A Nasty Piece of Work (21 page)

“I need you to scrunch to one side or the other,” I said. “Hard to follow someone from in front when you can’t see out the back.”

“Oh, sorry.” She moved over. The racing car was closing the gap so I sped up just enough to stay discreetly ahead of him. Two cars fell into line behind him. After six or seven blocks, the phallus signaled a right turn. Speeding up, I continued on for another block, turned right at the corner and right two blocks down and right again onto a long stretch of classy postwar residential apartment buildings set back from the street. I was expecting to see a pair of headlights coming toward me. Nothing. I pulled up at the curb, cut the motor and the lights and leaned into the steering wheel, thinking.

“So you’re supposed to be street-smart and lucky,” Friday said encouragingly.

“Right now I’m running on lucky,” I said. I had an idea. “Give me your mobile telephone and wait here.”

I got out and started down the sidewalk, eyeing the parking spaces between hedges in front of each of the apartment buildings. At midblock I spotted the silhouette of the phallus tucked in for the night in a space with rose vines woven into an overhead trellis. Making my way to the building’s lobby, I sidled past the phallus. It was a coal black Ferrari with red leather bucket seats, the hood over the motor was still pleasantly warm to the touch. In the dark I opened Friday’s mobile telephone and removed the chip, then smiling to beat the band, walking very carefully as if I were a wee bit tipsy, went up the steps and pushed through the door into the lobby. There was an elderly black man with a light gray crew cut and a trimmed white beard behind the night desk, and a thick glass door between me and a bank of elevators through which nobody went unless the night man buzzed you through. “My pal dropped this climbing into his Ferrari at the fancy riverside casino joint,” I said, holding out the mobile telephone. “Tried to catch up with him but couldn’t gain on that racing car of his. Will you give this to him in the morning?”

“You mean Mr. Picone.”

“Is there anyone else in Bullhead City drives a Ferrari?” I inpuired with what Kubra would have described as a knowing chortle.

The night man took the telephone from me and slipped it into a brown envelope and wrote on it
Mr. Picone 4C.
“I’ll be off duty but the day man will give it to him. Who shall I say—”

I chortled again. “He’ll know who left it here,” I said. “’Night.”

“’Night to you, sir.”

“Emilio Gava’s living in apartment 4C under the name of Picone,” I told Ornella back in the car. She had slipped into the front passenger seat where I could see the white of her thigh through the slit in her dress.

“My friend was right about you,” she said. “You’re plenty street-smart and don’t discourage easily. What you do, you do well.”

“You’re talking about finding a needle in a haystack,” I said.

She smiled one of those mystifying smiles that I was still busy deciphering. “I’m talking about the way you make love,” she said.

“Another compliment like that and I’ll light up the car with one of my aw-shucks blushes.”

I started the Toyota and headed back across the river to look for the all-night motel I’d spotted on the highway into Laughlin. After a while Friday murmured, “So where are we going?”

I was about to tell her when I noticed she’d fallen fast asleep. This time with her eyelids closed.

Twenty-five

I threw some cold water on my face and dialed Detective Awlson’s home number at seven ten the next morning. “Expect I woke you,” I said.

“Hell, no. I’ve been up for minutes,” he shot back in what sounded like an imitation of Groucho Marx describing how he swept women off his own feet.

I told him I’d tracked Gava down to Bullhead City. I gave him the street address, the apartment number, the name he was registered under. “Can you come up with a phone number for this Picone in 4C?”

“When do you need it by?”

“Ten minutes ago.”

“I’m on it,” he said.

When I phoned back, Awlson had the number for me. “What you figurin’ on doin’?” he asked.

“I’m going to go and wish him top of the morning,” I said. “Stay tuned.”

Friday was curled up in a fetal position on her side of the double bed, breathing heavily, snoring lightly. I propped up two pillows against the bed board and sat with my back to them, the motel telephone on my lap. I took a deep breath and exhaled and dialed nine for an outside line, then Picone’s number in Bullhead City. The phone must have rung twenty, twenty-five times before someone got around to answering it.

“Christ sake, you know what time it is? Who the fuck is this?”

“It’s someone who is going to save you a lot of grief,” I said. “But it’ll cost you an arm and a leg.”

I thought I could make out Emilio Gava lighting a cigarette on the other end of the phone line. I caught the dry hacking cough of a smoker savoring that first morning drag. “Bullhead City passed a no-smoking ordinance a few days back, Emilio. If you’re not careful you could be arrested for smoking in a no-smoking zone. R. Russell Fontenrose would have a hard time springing you from that rap.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Let’s skip the name-rank-serial-number bit and get down to job description. I’m a headhunter, Emilio. I’ve been tracking you across the country from the East of Eden poker condominium to that Blue Grass drug deal that got interrupted by three policemen to the courthouse where you walked on bail. Lot of folks would pay me handsomely to tell them where you are and who you are, Mr. Picone. Old man Baldini, for starters. The Las Cruces cop who arrested you at the Blue Grass. The girl who put up the $125K bail bond. The judge who let you out on bail thinking you would show up for trial. The FBI agent who runs the witness protection program you ran out on—he’s convinced you can help him with his inquiries into the murder of one Salvatore Baldini.”

Emilio must have been sucking on his cigarette because he didn’t answer right away. “You still there?” I asked. “If you’re thinking of running again, you won’t get far in that Ferrari of yours. There probably isn’t another car like that in the Far West.”

“Talk turkey, huh? What you expect to get from me, Mr. Headhunter?”

“Money.”

“How much?”

“Twenty-five grand. In crisp fifties and hundreds.”

“I don’t got that kind of dough at my fingertips.”

“You have ten times that in the bank accounts the Ruggeris set up for you, slugger.”

“Saying I go ahead with this, which I am not, how do I know you won’t come back for sloppy seconds?”

“You don’t. On the other hand you need to look at it from my point of view. This is a one-shot deal for me. Anything else wouldn’t make sense. I don’t want this to be the beginning of an ugly friendship, Emilio.”

“Say I got the money, which I am not saying, you planning on coming around to collect it?”

“Don’t play me for a chump, Restivo the Wrestler. You’re coming to me.”

“Where? When?”

Friday sat up in bed and tuned in to the conversation. She was wearing one of my T-shirts that was falling off one shoulder. “You talking to
him
?” she whispered. I nodded. To Emilio I said, “Midnight tonight.”

“That don’t leave me an awful lot of time,” he whined.

“It leaves you a day’s worth of banking hours,” I said. I gave him directions from Bullhead City to Kelso Depot. I told him I’d be out in the desert watching the Ferrari come down the road through the AN/PVS-10 telescopic night sight of an M-24 army sniper rifle. I couldn’t resist adding that I had reason to believe he knew how lethal a 175-grain hollow-point boat-tail round could be at half a mile. Ornella whispered in my free ear, “You’ve been reading too many detective novels.” In my ear glued to the telephone, I heard Silvio say almost the same thing. “You sound like you seen too fucking many Humphrey Bogart pictures.”

“With or without Bogart, I don’t much like motion pictures.”

“How can anyone not like flicks?”

“They distract us from real life, they don’t console us about real life.” I could tell we weren’t on the same wavelength. “Listen up, Emilio, did you ever see a woman lift a suitcase in a motion picture that looked as if it had anything in it except air? Most of what’s in pictures these days is as phony as these suitcases filled with air.”

“What the fuck we talking about movies?” Emilio demanded. He answered his own question. “This conversation is nuts. You are nuts.”

He was right, of course. It dawned on me that the last thing I needed to do was tangle with this hoodlum nicknamed the Wrestler. On the other hand, it was the first thing I needed to do if I wanted to get Ornella Neppi off the $125,000 hook she was hanging from. So I told Emilio about the abandoned hotel next to the railroad tracks at Kelso Depot. I told him to park his Ferrari a football field up the highway. I told him to leave the headlights and the interior lights on. I told him to walk to the hotel and leave the money under the staircase in what used to be the lobby. “Come alone,” I said. “I see someone else within ten miles, the deal’s off and your cover is blown, friend. At which point an old man in a wheelchair and his house proctologists will be breathing down your neck.”

“What about after?” he asked.

“What
about
after?”

“After I leave off the dough, if I decide to leave off the dough, then what?”

“After, you turn around and walk back to your car and take your cue from the spider and disappear back into your hole in the wall.”

I kept the phone to my ear but cut the connection with my thumb.

Ornella was impressed, which, looking back, I can see is what drove the dialogue between me and the bail jumper. “Wow!” she said softly.

I realized I’d been as tense as the night I’d staked out a Taliban safe house in Peshawar from a slit in the wall of the house across the alleyway. I had muscle cramps in the limbs that had muscles. I dropped the phone back on its hook and shook both my hands at the wrists the way I’d seen rock climbers do halfway up a cliff to get the blood flowing again.

“So you actually think he’ll show up?” Ornella asked.

“I think he’ll show up. I don’t think he’ll be carrying money.”

“Is he dangerous?”

“Is a snake dangerous?”

“You’re answering a question with a question, damn it.”

“Right now that’s the best I can do,” I said.

Twenty-six

I’ll do the Kelso Depot brawl now. It won’t be pretty. Parental guidance recommended, whatever.

I’d driven the Toyota over the Kelso tracks and off-road into a wadi a good two miles from the abandoned hotel, then hiked back, with Friday slugging along behind me, to a dune that had a good view of the Depot and the single paved road across the Mojave Desert leading to it. We’d brought along packaged white bread and a tube of mayonnaise and two cans of sardines and several bottles of Poland Spring water for a spur-of-the-moment picnic, but neither of us had an appetite for anything given the violence to come. By the time the sun had sizzled into the Mojave, kicking up a momentary firestorm on the horizon, and darkness began blotting up what was left of daylight, I was stretched out on the tarpaulin watching through the army PVS-7 night-vision goggles Ornella had picked up at Millman & Son Hard and Soft Ware. The bluish green hues rising off the desert in drifts stirred unpleasant recollections of the Hindu Kush—it was almost as if I was again trapped underwater and struggling to rise to the surface before my breath ran out. Friday heard me sucking air through my lips.

“You all right, Lemuel?” she asked. She was stretched out faceup on the tarp alongside me, watching the planets and then the stars sending their Morse-coded messages from the dark dome over her head. The black wig was gone, stuffed back into her silver astronaut knapsack, the thick makeup had been scrubbed off with Poland Spring water, the high heels had given way to basketball sneakers, the Sears sleeveless art-deco dress had been pulled up above her knees and the fabric tucked between and under her thighs. Through my goggles, the V-shaped sliver of skin on her chest looked to be the same color as the welts from that automobile accident I’d seen on her ribs, a sickly bluish green. I reached across and slipped a palm under the fabric onto her breast. She pressed her hand over the fabric, over my hand, locking in the gesture, sealing a contract we had yet to make.

After a time she asked if I had ever used night-vision goggles in Afghanistan.

“Once.”

“What did you see?”

“You don’t want to know. I don’t want to remember.”

She didn’t push the matter beyond where I wanted to go. I watched the luminous hands on my dad’s Bulova, they moved so slowly I thought the watch might have stopped and tried winding the stem only to find it was wound. I watched the Big Dipper pivot around Polaris. I watched Cassiopeia rise in the east. I watched the distant headlights of a car coming down the highway from Nipton flicker off and on as the road dipped and rose.

“He’s coming,” I whispered. My Bulova said it was twenty to midnight.

“Why are we whispering?” she whispered.

“We’re whispering because we’re frightened.”

I stood up and surveyed three hundred and sixty degrees of desert very carefully through the night-vision goggles. Iron oxide in desert rocks glowed in the dark. As far as I could see, nothing moved—not a coyote in sight, not a bramble blown by the wind. Then, at 11:44 sharp on my dad’s Bulova, one of those hundred-fifty-car Union Pacific freight trains hove into sight in the west. I took it for a rising planet until I saw the headlights on the first of the two locomotives and the penny dropped.

I must have cursed under my breath because Friday stirred. “What?”

“Forgot about the Union Pacific crawling past the hotel,” I said. “That’s how he’s going to do it.”

“Do what?”

Sure enough, only the abandoned hotel’s second floor and roof were visible for the twelve minutes it took the train to pass. I studied the hotel’s porch and ground floor through the goggles when I could see them again.