“On perjury.”
“That will just be a start!”
“I’m looking for the finish, Harry,” Michael said, and hung up.
The metal detector was a tunnel four or five feet long, and he had to walk a ramp up inside, and back down. On a trip to Hawaii six months ago, before everything went wrong, he and Pat had talked about how airline travel just wasn’t fun or special anymore; once upon a time, two or three years back, passengers wore suits and dresses, and the food was decent, and the stewardesses were friendly, and anyone with the price of a ticket was a kind of jet setter. Now you had to submit yourself and anything you carried onto the plane to a frisk.
“Like a common criminal!” Pat had said. “All the romance is going out of it.”
His wife and her voice in his mind, Michael walked casually toward his gate and didn’t spot Marshal Don Hughes until nearly too late.
The lanky, Apache-cheeked Hughes, his back to Michael, was at the check-in counter talking to a stewardess, showing her something—a picture of Michael probably. Two other guys in off -the-rack suits and snap-brim hats—who the fuck wore hats anymore, but feds!—were bookending Hughes, and fortunately both men also had their backs partly to Michael.
One marshal began to swing around, probably on the lookout for Michael, who lowered his head and fell in with a few other passengers, and moved on past the gate.
The airport was fairly dead this time of night, and it wasn’t as if a crowd was available to get lost in. But finally he found another small group to walk with and headed back. He watched in the reflection of a closed newsstand’s window to see if Hughes and/or his Joe Fridays were on to him.
Apparently they weren’t, because soon Michael had made it back out into the terminal lobby, his mind clicking through a thousand things, including wondering if Shore had been keeping him on the phone so Marshal Hughes could arrive and nab him.
Then he stopped in his tracks. Oh shit, he thought, sick with visions of his money and his guns catching the plane without him, going to Phoenix to make the connecting flight on their way to Reno.…
He went directly to the American Airlines counter, where he sucked in a relieved breath as he saw his Samsonite still waiting amid half a dozen others to be passed through for loading.
“I’ve got a sick kid at home,” he told the woman at the counter. “I have to scrap this flight. Can I get my bag back?”
He waved his boarding pass.
“No problem, sir,” she said, with a friendly apple-cheeked smile. The blue-eyed blonde looked just a little like Pat—or was he reading in? “I remember you—you seemed distracted. I hope your, uh…little boy?”
“Little girl.”
“Hope she gets better. You can use your ticket at a later date, no problem.”
Within two minutes he was again in the yellow-lit parking lot, unlocking the driver’s side of a wine-color Lincoln that he had never expected to see again. He unlocked and opened the back door, and threw the Samsonite in on the seat. He clicked the suitcase open, got the .45 out, stuck it in his waistband, closed the case, and soon was driving out of Tucson International Airport.
The terrible reality was he had only one option: driving to Lake Tahoe. The trip would take at least a dozen hours, possibly more, and he’d already had a long traumatic day. His soldier’s detachment had saved him so far, but fatigue could eat away at that, and emotions could get out of their cage.…
Right now, as he headed north, he tried to decide whether Anna was in any immediate danger.
She was not Giancana’s target. But if the “Smith family” cover had been blown due to Anna keeping in touch with Gary Grace, the girl’s current whereabouts would be known to the Outfit. The nastiest scenario he could come up with was Giancana goons snatching her and using her to get at Michael. If they already knew where she was, such a kidnapping had probably already taken place.
Bad as that was, she stayed alive.
Associate Director Shore seemed unaware of Anna’s status, although admittedly that could have been a scam. If WITSEC did know about the girl running away, and where she’d gone, Michael could do nothing about it. And the feds were no threat to her, really.
Perhaps he should call that panic number again, and send Shore after Anna, to protect her in case Giancana sent his forces after her.…
…But what if it hadn’t been Anna’s indiscretion with Gary that had blown the Smiths’ cover?
What if WITSEC had sprung a leak?
Pushing the panic button in that case meant handing Anna over to their betrayer.
No.
His only option was to go after his daughter himself; and she wasn’t going anywhere, not until after prom, which was Saturday night at eight p.m.
At Cal-Neva Lodge.
One eleven a.m., still near the airport, he pulled into a Standard station and told the gawky high-school-age attendant, “Fill ’er up.”
The Lincoln’s gas tank was what, twenty-one gallons? But he was getting around ten miles to the gallon. So he bought a canister of gasoline and two quarts of oil, as well as several big jugs of water, and put them in the trunk.
The coveralled kid, in the process of cleaning the windshield, grinned as he chewed his gum and said, “Must be gettin’ ready to do some desert driving.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you’re smart to do it at night.”
“Not sure ‘smart’ is the word. You got any coolers? Something on the small side?”
“Sure.”
“Throw some ice in one, and toss half a dozen cans of Coke in there, too. And a couple Snickers bars.”
“Sure thing!”
He gave the kid a twenty-keep-the-change, and then bore north on 89, going straight up through Tucson, barely noticing the slumbering city. He started with the windows rolled up and the air conditioner on low—cool enough outside without it, but he didn’t relish the rush of wind. Wasn’t like he was setting out in a buckboard into the wilderness—the Lincoln had comfy bucket seats, a Cartier clock, and plenty of headroom, not to mention horsepower.
Washed ivory in moonlight, the open plains of the desert, bordered by blue-tinged mountains, had a soothing, otherworldly beauty. Few other cars were on the road, and he had the two-lane stripe of concrete mostly to himself, often driving straight down the middle. He and Pat had taken this route to Vegas now and then, because they liked to spend the quiet time together, listening to music, enjoying the strangely peaceful landscape and the feeling that they were the only two people in the entire world.
He thought about her, various little incidents over the years, jumping from high school to just last year, from their early days in Chicago to Crystal Bay—nothing major, just tiny anecdotes that his mind kept playing for him, one memory triggering another and another.
An odd detached calmness settled over him as he drove and drove and drove. Whenever he came to a gas station, he would stop and fill up, since one never knew in the desert; many of these stations were twenty-four-hour, but the desert didn’t listen to reason, so better to keep the tank as full as possible.
Some stations had diners still open, but he didn’t eat, other than a Snickers bar about two hours in; and he drank Cokes, their caffeine helping out, and would stop and pee alongside the road, feeling weirdly serene as he sent a yellow arc into the ivory landscape under a vast sky of stars.
The third roadside pee break, he had his first bad moment. He looked up at the sky and said, “She was right, wasn’t she? Either you’re not fucking up there at all.…Or worse, you are up there and we’re just some goddamn ant farm you lost interest in! Fuck you!”
He yelled all of this, and it sounded hollow in the night, not echoing exactly, more floating.
Despite the caffeine, he was getting tired, and about four hours in, the monotony stopped helping and started hurting. Suddenly he was weaving and ran off on the soft shoulder and woke himself up. He reached into the cooler on the otherwise empty rider’s bucket seat, and got an
other can of Coke going. He turned the air conditioner up until the car’s interior was damn near freezing. Then he stuffed a random four-track into the tape player, and Johnny Mathis came on.
“Chances are,” Mathis sang, and Michael remembered how much Pat liked the song—wasn’t her favorite or anything, just a song that when it came on, she’d always say, “That’s so pretty,” and he began to cry.
Losing control of himself and the vehicle, he had to pull alongside the road and get out, and he knelt on the sandy desert floor in the big empty cathedral of the night, cacti here and there like prickly votive candles. He wasn’t praying. He was weeping.
Ten minutes later he got shakily to his feet, pouting like a kid who suffered an unfair parental spanking, flashed the sky a middle finger, and again got behind the wheel.
The idea had been to tough out the whole twelve or thirteen hours, but by just after dawn, when the Lincoln rolled through suburban Henderson into Vegas, Michael had decided he needed a new plan.
His route didn’t take him to his one-time home away from home, the Strip, where the Vegas of the Sands and Stardust and Sahara was in the process of displacement by the overblown-themed likes of Circus Circus, Caesar’s Palace, and the MGM Grand. Howard Hughes had talked of Vegas becoming a “family” town (not meaning “family” in the Syndicate sense, either), a concept that longtime casino manager Michael knew had great potential.
In some respects the Cal-Neva had anticipated that, with its genuine resort-in-the-mountains attributes, boating, hiking, horseback riding; yet a certain nostalgic fondness for the Rat Pack glory days lingered in Michael even now, perhaps because on his periodic Vegas stints, he and Pat had shared laughter and love in this neon paradise, hobnobbing with celebrities, enjoying fine food and the lush life.
Near downtown, practically in the shadow of that leering electric cowboy Vegas Vic, he pulled into the Lucky Seven Motel, one of those space-age two-story courtyard affairs with glass flecks in the cement serving as glitz.
The young man at the desk was skinny with bored brown eyes and an untrimmed mustache and shaggy dark hair, and seemed less than thrilled with the short-sleeve white shirt and snap-on blue-and-red striped necktie he was required to wear. “Stairway to Heaven” was playing a little too loud on a cheap radio behind him.
Michael spoke up, requesting a room on the first level as far away from the street as possible, and the clerk complied, possibly because that was the easiest thing to do. After signing in as John Jones, the former Michael Smith paid the twenty-five dollars in advance, and said to the clerk, “I need a nine a.m. wake-up call.”
The clerk frowned in thought, which was an obvious inconvenience. “Tonight you mean?”
“No—a.m.”
“Oh, you mean tomorrow morning?”
“This morning.”
The frown deepened. “Three hours from now?”
“Right. Will you still be on duty?”
“Yeah, just came on. So what?”
Michael summoned a smile for the sullen young man. “Because if I get that wake-up call, nice and prompt? I’ll be another twenty-five bucks grateful.”
The clerk brightened. “No problem, Mr. Jones!”
Locked inside the room, curtains drawn tight, air conditioner up, Michael placed the .45 on his nightstand, stripped to his underwear, slipped between cool sheets, and was asleep in seconds.
He dreamed he was driving.
Dreamed he was back on the endless highway through the desert, following the ribbon of concrete under a beautiful star-flung sky and a moon-bleached landscape. Pat was next to him, smiling over at him, wearing that lacy white dress from their evening at Vincent’s.
As dreams went, it wasn’t a bad one, other than his mind providing him with more of the same experience that had sent him into this motel room; a kind of delirium accompanied it, giving him an awareness of being in a dream but no power over that dream. Still, having Pat beside him, not talking, just smiling over at him, occasionally touching his shoulder or leg or hand, Johnny Mathis singing a nonexistent love song on the four-track, was comforting.
Then he glanced over at her, and she was someone else, another woman he’d loved once, a long time ago. They had killed Estelle in a terrible way, tortured her and burned her to death, and he had found her body, when he was just a kid in his early twenties who had admittedly seen horrible things in war but nothing to compare to a beautiful woman tortured and burned. Only in the dream Estelle was pristine in her loveliness, blonde and green-eyed with a ’40s hairstyle and makeup and a blue gown with sequins on the bosom; and then she was Pat in the ’40s hairstyle and makeup and blue gown, and his eyes returned to the highway, and then to her; only Pat was smiling like a skull now, her hair a fright, a wig with clumps yanked out and her face battered and bruised, nose bloody-broken, mouth punched to a pulp, one eye slashed, icepick punctures on her cheeks, throat cut ear to ear, bare arms a welter of welts and gashes and contusions until finally the lower half of her was a charred mass dissolving to cinders, and he drove off the highway and the phone rang shrilly and he sat up in bed, sweating in the air-conditioned room.
But he’d had his rest, and the long-haired clerk (sullen no more) got his twenty-five, “Stairway to Heaven” playing again (or still?), and Michael set out—on Highway 95 now—for Reno.
The Pineview development in Incline Village ran to rustic lodge–like dwellings built against a rising wall of pines, a stylistic world apart from the rambling ranch-styles of the Country Club subdivision with its golf-course view where the Satarianos had lived.
Typical of these, the Grace home had a driveway that swung around to a side double-garage in the basement, sloping landscaping designed to give the first floor a nice elevated rear look at the green scenery. This enabled Michael to pull in and park his car on a downward slant of cement, the Lincoln out of sight of anyone passing by.
The desolate drive from Vegas to Reno had taken over seven hours; with full-bore June heat beating down, he’d been careful not to overwork the air conditioner—Highway 95 skirted the edge of Death Valley—and again kept his gas tank topped off and his eye on the radiator. He even had a meal around two, a diner that would serve you breakfast any time of day, which was what he craved.
He’d listened to music, tapes mostly, Sammy Davis, Ella, Bobby D., Joanie Sommers—he’d pitched his Sinatras in Walker Lake, during a fit of anti-Outfit pique—and he’d again fallen into a groove of monotony that worked for him, the traffic scant all the way to Sparks. Long though the drive and the day had been, he came sharply awake when he hit Reno, “biggest little city in the world,” and his familiar home area. This sensation only increased on the half-hour drive to the Tahoe’s North Shore.
Now he was peering into the Graces’ garage—no cars. He cautiously walked around the rough-wood-sided house—he’d slung a dark gray sport jacket over the black Banlon to hide the .45 in the waistband of the slacks—and checked windows. Within five minutes he was convinced the house was empty.
Steps up to an elaborate wooden deck took him to glassed-in sliding doors onto the kitchen that, for all the rustic trappings of the mini-lodge, were the same as in the last two homes Michael had lived in. He forced the door open, without having to break the glass.
The interior of the home was phony farmhouse, starting with a mostly pine kitchen interrupted by calico wallpaper, avocado appliances, shelves of flea-market crocks, and a window of various wooden spoons hanging vertically and horizontally.
A sink filled with dirty dishes announced the aftermath of meals prepared for two. A wastebasket brimmed with empty cans of Tab, his daughter’s drink of choice. A big calendar with a picture of a covered New England bridge had bold notations, including a line drawn through five days today and tomorrow—“Bob and Janet/Caribbean!”
So Bob and Janet Grace had gone on a cruise and left high school senior Gary—the only one of the three Grace children still at home—to fend for himself for a few days. And Gary had done
so by driving to Vegas to bring his girlfriend back here to shack up and go to prom.…
…a theory the girlfriend’s father confirmed when he got to Gary’s room and found a double bed that had been slept in on both sides. In this all-pine room, with exposed beams, the walls wore posters of the Beatles walking across Abbey Road, the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, O. J. Simpson in his uniform grinning as he cradled his helmet under an arm, and Muhammad Ali in boxing trunks and I-Am-the-Greatest grimace, raising a padded-gloved fist.
He felt parental rage rising as he noted the open box of Trojan rubbers on the nightstand, as casual as a pack of open cigarettes; four ripped-open individual packets were tossed there, too, like chewing-gum wrappers. But a luxury like fatherly disapproval wasn’t available to Michael right now.
He found her powder-blue overnight bag, with various articles of clothing in it, all clean—she’d done her own laundry, apparently, even if she hadn’t done the dishes—but one item was conspicuous by its absence: no nice dress for the prom, much less a formal.
Which meant that though it was now only a quarter to six, she had already dressed for the prom; she’d already left here—for the Cal-Neva? Then he remembered: the Incline High kids usually went out for a nice dinner before prom. So Anna and Gary were probably dining somewhere in North Tahoe.
He returned to that nightstand, where earlier his eyes had only been able to focus on those condoms; now he noted the football-shaped phone and a small message pad.
On the pad it said: reno sat reservation—5 pm!!!
Which meant Anna and her rubber-sporting beau were at a restaurant in Reno, or on their way back, or possibly even were already at the Cal-Neva.…
But Gary’s otherwise specific note (the handwriting was not Anna’s) did not indicate what restaurant.…
He sat on the edge of the bed, but for just a moment, standing up as if the sheets had been hot; he looked back at the rumpled bedding and shuddered. As he left the boy’s bedroom, he knew that any hope of heading them off here, at the Grace home, before the prom, was as empty as those Trojan wrappers.
Road to Paradise Page 16