I shed my clothes, took a shower, and turned down the bed. For forty-eight hours all my sleeping had been done sitting up. I had just crawled between the sheets when I heard Hazel's step on the stairs, and I knew what was going to happen. She walked into the bedroom, and it was just as natural as any ace-six that ever rolled out onto a table.
She sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled off her boots, then rose and peeled clothing from herself in a rainbow-hued shower. The big, warm, naked female body slid into the bed and snuggled up to me. I stroked her lazily, then not so lazily. We filled our roving hands with flesh until by mutual consent we threw the top sheet aside. I was so tired that it was a long, leisurely, and delicious ride before my boiler finally flared up and we sprinted down the homestretch together.
I fell asleep afterward as though I'd been clubbed.
When I awoke my watch had stopped. Hazel had drawn the shades before she left the bedroom, and I couldn't tell if it was daylight or dark outside. I stretched luxuriously, slid out of bed, and took another shower. Hazel heard the water running, and when I came out of the bathroom she was seated on the edge of the bed again, smoking a cigarette.
"The sheriff's office called just after I boosted myself out from under your dead weight and went downstairs," she announced. "I gave him the registration number of the plane, and he called back twenty minutes later." She consulted a slip of paper she had removed from her Levis. "The plane is registered in the name of Frank Dalrymple who operates the Colonial Airport, a small private field near Tucson."
"Dalrymple," I repeated. "A hired plane, for sure, but maybe this Dalrymple could tell me who hired him."
"There's really no need for you to involve yourself," Hazel pointed out. "You were my agent on the trip to New York with Larkin's money, and I feel responsible for any loss you had."
I didn't even bother to answer that one. The whole crazy expedition to Cuba had come about because I wasn't about to use Hazel's money. "How long was I asleep?"
"Twelve hours."
"Damned if I don't feel I could do it all over again."
She arched an eyebrow. "Including the preliminaries?"
"Given similar provocation," I agreed. "But first I could stand a shot of bourbon and some food."
I put on a robe and we went downstairs. Hazel fed me a steak, and then I watched the last half of a ball game on television. Hazel had a tower stretching up into the cobalt blue of the Nevada sky that was higher than some cable-company antennas I'd seen. It pulled in a signal from everything this side of the Continental Divide.
We went back upstairs and sacked in again. I'd been a little doubtful about performance, but when I turned my palomino loose at the watering hole it was hip, hip, and hooray. We reached the quarter pole in.24, breezing, and worked out the mile in 35 and change.
"How'd you like to take a ride down to Tucson tomorrow?" I asked Hazel when she came out of the shower.
"Oh, man, have you ever got a one-track mind. Why don't you just forget the whole thing?"
I thought of a bronzed, high-cheekboned, eagle-beaked face peering at me along the barrel of a machine gun while I crouched on the wing of the 727. "I'd like to meet up with the one who got away, that's all. One more time."
"Why hasn't there been anything about it in the papers?"
"Because a man named Neal Harris decided there wasn't going to be anything about it in the papers."
"I still don't see why you feel-"
"Quit stalling. You want to go to Tucson?"
"Oh, all right, all right!"
So the next morning I was gassing Hazel's Corvette at the pump in front of the barn when she hailed me from the kitchen doorway. "Someone's driving in from the highway, Earl!" she called.
I stared in the direction of the dust devils swirling above the dirt road that led from the highway to the ranch property. I started for my own car instinctively before I remembered that my.38 wasn't in the glove compartment but buried in the sand near the abandoned airstrip where the hijacked plane had been forced down. There was no real reason I should need it, anyway. There was an umbrella now over my presence at Hazel's place, a by-product of the Cuban expedition.
The incoming car was only a hundred yards away when I recognized the driver. Hazel recognized him, too. "Earl, it's Karl Erikson!" she said. She sounded pleased.
I wasn't nearly so pleased myself.
Erikson was a government man who had suckered me into the Cuban caper I mentioned. I had no idea he was a government man at the time I was recruited, although in hindsight I should probably have realized it from his authoritative manner and take-charge personality.
So instead of a big bundle of cash I thought I was shooting for in Havana, it turned out I was working on a piddling per diem basis for the government. Wholly involuntarily, I might add. And once I found out, I had to go through with it in order to get out of Cuba with my neck intact. And this damn Erikson had backdoored me with Hazel who had aided and abetted the entire deception. "You said you were sick and tired of sitting around listening to the rust harden on yourself," she defended herself afterwards. "And I was afraid you'd take off on a bank job or something and get caught. This way I figured you were safe."
Which was a hell of an argument when you consider that four of us went down into Cuba and only Karl Erikson and I made it back. And that the last time I'd seen him he'd been flat on his back in Bethesda Naval Hospital with machine-gun holes and wooden splinters as big as railroad spikes in him from the boat that had been shot out from under us by Cuban Migs.
I walked across the yard to Erikson's car as he got out from under the wheel. He's a big, blond, rough-hewn type, possibly the strongest man I'd ever known. His movements were stiff, and I realized he hadn't fully recovered from his recent hospitalization. "I'm so glad you could come, Karl," Hazel greeted him warmly as she joined us. Erikson and I shook hands. "I hoped you'd accept my invitation to visit us here, but I really didn't expect you'd be able to manage it this soon."
"Didn't I tell you I'd come?" Erikson said easily. He eyed me up and down, the familiar cynical expression on his hard-bitten features. "How's the Shoot-'Em-Up Kid?"
"Great. Did they get all the lead out of your ugly carcass?"
"Enough to get me perpendicular again."
"Let's go inside and have coffee," Hazel urged.
We trooped into the ranch house. "I'm just leaving for Tucson," I told Erikson as he setded himself carefully at the kitchen table. "But I'll be back in a couple of days, and Hazel will make you comfortable here in the meantime."
"I'm just on my way down to Tucson, too," Erikson said. He accepted a cup of steaming black coffee from Hazel and regarded me over its rim as he sipped. "To the Colonial Airport. Why don't we ride down together?"
I tried to hold my face together since he was obviously enjoying my surprise. "The Colonial Airport," I repeated while I tried to get my brain in gear. How in hell could this big moose know about the Colonial Airport?
"I hope you can spend some time with us, Karl," Hazel said. I knew she was attempting a diversion while I pulled myself together. "You're not fit to be working again so soon."
"Something came up that my boss decided needed my delicate touch," Erikson said.
"You're about as delicate as a man lighting a cigarette with a blow torch," I snorted. "Now what's this about a Colonial Airport?"
His eyes were riveted on mine. "You're onto something that fits into my assignment. I want to know what it is."
"D'you mind starting at the beginning?" I inquired.
He glanced at Hazel as if about to ask her to leave the room, then changed his mind. Karl Erikson knew where he stood with Hazel Andrews. Did I say that Hazel piloted the boat to Cuba that picked us up, and was in the drink with us when the Mig-jockeys were circling our blazing cruiser?