The Poisoners by Donald Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page B

could have been professional wariness, but more likely, I thought, it was just tall Miss Devlin’s normal way of regarding all smaller and prettier women.
    “What now, Mr. Helm?” she asked.
    Beverly had spotted the black man sitting in the car, guarded by the driver. She drew back against me fearfully, forgetting that she was mad at me. I pressed her arm in what I hoped was a reassuring way, holding her there.
    “Have you got a place lined up for target practice?” I asked Charlotte Devlin.
    She said, rather stiffly and disapprovingly, “Well, there’s the pistol range we use, but I didn’t think that was exactly what you had in mind, so I called around and learned that there are some deserted oil properties…”
    “The pistol range will do fine, if the backstop will handle Magnum loads.”
    Charlotte raised her eyebrows, looking relieved and at the same time annoyed—relieved that what I was going to do, with her assistance, was innocent enough to be done at a public firing range, and annoyed that I’d let her believe, or at least suspect, otherwise. I was aware that McConnell, listening in the car, had shifted position slightly. I couldn’t see him clearly enough to know whether or not he looked relieved, too.
    I hoped he did. I’d wanted him more or less anticipating that I was either going to execute him or shoot his ears off to make him talk. As long as he was brooding about the tough time I might be giving him soon, he wouldn’t be trying to figure out what other kind of shooting I might have in mind, and why.
    Helping Beverly into the front seat, I said to the taller girl: “Incidentally, you’d better tell your wheelman that some evasive action may be indicated. That taxi turned up just a little too conveniently. I have a hunch it was planted on me, and I’d prefer not to have certain people know where we’re going. They might start wondering about things I’d rather not have them wondering about, yet…”
    It was a fairly long ride. The driver knew his stuff, however, and by the time we reached our destination there wasn’t anybody behind us, but there had been. The driver got out to unlock a wire-mesh gate in a forbidding wire-mesh fence topped with barbed wire. Then he drove us past a shadowy building and spoke for the first time.
    “We’ve got up to a hundred yards available here, Mr. Helm,” he said. “What range do you want to shoot at?”
    “Short,” I said. “With silhouette targets if you’ve got them. I suppose there are lights.”
    “Sure, it’s rigged for night firing.” He drove a little farther and stopped the car. “Here you are. The beginners’ range. We like to make it easy for them to hit something. It’s good for the morale. Just a minute while I unlock the switchbox.”
    We sat there until the floodlights came on, illuminating the backstop, a high ridge of dirt out there, much too neat and level to have been formed by nature. The lights also picked out the roughly man-like and man-sized silhouettes lined up in front of the bank like two-dimensional soldiers at attention. I figured the range at twenty-five yards from the rearmost firing line, closest to the car; but the ground was also marked for shorter ranges.
    I was glad to see that the firing points weren’t covered. It wasn’t raining, we needed no protection, and the .44 makes quite enough noise without having it bounced back at you from any kind of a roof.
    “All right,” I said. “Bring him along, Miss Devlin. Where’s the cannon?”
    She handed it to me over the back of the seat. Checking the loads once more as I got out of the car, I regarded the weapon without fondness. I’ve never really understood the fascination of these outsized, overpowering weapons; yet it seems you can’t sell a gun these days if it hasn’t got Magnum in the title. This was the second job I’d had recently involving this kind of hopped-up hardware.
    Charlotte had backed out of the car, covering McConnell as he got out