Something Borrowed, Something Black

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Cabs are for poor people in this town,” Abilene said. “It’s how they stay poor. How’s your head?”

  He towered over her in a red-and-white yoke shirt, crisp black jeans with copper rivets, and black boots that glistened like eels. Only the Stetson and the crooked grin were the same. He must have had a change of clothes in the Jeep and cleaned up and shaved in the men’s room in the lobby. He’d drenched himself in Aqua-Velva.

  “Oh—much better.” Her cheeks felt hot, and she knew they were red. She was sure he could hear her heart beating. “I thought I’d go shopping.”

  “I parked my crate behind the hotel. Where you want to go?”

  “Really, I’d rather walk.”

  “Run’s the word. I had to high-step it to catch up. You in a hurry? No one’s in a hurry out here. Even the earthquakes take their time.”

  She met his pale gaze. “Please don’t be offended. I’d rather be alone.”

  “No good.”

  Her heart speeded up. She hadn’t thought that was possible. “What do you mean, ‘No good’? I want to be alone, I said.”

  “No good means no good. Something was to happen to you, I’d never hear the end of it from Mr. Major. This town ain’t as friendly as it looks. There’s gangs and druggies. White slavers, I ain’t shitting. Snatch you off Sepulveda in broad daylight Monday and Saturday they’re bidding on you in Beirut. I could tell you stories you won’t hear from the chamber of commerce.”

  “I’m a nurse in training, Abilene. I’ve visited neighborhoods in Toledo at night that make the worst in Los Angeles seem like Disneyland. I just want a day to myself.”

  “I’ll keep my trap shut. You won’t even know I’m around.” His hand closed on her arm.

  Laurie looked around. The cab had left. There wasn’t a pedestrian in sight and the traffic on the street continued past as if the cars were drawn by invisible cables with nothing living inside them. The city itself was like some great self-propelled machine, going about its business without need or regard for the people who crawled over its surface. She knew he’d told her the truth about white slavers. She could be abducted there on the street as easily as if she were cornered in an uninhabited desert.

  He pulled gently, and she went with him. All the way to where his black Jeep stood against the curb behind the hotel she thought, Kidnapped, I’m being kidnapped. But she said nothing. She went with Abilene.

  “There’s a store in Tijuana I know you’ll like,” he said as he started the engine. “They got Louis Vuitton bags hanging like lanterns from the ceiling. Louis hisself wouldn’t know ’em from the genuine article.”

  She was only half listening. She had to concentrate. She had a plan. It was probably unnecessary and she would feel silly later—she wasn’t really being kidnapped, for God’s sake—but she knew now there was no talking to Abilene. She could not picture Peter tolerating him for long as a companion. It had probably been a business thing: He’d wanted to sell out, Mr. Major had been thinking of buying, Abilene was a valued employee. You couldn’t expect to close a deal by insulting a man’s taste in help. Well, she’d had enough of the fellow, and she wasn’t hoping to sell anything. When he stopped for the light at Western, she hit the door handle and pushed.

  A hand shot out and grasped her wrist. It wasn’t the polite hold of before. His fingers were strung with wire. Pain shot up to her elbow when she tried to twist free. She yelped.

  He held on. He was watching the light and a braid of muscle stood out along his jaw. When the light changed, he popped the clutch and they bolted forward. Rubber chirped, Laurie fell back in her seat. The momentum swung the door shut. Still holding her with one hand, Abilene leaned into a hard right turn from the inside lane, gunned the engine, and was well up Western before the line of drivers he’d cut off had time to react. Their horns sounded querulous and far away. He turned right again into the parking lot of a concrete-and-glass convenience store, circled behind the building, and braked inches short of the cinderblock wall. Gasoline whumped around inside the tank.

  He let go of her wrist then. A brown Dumpster filled the window on her side, preventing the door from opening.

  She turned to glare at him. “Just what—”

  His fist was a blur. A blue light snapped inside her skull. Her mouth stung and her head hurt where she’d bonked it against the window. She tasted salt and iron. Her vision swam. When it cleared, Abilene’s face was two inches from hers. He was gripping her upper arms, cutting off her circulation. She smelled Aqua-Velva and something sickening-sweet on his breath, nauseating: chewing tobacco. His eyes were so pale the pupils looked like pinpricks in ovals of white plastic.

  “This ain’t the farm, Heidi,” he said. “Mr. Major wants you kicking. He didn’t say you had to keep your teeth.”

  NINE

  At the last minute he decided not to use the ID that had been arranged for him.

  There hadn’t been time to research the driver’s-license format in his home state, so they’d used a blank passport. The paper wasn’t quite right—the quality of the bond was flimsier than government stock and there was something wrong with the eagle in the watermark—but airline employees were less experienced with passports than were customs officials and he’d been confident the flaws would pass unnoticed. The problem was the photograph.

  It was ten years out of date. The hair was significantly darker, he’d been wearing it longer then, and his face had filled out a little since it was taken. Old photos in themselves didn’t arouse suspicion, but the print was recent, and too glossy. Someone might wonder why, if he’d gone to the trouble of striking off a fresh print, he didn’t just pose for a new picture. There were any number of reasonable excuses he might use, but the bare fact that it would cause a busy clerk to give him and it a second look increased the risk factor.

  He considered scuffing it up, but resisted the temptation. Artificial aging was an art, and any attempt to streamline the process just called attention to itself. Had he been in charge of the operation, as had always been the case in the old days, he’d have postponed it until it could be done properly, and scrubbed it entirely if the time factor did not allow for the adjustment. If they wanted to cowboy the job, they might as well give it to that Arkansas shitkicker in L.A.

  The whole business screamed hurry-up. All his instincts were against it. If you needed a man dead without complications you either planned the thing through or caught him in an alley and bashed in his head with a jack handle. Anything in between was suicide, especially in Texas, where they executed murderers on a conveyor belt, rolling them in one end on gurneys and out the other in coffins. The jack handle was out: not because he wasn’t that kind of killer—there was a kind of poetic simplicity in blunt-end weapons, and he had no use for the dainty fellows who crouched behind telescopic sights and never got a drop of blood on their shirts—but because he didn’t know the alleys in San Antonio.

  There was, now that he thought about it, a third alternative: playing it by ear. That mean scouting as he went, making no plans that could not be changed on site, and in fact changing any plan on principle that had stood long enough to grow stale. He didn’t recommend it to beginners, even if he could picture himself sharing hard-won secrets that might one day be used against him. It had to do with knowing what to expect and not expecting too much, while leaving space to react to those events that could not be predicted. It was the same as playing cowboy if you did it out of ignorance, but if you knew the percentages it could actually prove superior to overthinking the operation.

  The drawback in his case was he was rusty. He hadn’t held a weapon in nearly two years, much less employed one with homicidal intent. His reflexes had slowed, for one thing, and for another, the people whose business it was to prevent him from practicing his craft with impunity had in the meantime acquired a chestful of shiny new tools. He’d congratulated himself on getting out when he had. Now he had to face the fact that if he’d stayed active and kept abreast of the changes as
they took place, he’d be in a much better position than he was. He was a manual typewriter racing against a roomful of computer keyboards. The smart thing was to walk away.

  That wasn’t going to happen, so he didn’t dwell on it. It was out of his hands, and had been since he’d been spotted in California by whoever had spotted him. Nothing in that. He’d known men in the work who’d gotten so hung up thinking about the nickel’s worth of gas they’d failed to put in the tank, the jammed automatic that could as easily have been a reliable revolver, the major artery missed by a thousandth of an inch, separating a living witness from a dead man; kicking themselves over the dead past until they had no energy left to deal with the present. And in the bargain threw away their future. He’d been dealt a stinker of a hand and he couldn’t fold, so he had to do what he could to turn it into a straight flush.

  All this came to him in the time it took to use the urinal in the airport men’s room and wash and dry his hands. On his way out the door, he folded the false passport inside the damp brown paper towel and poked it through the hatch into the bullet-shaped trash can. He would use his own ID and if it came to checking who’d flown in within forty-eight hours of the killing—well, it wasn’t against the law to take an unexplained flight. In any case he felt safer under his own name than under the one the sons of bitches had picked.

  He used a pay telephone in the terminal to book the flight, not bothering to cancel the reservation that had been made for him under the other name. That would slow down any attempts to double-check him from the L.A. end: no-shows weren’t reported until after a plane left the ground, and even then were usually tied up in the system for hours. By the time they thought to ask for him under his own name, he’d be burrowed in and halfway home. He’d learned to depend upon the infallible inconvenience of air transportation.

  He bought a personal-pan pizza in a sterile and soulless cafeteria, ate two slices, and dumped the rest along with the box and his napkin. In the old days he’d skipped eating entirely twenty-four hours before a job, so that his blood would carry oxygen to his brain instead of lagging in his digestive system, but since retiring he’d grown accustomed to regular meals. He didn’t want a growling stomach attracting attention. Then he picked up his suitcase, a cheap one made of brown vinyl he’d bought on his way to the airport, along with the jacket and some toilet items he’d stuffed inside just so the X-ray machine would have something to photograph, and joined the line at the ticket counter.

  A female clerk in her late fifties, wearing a hairstyle and makeup better suited to a woman twenty years younger, looked at his driver’s license and told him she’d found a seat on the aisle. “These midweek flights never fill up as fast as they hope upstairs,” she said.

  “I was counting on that.”

  “San Antonio’s a nice town. Business or pleasure?”

  “Business, I’m afraid. No time to visit the Alamo.”

  “That’s too bad. It’s worth it. Well, you’re all set. Gate E-ll, boarding in ten minutes.” She handed him his ticket and boarding pass. “Have a pleasant flight, Mr. Macklin.”

  TEN

  “How’s the lip?” Abilene asked.

  She touched it with a fingertip. It was puffing. She’d bitten it when he hit her and it was still bleeding inside her mouth. She hadn’t experienced that iodiney taste since she’d fallen off her bike when she was ten. She lowered her hand and stared at him without answering, letting the lip speak for her. She hoped he’d think her defiant. Instinct told her it would be a mistake to let him sense fear.

  He let his jaw slide sideways. “It ain’t bad. You look like Melanie Griffith. You ought to look into that collagen thing when it goes down.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Roy Skeets, though I don’t answer to it. We been through that. What you want to know is what I do, and I told you that too. I work for Mr. Major.”

  “Who is Mr. Major?”

  “Charles Major.” He waited. “Shit, I keep forgetting you ain’t from Detroit. Here.”

  They were still parked behind the convenience store, with the Dumpster blocking Laurie’s door. He slid a folded newspaper from its perch atop the sun visor and spread it on her lap. It was a copy of the Los Angeles Times with yesterday’s date. The only photo on the page showed a short, middle-aged man standing slightly hunched between two younger men carrying briefcases. CARLO MAGGIORE, REPUTED FORMER DETROIT MOBSTER, ARRIVES AT CITY HALL FOR QUESTIONING, read the caption.

  “Questioning for what?”

  “This and that. Mostly that. L.A.’s an open city, they don’t like it when folks from connected towns come here to settle. That’s why the guinea name. He ain’t used it in years.”

  “You work for a gangster?”

  “Don’t scrape me off your shoe, little nursie. So does your husband.”

  “My husband is retired from the retail camera business.”

  The grin slid another notch. “He sold cameras, all right, but just indirectly. And only to police photographers. You could say he helped create the demand. Pete’s a wet worker. He kills to live.”

  “Why are you lying?” she said after a moment. “Did you force Peter to write that note? Where is he? Did you kill him?”

  “Well, he ain’t in Sacramento, and he ain’t dead. Which if he was one or the other amounts to the same thing. He ain’t in L.A. neither. If he was, Mr. Major couldn’t be. That would wreck the whole point of hiring a kill.”

  “Don’t you mean a hit?” She tried to look contemptuous. It made her lip hurt.

  “Nobody’s called it that since they stopped using phones to set it up. It gets done on the street now, in crowds and noisy restaurants, where everybody’s jabbering and any kid with a scanner and a tape recorder can’t listen in. A kill’s a kill: not a contract or a hit or a whack job. You’re married to a killer, not a mechanic. It’s less confusing. Time was, when you told someone to take care of a guy, he’d put a bullet in him, when what you really wanted was to get him looked after. You can appreciate what a mess it was.”

  “Why do you keep saying that about Peter? He couldn’t even run over a seagull.”

  He pushed back his Stetson with a knuckle. There was a band of creamy skin across the top of his forehead where the hat shielded it from the sun. “If I show you, you promise not to try and jump the fence again? I’d hate to bust that cute little nose, smear it all over your face like a squashed chili pepper.”

  “You can’t show me what isn’t true.”

  He said nothing. She could see her reflection in his dead pale eyes.

  “I won’t try anything.” She could hardly hear her own voice.

  He lifted his hand. She shrank back against the door. His grin hardened. He grasped the shifting cane and jerked the transmission into reverse. “There’s Kleenexes in the glove compartment. We don’t want you bleeding all over the police station.”

  The building looked familiar, as if she’d seen it in a vivid dream: a narrow tower jutting vertically like the finger of Justice from between a pair of horizontal wings. It wasn’t until they’d parked around the corner and begun climbing the steps to the front door that she recognized it. It was Los Angeles City Hall. She’d seen it in fifty movies and in every episode of Dragnet on cable, embossed on the gold Zulu shield of Joe Friday’s badge 714. Eighteen stories of identical windows with neoclassical marble arches at the base. A number of Hollywood gangsters had defied the law inside only to be shot down by vigilantes on these very steps.

  “We’re really going into the police station?” she asked Abilene halfway up.

  “Think I’ll melt?”

  They passed through a metal detector into a big echoing room that reminded her of a hotel lobby at checkout time. Men and women in street clothes, officers in uniform, lawyerly types carrying briefcases, and apparent bums in grubby sweatshirts and jeans worn through at the knees trafficked about, jabbering like first-nighters at the theater. At the high front counter sat a short-haired female officer, scribbl
ing on a sheet attached to a clipboard. Laurie’s companion waited until the woman looked up.

  “Sergeant Thurtell,” he said. “Tell him it’s Abilene.”

  “Just Abilene?”

  “I bet I’m the only one dropped by today.”

  The officer used the telephone on the counter, then hung up and handed them each a visitor’s pass with a clip attached, instructing them to hang the boldly printed tags on the outside of their clothes. “Sixth floor. Room six-fourteen.” She resumed writing.

  “Dyke says ‘What,’” Abilene said softly.

  She looked up again. “What?”

  “Thanks, Officer. You have a nice day.”

  They shared an elevator with two big patrolmen strung all over with weapons and two-way radios. The officers smelled of clean sweat and chewing gum. Abilene, watching the numbers, paid them no attention. When the two men in uniform got off on the third floor, he said, “Let’s be careful out there.”

  One of the officers looked back just as the doors closed.

  Six-fourteen was a large, brightly lit room, nearly paved with desks made of laminated panels with woodgrain printed on them. Each desk had its own computer console. A young man rose from behind one to shake Abilene’s hand and put on his suitcoat before wishing Laurie good morning. He had frank eyes in a babyfat face and she knew the moment when he saw her split and swollen lip, but his smile didn’t change.

  “Thought you’d be up in Mendocino,” he told Abilene. “Tri-Star’s shooting a sure-enough western, big budget. Matthew McConaughey and some fresh slice off the runway. Lots of security work.”

  “I can’t watch these Hollywood boys ride. Anyway, I don’t moonlight no more. How’s the lion hunting?”

  “I gave it up. Orange County sheriffs caught my neighbor using a laser scope at night, confiscated the rifle and his car. I figure they can go on eating all the cats and poodles they can keep down. What I got for the pelt wouldn’t cover what I owe on the SKJ.”