The Frighteners Read Online Free PDF

else, he was my father’s partner, and I’ve known him a very long time. I couldn’t have deceived him like that, smiling at him in the chapel in front of all those people and giving him his wedding kiss like a female Judas if . . .” She drew a long breath. “But Mr. Somerset said he was going to import all kinds of dreadful weapons for people who planned to overthrow the Mexican government by force, as if we didn’t have enough violence and enough stupid, bloody revolutions in this world already. If there was a chance of stopping it by helping Mr. Somerset. I had to do it, didn’t I?”
    She sounded as if she was trying to convince herself; and I thought better of her for feeling a touch of guilt—after all, whether or not he deserved it, she had deliberately used her feminine wiles to first lead a man to the altar, and then to the slaughter.
    I said, “Horace. Is that what he liked to be called by you?”
    She said, “Well, all my life I’ve called him Uncle Buffy, but I could hardly go on calling him that after we decided to get married; I’d have sounded like an idiot child playing at matrimony with her mama’s diamond on her pinkie. And I wasn’t going to call him Buffalo Bill like some of his roughneck friends, or even Buff; and in this day and age I wasn’t about to go all respectful and call him Mr. Cody even if he was somewhat older than I. So we settled on Horace for him, and he called me Glory.”
    “Hi, Glory.”
    She gave me a reluctant smile. “Hi, Horace,” she said. The smile faded. “And I do hate guns and violence. Do you think I’d have betrayed him like that otherwise? Even though he . . .” She stopped.
    “Even though he what?”
    She shook her head. “Not now. We’ll talk about it later. I think I will rest a bit now. It’s been . . . a lot of strain, playing Delilah.”
    She used the tricky seat adjustments to allow her to lie back comfortably, first making sure that her skirt wasn’t tucked up so it would wrinkle or show me anything I wasn’t supposed to see. She closed her eyes. We were soon out of Texas; in that direction it terminates a few miles outside El Paso. As I followed the big four-lane highway across the arid New Mexico plains, with a steep, jagged mountain range off to the east, I saw that her breathing was soft and steady in sleep. . . .
    We had no trouble at the border. As a rule, driving south into Mexico, only two classes of people have trouble at the border: the cheapskates who can’t bear to part with a little cash and the highly moral folks who feel that it’s terribly, terribly wrong to present a foreign official with a small monetary reward for his services. I’m not particularly tightfisted at any time, certainly not when operating on a government expense account, and morality isn’t a big thing in our agency, so we went through in a breeze.
    “You didn’t have to be quite so generous!” My lovely young bride, who’d been awake since we’d made our first pit stop in New Mexico, spoke tartly as we drove away. “You’re the great Mexico expert, of course; but even I could tell they’d have been happy with a buck or two apiece. A veritable blizzard of five-dollar bills was not indicated.”
    “That’s my girl,” I said. “You’re doing fine. You sound just like an honest-to-God, genuine wife.”
    She started to make some kind of a retort, but glanced around and said instead: “You’d better pay a little attention to your navigation, mister. That doesn’t look much like a main highway out of town up ahead. Unless their roads are even lousier than I remember.”
    She was perfectly right. I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere or, since I’d made no turns, failed to take the right one, forgetting that Mexican road signs tend to be inconspicuous when they aren’t totally nonexistent. Actually, I was far from being the great Mexico expert she’d called me. Although I’d spent my younger years in the border state of New Mexico and