Menaced Assassin

by Joe Gores

  It was Christmas Eve in San Francisco, too. For the third night in a row the man bent on murder stole the car he would use in the killing; the owner was back east for the holidays. He had taken the key off the hook in the parking garage where he also parked; when the boy was off shagging someone else’s car, he simply drove out in it. Would return it when he was finished.

  Third time lucky. His target was a good Catholic, the man was bound to go to midnight mass at Saints Peter and Paul.

  He was obsessed with the killing urge. He had to do it. He knew he would have no rest until he did.

  On a dark side street, he stopped, opened the trunk, got out the Domino’s Pizza delivery sign he had stolen a week ago, with gloved hands fastened it to the top of the stolen car.

  Nobody ever looked twice at a parked pizza-delivery car.

  In Cabo San Lucas, the man bent on murder settled himself deeper in the short-legged deck chair dug into the sand in front of the little Mexican fast-order cafe, ate tortilla chips. The sun was almost set and the swimmers and sunbathers had departed, but the sand was still warm around his bare ankles.

  Out in the harbor the Christmas lights strung on the masts and bodywork of the dozens of yachts and cruisers were coming on. The yachts rocked slightly at anchor, the colored lights laying wavering shafts of color from the boats to him, the rocky hillside that was the very tip of Baja forming a black velvet backdrop behind them. It was a true fairyland.

  The man bent on murder had spent most of a week wandering around the clubs, the waterfront, innocuous, friendly, his Spanish quite fluent and serviceable, even if of a workingman sort. How he loved to talk. But he loved to listen even more. His dark eyes missed little, his ears missed no fact, no nuance.

  Hotel Pez Grande. During the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Hotel Pez Grande. Alone.

  So this was his third evening here on this beach, in the sagging canvas deck chair, sipping beer he didn’t want and eating Mexican junk food he didn’t need. Waiting.

  He straightened up. A huge motor yacht whose silhouette he knew was coming in with the last rays of the sun, water purling gently below its cutting prow.

  Tosca.

  He arose, threw the paper plate in a trash can set in the sand beside the cafe, shook the sand out of his shoes, went back up to the slanting earth street where he had parked his ancient battered yellow VW bug. There were no streetlights but it was not quite full dark yet. He was obsessed with the killing urge. He had to do it. Forty little miles away.

  Tomorrow Dante’s folks were coming up from Modesto, Rosie’s coming over from the Marina. Julie was home from school for the holidays, out with her friends. Tony was out with his. The in-laws were due at noon tomorrow. The tree was up, he and Rosie were doing the preliminaries for the big holiday dinner.

  Dante always made the stuffing, roasted the turkey, did the gravy, the mashed potatoes. Bread stuffing made with ground round and sausage and a lot of herbs and onions, moistened with the stock the giblets for the gravy had been cooked in, then left to stand overnight. He’d browned the flour for the gravy, too.

  The women did everything else, but these were his. He’d be up at six-thirty in the morning to salt the bird down, inside and out, stuff it, dot it with Crisco, cover it loosely with foil, pop it into the roasting pan breast-up at 325 degrees.

  “This is the mother of all turkeys,” he said to Rosa as he manipulated it back into the fridge where they had taken out one of the trays so it would fit. “Twenty-two damn pounds! I won’t be turning this baby in the oven tomorrow.”

  She was dressed in a red dress for Christmas and was pulling on her red winter coat. She wore red Christmassy earrings, too. “Will it be done by three, Dante?”

  “Done by two-and-a-half,” he grinned. He noticed her coat as he turned from the fridge. “That time already?”

  “If we aren’t there by eleven-thirty, we’ll have to stand all the way through mass.”

  He’d put the stuffing down in the garage when they got back. There wasn’t room for it in the fridge and it had to be kept cold. He clipped his gun and holster to his belt without conscious thought; it was what he did when he left the house. Put on his topcoat; he’d just put the lining in it last week. He remembered just in time Rosie’d been to the hairdresser’s.

  “Your hair looks wonderful, Rosie.”

  “Do you really think so?” She checked herself in the small wall mirror beside the front door, touched the hair gently.

  “It shows off your earrings, too.”

  She gave him a little kiss, he opened the door, they went out. He pulled it shut, checked that it was locked. Used the key to shoot the dead bolt home. They started down the concrete stairway; it was wide enough so they could go down arm in arm. A car was parked across the street with the motor running, a lighted pizza-delivery sign attached to the roof above the open driver’s window. Rosie gave a disdainful little snort.

  “Who wants to eat pizza on Christma- Dante! ”

  She yelled his name in outrage as he shoved her back against the concrete steps and fell on top of her, even as the pistol his conscious mind hadn’t even seen yet started firing. Bullets were ricocheting off the concrete, whining through the night. His only thought was to shield Rosie with his body. Something struck him a terrific blow on one cheek, jerked his head around. Rosie cried out beneath him as the pizza-delivery car accelerated up Greenwich for the left turn into Grant at the top of the hill. Rosie’s face was smeared with blood.

  Oh dear God, no! “Rosie, are you-”

  “I’ve run my new panty hose,” she said, and started sobbing. Then she saw Dante’s face. She shrieked. “You’ve been shot-”

  “Concrete chip.” He had realized the blood on Rosie was his own, from the cut on his cheek.

  They clung to each other there on the stairs, safe on Christmas Eve. Dante thanking God with some part of his mind, thinking with another part, some cop. Didn’t get a round off. Didn’t get a license plate. Didn’t get a look at the shooter. Didn’t even know for sure what kind of a car it was.

  Hey, a hell of a cop at that. Rosie was unhurt, wasn’t she? Merry Christmas.

  Hotel Pez Grande-literally Hotel Big Fish-was a quarter of a mile in from the highway on a sandy road barely wide enough for two cars to pass. The adobe main building holding the dining rooms and bars and offices was set facing the bay, its back to the parking area. The living units were in double rows down the slope to the beach, each with a concrete patio in back for sunbathing out of the wind.

  There was horseback riding, a pool, but Pez Grande, as the name suggested, catered to serious deep-water fishermen; the dining room walls were covered with trophies, and the menu always featured that day’s fresh catch. Their summertime “biggest fish” contest drew anglers from all over the United States.

  Now, in December, the wind was gritty with sand from the shore, blowing hard and cold up the hill. Anybody wanting to sunbathe in that during the day was out of their skull. But Hotel Pez Grande gave Prince his only true vacation each year during this jolly week between Christmas and New Year’s. Thing was, the Feebies had no legal jurisdiction down here, and now that he and the governor had come to a meeting of the minds, their clout would be even less. The DEA had a little juice, but they were after drug-cartel Latinos, not vacationing Mafia dons.

  So they left Prince alone down here.

  He and Miguel had brought in a good marlin; after it had been strung up by its tail from the block and tackle on the dock for that purpose, and photographed, it had been laid in the back of Miguel’s pickup to be taken up the hill and cleaned. Part for the hotel kitchen, the rest was to be sold at market the next day. Mr. Prince was widely known and liked by the locals because of his generosity with his catches. A true caballero.

  Midnight mass was finished, Prince was sitting in Pez Grande’s upstairs bar with most of the rest of the hotel guests, having a few postprandial jolts. It was, after all, Christmas Eve. There was even a tree. He raised
a beckoning forefinger at the lean Mexican behind his array of bottles and gleaming glasses inside the horseshoe-shaped bar.

  “A Christmas drink for everyone, Jose, por favor.”

  Jose had been a bartender for two years in San Diego before La Migra caught up with him and shipped him back home. He affected a drooping gunfighter mustache, sideburns an inch below his ears, and red suspenders.

  “And a Merry Christmas to you.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Prince.”

  Jose got busy with the drinks. Prince was at a table by one of the front windows, where he could look down the lighted walkways to the darkness of the water. No lights showed out on the bay. At the far end of the room was a TV getting a country music video show by satellite from Memphis. Tomorrow it would be showing an NFL game Prince planned to watch.

  Tex came limping in; Prince gestured and the hard-bitten old cowboy sat down across from him with a sigh. Tex had been a rodeo rider of some note until he had retired, semi-crippled, down here in the sun.

  “You still have that big black stallion-”

  “Mean as ever,” chuckled Tex. Prince was an excellent rider and could control the brute, and the old horse wrangler appreciated it. Most of the horses were for women or kids, but he kept a few feisty ones for guys like Mr. Prince.

  “How’s the hip, Tex?”

  Tex gunned his shot, jerked his head a little to one side and winked his faded blue right eye as the whiskey hit home. “Better here than up in el Norte, that’s a gut.”

  The jukebox was playing, people were dancing. Talk was difficult. They played a game of darts; Prince won honestly, he was always a competitor. Tex said he thought he would turn in.

  Restless, Prince drifted down the interior stairs to the main floor, to a shadowy alcove between the two dining rooms where there was always hot coffee. He poured himself a thick white ceramic mug full, drank it black, thinking.

  Eddie Ucelli had been hit at the very instant Prince himself was giving him a pair of assignments. Which meant both men were still alive, but, more importantly, the timing couldn’t have been coincidental. Somebody inside the Organization had been sending a message to him. Him. Martin Prince. That fucking Gounaris. Had to be.

  Well, there were other hitters around, and tomorrow he would reach out for one of them. Even if it was Christmas.

  Laughter and singing and music were coming through the ceiling from the bar above. He heard giggling voices, stepped back further into the shadows. Two women, Anglos, had appeared on the tile patio beyond the windows. Obviously mother and daughter. They began dancing arm in arm to the music, laughing and tossing their heads. The mother was slender, with a deerlike grace. The daughter had a beautiful athlete’s figure and all the right moves, she had to be a professional dancer.

  Even for a man like Prince it was a magic moment. He watched briefly, then slipped away so they wouldn’t know they had been spied upon.

  He walked out into the sandy parking area. With no moon, the stars were huge and bright and close. He had a sense of impending adventure, as if something momentous was coming in his life. The lot was filled with cars, some rentals, some the cars of Americans who had houses down here. One was a battered yellow bug. His first car had been a VW Beetle. A long time ago.

  He walked down the slanted walk toward the beach. The wind was cold on his face, sand gritted against his teeth. He stood facing the wind as it whistled up off the water, stood thick and blocky against it, tasting it, feeling its power, letting it feel his power, his immovability.

  Out at the end of the dock was the three-pole tripod with its block and tackle, waiting patiently for its next upside-down marlin with glazing eyes and fading colors. Even on the dock, Prince could feel the thud and roar of the surf through the soles of his shoes.

  He heard Tex’s uneven footsteps on the dock behind him, turned. In the starlight, he could just make out the tall Texan’s lanky form. He chuckled.

  “I thought you were off to bed, Tex.”

  Tex didn’t answer until he had come up within a couple of feet of Mr. Prince. He wasn’t Tex.

  “Look at this,” the man who wasn’t Tex suggested.

  Mr. Prince looked down involuntarily. The man’s hand, itself indistinct, held a huge glittering knife that faintly caught the starlight.

  As Prince’s eyes locked on it, widened, the hand slid the wide, heavy blade into Prince’s gut. He felt slippery cold, felt the guard thump on his stomach, knew belatedly that the whole ten-inch blade was inside his thick trunk.

  The hand ripped the blade upward, to his sternum. The man’s eyes watched his face with interest; they seemed to gather light from the darkness. He pulled out the blade, stepped back.

  Prince’s hands couldn’t quite keep his own hot, steaming, jumbled intestines inside him; they spilled out over his wrists.

  “I… they… mama… ”

  He was a fetus lying on his side on the rough spray-wet planks. His legs jerked and kicked. A great darkness was behind his eyes, a great terror… He knew…

  “ Ave Maria… piena di grazia… ” His sweet mother’s prayer, to the sweet Virgin… it was important. “ Il signore e teco… tu… ” He couldn’t hang on. He was going into fatal shock. “Sei… benedetta… ”

  A final sigh… the soul leaving the body…

  “What soul?” said the man who wasn’t Tex. He spat into the sand, wiped his knife on Prince’s shirt, sheathed it. Then he bent and grabbed Prince’s ankles, and with no trace of a limp began dragging the dead man along the dock.

  It was the day after Christmas, no work for most because the holiday had fallen on a Sunday, but Dante was in his office reading the reports of the shooting attempt. He had a small neat square of bandage on his cheek where the chip of concrete had struck him; rage still coiled through him like a snake.

  A. 38, a wimp’s gun in this era of Glocks, Magnums, and hypervelocity bullets. But it could kill you just as dead. Would have, if the guy had been any kind of a shot. No cars reported stolen in the appropriate time frame. No leads, no suspects, no witnesses who had seen the car racing away, no clues, no evidence, no nothing…

  The lousy shooting took Raptor out of it, even if the Death Valley note hadn’t: I DO NOT KILL MY OWN KIND. No, had Raptor been behind the. 38, he and Rosie would now be dead.

  Which meant Prince had hired himself a new shooter. Well, Dante was going to get on a plane to Vegas, go to the Xanadu, go up to that motherfucker’s suite, and tear his guts out.

  The door opened and Tim’s stomach came in followed not too closely by Tim. He ambled over to one of the desks and hoisted his big buns up on the edge of it with a sigh.

  “Way I ate yesterday, they oughta let me hibernate for a week or so,” he said. “I got a little something for you.”

  Dante tensed up. He knew that tone of voice.

  “Martin Prince. Christmas Eve. At a little fishing hotel in Baja called Hotel Pez Grande. Somebody gutted him like a fucking shark and hung him upside down by his ankles off one of those big-game-fish block-and-tackle arrangements. Guess a couple of early-rising honeymooners sort of lost their breakfasts when they found him.”

  Tear his guts out. All of Dante’s theories were turned upside down once again. And when he got home…

  “Our text today is from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea,” said the obvious English lit professor’s voice on his answering machine. “‘Those who had caught sharks had taken them to the shark factory on the other side of the cove where they were hoisted on a block and tackle, their livers removed, their fins cut off and their hides skinned out and their flesh cut into strips for salting.’ There will be a spot quiz on the meaning of this passage in the morning.”

  Then the man laughed a whinnying English-professor sort of laugh, and hung up.

  PART EIGHT

  25,000 b.c. to the Present

  Death is the evaluator… Death stalks the fish eggs, the seedlings, the foetuses. Death is a leopard that sees in the dark. Death i
s a goshawk, a glacier, the serpent; a wind from the desert, a dispute among friends, a plague of locusts or viruses, a tiring of species… We should all be lost in the wilderness of chance had not death, through a billion choosings, created the values of the world I know.

  Robert Ardrey, African Genesis

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Well, sir, talk about your savagery! I let myself get carried away in the matter of Mr. Prince, don’t I? Yet what am I to do? I plot brilliantly to arrange an unexpected tete-a-tete with that capo di tutti i capi where I have surprise on my side and a weapon besides, and he has only empty hands. When I have it, I indulge myself. Is this fair — is this sporting? No. But it is prudent. I wish to gaff the shark, not be his meal.

  And gaff him I do.

  I start out knowing only three things for certain about Martin Prince: what he looks like, thanks to congressional hearings into organized crime; that he is a Mafia don; and that his center of operations is the Xanadu Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. Oh, I know one other thing about him. His personal security will be state-of-the-art and of the highest quality.

  How am I to get next to him to eventuate his demise in as nasty a way possible? Long-range rifle, as in the case of Gideon Abramson? I would have to hang about resort hotel rooftops for weeks, even months, to catch him entering or leaving the Xanadu. This means I will last two or three hours if I am lucky, before being spotted by some of his bodyguards and suffering the fate I have been dealing out to his compeers.

  A pistol shot, a similar problem: He is seldom seen in pub lic, and when he is, he is surrounded by sharp-eyed men versed in the use of their weapons.

  Explosives? I have only a stump-blaster’s knowledge of dynamite, would probably blow myself up with pure TNT, wouldn’t know how to get C4.

  So it must be in close and personal-and that is the way I prefer it with this man. I want him to know he is dying. Already the savagery is surfacing in Raptor, is it not so? Up close and personal means somehow isolating him, or discovering him when he has isolated himself, from his protective minions.