A Nasty Piece of Work: A Novel

by Robert Littell

  “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 saf
e 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.

  Nothing visible suggested life.

  The headlights of the car coming from the direction of Nipton came over a rise. They looked a lot like the headlights of the Ferrari I’d seen in my rearview mirror when I was following Gava from in front. The car braked to a stop a football field down the road from Kelso Depot.

  Friday flipped onto her stomach. “What’s happening?”

  “I’ll give you my educated guess.”

  A man emerged from the car. I remembered Awlson’s description of Gava: The Wrestler was six foot even, one hundred seventy-five pounds, with good shoulders and a narrow waist. He held his head at an angle as if he was hard of hearing in one ear.

  The figure of the man coming down the highway matched the description Awlson had given me to a T—and looked a lot like the house dude on the high stool on the fourth floor of the Whistlestop gambling operation. I passed the goggles to Ornella. She adjusted them on her head. “It’s him,” she said flatly.

  I asked her how she could be so sure.

  She only repeated, “It’s Emilio. I’d know him anywhere.”

  “Why do you keep calling him by his first name?”

  I could feel her looking at me in the darkness. “That’s what I called him when I posted the bail bond.”

  “Keep watching,” I instructed her. I had a pretty good idea what she would see.

  “Okay, he’s climbed onto the hotel porch,” she whispered. “He’s looking around. He’s studying the desert skyline—oh my God, he’s looking directly at us. Do you think he can see us?”

  “No. But he knows I’m out here somewhere.”

  “He’s taken out a big envelope. He’s waving it over his head at the desert. He’s turned and gone into the hotel … I can see the faint beam of a flashlight inside flickering on the windows that still have panes. Ah, he’s come back onto the porch. He’s jumped off onto the sand path and starting up the road toward the car.” I heard Ornella catch her breath. “It’s not the same man, Lemuel. It’s not Emilio. The man going back to the Ferrari is roughly the same height but he has a completely different way of walking. How can that be?”

  “I figured Gava would still be in the hotel when I came to get the money,” I said. “Didn’t know how he’d pull it off. I was dumb not to think of the train. He had one of his cronies jump off the slow-moving Union Pacific when it passed Kelso Depot. It was the guy who jumped off the train who’s going back to the car.”

  “Which means Emilio is waiting for you in the dark inside the hotel. He’s surely armed. Oh my God, you can’t go in there, Lemuel. Forget about taking him back for trial, forget about my losing the damned bail money.” Friday sat up abruptly. “I don’t want to lose you.”

  “I have the night-vision goggles,” I reminded her. I took them from her and adjusted them on my head. The shadowy barefoot contessa crouching next to me on the tarpaulin materialized in her underwater bluish green majesty. For a moment I entertained the fantasy that I was sitting next to a mermaid. “I want you to make your way back to the Toyota in the wadi,” I whispered. “I want you to wait for me there.” When she didn’t move, I said, “I’m asking you to do this.”

  “Why?”

  “Why did you call him Emilio?”

  I could see the mermaid look away. “What will you do?” she whispered.

  “I’ll make my way down to that pathway that runs from the hotel to the road. There are small dunes there. When I don’t turn up in the hotel to retrieve the envelope, he’ll get impatient—my guess is he’ll give it an hour, two at the most. Then he’ll come out on the porch in his stocking feet and look around. Then he’ll sit on the edge of the porch, where the rail fell away, and put on his shoes. He’ll
figure I chickened out. He’ll start up the pathway. That’s when I’ll take him. I’ll have surprise on my side. I’ll have the advantage of being able to see in the dark. He’ll be blinder than a blind bat.”

  “You know how to do that kind of thing,” she breathed. “You know how to deal with someone like … someone like Gava?”

  “You were going to say Emilio.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. You know how to take on Emilio?”

  “I’ve been trained,”

  “Who trained you?”

  “Some very talented killers employed by the United States government.”

  She reached for my hand and pulled it under the fabric to her heart again. Her skin was cold to the touch, her heart racing, her body atremble. “I badly need to talk you out of this,” she whispered.

  That wasn’t going to happen. The anger had risen in me along with the adrenaline. Fact is I’d been startled the first time she called him Emilio, fact is I didn’t appreciate her calling him Emilio all the time, fact is my imagination had filled in gaps in her story, fact is I supposed a lot of things. Fact is I was no longer weighed down by facts.

  Fact is I was aching for a fight.

  A fight is what I got.

  I counted on him staying in the lobby for at least an hour, so I took the long way around, coming back up the pathway until I found a hidey-hole behind a small dune and a stump of a long-deceased tree. Gava held out in the dark of the lobby of the abandoned hotel for five hours and twelve minutes, according to the luminous dial on my father’s Bulova. He was clearly a hoodlum with a lot of street savvy. He knew I was out here somewhere. He was waiting with a stalker’s patience for me to come to him. I began to worry about that stalker’s patience of his. I began to worry he’d wait until first light tinted the east, at which point my advantage—my ability to see in the dark—would be gone. When I finally spotted the shadow of a man standing on the porch of the hotel, I bottled up a sigh of relief for fear he might hear it. I carefully slipped the Bulova from my wrist and folded it into my handkerchief and buried it deep in my pocket.