The Annihilators Read Online Free Page B

least be a consultation before anything was done. Maybe somebody sensible would prevail.
    Waiting, I thought about one possible course of action I’d passed up: I could have tried to beat the location out of her while she was still within my reach. The fact that she was a girl and quite attractive had not, of course, figured in my decision on the subject: Hell, they ask for equal treatment these days. Who am I to deny it to them? But that kind of interrogation is a long, slow process and doesn’t always work with the patriots and fanatics. Well, anybody can be broken eventually, but sometimes it takes days, even weeks. And even if I’d learned where Elly was being held, the odds would have been very great against my getting her away unharmed…
    Dolores Anaya Jimenez was hanging up the phone. I could tell nothing from her attitude, at the distance. She started walking again, in her crisp high-heeled way, and I followed; but when we came to a larger, better-lighted street and she flagged down a late-cruising taxi, I let her go. She probably knew I was behind her. It was my obvious move because it was my only move. She would lead me nowhere useful; and the word had now been passed, one way or the other.
    I walked back to the apartment building. Their timing was very good; or maybe they’d been waiting for my appearance. I saw the big old sedan turn the corner ahead very fast and brake hard in front of the building. I saw the door open. Something fell out and rolled along the pavement. Then they were roaring past me, accelerating violently. There were two of them. The street lights caught them briefly: a heavy-faced, darkly moustached young man in front, with massive shoulders, driving: and in the rear, struggling to get the car door closed again after discharging his cargo, a smaller, slighter young man, cleanshaven, whose features were quite familiar. I was getting so I could spot a Jimenez at a glance. Brother Emilio, and his friend the Bear. I suppose I could have shot at them, but what was the point? That would come, but there was no hurry now. There would be plenty of time for all that, later.
    The doorman was hurrying out to look, drawn by the screech of rubber, but I was the first to reach her. You learn how to shut yourself off at times like that. You button up the emotional armor like a tank going into battle. But the defenses are never perfect; and I stood there thinking how small she looked, lying there. I thought of how it would have hurt her to know she’d be seen like that, with a shoe missing and her stockings torn by the fall and her dress dirty and disordered, darkly stained in front around the small tear under the breast where the knife had penetrated.
    Elly’s face was very pale. Her eyes were open and unseeing. There was an ugly scrape along one cheek, but it had not bled significantly. They do not bleed much after the heart stops beating. I knew a sickening sense of loss and guilt. I reached down to tidy her dress a bit, but stopped. That was just me catering to my lousy conscience. The police wouldn’t like it; and it didn’t really, matter to her now…
    The police gave me a hard time, of course. They don’t like to find a man with a gun, even a man with an unfired gun, standing over a dead body. In fact they simply don’t like to find a man with a gun, period. They want the firearms concession all to themselves.
    But I finally managed to get my ID looked at by a plainclothes supercop of some kind named Bannon, to whom they’d turned me over at last like a curious specimen of butterfly they’d netted and stuck on a pin for careful scientific classification. Bannon was large and red-faced and sloppy-looking; and I’d met them before, those sloppy-looking law-enforcement gents who hope you’ll assume that their brains are as dull as the creases in their pants. His small greenish eyes studied the fancy little leather folder with its impressively official-looking contents that we carry to