Santa Fe Edge

by Stuart Woods

  A sea of cars greeted him. He figured if they were going to shop for groceries, they would park as close to Albertsons as possible, so he started at the front door and began driving slowly up and down the rows of parked cars, checking for Volvo station wagons. He found a silver one and a white one but no green one. He continued to look.

  Finally, he had covered the entire parking lot without finding the car he was looking for. He’d come back tomorrow and start again. Then, as he was driving back toward the supermarket, he saw a green Volvo station wagon, empty. He checked the plates: New Mexico, Santa Fe County. He double-parked, got out of his car and tried a door on the Volvo. Locked. He walked slowly around the car, looking inside. He saw a map of the state and nothing else.

  Todd returned to his car, opened the trunk and opened a case he traveled with. He chose two items, closed the case and the trunk, and returned to the Volvo. He looked around for cops or someone paying attention to him, found no one, then dropped to the ground, crawled halfway under the car, far enough that no one could reach unless they crawled as far as he had, and attached the little box magnetically to the frame. He pressed a button on the side and watched a red light start to flash. It would continue for two minutes.

  He got up from under the station wagon, went back to his car, drove a hundred yards away and stopped. He switched the GPS device on and pressed the button for current location. The device took a moment to locate itself, and then a map of Santa Fe appeared. He pressed another button, and a red light on the map began to flash. It had nailed the location of the green Volvo station wagon. Now he didn’t have to closely tail the car; when it moved, he could follow at an unseen distance.

  He found a parking space and sat in the car, waiting.

  BARBARA WAS WATCHING television in Jimmy’s study when he came home from the studio. “Hi,” she said.

  He didn’t reply but went to the bar, poured himself a stiff drink, then flopped down in his easy chair.

  “Something wrong, sweetie?” she asked. He hadn’t even offered her a drink.

  “Yeah, something’s wrong,” he replied, without looking at her.

  “What is it?”

  “You remember the pilot who flew us back from Mexico?”

  “Of course. What was his name?”

  “Bart Cross.”

  “Oh, sure. What about him?”

  “I gave you his name, remember?”

  “I had forgotten,” she said.

  “Did you ever speak with him?”

  “No. I decided he might not be the right man for the job.”

  “Well, Bart is dead,” Jimmy said. “He was shot at his home last night. It’s all over the papers.”

  “I haven’t read a paper today,” she said.

  “There was something else in the paper,” he replied. “Somebody attacked Ed Eagle with a knife in Santa Fe yesterday but failed to kill him.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. Sounds like somebody was doing you a favor.”

  “Well, trying, maybe.”

  “Barbara, did you hire Bart to kill Eagle? I mean, I knew you were going to do something like that, and I didn’t really care.”

  “I think you know the answer to that,” she said.

  “Did you hire Bart Cross?”

  She said nothing, just went to the bar and poured herself a drink, then came back and sat down.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And did you kill him for failing?”

  “Jimmy, he made mistakes. The police would have been onto him before the week was out. He’d have given me up in a plea bargain.”

  “Well, I can’t argue with that,” he said, “but I don’t like you killing a man who worked for me, somebody I liked.”

  “I’m sorry. It was necessary.”

  Jimmy took a deep breath and sighed. “Barbara, you’re going to have to leave here and not come back for a long time.”

  “All right, if that’s what you wish.”

  “I mean right now. I’ll drive you to the airport. I don’t want there to be a record of a taxi pickup here.”

  Barbara stood up. “I’ll go and pack now and be ready in half an hour.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  TEDDY CAME OUT OF Albertsons and saw that it had begun to snow, and he figured that if it kept up like this there would be at least six inches on the ground by morning. He put his groceries in the luggage compartment and returned his cart. Then, as he approached the Volvo, something occurred to him. He squatted and read the side of one of the tires: It was rated for mud and snow. The salesman had told him the vehicle was equipped with snow tires, and he knew that was a whole different thing. The driveway at the house was pretty steep, and in a couple of inches of snow, and with these tires, the car wouldn’t make it up.

  He got into the car and headed for Cerrillos Road.

  THREE HUNDRED YARDS AWAY, Todd Bacon was parked across the road from the National Cemetery, reading the local paper, when the GPS unit beeped. The Volvo was on the move.

  He started the car.

  TEDDY FOUND A DISCOUNT tire dealer on Cerrillos and asked if they had Pirelli 210s in stock. They did and could install them immediately and give him a small trade-in on his current tires. He was directed to drive the car into a service bay. He got out and watched as the hydraulic lift raised the car until the tires were at a working level.

  He thought he’d have a look at the chassis to check for rust, so he stooped and walked under the car. He inspected everything carefully, then stopped. Something had been placed under the car; he knew it instantly, because he had designed it himself. He reached up and detached it from the frame. Good thing it had snowed, he thought. In a day or two the device would have been covered with road grime and difficult to spot.

  He walked out of the service bay and looked around: no Volvos, but there was a dark green Ford wagon parked outside. He bent down and attached the device under the rear bumper, then went back into the service bay, where his car was waiting. He lowered the hydraulic lift, and when the technician came toward him, he told the man he had changed his mind.

  He got back on Cerrillos Road and drove to the dealer where he had bought the Volvo, remembering that he had seen a sign offering a ten-day car exchange with no questions asked.

  TODD WAS STOPPED AT a traffic light when he checked the GPS unit again. The Volvo was moving again, this time headed north. He checked his fuel and found that he had been given the car with only a quarter of a tank, so he pulled into a gas station and topped off the tank. He could catch up at his leisure.

  When he got back into the car he discovered that the Volvo had departed Santa Fe to the north and was headed toward Tesuque. He followed.

  38

  Dolly lay in bed with Tip Hanks, her head on his shoulder and her hand cupping his balls. She had just given him the blow job of his life, judging from his reaction, and for all practical purposes he was now hers. All she had to do was keep it that way.

  Dolly had made a very nice career for herself. Born Helga Swenson in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she had been a bookkeeper in a small factory for four years, and during that time she had taught herself to steal while covering her tracks. She had made only one mistake, one made by many embezzlers: She had taken a vacation.

  An embezzler, she had learned, couldn’t do that, because someone else would do the bookkeeping in her absence and discover her crime. By that time, however, Helga had stolen nearly a million dollars, and she still had seven hundred thousand of it in a safe-deposit box.

  She had returned from her two weeks in the islands to find several messages from her boss on her phone machine, and one from a police officer. She had immediately packed a bag and booked into a motel for the night. The following morning, she was at the bank at opening time and cleaned out her box. She drove to Chicago, sold her car, bought another from another dealer and headed west.

  She was a smart girl, and she had taken the precaution of obtaining a genuine passport and a driver’s license
under a new name, using a stolen birth certificate, so she made a clean getaway.

  She repeated her crime at two other companies, in Kansas City, Missouri, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, then she had had a bit of luck. Departing Tulsa, she had met a man in the bar of a fine hotel in Dallas, and before the week was out she was his mistress in a nice apartment and his personal assistant. He was a consultant in the oil business and traveled almost constantly, leaving her in charge of his bank accounts, which she had looted while charging a new wardrobe to his credit cards. Since she paid the bills, he never noticed.

  She had moved on to Santa Fe and met Tip’s wife in a bar, too, and after years of switch-hitting had no trouble in endearing herself. Constance Hanks had been smarter than her earlier bosses, though, and had caught her stealing cash from Tip’s desk drawer. Then she had found herself in the position of sex slave instead of sex partner, and she had not enjoyed it. She found a way out when she discovered a gun in the bedside drawer while looking for a sex toy. She planned the event carefully and surprised herself with her own coolness and lack of guilt. She had no plans to repeat the experience, because it was too dangerous, but it was nice to know she had the guts to do it if she had to.

  Tip Hanks, unbeknownst to him, was now on the brink of a major hit to his financial status. His inheritance of his wife’s estate would soon result in a very large cash deposit being made into his bank account, to which Dolly was now a signatory, and she was tracking the progress on the settling of the estate.

  Dolly had become more sophisticated in her techniques over the years. On a vacation in the Cayman Islands she had had a conversation with a banker and, as a result, had learned how, through a series of wire transfers to accounts established around the world, to make cash virtually untraceable, especially in the relatively modest amounts she stole. Less than a million dollars, she had learned, would not interest a Treasury or FBI agent, who would certainly have bigger fish to reel in. Still, she had managed, through thrift and daring, to amass a small fortune of nearly two million dollars, and she meant to see that it grew.

  Soon she would arrange a convergence of the settling of Connie Hanks’s estate with one of Tip’s five-day trips to a golf tournament, and when he returned home he would discover that his checks were bouncing. By that time, of course, she would be establishing herself in another city, perhaps Los Angeles, in an area not frequented by golf pros.

  Dolly gently left the bed of the snoring Tip and got into the shower. She had already, at his invitation, moved from the guesthouse into the master suite, and Tip was talking marriage, when a suitable period of mourning had been served. She liked Tip, but she liked his money more.

  ED EAGLE WAS SITTING up in bed when Susannah arrived with flowers and magazines.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked, kissing him fondly.

  “Stronger,” Eagle replied. “Not so tired. I’m going to bust out of here in a day or two.”

  “Maybe, sport, but you’re not going back to work just yet. I get to pamper you a little more before you do that.”

  “You think we really need the cop on the door?” he asked.

  “You bet your sweet ass I do,” Susannah replied. “You don’t think Barbara is done, do you?”

  Eagle sighed. “I guess I don’t, and the thought depresses me.”

  “Then don’t think it,” she said. “Let me do that.”

  “You know, don’t you, that if you keep on shooting people we’re going to end up in court.”

  “You have a point,” she agreed. “Vittorio has been a prince about it, though. He says my mistake was perfectly understandable, and I cannot bring myself to disagree with him.”

  “I paid his hospital bill,” Eagle said.

  “And I’ve been sending him his meals while he recuperates,” Susannah said. “Turns out he loves Mexican, and you know what a good Mexican cook I am.”

  “I do indeed,” Eagle said, squeezing her hand.

  “Listen, Ed, I was going to bring this up, even if you hadn’t nearly died, but do you think you’re in a position to ease up on the practice of law? I don’t mean sell the firm, just take, say, half as many cases, personally.”

  “Well,” he replied, “there’s nothing like a near-death experience to make you reevaluate your existence. I don’t want to make any rash promises. Let me think about it.”

  “That’s all I ask,” she said, “for the moment.”

  AT THAT SAME MOMENT Barbara was getting off an airliner in Albuquerque. She collected her bags and took a taxi to the long-term parking lot and found her car there, with the ticket tucked under the driver’s sun visor. She found a decent restaurant in Albuquerque and had some dinner, then checked into a motel.

  The following morning she looked for a medical supply store in the yellow pages and purchased some hospital scrubs, a white lab coat, a stethoscope and some of those awful white sneakers that nurses wear.

  While in the store, she saw a woman with beautiful hair and asked who her hairdresser was. She spent the afternoon there getting a facial, a manicure and pedicure, and becoming a brunette.

  It was time to get this thing done, once and for all.

  39

  Cupie came back from town to Vittorio’s house with some groceries and liquor, and found his host watching a soap opera on television.

  Vittorio quickly turned off the TV. Cupie settled into a chair and passed him the Los Angeles Times he had bought in Santa Fe. “Read the article.”

  Vittorio read.

  “Barbara was burning her bridges,” Cupie said. “Smart girl.”

  “Isn’t she something?” Vittorio tossed back the newspaper. “So, she’s headed here, right?”

  “Right. And we don’t have to worry about Eagle as long as he’s under guard in the hospital.”

  “You forget that he was under guard when he got his throat cut,” Vittorio pointed out. “And you and I were the guard.”

  “Just a slipup,” Cupie said. “Anybody can make a mistake.”

  “A mistake that got Eagle cut and me shot. You think that the SFPD is smarter than we are?”

  “Look, as long as he’s in a hospital room with a guard on the door, he’s fine,” Cupie said. “There’s only one way into the room, remember? Watch your soap opera.” Cupie turned on the TV.

  “What soap opera?”

  “Has Craig found out yet that Jonathan is the father of Alexandra’s baby?” Cupie asked.

  “Not yet,” Vittorio replied.

  BARBARA SPENT THE DAY reading magazines in her room, then at dusk she drove up to Santa Fe. She remembered a suite hotel that catered to traveling salesmen, and it was not far from the hospital. She phoned ahead and booked a suite.

  Once in the city she went first to the hospital and had a good look at it. There were two entrances, one for the emergency room and a main entrance. She parked outside and soaked it all in. As she sat there a uniformed policeman came through the door to the main entrance, buttoning his coat against the cold. He stood outside the door and lit a cigarette. He was no more than thirty yards from her, and she got a good, long look at him: maybe fifty, once muscular and athletic, now with a gut and jowls and a complexion that indicated a large and regular use of alcohol. She couldn’t read his name tag from where she sat, but she would remember that face and build.

  She drove to her hotel, checked in and began going over things in her mind. She called the hospital on her cell phone.

  “How may I direct your call?”

  “This is Crystal Florists,” Barbara said. “We have a delivery. Is Mr. Ed Eagle still in room 304?”

  “No, he’s in 106,” the operator said. “Shall I connect you?”

  “No, thanks. I don’t need to speak to him.”

  “Just deliver your flowers to the ground-floor nurses’ station,” the operator said. “One of the nurses will see that the patient gets them.”

  “Thanks. Good night,” Barbara said. She hung up. A good first step.

  TIP HANKS LEFT FOR
his golf tournament and would be gone for five days, and Dolly, having become accustomed to regular sex, got out of the house. She drove up Canyon Road to Geronimo, where she had met with Ellie Keeler, and took a seat at the bar. “A margarita, please, straight up with salt,” she said to the bartender. Half a minute later the drink materialized, and she closed her eyes and took her first, very welcome, sip. “Aaaaah,” she breathed.

  “I’m going to feel exactly the same way in just a minute,” a male voice said beside her. “One for me, too,” he said to the bartender, and it was done.

  Dolly turned her head and got a first look at her companion in tequila: tall, athletic-looking, sandy hair, a little on the short side, early thirties.

  “Aaaaah,” he said, having taken his first sip.

  Dolly laughed. “What did your day hold that made you need a drink?”

  “Sunset,” Todd responded. “I’m on vacation. I don’t need a better excuse.”

  “What are you on vacation from?” she asked.

  “Would you believe me if I told you I’m a CIA agent?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Nope.”

  “Then don’t ask.” He smiled and stuck out a hand. “I’m Todd Bacon.”

  She took the hand, which was large and warm. “I’m Dolly Parks. Where are you on vacation from?”

  He thought about that. “I’m afraid I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know where you’re from?”

  “Well, until very recently I lived in Panama, but I was recalled, and as yet, I’m unassigned.”

  “Where would you like to be reassigned?”

  “Here, I think. Santa Fe is a wonderful place.”

  “Then why don’t you get your company to transfer you here?”

  “I’m afraid my company doesn’t do business here.”

  “Then change jobs.”