I was still trying to come up with something semi-intelligent to throw into the breach when we heard it. It wasn't much more than a minor metallic click, but by the time I reacted, it was too late. Maggie Chrysler was standing right behind us with a little chrome-plated gun pointed directly at us.
"Surprise, surprise, surprise," I trilled, trying to give the lady my best impression of Gomer Pyle.
"Surprise is right," Maggie agreed, waving the small revolver back and forth between Hannah and me. "I'm surprised. Marshal would have been surprised, and I know Alonzo will be."
"Marshal would have been?" Hannah repeated.
"Would have been — past tense." Maggie shrugged. "Alonzo didn't care much for his handling of this whole affair. How can I put it delicately? Shall I say Alonzo has seen fit to sever the relationship?"
"Marshal is dead?" I asked numbly.
"You catch on quick, Elliott." Maggie grinned. "My friend Alonzo didn't much care for the fact that dear Marshal put the whole operation in jeopardy with his juvenile effort to keep his father from retrieving Bormann's stupid cylinders."
"Does Zercher have any idea what's in those metal tubes?"
Lovely Maggie gave me a nonchalant shrug. "The man really doesn't care. What he does care about is all those would-be treasure and salvage hunters poking around the Cluster and screwing up his nice profitable operation."
I could tell by the look on Hannah's face that she had the same string of questions for our former associate that I did. The difference was, I had no compunctions about asking them. "Go over that part again about how you got tangled up in all this. I must have missed it."
Even in the pale moonlight, there was no way to miss Maggie's meltdown smile. "It's a long story, but when you meet Alonzo, you'll understand why."
"I've got the time," I insisted.
"Elliott," she cooed, "like Cosmo says, you're a bright boy. But you jumped into this thing without doing your homework. You checked a lot of things, but you didn't check out the relationship between Bearing Schuster and Alonzo Zercher."
"Old man Schuster is involved with Zercher?"
"Old man Schuster, young man Schuster, Zercher — and a whole lot of other people."
"Then why the hell didn't Zercher just let the old boy come down here, retrieve his cylinders, go back home and play cryonics?"
"Like I said, it's a long story — but since I'm sure you're rather confused at this point, why not?" Maggie relaxed her stance but not the gun. "You see, Elliott, Alonzo and I are what you would call an item. It's been that way for quite a while now," she said proudly.
"But that doesn't explain how you got to be a part of Bearing's Prometheus team."
"Alonzo is just one of those naturally lucky people. We learned that the old boy was secretly trying to put together a squad to retrieve those stupid cylinders even though he had already assured Alonzo that he wouldn't do anything that would jeopardize their operation here in the Cluster. And since Alonzo knew Bearing didn't know anything about me, it was real easy to substitute little old me for the real Maggie Chrysler."
"The real Maggie Chrysler — and where is she?" Hannah asked.
The fake Maggie shrugged. "Who knows? Alonzo always spares me those unsavory little details. But if I had to guess, I'd say she's probably lying in a corn field some- place up in Wisconsin. Alonzo likes to throw in little twists like that. You know, ashes to ashes, dust to dust."
"What happens when they identify the body?" Hannah asked.
"Oh, they won't," Maggie said confidently. "Alonzo is far too careful for something like that to happen. The fact of the matter is, they'll have plenty of trouble identifying anything about her."
"What about Marshal? How does he fit in all this?"
Maggie continued to grin. "Ah yes, Marshal, the screw-up. I can tell you, Alonzo has just about had his bellyfull of the Schusters. First, he can't trust Bearing, then Marshal lets his own personal interests get in the way."
"I don't get it," Hannah insisted.
"Marshal is small potatoes. He and Chauncey Packer were supposed to keep the operation running smoothly — Packer here, and Marshal in the States. I guess you could call them lieutenants. But Marshal got all obsessed with making sure his daddy didn't get those cylinders. Alonzo didn't like that."
"So he killed him?" I asked, in disbelief.
"The organization comes first," Maggie said emphatically.
Hannah and I glanced at each other. Maggie was beginning to sound like one of those true believers that accepted what Alonzo said as the way things had to be. It had already occurred to me that if we were going to get out of this nasty little scrape, now was the time. From everything the counterfeit Maggie was telling us, Alonzo Zercher didn't sound like the kind of man we wanted to take our chances with.
"What now?" I asked, a little apprehensively.
"We wait for Alonzo," Maggie said calmly. "He's on his way."
"Oh, goodie," Hannah said sarcastically, "I can hardly wait."
The bogus Maggie was more than equal to the occasion. She demonstrated a remarkable ability to keep the little revolver pointed at us at all times. Whoever had trained her had trained her well. She had herded us from the dock area back up to the operations building and into a cluttered little room.
"You might as well make yourselves comfortable," she said casually.
Hannah found a straight back chair, I lowered my frame onto a wooden crate, and Maggie propped herself against a battered old typing table. "I've got to hand it to you, Maggie, or whatever your name is, you had me fooled."
"I was pretty good, wasn't I? Too bad it wasn't on a shoot and in a can. It might have led to bigger and better things."
"You're an actress?" Hannah asked.
"Used to be," she admitted. "That's how I met Alonzo. That's where he launders a lot of the cartel's money." Her green eyes lulled reflectively for a moment, and I had the feeling she had drifted back in time and space to other days and other times when she still had a dream. "I met him on the set of "The Smoke Screen.' Unfortunately, it was instant lust. That first weekend we flew down to his villa in Venezuela, and this poor little starlet with the rapidly tarnishing dream was out of show business for good. It wasn't a difficult decision. Most of my work was ending up on cutting room floors, and I was on a fast track to becoming a waitress. But… Alonzo changed all that," she added, almost dreamily.
Hannah was trying to give the impression that she was intrigued by Maggie's account of bygone days and broken dreams. On the other hand, I was a helluva lot more concerned with trying to figure a way out of this new mess we'd gotten ourselves into. The lady in the Maggie role, despite her penchant for storytelling, hadn't become the least bit careless with her gun, and if Alonzo was only minutes away, time was beginning to run out.
"How about a deal?" I tried.
Maggie smiled. "I don't make deals," she said evenly. "That's Alzono's department."
"Elliott's right. What have you got to lose by letting us go? We could tell Bearing that somebody had already retrieved the cylinders before we got there."
Maggie's smile only intensified. She wasn't buying it. I had about decided to take my chances with the old surprise attack routine when I heard the sound of a low flying, single engine aircraft. It made a pass over the building.
"Alonzo is the kind of man who thinks of everything," Maggie said brightly. "That first pass is our signal. If there are any problems, we simply turn off the lights. The buildings are configurated so as to be the glide path out into the bay. Lights on — coast clear. Lights off — trouble. Clever?"
If anything, the arrival of Alonzo Zercher only heightened Maggie's awareness. Her eyes darted back and forth between Hannah and me, and the opportunity for a frontal assault never materialized.