The Ravagers Read Free Page A

and figure.
    I lay very still. She’d said it was starting to rain. It hadn’t been when she said it, but it was now. The sound of raindrops was a murmur all through the woods, but I could hear the man behind me get up and move away. Cautiously, I turned myself around and squirmed after him. The rain helped, making the dead leaves soft and silent and helping to cover any noise I made, but after a little of it I wasn’t so sure I wouldn’t have preferred to crawl on dry ground and take my chances.
    The man ahead of me seemed to be fairly tall, and he moved like a reasonably young man, but he was either bald or very blond and crewcut: I could see his bare head gleaming faintly in the darkness even when I couldn’t distinguish the outlines of his body. He wasn’t much good in the woods. He made plenty of noise and he didn’t seem to be quite sure where he was going. After a while he stopped in a baffled way, looking around. He whistled softly.
    Another man spoke up from some bushes to the left. “Over here, Larry. Well?”
    “Christ, I’m soaked. This is a cold damn country.”
    “Who cares about you? What about the woman?”
    “She’s still with us. I guess she’s too smart to attract attention by pulling out after paying to stay the night. She was sitting out in the truck for some reason. Looked like she was crying.” The tall man laughed scornfully. “Remorse, do you figure? Jeez, what a job she did on that poor guy’s face, if it was she.”
    “If you hadn’t let them slip away from you we’d know for sure.”
    “Hell, they were at the dentist! Who ever got away from a dentist in less than an hour?”
    The unseen man said, “I wonder where the dead guy fits in, hanging around her. Well, fit. I guess he fits in nothing but a coffin, now. A closed coffin.” I heard him get up. “Now that we’ve put her to bed, we’d better get on the phone and let them know the party’s getting rough. Come on.”
    I gave the pair plenty of time to get clear. That made me thoroughly drenched by the time I’d crept back to check on the trailer again. Apparently Mrs. Drilling had found the crying jag relaxing. She wasn’t moving around in there any more. I decided it was safe to leave her until morning, while I dried myself off and tried to find something to eat. My last meal had been a drive-in hamburger a couple of hundred miles south. My last sleep had been further away than that, but sleep, of course, means nothing to us iron men of the undercover professions. At least that’s the theory on which we’re supposed to operate.
    It was a segregated campground: the peasants with tents were separated from the aristocrats with trailers. I’d been assigned a space pretty well over to the other side of the wooded area, and I’d pitched my tent to establish my claim before sneaking off to play Indian in the brush. The little Volkswagen was parked facing the front of the tent. From a distance it looked very good to me: it looked like dry clothes and a chocolate bar to ward off starvation until something more substantial could be obtained.
    As I moved closer, however, the car suddenly began to look less good. There was somebody in it, a woman, by the hair. My first thought was that somehow the woman I’d been watching had beat me here—after all, I knew of no other woman in the case. Then she saw me coming and got out to meet me, and I saw that she was considerably smaller and wirier than Genevieve Drilling.
    She stood by the car, waiting for me to reach her. I could make out that she was wearing dark pants and a light trench coat and light gloves. Her hair seemed to be black or very dark. Waiting, she pulled up a kind of hood to protect it from the rain.
    “You’re Clevenger?” she said as I stopped in front of her. “That’s what it says on the registration. David P. Clevenger, of Denver, Colorado.”
    “That’s me,” I said. “Now let’s talk about you.”
    “Not here,” she said. “The Victoria Hotel,