Read Matt Helm--The Interlopers for Free Online Page B

brought it back into line and put gentle pressure on the trigger. The drop-your-gun-and-stand-up-with-your-hands-above-your-head routine looks great on TV, but with a pistol at eighty yards I needed my target perfectly still. If I started shouting silly orders and gave him a chance to roll aside, I’d probably muff the shot, and that would give him a crack at me with his high-powered rifle. At this range, with that outfit, he couldn’t possibly miss. So I just steadied the coarse revolver sights on the widest point of the target and increased the trigger pressure until the piece fired.
    The .357 made an ear-splitting racket, rearing up in recoil in spite of the two-handed grip I had on the skimpy butt. For a moment, it blotted out the man in the bushes. When I got it recocked and lined up once more, he was lying exactly where he had been. The only difference was that all the sharpshooting tension had gone out of his body, and his head had dropped slightly, resting peacefully on the rifle stock as if on a pillow.

6
    The address I’d been given for the afternoon rendezvous, to be used if the morning contact should fail for any reason, was out at the edge of the town’s business district, in the middle of an incompletely developed block containing several vacant lots. Diagonally down the street from a convenient corner drugstore—well, convenient for me—it stood by itself: a flat-roofed one-story building that wasn’t very wide across the front, but ran back some distance from the street. There was a neat sign above the door:
    PASCO ANIMAL CLINIC
A RTHUR W ATTS , D.V.M.
OFFICE HOURS
9:00–5:00 (Weekdays)
8:30–12:00 (Saturdays)
    I couldn’t actually read the sign from the drugstore telephone booth in which I waited, but I’d got a good look at it, driving past. As I watched through the front window of the drugstore, a big yellow Cadillac convertible with California plates drew up in front of the building. A dark-haired woman with a figure that was youthful but not really young, if you know what I mean, got out deliberately.
    It was quite a production. She was wearing a yellow silk pantsuit—tailored jacket and slim trousers—plus yellow sandals and a white blouse with a million raffles. At least that was the impression I got from a distance. A white froth of lace encircled her neck, spilled down her bosom, and dripped from her wrists. It was quite a tourist costume to spring on a backward little town like Pasco; or any town for that matter.
    She walked around to open the curb door of the Cadillac and brought out a big, gray poodle, clipped and brushed to perfection. They disappeared into the veterinarian’s office together.
    “Yes, sir,” I said into the phone. “It was a big disappointment. No Holz.”
    “There was no reason for you to expect him, Eric.” Mac’s voice lost no crispness traveling three thousand miles from Washington, D.C. “Not yet. Who was the man you shot?”
    “Just a fuzzy-faced punk with a fancy rifle. He’s not in our files, I’m pretty sure. Oregon driver’s license issued to Michael P. Bird.”
    “Bird?”
    “Like with feathers.” I said. “He was using a heavy Douglas barrel on one of the good Mauser actions with a custom stock. Mesquite or some such light wood with caps and inlays of horn or dark plastic. A three-to-nine power variable scope cranked up to maximum magnification. I guess he wanted to see which button of my shirt he was going to perforate.”
    Mac’s voice was dry: “The young man seems to have gone to a lot of trouble with his murder weapon.”
    “I doubt that it was originally designed as a murder weapon, sir,” I said. “With its small caliber and that big telescopic sight, it’s the kind of outfit you’d have made up for varmint-shooting, as they call it: accurate long-range popping at nuisance rodents like groundhogs and prairie dogs. It’s a hobby with some people, and most farmers and ranchers are all for getting rid of the little pests and