover name.

There was a massive splash at the pool as Muscles hauled himself out.

Without looking at him, Linda said, “Here comes that bore, again. Are they all like that in San Francisco?”

“San Francisco?” asked Margaret, puzzled. “This morning at breakfast, Henry told me that he was from Las Vegas.”

“Doesn’t make any difference,” said Linda. “Wherever he’s from, I can’t stand him.”

She flashed me a smile and spun away on long, suntanned legs. Margaret gathered up their towels. I watched them walk up the stairs that led to the hotel terrace, their lithe, bronzed legs moving in beautiful counterpoint to their semi-clad, sensual bodies.

At the same time, I was wondering about Henry, who came from either San Francisco or Las Vegas.

About that time, a young couple came down the stairs and put down their things near me.

The man was slender and dark. Very hairy legs. The woman with him was slim and had a fine figure. Her face was pert rather than pretty. They went into the water and swam, and then came out. I heard them speaking in French to each other.

He dried his hands on a towel and took out a package of Gauloises. “The matches are wet,” he called to the woman.

He caught me looking at him and came over. He said, pleasantly, “Do you have a match?”

I tossed him my lighter. He cupped his hands in front of his face to light the cigarette.

“Thank you. Allow me to introduce myself. Jean-Paul Sevier. The young lady is Celeste. And you are?”

“Paul Stephans.”

Jean-Paul smiled cynically at me.

“Forgive me for not believing you,” he said. “You’re Nick Carter.”

I froze.

Jean-Paul gestured easily with his hand. “Don’t be disturbed. I merely want a word with you.”

“Go ahead. Talk.”

“We are puzzled about your connection with Stocelli.”

“We?”

He shrugged. “I represent a group from Marseille. Does the name Andrè Michaud mean anything to you? Or Maurice Berthier? Or Etienne Duprè?”

“I know the names.”

“Then you know the organization I represent.”

“What do you want from me?”

Jean-Paul sat down at my table. “Stocelli has isolated himself. We can’t get at him. Our Mexican friends here can’t get at him either. You can.”

“I don’t know what you expect me to do. Walk in and shoot the man?”

Jean-Paul smiled. “No. Nothing as crude as that. We merely want your cooperation to — as you say— set him up. We’ll take care of the rest.”

I shook my head. “No deal.”

Jean-Paul’s voice got hard. “You don’t have a choice, Mr. Carter.” Before I could interrupt, he went on quickly. “One way or another, we’re going to kill Stocelli. By that, I mean that our Mexican contacts will do the job as a favor for us. Right now, all they ask is a meeting with you. That’s not much, is it?”

“Just a meeting?”

He nodded.

I thought for a second. It could be a set-up to knock me off. On the other hand, it was the fastest way for me to get to know who the Mexican crowd was. In my business, you get nothing for nothing. If you want something, you’ve got to take the risks.

“I’ll meet with them,” I agreed.

Jean-Paul smiled again. “In that case, you have a date tonight Her name is Senora Consuela Delgardo.

An extremely pretty woman, I’m told. She’ll call for you here at the hotel around seven-thirty.”

He got to his feet.

“I’m sure you’ll have an enjoyable evening,” he said pleasantly, and went back to join Celeste, who’d just come out of the pool again.

* * *

Late in the afternoon, I took a taxi down the hill from the hotel to El Centro, the area of the cathedral and zocalo and the Monument to the Heroes. El Centro is the center of the town. It’s from here that all taxi and bus fares are computed by zones.

Acapulco is the main town in the state of Guerrero. And Guerrero is the most lawless state of all in Mexico. The hills just outside of Acapulco are filled with banditos who’ll slit your throat for a few pesos. The police aren’t able to enforce the law much outside the town limits. Even the army has its problems with them.

Wearing a loud sport shirt, a pair of light powder-blue slacks, and my feet in new leather huaraches, I walked into the park next to the malecon.

Everywhere I turned, I saw los Indios, the broad, brown-skinned faces of the men topped by short-cropped, jet black hair. Beside them, squatting on their haunches, were their women. And every one of them with obsidian eyed, high-cheekboned, brooding Indian faces.

As I looked at them, I realized that the old statuary of their ancient gods was more than a representation of some unknown deity; it also must be a good likeness of how the Toltecs themselves looked in those days.

And they hadn’t changed much over the centuries. These lndios looked as if they could still tear open your chest with a flint knife and rip out the bleeding, pulsing heart.

I made my way to a quieter part of the malecon, taking photographs as I went. Further down the curve of the waterfront, I could see a commercial tuna fishing boat, stumpy and squat Its decks were littered with equipment and it was tethered fore and aft by heavy manila hawsers to black iron bollards on the concrete malecon.

In the distance, at the docks below the massive stoneworks of Fort San Diego on the crest of the hill, I could see a freighter moored beside the warehouses.

I strolled along the malecon. On the stone steps that led to the water’s edge, I stopped and looked down.

There were two fishermen there. A young one and an old one. Both were bare except for ragged shorts. They held a huge, six-foot turtle between them. The turtle was on its back and helpless.

The young man took out a knife with a long, slim blade honed so many times that it was now worn to a thin crescent of convex steel.

He slid the blade under the bottom shell of the turtle near a hind flipper. Blood turned the knife red at the first slash. He cut in quick, savage strokes, moving his knife beneath the rim of the bottom shell, slicing through skin, flesh, muscle, and membrane with swift twists of his wrists as he squatted on his haunches beside the turtle.

The turtle twisted its head from side to side in slow, silent, saurian agony. Its slant, reptilian eyes were glazed from the sun. Its flippers waved in rhythmic, hysterical helplessness.

I watched the young man’s knife plunging deeper into the turtle. With each slash, his hands turned red with blood, first his fingers, then his hands, then his wrist, and finally his forearm all the way to the elbow.

I could see the viscera of the turtle pulsating in pink, wet coils of gut.

In a few minutes, they were through. They sloshed down the jetty steps with buckets of sea water and packed away the turtle meat in a bushel basket.

I had taken a full roll of color film while they were butchering the turtle. Now, as I wound the film back and began to reload my camera, I heard a voice behind me.

“They are pretty good, no? The one with the knife, eh?”

I turned around.

He was in his late twenties, good looking, with a stocky, athlete’s body, the muscles moving easily under his dark, copper-colored skin. He was dressed in cotton slacks, sandals, and a sport shirt completely open to display his bare, broad chest. He looked like every other one of the hundreds of beach boys who hang around the hotels.

“What do you want?”

He shrugged. “It depends. You need a guide, senor?”

“No.” I turned away and swung over to the Costera Miguel Aleman. The boy fell in beside me.

“What about women, senor? Eh?” He winked at me. “I know a very beautiful girl who knows many tricks—”

“Get lost!” I said, irritated at his unusual persistence. “I don’t like pimps!”

For a moment, I thought the guy would jump me. His brown face mottled with a sudden, dark flush of blood. His hand went back toward his hip pocket and then stopped. I saw sheer, murderous rage leap into his eyes.

I tensed, ready for him to jump.

He took a deep breath. The light went out of his eyes. He said, with an attempt at a smile that didn’t quite succeed, “Senor, you shouldn’t say things like that. Sometime, you will say-that word to somebody, and he’s going to put a knife in your ribs.”

“I told you I didn’t need your help.”

He shrugged. “Is too bad, senor. I can give you much help. Maybe you change your mind when I fee you next time, eh? My name is Luis. Luis Aparicio. Until then, adios.”

He turned and swaggered away, walking with an exaggerated stride to display his machismo.

There was something strange about what had just happened. I had insulted him. I had called him a name that, said to any other Mexican male, would have had him at my throat with a knife. Yet, he had swallowed his pride to go on pretending that he was just another tourist guide.

I’d intended to have a drink downtown before I went back to the hotel, but now I changed my mind. I was sure that the overtures my would-be friend had made were not accidental I knew I’d see Luis Aparicio again.

I stepped out into the street, waving down a taxi with its fibre sign showing. As I got in, I saw a familiar figure on the other side of the Costera. It was Jean-Paul. The slim Frenchman was with Celeste. He lifted a hand in greeting as my taxi moved away.

* * *

Senora Consuela Delgardo was prompt. She pulled up to the hotel at almost exactly seven-thirty in a small, red Volkswagen. I saw her come into the lobby and look around. She caught sight of me as I walked toward her, and held out her hand. We went back out the door together.

Consuela drove the winding roads like she was competing in the Mille Miglie.

We had a drink at Sanborn’s where the seats around piano bar were the only ones lit. I noticed that she steered us to those tables. I couldn’t see anyone else, but anyone else could sure as hell see me.

Then we went to dinner at Hernando’s. We met a tall, redheaded Englishman with a British accent so thick it was almost a parody. Consuela told me his name was Ken Hobart and that he ran a charter airline. He wore a thick RAF-type mustache under a beak of a nose. He finally ambled off, leaving us alone.

Consuela Delgardo was a beautiful woman. She was in her late thirties, a boldly handsome woman with a strongly boned face. Her hair was a rich, sable brown that she wore long, and it fell almost to her waist. She was tall, with superb legs, a narrow waist and full breasts. Her English was without a trace of an accent.

What unsettled me was that she stared as boldly and as appraisingly at me as I did at her.

Over coffee, I said, “Senora, you are one very lovely woman.”

“—and you would like to go to bed with me,” she finished.

I laughed.

“If you put it that way, sure.”

“And I,” she said, “I think you are a very fine man. But I am not going to bed with you tonight.”

“In that case,” I said, getting to my feet, “let’s go see your friends and find out what they want to tell me.”

We went to see Johnny Bickford.

* * *

Bickford was in his early sixties, white-haired, with a broken nose and a deep tan. The knuckles of both hands were flat from having been broken many times in the ring. Wide shoulders bulged his cotton knit, short-sleeved pullover. Faded tattoos, blue behind the deep brown of his skin, covered both forearms.

His wife, Doris, was almost as tanned as he. Platinum blond hair, eyebrows bleached blond from the sun, and faint blond down on her arms. She was also a lot younger than Bickford. I’d say she was in her early thirties. And she was a tease.

She wore no bra under her dress, and her cleavage was all hers and firm She was scented with Arpege. And I would have bet that when she was younger she went for at least two hundred a night You can always spot an ex-call girl There’s something about them that gives them away.

The terrace of Bickford’s casa overlooked the narrow inlet that led from the Pacific into the bay. I could see the dark expanse of the ocean as well as the lights of Las Brisas and the Naval Base at the foot of the hills across the inlet Scattered at random up and down the hillside were the lights of other houses, like immobile fireflies imbedded in the gelatin of the purple night shadows.

The two of us were alone on the terrace. Consuela had excused herself to go inside to freshen her makeup. Doris went with her to show her the way to the powder room.

I took a chance and said abruptly into the darkness, “I don’t want any part of your deal, Bickford.”

Bickford was not surprised. He said, easily, “That’s what we’ve been told, Mr. Carter. But, sooner or later, we’re going to get Stocelli. Since you can get to him easier than we can, you can save us a lot of time.”

I faced Bickford and said, sharply, “I want you to lay off Stocelli.”

Bickford laughed. “Come on, now, Mr. Carter.” His voice had the huskiness of an ex-prize fighter. “You know you’re in no position to tell us what to do.”

“I can blow your whole organization apart,” I said. “What kind of position does that put me in?”

Bickford chuckled. “Is that a threat?”

“Call it what you want to, but you’d better take me seriously, Bickford.”

“All right,” he said, “prove it.”

“Just a few facts,” I said. “Your people are running heroin into the States. Up until a year or so ago, you’ve been involved only with the Mexican-grown stuff. But the authorities have been clamping down on the poppy growers, and that cut into your source of supply, so you turned to Marseille. Your organization has become part of the pipeline from Marseille to the States. You run the stuff into the States through Matamoros into Brownsville, Juarez into El Paso, Nuevo Laredo into Laredo, Tijuana into L.A. A lot of it goes directly from here to San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, usually by tuna boat or freighter. A lot of it goes by private aircraft across the border into Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. Do you want the names of some of the ships you use? I can supply them, Mr. Bickford. Push me hard enough, and I’ll supply them to the authorities.”

“Jesus Christ!” said Bickford, slowly and softly as though he’d gone into shock. “What you know is enough to get you killed, Carter!”

“I know a lot of things that can get me killed,” I replied, coldly. “Now, how about it? Will you lay off Stocelli?”

Bickford was still stunned by what he’d heard. He shook his head. “I–I can’t do that I’m not in a position to make a decision like that.”

“Why?”

There was a pause, and then he confessed, “Because Tm just a guy in the middle.”

“Then pass the word on,” I told him, pressing him hard. “Tell your boss”—I saw Bickford wince at my use of the word—”that I want him to leave Stocelli alone.”

I saw the two women come out of the house toward us. I got to my feet

“I think we’ll have to be running along,” I said, taking Consuela by the arm as she came up to me.

Bickford stood up, a big, rangy man, his hair gleaming whitely in the moonlight, a troubled look on his battered face, and I knew I’d been right in my estimate of him. He’d dropped out of the fight game because he lacked the guts to take a hard punch and come back swinging. He was all show. His toughness was all on the outside.

“You’ll have to come around again,” Doris said brightly, looking at me, her eyes filled with invitation. “Both of you,” she added.

“We’ll do that,” I said, not smiling back at her. I turned to Bickford. “It’s been nice talking to you.”

“You’ll hear from us soon,” said Bickford, making no effort to keep up the pretense. Doris threw him a sharp, warning glance.

The four of us walked out to Consuela’s little car and said goodnight.

Consuela was quiet on the ride back to my hotel. We were almost there when I suddenly asked, “Who’s Luis Aparicio? Is he one of your men?”

“Who?”

“Luis Aparicio.” I described the young Mexican I’d met that afternoon on the malecon.

After a pause, she said, “I don’t know him. Why?”

“Just wondered. Are you sure?”

“I’ve never heard of him.” Then she added, “I don’t know everyone in the organization.”

“And the less you know the better off you are?”

Consuela made no answer for a long time. Finally, she said, in a voice devoid of all warmth, “I’m still alive, Mr. Carter. And, in my own way, I do quite well.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Consuela dropped me off at the hotel and went on her way, clashing the gears of the Volkswagen as she drove off. The lobby was deserted. I made my way through it out onto the broad terrace, that faced the town across the bay. I found a chair and sat down, wanting to enjoy a last cigarette before I turned in for the night.

When I finished the cigarette, I flipped it over the railing, the glowing coal making a tiny red arc in the darkness. As I was about to get to my feet, I heard someone come out onto the terrace.

Henry came up beside me, peering at me in the dark, trying to recognize me.

“Hi. You were at the pool this morning, weren’t you?” he asked, tentatively.

“Yes.”

He let his heavy body sink down into a chair facing me. “They never did show up,” he complained, his voice petulant with disappointment

“What’re you talking about?”

“Those chicks,” said Henry, in disgust “None of them. It’s one-thirty and not one of those dumb broads ever showed up to go skinny-dipping.”

“You really thought they’d go skinny-dipping?”

“Sure. At least the two that I was with. They probably found some goddamned Mexican beachboys instead!”

He fumbled in his shirt pocket for a cigarette. The flare of the match lit up his heavy, sun-reddened face before he blew out the flame.

“That English chick is the one Yd like to latch onto,” he said, morosely. “The skinny one. The other’s stacked, but it’s Margaret who’s got all the bread. Her old man’s loaded. The only trouble is that she’s so damn cold she’d probably give you frostbite!”

Ignoring my dislike for him, I asked as casually as I could, “What do you do?”

“Do? I don’t get you, man.”

“What kind of work are you in?”

Henry laughed. “Hey, man, that’s not for me! I live! I don’t get tied down to a job. I stay loose, you know?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

“I have connections. I know the right guys. I do a few favors for them, now and then. Like if they want me to lean on someone. I’m pretty good at that.”

“Muscle?”

“Yeah, you could say that.”

“You ever lean on anyone seriously? You ever take on a contract?”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to talk about something like that,” Henry said. “I mean, it wouldn’t be smart to sound off, would it?” He paused, letting the words sink in, and then he said, “I’d sure like to latch on to that little Limey chick. I could teach her a few tricks!”

“And take her back to Las Vegas with you?”

“You got the idea.”

“Or would it be San Francisco? Just where do you come from?”

There was a slight pause, and then Henry said, in a tight, unfriendly voice, “What business is it of yours?”

“I get curious about people who aren’t sure where they’re from. It makes me uneasy about them.”

“Keep your goddamned nose out of my business,” Henry growled. “It’ll be a lot healthier for you.”

“You haven’t answered my question, Henry,” I persisted, gently, surprising him by saying his name.

He swore and got to his feet, a hulking shadow in the darkness, his big hands closing into rocklike fists.

“Get up!” he said, angrily, waiting for me to stand. He took a threatening step closer. “Get up, I said!”

I reached into my pocket, took out a gold-tipped cigarette, and lit it, easily. As I snapped the lighter shut, I said, “Henry, why don’t you just sit down and answer my question?”

“Goddamn you!” Henry said, menacingly. “Get on your feet, you son-of-a-bitch.”

I took the cigarette from my mouth and in one continuous movement, I snapped it into Henry’s face, the ashes breaking, sparks flying into his eyes.

His hands went up to protect his face instinctively, his eyelids flicking shut in reflex; and in that second I launched myself out of the chair, my forearm snapping out, my whole body behind the blow as my stiffened, flat-knuckled fist drove deeply into Henry’s midriff just below his ribcage.

He gave an explosive grunt and doubled over in agony. I chopped at his face as it came down, the blow catching him on the bridge of his nose, breaking the cartilage. Henry gagged, his knees buckling as he slid to the terrace flagstones. Blood poured out of his nostrils onto his chin and onto the tiles.

“Oh, Jesus!” he gasped, painfully. Tin going to be sick.” He put a protective hand to his smashed nose. “No more!”

I stepped back, looking down at the big, helpless, crouching figure in front of me.

“Where are you from, Henry?” I asked him, quietly.

The big man drew in a shuddering breath.

“Vegas,” he said, pain distorting his voice. “The last couple of years, I been in Vegas. Before that, it was San Francisco.”

“What do you do in Vegas?”

Henry shook his head.

“Nothing,” he said. “I used to be a bouncer in a club there. I got fired last month.”

“Get up.”

Henry climbed slowly to his feet, one arm crossed in front of his stomach, the other hand held to his nose, oblivious of the blood that poured down onto his wrist

“Who are your connections?”

Henry shook his head. “I don’t have any,” he mumbled. “It was just talk.” He caught my look. “Honest to god! I’m telling you the truth!” He tried to draw a deep breath. “Jesus, it feels like you broke a rib.”

“I think you ought to move out of here,” I suggested.

“Huh?”

“Tonight,” I said, almost conversationally. “I think it would be best for you.”

“Hey, listen—” Henry began, and then he stopped and stared at me, trying to read my expression in the darkness and failing. He gave in.

“Okay,” he said with a sigh. “I’ve leaned on enough guys in my time. I guess it’s my turn now, huh?” He shook his head. “Me and my big mouth.”

Slowly, he backed away from me until he was near the lobby doors and then he turned quickly and went inside.

I sat down in the chair again and took out another cigarette.

“You smoke too much,” said the voice from the far, darker-shadowed end of the terrace. “I’m surprised that a man who smokes as much as you can move so fast. I thought for a certainty that you were going to be hurt That Henry, he is a big man, n’est ce pas?”

“Hello, Jean-Paul,” I said without surprise. “How long have you been out here?”

“Long enough. You expose yourself to too many dangers, my friend.”

“He’s no danger. He’s a punk.”

“He almost got himself killed,” said Jean-Paul. “If he knew how close he came, I think he would have dirtied his underwear.”

“I made a mistake about him,” I said soberly. “I thought he was after Stocelli. I should have known better. He’s a nobody.”

“It happens. Better to be wrong and sorry if you can’t be right. By the way, who was that Mexican who came up to you this afternoon?”

“He said his name was Luis Aparicio. He tried to sell me his services as a guide, assistant or pimp— whatever I wanted. I thought your friends might have sent him.”

“Possibly. What makes you think so?”

“My suspicious nature,” I said drily. “On the other hand, Consuela says she never heard of him before.”

Jean-Paul was silent for a moment. Then, almost as an afterthought he said, “By the way, I have a message for you. Apparently, whatever it was you told them tonight got you a quick response. Tomorrow afternoon, please plan on going out to El Cortijo to see a bullfight. It starts at four o’clock.”

“When did you get this message?” I asked suspiciously.

“Shortly before you returned to the hotel. I was coming out to deliver it when your friend Henry showed up. I decided to wait until we were alone.”

“Who’s it from?”

“He said his name was Bickford. He said he passed the word on to his boss. You’ll be talking to the top men.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s enough, isn’t it?”

“If you talked to Bickford,” I said, “then you know what I told them. I want you to lay off Stocelli.”

“So he said. He also told me of the threat you made.”

“Well?”

Even in the darkness, I could see Jean-Paul’s face turn serious. “My people in Marseille want Stocelli punished. We can’t push our Mexican friends any more than we have already. It’s their decision.”

“And you?”

He shrugged. “If we have to, we can wait. Stocelli will never leave this hotel alive. However,” he added, “if they decide not to agree to what you’ve suggested, if they decide to go after Stocelli in spite of your threats, then, in all likelihood, you won’t be alive much longer, either. Had you thought about that?”

“It’s something to think about, isn’t it?” I said, easily, and went into the lobby by myself.

* * *

In my room, I unpacked the Xerox Telecopier 400 from its case and moved it next to the telephone. My call to Denver went through with no lengthy delay.

“Have you come up with anything?”

“We hit it,” said Denver. “We don’t have all the passenger manifest lists in yet, but we found it on Air France, Air Canada, and Eastern. Can we talk openly, or do you want it on the Telecopier?”

“On the machine,” I said. “There are complications down here. Michaud’s organization has gotten into the act. And they brought their local friends in on the action.”

Denver whistled. “You’ve got your hands full, haven’t you?”

“I can handle it.”

Denver said, “All right, we’ll put it on the Telecopier. We ran into some luck, by the way. We have a file on the subject. Came through our credit checking bureau. They did a report on his company a few years back. We’ve included some of the highlights in our report We don’t have all the information about him yet, but he sure doesn’t fit into Stocelli’s group of friends in any way we can see.”

“Put it on the wire,” I told Denver and placed the phone handset in the Telecopier cradle and turned on the equipment.

When the machine was through, I picked up the phone and said, “Let me have whatever else you find out as soon as possible.”

“Did you read the last line of the report?” asked Denver.

“Not yet.”

“Read it,” said Denver. “It should scare the hell out of Stocelli if he finds out about it.”

I packed away the equipment and settled back to read the few paragraphs of the facsimile report

COMPARISON OF PASSENGER MANIFESTS FOR? AIR FRANCE, JFK TO ORLY, 4/20 —AIR FRANCE, ORLY TO MARSEILLE, 4/20 — NATIONAL AIRLINES, JFK TO MIAMI INTERNATIONAL, 4/28 — AIR CANADA, NEW YORK TO MONTREAL, 5/4.

STOCELLI PASSENGER FIRST-CLASS ON ALL ABOVE FLIGHTS. NO DUPLICATION OF OTHER FIRST-CLASS PASSENGER NAMES. HOWEVER, DUPLICATION ON ALL ABOVE FLIGHTS — REPEAT — ALL ABOVE FLIGHTS IN ECONOMY SECTION HAD PASSENGER LISTED UNDER THE NAME HERBERT DIETRICH.

CHECK OF AIR CANADA PASSENGER MANIFEST,

MONTREAL TO LAGUARDIA, 5/6 — LISTS NAMES OF RAYMOND DUTTOIT AND HERBERT DIETRICH.

FINALLY, CHECK OF AEROMEXICO, JFK TO MEXICO CITY AND ACAPULCO, 4/5 —STOCELLI AND DIETRICH.

CONTINUING TO CHECK OTHER PASSENGER MANIFESTS. WILL REPORT AS SOON AS INFORMATION COMES IN.

BEST INDICATIONS ARE THAT HERBERT DIETRICH IS NOW IN ACAPULCO.

— END MEMO—

I turned my attention to the second sheet:

INFORMATION EXCERPTED FROM CREDIT CHECK REPORT ON DIETRICH CHEMICAL COMPANY, INC.

HERBERT DIETRICH, PRESIDENT. FULL REPORT AVAILABLE. FOLLOWING IS PERSONAL DATA ONLY: HERBERT DIETRICH, AGE 63, WIDOWER, ADDRESS 29 FAIRHAVEN, MAMARONECK, NEW YORK. DIETRICH BORN LAWRENCE, KANSAS. GRADUATE OF KANSAS UNIVERSITY. M.A. DEGREE CHEMISTRY, CORNELL. RESEARCH CHEMIST, UNION CARBIDE, E.I. DUPONT, WORKED ON MANHATTAN PROJECT A-BOMB CHEMISTRY DURING WORLD WAR II. INTERWORLD CHEMICAL AND CHEMO-GLOBAL DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH FOLLOWING WAR. OPENED OWN R&D LABORATORY, 1956. DIETRICH CHEMICAL CO. NOW EMPLOYS STAFF OF THIRTY. PROFITABLE OPERATION SPECIALIZING IN RESEARCH PROJECTS UPON

ASSIGNMENT. SOME INDEPENDENT RESEARCH. SALE OF SEVERAL VALUABLE PATENTED FORMULAS BRINGS IN ANNUAL ROYALTIES IN SEVEN-FIGURE RANGE. TOTAL ANNUAL VOLUME WELL OVER $3,000,000. DIETRICH HAS LIVED IN MAMARONECK SINCE 1948. WELL-KNOWN, HIGHLY RESPECTED. FINANCIALLY SECURE. ACTIVE IN CHURCH AND COMMUNITY GROUPS. CHILDREN: SUSAN, BORN 1952. ALICE, BORN 1954. NEITHER MARRIED. WIFE: CHARLOTTE, DIED 1965.

HAVE STARTED FULL INVESTIGATION. WILL FORWARD REPORT UPON COMPLETION.

— END MEMO—

I put down the two sheets of paper, then undressed and got into bed. As I lay in the dark, in the short time before I fell asleep, my mind went over the last line of the first page of the reports:

BEST INDICATIONS ARE THAT HERBERT DIETRICH IS NOW IN ACAPULCO.

Who the hell is Herbert Dietrich, I wondered, and what possible connection could he have with criminals like Stocelli, Michaud, Duttoit, Torregrossa, Vignale, Webber, and Klien?

CHAPTER EIGHT

I was at the pool the next morning when Consuela Delgardo came down the steps and walked across the grassy area surrounding the pool to join me. I was surprised to see how much more attractive she was in the daylight. She wore a loosely-woven, light beach coat that ended just below her hips, showing superb legs that swung in a rhythmic, lilting walk as she came toward me.

“Good morning,” she said in her pleasantly husky voice as she smiled at me. “Are you going to invite me to sit down?”

“I hadn’t expected to see you again,” I said. I pulled out a chair for her. “Would you like a drink?”

“Not this early in the morning.” She took off her beach coat, draping it across the back of a lounge chair. Underneath, she wore a dark blue maillot bathing suit, almost transparent, except at the breast and crotch. It looked as if she were wearing a finely meshed net body stocking over a minute bikini. While it covered more of her than a bikini would have, it was almost as revealing and was certainly much more suggestive. Consuela caught me looking at her,

“Like it?” she asked.

“It’s very attractive,” I admitted. “Few women could wear it and look as good as you do.”

Consuela lay down in the lounge chair that I’d pulled out for her. Even in the harsh direct sunlight, her skin showed up smooth and taut.

“I told them I was your guest,” Consuela remarked, “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. But why? I’m sure this isn’t a social call.”

“You’re right. I have a message for you.”

“From?”

“Bickford.”

“About the bullfight at El Cortijo? I got the message last night.”

“I’ll be going with you,” said Consuela.

“So they’ll recognize me?”

“Yes. I hope you don’t mind taking me out so often,” she added, amusement in her voice. “Most men would love to “

“For chrissake!” I said, irritably. “Why can’t they just give me a simple yes or no? Why all the rigamarole?”

“Apparently, you told Bickford something last night about what you knew of their operations. It shook them. They didn’t think anyone knew so much about the operation they’re running. I think you’ve managed to frighten them.”

“And where do you fit into all this?” I asked her, bluntly.

“It’s none of your business.”

“I might make it my business.”

Consuela turned and looked at me. “Don’t I’m not important in the operation. Just take me at face value.”

“And what’s that?”

“Just an attractive woman to escort around town every once in awhile.”

“No,” I said, “you’re more than that. I’m willing to bet that if I were to look at your passport, I’d find it filled with visa stamps. Eight to ten trips a year to Europe, at the very least. Most of the entry stamps wouId be for Switzerland and France. Right?”

Consuela’s face froze. “You bastard,” she said. “You’ve seen it!”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “It stands to reason. There’s a lot of cash involved in your business. They can’t let it float around here in Mexico or in the States. The best place to tuck it away is in Switzerland — or the Bahamas — in numbered accounts. Someone has to carry the money from here to there. Who better than you? An attractive, cultured, elegant woman. You’re an odds-on bet to be the courier for them, the one who makes all the lovely trips and who smiles so pleasantly at the Customs people as she passes into the country, and who’s known by half a dozen bank tellers in Zurich, Berne, and Geneva.”

“What else are you so sure of?”

“That you never carry narcotics. They’d never risk your getting picked up for dope smuggling. Then they’d have to find another courier they can trust with cash the way they now trust you. And that’s hard to do.”

“You’re damned right!” Consuela was indignant “They know I’ll never carry drugs.”

“Does it make you feel better to think you’re only carrying money?” I asked her, with the faintest tinge of sarcasm in my voice. “Does that make it all right? It’s heroin that brings in the cash, you know. If you’re going to be moral, just where do you draw the line?”

“Who are you to talk to me like this?” Consuela demanded, angrily. “Whatever you do won’t stand up to inspection, either.”

I said nothing.

“We’re not so different,” Consuela told me, anger coating her voice like blue-white midwinter ice sheathing a rock. “I learned a long time ago that it’s a tough life. You make out the best way you can. You do your thing and let me do mine. Just don’t pass judgment on me.” She turned her face away from me. “Take me for what I am, that’s all.”

“I make very few judgments,” I told her. “And none in your case.”

I reached over, catching her chin in my hand and turning her face to mine. Her eyes were chilled with the deep frost of resentment. But below the thin glaze of repressed fury, I sensed a maelstrom of churning emotions she was barely able to control. Inside, I felt a surging response to the sudden, sensual feel of the smoothness of her skin against my fingers, and an overwhelming need arose in me to unleash the turmoil that stormed within her.

For a long, interminable minute, I made her look at me. We fought a silent battle in the few inches of space that separated our faces, and then I let my fingers move slowly across her chin and slide across her lips. The ice melted, the anger went out of her eyes. I saw her face soften, thawing into a complete and utter surrender.

Consuela opened her lips slightly, catching at my fingers in gentle, nipping bites with her teeth, without once taking her eyes from mine. I held my hand against her mouth, feeling the sharpness of her teeth against my flesh. Then she let go. I took my hand away from her face.

“Goddamn you,” Consuela said, in a hissing whisper that barely reached across to me.

“I feel the same way.” My voice was no louder than hers.

“How do you know how I feel?”

The anger was now directed against herself for being so weak and for letting me discover it.

“Because you came here to see me when you could have telephoned just as easily. Because of the look on your face right now. Because it’s something I can’t put into words, or even try to explain.”

I stopped talking. Consuela got to her feet and picked up her beach robe. She slipped it on in one lithe movement. I stood up beside her. She looked up at me.

“Let’s go,” I said, taking her by the arm. We walked around the edge of the pool and along the gravel path, up the several flights of stairs that led to the terrace and to the elevators that would take us to my room.

* * *

We stood close together in the dimness and the coolness of the room. I had drawn the drapes, but light still came through.

Consuela moved into my arms, pressing her face into my shoulder, close to my neck. I felt the softness of her cheeks and the wetness of her lips as her teeth nipped gently at the tendons of my neck. I pressed her closer to me, the heavy fullness of her breasts soft against my chest, my hands gripping the firmness of her hip.

Now, as she moved her face urgently up to mine, I bent down to meet her. Her mouth began an angry, insistent, relentless search for my lips and mouth. I took off her beach coat, slipping the straps of her maillot off her shoulders, pulling the suit down to her hips. Her breasts were incredibly soft — silky skin against my own bare chest

“Oh, wait,” she said, breathlessly. “Wait.” And she moved out of my arms long enough to pull the suit down past her hips and to step out of it. She threw the handful of net onto a chair and reached for the waistband of my swimming trunks. I stepped out of them, and we moved together as instinctively as if we had performed this act so many times before that it was now second nature to us and we did not have to think what to do next.

We moved over onto the bed. I reached for her again and was very gentle with her and very insistent until she came achingly alive in my arms.

She said, once, gasping, “I didn’t think it was going to be like this. God, it’s good.”

She shuddered in my arms. “Oh, god, it is good!” she exclaimed, breathing her warm, moist breath into my ear. “I love what you’re doing to me! Don’t stop!”

Her skin was fine and soft, slick with the thin sheen of perspiration, smooth with the ripeness of a woman’s body swollen with excitement. Her lips were warm and damp, clinging moistly to me wherever she kissed me. She moved slowly in response to my stroking fingers until she became wet and full and could not help twisting herself urgently against me.

In the end, we came together in a frantic outburst, her arms clenched around me, her legs entwined with mine, pressing herself upward against me as hard as she could, pulling me into her with her arms, her throat making little high-pitched sounds that grew into cat growls of sheer, helpless abandon.

At the final moment, her eyes opened and stared into my face, only a hand’s breadth away from hers, and she cried out in a torn voice, “You goddamned animal!” as her body exploded against mine, her hips beating against me with a fury she could not control.

Later, we lay together, her head on my shoulder, each of us smoking a cigarette,

“It doesn’t change anything,” Consuela said to me. Her eyes were fixed on the ceiling. “It was just something I wanted to do—”

“—we wanted to do,” I corrected her.

“All right, we,” she said. “But it doesn’t change one thing. Get that straight in your mind.”

“I didn’t think it would.”

“It was good though,” she said, turning to smile at me. “I like making love in the daylight.”

“It was very good.”

“Christ,” she said, “it was so nice having a man again. Not someone freaked out. Just straight,” I tightened my arm about her.

“It’s crazy,” Consuela mused. “It’s not supposed to be that good the first time.”

“Sometimes it is.”

“I think it would be good with you every time,” Consuela said. “Only it doesn’t pay to think about it, does it? We don’t know if it’s ever going to happen again, do we?”

She turned against me so that she lay on her side and put one leg across mine and pressed herself against my body.

“Listen,” she said, in an urgent whisper, “you be careful, will you? Promise me you’ll be careful.”

“I can take care of myself,” I said.

“That’s what they all say,” she said. Her fingers touched the scars on my chest. “You weren’t so careful when you got these, were you?”

“I’ll be more careful.”

Consuela flung herself away from me and lay on her back.

“Damn it!” she said, in her husky, ripe voice. “It’s hell being a woman. You know that?”

CHAPTER NINE

Consuela went home to dress. She said she’d return in about an hour to pick me up for our appointment later on. I showered leisurely and was shaving when the telephone rang. The rough voice did not bother to identify itself.

“Stocelli wants to see you. Right now. He says it’s important. Get up here as fast as you can.”

The phone went dead in my hands.

* * *

Stocelli’s swarthy, round face was almost purple with impotent rage.

“Look at that,” he bellowed at me. “Goddamn it! Just look at it! The son-of-a-bitch got it in here in spite of everything.”

He jabbed a thick forefinger at a parcel wrapped in brown paper with a blue slip of paper taped to it

“You think that’s my damned laundry?” Stocelli yelled at me in his rasping voice. “Pick it up. Go ahead, pick it up!”

I lifted the package from the coffee table. It was a lot heavier than laundry should be.

“We opened it,” growled Stocelli “Guess what’s inside.”

“I don’t have to guess.”

“You’re right,” he said furiously. “Five kilos of horse. How do you like that?”

“How’d it get here?”

“A bellhop brought it He comes up in the elevator so my boys stop him in the entry. He tells them it’s the laundry I sent out yesterday and puts it on a chair and goes back down the elevator. They even tip him. Those dumb bastards! The goddamned package sits around for more than an hour before they think to tell me about it How do you like that?”

“Was he a hotel employee?”

Stocelli nodded. “Yeah, he’s legitimate. We brought him back up here.. All he knows, it’s sitting on the counter in the valet shop waiting to be delivered. The laundry slip has my name and penthouse suite on it, so he brings it up.”

“I don’t suppose he saw who left it?” I asked.

Stocelli shook his round, almost bald head. “No, it was just there. Any of the hotel employees working in the valet shop could have brought it up. He just happened to see it first and thought he’d pick up another tip.”

Stocelli stomped heavily over to the windows. He gazed blankly out at the view without seeing it. Then he turned his thick lumpy body back to face me.

“What the hell have you been doing for the last day and a half?” he asked, irritably.

“Keeping you from getting killed,” I said, equally as blunt. “Michaud’s organization sent a man over here to get the local organization to knock you off.”

For a moment, Stocelli was speechless. He pounded one clublike fist into the palm of his other hand in frustration.

“What the hell am I?” he burst out. “A goddamned clay pigeon? First the Commission, now Michaud’s mob?” He shook his head like a short, angry bull. “How’d you learn about it?” he demanded.

“He made contact with me.”

“What for?” Stocelli’s small eyes focused on me, narrowing suspiciously in his round face. He hadn’t shaved and the bristle on his face was a gray and black stubble, contrasting with the black sheen of the few strands of hair he combed over his bald pate.

“They want me to help them knock you off.”

“And you’re telling me about it?” He put his hands on his hips, his legs astride, leaning toward me, almost as if he were barely able to restrain himself from attacking me.

“Why not? You want to know, don’t you?”

“What’d you tell them?” Stocelli asked.

“To lay off you.”

Stocelli lifted an inquiring eyebrow. “Yeah? What else? Suppose they don’t, then what?”

“Then I’ll blow their organization wide open.”

“You told them that?”

I nodded.

Stocelli pursed his small lips thoughtfully.. “You play rough, don’t you….”

“So do they.”

“What’d they say when you told them that?”

“I’m supposed to get their answer this afternoon.”

Stocelli tried not to appear anxious. “What do you think they’ll say?”

“Figure it out for yourself. They need Michaud’s organization more than they need you. That makes you expendable.”

Stocelli was a realist. If he was frightened, he didn’t show it. “Yeah. You gotta figure it that way, right?” He changed the subject suddenly. “Who’s over here from Marseille?”

“Someone named Jean-Paul Sevier. Do you know him?”

His brow furrowed in thought. “Sevier?” He shook his head. “I don’t think I ever met him.”

I described Jean-Paul.

Stocelli shook his head again. “I still don’t know him. But that don’t mean anything. I never paid no attention to any of them except the guys running the organization. Michaud, Berthier, Duprè. I wouldn’t know the others.”

“Does the name Dietrich mean anything to you?”

There was no reaction. If Stocelli knew the name, he hid it well. “Never heard of him. Who’s he with?”

“I don’t know if he’s with anybody. Did you ever have dealings with anyone by that name?”

“Look,” growled Stocelli, “in my lifetime, I met a couple thousand guys. How the hell do you expect me to remember everyone I ever met? He’s nobody I ever did any business with, that’s for sure. Who is this guy?”

“I don’t know. When I find out, I’ll let you know.”

“All right,” said Stocelli, dismissing the topic. “Now, I got a little job for you. I want you to get rid of that goddamned package.” He gestured at the laundry bundle with his thumb.

“I’m not your errand boy. Get one of your own men to dump it.”

Stocelli let out a rumble of a laugh. “What’s the matter with you? You think I’m stupid? You think I’m dumb enough to let any of my boys run around this hotel with five kilos of pure horse? If they get picked up with it, it’s like putting the finger on me. Besides, you know goddamned well I can’t trust them to get rid of it. You know how much that stuff is worth? Whoever I give it to, the first thing he’s gonna do is try to figure an angle how he can peddle it Five kilos, that’s better than a million bucks on the streets. That’s too much temptation. No sir, none of my boys!” I changed my mind. “All right,” I said, “I’ll take it” Stocelli was suddenly suspicious of my easy agreement “Wait a second,” he growled. “Not so fast. How come you don’t tell me to go get lost? That’s no little favor I’m asking you. You get caught with that stuff and you’re gonna spend the next thirty years in a Mexican jail, right? From what I hear, those aren’t places to spend even thirty minutes. So how come you’re willing to stick your neck out so far for me?”

I smiled at him and said, “It doesn’t make any difference, Stocelli. I’m the only one around here you can trust to get rid of it for you and not get your ass in a wringer.” I wasn’t about to tell him what I had in mind. The less Stocelli knew about what my plans were, the better. Stocelli nodded slowly. “Yeah. Come to think of it, that’s funny, ain’t it? Out of all my boys, it turns out you’re the only one I can depend on.”

“Very funny.”

I picked up the package and tucked it under my arm, then turned to go.

“Let me know what happens,” said Stocelli, in almost a friendly voice. He walked to the door with me. “I get nervous sitting up here without knowing what’s going on.”

I took the elevator down to my room without meeting anyone. I opened the door with my key and walked in. And stopped. Lying on top of my bed was a brown, paper-wrapped package with a blue laundry list attached to it, identical with the one I held in the crook of my arm, the one I had just taken from Stocelli’s penthouse suite.

* * *

It took me no more than ten minutes to fix things so that when the police came they’d find nothing. If the pattern was the same, I knew that the police would have been tipped off that they could find one cache of heroin in Stocelli’s penthouse suite and another in my room. They were probably on their way to the hotel by now.

Less than half an hour later, I was in the lobby waiting for Consuela to pick me up. I wore my camera slung around my neck with a 250mm telephoto lens attached to it. Over my shoulder, I carried a large, top-grain, cowhide camera equipment bag.

Consuela was late. I put the heavy camera equipment bag and my camera down on the seat of an armchair. “Keep an eye on that stuff for me, will you,” I said to one of the bellhops, handing him a ten-peso note. I walked over to the desk.

The clerk looked at me with a smile.

“Senor Stephans, no? May I help you?”

“I hope so,” I said, politely. “Do you have a guest registered here by the name of Dietrich — Herbert Dietrich?”

“Momentito” said the clerk, turning to the guest card-file. He searched through it and then looked up. “Si, senor. El Senor Deitrich arrived yesterday.”

Yesterday? If Dietrich came in yesterday and Stocelli the day before, and he had been on the same plane with Stocelli, then where had Dietrich been for twenty-four hours?

I wondered about that for a moment, and then asked, “Would you know what room he’s in?”

“He occupies Suite nine-oh-three,” said the clerk, checking the file again.

“Would you happen to know what he looks like?” I asked. “Is it possible that you could describe him to me?”

The clerk shrugged. “Lo siento mucho, Senor Stephans. Es imposible! I’m sorry, but I was not on duty when Senor Dietrich registered.”

“No es importante” I told him. “Thank you anyway.” I passed him a folded bill.

The clerk smiled at me. “De nada, senor. If I can be of help to you in the future, please let me know.”

I went back across the lobby and picked up my equipment. I was hanging the camera around my neck when Consuela came up to me.

“My god,” she said, laughing at me, “you really do look like a tourist with all that photographic gear strapped on you.”

I smiled back at her. “Tools of my trade,” I said, easily. “I’m a freelance photographer, remember?”

“Tell me about it later,” Consuela said, looking at her wristwatch and then taking me by the arm. “We’ll be late if we get caught in traffic.”

We were just pulling out of the circular drive in front of the hotel when the police car turned in and came to a screaming stop in front of the entrance. Four policemen jumped out and walked quickly into the hotel.

“What do you suppose they want?” Consuela asked, peering into the rear-view mirror.

“Damned if I know.”

Consuela looked askance at me, but made no further comment. She concentrated on speeding along the Costera Miguel Aleman, past the Acapulco Hilton to Diana Circle, where Paseo del Farallon intersects the Costera. She took Highway 95 that goes north to Mexico City.

About a mile further up the road, Consuela turned onto a dirt road that led into the foothills. Finally, she pulled up in a gravel parking lot half filled with cars.

“El Cortijo,” she announced. “The farmhouse.”

I saw a wooden structure, painted bright red and white, actually nothing more than a large, circular platform built about six feet above the ground, surrounding a small, sand-covered ring. A shingled roof had been erected over the platform area, its center open to the sky and to the bright sun. The platform itself was a little more than ten feet wide, just wide enough for small tables to be set two-deep around its perimeter.

We sat down at a table against the railing, opposite the gate through which the bulls were to come. From that position, our view of the ring below us was completely unobstructed.

The band struck up a brassy tune. Four men walked out across the packed sand of the ring, swaggering to the beat of the music. The crowd applauded them.

I’d expected them to be dressed in the traditional trajas de luces, the tightly tailored, brilliantly embroidered “suit of lights” worn by matadors I’d watched in the bullrings at Pamplona, Barcelona, Madrid, and Mexico City. Instead, these four wore short, dark jackets, white shirts with ruffles and gray trousers tucked into black, ankle-high boots. They stopped at the far side of the ring and bowed.

There was some scattered applause. The matadors turned and walked back, disappearing under the platform beneath us.

Next to us, the table filled up. There were six in the party. Two of the three girls sat down with their backs to the ring. One of them was blonde, the other redheaded. The third girl was small and dark, with a delicate, cameo featured face.

At the head of the table, a husky, gray-haired man with a large paunch began joking with the girls. A tall thin man sat between the redhead and a stocky, bronze-featured Mexican.

I leaned toward Consuela. “Are these your people?”

“Two of them.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. She didn’t turn her head away from the ring.

“Which two?”

“They’ll let you know.”

Now the picador rode out into the ring on a horse with heavy padding on its right side and a long blinder at the side of its right eye to keep it from seeing the bull.

The bull lowered its horns and charged the horse. In a vicious thrust, the picador leaned over and planted the point of his pic deep into the bull’s left shoulder, leaning his full weight into the long haft of the pic. He pushed hard against the drive of the bull, keeping the horns away from his mount. The bull tore loose from the agonizing pain and ran around the ring, a bright gush of blood coming from the wound in its shoulder, streaking it like a gay, red ribbon against the dusty black of its hide.

The first banderillero came out into the ring. In each hand, he held a long-shafted barb, and with his arms outstretched in a vee, he made a curving run at the bull. The bull lowered his head to charge.

Leaning in, the banderillero planted the sharply honed barbs in each shoulder of the bull. The pointed iron slid into the tough hide of the animal as if it were made of tissue paper.

I looked at the people at the next table. None of them paid any attention to me. They were watching the action in the ring.

The matador came out again, carrying the small muleta. He moved up to the bull in short sidesteps, trying to get the bull to charge. The bull was very bad. But the matador was even worse.

The blonde girl at the next table turned away from the ring. “Hey, Garrett, when do they kill the bull?”

“In a minute or two,” the heavy-set man answered. “You won’t see it it unless you turn around.”

“I don’t want to see it. I don’t like the sight of blood.”

The bull was tired. The matador was ready for the kill The bull’s flanks were heaving with exhaustion, its head dropping close to the sand. The matador moved up to the lowered head, leaned in and thrust his sword into the bull, up to the hilt. He missed the vertebrae..

If you cut the spinal column, the bull will collapse instantly. It’s a fast, clean death, almost instantaneous. This bull didn’t fall. It stood there, with the sword in its neck, blood coming from the fresh wound and streaming from the two barbs in its shoulders and from the gaping pic wound. And now, blood began to spout from its mouth in a thick, ropy stream.

“Oh, shit,” said the blonde, who had turned back to the ring in spite of herself. “This is such a goddamned bloody country! Who needs all this killing.”

The Mexican was amused by her revulsion. “We’re still a primitive people,” he said to her. “The sword, the knife — steel and bloodletting heighten our sense of machismo. You norteamericanos are too soft.”

“Screw you, Carlos,” she snapped and turned her back on the ring.

The matador came back to the bull with a stabbing sword in his hand. One of the banderilleros had pulled put the other sword. The matador leaned over the bull and made a chopping motion. The blade severed the spinal cord and the bull collapsed on the sand.

Garrett turned his head and caught my eye. He got to his feet. “I’ve got a couple of bottles of Scotch in the car,” he said, loudly. “Let’s go get them, Carlos.”

I saw them walk around the perimeter of the bullring and cross the wooden platform that led to the parking lot.

Consuela touched me on the arm. “You can join them now.”

I followed them out of the enclosure. Garrett threaded his way through the parked cars until he came to the far side of the lot. He stopped to turn and wait for me.

As I approached, he eyed me coldly. I stopped in front of him.

I don’t know what he expected me to say, but I didn’t waste words or time.

“Lay off Stocelli,” I said abruptly, staring into Garrett’s heavy, belligerent face. Then my eyes moved to Carlos, who met my stare with an impassively bland expression.

Carlos was dressed in lime-green slacks, a raw silk shirt, and wore white, tasseled loafers on his small feet. He looked like a fop, but I sensed a deep core of toughness in him that Garrett didn’t possess. Garrett was bluff and bluster. Carlos was the more dangerous of the two.

Carlos reached out and touched me on the arm. His voice was importurbably calm and polite.

“Senor, I think Acapulco has just become very un-healthy for you.”

“I don’t frighten.”

Carlos made a small shrug of his plump shoulders.

“That is too bad,” he remarked. “A little fear can sometimes save a man’s life.”

I turned away from them, hiding my anger. I made my way back to the ring, through the tables to Consuela. I touched her on the arm.

“There’s going to be trouble. Can you get a ride back to town with your friends?”

“Of course. Why?”

“Give me the keys to your car. “I’ll leave them at my hotel.”

Consuela shook her head. “I brought you here. I’ll drive you back.”

“Let’s go then.”

I gathered up my camera and the large equipment bag. With Consuela a step behind me, I walked out of the enclosure.

We were crossing the small wooden bridge, Consuela at my side, when I suddenly caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye. In pure, instinctive reflex, I flung Consuela away from me toward the railing and threw myself against the wooden wall that formed one side of the passageway.

I caroomed off the wall at an angle, spinning around and dropping to one knee. The back of my neck burned like someone had scorched it with a white-hot branding iron. I felt the trickle of blood begin to run down my collar.

“What is it?” cried Consuela, and then her eyes went to the long handled banderilla that was still quivering in the wall between us, its honed, steel barb sunk deeply into the wood. The long handle, with its bright ribbons, swayed back and forth like a deadly metronome.

I remembered how easily the barbed steel had sunk into the leathery hide of the bull. It wasn’t too hard to imagine the bander ilia piercing my throat if I hadn’t acted, so fast.

I got to my feet and dusted off the knee of my trousers.

“Your friends don’t waste any time,” I said, savagely. “Now let’s get out of here.”

* * *

Jean-Paul was waiting for me in the lobby. He came to his feet as I walked in. I headed across the lobby toward the elevators, and he fell into step beside me.

“Well?”

“I was told to get the hell out of Acapulco.”

“And?”

“They also tried to kill me.”

We got into the elevator. Jean-Paul said, “I think you are in a bad spot, my friend.”

I made no answer. The elevator stopped at my floor. We got out and walked down the corridor. As we came up to my room, I took out my key.

“Wait,” said Jean-Paul sharply. He held out his left hand for the key, “Give it to me.”

I looked down. Jean-Paul held a gun in his right hand. I don’t argue with guns that close. I gave him the key.

“Now move to one side.”

I moved away. Jean-Paul inserted the key in the lock and turned it slowly. With a sudden movement, he flung the door open, dropping to one knee, the gun in his hand aimed into the room, ready to blast anyone inside.

“There’s no one there,” I told him.

Jean-Paul rose to his feet.

“I’m never ashamed of being cautious,” he said. We went into the room. I shut the door behind us and walked over to the terrace window and looked out. Behind me, Jean-Paul busied himself mixing drinks for us. I dropped my equipment bag on a chair and put my camera on top of it.

Staring across the bay, I could see the motor boats towing the waterskiers. At the Yacht Club, there were a number of motor-sailers at anchor. The tuna boat that I’d seen the afternoon before was still tied up at the malecon. I wondered about it.

Jean-Paul asked, “Aren’t you afraid to turn your back on me?”

“No.”

He stirred the drinks. “We had some excitement here while you were gone. The local police paid a visit to the hotel. They searched Stocelli’s penthouse suites.”

“So?”

“They also searched your room.” Jean-Paul was staring intently at my face, trying to catch even the smallest expression of surprise. “It doesn’t bother you?”

“I expected it.”

I turned back to stare out the window again. Td known from the moment I’d seen the fake laundry package on my bed that the police would call on me.

They’d probably been tipped off to search both Stocelli’s suites and my room for narcotics. Someone was trying to lay a heavy frame on Stocelli.

But that wasn’t what was bugging me.

“Why would the police want to search Stocelli’s penthouse?” Jean-Paul asked.

“Because five kilos of heroin wrapped like a package of laundry was delivered to him earlier today,” I said.

Jean-Paul whistled in surprise.

“Apparently, then, he got rid of it. Eh bien?”

“I got rid of it for him.”

“Oh?” Another long pause. “Is that why they searched your room?”

“No. Another package like it was delivered to my room, too,” I said, calmly, my back still toward Jean-Paul. “Five more kilos, wrapped exactly the same way.”

Jean-Paul digested the information thoughtfully. Then he said, “Since the police found nothing, may I ask what you did with the heroin?”

“I took it with me.”

“And you got rid of it this afternoon? How clever of you, mon amil.”

I shook my head. “No, it’s still in my equipment bag over there. All ten kilos of it. I’ve been carrying it around with me all afternoon.”

Jean-Paul turned to look at the bulky equipment bag that I’d placed on the chair near the window. He began to laugh.

“You have quite a sense of humor, my friend. You’re aware of what would have happened if the police had found it on you?”

“Yes. Thirty years at hard labor. So I’ve been told.”

“And it doesn’t bother you?”

“Not as much as something else.”

Jean-Paul brought me a drink. He took his own and sat down in one of the chairs.

He raised his glass. “A voire sante!” He took a sip. “What bothers you?”

“You.” I turned around. “You’re not from Michaud’s organization.”

Jean-Paul sipped at his rum. There was a challenge in his gray eyes. “Why do you think that?”

“For one thing, you’re too friendly with me. You act more like my bodyguard. Second, you’re really not pushing to get Stocelli wiped out. Finally, you’ve known all afternoon that someone’s trying to frame Stocelli, just like Michaud was framed. It should have proved to you that Stocelli didn’t set up Michaud, and therefore you’re after the wrong guy. But you’ve done nothing about it.”

Jean-Paul said nothing.

I went on. “Not only that, but you’ve hung around the hotel all afternoon in spite of the fact that four cops were searching the joint for narcotics. If you really were from the Marseille organization, you’d have run like hell at the first sight of them.”

“So?”

“So who the hell are you?”

“Who do you think I am?”

“Police.”

“What makes you think that?”

“The way you came in the door a few minutes ago. That’s strictly a police technique. You were trained that way.”

“You are perceptive, mon vieux! Yes, I’m a policeman.”

“Narcotics?”

Jean-Paul nodded. “L’Office Central Pour la Suppression du Trafic des Stupifiants. We’ve been working with your Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, the BNDD.”

“And the Mexican police?”

“For this operation, yes. The Federates. They know I am working undercover.”

“Did Michaud’s organization really send someone over here to get the Acapulco mob to eliminate Stocelli? Or was it a cover story?”

“Oh, they sent a man, all right. That’s how we found out about it. We asked the Mexican police to detain him when he got off the plane in Mexico City.”

“And he told you all about their plans for Stocelli? I thought Corsicans didn’t talk. They’re supposed to be even more close-mouthed than Sicilians.”

Jean-Paul smiled at me. “The Mexican police are not as restrained as we are. Especially with foreign criminals. They attached electrodes to his testicles and turned on the current. He screamed for five minutes and then broke down. He’ll never be the same again, but he told us everything.”

I changed the subject. “How do you know about me?”

Jean-Paul shrugged. “I know you’re from AXE,” he said.” I know you are N3—a Killmaster in the organization. That’s why I would like you to cooperate With us.”

“Who’s ‘us’? And how?”

“The Americans want Stocelli. The Mexican police want the Acapulco organization broken up. And we French would like to break the connection between Michaud’s gang and Stocelli and the Acapulco crowd.”

“My orders come from Washington,” I told him. “I’ll have to check with them.”

Jean-Paul smiled at me. “You mean you’ll have to check with Hawk.”

I didn’t say anything. Jean-Paul had no business knowing about Hawk — or about me being N3, or my designation as a Killmaster. He knew far too much.

“HI let you know,” I said.

Jean-Paul got to his feet and put down his drink. He went to the door and opened it He started out and then turned in the doorway.

“I’d like your answer no later than this evening,” he said. “We intend to—”

Like a phonograph needle suddenly lifted from a record, his voice broke off in mid-sentence, the word ending in an unintelligible grunt of surprise. He took a stumbling, lurching, half step forward into the room, pulling the door shut behind him. Then he sank back against it and slid to the floor.

I leaped across the room. Jean-Paul’s eyelids were closed. A frothy bubble of crimson suddenly welled from his lungs. Blood spewed out of his mouth. His legs twitched heavily against the floor in protest against death.

I reached for the doorknob, but his body had collapsed against the lower panel and prevented me from opening it.

Outside, the thick carpeting of the hall muffled whatever footsteps there might have been. I let go of the knob and knelt beside the Frenchman’s slender body. I felt for a pulse. There was none. I turned his body halfway around and saw the bone handled haft of a switchblade knife standing out from Jean-Paul’s back like a strange, malignant growth.

CHAPTER TEN

The killer had chosen his time well. I heard no doors opening or closing. No one came out into the corridor. There was nothing but quiet in the hallway outside my room. I stood for a long time over Jean-Paul’s body before J reached down and grasped the entry hall rug, pulling the corpse further into the room, sliding it away from the door. Cautiously, I opened the door and looked out. The corridor was empty. I shut and bolted the door and knelt down beside the slim body of the Frenchman sprawled on the bloodied rug and looked at his face for a long time, all the while feeling an angry churning inside me because I had made a mistake.

I should have realized earlier at El Cortijo that Carlos had already put into motion whatever plans he had to get rid of me even before he and Brian Garrett met with me. I should have known that he never had any intention of letting me leave Acapulco alive, not while I knew what I did about his organization. I’d thought I had more time, at least until tomorrow morning, but I’d been wrong in that assumption. Time had run out and now Jean-Paul was dead because of it. I knew, too, that I could never get the Mexican police, especially Lieutenant Fuentes, to believe that I’d had no part in Jean-Paul’s death.

It was long past time for me to act. I looked down at Jean-Paul’s open, staring eyes and reached out with a finger to close the lids. I opened his jacket. A walnut handled, 38 calibre Smith & Wesson Airweight Model 42 revolver was tucked into a short holster in the waistband of his slacks. I transferred the gun to my own hip pocket. I checked my watch — too early in the evening for me to make any attempt to dispose of the body. Even though there weren’t many guests in the hotel, it would be taking too much of a chance to assume the hallways would be empty now.

Carefully, I rolled the thin rug around his corpse. It didn’t quite come down to his ankles but at least his face was covered. With strips of cloth that I tore from a pillowcase, I tied the rug at his chest and at his knees.

I looked around for a hiding place in the room. The clothes closet was too dangerous, so for the time being I settled for pushing the rug-wrapped body under the double bed, dropping the bedspread down the side so that its edge came almost to the floor.

With Jean-Paul out of the way for the moment, I turned my attention to cleaning up the evidence of what had happened. I turned on the hall light, checking the walls for spatters of blood. I found a few. The lower panel of the door was a mess. In the bathroom, I soaked a towel in cold water and went back to the entry hall and washed down the door and the walls.

The rug had prevented any blood from getting on the floor.

Afterward, I rinsed out the towel as much as I could and balled it up and threw it on the floor under the sink. I stripped off my own blood-stained clothes and showered.

I used two more towels drying myself off and balled. them up and threw them under the sink along with the other towel. Let the maid think I was a slob. At least, it would stop her from examining the first towel too closely.

After I shaved, I changed into a clean sport shirt, slacks, and a Madras jacket.

I was going to strap on Hugo and wear Wilhelmina, my 9mm Luger, but a 9mm handgun of any size makes a pretty hefty bulge. You can see it too easily under tropical weight clothes, so I left the gun and the knife in the false bottom of my attaché case.

I settled for Jean-Paul’s .38 Airweight instead.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have worn the jacket. In May, Acapulco evenings are too warm to make a jacket anything but unnecessary, but I was carrying Jean-Paul’s revolver and small as it was it was still too noticeable unless I wore something to cover it.

When I finished dressing, I went back into the bathroom one more time. I took a small vial of nembutal sleeping pills from my shaving kit. There were ten or twelve capsules in the vial. Occasionally, when I can’t fall asleep, I’ll take one of them. Now, I had another use for them. I put the small, plastic container in my pocket, along with a roll of half-inch adhesive tape that I had in my first-aid kit.

Back in the bedroom, I picked up my camera and slung the bulky camera equipment bag over my shoulder.

As I went out the door, I hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign oyer the outer doorknob. I put the room key in my pocket. Like many hotels, the Matamoros attached a heavy, bronze plaque to the key so that guests wouldn’t want to carry it around with them and would get in the habit of leaving the key at the counter. I don’t like to do that. I want to be able to get in and out of my room without attracting notice by stopping at the desk each time. The key and plaque sat heavily in the hip pocket of my slacks.

Going down to the lobby, I saw no one either in the corridor or in the elevator. At the front desk, I stopped to ask if there was any mail for me. I didn’t expect any, but as the clerk turned to the racks behind him, I was able to check the slot for Suite 903. Both keys were in the box. Apparently, Dietrich still had not come in.

The clerk turned back, smiling regretfully. “No, senor, there is nothing for you.” He wasn’t the same clerk that I’d talked to earlier in the day,

“Do you know Senor Dietrich?”

“Senor Dietrich?”

“Suite nine-oh-three,” I prompted him.

“Ah! Of course. He is the very nice gentleman who checked in yesterday. I registered him myself.”

“He’s not in now, is he?”

The clerk shook his head. “No. I saw him leave about half an hour ago.”

“You’re sure? A man in his middle sixties — I stopped. That was as much as I knew about Dietrich’s appearance. I hoped the clerk would go for the bait.

“Certainly, I know what he looks like! Quite tall. Very thin. Very distinguished. Silver hair. Blue eyes. He walks with a slight limp although he does not carry a cane. His daughter is most beautiful.”

“His daughter?”

“Si, senor. One does riot forget a young woman as beautiful as she! Such long blond hair!” Then the clerk caught himself as the idea struck him. He arched a knowing eyebrow. “Of course, perhaps she is not his daughter, eh, senor? We do not ask such questions.”

“That’s Dietrich, all right.” I passed a bill to the clerk. “I’ll get in touch with him later.”

“Shall I leave word for him, senor?”

“No, I’m not sure just when I’ll be able to see him. Thank you for the information.”

“De nada.”

* * *

At the Hertz office, I rented a sedan and drove to Sanborn’s where I purchased a detailed street map of Acapulco. In the dining room, I sat in a booth and ordered coffee and spread the map out on the table in front of me. I tried to trace the route to Bickford’s villa over which Consuela had driven me last night. The map didn’t show all the smaller byways, so I wasn’t completely sure that I had the right street. I remembered that it was a short cul-de-sac and that there were only a few houses on it. All of the houses overlooked the bay. I felt sure that I’d recognize the street if I could find it again. Bickford’s house was the very last one at the end of the cul-de-sac, isolated from the others.

In my mind, I went over all the possibilities until I narrowed them down to three. It took me two cups of coffee and half a dozen cigarettes before I finally folded up the map and left.

The first street tried wasn’t a dead end as the map showed it to be. It had been extended to join another, so I turned back and tried the second. This one was a dead-end street but there were too many houses on it, all jammed as closely together as they could be built.

I made another attempt. This one was wrong, too, so I drove back to the highway and pulled the car off the road. By now, it was getting on toward ten-thirty. I turned on the dome light and spread out the map again, trying to discover where I’d gone wrong. Finally, I found it. I’d made my turn at the wrong traffic circle. I turned off the light, folded up the map and pulled back out onto the road.

This time, I found the street on my second attempt. Four widely separated houses were spaced along its length. Bickford’s house was the last one on the side toward the bay; A high, adobe brick wall with an ironwork grilled gate faced the street. I didn’t drive down to it. I left the car out of sight around the corner and walked down the unpaved road to the gate which was secured with a chain and padlock. I pressed the bell and waited. In the darkness, I heard the chirp of insects and the clacking rustle of palm fronds rubbing against each other in the gentle, moist sea breeze.

It was several minutes before the gateman showed up, an elderly, gray-haired mestizo with a bristling stubble of whiskers, tucking his shirt into his baggy trousers as he came padding up the path.

I gave him no time to think.

“Hurry up, viejo!” I snapped curtly in Spanish. “Senor Bickford is waiting for me!”

The old man stopped a foot away from the gate, peering at me, his brows wrinkling in thought.

“I know nothing—”

“Open the gate!”

The old man took a flashlight out of his pocket He turned it on my face.

“Not in my eyes, you old fool! Turn the light on my hand.”

Obediently, the old man pointed his flashlight down. He saw the blued steel of the Smith & Wesson .38. His eyes still fixed on the gun, the gateman took a fat bunch of keys from a pocket of his worn trousers. His fingers trembled as he selected the key and inserted it The padlock snapped open. I reached in with my left hand and unhooked the chain. I pushed the gate open, still pointing the gun at the old man, and moved inside.

“Close the gate, but don’t lock it.”

He did as I told him.

“Who else is here?” I motioned with the gun to step off the path.

“Only the senor and the senora,” he answered nervously.

“Your wife?”

“Mi mujer es muerta. She’s dead, there’s only myself.”

“The other servants?”

“Gone. They do not sleep here. They will not be back until morning.”

“Has Senor Bickford gone to bed yet?”

The old man shook his head. “I do not think so; The lights are still on downstairs.”

He lifted watery, frightened eyes to me. “Por favor, senor, I am an old man. I want no trouble.”

“There could be much trouble here tonight,” I said, watching him.

“I can be very far away in a very short time,” the old man said, pleading now. “Especially if the police might come.”

“All right,” I said. I reached for my wallet and took out four hundred-peso notes — about thirty-two dollars.

“To make your trip easier. For your inconvenience.” I pressed the bills into the gateman’s hand.

The old man looked down, then thrust the bills into his pocket “I may go now?”

I nodded. The man opened the gate a hand’s breadth and slipped through. He was running down the dirt lane immediately, his huaraches flapping against his heels and making soft, scrabbling sounds in the gravel as he ran. He turned the corner and was out of sight within seconds.

I pushed the gate shut and moved into the darkness of the landscaped grounds toward the house.

From the doorway that led from the kitchen into the dining room, I watched Bickford and his wife. They both sat in the part of the living room that I could see across the dining area.

Bickford put down the magazine he’d been holding and took off his heavy-framed reading glasses.

“You want a nightcap before we turn in?” he asked Boris.

Doris was sitting on the couch painting her toenails with intense concentration. Without looking up, she said, “Make it a double.”

I walked into the dining room and stopped in the archway that separated it from the living room. “I suggest you save it for later,” I said.

Bickford looked up in surprise. Doris dropped the bottle of nail polish on the white couch. “Oh, shit!” was all she said.

I stepped into the living room and let Bickford see the gun in my hand.

“What the hell is this all about?” he demanded.

“Your friends don’t want to do things the easy way.”

He wet his lips, nervously looking at the gun. “Why me? I did what you asked.”

“As you once said, you’re just the guy in the middle. I guess that means you get it from both ends.”

“What do you want?”

“Not much. You and I are going to take a little ride together.”

“Hey, wait a second!” Doris cried out.

“He won’t be hurt if he does what I tell him to,” I reassured her.

“What about her?” Bickford was still nervous about the gun.

“She stays behind.” I took the vial out of my pocket and shook out two capsules onto the top of the bar.

“Mrs. Bickford, I’d appreciate it if you’ll just take these pills—”

“No!” Bickford burst out, getting to his feet “Leave her out of this!”

“That’s just what I’m doing. I’m not foolish enough to tie her up. There’s too much chance of her getting free. And I’d rather not hit her on the head.”

“What — what are they?” he asked.

“Sleeping pills. They won’t hurt her.”

Doris rose from the couch and came over to the bar. I noticed that she wasn’t frightened at all. She even gave me a quick smile that Bickford couldn’t see. She picked up the pills and poured herself a glass of water.

“You’re sure they won’t hurt me?” There was a tinge of amusement in her voice, her heavily lashed green eyes stared boldly into mine. She put the pills in her mouth and washed them down, then stepped closer to me. “All I’m going to do is fall asleep?”

“Go sit down, Mrs. Bickford.”

“Doris,” she murmured, still staring boldly into my face, the tiny smile locked on her lips.

“Back on the couch.” Doris turned away from me slowly and walked back to the sofa, deliberately putting a swing into her hips. Bickford crossed to her and sat down beside her. He reached solicitously for her hand, but she pulled away.

“For Chrissake, Johnny. I’m all right, so calm down, Will you? If he wanted to hurt me, you couldn’t stop him.” She turned her face toward me. “How long does it take?”

“Ten to twenty minutes,” I said. “You might just as well stretch out and relax. We’ll wait.”

* * *

Less than fifteen minutes later, Doris closed her eyes. Her breasts rose and fell in the easy rhythm of sleep. I waited another five minutes and then motioned Bickford away from her.

“Let’s go.”

Bickford got to his feet. “Where?”

“We’re going to pay a visit to a tuna boat,” I said “The one tied up down at the malecon—”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“—and once aboard,” I went on as if Bickford hadn’t said a word, “you’re going to get hold of the captain and give him a package. You’ll tell him that it’ll be picked up in San Diego in the usual way.”

“You’re crazy!” Bickford burst out. “You want to get both of us killed?”

“You’re not dead yet,” I said, raising the gun to his chest.

He stood there, hulking, aging, defeat turning him older than his years. “But they’ll kill me when they find out. You know that, don’t you?” He looked up at me. “How did you know about the tuna boat?” he asked, dully.

“I told you last night that I had a list of the vessels your people have been using to smuggle heroin into the States. The tuna boat is the Mary Jane, out of San Diego. It’s been hanging around for several days now, waiting for another shipment.”

“You’re guessing,” Bickford said, hesitantly, but I’d caught the flicker of expression on his face and it was all the confirmation I needed.

“Not anymore,” I said. “Let’s go bring them the package they’re waiting for.”

* * *

There was no problem in delivering the package to the tuna boat. We took Bickford’s car down to the malecon, Bickford driving and me beside him with the .38 in my hand.

Once on the boat, Bickford went directly to the captain’s cabin. The three of us filled the small room. Bickford went through the story. The captain asked no questions except to look suspiciously at me when I handed him the laundry parcel.

“He’s all right,” Bickford vouched for me. “It’s his buy. He just wants to be sure we deliver it.”

“We’ve never had any trouble before,” the captain complained, taking the parcel from me. He looked down at it and turned it over in his hands. “Laundry? That’s a new one on me.”

“How soon can you get under way?”

“Half an hour — maybe less.”

“Then you’d better be going.”

The captain looked inquiringly at Bickford. “Do as he says,” Bickford told him.

“What about the shipment I’ve been waiting for?”

Bickford shrugged. “It’s been delayed. We can’t have you hanging around here too long.”

“All right,” said the captain. “The faster you two clear my decks, the sooner I can get underway.”

Bickford and I left the cabin, making our way slowly in the dark along the cluttered deck. I stopped once beside a tarpaulin-covered lifeboat, and swiftly, with Bickford’s back to me so he couldn’t see what I was doing, I pushed the second laundry package under the heavy canvas and into the lifeboat.

As we dropped onto the dockside, we heard the engines start up. On deck there was a flurry of activity.

We crossed to where Bickford had parked his car on the Costera.

“Now what?” Bickford asked me, as we got in.

“I think we should pay a visit to Brian Garrett,” I said. Bickford started to protest, then thought better of it. I held the stubby, blued-steel revolver only a few inches from his side. He drove the car east along the Costera Miguel Aleman out of town and to the top of the headland. Finally, he turned onto a secondary road, and after a few minutes, he slowed to a stop.

“That’s Garrett’s place down there. You want me to drive right in?”

The house was set off by itself just under the crest of the ridge on the edge of the cliff that dropped away below it some two hundred feet to the sea. We were about a hundred yards away from the driveway that led to the main gate of the house.

“No, pull over here.”

Bickford turned the car to the side of the road. He brought it to a stop and shut off the ignition and the headlights. Sudden darkness closed us in, and, in that moment, I whipped the gun butt against the back of Bickford’s head, catching him just behind the ear. He slumped forward against the wheel. I put the gun in my right-hand jacket pocket, and, reaching into the other pocket, I brought out the roll of adhesive tape. I pulled Bickford’s hands behind his back, taping his Wrists with a dozen turns of the surgical tape. I stuffed his handkerchief into his mouth, taping a strip of adhesive from one cheek to the other to hold the gag in place.

Going around to the far side of the sedan, I opened both left-hand doors. Bickford was heavy. The years had put him well into the heavyweight class. I had to struggle to move his inert body into the back of the sedan. I bent over and taped his ankles and his knees. When I was through, I’d run out of tape, but he was securely bound. I wouldn’t have to worry about him getting loose.

Ten minutes later, I was moving silently through the darkness along the edge of the road until I came to the high wall that surrounded Garrett’s villa. The wall began at the sheer drop of the cliff edge on my right, cut through the field, then made a semi-circle all around the sprawling house to the cliff-edge on the far side.

There were lights on behind the wall. I could hear voices calling out to one another. As I moved closer to the wall, I could hear the splash of water. I recognized one of the girls’ voices as that of the blonde I’d seen earlier that afternoon at El Cortijo.

I crept along the base of the wall until I came to the driveway that angled in from the road. The gatefront was illuminated by two spotlights hung high on the main supports. There was no way for me to cross the driveway that close to the house without being seen, so I crawled back to the road and crossed it where I’d left Bickford and the car. It took me twenty minutes to make a complete reconnoiter of the other side of the house from the cliff edge to the drive, and then I retraced my steps and came back to the edge of the road again.

I was about to cross the road, the muscles of my leg already tensed to make the step, when some deeply rooted sense of danger halted me in my tracks.

There had been no change in the night sounds. Below the cliff, I heard the waves break in their same, slow, irregular rhythm against the boulders and onto the narrow, sandy beach. The westerly sea breezes rustled palm fronds together like a rubbing of dry hands. The night insects whined and chirped, twittering in the darkness all around me, yet it was as if some primordial alarm had been triggered inside my mind.

Long ago, I’d learned to trust my instincts completely. Even before the first, faint whisper of sound reached my ears, I flung myself sideways, twisting away from my unseen assailant.

I almost made it unscathed. The blow aimed at my spine caught me on the forearm as I turned, the blade of the knife ripping into my right arm just below the elbow, slashing it down to the wrist, making me drop the gun that I held in my hand. At the same moment, a hard, muscular body drove into me, knocking me off balance.

I fell flat on my face, barely in time to avoid the return slash as the blade cut the air where I had been only a second before. Without thinking, acting by pure reflex, I rolled quickly to the far edge of the road.

I lifted my head to see the blocky form of my attacker crouched in the spread-legged stance of a knife fighter. Moonlight glinted off the honed, razor-steel blade that he held in one outstretched hand, weaving his arm back and forth in front of him. I heard the rasping inhalations of breath as the man moved toward me, one shuffling step at a time.

I gathered my legs beneath me. My left hand scraped at the road. I found and clutched a fist-sized rock. I could feel the damp warmth of blood streaming down my right forearm and wrist. I tried to move my right hand. It was almost uselessly numb from the blow.

The man moved up beside the car to the open window of the driver’s seat. I saw him move his hand in through the window, and suddenly the car’s headlights came on, illuminating the road and the edge of the field, pinning me down in its harsh, white glare.

Slowly, I rose to my feet, my eyes squinting against the brightness of the lights. I began to move, trying to get out of the beam of the headlights.

My attacker moved out in front of the car, a stark, dangerous silhouette against the dazzling brilliance of the beams.

I moved another step.

“It ain’t going to do you no good to run.”

The long blade of the knife in his hand began its slow, snakelike weaving once more.

“Stand still, hombre! I’m gonna make it quick for you.”

I recognized the voice. It belonged to the stocky young man who had approached me at the malecon two days before — Luis Aparicio. The recollection brought back a flood of others. For some reason, the image of the turtle being disemboweled flashed into my mind. In my head, I could see again the turtle lying helplessly on its back, the quick slashes of the fisherman’s knife, the muscular arm bloodied to the elbow, and the long gray and pink coils of wet gut spilled onto the steps of the jetty.

Pushing the images away, I kept my voice calm with an effort. “Hello, Luis.”

“I told you we would meet again,” Luis said. He moved forward another shuffling step. “Tonight, I fix your friend at the hotel. Now, I take care of you.”

“You’ve been following me?”

Luis shook his head. “No, I don’t follow you. I come out here to see Carlos Ortega to tell him what I do at the hotel. I come up the road and I see a car. What you think I find inside, all tied up, huh? So I wait. Pretty soon, who you think comes up?” He smiled without mirth and took another step toward me. “Hombre, I’m going to cut you slow, and there ain’t nothing you can do.”

My mind was racing, calculating the few options I had. To run would only delay the end by a few desperate minutes. To stand and fight with only a rock as a weapon and with one arm rendered helpless was equally useless. To move in, unarmed, on a trained knife fighter would be sheer suicide.

In that second, I evaluated and discarded every choice but one, and even then, I knew the odds would be heavily against me. One small fact had come into my mind. I remembered how quickly Luis had lost his temper when I’d refused his offer to serve as my guide. Now, I gambled on that.

“A little punk like you?” I laughed at him, the derision in my voice reaching out and stinging him like a slap in the face. “Only from behind and in the dark— and even then you missed!”

Luis stopped moving forward. We were no more than eight feet apart

“You think I can’t do it?”

“Come and try!” I held out my left hand so that Luis could see the rock I held in it. Deliberately, I turned my hand over and let it fall to the ground.

“For a man, I might need a weapon,” I said, putting as much scorn into my voice as I could. “For you—” I spat into the road.

Luis turned slightly toward me. The headlights touched and lit up his face in sharp triangles of black and white. His mouth twisted into an angry grimace.

Slowly, I reached back into my hip pocket with my left hand and took out my handkerchief. I wound it around my slashed, right forearm.

“What’re you gonna use when I cut your stomach open?” Luis jeered.

I didn’t look at him, although every nerve in my body screamed at me to keep my eyes on the knife in Luis’s fist. Again, I reached behind with my left hand, my fingers going into my pocket and curling around the heavy brass plaque attached to my hotel room key. I kept my body turned away from Luis as I slid the key and plaque out of my pocket.

“You don’t have the cojones to come at me face to lace,” I taunted him. “I might take that knife away from you and make you get down on your hands and knees and lick it with your tongue like a dog! You’d like that, wouldn’t you, you little maladonada.”

“Don’t talk like that!” Luis snarled, trembling with rage.

I prodded him again. “Malcreado, chico! I spit on little pimps like you!”

Deliberately, I turned my back on him and took a step down the road away from him. Luis uttered a cry of rage and sprang after me.

With the first scraping noise, I flung myself to one side and spun around. Luis’s knife came whipping up at me, slashing through the air where I had stood only a fraction of a second before.

The furious sweep of his lunge had left him wide open. With every ounce of strength I could muster, I brought my left hand swinging around from my side in a vicious snap, hurling the brass plaque and key full into Luis’s face from only inches away. The heavy edge of the brass plate caught him across his eyelids.

He screamed out in pain. One hand involuntarily flew up to his blinded eyes, the other desperately thrust out the knife as he stumbled away, his sandals skidding on the loose gravel of the road. He slipped to one knee, his left hand going out to break his fall, the other still clutching the switchblade.

I took a long, savage step forward, lashing out with the full power of my right leg in a hard, driving kick— thigh muscles, calf muscles, back muscles all explosively concentrated with the whole force of my body, my ankle locked, my toe pointed rigidly.

And Luis, desperately pushing himself to his feet, came rising sightlessly into the blow, catching the point of my shoe squarely in the middle of his throat.

His mouth flew open. His knife dropped. Both hands went to his neck. He thrust himself stumblingly to his feet, staggering erect, standing finally in a bent-kneed, swaying crouch, the raw, animal sound of his scream blocked in his throat by a smashed larynx.

Luis turned toward me, the brutal glare of the headlights shining full on his bulging eyes and tortured face. Blood ran from his eyelids where the key and plaque had torn them open. His mouth gaped and closed as he tried to drag air into his lungs. His chest convulsed with the enormous and futile effort. Then, his legs buckled and with a great shuddering gasp, he fell forward, his face smashing into the gravel of the road. He thrashed crablike in the dirt, trying to breathe, trying to get up. His muscular body arched in one, giant final spasm and then he was still.

For a long moment, while I caught my own breath I watched him carefully. Then I went over to him and picked up the knife from beside his body. I wiped my own blood off the blade onto Luis’s shirt, folding the blade into the handle and putting it into my pocket I found my hotel key and, after a few minutes’ search, I found the .38 Airweight revolver that he had knocked from my hand in his first, murderous rush.

Finally, I went back to the car and turned off the headlights. I didn’t know how much longer I had before someone might come along. In the sudden darkness, I felt drained and tired and my arm began to ache badly, but there were still a few things I had to do before the night was over. For one thing, I couldn’t leave Luis’s body where it was. I didn’t want it discovered just yet.

I opened the trunk of the car, and, tired as I was, I hauled his body to the car and heaved him into the compartment, then slammed the lid shut

Wearily, I climbed into the front seat and started the car. I turned it around in the darkness before I switched on the headlights and drove back to Bickford’s casa.

* * *

Half an hour later, I sat patiently in Bickford’s living room waiting for the big man to regain consciousness. My arm had given me hell, especially when I had to move Bickford’s inert body from the car into the house, but I managed it in spite of the pain. I’d cleaned the cut with peroxide and had wrapped it tightly with bandages, both of which I’d found in the medicine cabinet in Bickford’s bathroom. The wound wasn’t deep, no tendons had been cut, but now the numbness had worn off and it hurt. I tried to ignore the pain, exercising my fingers to keep them from stiffening up. Every once in awhile, I’d pick up the gun in my wounded hand and grip the butt tightly. After awhile, I was satisfied that I could use it with my right hand if I had to.

Bickford was still completely out. So was his wife. Doris would probably sleep through until late morning. While I waited for Bickford to come to his senses, I went over to the telephone and got the number I wanted from information. I put in the call to police headquarters and hung up quickly because I didn’t want to answer any questions. I went back to the armchair to wait patiently.

In about fifteen minutes, Bickford came awake. I saw the surprise on his face at finding himself sprawled on the floor, staring at my shoes. He grunted heavily and rolled over onto his back. I leaned down and ripped the adhesive tape from his mouth. He spat out the gag.

“You son-of-a-bitch,” he said thickly, “what’d you have to slug me for?”

I ignored the question. “I want you to telephone Garrett.”

Bickford glared at me. “What the hell am I supposed to tell him?” he asked sourly. “That I screwed up? That you’re sitting here in my house with a gun in your hand and want to talk to him?”

“Exactly. Right down to the last detail.”

I knelt down beside him, taking Luis’s knife from my pocket and pressing the button on the side of the handle. The blade flicked out Bickford’s eyes widened in sudden fear. Roughly, I turned him on his side, slitting through the adhesive tape that bound his wrists behind him, and then I cut the tape at his ankles and knees.

He sat up slowly, flexing his fingers. He rose unsteadily to his feet, moving across the room on ponderous feet. His eyes went to the couch where Doris lay.

“She’s still asleep. I’ve already checked on her.”

“She’d better be all right,” Bickford growled.

I ignored the comment “Get on the telephone and tell Garrett that I’m waiting here for him — and that he’s to bring along his friend, Carlos.”

Bickford glared at me, but he reached out for the phone and made the call Then there was nothing for us to do but wait until Brian Garrett and Carlos Ortega arrived.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Doris was still asleep on the couch. Bickford sat beside her, a shambling brute of a man, ashen with fatigue and worry. Carlos sat in one of the armchairs, his legs crossed carefully in front of him so as not to spoil the crease in his slacks. He stared silently at the bandage that covered my right arm from my elbow to my wrist My Madras jacket lay on the floor beside me, its right sleeve ripped open. The gun in my right hand was steady, without showing the least sign of a quiver in spite of the pain I felt. I couldn’t let him think Td been hurt much. Brian Garrett sat in the other arm chair, leaning forward, his beefy face flushed with anger, glaring at me.

“Just so that you’ll know that what Bickford told you is true,” I said. I leaned forward over the coffee table cluttered with magazines and newspapers. The Sunday edition of the Mexico City News was on top. I lifted up part of the newspaper. Underneath was a one-kilo, plastic bag packed full of a white powder.

Carlos and Garrett both looked down at the bag, their eyes drawn irresistibly to it. With my left hand, I took out Luis’s knife and flicked open the blade.

Carlos’ expression didn’t change. If he recognized the knife, he gave no sign, but then there were hundreds more like it in town — one of which was embedded deeply in Jean-Paul’s spine.

I jabbed the point of the blade into the bag, tearing it open slightly. Some of the powder drifted out onto the glass of the table top.

“Want to test it?”

Carlos reached out with his fingertip to touch the powder. He put his fingertip to his tongue. He nodded his head.

I reached out with the knife again and enlarged the cut I put the knife back into my pocket, still holding the gun on them. Then, I picked up the torn bag in my left hand and moved to the French doors. I pushed one of the doors ajar with my foot. Standing in the doorway, still facing them, the Smith & Wesson .38 aimed directly at Carlos, I turned the torn bag over so that the white powder blew out into the night.

Garrett jumped to his feet “You fool!” he burst out “You know how much that’s worth?”

“Sit down, Brian,” Carlos said, equably. “This is a game for big stakes. The man is showing us he can afford to sit in on it.”

Brian dropped back into his chair. He ran a meaty hand through his greying hair. “Goddamn you,” he said to me, savagely. “What do you want from us?”

“Just what I wanted before. Lay off Stocelli. Stay away from me.”

“Or?” Carlos asked, calmly.

“I’ll bust you wide open. I told you that before.”

“You talk big, Mr. Carter. I don’t believe you can do it.”

“I’d been looking out the open French doors. Now, I said, “Come outside for a minute. I want you to see something.”

They exchanged looks. Carlos lifted his shoulders in a shrug as if to say he didn’t know what I had in mind. The three of them got to their feet and went outside onto the terrace.

“Over there. Take a look at the naval base.”

We could make out a flurry of activity as lights suddenly came on. The deep, urgent hooting of a ship’s horn blowing insistent, hoarse blasts for action stations came faintly across the bay to us. In only minutes, we could make out the dim shape of a corvette backing away from the dock and then, as it turned, churning water at its stern. It began to pick up forward motion. By the time the corvette had reached the narrow inlet to the ocean, it was moving at almost flank speed, curls of white spray making twin rooster tails at its bow.

“What’s all that about?” Garrett asked.

“You tell him what you think,” I said to Bickford. Even in the moonlight, I could see fear on his face.

“They’re going after the tuna boat,” he guessed.

“Exactly right.”

“But how? How could they know about it?”

“I told them,” I said, tersely. “Now, shall we go back inside?”

* * *

“Let me get this straight,” Carlos said. “You gave five kilos of heroin to the captain and sent him off?”

Bickford nodded miserably. “He’d have killed me, Carlos. I had no choice.”

Carlos turned to me. “And then you notified the naval base?”

“Indirectly. I called the police. I think they’ll pick up your ship in the next half hour or so.”

Carlos smiled confidently. “You think my captain will be so stupid as to let a naval vessel board his ship without first dropping the package over the side?”

“Of course not,” I agreed. “But he doesn’t know about the other four kilos I planted when Bickford and I were leaving the ship. They’ll find that second package because I told them just where to look for it. The first was only a decoy.”

Carlos’ face was an olive mask with two, narrowing eyes aimed at me.

“Why?”

“Do you still think I can’t break up your organization?”

“I see.” He leaned back in the armchair. “You’ve just cost us a great deal, Mr. Carter. Our captain will think we’ve double-crossed him. It’s going to be hard to keep him from talking as long as he thinks that way.”

“That’s step one,” I said.

“I think we’ll have to do away with him permanently,” Carlos reflected out loud. “We can’t take a chance on him talking.”

“He’s no great loss. Add up the rest of the damage.”

“We’ve also lost a vessel. Is that what you mean? True. Worse than that — word will spread. We shall have a difficult time finding a replacement for him.”

“Now you’re catching on.”

“And for this, you gave up — let me see — four and five more, nine kilos, plus the one you threw away so dramatically to impress us—ten kilos of heroin?”

I nodded.

“That’s a large amount of money to throw away,” Carlos observed, watching me.

“It’s worth it.”

“We’ve underestimated you.” His voice was still un-troubled. We might have been two businessmen discussing a fluctuation in the stock market “We’ll have to do something about it.”

“Don’t try. It’s already cost you two men.”

“Two?” Carlos lifted an eyebrow. “The captain is one. Who’s the other?”

“Luis Aparicio.”

This time I could see the shock of my words hit Carlos, but the man regained control of himself almost immediately. I pointed at the bandage on my arm.

“He almost had me. He wasn’t good enough, though.”

“Where is Luis?”

“Dead.”

I watched Carlos freeze — all but his eyes which stared at me dubiously, as if he didn’t believe what he’d heard.

“You’ll find him in the trunk of Bickford’s car,” I said, carefully observing the impact of my words on the three of them. Bickford almost leaped out of his chair. Carlos had to put a hand out to restrain him. Garrett’s face turned a mottled shade of red. Carlos leaned forward, and, for the first time, I saw pure hatred on his face.

“He was my nephew,” said Carlos. The words coming from his lips were numbed by the realization of what I’d said.

“Then you can have the family duty of burying his body,” I said, and moved my hand enough so that the squat .38 Airweight revolver was aimed directly at Carlos’ head. Carlos sank back into the armchair.

“Aren’t you going to ask me about Jean-Paul Sevier?” I asked.

Carlos shook his head. “I don’t have to. Your question tells me that Luis was successful.”

“Then Luis didn’t make a mistake?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Carlos was in control of himself again.

“I thought Jean-Paul was killed by mistake, that I was the target. But if Luis killed him deliberately, it means you knew he was a police agent.”

Carlos nodded slowly. “Yes.”

“How did you find out?”

Carlos shrugged. “In the past, there have been several attempts to infiltrate our organization. We’ve become extremely cautious lately. Yesterday, to make doubly sure that Jean-Paul was who he said he was, I put in a call to our friends in Marseille. Everything checked out, except for one thing. Jean-Paul Sevier did not fit the description of the man they had sent. So I told Luis to get rid of him.”

His voice still showed no concern. His face had settled back into its normal imperturbability, his features varnished into their usual blandness.

“We have arrived at a detente, Senor Carter,” Carlos said. “Apparently, neither of us can make a move without bringing on a violent retaliation from the other.”

“So?”

“Wait a second, Carlos!” Garrett broke in to protest. “You mean we’re going to go along with this son-of-a-bitch?”

I looked at the angry, jowled face, the tiny broken veins in Garrett’s nose, the nicks in his heavy-fleshed chin where he’d cut himself shaving. This was a man whose impatience could destroy him, I realized, filing the thought away.

Carlos shrugged. “What other alternative do we have, amigo?”

“Goddamn it! He’s cost us two men and a ship. Are you going to let him get away with it?”

“Yes.” Carlos didn’t look at Garrett as he spoke. “There’s nothing else we can do at this moment.”

And what have you planned for me later, I wondered. I was sure that Carlos didn’t intend to let me live if he could help it I was much too dangerous to him. I knew that for the time being Carlos would go along with me because he had no other choice. The question was, how long would that be?

I arose. “I take it you’ve agreed to lay off Stocelli?”

Carlos nodded. “You can tell him he’s safe from us.”

“And myself?”

Again Carlos nodded. “We’re going to have our our hands full protecting our organization from the damage you’ve already done. Survival first, Senor Carter.”

I moved to the French doors without haste. Pausing in the doorway, I said, “You made one mistake today. I told you it would be costly. Don’t come after me again. It would be another mistake.”

“We profit by our mistakes.” He didn’t take his eyes off me. “Be assured we won’t be so foolish next time.”

You could take that remark two ways, I thought I was sure that the next time he sent someone after me it would be in a more careful manner.

“Just remember Luis,” I warned him. “If there’s another attempt on my life, I’ll go after the man who sent him — you! Entiende, Senor Ortega?”

“I understand very well.”

Quickly, I turned and went out through the French doors, leaving the three of them in the living room: Carlos seated in the deep armchair, the smoothness of his face an inscrutable mask hiding his feelings as he watched me go; Bickford, a gray-faced hulk sitting on the couch beside his sleeping wife; and Brian Garrett, staring angrily at the dusting of white powder on the rug and the empty, ripped plastic bag that lay on the floor near the doorway where I’d dropped it.

I crossed the terrace and swung my legs over the ornamental concrete block balustrade to the grass of the yard. Then, hidden in the darkness, I doubled back to stand beside a window opened next to the terrace, my back pressed against the wall of the house, the gun in my hand, waiting to see if they’d come after me.

Turning my head, I could see them in the living room. None of them moved.

After a few minutes, Brian Garrett walked over and picked up the plastic bag that had held the heroin.

“Ten kilos! Where the hell did he lay his hands on ten kilos to throw away like it wasn’t worth a goddamned cent?”

“You fool!” Carlos spat out the words. Garrett turned around to face him. “Forget the heroin. I want Carter. I want him dead! Don’t you understand what he’s doing to us?”

CHAPTER TWELVE

I went into my hotel through a service entrance because I didn’t want to advertise my presence. Instead of going to my room, I took the service elevator up to the ninth floor.

Suite 903 was at the end of the corridor. I checked my watch. Three-thirty in the morning, yet a tiny spill of light came from the crack between the door and the sill. I wondered why Dietrich would be up so late. Cautiously, I inserted a metal probe into the lock and pressed a thin plastic card into the door at the latch.

The bolt turned back, making only the faintest click. I waited, listening, and when there was still no noise on the other side of the door, I took out the snub-nosed .38 Smith and Wesson Airweight and silently pushed the door open.

I walked into the living room. I heard noises in one of the bedrooms. Almost immediately, a tall, silver-haired man appeared in the doorway. Thin and fine-boned, he appeared as fragile as a praying mantis with his elongated, bony face and his somber dignity. He stopped short in complete surprise,

“What the devil are you doing here?” he demanded imperiously. “Put that gun away!”

“Are you Herbert Dietrich?”

“Yes, I’m Dietrich. What is this? A hold-up?”

“My name is Paul Stephans,” I said, “and I think it’s long past time that you and I had a talk, Mr. Dietrich.”

Recognition leaped into his eyes. “You’re Stocelli’s man!” he said accusingly.

I shook my head. “Why do you think I’m connected with Stocelli?”

“I was told you had a secret meeting with him at three o’clock in the morning on the night you arrived.”

I sighed. Apparently, everyone in the hotel knew about that midnight visit

“I’m not Stocelli’s man. I’m doing a job for Alexander Gregorius. He sent me down here to deal with Stocelli on a business matter.”

Dietrich took a moment to grasp what I’d just told him.

“My god!” he exclaimed, “I’ve just done a terrible thing. And it’s too late to correct it!”

“You mean the five kilos of heroin in my room?” I asked.

Dietrich nodded — and it was the confirmation I needed He’d as much as admitted that he was the one who’d set up Stocelli’s associates and had been trying to do the same to Stocelli and me.

“I got rid of it,” I told him.

Dietrich shook his head. “Even more. I sent a bellhop to your room with a black fabric suitcase. It contains almost thirty kilos of heroin. No more than an hour ago.”

“Have you informed the police yet?”

Dietrich slowly shook his head. “I was about to— when I heard the door open.”

“The police won’t trouble me about it,” I told him, and watched his reaction.

An edge of fright came into his voice.

“Just who are you, Mr. Stephans? What land of a man are you that you’re sent to deal single-handedly with a brute like Stocelli? You’re not bothered by the police. You’re not in the least disturbed by knowing that there’s enough heroin in your room to put you behind bars for the rest of your life. You break into a hotel room at almost four in the morning with a gun in your hand. Just who the devil are you?”

“Someone who means you no harm,” I reassured him. I could see he was on the verge of breaking apart “All I want from you is some information.”

Dietrich hesitated. Finally, he let out his breath. “All right Go ahead.”

“So far, I’ve totalled up more than a hundred and forty kilos of heroin that you’ve distributed. It has a street value of somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty-two million dollars. Now how the hell could a man like you lay his hands on that much heroin? Even Stocelli can’t do it with all his contacts. Where in God’s name are you getting it from?”

Dietrich turned away from me, stubborness coming into the set of his face.

“That’s one thing I will not tell you, Mr. Stephans.”

“I think you should.”

The woman’s voice came from behind us.

I turned around. She stood in the doorway to the other bedroom, clad in a light, semi-transparent negligee. Beneath it, she wore a short, knee-length nylon nightgown. Her long, straight blonde hair fell almost to her waist. She was somewhere in her middle twenties, her face a softer, feminine version of Dietrich’s elongated features. Under a broad forehead, a fine, long nose that barely escaped being too thin divided her tanned face. Her eyes were the same soft gray as her father’s. Her chin was a delicate joining of the sweeping curves of cheek and jawbone.

“I’m Susan Dietrich. I overheard what you’ve told my father. I apologize to you. It was my fault. I’m the one who bribed the bellhop for information about you. He told me you were seen coming out of Stocelli’s penthouse the other morning. That’s why we thought you were part of it.”

She came into the living room and stood by her father, putting one arm around him.

“I think it’s time you told someone. It’s been tearing you apart for years. You’ve got to stop. You’re getting in too deep.”

Dietrich shook his head. “I won’t stop, Susan. I can’t stop! Not until every last one of them—”

Susan put her fingers to his lips. “Please?”

Dietrich took her hand away. “I will not tell him,” he said defiantly, his voice beginning to rise to an almost fanatical pitch. “He’ll tell the police, and they’ll all get off scot-free. Every one of them! Don’t you understand that? All my effort — all those years will have been wasted.”

“No,” I said “Frankly, I don’t give a damn about the men you’ve framed — or how long they’ll rot in jail. All I want to know is where you’re getting all this heroin.”

Dietrich lifted a thin, pale face to me. I could see the lines of suffering that had etched themselves deeply into his skin. Only years of agony could have produced the tortured look in the old man’s eyes. He looked at me steadily, and without a flicker of expression in his voice, he said, simply, “I make it, Mr. Stephans.”

* * *

Dietrich held Susan’s hand tightly in both of his as he told me his story.

“I had another daughter, Mr. Stephans. Her name was Alice. Four years ago, she was found dead of an overdose of heroin in a despicable, dirty hotel room in New York City. She wasn’t quite eighteen at the time. For a year before she died, she’d been a prostitute. As the police told me, she’d been taking on everyone who could pay her even a few dollars because she needed money so desperately to pay for her addiction. She couldn’t live without heroin. She finally died because of it.

“I swore revenge. I swore to get the men who count, the ones who make it possible — the ones at the top! The big men that the police can’t touch because they never handle the stuff themselves. Men like Stocelli, Torregrossa, Vignale, Gambetta, Klein, and Webber. The whole filthy bunch! Especially the ones who process it for them. Men like Michaud, Berthier, and Duprè.

“If you know anything about me, you know I’m a chemist. Recently, I found a way I could get my revenge. I found a means by which I could literally bury them in their own foul traffic!”

He paused, his eyes gleaming with a light that came from deep within him.

“I found a way to make synthetic heroin.”

Dietrich saw the look on my face.

“You don’t believe me, do you, Mr. Stephans. But it’s true. I actually discovered a way in which to manufacture heroin hydrochloride of better than ninety-one percent purity” He got to his feet. “Come with me.”

I followed him into the kitchenette.

Dietrich toned on the light and pointed. “See for yourself.”

On the counter was a simple array of glass retorts and glass tubing. Most of it made no sense to me, but I’m not a chemist

“It is true,” Susan said, and I recalled that on the second page of the report that Denver had sent me via Telecopier the key phrase on Dietrich Chemical Inc. was “research and development.” Was it really possible that the old man had found a way to manufacture heroin synthetically?

“Yes, Mr. Stephans,” Dietrich said, almost proudly, “synthetic heroin. Like many discoveries, I practically stumbled upon the technique of synthesizing the drug, although it took me quite some time to perfect it. And then”—Dietrich reached over to the counter and lifted a brown, plastic quart bottle, holding it up—”then, I discovered how to concentrate the synthetic. This bottle contains concentrated synthetic heroin, I suppose a good analogy would be to liken it to concentrated liquid saccharin, one drop of which is equal to a full teaspoon of sugar. Well, this is even more concentrated. I dilute it with plain tap water, half an ounce to the gallon.”

I must have looked dubious because Dietrich caught me by the arm. “You must believe me, Mr. Stephans. You’ve tested the stuff yourself, haven’t you?”

I hadn’t, but I remembered Carlos Ortega reaching out with his forefinger and touching it to the powder and touching that to his tongue and then nodding agreement that it was indeed heroin.

“How does it work?” I asked.

“You know I’ll never reveal the formula.”

“I didn’t ask you that. I just don’t see how you get a crystal powder out of that”—I pointed to the bottle —”and plain water.”

Dietrich sighed. “Very simple. The concentrate has the property of crystalizing water. Just as cold turns rain into snowflakes — which is nothing more than crystallized water. A gallon of water weighs around three kilos. This bottle contains enough concentrate to make almost two hundred kilos of synthetic heroin that can’t be distinguished from true heroin hydrochloride. There isn’t a chemical test in the world that will show the slightest difference. And I can turn it out for only a few dollars a pound. Do you know what that means?”

I surely did, even if he didn’t The implications of what Dietrich had just told were tremendous. Thoughts churned around like wreckage in a typhoon. I couldn’t believe that Dietrich was unaware of what he’d said.

We returned to the living room, Dietrich pacing back and forth as if the energy in him had to find some release other than in words. I was silent because I wanted to sort out the thoughts in my mind.

“I can make it anywhere. The heroin that I tried to plant in your room? Did you think I smuggled that much heroin into Mexico? I didn’t have to. I can make it here as easily as I made it in France when I planted it on those Frenchmen. I made it in New York. I made it in Miami.”

Susan sat down on the couch. I watched Dietrich stride back and forth in the confines of the living room and knew that the man was not completely in his right mind.

“Mr. Dietrich.” I caught his attention.

“Yes?”

“You asked me before if I know what your discovery means? Do you?”

Dietrich turned to face me, puzzled.

“Are you aware of how valuable your discovery is to the very men you’re trying to destroy? Do you know the risks they now take to smuggle narcotics into the States? Or how many millions of dollars in cash they must pay for it? They do it for only one reason. The fantastic profit involved. Hundreds of millions a year. Now you’ve found a way that will eliminate the risk of smuggling narcotics into the States as well as giving them larger profits than they could have dreamed of. Don’t you know what your formula is worth to them?”

Dietrich stared uncomprehendingly at me.

“There isn’t one of these men who wouldn’t commit a dozen murders to lay his hands on your formula. Or on you, for that matter.”

He stopped almost in mid-stride, his face stricken with a look of sudden fright.

“I–I never… I never thought about it,” he stammered.

“Damnit, think about it!” I’d finally gotten through to him. There wasn’t any need to say more.

The old man went over to the couch and sank down beside his daughter, putting his face in his hands. Susan put her arm around this thin shoulders to comfort him. She looked across the room at me with pale gray eyes.

“Will you help us, Mr. Stephans?”

“The best thing you can do now is to go back home and keep your mouths shut. Never mention a word to anyone.”

“There’s no one else to help us,” she said. “Please?”

I looked at them, father and daughter, trapped in a web of revenge. My duty was to Gregorius and in order to help him I had to keep my promise to Stocelli, to clear him with the Commission. All I’d have to do would be to turn these two over to him, but the thought of what Stocelli would do if he got his hands on Dietrich was sickening. And if I turned Dietrich over to Stocelli, it would be the same as handing him Dietrich’s formula. Within a year, Stocelli would control the entire narcotics rackets in the States. No big-time operator would be able to compete with him. With the risk of smuggling heroin into the States eliminated, and with the incredible profits to be had because of its low manufacturing costs, it would be no time at all before Stocelli would be supplying every narcotics ring in every city in the country. There’d be no way to stop him. Giving Dietrich to Stocelli would be like turning a plague loose on the country.

I knew I had to keep Dietrich’s formula out of Stocelli’s grasp. And since it was locked up in the old man’s mind, I had to get the pair of them out of Mexico.

“All right,” I said. “But you must do exactly what I tell you to.”

“We will.”

“How much heroin do you have in there?” I asked Dietrich.

Dietrich looked up. “Almost forty kilos in crystal form.”

“Get rid of it And anything else you’ve been brewing, too. Get rid of all the glassware. You can’t take a chance that it’ll be seen by a maid or bellhop. Clean the place up thoroughly.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. Tomorrow, I want you to book your return flight to the States on the first plane out.”

“And then?”

“For the time being, nothing. That’s all you can do.”

I suddenly felt exhausted. My arm ached with a dull, throbbing pain. I needed rest and sleep.

“What about Stocelli?” asked Dietrich, the fanatical light in his eyes flaring up once more. “What about him? Does he get off scot-free? Does this mean he’ll not be punished?”

“HI take care of Stocelli. You have my word for that.”

“Can I believe you?”

“You’ll have to.”

I rose to my feet and told them that I was tired and that I was leaving, and I walked out the door, shutting it carefully behind me. None of us said anything as I left. There was no more to be said.

* * *

When I left Dietrich and his daughter, it was well past four in the morning, but I still had one final chore to do before I could go to sleep. I went back to my room to pick up two tape recorders — a pocket recorder and a slightly larger one. The larger recorder had been fitted with a high-speed playback. It could play back a full hour of tape in less than thirty seconds. To anyone listening, the sound it made would be nothing more than a high-pitched whine.

With both machines, I went down to the deserted lobby and settled myself in one of the telephone booths. Pretending to be speaking into the mouthpiece, I dictated a report of my activities into the small pocket recorder. I covered almost all the events that had occurred, except for the killing of Luis Aparicio. It took me almost fifteen minutes before I was through talking.

Then I got through to Denver.

“You sound tired,” Denver said when he came on the line.

“I am,” I said, tartly, “so let’s get this over with, okay?”

“I’m taping now.”

“High speed,” I said, wearily. “Let’s not take all night.”

“Roger. Ready for reception.”

“Okay, this is private. For playback to Gregorius only. Repeat — for Gregorius only.”

I put the tape cassette into the high-speed player and held it to the mouthpiece of the telephone. I pressed the ‘play’ button, and the machine gave off a whine like the shrill scream of a distant buzz-saw. The sound lasted for seven or eight seconds, then stopped abruptly.

I put the handset to my ear and said, “How was the reception?”

“The scopes say it was okay,” Denver acknowledged.

“All right,” I said. “I want that tape destroyed immediately after transmission to Gregorius.”

“Will do. Anything else?”

“No,” I said. “I guess that’s all for now.”

I hung up. Before I left the booth, I rewound the original cassette, disconnected the microphone, and ran it in the ‘record’ mode in the high speed recorder until the tape was completely erased.

Back in my room, I had to pull the drapes against the glare of the coming dawn. I undressed and got into bed and lay thinking for a long while because my thoughts were on the last part of the message I had sent to Gregorius:

“What Dietrich has discovered is so dangerous that it cannot be entrusted to him. The man is highly neurotic and unstable. If his formula for synthetic heroin ever gets into the wrong hands, I’d hate to think of the consequences. Objectively, I would recommend that he be eliminated — as soon as possible.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I slept until the late afternoon, when an hysterical and terrified Susan aroused me by her frantic pounding on my door.

I stumbled out of bed and opened the door groggily. Susan was clad only in a bikini and a sheer beach jacket. Her long blonde hair cascaded in a tangle over her breasts.

“My father’s gone!” she cried out.

Fear was written in a pale wash across her features. Her eyes were an unfocused blank stare from the shock she was barely able to control.

When I finally calmed her down, I slipped into slacks, a shirt, and sandals. We went up to her suite.

I looked around the living room of the Dietrich suite. It was a shambles. Lamps had been overturned, the coffee table lay on its side. Ashtrays had spilled cigarette butts onto the floor.

I turned to the kitchenette. It was completely empty. Nothing remained of the retorts and tubing and other laboratory apparatus that I’d seen there only hours before.

“There!” said Susan. “See for yourself!”

“Tell me what happened.”

She took a deep breath to calm herself. “I awoke around ten-thirty this morning. Father was still sleeping. We’d gone to bed right after you’d left, but he was so disturbed that I made him take a sleeping pill. I called the airlines as soon as I was up and made reservations for us to leave this afternoon. It was the earliest flight I could get. Then I had a cup of coffee. By that time it was eleven o’clock. I wanted to get a little more sun and I didn’t think it would hurt if I let Father sleep as long as he could, so I went down to the pool. I was down there until just a few minutes ago. I came back to pack and — and found this!” She swept her arm around in a despairing gesture.

“Did you find a note or anything left here?”

She shook her head. “Nothing! Apparently, Father awakened and got dressed. He must have made breakfast for himself. The dishes are still on the table on the terrace. All he ever has is juice, coffee, and an egg.”

I looked around the kitchenette. “Did he clean up in here?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t last night. He was too tired. He said he’d do it this morning.”

“What would he have done with the lab equipment?”

“He’d told me he would smash it and put the broken pieces in the garbage pail.”

“Did he?”

Susan lifted the lid of the trash container. “No. There’s no glassware in here.”

“He told me that he’d made another forty kilos of heroin. Where did he store it?”

“In the cupboard over the sink.”

“Is it there?”

She swung open the cupboard doors so that I could see that the shelves were bare. She turned a baffled face toward me.

“Did he dump it?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. He didn’t do anything last night except go to bed.”

“What about the concentrate?”

Susan looked around the kitchenette again. She lifted the lid of the trash container. “Here,” she said, lifting some used paper towels. She held up the plastic bottle. “It’s empty.”

“Thank god for that, at least.”

I walked back into the living room.

“Is he playing another of his games?” I asked Susan. “Has he gone after Stocelli?”

“Oh, my god!” she exclaimed, aghast “I never thought of that!”

“I told him he was playing with killers! What the hell did he think he was doing?”

Susan shook her head silently. Tears filled her eyes. She suddenly threw herself into my arms. Her long, blonde hair streamed down her back. I could feel the heat of her almost naked body against mine, her small, firm breasts pushing against my chest.

She made sniffing sounds against my chest, and I cupped her chin with my hand to turn her face up to mine. She closed her eyes and put her lips against mine and opened her mouth.

In a moment, she took her mouth away, but only a fraction of an inch.

“Oh, god,” she whispered, “make me forget! I can’t take any more of it Please, please… make me forget!”

And I did. In the wreckage strewn living room. In the shafts of light streaming through the windows. Somehow, we tore our clothes off and embraced each other, both of us finding forgetfulness and release from our own tensions.

Her breasts fitted the palms of my hands as if they had been molded to their shape. Her thighs spread and wrapped themselves around me. There was no teasing. Nothing but a sudden, furious taking of each other. She took me as much as I took her.

And, finally, engulfed in perspiration, slippery with sweat, pounding in a furious burst of sexual energy, she exploded in my arms, her nails raking at my back, her teeth biting into my shoulder, and her moans filling the room.

We had just moved apart, tired but replete, when the telephone rang.

We looked at each other.

“You answer it,” she said, wearily.

I crossed the room to the table by the window. “Hello?”

“I’m glad to find you there, Carter,” said the man’s voice, abruptly. “Senor Dietrich’s life is in your hands. The lady you have been dating will meet you this evening. Eight o’clock. The same place you dined with her previously. And make sure you aren’t followed by the police.”

The phone went dead in my ear, but not before I recognized the voice of Carlos Ortega, bland, suave, controlled, and with not the slightest hint of emotion or drama.

I put down the phone.

“Who was it?” Susan asked.

“Wrong number,” I said and went back to her.

* * *

We spent the afternoon in pleasant carnality. Susan burrowed into me as if to hide from the world. We went into her bedroom and pulled the blinds down and shut out the light and the honor. And we made love.

Later, much later, I left her to go down to my room to change.

“I want you to stay here,” I told her. “Don’t leave the room. Don’t open the door. No exceptions. Do you understand?”

She smiled up at me. “You’ll find him, won’t you?” she asked, but it was more of a statement than a question. “Father will be all right, won’t he?”

I didn’t answer her. I knew that there was no way at all that I could make her aware of the vicious brutality of the men among whom I prowled, or their callous indifference to another man’s pain.

How could I explain to her a world where you wrapped a chain around your gloved fist and smashed a man in the ribs again and again until you heard the dry, crunching snap of breaking bones and watched impassively as he began to spew up his own bright blood? Or laid his hands flat on a board and smashed a crowbar across his knuckles? And ignored the animal screams of pain that came out of his torn throat and paid no attention to the wracking spasms that wrung his body into limp muscle and ripped tissue.

How could I make her understand men like Carlos Ortega or Stocelli or Luis Aparicio? Or myself, for that matter.

With Susan in her present state of mind, it was best to say nothing. She was no Consuela Delgardo.

I kissed her on the cheek and went out, locking the suite behind me.

* * *

In my own suite, I immediately noticed the black suitcase that Herbert Dietrich had told me about Thirty kilos of pure heroin. Without opening it, I put the suitcase with mine. Jean-Paul’s body was another matter. If I could have called on AXE, it would have been a simple matter to dispose of it. But I was on my own, and it was a problem.

There was simply no way to get rid of it, and time was getting short I finally decided to delay taking any action. I unwrapped the body, then I lifted him in my arms and brought him out to the terrace, putting him gently down in one of the sundeck chairs. To any casual observer, he looked as if he were taking a nap.

I showered and changed quickly, then strapped Hugo to my left forearm and put on a low-slung shoulder holster. I checked the elbow-slide action of Wilhelmina. I took out the clip of 9mm cartridges, reloaded the clip, and snapped a round in the chamber before I set the safety.

I donned another lightweight jacket. In the daytime, I couldn’t have gotten away with it. A 9mm Luger is a big handgun any way you look at it and the bulge under the jacket would have given me away. But, in the night, I could get by with it. That is, if no one stared at me too closely.

When I was ready, I left my room and cut down the corridor to the service elevator, heading for the back exit.

In less than five minutes, I was out of the hotel, scrunched down in the back seat of a cab, heading for El Centro.

As soon as we’d gone a few blocks, I sat up. We were driving west along the Costera. The Costera is too open and has too many police cars on it for me to feel comfortable, so I had the driver turn off when we came to the Calle Sebastian el Cano. After three blocks, we turned left onto the Avenida Cuauhtemoc, which parallels the Costera almost all the way in to El Centro. Where Cuauhtemoc joins the Avenida Constituyentes, we turned left again. I had him stop at the corner of the Avenida Cinco de Mayo and paid him, watching him drive out of sight before I moved.

I was only two blocks away from the zocalo, behind the cathedral, whose graceful, blue-painted onion-bulb spires make it look like a transplanted Russian Orthodox church. I picked up another cab and had him drop me off several blocks away from Hernando’s. I could have walked the distance, because it wasn’t that far away, but I’d attract less attention driving up in a taxi.

It was eight o’clock exactly when I walked into Hernando’s. The piano player was playing soft rhythms on the piano with his large, black hands, his eyes shut, swaying gently back and forth on his seat. I looked around. Consuela was not at the piano bar. I walked through the dining rooms. She wasn’t in any of them.

I sat down at the bar to have a drink while I waited for her. I looked at my watch. Five minutes after eight. I got up and went over to the public telephone and called the hotel. They rang through to Suite 903. There was no answer. Apparently, Susan was following my instructions to the letter. She wasn’t even answering the telephone.

Consuela was standing at my elbow when I turned away from the phone. She put her arm through mine and kissed me on the cheek.

“You’ve been trying to reach Susan Dietrich at the hotel?”

I nodded.

“Then you know that Miss Dietrich isn’t in her room,” she said. “She hasn’t been there for at least half an hour. She left with someone you’ve already met.”

“Brian Garrett?” I said, with a sinking feeling.

Consuela nodded.

“I suppose he told her a story about taking her to her father?”

“How on earth did you ever guess? That’s exactly what he did. She made no fuss at all.”

“Why?”

“Among other things, to make sure you’d cause no trouble when I take you to meet Carlos later on.” Her face softened. “I’m sorry, Nick. You know I have to go along with them, even if it means hurting you. How much does this girl mean to you?”

I looked at Consuela, in surprise. “I just met her last night,” I said. “Didn’t you know?”

“Somehow, I had the impression she was an old friend of yours.”

“Forget it. What’s the next step?”

“You’re taking me to dinner at La Perla.” She smiled at me. “We’re going to have a pleasant meal and watch the high divers.”

“And Carlos?”

“He’ll meet us there.” She reached up and touched my cheek lightly with her fingers in a gentle caress. “For god’s sake, Nick, don’t look so severe. I’m not so unattractive that you can’t smile at me, am I?”

* * *

We descended the narrow, stone steps built steeply into the innermost face of the Quebrada cliffs below the Hotel El Mirador. We’d eaten a light dinner at the El Gourmet restaurant on the Upper level, and now I followed Consuela as she picked her way down in the darkness to La Perla on the lowest level. She found a seat at one of the tables close to the railing that overlooked the narrow finger of the sea and the waves that came rolling in against the base of the cliff.

It was almost ten o’clock. Consuela had not tried to make small talk during dinner.

“How much longer?” I asked her as we sat down.

“Not long. He’ll be here soon. In the meantime, we can watch the high divers.”

By the time we’d finished our first drink, the divers had come out on the low, rocky escarpment to our left and climbed down to a ledge just above the water. There were three of them. One of them dove into the inlet from an outcropping of rock and swam across to the other side. Now, all the lights — except for a few spotlights — were turned off. The first diver came out of the water, his body glistening wet. The spotlights followed him as he picked his way slowly up the almost sheer face of the cliff from which he was going to dive. Toehold after toehold, fingers gripping the rock, he made his way to the top. Finally, he swung himself onto the ledge a hundred and thirty feet above the water of the inlet.

The young diver knelt briefly in front of a small shrine at the back of the ledge, bending his head and crossing himself before he rose to his feet again. He picked his way back to the edge of the cliff.

Now the spotlights went out and he was in darkness. Below us, there was the smash of a hard wave and the high toss of white spume against the base of the cliffs. On the opposite side of the chasm, a bonfire of crumpled newspaper erupted into flame, the glare lighting up the scene. The boy crossed himself once more. He stretched on his toes.

As the drums picked up a fast roll, he sprang out into the blackness, his arms whipping out from his sides, his legs and back arching until he was a bow in the air, falling slowly at first and then faster, dropping into the brightness of the bonfire light and finally into the great swell of a wave — his arms breaking the swan dive and coming up over his head at the last possible moment.

There was silence until his head broke water and then there were shouts and applause and cheers.

As the noise died away around us, I heard Carlos Ortega speak up from just behind me. “He’s one of the best of the divers.” He pulled out a chair next to me and sat down.

“Once in a while,” Carlos remarked pleasantly as he sat down and adjusted the chair, “they kill themselves. If his foot slips on the ledge as he jumps, or if he doesn’t spring out far enough to clear the rocks—” he shrugged. “Or if he misjudges a wave and dives in too steeply when there isn’t enough water. Or if the undertow sweeps him out to sea. A wave can smash him. against a rock. Angel Garcia died that way when they were filming a jungle movie here in 1958. Did you know that?”

“You can skip the sightseeing lecture,” I said. “Let’s get to the point.”

“You know that Senor Dietrich is my guest?”

“I managed to figure that one out for myself.”

“And you know that his daughter decided to join him?”

“So I’ve learned,” I said, unemotionally. “Now, what the hell do you want from me?”

Consuela spoke up. “Shall I leave you now, Carlos?”

“Not just yet.” He took out a small, thin cigar and lit it slowly. He lifted his eyes to me and said affably, “How would you like to go into partnership with us?”

I’d expected threats. I’d expected and thought about almost every eventuality but this one. The offer caught me completely by surprise. I looked at Consuela. She, too, waited for my answer.

Carlos leaned even closer to me. I caught the scent of his after-shave lotion. “I know about Dietrich’s formula,” he said, his voice barely loud enough to reach my ears. “I know about his conversation with you and what he can manufacture.”

“That’s quite a spy system you have at the hotel,” I commented.

Carlos ignored my remark.

“What Dietrich has discovered can make billionaires of us all.”

I leaned back in my chair.

“Why include me in the deal, Ortega?”

Carlos seemed surprised. “I thought it would be obvious to you. We need you.”

And then I understood it all. “Stocelli,” I muttered. “You need a distributor for the heroin. Stocelli would be your distributor. And you need me to get to Stocelli.”

Carlos smiled at me, a thin, malevolent grimace.

Consuela started to speak up. Ortega silenced her. “Perhaps you should leave us now, my dear. You know where to meet us — that is, if Mr. Carter agrees to join us.”

Consuela rose. She walked around the small table to my side and let her hand rest on my shoulder. I felt the tight pressure of her slender fingertips.

“Don’t do anything rash, Nick,” she murmured. “The three men at the next table are armed. Aren’t they, Carlos?”

“Esverdad.”

Consuela moved off in the direction of the steps. I watched her for a moment before I turned back to Ortega.

“Now that she’s gone, Ortega, what is it you want to tell me that you don’t want her to know about?”

For a moment, Ortega didn’t answer. He lifted one of our empty glasses and idly twirled the stem in his fingers. Finally, he put it down and leaned toward me.

“Do you think I don’t know that John Bickford is a Weakling who can be pushed around without much trouble? He thinks with his cojones. All that matters to him is that wife of his, that expensive puta. And Brian Garrett? Do you think I’m unaware that Garrett is no stronger than Bickford?”

Carlos was whispering now, his face only inches away from mine. Even in the darkness, I could see how his eyes had lit up With the intensity of his inner vision.

“I can be one of the wealthiest men in the world. But I cannot do it myself. Here in Mexico I have some influence. I have connections. But what happens when we move our operation to the States? There would be only Bickford, Garrett, and myself. Can you see Bickford standing up to Stocelli? Or Garrett? They would dirty their pants the first time they came face to face with him. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“Yes. You’d get rid of Garrett and Bickford to team up with me on this deal.”

“Exactly. Now what do you say?”

“What’s the split?” I said, knowing Ortega would take my question as the first step toward my agreeing to go along with him, Carlos smiled. “Ten percent” I laughed out loud. I knew that Ortega expected me to bargain. If I didn’t he would be suspicious. Ten percent was ridiculous. “If I go along with you, then we split right down the line.”

“Fifty percent? Absolutely not.”

“Then get yourself another boy.” I settled back in my chair and reached for my pack of cigarettes lying on the table. In the flame of the lighter, I could see Ortega’s face regain its smooth, cold composure.

“You’re in no position to bargain.”

“Who says so? Look, Ortega, you need me. You just got through telling me that you can’t pull off this deal without me. Bickford and Garrett? Stocelli would eat them up and spit them out and come after you. Now, you listen. If you’re going to hold out a carrot for me to stretch after, you damned well better make it a fat, juicy one or I’m not even going to nibble.”

“Forty percent?” Carlos offered tentatively, watching me carefully.

I shook my head. “Fifty percent. And if I ever catch you trying to cheat me — even by a penny — I’ll come after your hide.”

Carlos hesitated, and I knew I had him convinced. Finally, he nodded his head. “You bargain hard,” he said, grudgingly. He held out his hand. “Agreed.”

I looked down at his hand. “Come on, Ortega. We’re still not friends, so don’t try to make me think I’m your buddy. This is purely a business deal. I like the money. So do you. Let’s keep it on that basis.”

Ortega smiled. “At least you are honest” He dropped his hand to his side and rose to his feet “Now that we are partners, shall we go, Senor Carter?”

“Where?”

“I’m a houseguest at Garrett’s hacienda. He’s asked me to invite you to join us there — if you decided to team up with us.” He smiled at the irony.

As we walked up the narrow stone and concrete steps that led up from the La Perla nightclub, I could see that we were followed by the three men who’d been sitting at the next table all evening.

A car was waiting for us at the circular, cobblestone drive at the top of the cliff. The chauffeur held the door open as we came up to it. Ortega got into the rear seat first, motioning for me to join him. As I settled myself, the chauffeur closed the door and went around to the front seat. He started up the engine and then turned to face me, his thick fist gripping the butt of a big Mauser Parabellum pistol, its muzzle aimed squarely into my face from only inches away.

Without moving, I asked, “What the hell is this all about, Carlos?”

“Your gun,” said Ortega, holding out his hand. “It’s been making me nervous all evening. Why not give it to me so that I can relax?”

“Tell him to be careful,” I said. “I’m reaching for it now.”

“By the barrel,” Ortega snapped. “If it comes out of your jacket any other way, he’ll shoot.”

I slid Wilhelmina carefully out of the holster. Ortega took it from me.

“Do you have any other weapons, Senor Carter?”

It took me only a fraction of a second to decide. I slid Hugo out of his sheath and handed the slim stilleto to Ortega. “Take care of them for me,” I said easily.

“Vamanos, Paco!” Ortega snapped out the words. The driver turned around and put the car into motion. He drove around the center island and down the hill.

We came slowly down the cobblestone streets from the cliffs of Quebrada and through the narrow streets of the older section of Acapulco. As we turned onto the Costera Miguel Aleman and drove eastward I could look across the bay at the lights of the Hotel Matamoros. Ortega caught my glance.

“It would be very bad for you to even think of going back to your hotel, Senor Carter,” said Ortega, drily.

“How do you figure that?”

“You might run into Teniente Fèlix Fuentes of the Federales,” said Carlos. “And that would have been a bad thing for both of us, como no?”

He turned his head to face me, his dark eyes glinting with malicious amusement.

“Did you think I didn’t know about Teniente Fuentes being here in Acapulco?” he asked. “Do you think I’m a fool?”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Downstairs in Garrett’s huge hacienda, there was a raucous party going on. A dozen of his friends had come down from Newport Beach in an eighty-foot motor sailer. The stereo was blasting away, and half of the guests were already drunk. Td been hustled upstairs into the bedroom by Ortega and Paco. Paco had pushed me into the room and slammed and locked the door behind me.

Consuela lay on the huge king-sized bed. Across the room from her was an entire wall of wardrobes, their doors mirrored to catch every reflection in the room.

She smiled at me, and suddenly she was a sleek, sinuous jungle cat, stretching sensuously. She held put her arms. “Come here.”

I stretched out in an armchair, leaning back and crossing my legs.

“I want you to make love to me,” Consuela said, her eyes half closed, twisting her body like a smooth, limber tigress. I sat where I was, eyeing her reflectively.

“Why?” I asked. “Because the house is full of people? Does that turn you on?”

“Yes.” Consuela’s eyes were only slightly opened.

She smiled possessively at me. “You’re teasing me,” she said. “Come here.”

I got to my feet and moved over to the bed. I let myself down on top Of her, putting my lips against the smoothness of her throat, holding her long ripe body in my arms. I let my weight come down on her as I breathed into her ear.

“Oh, you bastard!” Consuela lifted my head, holding it in both her hands and smiling into my eyes.

I lifted myself from her and moved across the room,

“Where are you going?”

“To shave,” I said, rubbing one hand across the bristle on my cheeks. I went into the bathroom and stripped off my clothes, then turned on the shower and stepped into it.

I had toweled myself dry and was lathering my face when I heard her call out, “What’s taking you so long?”

“Come join me,” I called back.

In a moment or two, I heard her come up behind me, and then I felt her naked body pressing against me, soft breasts flattening against my back, smooth arms coming around my waist, wet lips kissing my shoulder blades and running up my spine to my neck.

“You’ll make me cut myself.”

“Shave later,” she whispered against my back.

“Take a shower while I finish shaving,” I said.

I watched her in the mirror as she moved away. She turned on the water and stepped behind the shower curtains out of my sight. I heard the heavy stream gush in a roar of sound from the shower head. Quickly, I looked around the shelves beside the mirror. On the counter, I found a pint-sized bottle of after-shaving lotion in a heavy, cut-glass decanter.

Consuela called out to me. “Come in here with me, darling!”

“In a moment,” I called back.

I grabbed a hand towel from the rack and twisted it around the decanter. Holding both ends of the towel in one hand, I swung it back and forth, then slapped the heavy weight of the makeshift sap against my left hand. It made a reassuringly solid thud as it struck my palm.

I moved over to the bath and pulled the curtain aside gently.

Consuela had her back to me, her face lifted and her eyes closed to the hard spray of water beating against her. For a second, I looked at the rich, curving lushness of her body, the smoothness of her back and the way her waist curved in then flared out to join her round hips and the long line of her thighs.

With an audible sigh of regret, I snapped the towel-wrapped decanter against the back of her skull in a short, swift flick of my wrist. The blow caught her just behind the ear.

As she sagged, I caught her weight with my left arm, feeling her soft skin slide against my own, feeling all the smooth, taut flesh going suddenly slack in the crook of my arm. I dropped the decanter onto the bathmat behind me and reached under her legs with my right arm.

Lifting her from the tub, I carried her into the bedroom. Carefully, I put her down on the bed, then went around to the far side and pulled back the covers. I picked her up again and gently put her on the sheet.

Her long, seal-brown hair, damp from the shower, was spread out on the pillow. One of her slender, tanned legs was half-crooked at the knee, the other stretched out straight. Her head had fallen slightly to one side.

I felt a surge of remorse over what I’d had to do as I lifted the top sheet over her, pulling it up to cover the lovely joining of her legs. Then I lifted her right arm, placing it on the pillow above her head. I stepped back and looked at her. The effect was just right — exactly as if she were asleep.

Now, I pulled back the covers on the other half of the bed, rumpling the sheets deliberately. I punched the pillow until it was mussed and threw it haphazardly against the headboard. I turned out all the lights in the room except for one small lamp in the far corner of the room.

Back in the bathroom, I dressed and checked the bedroom one last time before I slipped out through the tall French doors onto the dark balcony, carefully closing the doors behind me.

The sounds of the party surged up at me from below. The music was as loud as when I’d arrived with Carlos. The pool was bathed by the floodlights, making the area around it seem even darker in contrast. The balcony on which I stood was in the darkest part of the shadows.

The room behind me was in the wing of the house that overlooked the pool I felt sure that the Dietrich’s would be in the other wing of the house. Moving silently, I paced along the balcony, pressing myself against the wall to remain in the shadows.

The first door I came to was unlocked. I opened it a crack and peered into the room. It was empty.

I moved on. I tried the next room. Again nothing. I moved around to the front of the hacienda. From where I crouched in the shadows of the balcony, I could see two of the guards near the front gate which was brilliantly and harshly lit by the spotlights mounted above the entrance. Beyond it was the driveway that led to the road on the edge of the cliff. Other guards were probably patroling the grounds.

I went back to the wing where Consuela Delgardo’s bedroom was located. I checked out every bedroom there. The last one was the one in which Ortega bad been sleeping. The heavy scent of his after-shaving lotion struck my nostrils as soon as I stepped into the room. I took a chance and turned on a lamp. Against the far wall was a large wardrobe closet. I opened the double doors. Behind Ortega’s neatly hung slacks and sport shirts, I found a cardboard carton, the flaps interlocked to keep them closed. I opened it Inside was an array of the by-now familiar plastic kilo bags of heroin. It was the forty kilos that had been in Dietrich’s suite.

Refastening the flaps of the carton, I pushed it back into the wardrobe and shut the doors, then turned out the lamp and left.

Well, I’d found the heroin, but there was still no sign of Dietrich or his daughter. Standing in the dark of the balcony, pressed against the wall of the house, I began to feel my frustration. I looked at the luminous hands of my wristwatch. More than ten minutes had gone by.

There was still the downstairs to check out I went back to the far end of the balcony and, in an easy drop, I let myself down to the ground. The cliff edge was only a few feet away, falling precipitously to the sea almost a hundred feet below. Hidden by the shrubbery, I moved from one room to the next, checking out the downstairs completely. Not a sign of the Dietrichs.

The servants quarters? Yes, of course. They could be there. It made more sense than keeping them in the main house where someone could stumble onto them accidentally. I moved across the neatly trimmed grass, moving from one palm tree to the next, hiding in their shadows. Twice, I had to avoid the patroling guards, thankful that they didn’t have dogs with them.

The servants’ quarters was a long, low one-story adobe brick building. I could look into each of the six rooms through the windows. Each was lit up, and in each there was no one but Garrett’s Mexican help.

I moved away from the building, crouching beneath the leaves of a low-growing pineapple palm. I looked back at the hacienda. It had been built on a concrete slab foundation with no basement There was no attic, either. I’d checked the house thoroughly and was certain that the Dietrichs weren’t in it, not unless they were dead and their bodies had been stuffed into some small closet I had overlooked. But that didn’t seem likely. Carlos needed them alive.

I peered at my watch again. Twenty-two minutes gone. Where could they be? Once more I went over the options that remained for me. I could go back to the room where Consuela lay unconscious and wait to follow Carlos’, lead. When we had left the Hotel El Mirador he’d said that we’d be leaving for the States around four or five in the morning. But, if I did that, if I waited until then, the initiative and the advantage would be with Carlos.

That would be a mistake. I knew I had to make my own breaks. One way or another, I knew that I had to force Carlos’ hand, and I had to do it quickly.

Carefully, I avoided the patroling guards and moved around the back of the hacienda, then made my way to the edge of the cliffs. Lowering myself over the lip, I started down.

In the darkness, I could barely make out the footholds as I let myself down the face of the rock. The cliff was steeper than it looked. Inch by inch, handhold by handhold, I let myself down. Once, my toes slipped off the slippery, sea-wet surface and only the desperate grasp of my fingers kept me from falling the hundred feet onto the boulder-strewn base of the cliff.

I’d moved down only about ten feet below the lip of the cliff when I heard the guards come by overhead. The sound of the waves and the wind had kept me from hearing their approach sooner. I froze where I was, fearful of making a sound.

One of them struck a match. There was a brief flare and then blackness again. Any second, I thought, one of them could take a step to the “edge of the cliff and look over, and the first I would know that I’d been seen would be a bullet blasting me from my precarious handholds. I was completely vulnerable, totally helpless. My arms ached from holding myself in the awkward position I’d been in when I first heard them overhead.

They gossiped a moment about a girl in town, laughing at some trick she’d pulled on one of them. A cigarette butt came arching over the cliff, its red coal falling past me.

“… vamanos!” said one of them, finally.

I forced myself to remain motionless for almost another full minute before I dared take a chance that they’d gone. I began to move downward again, my mind concentrating on the sheer descent. I stretched out my foot, finding another toehold, testing it carefully, moving down another six inches. By now, my muscles were aching in torment. My right forearm, where Luis had slashed me, began to throb with pain. With a deliberate effort of will, I blocked everything from my mind except the foot-by-foot, slow descent.

Once my foot slipped into a fissure and I had to wrench it free. My ankle ached from the sharp twist as I worked myself downward. My hands were torn, the skin on my fingers and on the palms of my hand were sandpapered raw by the rocks.

I kept telling myself that there was only a few more feet to go, only another few minutes, just a little way further.

And then, panting, almost completely exhausted, I was on the narrow beach and moving along the base of the cliffs, avoiding the boulders, forcing myself to run in a tired dogtrot around the curve of the headland, trying not to think about how much time had been wasted in my descent.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

On the far side of the headland, I found a sloping ravine that cut down between the steep cliffs. In the rainy season, it would be a torrent of water that poured the floodwaters from the hills into the sea. Now, it provided me with a path to the top of the cliff.

Tripping, sliding over loose shale, I scrambled my way up the ravine until I came out within a hundred yards of the road. To the east, almost half a mile away, I could make out the glow from the spotlights over the front gate of Garrett’s hacienda.

I waited by the edge of the road, forcing myself to wait patiently, trying not to think of how rapidly time was running out on me. The hour I’d allowed myself was more than three-quarters gone. Headlights finally glowed in the distance. I stepped out into the middle of the road, waving my arms. The car braked to a halt, the driver poking his head out the window.

“Qui pasa?” he shouted at me.

I came up to the car. The driver was a teenager with lank, black hair swept back over his ears.

“A telephone. Can you get me to a telephone? El asunto es muy importante!”

“Get in!”

I ran around to the front of the car and slid into the seat. Even as I gasped, “Vaya muy de prisa, por favor!” he let in the clutch in a racing start. Gravel spewed from the rear wheels, the car leaped ahead, the speedometer needle swinging up to sixty, seventy and then past one hundred and ten kilometers an hour.

Less than a minute later, he screeched in to the Pemex station and burned rubber coming to a halt.

I flung open the door and ran to the public telephone. I put the call in to the Hotel Matamoros, thinking how ironic it was that Ortega himself had told me where to get hold of Teniente Fuentes!

It took almost five minutes to get him on the line. It took another five minutes to convince him that I was going to give him the cooperation that Jean-Paul had asked me for in the minute before he was killed. Then I told Fuentes what I wanted from him and where to meet me.

“How soon can you get here?” I asked, finally.

“Ten minutes, perhaps.”

“Make it sooner if you can,” I said, and hung up.

* * *

Teniente Fèlix Fuentes had a face like a Toltec idol carved out of brown rock. Short, massive chest, powerful hands.

“Did you bring the rifle?” I asked as I climbed into his unmarked police car.

“It’s on the back seat. It’s my own personal hunting weapon for small game. Take care of it. Now, what do you have in mind?”

Fuentes put the police car into gear. I told him where to head. As we drove, I outlined what had happened so far. I told Fuentes about Dietrich and his formula for making synthetic heroin. I told him that Ortega now had Dietrich a prisoner and what Ortega planned to do. Fuentes listened soberly as I brought him up to date.

“And now,” I said, “I’ve got to get back into that house before they find out I’ve been gone. And as soon as I’m back, I want your men to raid it. We’ve got to flush out Ortega. If we can throw them into a panic, there’s a good chance Ortega will lead me to Dietrich.”

“What excuse do I have to raid Garrett’s hacienda, Senor Carter? He’s a very influential man. So is Ortega.”

“Is forty kilos of heroin a good enough excuse?”

Fuentes whistled aloud. “Forty kilos!For forty kilos I would raid the Presidente’s house!”

I told him where to find the heroin. Fuentes picked up the hand mike and radioed headquarters for rein-forcements. He was explicit. No sirens, no flashers, no action until he gave the signal.

By this time we were back down the road that led past Garrett’s hacienda. At almost the exact spot where I had parked Bickford’s car only the night before, he stopped to let me out.

I took the rifle and a rope grapnel from the back seat. I hefted the weapon. “It’s a beauty,” I told him.

“My prize possession,” said Fuentes. “Again, I ask you to be careful of it.”

“As if it were my own,” I said, and turned away, setting oil across the field in a crouching run. Fuentes backed the police car down the road some hundred yards or so to intercept the others when they came.

I picked out a position on a slight rise about two hundred feet from the driveway that led from the road to his house. I was at a slight angle to the gateway. I dropped the grapnel at my feet and lay down carefully on my stomach, the rifle cradled in my arms.

In a few minutes, two police cars drove up, the second one almost directly behind the first. Fuentes directed them into position, one on each side of the road that led past the driveway, the men in the cars waiting with engines turned off and headlights out.

I lifted the heavy rifle to my shoulder. It was a superbly made Schultz & Larson 61 match rifle, a .22 calibre, single shot, bolt action weapon with a twenty-eight-inch “barrel and a globe front sight. The palm rest was adjustable for my left hand. The stock was carved with a thumbhole so that I could grip the semi-molded pistol grip stock with my right hand. Especially manufactured for International Match requirements, the rifle was so accurate that I could put a bullet through the end of a cigarette at a hundred yards. Its heavy weight, sixteen and a half pounds, made it rock steady in my grasp. I aimed it at one of the two spotlights mounted high above the left side of the front gate.

Slowly, my fist contracted, my finger squeezing the trigger. The rifle bucked slightly in my hands. The spotlight smashed out simultaneously with the sharp crack of sound in my ears. Quickly, I worked the bolt, pulling it up and back, the spent cartridge flipping up into the air. I fed another round into the chamber and slammed the bolt shut and locked.

I fired again. The second light exploded. There were shouts at the hacienda, but the front gate and the area around it was in darkness. Once more, I ejected the spent case and reloaded the rifle. Through the open grillwork of the gate, I could see the plate glass window of the living room that looked out onto the still floodlit pool area.

I adjusted the sights for the additional distance and aimed again. I put a bullet through the glass, spider webbing it almost dead center. I heard faint screams coming from the house as I reloaded. I put the fourth bullet through the plate glass window not more than a foot away from the other hole.

There were more shouts from the house. Suddenly, all the lights went out So did the music. Someone had finally gotten to the main switch. I put down the rifle where Fuentes would be able to find it easily, picked up the grapnel rope and ran across the field to the wall that surrounded the house.

Now that I was close, I could hear the shouts and screams coming from inside. I heard Carlos yelling at the guards. One of them fired into the darkness until he emptied his pistol. Carlos shouted furiously at him to stop.

Swiftly, I made my way along the wall. About forty or fifty feet away from the gate, I stopped and took the grapnel from my shoulder. I flung the hook up over the wall, and the tines caught on the first throw, the metal biting firmly into the brickwork of the wall. Hand over hand, I pulled myself up onto the top of the wall. Unhooking the grapnel, I dropped it over the other side and jumped down beside it, landing in a jarring crouch.

As I ran through the shrubbery to the wall of the house away from the pool area, I coiled the rope again. Stopping below the balcony, I flung the grapnel once more and it caught on the railing.

I pulled myself up until my fingers caught the wrought iron of the railing and, in a twisting scramble, I swung myself over the edge. It took only a moment to haul in the rope, and then I was running along the balcony to the room I had left more than an hour before.

As I opened the doors to slip inside, I heard the first rising howl of the police car sirens. Consuela was still unconscious. In the darkness, I shoved the coiled rope far under the double bed. Quickly, I stripped off my clothes, letting them drop to the floor in a pile. Naked, I slid under the topsheet beside Consuela’s nude, warm body.

I heard the insistant, rising and falling howl of the police sirens coming closer, then the shouts from downstairs and from outside. Then there was a pounding on the bedroom door. The knob was rattled angrily.

Someone shoved the key in the lock and twisted it savagely. The door was flung open, slamming against the wall. Ortega stood there, with a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other.

“What the hell is going on?” I demanded.

“Get dressed! There’s no time to lose! The police are here!”

Hastily, I grabbed for my slacks and shirt and slipped into them. I shoved my feet into my loafers, not bothering to put on my socks.

“Wake her up!” snarled Ortega, turning the flashlight on Consuela. She lay as I’d left her, her hair flowing over the pillow, her arm bent over, her head, her face turned sideways.

I grinned at him. “Not a chance. She’s had too much to drink. She passed out on me just when it was getting interesting.”

Carlos swore in frustration. “Then we leave her,” he decided. “Let’s go!” He motioned with his gun.

I went out the door ahead of him. I heard the police sirens again.

“What the hell are the police doing here?” I asked.

“I’d like to know that myself,” Carlos snapped angrily. “But I don’t intend to stay and find out.”

I followed Ortega down the hall to the stairs. He shone his flashlight down the steps. Brian Garrett was at the foot of the staircase, blinking in the beam, looking up with fright written over his florid face. He ran halfway up to meet us, the drunkenness leached out of him by the sudden panic.

“For god’s sake, Carlos!” he shouted. “What the hell do we do now?”

“Get out of my way.” Carlos moved down the steps to get past Garrett Garrett caught him by the arm. “What about the forty kilos of horse?” he demanded, hoarsely. “Goddamn it! It’s my house! They’ll get me for it! Where can I run to?”

Carlos halted in midstep. He turned to Garrett, the light from his flashlight illuminating them eerily.

“You’re right,” said Carlos. “You don’t have any place to run, do you?”

Garrett looked at him with frightened eyes, mutely pleading with him.

“If they catch you, you’ll talk. I don’t think I need that kind of trouble,” said Carlos, brutally. He lifted the gun and pulled the trigger twice. The first shot caught Garrett squarely in the middle of his chest He was opening his mouth in shock when the second bullet smashed his face apart.

Even as Garrett’s body was crumpling slackly against the railing, Carlos was moving down the stairs again. He was almost running now and I was just a step behind him.

“This way!” Carlos shouted over his shoulder at me as we turned at the end of the living room. He made his way down the corridor to the kitchen and out the service door. The big sedan was waiting there, its engine idling, the same driver at the wheel.

Carlos flung open the rear door. “Get in!” he snapped. I threw myself into the car. Carlos ran around to the front seat, slamming the door shut

“Vamanos, Paco!” he shouted. “Pronto! Pronto!”

Paco put the car in gear and stepped on the accelerator. The fat, wide-tread tires dug into the gravel. We were picking up speed as we skidded around the corner, of the house, careening around the curve of the circular drive in front of the entrance. Paco spun the wheel desperately to straighten out for the gate, blowing the horn frantically, swearing as loudly as he could at the idiots to open the gates.

He slammed on the brakes momentarily, slowing up the car until one of the gates opened enough for us to squeeze through, and then he stepped on the gas pedal again. The big car shot through the gate.

The first of the police cars was parked less than twenty yards away, blocking the driveway to the main road. Police were crouched behind the car, firing at the gate as we came through.

Paco didn’t hesitate. With a curse, he twisted the wheel of the car, sending it off the driveway into the rough ground of the field, still jamming the accelerator to the floorboards. In the darkness, without headlights, the heavy sedan hurtled across the field, bucking and lurching like a wild mustang suddenly gone berserk, throwing up a rooster tail of dust and dirt clods behind it.

The bouncing, slewing roll of the sedan flung me helplessly from side to side. I heard a fusillade of shots being fired at us. The rear window disintegrated, showering me with shards of broken glass.

There were more shots, and then the car ceased its pounding as Paco suddenly spun the steering wheel again and brought us back onto the road. We roared away in high gear.

There was no pursuit. Once on the highway, Paco flicked on his headlights and brought the big car up to almost racing speed.

Carlos sat up and leaned over the back of the front seat. He smiled at me and said, “You can sit up now, Senor Carter. For the time being, I think we are safe.”

“What the hell was that all about?” I picked myself off the floor where I’d been thrown and sank back on the cushions of the seat. I took out my handkerchief and carefully brushed the sharp glass splinters from my trousers.

“I think it was because the captain of our ship talked,” Carlos speculated. “He knew we had a load to be shipped. I think the police were guessing that it was at Garrett’s.”

“Now what?”

“Now we pick up Senor Dietrich and his daughter and head for the States. Our plans have not been changed. They have merely been moved up by a few hours.”

“What about Consuela?”

Carlos shrugged.

“If she keeps her wits about her, she’ll be all right Garrett’s guests knew nothing about our activities. Consuela’s smart enough to claim that she, too, was merely a guest and knows nothing about whatever they find.”

“Or Garrett’s murder? You took care of that problem, I see.”

Ortega shrugged. “It had to be.done sooner or later.”

“Where to now?”

“To Bickford’s place,” Ortega answered. “That is where the Dietrichs are being held.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The soft, gentle expression was gone from Doris Bickford’s face. What came through now was the un-embellished, merciless core that was her real self, seeming even tougher because of the contrast with her small, doll-like features framed by her long, platinum blond hair. John Bickford prowled the living room like a huge, aging lion limping out the last few months of its life in angry bewilderment at the loss of its strength, its mane gone white with the years. He was at a complete loss for words. He couldn’t understand the change that had taken place in his wife in the last few hours.

Herbert Dietrich sat on the couch, Susan beside him. Dietrich Was a worn, tired man, exhaustion from the day’s strain showing on his face, an old man on the verge of collapse, yet sitting erect and stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the weariness that had settled in his bones. But his eyes had filmed over with a dull, unseeing glaze, a curtain behind which he had retreated from the world.

Doris turned to us as Carlos and I came into the room, the gun in her hand pointing quickly in our direction before she recognized us.

“For god’s sake,” she said, acidly, turning the gun away, “what took you so long?”

“It’s only three o’clock,” Carlos said, easily. “We hadn’t planned to leave until almost five.”

“Are we ready to leave, then? I don’t think that he—” she gestured at her husband with the gun—”can hold out much longer. He’s a bundle of nerves.” There was sharp, abrasive scorn in her voice. Bickford turned around, worry showing openly on his blunt, scarred face. “I didn’t bargain for this, Carlos,” he said. “You can count me out.”

Carlos cocked his head and stared at the big, ex-prize-fighter. “You really mean that?”

Bickford nodded seriously. “I sure as hell do. I don’t want any part of kidnapping or murder.”

“Who said anything about murder?”

“You see what I mean?” Doris interrupted. “He’s been like this all day, ever since you brought the old man here. And when Brian Garrett came in with the girl, he went completely apart.”

“I can’t go through with it, Carlos,” Bickford said, apologetically. “I’m sorry.”

Doris gestured toward me. “What about him?” Carlos smiled at her for the first time. “He’s with us from now on,” he said. Doris looked at me in surprise.

Susan Dietrich lifted her head. Shock was written all over her face. I kept my own features blank. Susan turned away from me, despair and fright showing in her eyes.

Doris was measuring me in the same cold way she might examine an expensive sable coat brought out for her approval. Finally, she said, “He’ll do. A hell of a lot better than Johnny, I think.”

Bickford turned around in his pacing. “What do you mean by that?”

“You wanted out, didn’t you?”

“That’s right. For both of us. You’re coming with me.”

Doris shook her head, her long, platinum hair swinging heavily in front of her face. “Not me, honey,” she said, bitingly. “I don’t want out. Not now. Not when the big money is going to start rolling in.”

“What’s the matter with you?” Bickford demanded, incredulously. He strode over and grabbed her by the shoulders. “You’re my wife! You go where I go!”

“The hell I do! I want a man, not a broken down old prize-fighter who can’t talk about anything but the good old days when he was getting the shit kicked out of him. Well, the good old days are just beginning to come for me, honey. And you’re not going to stop me from enjoying them!”

Bickford looked as if he’d Just caught a hard right cross to the jaw. Bewilderment glazed his eyes. “Listen,” he said, shaking her roughly. “I took you out of that life. I gave you things. I made a lady out of you Instead of a hundred-dollar call girl! What the hell’s gotten into you?”

“I took myself out of that life!” Doris told him sharply. “And I’m the one who pushed you so that you could afford to give me things. Who introduced you to Brian Garrett? Who paved the way for you? Don’t be stupid, Johnny. It’s been me all the way. If you don’t want to come along, then I’m going by myself. Don’t think you can stop me.”

Bickford stepped away from her. He looked blankly at Doris and then turned helplessly to Carlos. “Carlos?”

“I prefer not to get involved.”

“The hell you do,” said Doris assertively, turning to Ortega. “You and I are already involved. It’s time this big, stupid jerk learned about us, Carlos.”

Bickford looked at each of them in turn, a man rocked by one blow after another, yet still standing, still asking for more punishment.

“The two of you?” he asked, numbly.

“Yes, the two of us,” Doris repeated. “All this time. Didn’t you know, Johnny? Didn’t you even suspect a little bit? Why do you think we took so many trips every year to Mexico? Why do you think Carlos visited us in Los Angeles so often?”

The telephone rang, cutting through the silence that followed her words. Swiftly, Ortega picked up the phone. “Bueno!… oh, it’s you, Hobart. Where the hell… at the airport?… Good! How soon can you be ready to leave?” He looked at his watch. “Yes, twenty minutes at the most Maybe less than that. I want you ready for takeoff when we get there. Full tanks, we’re going all the way.”

Ortega hung up. “Shall we go? Hobart’s at the airport.”

Bickford stepped in front of him. “Not just yet,” he said stubbornly. “You and I have things to talk about. I want to get something straight first.”

“Later,” said Ortega, impatiently.

“Now!” said Bickford, taking an angry step toward him and pulling back a clenched, knuckle-broken fist to smash into Ortega’s face.

“Johnny!”

Bickford turned around to his wife. Doris lifted the gun in her hand, straightening her arm so that it pointed at him, and pulled the trigger.

There was a sharp explosion. Susan screamed. Bickford’s face contorted. He opened his eyes in a wide stare. I couldn’t tell if the expression of amazement on his face came from the impact of the bullet smashing into him or from the shock of realization that it was Doris who’d shot him. His mouth opened and a trickle of blood ran down his chin. He forced himself to take a staggering step toward Doris, reaching out with both of his powerful hands for her. She backed away and pulled the trigger again. Bickford collapsed on the floor.

In the silence, Doris turned to Carlos and said crisply, “Are we going to hang around here all night?”

* * *

It was a small, private airport, a single dirt strip with two hangars at the near end. Hobart was waiting for us as the big sedan swept off the main road and jounced along a rutted track to the far end of the field. In the moonlight, the plane looked larger than it was. I recognized the aircraft as a Piper Aztec Model D with twin turbo-charged engines in flat nacelles.

We got out of the car, all of us except Paco. He sat immobile, the engine running.

“Hello!” said Hobart as he saw me. “You’re the chap I met the other evening. Fancy meeting you again so soon.”

“Are you ready to go?” Carlos asked impatiently.

“I topped the tanks myself. She’s checked out and been run up. We can take off as soon as you’re all on board.”

Susan helped her father climb into the aircraft and followed him in. Doris went in after them, stepping up onto the wingroot, waiting until they had seated themselves and had fastened their seat belts before she entered.

I climbed up onto the wing and paused. From the time we had arrived at Bickford’s until now there had not been a moment for me to take any action. Had I been alone, it would have been a different story, but I had seen how ruthlessly Doris Bickford had put two bullets into her husband. I knew she’d have no compunction about turning the gun on Susan or Dietrich. She’d no more hesitate in killing either of them than she did in killing Johnny Bickford.

This would be the last opportunity to make, a break in one way or another, but if I was aware of that fact, so was Carlos. Sharply, he said, “Please don’t try to delay us. We’re running out of time.”

There was nothing I could do, not with Doris in the aircraft holding a gun on Dietrich and Susan, not with Carlos holding a revolver that he could turn on me in a split second, and especially because Paco was now leaning out the window of the car, holding his big 9mm Mauser Parabellum pistol as if he were just hoping for the chance to use it.

I was about to duck my head into the aircraft when I heard the sound of an automobile racing down the dirt load toward us.

“Hurry!” Ortega shouted at me.

The police car turned on its siren and its flashing red beacon. A series of shots came from it as it raced down the side road toward us. I heard the thunk of bullets slamming into the side of the heavy sedan. Paco flung open the door and scrambled to the front of the car. He began to fire back at the police cruiser. The big Parabellum bucked in his hand with each shot.

I heard Ken Hobart cry out, but his shout was drowned in the blasting of Paco’s Mauser.

Suddenly, the police car swerved off the road in a long skid, spinning around in a scream of tires, completely out of control, its headlights making revolving arcs in the darkness like a gigantic, whirling St. Catherine’s wheel. Paco stopped firing. I heard the gasping wheeze of Carlos’ breathing.

The silence was almost complete, and in that moment, with the danger gone, Paco fell into a panic. He leaped to his feet and threw himself into the driver’s seat. Before Carlos could grasp what he was doing, Paco had put the sedan into gear and was racing off into the night across the fields as fast as he could push the car.

Carlos shouted at him to come back. “Idiot! Fool! There’s no danger! Where are you going? Come back!”

He stared at the taillights of the car growing smaller every second. Then he shrugged and dropped down off the wing, ducking under it to get to Ken Hobart The lanky, redheaded Englishman lay in a crumpled mess on the ground near the right main landing gear.

Carlos stood up slowly, the gun in his hand held limply by his side, frustration showing in every line of his body.

“He’s dead.” He uttered the words in a tone of quiet resignation. “And that fool has driven off.” He turned away from the body. I dropped off the wing and knelt beside Hobart. The Englishman’s head had fallen against the right tire of the aircraft. His chest was covered with blood that still seeped slowly out of him.

I pulled Hobart as far away from the aircraft as I could. Wiping the blood off my hands with my handkerchief, I walked back to Carlos, who was still standing beside the aircraft. “What’s the matter with you?” I asked him roughly.

Defeat was written into every line of his face. “We’re finished, amigo,” he said dully. “Paco has gone with the car. Hobart is dead. We have no way to escape from this place. How long do you think it will be before there will be more police here?”

“Not before we can be gone. Get in that airplane!” I snarled at him.

Carlos looked up at me blankly.

“Damn it!” I swore at him. “If you’re going to stand there like an idiot, we’ll never get out of here! Now move!”

I scrambled up onto the wing and into the pilot’s seat. Carlos followed me in, slamming the cabin door shut as he settled himself in the seat.

I snapped on the cabin overhead light and scanned the panel quickly. There was no time to go through the complete checklist. I could only hope that Hobart had been right when he’d said that the plane was ready for takeoff, and I prayed that none of the shots fired by the police had struck a vital part of the aircraft.

Almost automatically my hand went out, turning on the master switch, turbo-charger circuit breakers on, turbo switches off. I flicked on the magneto and the electric fuel pumps, then I cracked the throttles about half an inch and pushed the fuel mixture levers to full rich. The fuel flow meters began to register. Back to idle cutoff. I engaged the left-hand starter switch and heard the whining, rising scream of the starter motor.

The left-hand prop swung over once, twice, and then caught with a spitting, cracking roar. Mixture back to full rich again. I fired up the right engine.

No time to check out all the gauges. Time enough only to move elevators, ailerons, rudder, as I fed in power to the twin engines and taxied the aircraft to the runway, turning onto it, trying to line up with its dim outline in the darkness. I turned off the cabin interior light and turned on the landing lights. I set quarter flaps, and then my hands were on the twin throttles, pushing them forward smoothly until they hit the stop. The big turbo-charged Lycomings bellowed as the aircraft began moving forward down the strip, faster and faster.

As the airspeed indicator reached eighty miles an hour, I hauled back on the ram’s horn control wheel. The nose lifted, the pounding of the main gear on the bumpy dirt strip ceased. I snapped off the lights. We were airborne.

I made the rest of the climbout in complete darkness, pulling up the gear lever, hearing the whine and then the heavy thunking of the main gear retracting into their wheel wells. At a hundred twenty miles an hour, I trimmed the aircraft to hold a steady rate of climb.

For the same reason I’d snapped off the landing lights as soon as I’d cleared the ground, I didn’t turn on the red and green running lights or the rotating strobe beacon. I wanted no one on the ground to see the aircraft. We were flying in complete darkness, illegal as hell, with only the faint, blue spitting flames from our exhausts to give away our position and, as I reduced climb power, even those disappeared.

At eighteen hundred feet, I turned the aircraft northwest, keeping the mountains to my right. I turned to Carlos. “Look in the map compartment. See if Hobart has his charts there.”

Ortega pulled out a stack of WAC maps.

“Good,” I said. “And now, if you’ll tell me where we’re going, I’ll try to get us there.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

It was daylight when I reduced power and came down over the mountains to the brown, bare hills somewhere in the area bounded by Durango, Torreen and Matamoros. We were flying now at less than five hundred feet, with Ortega peering out the starboard window, giving directions to me.

I made a landing on a strip to the north of an isolated ranch house. There was only a wooden shack to mark the end of the strip. I taxied the big Aztec twin up to it and killed the engines.

A surly-faced Mexican in worn chino trousers came out of the shack to meet us. He didn’t speak to us as he began to service the aircraft, topping off the tanks and checking the oil.

We all got out of the plane. I spread out the sectional air charts on the wing of the plane and Carlos drew in the route for me to follow, marking the point where we would sneak across the border into the States.

“Here’s where we cross,” he said, pointing to a spot on the Rio Bravo just south of the Texas railroad town of Sierra Blanca. “Beginning here”— he pointed again, this time to a place more than a hundred miles inside Mexico—”you’ll have to fly as low as you can. You cross the river at no more than treetop height, make an immediate turn to go around Sierra Blanca to the north, and then, at this point head northeast.”

“And from there?”

Carlos straightened up. “From there, I’ll direct you again. Remember, minimum altitude until we are well across the border.”

I folded the charts and stacked them in the order I’d use them. The Mexican had finished refueling the aircraft. Doris came back with Susan and the old man. They climbed aboard the aircraft, Susan ignoring me as if I did not exist, Dietrich walking stiffly like a man in a trance. Carlos got in after I did.

He shut and locked the door and fastened his seat-belt. I sat there a moment, rubbing the bristles on my chin, my eyes tired from lack of sleep, my right arm aching.

“Shall we go?” Ortega prodded.

I nodded and started the engines. I swung the big Aztec around into the wind and fed in power as we raced down the dirt field and took off into the crisp, blue Mexican sky.

It takes several hours to fly from Torreon-Durango to the Rio Bravo. I had plenty of time to think and the vague ideas that had begun to form in my mind the evening before — wild, almost impossible thoughts — began to crystallize into a hard suspicion that grew more and more solid with every passing minute.

Following to Carlos’ instructions, I came in low and crossed the border at treetop height south of Sierra Blanca, and then swung around the town in a pant curve far enough to be out of sight. Ten miles to the north, I turned the aircraft to a northeasterly heading. As the minutes passed, the suspicion in my mind began to jell and became more than just a vague, uncomfortable stirring.

I picked up the airway chart again. El Paso was to the northwest of us. I projected an imaginary line from El Paso at a heading of sixty degrees. The line went into New Mexico, coming close to Roswell. I looked at the compass on the panel of the aircraft. On our present heading, we’d intersect that line in only a few more minutes. I watched the clock.

Almost as if he, too, had been looking at the chart and watching for the imaginary line, Carlos said, at just the precise moment, “Please take up this heading,” and put his finger on a spot that lay to the north of us in the valleys of the Guadelupe mountains.

It was now no longer a suspicion. The thought became a certainty. I followed Carlos’ instructions until we finally flew over a ridge and there was the valley and Carlos was pointing down at it and saying, “There! That’s where I want you to land.”

I pulled back on the throttles, pushed the mixture controls to full rich, dropped flaps and gear, and set up for the landing. I turned the twin-engine aircraft into a tight bank, straightening out on final approach with full flaps at the last minute.

I wasn’t surprised to see the big Lear jet at the far end of the airstrip or the Bonanza single-engine plane beside it. I put the Aztec down nose high and let it settle gently onto the dirt strip, applying just a shade of power to extend the rollout, so that when I finally turned the aircraft off the runway, it came to a stop only a short distance away from the other two planes.

Carlos turned to me.

“Are you surprised?” he asked, with a faint smile on his thin lips and a glint of amusement in his dark eyes. The gun was once more in his hand. At that short distance I could see that each chamber in the cylinder “Was loaded with a fat, copper-sheathed bullet.

I shook my head. “Not really. Not after you gave me the last heading. I’d have been surprised if it had turned out any other way.”

“I think Gregorius is waiting for us,” said Carlos. “Let’s not keep him waiting any longer.”

* * *

In the blazing heat of the New Mexico sunlight, I walked slowly beside Gregorius’ bulky figure. Carlos, Doris Bickford, Susan Dietrich and her father were in the air-conditioned Lear jet. A muscular, acne-scarred gunman walked a dozen steps to our rear, never once taking his eyes off me.

Gregorius strolled in slow deliberation, with his hands held behind his back and his head lifted toward the brilliant, cloudless sky.

Casually, he asked, “What made you suspect that I might be involved?”

“Carlos knew too much too soon. I just couldn’t buy the idea that his men had me under such tight surveillance that they knew every move I made. Sure, the first time I met with Stocelli, I wasn’t on my guard. What I couldn’t accept was the idea that Ortega’s men had followed me the night I saw Dietrich — or that they’d heard our entire conversation. It was too much of a coincidence. Carlos kidnapped Dietrich within hours of the time I made my report to Denver — and that report was for your ears only! Except for myself, you were the only man in the world who knew what Dietrich had discovered and how valuable it was. So, Ortega had to be getting his information from you.”

“Well,” said Gregorius, “the question is, what are you going to do about it?”

I didn’t answer him. Instead, I said, “Let’s see if my guesses are right, Gregorius. First, I think you made your original fortune smuggling morphine base out of Turkey. Then you changed your name and became legitimate, but you still never really got out of the racket. Right?”

Gregorius nodded his large head without speaking.

“I think you helped finance Stocelli. And now I know you’re the money man behind Ortega.”

Gregorius looked sharply at me and then turned his eyes away. His meaty lips pushed out as though he were pouting. “But you also knew that Ortega couldn’t handle Stocelli.”

“You can handle Stocelli,” Gregorius observed calmly.

“Yes, I can. That’s why you instructed Ortega to bring me into the deal. He’d never have done it himself. Too much pride. Too much hatred because I killed his nephew.”

“You’re thinking very clearly, Nick.”

I shook my head. I was tired. The lack of sleep, the strain of flying the aircraft for so many hours, the slash on my right arm — all were beginning to tell on me.

“No, not really. I made a mistake. I should have killed Dietrich once I’d learned about his formula, There’d have been an end to the affair right then—”

“But your compassion for the old man wouldn’t allow that. And now I’m giving you the same options that Ortega gave you. Only remember, you’ll be my partner, not his, and I certainly will not give you a full fifty percent share. However, it’ll be enough to make you a very rich man.”

“And if I say no?”

Gregorius gestured with his head toward the pock-faced gunman standing a few yards away watching us. “He’ll kill you. He’s impatient to show how good he is.”

“What about AXE? And Hawk? I don’t know how you’ve managed to fool him this long into thinking you’re straight, but if I go in with you, Hawk would learn why. And my life wouldn’t be worth a plugged nickel! Hawk never lets up.”

Gregorius put his arm around my shoulder. He squeezed it in a friendly gesture. “Sometimes you amaze me, Nick. You’re a killer. Killmaster N3. Didn’t you try to run out on AXE in the first place? Wasn’t it because you were tired of killing for nothing but a vague ideal? You want to be rich, and I can give that to you, Nick.”

He took his arm away and his voice turned frosty.

“Or I can give you death. Right now. Ortega would love to blow your head off!”

I said nothing.

“All right,” said Gregorius abruptly. “I’ll give you time to think about your scruples and about the money that can be yours.”

He looked at his wristwatch. “Twenty minutes. Then I’ll expect an answer.”

He turned and walked back to the Learjet. The gunman remained behind, keeping a careful distance from me.

Up to now, Td been sure that Gregorius would not have me killed. He needed me to cope with Stocelli. But not if I told him to go to hell. Not if I turned him down. And I was going to turn him down.

I stopped thinking about Gregorius and turned my mind to the problem of getting out of this mess alive.

I glanced over my shoulder at the gunman following me. Even though he carried his gun in a shoulder holster instead of in his hand, he wore his sport coat open So he could draw and fire before I could get anywhere near him. He walked when I did and stopped when I stopped, always keeping at least fifteen to twenty yards away from me so that I had no chance to jump him.

The problem wasn’t just how I could escape, either. In one way or another, I could probably manage to get away from this goon. But there were the Dietrichs. I couldn’t leave them in Gregorius hands.

Whatever I decided to do would have to work the first time, because there wasn’t going to be a second chance.

Mentally, I checked out what I had on me that I could use as a weapon against the gunman behind me. A few Mexican coins. A handkerchief and a wallet in one hip pocket.

And, Luis Aparicio’s switchblade knife in the other. It would be enough — it had to be enough, because that was all I had.

I paced down the long dirt strip for almost two hundred yards. Then I turned and walked back in a wide arc so that, without his being aware of it, I managed to get the big Aztec between us and the Learjet.

By now, the sun was almost directly overhead and the heat of the day sent shimmering waves reflecting upward from the bare ground. I stopped behind the plane and took out my handkerchief, mopping the sweat from my forehead. As I started to move on again, the gunman called out to me. “Hey! You dropped your wallet.”

I stopped and turned around. My wallet was lying on the ground where I’d deliberately dropped it when I took out my handkerchief.

“So I did,” I said, pretending surprise. “Thanks.” Casually, I walked back and picked it up. The gunman didn’t move. He was standing by the wingtip of the Aztec, out of sight of anyone in the Learjet, and now I was only ten feet away from him. He was either too cocky or too careless to move back.

Still facing him, I put my wallet back into the other hip pocket and closed my fingers around the handle of Luis Aparicio’s switchblade knife. I took my hand out of my pocket, my body hiding my hand from the gunman. Pressing the little button in the handle, I felt the six-inch blade leap out of the haft and lock into place. I turned the knife in my hand, grasping the blade in a throwing position. I started to turn away from the gunman and then, suddenly, I whirled back. My hand went up and my arm shot forward. The knife whipped from my hand before he knew what was happening.

The blade took him in the throat just above the point where the collarbones join. He let out a gasp. Both hands went up to his throat. I made a running dive at him, tackling him at the knees and brought him crashing to the ground. Reaching up, I grabbed at the handle of the knife, but his hands were already there, so I wrapped my own fist around his hands and pulled hard in a sawing motion.

Blood gouted from the ripped flesh and cartilage of his heavy neck. His pocked face was only inches from mine, his eyes glaring at me with mute, desperate hatred. Then his hands fell away and his whole body went slack.

I squatted back on my heels, blood on my hands like a sticky, crimson lotion. Carefully, I wiped my hands on the cloth of his jacket. I got a handful of sand and scrubbed away what was left.

Finally, I reached inside his jacket for the gun he’d so foolishly carried under his armpit instead of in his fist ready to fire.

I pulled out the weapon, a huge Smith & Wesson .44-caliber Magnum revolver. It’s an enormous handgun, made especially for accuracy and for shocking power, even at a distance. It’s really too much gun to carry around. Only a show-off would pack one.

Holding the gun behind my back in one hand, I rose and walked quickly around the Aztec to the Learjet. I went up the steps into the cabin.

Gregorius was the first to see me.

“Ah, Nick,” he said, with a cold smile on his face. “You’ve made up your mind.”

“Yes,” I said. I brought the heavy Magnum from behind my back and pointed it at him. “Yes, I have.”

The smile slid off Gregorius’ face. “You’re making a mistake, Nick. You can’t get away with this. Not here.”

“Perhaps.” I looked at Susan Dietrich. “Outside,” I ordered.

Doris lifted her gun and held it to Susan’s head. “You just sit still, honey,” she said, in her small, sharp voice. My hand moved a fraction and my finger pulled the trigger. The heavy .44 Magnum slug slammed Doris back against the bulkhead, tearing half her head away in an explosion of white bone, gray brain matter, and red, spouting blood.

Susan put her hands to her mouth. Her eyes reflected the sickness she felt.

“Outside!” I said to her, sharply.

She got to her feet. “What about my father?”

I looked over at where Dietrich was lying stretched out in one of the large leather armchairs that had been placed in its full reclining position. The old man was unconscious.

“I want you out first” Susan moved carefully around Gregorius. I stepped to one side so that she could cross behind me. She went out the door.

“How are you going to get him out?” asked Gregorius, gesturing at Dietrich. “Do you expect us to help you move him?”

I made no answer. I stood for a moment, looking first at Gregorius and then at Carlos and finally at the old man. Without saying a word, I backed out the door and went down the steps.

There was a sudden flurry of activity inside the Learjet. The steps swung up, the door closed, slamming shut Susan came running over to me, catching me by the arm.

“You left my father in there!” she cried out.

I put my arm around her and backed away from the aircraft Through the small cockpit window, I could see the pilot slip into his seat. His hands reached up, rapidly flicking switches. In a moment, I heard the engines begin to whine as the rotor blades spun.

Susan pulled away from my arm. “Didn’t you hear me? My father’s still inside! Get him out! Please get him out!” She was screaming at me now over the blasting roar of the jet engines. Desperation was written all over her face. “Please! Do something!”

I ignored her. I stood there with the heavy revolver hanging down in my right hand and watched as the Learjet, both engines now fired up, turned in a clumsy waddle and began to trundle away from us.

Susan clutched at my left arm, shaking it, crying out hysterically, “Don’t let them get away!”

It was as if I were standing apart from both of us locked into a lonely world of my own. I knew what I had to do. There was no other way. I felt cold in spite of the heat of the New Mexican sunlight. The coldness reached deep inside me, chilling me to the very marrow of my soul.

Susan reached up and slapped me across the face. I felt nothing. It was as if she hadn’t touched me at all.

She screamed at me. “Help him, for god’s sake!”

I watched the jet move to the far end of the runway.

Now it was several hundred yards away from us, its engines blasting a whirlwind of dust behind it. It turned onto the strip and began its takeoff roll. The twin jets were now at full scream, a high-pitched hurricane of noise that battered deafeningly at our eardrums, and then the plane picked up speed and was racing down the dirt strip toward us.

I pulled my left arm away from Susan’s grip. I lifted the .44 Magnum and grasped my right wrist with my left hand, bringing the gun up to eye level, lining up the bar of the front sight in the vee notch of the rear sight.

As the plane came abreast of us, it was almost at maximum takeoff speed, and in that minute before the nosewheel began to lift, I squeezed off a shot. The left tire exploded, blown apart by the heavy slug. The left wing dropped. Its tip caught the ground, cartwheeling the plane around in a great, tortured scream of metal breaking apart. The wingtip tanks split open, spewing fuel into the air in a black, greasy spray. Almost in slow motion, the tail of the plane lifted higher and higher and then, as the wing broke off at the root, the plane went up and over onto its back, twisting down the runway in a cloud of black fuel spray and brown dust, broken bits of metal wildly flinging themselves out in bright fragments.

I fired again at the aircraft, and then a third time and a fourth. There was a quick flash of flame; a ball of orange-red fire expanded outward from the broken, crippled metal of the fuselage. The plane came to rest, flames shooting out from it as a thick, oily black smoke poured out of the holocaust of leaping fire.

Still without the faintest sign of emotion showing on my face, I watched the aircraft destroy itself and its occupants. I lowered the gun and stood there on the floor of the valley, tired; lonely. Susan slipped to her knees beside me, her face against my leg. I heard a whimpering sound of despair creep from her throat, and I reached down gently with my left hand and touched her softly on the top of her golden hair, unable to speak to her or to comfort her in any way at all.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I made my report to Hawk via telephone from El Paso and finished by telling him cynically that he’d been fooled by Gregorius for years. That he’d had me out on loan from AXE to one of the master criminals of the world.

I heard Hawk’s dry chuckle over the line.

“Do you really believe that, Nick? Why do you think I violated all the rules and let you work for him? And let you know you couldn’t call on AXE for help?”

“You mean—?”

“I’ve wondered about Gregorius for years. When he asked for you, I thought it was a great opportunity to smoke him out in the open. And you did it. Nice work, Nick.”

Once again, Hawk was a step ahead of me.

“All right,” I growled, “in that case, I’ve earned a vacation.”

“Three weeks,” Hawk snapped. “And give my regards to Teniente Fuentes.” He hung up abruptly, leaving me to wonder how he knew I planned on going back to Acapulco again?

So now, wearing beige slacks, sandals, and an open sport shirt, I sat at a small table beside Teniente Fèlix Fuentes of the Policia Federal de Seguridad. The table was on the broad terrace of the Hotel Matamoros. Acapulco had never been prettier. It glistened in the late afternoon tropical sunshine, washed clean by a rainstorm earlier in the day.

The waters of the bay were a rich blue, the town on the far side, almost hidden behind the palm trees that lined the malecon and the park, was a smudge of gray along the base of the brown ridged hills.

“I’m aware you haven’t told me everything,” Fuentes remarked. “I’m not sure I want to know everything, because then I might have to take official action, and I do not want to do that, Senor Carter. However, I do have one question. Stocelli?”

“You mean, has he gotten off scot-free?”

Fuentes nodded.

I shook my head. “I don’t think so,” I said. “Do you remember what I asked you to do when I telephoned from El Paso yesterday afternoon?”

“Of course. I personally notified Stocelli that my government considered him persona non grata and re-quested him to leave Mexico no later than this morning. Why?”

“Because I telephoned him right after I talked to you. I told him that I’d taken care of things for him and that he could go back to the States.”

“You let him off?” Fuentes frowned.

“Not quite. I asked him to do a favor for me and he agreed.”

“A favor?”

“To bring my luggage back with him.”

Fuentes was puzzled. “I do not understand. What was the purpose of doing that?”

“Well,” I said, looking at my watch, “if his plane is on time, Stocelli will be arriving at Kennedy airport sometime in the next half hour. He’ll have to go through Customs. Among his luggage is a black fabric suitcase with no markings on it to indicate it belongs to anyone except Stocelli. Now, he might claim it’s one of my bags, but there’s no way for him to prove it. Besides, I don’t think Customs will pay much attention to his protests.”

Comprehension lit up Fuentes’ eyes.

“That is the suitcase Dietrich sent to your room?”

“It is,” I said, grinning, “and it still contains the thirty kilos of pure heroin that Dietrich packed into it.”

Fuentes began to laugh.

I was looking past him at the doorway that led in from the lobby of the hotel. Consuela Delgardo was walking toward us. As she approached, I could see the expression on her face. It was a mixture of joy and anticipation, and a look that told me that somehow, somewhere, in some way she would get back at me for what I’d done to her at Garrett’s hacienda.

She came up to the table, a tall, regal, full-bodied woman, her oval face never looking more beautiful than now. Fuentes turned in his chair, saw her, and got to his feet as she reached us.

“Senora Consuela Delgardo, Lieutenant Fèlix Fuentes.”

Consuela held out her hand. Fuentes brought it to his lips.

“We’ve met,” Fuentes murmured. Then he straightened up. He said, “If you are going to be in Mexico for any length of time, Senor Carter, I would appreciate it if you would both be my guests for dinner some evening.”

Consuela slid her arm possessively through mine. Fuentes caught the gesture.

“We would be delighted,” said Consuela in her husky voice.

Fuentes looked at her. Then he looked at me. The faintest flicker of some unreadable expression glowed for a moment in his eyes, but his face remained as stolid and severe as ever — a nut-brown carving of an ancient Toltec god.

“Enjoy yourself,” Fuentes told me drily. And then he closed one eye in a slow, lascivious wink.

The End

Content

Nick Carter
The Aztec Avenger

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN