Free The Removers by Donald Hamilton Page B

shoulder. Her voice was muffled. “Why couldn’t we just be two ordinary people, with ordinary jobs and parents? Why does it have to be. Why? That’s a lousy, useless word, isn’t it? You’re really not after Dad, are you? But if he should get in the way.”
    You had to hand it to the kid. She kept coming up with all the right answers. I’d met professionals who’d have taken a week to get the information she’d wormed out of me in one evening—and the funny thing was, the more she learned, the more sure I became that she was just exactly what she seemed. There was something naive and direct about her prying that, more and more, led me to believe that my earlier suspicions had been unjustified.
    She sat up beside me suddenly, looking through the windshield.
    “What’s the matter?”
    “There’s a jack,” she said. “Look!”
    She pointed, and I saw a long-legged jack rabbit take off through the sparse brush. There was light around us now, although the sun was not yet in sight. Moira freed herself from my arm and reached for the door handle.
    I said, “What—”
    “I promised to show you something this morning, remember? Have you got a pair of binoculars in this caravan? Well, get them quick while I get the dog.”
    She was a screwy kid. I dug around behind the seat and got out the war-surplus 7x50’s that I carry there—I picked up some fine, light, compact Leitz glasses overseas, but they’re too nice to leave around like that; besides, they don’t have the light-gathering power of the big old optical relic. When I came around the truck, she had Sheik out, at the cost of some paw-smudges on the front of her dress. While she brushed herself off, he was stretching lazily, looking completely ridiculous with his bony rump in the air and his long body flexed like Robin Hood’s bow.
    “Come on,” she said. “Let’s see if he’ll pick it up.”
    We made a peculiar procession heading out across the desert, she in her high heels with the unlikely-looking dog on leash, and I following gingerly in my sporty loafers, carrying the binoculars, cased. I don’t know if we found the same bunny or another—they’re hares, actually—but suddenly there was a thumping sound and one took off ahead of us. Moira knelt down quickly and put her arm around the dog’s neck as she snapped off the lead. She hugged him tightly and released him.
    “Go get him, Sheik!” she breathed. “Go get him, big dog!”
    The Afghan didn’t pay much attention to this pep talk. He didn’t seem much interested in the vanished jack rabbit, either. He just stood for a moment, kind of looking around vaguely and testing the breeze with his nose—why he’d bother with that, I don’t know, since they’re supposed to be sight-runners without much sense of smell. Maybe nobody’d told him.
    Then he started forward deliberately with that gliding gait I’d seen once before. He didn’t really seem to be gathering speed, any more than a train pulling out of the station so gradually, at first, that you don’t realize it’s moving. By the time I realized Sheik actually had something in view and was going after it, he was lost to sight over the nearest ridge.
    “This way!” Moira said. “Up on the knob here! We can see it all from there, I hope.”
    We labored upwards. The Nevada desert is a prickly place—maybe all of them are—and I kept getting small sharp spikes driven clear through the leather of my shoes. How she was doing in her thin pumps, I didn’t even want to think about. We reached the top, panting, and looked around. There wasn’t an animal visible that I could see.
    “Let me have them,” she said, taking the binoculars from me. “There he is!” she said presently, passing them back. “Look way out there. See, along that arroyo—”
    The dog was out there, all right. I just hadn’t looked far enough out. I found him with the naked eye, first. He didn’t seem to be moving very fast, just kind of ambling along. Then