Carter watched the jeep's erratic progress and smiled.
When the jeep at last ground to a dusty stop in the jumbled yard, he walked toward it.
"Charlie Smith-deal?"
"Betcha!" the driver said, exhaling a cloud of whiskey.
His eyes were red and bleary. He jerked his baseball cap around so the flap was over the back of his neck. He raised his fool, aimed it outside the jeep, and set it deliberately on the ground. He grinned at Carter.
"Do I know you?"
"Don't think so," Carter said, grabbing Smith-deal's arm to steady him.
He followed Smith-deal up the path to the shack's porch. Smith deal never wavered, a dog on a scent. There was probably a bottle in the shack.
"I'm looking for a friend," Carter went on. "Name's Rocky Diamond. You might know him as Philip Shelton, or Shelton Philips."
"Oh?" Smith-deal's interest was waning. He opened the door. "Need a drink."
There was a faint, plastic click.
Carter tackled Smith-deal's legs Hurled them off the porch. Rolled them next to the stone foundation.
The shack exploded.
Nine
The ground shook and rolled. The roar of the explosion rocked their eardrums. Dust and debris clotted the air, and the two men huddled next to the stone foundation and coughed.
The bomb had been set on a split-second delay switch to be sure that anyone entering would be inside when the explosives blasted the shack apart. That had been the soft click that Nick Carter's acute hearing had picked up. Just like all experts, bomb professionals tried to think of every contingency.
As Carter picked up Charlie Smith-deal and held him by a wobbly shoulder, he thought about it. Too much of anything was often not a good idea… even too much efficiency.
Smith-deal gazed at the stone foundation of his shack, now filled like a volcano crater with wood splinters useful only to a toothpick factory. Dust settled slowly toward the ground.
"Shit," he said mournfully.
"Sorry about that," Carter said. "Looks like somebody doesn't like you. You'll need a new house."
"Never mind the bloody house!" Smith-deal cried in outrage. "Me bottle was in it!"
"I am sorry." Carter grinned. "You don't have an emergency bottle, maybe? Hidden somewhere?"
Smith-deal looked blankly at Carter. Slowly memory brightened his eyes. He snapped his fingers.
"Dammee, you're right!"
Carter followed Smith-deal across the jumbled yard to the back. The drunk went straight to a well with a low stone wall. The overhead arch that had held a bucket was long gone. The bucket was nearby, upside down, with a tattered rope tied to the handle. Smith-deal ignored it. Instead, he pulled up a second rope that was fixed lo a deeply embedded hook inside the well's wall. The bucket was left outside the well so that the puller wouldn't get the ropes confused in the night.
Carter looked over the well's edge into darkness. Slowly the jug appeared. It was home-brew in a plastic bleach bottle, not an encouraging container. It had been there so long that algae covered it in a slimy green.
Smith-deal crowed with pleasure. He sank next to the well, his back supported by the wall, lifted the bottle, and drank.
Carter squatted next to him.
"Looks like you've been having a good time," he observed. "A long celebration of something."
"Can't figure it," Smith-deal said, wiping a fist across his mouth "Who'd want to blow the old shack? I don't even own it."
"They were after you, not the shack."
"Doesn't make a goddamned bit of sense."
Smith-deal drank again, long and deep. At last he sighed, and set the jug next to nun. He kept a proprietary arm around it.
"You don't want any, do you?" he inquired.
"Wouldn't dream of depriving you," Carter said.
Smith-deal beamed and rotated his baseball cap so that the brim was again over his eyes, sheltering his face from the afternoon sun. He was in his early forties, a slender man in need of a shave. What flesh he had was pulpy, almost without substance. He'd been drinking for years and not bothering to eat when he did. He appreciated those who didn't take the liquor that he substituted for proper nourishment.
"It's not all that great," the New Zealander admitted and drank again. "But you can have some. Sure. You saved my life. I think. Didn't you?"
Carter laughed.
"Probably, but you keep your booze. Instead, maybe you'd answer some questions. Know anything about airplanes?"
Smith-deal blinked slowly, digesting Carter's words.
"Mechanic," he replied, still puzzled.
"Know a flyer by the name of Rocky Diamond?"
Smith-deal hooted and slapped his thigh.
"Oh, he's a hard case, he is!" he said. "One of the hardest cases around!"
"Did you see him last week?"
The mechanic's eyebrows knitted in thought. His forehead creased with suspicion.
"Why d'you want to know?"
"If I wanted to hurt him, I wouldn't be bothering to talk to you now. I'd have you down, your arm locked back, and your neck stretched from here to Auckland. You'd tell me anything I wanted."
Smith-deal blanched.
"Diamond's missing," Carter continued. "Maybe he's dead. Maybe he's hurt somewhere and needs help. If he's your friend, you'll want to tell me what you know."
Smith-deal drank, then looked at Carter with bleary eyes.
"He flew out of Christchurch?" Carter prodded.
"That's it," the mechanic said. "Don't know whether he'd want me to tell you or not. But then, if the poor boy's missing…" He shrugged. "Ah, well. He should be there by now, and no damage done. He was doing a bet. Someone hired him to make a stunt flight from Christchurch to the South Pole. He was supposed to stay overnight there and then fly on to the Falklands. When he took off, he gave me a wad of money for helping him and to keep my mouth shut. I went off to celebrate. Haven't been home since." He stared mournfully across the yard to the remains of the shack.
"It saved your life," Carter reminded him. "If you'd come back sooner, you wouldn't have heard the click and you'd be dead."
"Don't know why anybody'd want to kill me." The mechanic shook his head sadly. Thinking about it was upset-tag, so he drank again.
"Did he file a flight plan?" Carter went on.
"Sure. Had to. Everyone does."
"And he had plenty of supplies?"
"Everything. Snow equipment mostly. Just in case. Food, too, and survival gear. No frills. And the gas tanks were full, Saw to it myself."
"There's no record of him at either Christchurch International Airport or Wigram Aerodrome."
"Well, we were quiet about it all. Rocky called himself something else — Philip something — but there should be records. The flight plan."
Carter stood and dusted his hands.
"Come on," he said. "There's someone you need to talk to."
He lifted Charlie Smith-deal by the armpits and steadied him on his feet. The mechanic clasped the algae-covered jug to his chest.
Smith-deal was the only witness Carter had to Rocky Diamond's presence in New Zealand Smith-deal believed what Diamond had told him, hut somewhere in the man's unconscious there might he clues about what Diamond had really been up to. Carter would get Smith-deal to Colonel ffolkes and let the New Zealand intelligence head's expert psychologists take over.
"Not sure I like this," Smith-deal muttered as Carter propelled him around the house.
"Can't be helped," Carter said, aiming him at the Ford Laser 1.3 he d rented in downtown Christchurch. "No one's going to hurt you. Just help you remember better. Might actually be fun for you. Interesting."
"Don't like this at all!"