The Menacers Read Free Page A

I’d been prejudiced against her before I ever saw her. But now I wasn’t condemning her merely for her taste in clothes and countersigns. The two most dangerous aberrations in our line of work are idealism and innocence, and if I was any judge she suffered from both.
    She was talking to a tanned, rather husky young woman with short blonde hair who wore a skimpy, sleeveless, bright orange garment with native designs on it—just a sack with holes for the arms and head—undoubtedly purchased at one of the local tourist shops. My girl took off her sunglasses casually and wiped them with a Kleenex as the crowd from the plane kind of washed me past her.
    I responded by mopping my face with a handkerchief as instructed. It wasn’t hard to make the gesture convincing. I was dressed for Santa Fe and Mexico City, mountain communities a mile and a half high, cool and dry. Down here at sea level the temperature was in the high nineties and the humidity was running it a close race for the hundred mark.
    I did notice, as I went past, that Priscilla Decker didn’t look quite as dewy at short range as she had across the room. She was getting on towards twenty-five, I judged, and she was beginning to show just a hint of the dried-up look of the professional virgin, which is what happens to them if they’re left on the vine instead of being picked, so to speak, at the proper time. I didn’t know whether this was good or bad from my point of view, but at least I wouldn’t have to make allowances for extreme youth. She’d had the years. If she hadn’t taken advantage of them, that wasn’t my fault.
    That was all there was to it. I didn’t look to see where she went; I wasn’t supposed to pay her any attention. She was supposed to find me when the time came. I waited for my suitcase to be unloaded—I don’t think flying is going to be really practical until they invent self-propelled luggage to match the planes—and was driven to the Hotel Playa by a genial robber who charged me twenty pesos, about a dollar sixty, which was obviously too much since he was disappointed when I didn’t give him an argument. There was a reservation waiting for me here, but it didn’t really matter. The winter season wouldn’t begin for a month or so yet, and they had lots of room.
    Playa
means beach in Spanish, and they were situated right on theirs. It seemed like a hell of a good idea, so after making sure the air-conditioner was going full blast in my room, I changed into trunks and walked out there. Some pretty big waves were breaking against the shore—well, big for a calm summer day—but I’d recently learned a bit about surf and swimming in the line of duty, and I watched the crests briefly to get the timing, and dove under one and paddled out a ways, ducking beneath the white stuff as it came at me.
    There were some other people playing around out there, including a woman in a white satin bathing suit—a sleek, one-piece job, not a bikini—who caught my eye for some reason, perhaps just because I have that kind of an eye and she was the only woman venturing out that far. She swam pretty well, but with a European touch to her style that I couldn’t quite identify. Maybe she behaved just a bit as if she’d been brought up on the breast stroke and the crawl were a later accomplishment.
    She was quite slender, almost thin, and her hard adult body sheathed in wet white satin was a lot sexier than most of this soft nymphet stuff you see on the beach covered by practically nothing but a good tan. Something about her had aroused my curiosity—if you want to call it curiosity—so when she headed towards shore I gave her a minute or so and then picked up a crest, paddled hard to match its speed, and let it carry me in.
    A good-sized breaking wave, even a summer wave, can give you a pretty rough ride; it’s kind of like being shaken by an angry dog. I cut out of it before it buried my head in the sand, and stood up. I’d been carried past