The Frighteners Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Your name?”
    I nodded. “That need-to-know nonsense is a pain in the butt. Those bureaucrats get all tangled up in their own security.”
    She was looking around, frowning. “Where are we going? You should have kept straight at that last intersection, for Juarez.”
    I said, “We’re not going to Juarez.”
    “But we have reservations—”
    “Buff Cody never had any intention of picking up that hotel reservation in Juarez. He was planning to make contact with someone at dinnertime in a small Mexican town called Cananea some two hundred miles to the west. Mr. Green’s Restaurant, if you’ll believe it. Fine old Spanish name. We’re going to keep Mr. Cody’s appointment. Afterwards, he was planning on spending his wedding night with you in the Hotel Gandara in Hermosillo, about a hundred and fifty miles farther on. With luck we’ll make that, too, without too much night driving, which is not recommended in Mexico.”
    She said, “That’s around three hundred and fifty miles. I thought we’d just be ducking across the Rio Grande to our honeymoon hotel.” She glanced down at her shining costume. “I’m not exactly dressed for long-distance touring.”
    I said, “Cody was probably counting on that, figuring that nobody’d expect him to take any vigorous evasive action with both of you still in your wedding clothes.”
    She said, “Now we seem to be heading north. That’s hardly the way to get to Mexico. ”
    Well, at least the girl knew her compass directions. I said, “We’ve lost our tail, at least temporarily. Buff Cody’s tail. He was taken into custody just before Cody himself, to clear the scene for the substitution. Presumably Cody had figured out some other way of escaping surveillance. We don’t know what route he planned to take to Cananea, but we’re taking the interstate west, I-10. We’ll run it as far as Lordsburg, New Mexico. Even though it takes us a little out of the way, we can make better time up there on the U.S. freeways than we could on the little Mexican roads south of the border. From Lordsburg—well, a few miles beyond Lordsburg—we’ll cut back down across a corner of Arizona to Douglas, which is on the border. From there we'll cross over into Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico, and continue west on their Highway 2. Okay?"
    She asked, “How do you know what . . . what Horace was planning?”
    I grinned. “Don’t ask. I didn’t. I think there was a snitch involved, an informer. Actually, I understand you met him; he’s the guy who told you some unpalatable truths about your elderly fiance that made you decide to cooperate with Mr. Somerset.”
    Gloria made a wry face. “Yes, a nasty little man, but would he know all of. . .all of Horace’s plans in such detail?”
    I said, “Perhaps not, but Cody’s activities had already attracted attention, and I’m sure Somerset had him under close surveillance. I don’t think our federal friend is a man who bothers with official authorization for every wiretap he uses; and then there are gadgets like parabolic mikes. . . . Unfortunately you see before you an obsolete secret agent. I don’t know much about that newfangled stuff'. My main qualification for the job is that I learned to shoot pretty good as a kid. ”
    “I hate guns,” she said.
    I managed to stifle a groan, I hoped. I was heading into a foreign country pretending to be a man I didn’t look much like and messing with a potential revolution in a way that could make me a target for both sides. All I needed to make it a real suicide mission was to be stuck with one of the beautiful, nonviolent, gun-hating people as my partner.
    I said, “It’s going to be a long drive. Why don’t you recline that fancy seat and take a nap?”
    She turned on me fiercely, “Don’t you dare change the subject in that condescending way! I think guns are terrible and I think men who use them are terrible. That’s one reason why I had to do that to Horace! Regardless of everything