“I’m going in, kitten. You’re staying on the outside near the phone. Every ten minutes I’m going to call . . .”
“I’ll stay in the room.”
“Good. When I get ready to come out I’ll tell you, then give me thirty minutes to show up. If I don’t, you call the state troopers right away. Not the local constabulary . . . the troopers. Then call Pat and get ready to raise hell on the Ponti estate.”
“You think it might get that bad?”
“Anything can go sour when you’re talking about billions.”
“Mike . . .”
“What?”
“You have a gun on you?”
“No. I was bluffing poor old Homer.”
“Ponti won’t buy a bluff, Mike.”
“I know. They’ll frisk me anyway, so I’ll go in without one.”
I kept my lights on bright and leaned on the horn. I kept hitting it intermittently until a shotgun came in the open side window and both barrels banged against the side of my head. “What the hell do ya think you’re doing?” the city-accented voice demanded.
“I want to see the don, that’s what I want!” I could be just as demanding and it made the guy think, which wasn’t easy for him to do.
“He ain’t seeing nobody!”
“He’ll be seeing me, buddy, and if you don’t tell him I’m here he’ll rip your tail off.”
This time he was real confused. “Who you supposed to be?”
“Hammer, Mike Hammer. Now you get to the don and tell him I’m here.”
No way was he going to see Ponti. He let out a yell for Sammy, and when his backup got there, he shouted, “This punk wants to see the don. What’re we gonna do with him?”
Sammy looked in the window, stared a second and looked up at his partner. “You know who this dude is?”
“He said he was Hammer.”
“Yeah, he’s a damned PI. He’s the one who knocked off Azi Ponti on the docks.”
“Does the don know that?”
“Sure he knows it.” Sammy reached in his pocket and took out a walkie-talkie, touched the SEND button and told somebody what he had. A full minute went by and another city voice said to send him in. Sammy told me, “Go slow, leave your lights on and do what you’re told.”
The shotgun came away from my head reluctantly and when the pair backed off I put the gearshift in drive and eased on up the road. Every so often a flashlight would bathe the car, lingering on my face a few seconds. Finally I reached the last bend and there was the house awash in lights. The men came out of the dark beside me and escorted the car right up to the door. Four more stood there, guns in their hands. Ordinarily, I’d be flattered to see how they showed their respect, calling out all that firepower, but right now they were holding all the cards and I was going to play it cool, real cool.
I cut the motor, stuck the keys in my pocket and slid out the door. The first frisk was fast, to make sure I didn’t have any big equipment to lay on them. The second time it was more detailed, looking for a knife or a hidden razor blade. When they were sure I was clean one waved me to the door, touched the bell and it opened. There was Patterson standing there with a small automatic in his fist and a nasty smile on his face. Had not the don come in at that moment something would have happened, but Ponti said, “Get in here, Hammer.”
There were only the two of us in the room, but outside the closed doors there was the army. Somewhere eyes would be watching through concealed apertures to make sure everything stayed calm.
“Drink?” Ponti offered.
I didn’t have any wine taster here, so I said, “Whatever you’re having.”
Don Ponti made two Canadian Club and ginger ale highballs in tall glasses with plenty of ice, handed me one and indicated that I take a seat. It looked like a nice, friendly meeting, but both of us had felt guns grow hot in our hands and knew well enough how the system worked. I asked the don if I could use his phone and picked it up even before he nodded that I could. I dialed Velda’s number, gave her the digits from the don’s phone and hung up.
“She’ll keep calling back,” Ponti stated.
“Every ten minutes.”
“I like that, but it’s not necessary.”
I shrugged and sipped my drink. “Why take chances?”
“You know, I could have used you in my family,” he said.
“Don Ponti, I couldn’t take all that excitement.”
“You came in here alone.”
“Did I?”
He didn’t like my tone and frowned. When I grinned he lost the worry lines and smiled back. “By rights I should kill you, Mike. For killing my son I should kill you, even if Azi did a bad thing. I believe you when you said you wanted to warn me of the treachery on the docks, but I was prepared for such a thing. You think I would not know what a target I was, coming off the boat at night like that? You think that when the boss goes away everything stays the same. Someone takes his place for a little while, then gets so he feels like that place is where he really belongs.”
“I appreciate your consideration, don,” I said flatly.
“Certainly, I couldn’t kill you until you tell me where the money is.”
“Remember how it was in the old days, Don Ponti? You could take a guy and pull his fingernails out or cut his feet off . . . just about anything to make him talk and believe me, he’d talk. You think I could take that?”
Ponti snorted and sipped his drink. “No, you could not take that, Mike. You would talk. The trouble is, you would not have anything to say that I want to hear.”
I looked at him over the top of my glass.
“Dooley told you, Mike, but you haven’t figured it out yet. Am I right?”
“You got it.”
“Then why are you here?”
“To find out who put a hit order on Dooley.”
“Why do you worry about that man? He was a nothing. He was not with us, and now he’s dead.” For a moment he stared at the wall, then continued. “For me, it is not worth hating him now. I made a mistake. Because he was not one of us I trusted him. He had no taste for money at all. Many times I showed him how he could make a quick score, but he couldn’t be bothered. That’s why I trusted him. The heads of the other families went with my reasoning.”
“You were going to store that money in that cave of yours, weren’t you?”
“That was the original idea. It would go in the back section, then the cave would be closed off in a natural manner with a hidden entrance.”
“And you’d keep the mushroom farm going to disguise the operation.”
“You have done your homework, Mr. Hammer.”
Hell, if Homer hadn’t let it slip I never would have known about it at all. At least I didn’t have to do a personal search of the place now. Ponti wasn’t lying to me, but he wasn’t letting me off the hook either. I looked at my watch, picked up the phone and called Velda again. I told her everything was cool and hung up.
“What about Dooley, Don Ponti . . . did he do something that put you wise to what he was doing?”
Ponti suddenly looked puzzled and a little bit sad. He lost that toughness that used to be a part of him, that constant wariness that kept him aware of every movement an enemy made. It wasn’t so much that he lost it as that a degree of acceptance seemed to surround him. He wasn’t a young guy anymore. He probably was in his early eighties and the last of a breed that came in on one generation and went out on another.
“I should have remembered not to trust anybody,” he said. “These are times when nobody has a friend.”
“Not in your line of work.”
“Why would he do that to me? He should have known what would happen.”
“Ponti,” I said to him, “Dooley didn’t do a thing to you. He didn’t even steal your money. He just took it out of circulation and put it where nobody could get it. He finally got sick of what happened to the world. He fought a war to save it then watched it go to pot, helped on by the nudging of the crooks o
f the world. What he did was make a statement, but so far nobody has heard that statement. It’s buried with that money.”
While I was talking the toughness came back to his face. “It was too big a pile for anybody to hide for long. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I know that.”
“No buildings are available to warehouse it either.”
“So?”
“The cave was the perfect answer. It would have worked.” His lips parted in a tight smile. “I understand you and your secretary looked at the cave at Harris’ place too.”
“Nice spy system you have.”
“What did you think about it?”
“Empty, what else? A great spot for a bootlegger. Hasn’t got any bats either. How do you keep them out of your mushroom farm?”
“Could be the activity. Could be the cyanide they clean the beds with.”
The conversation was going noplace, so out of the blue I asked Ponti, “How did you think you were going to get away with it?”
His shrug was eloquent. “While the transfer was being made, I was not a part of it. So far I’ve never been inside a prison. I don’t want to go now. Had Dooley not screwed me, this would have been the move of the century.” He suddenly gazed at me curiously. “Have you ever wondered why the government never tried to deport me?”
I didn’t say a word. He knew the answer.
“I am a citizen. The day my mother got off the ship from Sicily I was born. She had me on a table on Ellis Island; I was given a birth certificate by a doctor who was inspecting all the immigrants. That is why I could not be deported.”
“That’s too bad, Lorenzo. Deportation could have saved your life.”
“I think anybody who could be called my enemy is a long time dead. The new dons take, er, suggestions from me. It seems that they are short on experience. There is no more commissione, the way it was. I think you know . . . business goes on as usual. With the way the world is going, business will probably increase.”
I felt my skin crawl at the calm way he said it.
“If this incredible amount of money just . . . disappears . . . how much will it bother you?”
He shrugged, a gently eloquent shrug you almost had to believe. “It would be a loss. Not something that couldn’t be recouped, of course. This time it would be quicker to accumulate.”
“What makes you think so?”
He said, “This world, Mr. Hammer. Look at it. Every city is full of violence, every country on the brink of war. The people are so wrapped up in troubles that they turn to anything we want to supply them with to keep their minds from unwinding. You know that. The government has to run its own sting operation to keep its members in line. The police and politicians go down the drain when corruption pays them ten times what their employers do. You read about it in the papers all the time. This is nothing new to you, is it?”
I shook my head. He was right on the mark.
“All this has just put me to a lot of trouble, that’s all.”
“Not everybody is going to think like that, Lorenzo. No matter what you say there’s a lot of money somewhere. There are a lot of hotheads who will do anything to get at it. You’re not dealing with great intelligences, and you damn well know that too. It was you and your kind that set this thing in motion and it’s not going to just cool down and go back to business as usual.”
“Mike,” he said to me coldly, “you are the loose cannon in this affair. Dooley told you something that got you involved and you will be as much of a target as me. But you don’t own an army to cover your back like I do.”
For a moment I didn’t answer him, then said, “Nobody can get to you, don?”
He liked the way I used his title and smiled indulgently. “No,” he told me. “You can see how careful I am. My men are well taken care of. That business at the docks should have shown you that.”
“Who instigated it, Don Ponti?”
A sense of sad annoyance crossed his face. “It does not matter now, Mr. Hammer. Death eliminates many enemies. It also takes a lot of talent out of circulation. Sometimes you lose somebody close to you, but that is business, the business of life. It cannot be mourned as if it is the end of all things.”
The years had bored into the don deeper than I had thought. They had dried up the incredible reservoir of controlled rage that could direct violence to achieve his own ends. At one time nothing would have shown in his mannerisms, no emotional expression would have crossed his face. His eyes could tell you that you were going to die easy or hard, sooner or later. They could tell you that you were going to die now too. One look at his guys could have your business burned or your family wiped out. Anything to bring you into submission.
Right now his eyes just had a hard, used look. They weren’t too sure anymore.
I said, “What do you want from me, Lorenzo?”
Those eyes of his drilled right into me again. They were still hard, but the steel wasn’t there any longer.
“Right now you’re just useless, Hammer. If you really knew anything you would have been right on top of it. I think you know what I’m going to do. You’re going to be covered by pros of my own. Anything you come up with, they’ll know about.”
“Your guys are garbage heads, Don Ponti.”
“I didn’t say ‘my guys’, Hammer. I said, ‘pros of my own.’ You should know what money can buy.”
There are times when the talking has stopped and you get out while you still have a chance. This was one of them. I made a phone call to Velda. I didn’t even say so long. I just nodded to Don Lorenzo Ponti and got up. He followed me to the door, opened it and did something with his eyes to the guys standing there. Whatever passed between them was understood and they just watched while I got into my car.
One of them made a mistake and I heard a pump automatic shotgun jack a shell into the chamber.
There was a turnaround area designed to fit one radius of a normal vehicle and I swung into it gently. I had made almost the full circle that led to the single road back to civilization when my headlights picked up the almost imperceptible shift of their shoulders and I knew that the don had changed his mind. I was more of a threat than he had assumed. He was still that deadly animal from the old days, eaten up with the white heat of hate, fed by the craving of ambition, and I was going out in one great broadside of armament right into the driver’s door and window and I’d wind up being compressed right inside my car to a bale-sized piece of metal destined for the smelters of some foreign country.
But I hit the gas pedal and twisted the wheel so that I went right into that group of killers and saw Patterson fly off the hood and the one with the shotgun let a blast off into the night sky that was almost as loud as his shriek and out of the corner of my eyes saw the big door slam behind the don as my wheels went over something that cursed and yelled, then I cranked the wheel back, picked up the ruts in the driveway and headed out.
Luckily, I saw the lights through the trees, cut my own, and pulled to one side where the brush shielded me. The big car that was roaring up toward the house never stopped because the driver never saw me, and as soon as he was past I got out into the cleared area and drove back to the highway. There should have been more of the don’s men along the way, but whoever drove that big car must have picked them up.
It was a new scene now. There wouldn’t be any more peaceful days, or empty time to plan the next move. As far as Ponti was concerned, I wasn’t somebody to follow, but a mad dog to be hunted and shot dead, any way, any how, and the sooner the better.
10
I GOT BACK TO THE MOTEL in time to catch Velda tossing our gear into her rental car and slid to a stop beside her. The sharp lines of anxiety on her face turned to instant joy and she dropped a piece of luggage and threw her arms around my neck before I was all the way out of the car.
Pulling her off me wasn’t easy. “What’s going on, kitten? You all right?”
“Oh, Mike, yes, I’m all right. But you didn’
t call on time like you said you would and I phoned the state troopers. They should be at Ponti’s place right now!” She read my eyes and felt my fingers tighten on her arms. “What happened?”
I told her.
“Did you kill anybody?”
“I didn’t stay around to look, but I’ll tell you this: I tried to get as many as I could. They were going to gun me down. You call Pat?”
“Yes. He was going to get the troopers up here on the phone. This is a no publicity deal and he’s got Homer Watson to back him up.” She paused, squinted at me and added, “Will that do any good?”
“Maybe. We’re not in Pat’s jurisdiction, but Homer has that federal edge.”
“Now what?”
“We move. We need a safer place than this. I don’t even want Homer tracking us down. Tomorrow we take your car back and we stick with mine. There must be a half million other Ford sedans like this out on the road so it won’t be easily noticed.”
“Just get it washed and nobody will know it’s yours,” she told me.
A sleepy night clerk checked us out and went back to bed. It took a half hour to locate a raunchy little motel complex whose Vacancy light was still on. Another sleepy guy got off his couch to let me sign in, took my money in advance and handed me a key. On the way out I saw him flip the vacancy light off even though only three other cars were parked outside the rooms.
I backed up to the door in case we needed a fast get-away. We only took in what we were going to need, pulled the curtains shut and turned on the bathroom light with the door partially closed to leave only a soft glow. In the thirty minutes between motels I had made pretty sure nobody had been on our tail. Traffic was almost at zero and I had made a one-eighty-degree turn after I passed the motel, approaching it from a different direction in case I did have a tail. For five minutes I had sat in the dark, lights off, outside the office building, waiting and watching. When I was sure I was clear, I went inside.
We both cleaned up, then got fully dressed except for our shoes, finally easing back into the twin beds. If anything happened and we did have to make a fast move, we’d be ready for it.
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