The Hamlet Warning by Leonard Sanders Read Free Book Online Page A

afoot. I don’t know what it is. But it involves you and this flea-bitten country. I think you’d be damned foolish not to take advantage of it. That’s my personal opinion. But they gave me a long, prepared script. Want to hear it?”
    “Why not?” Loomis said. “It’s your show.”
    “O.K. Here it is: I spent some time in your old home town last week. You probably wouldn’t recognize it. The Interstate cuts through the west edge, and the house where your maternal grandparents lived is gone. The house you grew up in on the ranch is still standing, but no one has lived in it since your dad died. It’s deteriorating rapidly. Your high-school sweetheart is married to a rancher and has a daughter seventeen that looks a lot like she did at that age, if her high-school graduation picture was a good likeness.”
    Loomis knew that the monologue was calculated to stun him emotionally.
    It did.
    “The superhighway has put San Antone twenty minutes away, and most people now go there to shop,” Johnson went on. “Half the stores along Main Street are closed, and the windows of most are boarded up. Your old home town is practically a ghost town. The drugstore’s still open, but they’ve taken the soda fountain out, so I doubt if you could get your old job back. The movie theater closed in sixty-eight. Your Uncle Pete stores hay in it. And incidentally, he’s doing real well. He’s what? Eighty-two now? The ranch seems in good shape. He pastures about four hundred head of cattle on it — red cattle with white faces and no horns, I forget what the fuck they’re called.”
    “Polled Herefords,” Loomis said. “All right. I’m impressed. You and the company have gone to a great deal of trouble. But you’re talking about thirty-some-odd years ago. If you know that much, you know I left at fifteen. And I’ve never been back.”
    “And now you can’t go back,” Johnson said. “Not unless you send in your boxtops and accept our generous offer. According to the script, along about here you’re supposed to start weeping, swear you’ll do anything to go home again, and break into ‘America the Beautiful.’”
    “Shit, just my luck,” Loomis said. “I’ve forgotten the words.”
    “Your mind tends to rot in two-bit tropical revolutions,” Johnson said.
    “Since it’s old home week, how about some company news? What ever happened to Smitty?”
    “He bought it. About sixty-eight. Chopper lost a blade in the Delta.”
    “Tompkins?”
    Johnson laughed. “He’s out. A millionaire. The company set him up in a Delaware corporation as cover. He’s apparently more businessman than spook. The cover grew too lucrative. Now he’s running an airline.”
    “Melana?”
    “You’re not going to believe this. I flew back from Beirut and married her. Three kids now. Two boys and a girl.”
    “Son of a bitch. That must have jolted the folks at Langley.”
    “For a time. But it’s all right now. Gooks are in fashion and I’ve got a houseful.”
    “Somehow, I never figured you for a family man.”
    “Melana knows the score,” Johnson said. “She knows my work. She knows me. We just carry a lot of insurance and don’t think about it. She’s young and still beautiful. If anything happens, she’ll make out.”
    That was Johnson. The complete realist.
    “I suppose you heard about Susy,” Johnson added.
    “Yes,” Loomis said, fighting to hold back his anger. “They didn’t have to do that.”
    “The company wasn’t involved,” Johnson said quickly. “I made certain, later. It was local talent. The company had nothing to do with it.”
    “Well, it happened,” Loomis said. “She’s long dead. And you’ve made your point. What is it they want me to do?”
    “First, go on the payroll.”
    “In place?”
    “In place.”
    “No,” Loomis said emphatically. “I’m old enough to be old-fashioned. I only work for one country at a time.”
    “Better think it over. The pay’s good, and you’re no spring