by Joe Gores
I watch surreptitiously past the long bill of my cap as he is stopped by two obvious thugs because he has a pair of binoc ulars around his neck. They talk of birds. One of the pair is just a thug, but the one called Red is intelligent and probing. One of Prince’s creatures, no doubt.
Paradoxically, I must now spend most of my time following Stagnaro about so I will know where he is and won’t risk another face-to-face confrontation. I assume he is here because of Gounaris, and will leave Death Valley when Gounaris does.
Thus I am his shadow as he talks with the Mafia goons, at Zabriskie Point, at the stovepipe well, at the dunes. Returning to the ranch, I get my second nasty shock: by the grossest of coincidences we are sharing the same cabin! He the left-hand unit, me the right, with a common front stoop.
This unexpected proximity drives me to decisive-perhaps foolhardy-action. I have not yet figured out how to kill Abramson, so I decide to precipitate matters, as one precipitates a chemical reaction in a retort. I will let Stagnaro know that Raptor, Fantomas to his Inspector Juve, is here in Death Valley. If nothing else, I will learn much of Stagnaro; always valuable with a man so dangerous to my enterprises.
Will he see Gounaris, or Abramson, as my prey? Will he let them know he has them under surveillance? Will he alert local authority with its powers of search and seizure? Or will he do nothing at all, despite his policeman’s protect and serve oath?
I filch a few sheets of stationery from the office after seeing him safely in the cafe for supper, return to my room and, wearing gloves so I will leave no prints, use a heavy marking pen to write on a sheet taken from the center of the sheaf:
I DO NOT KILL MY OWN KIND
RAPTOR
I am about to shove it under the door of his unit when I see him returning. I barely get back into my own room in time. I could leave it under the windshield wiper on his car, but it is parked in front of his window. I must wait until he retires.
Through the thin walls, I hear him moving around. I can sympathize: as Raptor, I have many bad nights. But then, at midnight, he leaves again. What is he up to, driving off into the dark emptiness?
He returns to the dunes. I park my car up near the highway and follow on foot. Halfway up a dune I find him, sleeping like a baby. Death Valley’s stark beauty seems to have given him profound tranquillity: I shall take it back.
My RAPTOR note still in my pocket, a safety pin in the compact first-aid/notion kit I always carry in the field, I think myself into my coyote-trickster mode for stalking game. He will not sense me. I approach, tie his shoelaces, pin the note.
I return to the ranch. Stagnaro returns at 4:16. He paces, paces, leaves again at first light. I follow. We both see Gounaris off. Perfect-our appointment will be at another Samarra, later. Stagnaro joins Abramson at the breakfast table; a man of honor indeed, I know how he hates all mobsters’ guts.
In a flash I see my method of execution. I call Abramson on the phone, tell him I am scheduled to kill him next, admit I fear for my own life and will make a deal with him. I say a nasty thing about his mother, to enrage him and thus keep him from thinking clearly; emotion always clouds reason. I offer him a meet. He leaps at the chance.
The rest is mere execution. The site is admirably chosen, I have the necessary rifle and scope in the trunk of my car-I have been a hunter, a shooter, all my life. It is manufactured the year I am born-a Winchester center-fire Model 70 in. 270, bolt action, which I can work in a blur because I have fired thousands of rounds through it. My scope is a Leupold 10X, my ammunition is Lake City Match M852s. I have come to shoot.
I am about to squeeze off the killing round when Abramson enters the toilet stall. To equate his death with his ultimate evacuation is too delightful to pass up. I lay down a barrage, take him out decisively, slip away when Stagnaro shows up.
Abramson’s is the first killing I have actually enjoyed. Am I getting callous? Losing my soul? Or is it because this is longdistance rifle shooting, the kind of shooting I have been doing at targets and game most of my life? You are no longer man and rifle, it is no longer scope and target, it is spot-weld of cheek to stock, it is nonverbal, it is…
Or is it just that the colossal hypocrisy of Gideon Abramson’s life makes his death-the sixth in the series-the most satisfying?
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“The sixth day of creation,” said Will. “Tomorrow, the God of Genesis rests. Today… well, today is a long day indeed for Him. Tough to cram all that creating into twenty-four hours. In science’s terms an even longer day, stretching from the late Paleozoic a bit over 300 million years ago to this evening’s mighty reckoning in this little room.”
Another hint, thought Dante, that Will had returned knowing Raptor was going to be waiting for him.
“Genesis: ‘And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.’
“That’s it, folks. Shazam! Cattle, creepings things, beasts of the earth. Everything except His final creation, man, made and then instructed during the balance of the sixth day.
“But we need the fossil time frame, not a few minutes of a single twenty-four-hour day, to explain what went before to shape us with all our terrible and glorious complexities and contradictions.
“As vertebrates we had gained a bony skeleton, a jointed spine, muscle and nerve systems that oxygenated and circulated the blood. As amphibians we became tetrapods: air-breathers with no more than five digits on each of our paired limbs.
“The amphibians were most successful for their day, some getting to be a few feet long and shaped like a silly-looking crocodile drawn by a five-year-old. In less than 100 million years they developed into the earliest reptile, proto-reptile, what we could call the base reptile, so successful that the amphibians today have been reduced to barely enough frogs and newts, as William Howells notes, ‘to keep a witch in brew.’
“By changing to proto-reptile, what did we gain over the amphibian ancestors we so closely resembled? We became amniotes. Only mammals, reptiles, and birds-which wouldn’t appear for sure until the flying feathered dinosaur, archaeopteryx, in the late Jurassic 170 million years ago-are amniotes.
“Amniotes have their fetal development either in an egg or in a womb. The amnion, and other protective membranes, supply the fetus with food and oxygen.
“Successively more advanced models followed that base reptile of 300 million years ago. They became the first of four ‘Megadynasties’ that Robert Bakker, a maverick dinosaur guru who has stood paleontology on its ear a score of times, suggests have existed during the history of life on land.
“Megadynasty One, the proto-reptiles, had great staying power-these early reptiles ruled for 20 million years with two types of beasts. Big quick predators, dimetrodons-popularly, ‘sail lizards’ because of tall webbed spines on their backs-and big slow vegetarians.
“Near the very end of the Paleozoic era, maybe 260 m.y. ago, one line of these sluggish and decidedly cold-blooded proto-reptiles split into two basic new vertebrate life-forms. One, called thecondonts, became the modern reptiles, the dinosaurs, and their descendants, the birds.
“The other became mammal-like reptiles called therapsids-some call them synapsids, although I doubt they had very many synapses to help them along-that formed the second of Bakker’s Megadynasties. They dominated the thecodonts from the late Permian through the Triassic, ranging from early bone-headed proto-mammals to, at the end of their reign, very advanced dog-faced cynodonts just a knife blade away from true mammals.
“They had become warm-blooded-mammal-like bony palates separating the mouth and nose cavities in some of them suggest this-but the mass extinction 249 m.y. ago at the Paleozoic/Mesozoic boundary finished them. They already had spawned the true mammals, however, tiny mouse-like things that had to wait their turn because the reptiles moved first, evolved faster, to grab all major Mesozoic ecological niches.
“These Archosau
ria-true reptiles-the most successful early model being the so-called crimson crocodiles, were soon weighing in at a half-ton or so, and the third Megadynasty, the Age of Reptiles, was under way. Through the Jurassic and Cretaceous right up to the end of the Mesozoic 65 m.y. ago, dinosaurs and other reptiles reigned supreme. Their story is not our story, but they were a tremendous success.
“They ruled the earth as tyrannosaurs, as stegosaurs, as ceratopsians, as massive sauropods like diplodocus and brontosaurus who reached eighty tons in weight and a hundred feet in length. Truly thunder lizards. They reentered the sea as plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and mosasaurs. Soared the skies as pterodons, pterosaurs, and pterodactyls, in sizes ranging from a robin to a jet fighter.
“Archosauria seemed destined to control the world forever. Why didn’t it? Because of the infamous mass extinction at the K/T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) boundary 65 m.y. ago, often called the Great Dying. The dinosaurs went extinct not through bad genes, but through bad luck. Environmental catastrophe overtook them. Three-fourths of all living species on the earth, in the sea, in the sky, were abruptly terminated.
“The current Megadynasty Four, the Age of Mammals, was about to begin. At first it didn’t look like much. During the dinosaurs’ reign the mammals essentially were limited to two major sorts of what Bakker called little furballs: the rodent and the shrew. These little guys played out their tiny, apparently insignificant destinies down around the dinosaurs’ toenails, but they bore the marks of the mammal-live birth, warm blood, flexible skeleton.
“Live birth means mammary glands-the young are nursed and receive maternal care.
“Warm blood means hair and fur, a four-chambered heart, two sets of specialized teeth (milk teeth to grow with, permanent teeth to live with) essential for true warm-bloodedness, with variously shaped hard enamel crowns adapted to the animal’s diet.
“Flexible skeletons mean a free lumbar spine, and a unique bone growth pattern called epiphyses whereby the bone grows in the middle, not at the ends. It is this that gives the mammals their tight, flexible, very usable joints.
“Early rodent-let’s call him proto-rat-had very big teeth to chew the roots and plants of the day: tree ferns, horsetails, cycads, conifers, sequoias, araucarias (monkey puzzle trees), and the spanking new flowering plants called angiosperms.
“And proto-rat used those sharp teeth on proto-shrew, forcing the little scuttler to become tree shrew by taking to the trees where proto-rat wouldn’t-couldn’t? — follow. Also, since nocturnal proto-rat controlled the night and the ground, tree shrew became diurnal and claimed the day and the trees.
“When the dinosaurs finally galloped and leaped and plodded off in the Great Dying, our little squirrel-like ancestors were waiting in the trees just as proto-rat’s descendants were waiting on the ground. During 30 million years in their arboreal world, the tree shrews had evolved, had begun developing and coordinating our three major features-hand, eye, and brain. They had started to become monkeys.
“In the process, our eyes moved to the front of our heads, giving us the tremendous advantages of binocular and Technicolor vision. Our muzzles shrank as eye became more important than nose, the claws on the digits of our hands and feet became nails, and we developed opposable thumbs and friction skin (fingerprints) on hands and feet to help us grab useful things like tree branches or a piece of fruit.
“All of this new activity was making our brain bigger and bigger in relation to our size and weight. Which, for some, kept getting bigger also.
“Some of the monkeys got so large and slow, in fact, that they had to confine themselves to lower branches that could support them. As we move to about 28 million years ago, remember that heaviness: it is forcing some of them to develop into… loud movie music here… apes…”
A lean, fast-walking man was passing across the windows on the walk outside. Dante quit listening. The man looked in, saw Will behind the podium, and faltered for a moment before going on. Dante waited, tense, until he had gone up the stairs to the Theological Union. It was a while before he settled back against the wall, and then he kept his hand close to his gun, in case that other fast-moving man should appear out of nowhere.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The P.W. appeared out of nowhere on the icy, windblown day after Thanksgiving, materializing out of a swirling snowstorm like a figure on a Polaroid photo gradually taking on definition once it has been pulled from the camera. He was walking as he would always walk, with his arms raised and bent at the elbows, his hands clasped behind his head in the traditional “surrendering prisoner” manner. Thus, P.W.-prisoner of war.
On that first late afternoon, with the light already fading and early snow on the ground, there was nobody to see him but Old Mose. Mose was seventy-eight, with a seamed chocolate face and frizzy hair turned white as the snow he was struggling with. When the Roadhouse had been one, Mose had played some mean blues piano in the lounge; but an irate customer, a made man-Eddie Ucelli (cool on the kill, a creep in his cups)-had taken care of that by repeatedly slamming the keyboard cover on Mose’s hands because Eddie wanted “O Sole Mio ” instead of “Hellhound on My Trail.”
Mae had kept Mose on as handyman-a misnomer if there ever was one, seeing the state of his hands-so on this snowy afternoon he was outside painfully clearing the front walk, holding the shovel awkwardly in his more or less useless claws.
That was when the P.W. appeared between the eastern white pines, crunching through the snow from the road that had once been a highway. He took the shovel from Mose’s twisted fingers with his strong gloved hands, and started shoveling vigorously.
“Hey, mister, ain’t no call for you to…”
The P.W. paused to lay a gloved finger to his lips, then returned to his shoveling. Mose didn’t have to shovel again as long as the P.W. was there. He didn’t have to tend the furnace, either, or the water heater, or carry in cases of booze or crates of frozen steaks from Ucelli’s meat wholesale company, or perform any of his other heavier tasks. The P.W., in the same plodding manner he did everything, took care of all of them.
It was hard to tell how tall or how heavy the P.W. was, or even how old. His scraggly hair was mostly hidden by a Navy watch cap he seemed to wear both day and night. He had a matted beard he never cut, wore God knew how many layers of clothes underneath an Army camouflage jacket and baggy camouflage combat pants. The soles of his battered Army boots were sadly run over on the outside edge. He never removed his gloves.
Old Mose told the girls in a self-important voice that the P.W. had confided he’d been tortured repeatedly by the V.C., and his hands were not something anyone would ever see again. How much of this was real and how much Mose had dreamed up because it seemed that’s the way it must have been, nobody ever knew, since the P.W. talked to Mose damned little and to anyone else not at all. But anyway, it made a nice story. And it made old Mose feel he had a coeval in the hands department.
The P.W. carried his head thrust forward on his neck like a lily on a stalk, walking with a stooped shuffle that neither slowed nor speeded nor turned aside. It seemed that if he had needed to walk through the building, he simply would have done so like a tank, trailing broken lengths of lath and uprooted wiring and odds and ends of plasterboard with him.
Nobody ever tested the impression, because Mose made sure on that first night that he got some of the half-eaten meals that otherwise would have gone into the garbage, and found a place in the basement by the furnace for him to lay out his grimy sleeping bag. The P.W. rigged a length of hose to fit over the overflow valve on the water heater, and thus could give himself a rudimentary shower-not that anyone ever saw him take one.
Mae didn’t even become aware of him until the third morning after his arrival, when she saw him carrying in cases of booze from the Acme Liquors truck-an Organization firm, of course.
“Mose, just who the hell is that?” she demanded.
“He jes’ show up t’other night, Miss Mae.”
“But wh
o the hell is he?”
“He jes’ show up, Miss Mae,” repeated Mose vaguely.
Delia Ann, a short sturdy black girl much in demand because she had a big butt but was very supple and inventive, said, “The girls have started calling him the P.W.-for prisoner of war.”
“Why do you…” Then Mae saw him walking around to the back of the building to get another load, his arms in their invariable “I surrender” position, and she understood the name. So she changed what she had started to say, to, “I don’t care what the hell you call him, just so long as you call him gone.”
Old Mose said dolefully, “He be a pow’ful he’p to me roun’ de place, Miss Mae.”
“Be a sport, Mae,” said tall, stately, redheaded Clarisse. She was also very popular with the clientele because she could get up on a tabletop, squat naked over a long-necked beer bottle, and pick it up without a laying on of hands. “Let him stay. He’s harmless and a real gentleman.”
“How can you tell?” asked Mae.
“He never ogles any of us no matter what we have on-or don’t have on. He’s like a horse with blinders.”
So the P.W. stayed. His only idiosyncrasy occurred the first time he saw each of the girls, and never again with any of them. He would stop in front of her and peer intently into her face for a moment with his shocked, faded blue eyes behind a pair of women’s lightly tinted sunglasses.
“Soo Li?” he would ask in a hoarse mumbling voice that sounded as if he either had vocal cord damage or didn’t use his voice much any more.
Whatever the girl answered, and many of them never got a chance to answer at all, he would immediately put his finger to his lips in a shushing motion as he had done to Mose that first evening. Then he would shake his head and turn dolefully away, never to speak to her again.