The Ambushers by Donald Hamilton

Author:Donald Hamilton [Hamilton, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781162354
Publisher: Titan
Published: 2013-07-16T22:48:00+00:00

14

When I reached the motel, I saw that the blue Volkswagen had beat me home. I hadn’t felt up to any fancy driving. Besides, I’d had to stop at a pay phone and put in a long-distance call to Washington asking for full reports on a woman who called herself Catherine Smith, a man who called himself Max, and a couple of married people locally known as Mr. And Mrs. Ernest Head, who’d in the past gone by other names, specified. I’d paid for all those names. I figured I might as well go through the motions of feeding them into the machinery, although I had doubts whether the information would get out to me in time to be of much use.

I saw Sheila get out of her little car as I turned in off the street. She came up beside me as I parked the station wagon.

“Are you all right?” she whispered. “When you didn’t arrive right behind me, I got worried. Come on. I’d better look after those burns.”

She opened the car door and started to help me out, but she remembered her neurosis about heterosexual contacts and checked herself short of touching me. Or perhaps she just realized that a two-hundred-pound man has to be in pretty bad shape before he takes kindly to being helped out of a car by a hundred-pound girl. She did take the motel key out of my hand and open that door for me and close it behind me.

I said, “What the hell are you bucking for, Skinny? The title of little mother of the year? Hell, I’ve singed myself worse than this lighting a cigarette.”

She looked startled and injured; then she laughed. “All right. Be brave. Be heroic. Do you want a drink?”

“Sure.”

“Ice?”

“If there’s any left.”

“It’s all melted,” she said, investigating. “I’ll get some more. I’ll be right back.”

I started to register a gentlemanly protest, but she’d already taken the cardboard bucket and slipped out of the room. I sat down on the bed and took off my shirt. After examining the battlefield, I came to the conclusion that regardless of how it felt, it wasn’t really the scene of a major catastrophe. The only burn that went deep was on the shoulder. Elsewhere I’d merely lost a little skin. The fact that it hurt like hell was, to a tough undercover operative of my courageous and stoical nature, irrelevant. At least it was supposed to be.

I took from my pocket the tube of ointment Catherine Smith had given me. I was sitting there reading the label and feeling sorry for myself when Sheila let herself back in quietly. She put the ice bucket on the dresser, came over to look, and snatched the tube from my hand.

“You’re not going to use that?”

“Why not?”

“I wouldn’t trust her to give me anything but syphilis!”

I said, “That’s probably the one thing she can’t give you, Skinny. At least I’m under the impression VD doesn’t work like that.”

“You know what I mean!”

“Sure,” I said.

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