I saw Jake stiffen slightly and lie there listening. I let a couple of minutes pass; then I tossed another stone, not quite so far, as if somebody down there were sneaking closer, very slowly and rather clumsily. Jake looked around uneasily. Seeing nothing, he glanced down at the beach in front of him, out of my range of vision. Apparently he found nothing urgent down there; he backed away from the edge and rose, holding the rifle ready. He came towards me cautiously, scanning the brush for movement, pausing every other step to listen hard.
I had a small stone, like a marble, between thumb and forefinger. When he paused five feet away, I flipped it after the others. He froze, looking that way. I came out of the bushes low and broke his leg with the jack handle.
XXII
I was taking a chance, of course. He might have yelled and alerted half of Baja California-including Sapio, nearby, with the submachine gun-but I was counting on Jake and his tough professionalism and he didn't disappoint me. His mental computer was programmed for silence, and the sudden pain got only a sort of choked, moaning grunt out of him, as he came down on top of me.
Something hard struck me in the small of the back: the butt of the falling rifle. It hurt, but I didn't mind. If the weapon had hit the ground first, it would have made more noise; it might even have been discharged by the shock. But everything worked out well; and I threw the big man off me and came to my feet as he struggled to hands and knees and tried to rise. I had plenty of time to reach down and give him a judicious tap behind the ear with the short iron bar I held.
Then, standing above him, I had a fight with my conscience, but it wasn't much of a fight. I mean, the question was which injection to use to keep him quiet- the temporary or one of the permanents-but the answer came quite easily. To be sure, I'd promised myself the pleasure of watching this man die in agony, back when he was beating on me in Bobbie's hotel room, but that had been merely a psychological crutch, to help me face the ordeal with fortitude. Actually, I didn't have a great deal against Jake. He'd knocked me around a bit, but I'd walked into the situation with my eyes open, and it had all been strictly in the line of business.
And in a sense, while he was undoubtedly a bad citizen, tonight he seemed to be on the side of the angels. Apparently he, and Tillery and Sapio, were trying to prevent a man from smuggling dope, a worthy cause-although the degree of virtue did depend somewhat on their true motives.
The syndicate, Mafia, Cosa Nostra, corporation, or whatever you want to call it, is not my bag, and I don't know a hell of a lot about it. However, just because some unpleasant people insist they're dropping an illegal activity because it's become too hot to be profitable, or for any other reason, doesn't mean I have to believe them. For all I knew, Jake could have been assigned this job of marksmanship, not because Wand was disgracing his innocent Mafia associates by dealing in dirty heroin, but simply because he was stepping on the toes of some other mafioso-if that's the correct term-somebody with better syndicate connections than Frankie's, who'd been promised this lucrative branch of the drug trade for himself.
Still, ostensibly, the project upon which Jake was embarked, homicide apart, seemed kind of praiseworthy even if it was interfering with Charlie Devlin's elaborate plans-and if somebody just had to be shot, I couldn't think of a more suitable candidate than Frankie-boy Warfel. Furthermore, Big Jake hadn't got any rougher than necessary, putting on his interrogation act for me back at the hotel-he'd added no personal frills to the beating-and I don't go around killing people merely because they hit me a little with their fists in the line of duty.
Finally, it kind of intrigued me to think of some ruthless syndicate rub-out men, bent on murder, napping peacefully on a Mexican hillside while their quarry sailed away unharmed. Killing one of them would have spoiled the joke.
As I slipped him the needle, Jake was trying to wake up, but the drug soon rendered him passive once more.
I picked up the fallen rifle and studied it, frowning. Although it seemed to be a standard bolt-action sporting model-a fully loaded, short-barreled.308 Remington in their cheapest grade, if you must have the details- it had a Buck Rogers appearance due to the bulky, homemade-looking gadget that was solidly mounted on top.
What I'd taken to be a telescopic sight of sorts seemed to be a kind of fancy flashlight with a long black hood, or snoot, shielding the big front lens, presumably so that light wouldn't spill to the sides. Well that wasn't unheard of. Spotlights are frequently clamped on guns for nocturnal hunting use in some parts of the world, but generally the idea is merely to put some light on a leopard, or other beast, at close range-enough illumination to let you see the sights to aim and shoot. Apparently that was not the principle involved here. Jake had been planning a shot of better than a hundred yards, too far for ordinary spotlighting techniques, and his rifle had no sights other than this odd contraption.
My research was interrupted by the sound of the outboard motor, that had been silent for a while, starting up once more. I sneaked up to the rim and saw that the Fleetwind's dinghy had taken the completed pontoon raft in tow and was heading out towards the ketch, which now had a decided list to port due to the great metal cylinder suspended from the boom swung out over the side. The two men I'd tentatively identified as Willy and Mr. Soo still stood together by the jeep at the far side of the beach. There was no sign of Frank Warfel, although one of the dim, small, distant figures on the deck of the motorsailer could have been him, and probably was.
I eased away from the edge, and squirmed back to Jake, checked that he was sleeping soundly, and made my way into a gully well below where, I hoped, I could experiment a bit with the trick rifle without attracting attention. I aimed it at a rock some twenty yards away- as close as I could line it up in the dark without sights- and pressed the switch on the side of the Flash Gordon gizmo, bracing myself for all kinds of spectacular fireworks, although it didn't seem likely that a gadget in-tended for night operations would be too bright or too noisy.
Actually, nothing much happened. A small, sharp, intense cross of light just appeared silently on the rock at just about the point where, I estimated, the gun was aimed. Very neat. All you had to do, apparently, was put the X on a guy, and he was dead when you pulled the trigger.
Well, it still wasn't a totally new idea. Back when I was making my living with a press camera, in another and more peaceful incarnation, they'd rigged a light to shine through the range finder optical system, projecting two bright spots as far as you'd be likely to take an ordinary flash picture. Working at night, in light too dim for ordinary focusing, you merely brought the two spots together on the celebrity you wished to photograph, and fired your flashgun.
The only really impressive thing here was the remarkable sharpness and intensity of the illuminated cross, good enough to make feasible shots of over a hundred yards- at least Jake had obviously thought so. I wondered if laser technology might not be involved in some way. I also wondered if Jake had cooked up the thing himself, swiped it from some top secret Army project, or whether perhaps the syndicate also had inventors and armorers hard at work dreaming up interesting new toys for the boys.
I switched off the beam and crouched there, considering the next step; but a rustling sound brought my thinking to an abrupt halt. I flattened out and lay absolutely still, waiting. Presently a shadowy figure appeared by the rock I'd used for a target: a thin little man with a sawed-off shotgun like the one that had been used on Lionel McConnell He stood by the rock for several seconds, first studying it, and then looking warily around. Obviously, wherever he'd been hiding, he'd caught a glimpse of something bright and had come over to investigate-another of Warfel's sentries, who probably, judging by his uneasy attitude, was wishing he were back in good old smoggy L.A.