The Ravagers Read Free Page B

room four-eleven. Just as soon as you get cleaned up. You can’t go through the lobby that muddy.”
    “The Victoria Hotel,” I said. “What makes you think I’ll come?”
    She smiled. She seemed to have nice white teeth; they showed up well in the darkness. I had the impression she might look quite attractive if I could see her clearly.
    “Oh, you’ll come,” she said. “Or would you rather tell the Regina police what you were doing in a room at The Plainsman Motel with a dead body? Of course, the body had been dead for quite a while before you sneaked up and picked the lock to get in, but I don’t really think you want to be called upon to explain your behavior officially, in a foreign country. Room four-eleven, Mr. Clevenger.”
    I said, “Throw in a drink and a roast beef sandwich and it’s a deal.”
    She laughed and turned away. It was a break of sorts, I thought wryly, watching her walk off. Without expending any effort, I’d learned that I had, after all, been observed earlier. I was now taking steps to identify the observer, as I’d been instructed to do.

4
    She was standing at the dresser in the corner, operating on the cap of an interesting-looking bottle, when I entered the hotel room after knocking on the door and being told it was unlocked, come in.
    “Your sandwich is over on the TV,” she said without looking around. “Help yourself, Mr. Clevenger. I’m sorry, they didn’t bring up any mustard or catsup.”
    I said, “Who needs it? At the moment I could eat the damn cow with the hair on.”
    I went over and took a couple of bites and felt stirrings of returning strength and intelligence. I swung around to look at the small, wiry girl across the room. She was wearing slim black pants, a long-sleeved white silk shirt, and a little open black vest. What the costume was supposed to represent wasn’t immediately clear to me, but then there’s a lot about women’s fashions I don’t dig.
    I asked, “Do I call you by a name or do you answer to any loud noise?”
    She said without turning her head, “I’m registered as Elaine Harms. If you’ve got to call me something, that’ll do.”
    “Sure.”
    “I hope you like Scotch. It’s as cheap as anything up here, which isn’t cheap.”
    “Scotch is fine.”
    Normally I’m a bourbon-and-martini man, but I don’t consider it a principle worth fighting for at three in the morning in a strange girl’s hotel room. Anyway, I was less interested in her liquor than in the face she was being so careful to hide from me. When she turned, there was something deliberate and challenging in the movement that would have warned me, had I needed warning. She came forward with a drink in each hand and a rather malicious gleam in her eyes, watching me for signs of shock. To hell with her. I’ve played poker since I was a boy; and I’ve seen plenty of men—and women, too— with damaged faces. Only a couple of hours back I’d seen a man with no face at all. She couldn’t scare me.
    I took the glass she held out and said, “Thanks. You’re a lifesaver, Miss Harms.”
    “I hope your sandwich is all right, Mr. Clevenger.”
    “Swell,” I said. “Two more like it would just about bring my day’s intake up to the subsistence level.”
    It wasn’t really very shocking. I mean, she’d had smallpox as a kid, that was all. It had left her skin with a general over-all roughness. It was too bad, of course, but not as bad as if she’d had the fragile type of good looks to which a rose-petal complexion is essential.
    Instead, she had a kind of street-urchin face with a good big mouth and a small upturned nose. With a smooth skin, she’d merely have looked cute; now she looked both cute and tough. The smallpox scars did for her what a dueling scar does for a man; they gave her a hard and dangerous look. In her pants and silk shirt, she resembled one of the deadly, often similarly pockmarked, sword-packing young dandies of centuries past, who’d skewer you