“How’d that come to pass?”
“Johnny had it handy. You said you needed it fast; he had it. Losing it wasn’t exactly part of the plan, you know? Besides, Johnny said he was anxious to pitch in, wanted Jack and Bobby to see how helpful he could be.”
“Help? I’ve told you before, those guys are not your friends, Frank. They don’t have any friends. I guaran-fucking-tee you the mob wants that film to leverage against the Kennedys—whose problems just got a lot worse.” I banged the phone against the booth wall, blew out a deep breath. “You got anything else I need to know?”
“Yes.”
“And what might that be?”
“I think there’s a bunch of hired guns headed down there.”
I bit my lower lip hard enough to draw blood, grunted with suppressed rage. “Aren’t you just full of surprises …”
Then things started to click together in a horrible way. “How do you know that?” I demanded, my throat tightening.
“Lawford told me.”
“Lawford?”
“Yeah. He was acting real squirrelly when we were discussing our options this evening. He didn’t want to talk about it when I confronted him, so I slapped him around a little and he broke. Jack told him his old man had contacted Hoover out of desperation about some kind of a commando unit. Do you think he could be serious?”
Everything crystallized. The flattop punks, the P-38, the rifleman.
Joe Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover, two of the most powerful men in America, both long suspected of nefarious behavior and both capable with a phone call of generating the kind of mayhem I’d seen tonight—and a whole lot worse. Strange bedfellows to be sure, but if enough power was at stake, they’d walk arm in arm down Fifth Avenue in the Macy’s parade.
Then I remembered how intently Roselli had been listening to our conversation the other night at Frank’s. Commando teams were a little out of his league—but not out of his buddy Momo’s.
Hoover. Kennedy. Giancana. One hell of an unholy trinity if there ever was one.
I swallowed hard and slumped against the back of the booth, the words first light and not gonna be anything left standing cycling through my mind. It was all there in front of me now—they were going to hit Bravo’s place to get the film, to wipe out all record of it. Everyone inside would die.
“Joe? You still there?”
“Yeah, sorry. Listen, I think Lawford could be telling the truth. I’ll have to come up with something—tonight. I’ll try and call Bravo, maybe I can get him to release Helen. But I’ll tell you this, paesan, I haven’t heard one word about that film since I got down here. For all we know, Johnny Spazzo still has it somewhere off in Vegas or God knows where.”
“Spazzo? Where’re you getting your news, Pony Express?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Johnny Spazzo is dead, pal. Thought you would’ve heard from your goombahs down there. Border Patrol found his body down by Calexico last night. Shot three times at close range with a large-caliber gun. Coyotes been eating him for days.”
A chill, jet-stream cold, grew in my chest as the words sank in. A grim thought formed in my mind, one I’d been repressing for days but was unable to deny any longer. It had been there all along, this gnawing feeling, awful and growing, seeping down deeper into my consciousness with each passing day.
My stomach bucked once, but I fought it down. “I’ve gotta go,” I said.
“What … what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know, I really don’t know. I’ll try to get in touch with you if there’s time.”
“Joe, wait,” he said, his voice pitched with alarm. “Don’t take any more chances. This whole thing is way, way out of control. I’ll call this Bravo guy myself; maybe I can reason with him. This is my problem, after all. You don’t have to do anything else for me.”
I drew in some air, held it, let it out. “Frank … I’m not doing it for you. Not this time.”
He started to speak, caught himself. After a long pause he said, “Well, keep your head down, old friend. Godspeed, paesan.” His voice had a dull ring of finality.
I hung up the phone and fell back on the wooden bench in the booth, sweat breaking out on my forehead around the outline of my fingers.
* * *
My last, and best, chance was to call Bravo and hope he’d listen to me. I dropped fifty centavos into the slot, dialed his number, and took a deep breath. His man answered again, said Señor Bravo wasn’t taking any calls. I told him who it was. He said he’d see and walked away.
A minute passed, then I heard shouting in the distance and the sound of breaking glass. Heavy footsteps clicked across the floor in an accelerated gait. A voice came on the line, spewing bile.
“Just who in the hell do you think you are? That was the dumbest elementary-school stunt that anyone ever pulled! And it will be the very last one of your life, I assure you that, Joe Buonomo!”
“Mario—”
“What could you possibly want from me now? If you think there is any way you can save yourself now, you are very badly mistaken. You and everyone in your miscreant army is going to die. You insect! Nobody does that to Mario Bravo! Nobody!”
“That wasn’t my man …”
“Bullshit!” He was screaming now, pounding on a table or desk near the phone.
“Mario, why would I do that? That shooter was firing at all of us. He’s a third-party player.”
He wasn’t listening. He just continued his rant at fever pitch. “Two of my men are dead. So are several villagers—and a first-rate mariachi. For what?”
“I lost two men, too.”
“Two? You told me you had one; that proves you are a liar.”
“Look, Mario, somebody sold me out, and you better start to realize that they sold you out, too. Haven’t you asked yourself why? Do you think you know all you need to know here?”
“This is what I know: In this land … I. Am. King,” he declared, punctuating each word with a heavy knock. “And I stay in power because people know that my vengeance is swift and absolute. You will see that soon enough.”
I waved a hand in the air. “All I want is Helen. You’ve got the money now—”
“Helen? You are a remarkable man, Joe. Re-mark-able! What elephant has loaned you the balls big enough to ask me that now? You break your word to me, shoot up the Fiesta de las Cabras, and then ask for your blue movie star back?”
“Blue what?”
“I’ll tell you what you’ll get. You’ll get a lesson no one around here will ever forget. They won’t forget because your crucified body will be hanging on a cross in that plaza until the very last buzzard in all of Mexico has picked the flesh from your bones, devoured it, and shat it out!”
“Hold on there—”
“Goodnight, sir!” he shouted then slammed the phone down, an audible clack ringing in my ear as the line went dead.
That pretty much ended that. Spent, I pulled myself up and out of the booth, then wiped my face with the back of my hand. I bit a knuckle and sucked wind while trying to come to grips with the latest revelation.
Absently, I reached down into a nearby agave planter, scooped up a handful of native soil, and sifted it through my fingers, watching as a million disturbed grains took flight on the midnight wind.
Blue movie star, I repeated to myself over and over and over, a dull, twisting knife spinning in my gut, tearing out everything left inside me.
82
I walked through an alley that ran off the plaza and cut down the next street toward the Rambler. I crept the last fifty yards as I approached the vehicle, not in the least bit surprised to find it empty.
There was a faint high-low whistle behind me and there was Vito, crouched behind a rusting barrel, hands ready at his sides. I looked behind me once and walked over to his refuge.
“Vito,” I said under my breath, “the whole thing’s fallen apart. Frank says the money we lost was Johnny’s and he’ll hold you responsible. Hi
m, Bravo, the Federales, and the Ching Hwas—the Chinese gang who took out Lino—are all going to be hunting for us.”
We headed toward the car. When we reached it, I opened the door and stuck the key in the ignition. “Get everything you need out of this heap now, ’cuz it’s way too hot to drive. Someone will take this off our hands within ten minutes, I’m sure.”
I turned the engine over and rolled down the driver’s window. Vito was already behind the wagon, rummaging through the back.
“I know about the money, too,” he said. “Roselli told me before we leave. I know what we’re up against.”
“Good, because we’re pretty much fucked six ways from Sunday down here. I’d seek out a quiet place, or steal a car and head up to Tijuana. You can get across the border from there.”
I closed the car door and we began walking. Vito cocked his head, turned his hands a little, and made an inquisitive face. “And you, Joe, where are you going?”
“Nowhere. I’m staying here. I’ve going to get Helen out of Bravo’s hacienda.”
He stopped walking, pointed a finger down, and said, “Okay. I stay too.”
“No,” I said, looking into his glowing eyes. “There’s a mercenary gang down here, and they’re going to finish what somebody started at the plaza. They shot up the place, them or the Ching Hwas—or both. Unless I’m badly mistaken, that posse’s going in at dawn to burn Bravo’s place to the ground. No sense you going in there along with me.”
He swatted my bicep with a light backhand. “Where you want me to go? Roselli, ’e’s gonna cut off my coglioni, okay? I may as well go with you. You come to get the girl, I come to ’elp you. Nothing ’as changed. Besides, maybe we find the money in there and everything works out.”
“That house is heavily defended and set for destruction in, oh, five hours. I don’t even have any idea how I’m gonna get in there, and I might just kill the girl myself when I find her.”
He chewed on my words a little, said, “It’s Bravo’s ’acienda, right? Surrounded by montagne, Joe—mountains.” He carved peaks with his hands to underscore my obtuseness.
Mountains. The dawn broke over me, late but clear. Mountains. Vito, who fought with the Tenth Mountain Division in Italy during the war, might know a thing or two about scaling them. I stared coolly at him as I thought it over.
“One of the ’ookers, she told me that she’s been there. That place is right against the rocks in a box canyon.”
I’d been told the same thing. That the only approach was from the highway a mile or so below the walled citadel, up a sloping plain. The high ground and the mountains that ringed it on three sides formed a daunting natural defense. If there was a way in, it was going to be from above.
“Think there’s any way to drop down behind that place?” I asked.
“I see the ’ills around ’ere today. They’re not too ’igh. These people, they are not mountain people. I,” he said, tapping his burly chest, “I am a mountain person. I can climb these ’ills.”
“I can’t ask you that. We have very little chance of getting out of there alive.”
“It’s more than I ’ave if I go back to Vegas with nothing.”
It was impossible to refute that statement.
“Okay, Vit, okay.” I smiled and clasped his shoulder. “Guess we’ll need some rope.”
He smiled back, but then his face tightened up with anxiety. “’ow the fuck we gonna get there? We can’t drive past Agua Caliente again. They got Federales from ’ere to the border by now.”
He was right. The only road to Ojos Negros ran very close to Agua Caliente and there wasn’t enough time to loop around the mountains and come in from the other side. Driving was out. Flying was too—besides the noise there was way too much of a chance of making a smoking hole in the ground trying to land in rocky terrain at night.
Then fortune smiled on me. Peg-Leg Pegasus flashed into my mind and an idea sprouted up. “Vito,” I asked, a small smile on my lips, “can you ride, paesan?”
83
Piedras Gordas was the first small town I had checked out in the afternoon. It was no good for my first plan, but it had something else that suddenly made it enormously valuable to me: a large riding stable. It was the kind of thing you don’t pay a whole lot of attention to down in Mexico, since they still have plenty of vaqueros roping and riding, but now it was a godsend. We could be there in twenty minutes by taxi.
I was holding enough of a roll that I was sure the owner wouldn’t mind the late rousting. He would be handsomely compensated for a couple of horses and saddles, and maybe a rifle or two if he had any. Several hundred gringo greenbacks on the barrelhead would speak plenty for us if he was curious. Nobody asks any questions on the Frontera anyhow.
As I expected, Vito said he was a good horseman. That made the decision easy. I was no threat to Roy Rogers, but I was passable. Either way I was in, but it was a lot better to have some help in a deal like this.
It was a good eight miles across open plain from the stable to Ojos Negros. From there I’d have to locate Bravo’s hacienda, scale the cliff with Vito, and drop down into an armed compound I’d never seen before. After I’d completed that little warm-up, all I had to do was break into the house, steal a woman from under the nose of a murderous warlord who wanted to kill me, and then ride off into the hills free and clear.
Day at the beach.
* * *
A couple of men were still up at the Dos Milagros stable passing a tequila bottle around when we arrived. They had no interest whatsoever in waking the owner, but they were strangely obliging to our need for horses and saddles. Something told me the sale went unrecorded for tax purposes.
It turned out all right, though, as Vito got them to throw in two hundred feet of rope and some blankets and canteens. I winced at the price for the Springfield rifle, but took that, too, along with a box of thirty-aught-six shells.
The horses were both Spanish mustangs, beautiful hearty animals, strong and spirited. Mine was chestnut, Vito’s gray. We saddled them up ourselves and slung our limited amount of gear on top. Vito made a makeshift holster for the rifle from a couple of leather straps and slid it in.
The cowhands said it was good riding across the plain and that most of the fences were low enough to jump. They thought we were crazy to be heading out into those badlands at night, but they could see we were well armed—and deadly serious. Their eyes told me they would be content with killing the tequila and would leave the bushwhacking to someone else. It was just after one when we set off.
84
We kept a mile or so north of the highway, which ran almost due east toward Ojos Negros. The ground was dark and featureless but the moonlight made it clear enough to trot. The terrain rose gently along the way with only the occasional array of cactus or low fence slowing the horses’ gaits. The constant slight clump clump of hooves and the random snorts of the mustangs were the only sounds as we rode.
Thirty minutes after we set out, the lights of a small town to the south winked on the horizon. I made it for Agua Caliente, still weeping in the night. I felt it all the way to my bones, shaking my head reflexively at the senseless slaughter.
I looked over to Vito, who was also watching the village, his face somber, drawn.
“Hey,” I said, “on the odd chance we get out of this place alive, we should do something for those people.”
He just kept surveying the town, thinking perhaps. His head tilted back. “We could give them our ’orses, but then we gotta steal a car. That’s no good.”
“I’ve got something else in mind. You okay with the church, Vit?”
“’ow you mean okay?”
I waggled my hand. “You know … okay.”
He shrugged. “Yeah. All right, I guess, considering.”
“Then you can be the messenger.”
He cut me a sidelong glance. “To who?”
“Father Lázaro, the padre at that church.”
“Lázaro?” he aske
d, his voice spiking.
“Yeah. Lázaro.”
He looked on, his face crumpling up in little furrows as he thought it over. “Okay,” he said finally.
We rode along in silence awhile. Then he asked, “What’s the message?”
“Tell him to get that damn floor fixed.”
He shrugged again, made a s’alright gesture.
I checked my watch and spurred the mustang, urging it forward. Behind us the lights of Agua Caliente ebbed, then vanished quietly over the horizon. But the angst lingered on.
85
Ojos Negros loomed out of the black around two thirty. Based on the information I had, Bravo’s place was a couple of miles outside of town, down a narrow road that ran due north a bit then dog-legged east. It was the only home along that stretch of road for miles. We weren’t apt to find too many other walled fortresses out there anyhow.
We crossed a dirt road then took the next one, a paved one-lane highway abeam town. Sure enough, after a half mile, it banked eastward as we traveled on. High hills rose before us, and the terrain became rocky and steeper. I decided to take us off the highway despite the chance of throwing a shoe or cracking a hoof on the rocks. The last thing we needed now was a lame horse, but if one of Bravo’s cars spotted us, we’d be between the dog and the fire pole.
Ten minutes later I began to pick up a faint tinge of light as we edged past the outline of a crumbling hill. I raised my hand, signaling Vito to pull in next to me. Together, we nudged the horses forward a hundred feet or so until the source of light was in plain view. It came from a large home high up in the crook between two mountain ridges. The granite walls were better than a thousand feet above the canyon floor with a pretty good drop to them. High, but not insurmountable.
The home itself was a ranch style, but split into three distinct sections, stepping down along the base of the hills. A high, rough-hewn stone wall surrounded the entire complex, running off into the shadows of the adjoining hills. It was ten feet high if it was an inch and lit at hundred-foot intervals by lanterns. A small dirt access road ran from the road up the rock-strewn incline toward the home above, still a good mile away.
One for Our Baby Page 25