Operation Whiplash Read Free Page B

woke in early-morning darkness with Robin nibbling at my ear, so we got a late start. Even so, we reached Mobile by mid-afternoon. Beyond Jackson we’d turned southeast again on Route 49. Past Hattiesburg we joined the Old Spanish Trail at Gulfport. I left Robin at a motel cocktail lounge when we reached Mobile. “I’ll only be about an hour,” I told her.
    “I can hardly wait,” she answered with a smile marred only by a full-grown tabby’s attempt to look kittenish.
    I drove to the Golden Peacock, Rudy Hernandez’ place. I knew he worked the bar afternoons. Evenings he prowled the floor, keeping order. Sometimes he had a lot of it to keep. The police had never been known to compare the neon-encrusted bar to a convent.
    I selected an isolated bar stool and ordered my usual Jim Beam on the rocks. The dark-faced, potbellied Rudy paused in his supervision of the barboy’s washing of glasses to serve it to me. We were alone at one end of the bar. “You’ve got a package in your safe for Earl Drake,” I said. “It’s marked ‘ hold’.”
    “Who said I had a safe?” he countered.
    “I’ve been here before.”
    He looked me over carefully. “I don’t know you,” he said.
    He knew me.
    He just didn’t know the name or the face.
    “There’s a 9mm Smith & Wesson automatic with a notched sight in the package, Rudy.”
    He studied me again. “C’mon into the office,” he said abruptly. He raised a wooden flap in the bar and I joined him behind it. He unlocked a door and we entered a dingy, cluttered back room. Rudy paused in front of a large, old-fashioned safe. “You say you’ve been here before?” he repeated my statement.
    “Not often enough to know the combination.”
    He stood with his head cocked to one side while he listened to the sound of my voice. “Okay,
somethin’
about you rings a bell,” he decided. He opened the safe, his bulk hiding the dial while he spun it. He handed me the package, and I ripped it open and showed him the automatic. He nodded, and started to close the safe.
    “How about a couple of extra clips and a box of 9mm Parabellum cartridges?” I asked. Rudy had no difficulty in producing the items. “Any interesting toys in that crackerbox?” I continued when he again started to swing shut the massive door.
    “Crackerbox?” he echoed in an injured tone, but he reversed the direction of the door. Neatly arranged on shelves inside, each on its own individual chamois, were a Walther; two Colts, one long-barreled; a Webley; a Beretta; and a conventional-sized pistol I didn’t recognize. To one side was a tiny palm gun. I reached inside the safe and picked it up.
    “I took that in on a bad debt,” Rudy said. “At anything more’n twenty yards it prob’ly wouldn’t do much more damage ‘n a kick in the ass. I only got about a dozen bullets for it. They’re.41 caliber, an’ they don’t make ‘em any more.”
    The gun was an over-and-under derringer, a replica of the old-style gamblers’ vest-pocket weapon, but made in modern steel. Fired across an average-sized room there could be a ten-inch variation in bullet placement, depending upon which barrel was used, but a man doesn’t always want to shoot across a room. The last time I’d been in Hudson I had a midget weapon, and without it I wouldn’t have gotten out of town. “I’ll take it,” I said. “What about a lock-pick?”
    Rudy opened a drawer. He had spring steel picks, very thin but of great tensile strength. The torque wrenches were both Z-shaped and L-shaped. I selected a Z-shaped wrench with its accompanying pick, buttoned my collar, and inserted both flexible strips of steel in place of collar stays. Placed there, a man can stand almost any kind of a frisk.
    Rudy nodded approvingly, and an exorbitant amount of money changed hands. Rudy’s prices were outrageous, but he always had reliable merchandise. We parted without farewells. I put the automatic in my briefcase before I went back to collect