Dead and Gone (25 page)

“They wanted to kill you because they knew you. We do not know why. Assassins kill when they are paid. But those who hire assassins, it is always for one of two reasons: it is either what you did, or what you are. What you described, it was too intricate for simple revenge. Too expensive. And it has become very, very complicated. So it must be that whoever wants you dead also fears you.”

“Look, Gem, all this … logic of yours is fine, but—”

“Indulge me, please. Assume they know you. Or know
about
you, anyway. They do not know where you are. Or even if you are alive. But one thing I am certain they would not expect—that you would be married.”

“Huh?”

“Oh, I do not mean you
could
not marry. Have you ever—?”

“No.”

“Yes. All right. What I meant was, you would not be … traveling as a married man. With a wife, see?”

“So you’re coming along as cover?”

“I am coming along because I am your woman.”

“You keep saying that.”

“That?”

“That you’re my woman.”

“I am.”

“My ‘woman’ … What does that mean in Cambodian, my boss?”

“Don’t be silly!” She giggled. “I am very obedient.”

“So long as—?”

“So long as the orders are sensible,” she said, climbing off my lap.

G
em sat quietly next to me in the back seat of Flacco’s Impala on the way back up to Portland. Maybe being a married woman required more decorum.

“I am going to build one for myself, very soon,” Gordo said to me. I figured Flacco had heard this a few hundred times.

“Which way are you looking to go?”

“Like this one,” he said, patting the Impala’s padded dash. “But not no Chevy, that’s for sure.”

“Because …?”

“I need my ride to be … I don’t know, man … like no other one on the road. But I want to stay with the factory look,” he said, with a nod in Flacco’s direction. “That’s what’s happening now.”

“Me, I like the fifties better than the sixties for that,” I told him.

“Fifties? I don’t know, man. The sixties, the shapes were … wilder, you know?”

“Maybe. Maybe
too
wild. If I was doing it, I’d want something people’d have to look twice at just to figure out what it was.”

“Hey,
hombre,”
Flacco threw in, “there’s no way to do that when they made
millions
of each model then. What you mean? Something like a ’55 Crown Vic? Or a ’57 Fury? They’re cool, all right, but you could pick one out at a hundred yards if you leave them looking near-stock.”

“You’re right. But the one I was thinking of, it’d slip right by, you did it right.”

“So which one, man?” Gordo wanted to know.

“Picture this,” I told them. “A ’56 Packard Caribbean. The hardtop, not the convertible. Strip all the chrome, even that fat wide strip down the sides. Then you slam it all around—not put it in the weeds, just a nice drop. Give the top a subtle chop … maybe only a couple of inches. I see it with some old-style mag wheels, like American Racing used to put out. Paint it about twenty coats of the deepest, darkest purple-black—you know, that Chromallusion stuff that changes color depending on how you look at it.”

“I never seen one of those,” Gordo said.

“I did,” Flacco said. “It had those giant taillights, right? Cathedrals?”

“That’s the one.”

“The man’s nailed it,
compadre,”
Flacco told his partner. “That would be the biggest, bossest, most evil-looking ride on the whole coast. And those suckers had some
serious
cubes.
Mucho
room for anything you wanted to do with the rubber, too.”

“Problem is finding one,” I reminded him.

“Oh, they’ll be out there,” Flacco assured me. “This part of the country, people
keep
their old cars. There’s always Arizona, too—we got plenty people down there could keep a lookout for us. And you should have seen
this
one when I first got it. Just a rusted-out shell.”

“You went frame-off?”

“Sí!”
he said, proudly. “Me and my man, here, we got about a million hours in it. Gordo’s the mechanic, I’m the bodyman.”

“Be harder for the Packard,” I said. “They make all kinds of NOS parts for Chevys, but …”

“Be more work, is all,” Gordo said, reaching over to high-five Flacco.

“It sounds very beautiful,” Gem said, her chest puffed out a bit, proud of me for some reason.

I
t was still dark when they dropped us off in front of the Delta terminal at PDX. The first-class line was empty. Check-in was nothing at all—the clerk glanced at my passport photo so quick I could have been Dennis Rodman for all he knew.

The first-class thing was all about keeping our options as open as possible. We were only taking carry-ons, and they cut you a bit more slack with the size of the bags up in the front of the plane. You get out faster, too, and that can count for something when you have to change planes. But most important was that we wouldn’t have any company right next to us—I could take the window seat and just lie in the shadow until it was time to make our move.

The corridor leading to the gates at PDX was like an indoor mall. Upscale shops, some brand-name, some “crafts,” even a fancy bookstore—Powell’s—a real one, not the usual magazine stand with a couple of paperback racks.

Gem failed to surprise me by suggesting that we had plenty of time to get something to eat. A bakery-and-coffee-shop was open, with little café-style tables standing outside. Inside, music was coming over the speakers. Kathy Young’s version of “A Thousand Stars.” The sound system must have been real sophisticated, because someone had the bass track isolated … and cranked up so high you could barely make out the lyrics. I know it’s hip to say the Rivileers’ version is the real thing, and Kathy’s was just a white-bread cover. But I think the girl really brings it, her own way.

I got a hot chocolate and a croissant. Gem got a tray-full of stuff. We sat outside all by ourselves, listening to the music. The Spaniels’ version of “Goodnite Sweetheart, Goodnite.” The Paradons doing “Diamonds and Pearls.” The Coasters on “Young Blood.”

“What do you call that?” Gem asked me, head cocked in the direction of the music. “Rock and roll?”

“No. It’s doo-wop. From the fifties, mostly. Where the voices were the instruments—
a capella
. The kind of stuff that sounds the same in the subway as it does in the studio. If you ever heard the Cardinals, or the Jacks, or the Passions, or—”

“And today it does not?” she interrupted.

“Today it’s all sixty-four-track, electronic-mixmaster stuff. The engineers are as important as the musicians. Except for the true-blues stuff.”

“What is that?”

We had time, so I told her about Son Seals. And Magic Judy Henske. And Paul Butterfield. Gem was so obviously listening,
really
listening, that I would have gone on for a much longer time … but she finally tapped her watch and raised her eyebrows.

T
he metal implants in my skull didn’t set off the detectors like I’d thought they might—I wore one of those Medi-Guard ID bracelets, just in case I had to explain. I’d left the never-fired twin to the piece I’d put Dmitri down with at Gem’s, and made her leave her baby Derringer there, too, so I figured we were golden when our bags went through the conveyor without attracting any attention. But as we turned to enter the corridor to the gate, someone called out, “Sir!”

It was a guy in some kind of uniform. He motioned me over. “Sir, do you mind if we check your luggage?”

“Go ahead,” I told him.

But instead of opening my bag, he put it on a small, flat platform, then ran a wand over the outside. “Supersensitive,” he said. “It can detect the most microscopic traces.”

“Of what?” I asked him. “Cocaine?”

“No, sir,” he said, a thin smile on his face. “This tests for the presence of explosives.”

“That’s nice. So why did you decide to check
my
bag?”

“Well, sir, this was just a random check, you understand.”

“I understand you didn’t
randomly
check anybody else.”

“Honey, sssshhh. The officer is just doing his job,” Gem said, tugging at my sleeve as if she thought I was going to lose my temper.

“All finished,” the ATF cop announced. “Thank you for your cooperation, sir.”

As we walked away, I put my arm around Gem’s waist. She moved slightly closer to me. I dropped my hand to her bottom and gave it a hard pinch.

“Oh!” she said. Then: “What was
that
for?”

“Overacting,” I told her.

“Pooh!” is all I got in response. But she didn’t move away.

W
hen you fly first-class, they let you board first, right along with the people with infants and the ones who need assistance walking. Not for me. You take your seat first, everybody passing through to the back entertains themselves by checking you out.

And they always have plenty of time to do that, because some certified hemorrhoid is guaranteed to stop by the first overhead, where they keep the magazines, and root through them one by one, taking his own sweet time before grabbing a whole fucking handful he can hoard for himself.

By the time we boarded, the overhead racks were crammed full. Gem said something to the flight attendant, and he opened a closet near the kitchen and placed our stuff inside. I climbed in first. Gem brought me a blanket and a pillow, then settled herself in.

The porthole next to me was dimpled with raindrops by the time we were cleared for takeoff, but it didn’t delay things.

Our flight attendant was a man in his forties, maybe, with carefully combed brown hair and a tight smile. He made the mistake of asking Gem if he could get her anything before takeoff. Me, I closed my eyes and tried to keep images of Pansy from opening inside my window.

When Gem finished her dozen sacks of peanuts and four bottles of water, she carefully spread a blanket over my lap. Then she slipped her hand under it.

W
e only had about a half-hour to catch our connecting flight, but Gem decided that was enough to make me buy her a frozen-yogurt cone topped with hot fudge.

It was just after eleven-thirty in the morning when we touched down in Albuquerque. I felt the tension go out of my body as soon as we got inside the terminal—you miss a meet with Lune, you might never get another.

I wanted to go outside to the parking lot right away, see if the tiger-striped car was where the message said it would be. But I knew better, so I just let Gem pull me through the airport until she found a place that sold a pair of boots she just had to have. That killed more than an hour. The search for just the right restaurant took some time off the clock, too. And by the time we’d finished there, we only had about twenty minutes to contact.

W
e walked past the taxi stand and headed for the parking lot. I held a scrap of cardboard in my hand and kept glancing down at it. Anyone watching would assume I’d written down the location where we’d left our car on the back of the claim ticket.

I led Gem straight to the top floor, figuring whoever left the contact car in place would have picked the least desirable spot, so it would attract less attention if it had to stay there for a while. We stepped off the elevator and started a brisk circuit, as if we knew where we were going. It didn’t take more than a couple of minutes to find what we wanted: a generic GM boxcar sedan covered in orange primer and black tiger-pattern stripes.

“Wait,” was all the message Mama had given me. When we walked up closer, the GM turned out to be an eighties-era Buick. An empty one. And it looked like it had been that way for a while. I glanced at my watch: 1:51. I patted my pocket for the cigarettes that weren’t there. Pulled Gem close to me so whoever showed wouldn’t think she was a spectator. Breathed slow and shallow through my nose.

A once-red Land Rover, one of the old ones, came to a stop perpendicular to the tiger-striped Buick, blocking us in. The windows were too deeply tinted to see inside. The back door closest to us opened slightly. I pulled it toward us, gently. The back seat was empty. I got in first, Gem right behind. The driver didn’t turn around. All I could see was that he was wearing an Australian Akruba hat. And next to him, on the passenger seat, was a mammoth pit bull, a brindle with white markings. The dog turned and regarded us with the flat, confident stare of someone who knows, no matter what you’re holding, he’s packing something a lot heavier.

The Land Rover pulled off. Gem opened her mouth, but I put two fingers across her lips before any sound came out. I knew what the problem was … just not how the driver was going to handle it.

We exited at the gate, turned left, and proceeded at a leisurely pace through the city. From where I was sitting, the only gauges I could see were navigational. I spotted a small-screen GPS unit, as well as a large mechanical compass and altimeter—whoever put that rig together was a heavy believer in backups. We were driving east on a complicated highway system. After a while, we got off and curled back so that we were going north. And climbing. When the altimeter got past six thousand feet, the driver suddenly pulled over and stopped.

Nothing happened for a minute or two. Then he dismounted. I waited for him to come around and open up the back doors, but all he did was let the monster pit bull out, leaving that door wide open. Through the window, I could see him step back a few yards, but the dog didn’t move, holding its ground. The driver took off his hat, tossed it aside, then made a “come toward me” gesture with his hand. I knew better than to exit from the door out of the driver’s vision, so I reached across Gem, opened her door, and guided her out, with me right behind.

“Close enough,” the driver said, as soon as both of us were on the ground. I could see he was an Indian—heavy cheekbones, dark eyes, thick black hair combed straight back and worn close to his skull, a calm interior stillness radiating off him. His skin had a faint coppery tone, but the shade was too light for his features—I figured him for a mixed-blood.