Johns Davis had been in San Antonio eight years. He’d spent seed money he’d brought with him to establish the contacts he needed to run a respectable sports book, which through swift settlement of losses on his part, and short-term hiring among the local strong-arm talent to collect winnings from reluctant customers, had become the place to go in central and south Texas when one wished to place a bet on anything from NBA basketball to curling matches in Edinburgh. He’d done everything according to the rules, beginning with asking Spanish Rivera’s permission to operate in his territory in return for a slice off the top, and winning the old Sicilian’s confidence with a nearly one-hundred-percent collection record without a single fatality; although orthopedic surgeons in Austin, San Antonio, and Corpus Christi had learned to brace for a spate of compound fractures during the weeks following March Madness and the Super Bowl. When Davis’s closest competitor decided to sell his sports book and retire, Rivera brokered the deal, negotiating a price that would maintain his Frank Lloyd Wright house in Galveston the rest of his life, but that would not put Davis so far into the hole he couldn’t make it up during the next World Series. The fact that the first illegal gambling operation of its size to fall into non-Italian hands should do so almost without note was yet another sign that great changes had come to pass in the American underworld.
Johns Davis, Macklin learned, was sixty-one years old, a short-con artist who had graduated to the long con in his native Chicago, essentially applying the principles of the simple pigeon drop to the greater profits (and equally greater risks) of stock-market fraud. He’d played a little college ball at Loyola and knew enough about the sport to have passed himself off as a former NFL player and shorn a number of widows of their late husbands’ life insurance as well as a couple of big-time speculators who ought to have known better. He had balls and some brains and no known serious health problems, so there would be no making it look like a heart attack or that he’d blacked out while driving along 410. That was no problem, since Macklin had been instructed to make it an open job, meaning the world should know it was murder.
Why this was so, or for that matter why Davis had to die, was not a question he felt compelled to ask. Edison wouldn’t know, and if he asked Macklin, his stock would go down in Macklin’s estimation. Curiosity was the first casualty of the work. If you knew why and didn’t agree with the reason, your subconscious might force you to fuck up the job. Even more certainly, the more you knew, the greater threat you posed to the man who’d given you the assignment in the first place. No one in the Organization blamed the shooter in an unnecessary killing, but if the order might earn general disapproval, the man who issued it was at risk as long as there was someone out there who knew his motives. Macklin’s very first killing, twenty years ago, involved a hitter who knew more than was considered safe. Ignorance—or the appearance of it—was the next-best defense against second-guesses.
Of course, the best defense was a working weapon. It was to the spotter’s credit that he addressed the issue at the very moment Macklin’s thoughts turned toward it.
“Carrying yet?”
Macklin said he wasn’t.
“Didn’t think so, but don’t get sore at me for asking. There’s an oilman waiting his turn at the needle in Huntsville because the horse’s-ass he hired liked the Glock he used in Dallas and checked it through to Amarillo instead of chucking it into the Trinity River right after the mark went down. ATF matched it to a casing he left at the scene and he made a deal for a life sentence. A thing like that can shake your faith in the Pope.”
“I never use automatics.” Macklin offered no more information.
Edison nodded, understanding, and drank the rest of his cola. “I had the place swept this morning when I heard you were coming. Nobody’s listening but the fucking rattlesnakes. Everything you’ve been told about guns and Texas is straight, but that doesn’t mean you want to deal one from a barber or a lady cab driver. When you buy a piece that way you buy its history, too, and if you get picked up with it on you the difference is between a year mandatory for CCW and the needle for someone else’s hit. You know about Goliad?”
“The whorehouse?”
“That’s like saying, ‘The Chicken McNugget place?’ when somebody mentions McDonald’s. They make as much money legitimately as they do upstairs. You can’t go wrong in San Antonio if you put ‘gun’ or ‘Davy Crockett’ in the name of your business. You want to talk to Red Cotton there. Austine Holland runs the place, but if it’s guns she’ll just turn you over to Red, unless there’s something about your look she doesn’t like. Then you might as well go stand in the middle of U.S. 35 and wait for a tractor-trailer rig to run over you, because you won’t be doing business in Texas.”
“Until they need me.”
“Except you could starve to death waiting for them to admit it. You left the United States when you came here.”
“Bullshit. Everyone has to eat and piss, even people in Texas.”
“Try telling them that. All you’ll get is a speech.”
“Do they know what you think of them?”
“They’d be suspicious if they didn’t. They’re worse than the French when it comes to outsiders going native. They don’t thank me for my opinion, but they let me alone.”
Macklin was irritated, and he was irritated at himself for becoming irritated. One year out of the loop and he’d turned into a citizen. He changed the subject. “Every cockshop madam I ever knew was a snitch.”
“Well, sure. It’s a whorehouse. But the Holland woman knows when to use the slow mail. You’ll be back in Detroit before anyone acts on the information. I understand this one has to be done quick.”
“Who said I’m from Detroit?”
“Don’t sweat it. They didn’t even tell me your name. Someone pointed you out to me in Toronto ten or eleven years ago. It was a big meet. You were with old man Boniface. I’d heard about you, so I took a good look.”
“Not good enough. I’m not from Detroit and I’ve never been to Toronto.”
Edison’s face went flat. “My mistake.”
Now he was more irritated than ever. He seemed destined to go through life having to kill people he’d started to like.
TWELVE
Leroy Skeets—who had spent much of the first half of his life persuading people to call him Abilene, a town he had never visited except through the magic of cinema—truly did not fear death. He’d been dead, and had found the experience itself not as troublesome as losing his keys.
“Roy, I’m going to kill you,” his father had told him the year he turned fifteen. “I’m telling you that on account of I want you to know what’s happening. Ain’t nobody going to come stop it like in them cowboy pictures you like.” Then he’d strangled him to death.
Abilene had fought as hard as he’d ever fought anyone, smashing the old man’s nose and gouging his eyes, but Dan Skeets was six foot two and two hundred forty pounds and had served nine years in Little Rock for beating a man to death in a hardware store parking lot. His thumbs crushed Abilene’s Adam’s apple as if it were a beer can and his big red face with blood gushing out the nostrils shrank to pinpoints and went out like the picture on a TV tube. The boy was in a coma two weeks. When he woke up, a doctor told him the paramedics had jump-started his heart with paddles from no pulse at all, which was nothing new, but Abilene was the first person in the state of Arkansas to come back after he’d been declared brain-dead. That had happened at the hospital, after his mother had agreed to remove him from life support.
So he’d been dead twice. There had been no bright lights, no floating outside himself and looking down from the ceiling, none of that bullshit you heard about that made death sound like going on a ride at Six Flags, but on the other hand there had been no pain, either, just a kind of warm blackness, like drifting off under a thick quilt after a day spent in the raw cold.
He’d been found by his Uncle Bud, who’d stopped by to visit and got suspicious when he found the f
ront door standing open and no sign of life inside. His mother had gone to Wal-Mart before the fight and his father had packed his things and some pawnable items in his army duffel and hitched a ride out of town, having made certain of Abilene before he left. Alerted by the state police in Arkansas, Missouri troopers traced him to a truck scale near Cape Girardeau, but could not determine whether he climbed aboard a rig there or took off on foot. He might have been abducted by aliens for all anyone heard of him after that. Abilene hoped that was true and that the little silver fuckers were still probing the son of a bitch.
Death didn’t scare him one little bit, but he would never forget the pain and terror just before, or the weeks of recovery from three separate surgeries to repair his damaged larynx and vocal cords. He still suffered frequently from severe sore throats and lost his voice for days every time he caught cold. Knowing what he did about fear and pain was the chief asset he brought to his work. Too many times in the past, some capo had lost his head and had a snitch killed before finding out how much information he’d passed on and to whom, or some clumsy wet worker forgot himself during an interrogation, sticking an icepick too far into the brain or misjudging the strength of the subject’s heart. Such cases required delicacy and a certain understanding of just how much a human being can stand. Abilene had that understanding, having been there and beyond. “‘A man has to know his limitations,’” he’d told Mr. Major, the first time they met. “Know who said that? Clint Eastwood. Well, I know mine, and I ain’t so high on myself I think they’re any bit less than anybody else’s.” Major had hired him based on that statement.
He’d never killed a man, but as he’d confided to certain people (victims and employers, mostly), he’d made one or two wish they had, and not just at the moment Abilene was working. Some men were more stubborn than others, and the more mule-headed they were, the higher their threshold of pain, the more likely the results were to be life-affecting. Cowards got off easiest. The sight of his knife alone was enough to bring some of them around. Depending upon the seriousness of their transgression, after they’d given up what was wanted they were let loose minus a finger or an ear as a warning to others, or turned over to someone else for quick extinction. Either fate was preferable to crippling. And so he had the reverse view of strength and courage from most of the rest of the human race—having them meant more work for him and a definite lowering of the quality of life for the afflicted party. Such virtues were like conscience, something invented by cops and ministers to make their jobs easier and Abilene’s tougher. He himself had never known a twinge of guilt or a moment when protecting someone other than himself, sacrificing his life or his convenience for the benefit of another, seemed a reasonable course of action. All possibility that he ever would had been throttled out of him at age fifteen.
If pressed, he would concede that he enjoyed his work, but the enjoyment was in the satisfaction of a thing done well, not the act itself. He was no sadist, not a pervert who whacked himself off at the sight of hemorrhaging or the memory of a bubbling shriek. The head jobs you read about every day who skinned their victims, cooked their entrails in their brainpans and humped their ice-cold assholes, were individuals he would glady work on for free. That would be the only scenario in which his entertainment would come from the suffering. Abilene contributed. It was the sick shits that gave crime a bad name.
Women were easy. They weren’t less courageous than men—some of them had shown themselves to be surprisingly obstinate and resilient—but they cared about their looks. The beauties, particularly, looked upon hamstringing and a simple broken nose as one and the same thing. Often a short rap to the mouth, like the one he’d given the Macklin woman, worked like a dose of salts. There was nothing better than a taste of one’s own blood and a glimpse at a life of nights with one’s teeth in a jar to put a girl wise. He considered women practical creatures, in the main unburdened with silly notions of stoicism and valor. And on occasion, when time was not at issue and the woman was easy on the eyes, Abilene could get himself a little bonus. Laurie Macklin was cute quail, there was no reason for hurry, and there was a hotel room all paid for and going to waste.
After he saw her back to the room, still in shock over what she’d learned about her bridegroom at the police station, he went back down to the lobby. There he waited for the clerk to finish checking out a fat bastard in an Armani knockoff who insisted he’d watched one less movie than appeared on his bill. Finally the clerk agreed to subtract the charge and the fat fuck hoisted his Samsonite and left.
“Which one he miss, Big-City Titties or My Fair Anus?” Abilene asked.
The clerk was a good-looking surfer boy and knew it, bleached his eyebrows to match his hair. He looked at Abilene without expression. “I wouldn’t know, sir. Movie titles don’t show up on the bill.”
“Sure. What do they think, robots look up the tapes and stick ’em in? Like Lardass there would stretch out in his jammies and watch four movies in one night with Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow.”
“Three, he said.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll make it up on the next fatty from Chicago.”
“Can I help you, sir?”
“Let’s find out. I want the room next to twelve-oh-six. One with a connecting door.”
“Twelve-oh-eight.” The clerk tapped some keys. “I’m afraid that one’s reserved. The party’s expected by six o’clock.”
“That’s good. You won’t have to move him.”
“I can let you have twelve-eleven. Smoking, just down the hall.”
“Nope. Twelve-oh-eight. If it’s got a connecting.”
“It has, but it’s taken. I’m sorry, sir.”
“Don’t be. There’s no need to be. This ain’t a sorry day for you.” The mirror finish on the veined marble behind the registration desk told him there was no one waiting behind him. He took his wallet, tan leather with stitching, Abilene tooled on one side, out of his hip pocket and counted bills onto the desk. It took awhile to stack ten of them one on top of another, but that was the idea. He’d tried using hundreds once, but although they did the trick he’d been disappointed by how quickly he’d come to five. Ten fifties added up to the same amount, but they seemed to go on and on and he enjoyed watching the eyes of clerks and receptionists, doormen and hostesses—people who in New York and L.A. made that much in a day, face it, it wouldn’t change their lives as much as a good pair of Nikes—get wider and wider until a rap on the back of the head would pop them out like contact lenses. The great thing about the plastic economy was the increasing wizardry of cash. Ten crisp fifty-dollar bills, the new ones with Grant’s big knobby face looking bigger and knobbier, had a larger effect than ten thousand dollars printed out on a cashier’s check. It meant five hundred bucks Uncle Sam and the prick in the office in back didn’t know about. It was like flipping off the president.
The clerk impressed him with his reserve. He picked up the bills and drummed the edges even on the shelf under the counter and slipped them into the inside breast pocket of his blazer, unhurriedly and without breaking a sweat. He tapped the keys again, asked Abilene how he would be paying, accepted the corporate card drawn on the account of Mr. Major’s holding company in Burbank, and gave him his key card in its little folder. He explained that room service was available until midnight and that a complimentary breakfast was served between six and eleven A.M.
“Eat it yourself, Frankie. I’m ordering raw oysters in the morning.”
THIRTEEN
The gun room and indoor firing range at the Goliad Rod and Gun Club were in the basement, which didn’t look or feel like any basement Macklin had ever spent time in. The bright Texas sun filtered in through vertical blinds over glass doorwalls on the walk-in end and through heat-treated slanted windows like solar panels. The sky looked wavy through the glass, and Macklin supposed the windows were extra thick or multiple-paned, possibly both, to deaden the noise of reports from inside. A silent ventilation system exchanged oxygen for stale ai
r constantly, and humidifiers built into the walls kept the harsh Southwestern climate at bay. The long aisles of varnished wood separating the shooting stands from the targets might have belonged to any aboveground bowling alley in Miami or San Francisco, except for the western touches: What looked like an original Remington bronze of a six-hitch stagecoach clattering down a hill stood four feet high on a pedestal at the foot of the staircase that led down from the club rooms, and the carpet was an industrial-strength variation on a traditional Navajo design. The color scheme was sand and burnt-sienna.
The range, unoccupied in favor of the outdoor facility on a moderate day in the high eighties, was equipped with standard police-type silhouettes, with the occasional whimsical addition. There was a cartoon burglar in a black mask and striped jersey, a hippie flashing the peace sign, and a caricature bearing a slight resemblance to a former U.S. attorney general. The cabinet member had acquired a stitched facial scar and a Nazi uniform, possibly a precaution in the event of a lawsuit Macklin assumed the Ayatollahs, Saddams, and bin Ladens came out on more public occasions. The targets were suspended from wires and pulleys, enabling the shooters to select the range and inspect the results. The score from the motion picture Giant floated softly out of wall-mounted speakers on a cushion of spent gunpowder.
The door to the gun room had no handle. He pressed a button set into the frame, but no sound issued from within, which meant the door had baffles and probably a steel core. Although there was a speaker grid next to the button, no one challenged him through it. Instead a flat buzzer sounded on his side and the lock clunked open. The receptionist he’d spoken to upstairs must have passed Edison’s name downstairs through an intercom. Macklin stepped inside and let the door drift shut behind him. It made a little sucking noise easing into its airtight frame.
The room was a vault, but again unlike any in his previous experience. A tenth as large as the indoor range and windowless, it was paneled in real walnut, with a suspended ceiling that shed light through frosted panels from invisible fixtures above. The carpet was green pile and felt spongy beneath his feet. There were ventilators here as well, but they whispered steadily, as if wheezing from a greater effort. There was no other way for air to circulate, and without them whoever was inside would suffocate in minutes if he had no way to get out. The room, Macklin was sure, was a steel box, self-contained and set by cranes directly on the concrete slab that supported the basement before the rest of the building was constructed. In Texas, there was only one commodity that was considered precious enough to warrant such secure storage, and the racks and glass cases that lined the walls gleamed with it. He recognized a Mannlicher elephant gun among the more common Winchesters, Mausers, and venerable Krag repeaters, and saw a number of rifles he couldn’t identify, with large bores and black composition stocks, although he suspected he’d have read about them if he’d been keeping up with new developments as he had in the past. Some were fitted with laser sights, an innovation he despised, both because branding a man with a floating red dot and thus warning him he was about to become a victim went against logic and because it eliminated the element of skill, which was the only thing he found worthy of respect in the character of the long-distance sniper. There were shotguns of every make as well, sporting models with hunting scenes engraved on the buttstocks and ambush guns with pistol grips only and barrels too short to be legal in any state, and scores of handguns. These included the homely Colt revolver whose design had not changed dramatically since frontier days and the Glock and Sig-Sauer semiautomatics that had flooded the American market about the same time the Detroit automobile industry went down on its knees before West Berlin and Tokyo. There was roughly two million dollars’ worth of ordnance in sight, and probably a good deal more socked away behind hidden panels.
Something Borrowed, Something Black Page 9