Free The Demolishers by Donald Hamilton

country saying: If they’s big enough they’s old enough.”
    She said, “I don’t think that was meant to apply here.” I said, “I don’t understand your complaint. You’re a mere slip of a girl but nobody hesitated to blow you up with a bomb. Matthew was just a boy, himself, by some standards, but they didn’t spare him. Why should I worry about a punk’s birthday when he’s waving a gun at me?” I cleared my throat. “As far as I’m concerned, anybody who’s old enough to shoot is old enough to get shot. Am I supposed to let somebody empty a cheap .22 into me just because his ID says he can’t drink legally yet? Anyway, I was aiming for his lower leg. Don’t you ever sight in your weapons? That damn peashooter of yours throws over a foot high at fifteen feet.”
    “It’s just something Daddy gave me when I said I wanted a gun to carry. Its main virtue, he said, was that if I did shoot somebody with it, it couldn’t be traced.” “Main and only virtue,” I said. “Do you want the lousy clunker back?”
    “No, but I suppose Daddy’ll want to bury it, now that it’s killed somebody.” She hesitated. “I wasn’t blaming you for shooting him. He did have a gun. It was what . . . what you did to him afterwards, a dying boy, that was a little hard to stomach.”
    I said, “Did you want me to have killed him for nothing? Well, just to save my skin?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “He had only a minute or two left. If there’s a pressure point you can use to check the bleeding when that big leg artery is cut that high, I don’t know about it. I could either just stand there and watch him exsanguinate, or I could get something useful out of him while he was still breathing. In order to accomplish that, I had to keep him from realizing what was happening to him; what leverage can you use on a man, or even a boy, who knows he’s dying? So I went at him hard and bullied him, threatened him, scared him; and I got a couple of words before he went. What they mean, if anything, I don’t know yet, but it didn’t hurt him much more than he was already hurt, did it?” I took a fake-alligator wallet out of my pocket and opened it to check the driver’s license. I read the name aloud: “Antonio Morelos.”
    We drove for a while in silence; then she said, “It’s el no mb re.”
    “What?”
    “When you were browbeating him. Your Spanish is lousy. Nombre is masculine. El nombre, not la nombre.”
    “Thank you, teacher.”
    “Just what did he say?” she asked. “He was so weak we couldn’t hear.”
    I said, “Your daddy’s probably going to go for a big debriefing scene; they’ll have given him a preliminary report over one of the car phones. So let’s save the postmortem until we get there.”
    She glanced at me sharply. “If you’re thinking of holding out on him, please don’t. He ... he gets very rough sometimes.”
    I said, “Oh, gee, golly, you mustn’t scare me like that, ma’am.”
    Her mouth tightened. “Just because his men have been trained not to behave like movie hoods, just because they say mister and missis and please, don’t underestimate what they’re capable of.”
    I said, “What are you trying to do, tease me into telling you how we big, tough characters from Washington eat little fellows like that for breakfast and spit out the bones?”
    She laughed, and stopped laughing. “I guess ... I guess I just don’t want any unpleasantness between the two men who are left in my life now that Matthew . . . now that I no longer have a husband. Please don’t fight with Daddy if you can help it, Matt.” She went on quickly, without waiting for me to commit myself: “That was the bridge across Lake Worth we just crossed. Now we’re driving through Richville-by-the-Sea, vulgarly known as Palm Beach. You should really take your hat off to show respect, like in church. If you had a hat.” “They gave you a hard time here when you were a kid, huh?”
    “And still do. It