Strip

by Thomas Perry

  “Even if those two girls testified at a trial, the jury might not believe them.”

  “I don’t see why they wouldn’t.”

  “They’re criminals.”

  “Do the girls know you did business with Rogoso?”

  “They know something. They delivered Rogoso’s money to me a few times.”

  “Think back. Can they say you were in business with Rogoso and how the business worked?”

  “Sure, but who’s going to believe them?”

  “Mr. Kapak, I don’t usually step out of line and give advice to my elders, or to the guy I’m working for. I shut up and learn. But you seem to be asking my opinion. Is that right?”

  “I guess it is. Yeah,” Kapak said.

  “Okay then. Will a jury believe two girls who worked for Rogoso when they say they saw you kill him and Alvin and Chuy? Yes. They will. Unanimously.”

  “All I’ve got to do is pay one guy to hold out for innocent.”

  “If there’s a hung jury, they don’t have to let you go. They can have another trial.”

  “We can pay the next guy.”

  “Even if we do, the whole story will have been in the papers and on television everywhere, every day, because it’s about a drug dealer with a house in Malibu and a strip club owner who’s been running dirty money through his pussy palaces for years to help gangsters. You’d be in worse trouble. Everybody in Rogoso’s organization, and all of his relatives, will know who got him. Getting off in court doesn’t get you off with them. There will be bunches of them out for revenge. There will also be people who can’t imagine anyone burning Rogoso’s house without first backing a truck up to the place and filling it with money and drugs. They’ll want to take you alive, but they’ll settle for dead, because then they can search your house and the clubs.”

  Kapak let his frustration show. “I had no choice. What the hell am I supposed to do about any of that?”

  “What I thought you must be doing already—getting out of town as fast as you can. Have the cops filed any charges yet?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I asked Slosser before I left.”

  “And he didn’t say you can’t leave the city?”

  “No. And fuck him if he did.”

  “This is good. It’s great. You’re still free. We’ve got to keep you out of sight and away from them. They’ll probably try to keep an eye on you so they can yank you in as soon as they’ve finished their investigation. They could even be running the case by the DA right now. Once they arrest you, you’re stuck.”

  “But what about Rogoso’s people?”

  “I don’t think they can know it was you yet. The girls would be crazy to tell anyone before they were under police protection, because Rogoso’s people would also want to know why you let them go and how they got away.” He sighed. “Of course, the minute you get arrested, it will be on the news. Then you worry about Rogoso’s people.”

  Spence judged it was time to be silent and let Kapak think about his predicament. He drove the rest of the way to Kapak’s house, waiting for Kapak to change his mind and name another destination. He pulled up in front of the house, and Kapak said, “I’ve got some things to do right now. I’ll call you in an hour or two, so keep your phone on.”

  “Don’t you want somebody around to watch your back?”

  “No. This is stuff I have to do alone. And besides, the only ones who might come now are the police. If they do, I don’t want you watching my back. I want you miles away. It doesn’t do me any good to have both of us arrested.”

  34

  AT 1:30 in the afternoon, Voinovich parked the big SUV on the street around the block from Kapak’s vast backyard. There was a grove of bamboo trees in that quadrant. They were thirty feet tall, with trunks that were at least five inches thick at eye level and tapered to thin whip-tips at the ends. In the slight breeze the only sounds were the thousands of small leaves whispering, the creaking of the trunks, and the occasional clack when two flexible waving shafts touched.

  The three men moved deep inside the shadowy grove so they couldn’t be seen. Voinovich spoke in a whisper. “I’ve never been back here before. Why are we coming in this way?”

  Jerry Gaffney said, “This is the way Joe Carver came to see him and then got away. You can’t say that about any other way in.”

  Jimmy said, “I thought we were going to talk him into coming with us, not sneak in his backyard. What’s he going to think?”

  “We talked about this. Don’t you remember?”

  “No. Who talked about it?”

  “We did. We’ll tell him it’s safer for him if he gets into the habit of doing things in less obvious ways.”

  “Why?”

  “So if something goes wrong in there, then when the police ask questions, there won’t be eight neighbors who say they saw Kapak leave with us.”

  “I mean, what do we tell Kapak the reason is?”

  “Jesus, Jimmy. The man is under siege. There’s Joe Carver robbing him once a day, with his crazy girlfriend yet. And didn’t you hear the news about Rogoso on the radio? The evil son of a bitch got killed last night. If somebody got him, then Kapak could be next. He’s the one who had Rogoso’s money taking round trips. Kapak has a hundred reasons to lay low.”

  Jimmy thought for a moment, then nodded. “All right. He has reasons to be careful. I didn’t know Rogoso was dead.”

  “You must have been in the bathroom or something when we talked about it. Anyway, we’re here.”

  Jerry and Voinovich put on their ski masks and checked the loads in their guns. Jerry produced a small hand-held device.

  “Is that a stun gun?” Jimmy said. “A stun gun? Are you crazy?”

  Jerry slid a switch with his thumb, a small light went on, and the device crackled in his hand and gave a hum, then switched to a higher frequency, then off. “Yes.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “Don’t worry. It’s just a precaution.”

  “You zap a fat sixty-four-year-old with that and you’ll be thumping his chest to restart his heart.”

  Voinovich was impatient. “Can you two talk about this later?”

  “Yeah,” said Jerry. “Let’s go.”

  Jimmy breathed audibly through clenched teeth as he followed.

  They emerged from the bamboo grove and walked into the sunlight, up the winding path toward the guesthouse. Voinovich stopped. He whispered, “Hold it. Stop.”

  The Gaffney brothers turned to look at him. He was motionless, his head cocked slightly to the side, his hands in front of him clutching his gun. “I heard something.”

  “What?”

  “Leaves rustling. Somewhere up there.” He gestured toward the guesthouse. “Like something moving into the underbrush.”

  “You serious?”

  “Of course he’s serious,” said Jerry. “Kapak doesn’t have a dog, right?”

  There was a long moment of deep silence, when even the fluttering of the bamboo leaves was muted. In the middle of it there was a sound of metal sliding on metal. The three men turned toward the guesthouse.

  There was the loud roar of a shotgun, and the dust of the path in front of Voinovich puffed upward in a cloud. Voinovich had been in firefights, and he knew enough to instantly calculate two values: the time it would take to find and kill the shooter, and the time it would take to get behind something. He dove, rolled, and was on his feet, running with his head down. He crashed into the grove between two tall bamboo stalks, his momentum carrying him through the narrow space and a few feet deeper, where the shooter could not see him.

  The Gaffney brothers ran the other way, making a sprint for the guesthouse. The cover of a brick building seemed much better to them than bamboo. They reached the porch at the same time and hurled themselves against the wooden door, but it didn’t budge. Jimmy turned the handle as Jerry threw his shoulder against it again, and it flew open and swung into the wall as he sprawled on the l
iving room floor. He got to his feet to join Jimmy in his rush to the windows on the far side of the house. As he ran, Jimmy had a moment when the extremities of his body felt icy. The window he was running for was already open.

  It was too late to change course now. He reached the low window, sliding along the last three feet of hardwood floor on his knees and then stopping hard, already scanning through the window to see the shooter. He saw nobody. The tall pines on the far side of the yard had no foliage near the ground to hide anyone, and nothing about the low, leafy plants in the tropical garden seemed to hold any menace. He leaned outward and craned his neck.

  Blam! It was a roar so loud that it seemed to be a part of a larger reality, like an explosive charge going off. He did not duck back so much as allow the surprise of it to propel him onto his back on the floor. He said quietly, “What the fuck.”

  Jerry started firing his pistol out the other window, volleys of three shots each, an insistent staccato pop-pop-pop! Each time he paused, the three brass casings ejected to the right clattered on the hardwood floor.

  “Where is he?” Jimmy cautiously peered out his window.

  “Out there!” Jerry fired two more volleys, one to the right, and the next to the left.

  “Did you even see him?”

  “No, but he’s there.”

  “Hold it. Stop firing.”

  Jerry held his fire, ducked back in to release the magazine of his pistol and slip in a new one, then pull the slide back to let the first round into the chamber. “Why stop? The bastard’s shooting at us.”

  “Think, for Christ’s sake. He must have been in here and we startled him, sneaking into the yard with ski masks over our heads. He doesn’t recognize us.”

  “That was a shotgun. Know what you’ll look like if he hits you with double-ought?”

  “We don’t want to kill him.”

  “Did I mention he’s shooting at us?”

  “I’m not talking about that. I mean he’s not worth anything to us dead. He can’t pay if he’s dead. Nobody will pay if he’s dead.”

  Kapak had heard the gunfire coming from the back of his property. He stood in the small room off the kitchen staring at the security monitor. He had been there since it started, trying to make out the shooters and figure out how to avoid them. He could see there were at least three men wearing masks and windbreakers intended to hide their faces and their gear. They charged into the guesthouse, and then he lost sight of them.

  He had not expected Rogoso’s friends to know enough to come after him this quickly, less than a full day after he’d killed Rogoso. He also wondered who was down there fighting them off with a shotgun. He hoped it wasn’t one of the gardeners, some innocent who had simply been cornered and found the gun in the cabinet. He supposed it was possible Spence had not left after he had dropped Kapak off. Maybe he’d just gone down to the guesthouse to watch the rear of the property—to watch Kapak’s back, as he had said. Spence was a real soldier.

  Kapak was worried. After the second shotgun blast, he had heard a series of three-shot bursts, one after another, only one gun firing. Had they killed the defender? Blam! The shotgun. He was still alive.

  Kapak squinted, trying to make out human shapes in the backyard foliage. Suddenly the guesthouse door flew open and two men dashed out, sprinting across the open lawn into the invisible dim spaces of the bamboo. The shotgun was silent, as though the defender felt he had done all he wanted by making them retreat. He apparently didn’t want any bodies in the yard. That would be like Spence, and he was grateful once again to the man. Killing one of the invaders would have created a new problem.

  There were already enough problems. Spence had to plant the bloody relics of Joe Carver to prove he was dead and imply to the people in the club scene that it was Kapak’s people who had done it. There was also the continuing problem of the police. Lieutenant Slosser clearly knew he had killed Rogoso, and by now his detectives were talking to people who had been at the club last night, trying to break his alibi. They would also talk to Rogoso’s people to establish that he had reason to kill Rogoso. When they had enough, they would arrest him.

  He hurried to the other end of the house, picked up the pistol from the nightstand by his bed, put it into the inner pouch of his briefcase, threw on a summer-weight jacket, and looked around for anything else he might need to bring with him. He unexpectedly knew several things that he hadn’t before. One was that he had never actually liked the big house, only the gardens that had attracted him to the property in the first place and the guesthouse that he had built. If he had seen clearly before, he would have put an office in the main house, stationed a couple of men there for protection, and lived in the back of the lot in the guesthouse.

  Another thing that he now knew was that if today had happened to him when he was thirty, forty, or even fifty, it would have meant little to him. One place was the same as another. He had moved to one country and then another with a few briefer stops in between. Each move had involved a wrenching departure, a great deal of effort, a period of getting used to strangeness and language difficulties. But each, in the end, had left his life improved.

  Now he was getting old and feeling reluctant to face the upheaval again. It wasn’t the effort so much as the time. He couldn’t help making rough estimates. Did he have five years to waste while he was getting settled again? He felt his mouth contract into a sad smile. There were already assassination squads sneaking around his house on a sunny summer afternoon. There was little choice.

  He filled his briefcase with financial papers from the filing cabinets in his office, locked the door, and hurried to the garage. He got into his Mercedes and drove. As he reached the first turn, he looked in the rearview mirror, but not at his house. He was only looking to see if his death squad was following, or the police.

  After he turned the corner, he heard a siren a few blocks away, and looked behind him once more. He saw nothing but clear pavement.

  Voinovich made it through the bamboo to the street long before the others. He sat at the wheel of his Sequoia with the motor running, listening to the last sounds of gunfire with his eyes closed, picturing what must be going on by the guesthouse. It didn’t sound good to him. He had confirmed the fatalism that was natural to his temperament through a lifetime of error and disappointment. Whenever he was on the edge of great fortune, he found that something unexpected made all efforts laughably inadequate. Some ideas, some places on the earth, some souls, were simply doomed.

  When the gunfire stopped, he heard the sound of feet running down the narrow path through the bamboo grove. He calculated the relative likelihood that the footsteps were the Gaffney brothers and decided it was a one in five chance. Instead it was probably some new security men that Kapak had hired, or some of his regulars, possibly Spence and Corona.

  If they had killed the Gaffneys, they’d be coming for him. He reassessed how much faith he had in the Gaffneys, then pulled the mask back over his face, chambered a round, and aimed his gun at the open end of the path.

  To his amazement, it was the Gaffneys. He withdrew his gun from the window, tugged off the hot ski mask, and pressed the button to unlock the doors. The first Gaffney swung the back door open and dived onto the back seat. The second scrambled in, slammed the door, and shouted, “Go!”

  Voinovich stomped on the gas pedal and accelerated away from the curb abruptly, so the two Gaffneys were pinned to their seats before they could get into a sitting position.

  “Jesus,” Jimmy muttered.

  “Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all the saints in California,” said Jerry. “I’ve never been so shocked in my life. I thought the old man would just be sitting there alone in his kitchen having lunch or something. What the hell was that?”

  “It was an ambush,” said Voinovich.

  “An ambush set up for whom—us?” said Jimmy. “How could Kapak know we were coming? We weren’t even sure we were going to do it until an hour ago.”

  “I don’t tell
people things,” said Voinovich.

  “What are you looking at me for?” Jerry said. “I only talked to you two.”

  Voinovich shrugged. “All right. Then it was the old man.”

  “He told himself?”

  “He’s been around for a long time. When he was coming up, it was a different world. In the Balkans, where he lived, you couldn’t close your eyes. People hated you for things your great-grandfather did. Anybody who lived must have gotten good at figuring out what other people were going to do before they did it.”

  “He figured out that we would come for him?”

  Jimmy said, “How could he?”

  “He knows us, he knows that his luck has been disappearing fast,” said Voinovich. “Maybe he knew that the next thing was going to be that his own people would turn on him. He didn’t have to know who it would be.”

  “Wait a minute,” Jerry said. “We can’t just assume something like that. We’d have to do something—leave the state, kill him—and we wouldn’t even have any proof that he knew it was us.”

  “If he’s smart enough to know what we were going to do before we knew, then how are we going to get him to admit he knows it was us?”

  “I don’t think we want to just show up at the front door right now.”

  “Call him.”

  “On the phone?”

  “What else is there?”

  Jerry reflected. “Maybe we should. If we do it now, we sound like we couldn’t be the ones who just came to his backyard. And he doesn’t have time to think things through and make a plan to trap us.” He held out his iPhone. “Here. Call him.”

  Voinovich didn’t look at it. “Did you notice I’m driving?”

  Jerry held the phone out to his brother.

  “Not me. You two were the ones who have this great plan to call him. Your second great plan of the day, by the way.”

  Jerry scowled, pressed an icon on his phone, and smiled. “Hey, boss. It’s me, Jerry.”

  The others watched him for a moment while he listened. His facial muscles relaxed. He looked relieved, then actually smiled. “I’m out trying to find out what I can about the other girl who told us about Joe Carver. I’m pretty sure Carver will show up at her house sometime.”