"Sure," I said. "Anything to oblige, ma'am."
I got on my knees and arranged the lantern for better visibility. I prepared the patient for the operation. After a little, she laughed softly, watching me work.
"Does it bother you, undressing a woman, Matt?" She didn't seem to be shivering so much any more. "No, that's right, you're the iron man, aren't you? The unfeeling brute who strips them and searches them without a thought for anything but duty and country." There was malice in her voice.
I shook out a transparent nylon stocking and draped it over a pile of stuff at the side. "Would it have made you feel better if I'd raped you?" I asked.
She laughed again. "In a way, of course it would. It would have meant you were looking at me as a woman instead of as a suspicious character." She watched me work the other stocking down and slip it off her foot. When she spoke, her voice was quite different, very soft, very gentle. "You don't have to stop with the stockings, darling. You know that."
"Yes," I said. "I know it."
There was a little silence inside the canopy, while outside the storm whistled and howled. For some reason I was stalling. I drew a long breath and looked at my watch.
"What's the matter?" she asked, rather sharply. "What are you doing?"
"Just checking the time," I said. "I've got a bet riding on this." I didn't but it seemed like a good line. I don't like sex under false pretenses. Sometimes you have to do it that way, in the business, but tonight I couldn't see that it was necessary. "Five bucks," I said.
There was another little silence. When she spoke, her voice was absolutely flat. "Five bucks?" she said, "on what?"
"On whether or not we're making love by nine o'clock,"
I said, which was another lie. We'd discussed the probability, Mac and I, but no time had been mentioned. "It's all right," I said. "My money's safe. We've still got forty minutes to go."
There was another stretch of silence, but it didn't last long. I was ready for her when she came at me, striking at my face with her nails. I got her wrists, as I had once before. She was strong enough, for a woman, but she had no conception of the use of leverage.
"Easy now," I said. "Take it easy, glamor girl. You'll only hurt yourself."
"You beast!" she gasped. "You… you creature! You contemptible-"
"Sure," I said. "There wasn't any bet, Gail. I was just kidding." She didn't speak, breathing heavily, and I said, "You were pretty corny, you know, with that stocking routine. I had to shake you up a bit."
"You louse! You stinking, miserable-" She stopped abruptly and spoke in that perfectly flat voice: "I don't understand."
"Truce?" I said, still holding her.
After a moment, she nodded. I released her wrists, and she sat there rubbing them, not looking at me, while the truck rocked on its spring and hard little pellets of wind-driven snow rattled against the aluminum canopy. I thought the weather would probably break by morning. That hard buckshot snow generally comes with the end of the storm.
"I don't understand," Gail said again.
"You shouldn't try to seduce a man my age with such obvious tricks, glamor girl," I said. "It hurts his pride. Also, there was a matter of principle. There wasn't any bet, but, last night my chief and I did discuss your possible reactions. The consensus was that you'd probably try this. I thought you ought to know that we'd talked about it."
She licked her lips. "You discussed… You actually talked about whether or not I'd… What in the world made you think…?"
"Cut it out," I said. "Can't you see I'm trying to keep this on a reasonably honest basis? Don't go hypocritical on me, Gail."
She hesitated, then said in a different voice: "Did I give myself away that badly?"
"You didn't have to. It was obvious that you hated us, me in particular. God knows, you had plenty of reason. It seemed inevitable that somewhere on this trip you'd try to get even, somehow. And how is a woman going to get even with a man who's too big for her to beat up and has all the resources of the U.S. Government behind him?"
She started to speak, then stopped. Presently she said, "You're a funny person. All right, and where are we now?"
"In the back of a truck in a blizzard," I said, "slowly turning ~ solid ice while you make up your mind where and how you're going to spend the night."
Her head came up. She stared at me. "You're not really conceited enough, are you, to think I'd still consider…?" I didn't say anything, and presently she laughed. It was a real laugh, soft and warm and kind of nice. "Oh, hell," she said, "I'm certainly not going to wade back through three feet of snow to that cast-iron front seat, and if I stay here you'll probably ravish me before morning, anyway."
I said, "Damn, I hate women who think they're irresistible. Do you want me to sleep in the cab, just to prove something?"
She said, "No, darling, I think you've proved quite enough for one night. Well, almost quite enough…"
XIII
The first thing I noticed, waking, was the silence. There wasn't a sound anywhere, inside or outside the truck, except for the quiet breathing of the woman in my arms.
Gail stirred sleepily and burrowed closer. The temperature must have dropped twenty degrees during the night- as it often does out there right after a storm. I stuck my head out of the covers and saw there was light under the canopy. The windows were white with frost. I summoned my courage and squirmed out from under the sleeping bag and blankets piled on top of us, tucking them back around Gail. I put on coat, hat, and boots, and opened my suitcase to find a pair of gloves.
I found them all right and stopped in the middle of pulling them on, looking at a small, unfamiliar, paper-wrapped package tucked in among my belongings. The printing on the wrapper said: RODRIGUEZ CURIOS, JUAREZ, MEXICO. I hesitated, pulled off the gloves again, opened the package and looked at the rolled-up belt inside-obviously a farewell gift from Mac, something he thought I might be needing on this job.
It looked innocent enough, just a handcarved leather belt with a heavy, ornate buckle. It was, I knew, almost as innocent as it looked. There were no secret compartments, no razor blades concealed between strips of leather, no steel spring knives or saws. The only gimmick was the buckle, carefully designed to serve a number of purposes, some quite lethal. It was a grim reminder that I hadn't come here to play amorous games in the snow.
"Good morning, darling," Gail's voice said behind me.
"Is it as cold as I think it is?"
"Colder," I said. "You stay wrapped up until I get the cab warm. How's the glamor girl this morning?"
"She never felt less glamorous," Gail laughed. "I'd make a terrible Eskimo; I like to take my clothes off when I go to bed… What have you got there?"
"Just something I picked up in Juarez."
The falsehood was a little harder to manage convincingly, I noticed, than it would have been the previous day. I dropped the open package in front of her.
"Oh, a belt," she said, and let it lie rather than expose herself to the cold by reaching out to investigate. "I don't like those damn big fancy cowboy belts. I think a man looks much smarter in a plain, narrow belt."
"I'll remember that," I said, "the next time I want to look smart."
Outside, I warmed myself quickly by shoveling the snow clear of the truck's exhaust pipe. Then I shoveled a path forward and started the motor to warm it up. The pickup rocked a little to indicate that Gail was moving around in back. I went back to investigate and found her sitting up with a blanket over her shoulders, pulling on a fresh pair of nylons. The snow was still frozen on the ones she'd had on the night before.