The Silencers Read Online Free Page A

that?”
    Fat Elena jerked up her sweater and showed me what it was. LeBaron laughed heartily.
    “Tetas,” he said. “You know, like tits. Cover them up, baby...”
    He touched me again with his elbow to remind me, and after a moment I looked around casually. There were tall Mr. Texas with his high-heeled boots and his pretty companion with her mutation minks and haystack hairdo. It seems like a hell of a place to bring your girl friend, was my first thought. But what could you expect from a guy who’d take a girl out to dinner dressed for a rodeo?
    The woman was watching the stage with stiff fascination. I looked that way again. Sarah, Lila—or was it Mary Jane?—had made her circuit once. Coming back towards us, along the edge of the floor, with an undulating, rhythmic walk, she looked suddenly very young despite her height and the dyed hair and the sexy satin dress—tall and young and kind of scared—but she did not falter. She swung a hip towards a table full of Mexicans and slipped past smoothly, laughing, before they could touch her. She reached out and rumpled the hair of an American tourist, retrieving her hand gracefully before he could seize it.
    “All the way, Lila!” somebody shouted from the back of the room.
    She smiled. The bloodhounds might be on her trail, but she was going to do her stuff regardless. The kid had guts. Well, I knew that. She’d tried to jump me, the time we’d got our identities confused in San Antonio. I’d been holding two guns at the time, like Wild Bill Hickok, but she’d jumped me anyway.
    “All the way!” the M.C. yelled, and the loud-speakers threw his voice at us from the dark recesses of the room. “All the way, baybee!”
    She made her corner and passed across the front of the stage, swinging away from us. Her back turned toward us, she reached up and did something feminine and provocative with her hair, teasing, before she reached for the zipper. As the yellow dress opened from top to bottom, baring her back, a knife, coming from nowhere, buried itself to the hilt just below her left shoulder blade.

5
    I made no apologies for letting it happen. My job wasn’t to protect her life, it was to get her out of an awkward situation alive or dead. I’d made sure that my instructions were quite clear on that point. If I’d been sent to preserve her from bodily harm, I’d have run the whole thing differently, and Mac would undoubtedly have worded his orders differently.
    I heard two quick warning whistles, barely audible, from LeBaron, meaning watch at your right (three means on your left and one means behind you), but I’d been in this business longer than he, and I’d already taken care of Dolores. Maybe she was just a nice friendly girl from Chihuahua City, but she’d been planted on us by the management and I wasn’t taking any chances. She folded when I clipped her, and I laid her head gently on the table, tucked a five-dollar bill into the front of her dress by way of apology and looked around.
    It was a nice hellish scene by this time. The long, dark room was in a turmoil as everybody tried to make it out the door before the police arrived. There were curses in Spanish, English and Texan. Meanwhile, on the brightly lighted stage at the other end, forgotten, the tall girl had gone to her knees in agony, feeling in back for the thing that hurt her. She couldn’t quite reach it, and she fell forward onto her yellow-satin stripper’s dress, spread out as if to receive her.
    LeBaron had muffed it. Fat Elena knew judo, too, apparently, and she was giving him a hard time. I couldn’t be bothered with them. I started for the stage, and somebody running past knocked me off balance. I caught a whiff of expensive perfume and felt soft fur brush against me.
    “Janie!” a woman’s voice gasped. “Oh, Janie...!”
    I picked myself out of the chairs and tables, and made it up to the stage. The lady of the minks was ahead of me, but the M.C. was ahead of her, crouching