by Thomas Perry
“No, I suppose not,” said Elizabeth. She wondered how far away Carson City was. The world was supernaturally dark. She imagined desert on all sides, but could see nothing but the road.
“Damn right,” said Palermo. “When Old Granddad was killed—”
“Old Granddad?”
“Castiglione. When he was killed they said they’d protect me. Told Ferraro that too. They protected the shit out of him, didn’t they? Then I find out they’ve pulled out all the soldiers they had for some important project Carl Bala had on his mind. Nicky Palermo can go fuck himself. Well, we’ll see.”
“So you feel betrayed,” said Elizabeth.
“Betrayed?” said Palermo. He drove in silence, staring off into the darkness. “Yeah, I guess that’s the word for it. For years it was Nicky, you’re terrific, Nicky you’re a real friend, Nicky, I owe you. All of a sudden the roof collapses and what do I hear? Who’s Nicky Palermo?”
“What do you mean, the roof collapses?”
“Lady,” said Palermo, “I don’t know what you people do all day, but it must not be much. You must know about Castiglione, right? It was in all the papers, for Christ’s sake.”
Elizabeth said, “Of course.”
“Well, he was the old consigliere. He kept the young bulls in line—Carl Bala, Toscanzio, Damon, Lupo, DeLeone, all of them.”
“But I thought he was retired.”
“He was, in a way. He had everything he wanted, so he wasn’t interested in getting more. What he was interested in, I guess, was keeping the world quiet so he could hold on to it.”
“But if he was retired, how could he do that? He didn’t have any soldiers, did he?”
Palermo chuckled. “Neither does the Pope, honey. Or the head of the United Nations. When he made a decision it stuck. If it needed to be enforced, he’d get word to all the families and they’d do it. The smaller, weaker ones would be afraid the bigger ones would eat them up. The big guys like Toscanzio and Bala and Damon weren’t interested in having twenty families come together against them. Besides, they couldn’t trust each other. Castiglione they could trust. He didn’t want anything but peace and quiet.”
“So who wanted him dead?” asked Elizabeth.
Palermo drove on, shaking his head. “Figure it out for yourself, like I did. Who stood to gain anything? The little guys like Bellino or Lupo? Hell, they only existed because Castiglione kept the big fish off them. They’re all scared shitless. It had to be somebody who was big enough to think he could step in and take over, gobble the small operations up.”
“Then you think it was Toscanzio or Bala who did it. Or maybe Damon.”
“No, I know who did it,” he said. “There was supposed to be a meeting this week. Castiglione had called it. The only reason I knew was because it affected me in a way, or would have. I’d dealt with FGE a few times, and Castiglione wanted to talk about FGE.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t like it. It was practically in his backyard, and it had been used for some things he hadn’t agreed to. Things that might bring a lot of weight down on him.”
Elizabeth detected the slight shift in his tone. They were nearing some point he wasn’t going to talk about: something he was planning to sell. She knew she had to steer him away from it or he’d stop talking entirely. She said, “So they killed him rather than give it up, and killed Ferraro and Orloff and would have killed you.” He didn’t react, so she took a stab in the dark. She had to get him back on the subject he was most interested in, himself. “Because you killed Senator Claremont and that man in California.”
“The hell I did,” said Palermo. “For Christ’s sake, look at me. I weigh two thirty and I’m five eight. I’m over fifty years old. For the last twenty years I’ve cleared over two hundred thousand a year. Do I look like somebody who takes on wet jobs? Hell, they hired somebody to do that. A specialist.”
“Who hired him?”
Palermo laughed. “I’m not going to tell you that,” he said. “At least not now. Maybe later when I see what arrangements your boss made in Carson City.”
“But these are the people who are trying to kill you,” said Elizabeth. “And if you don’t get them, they’ll get you.” She had stumbled into the spot he was protecting; all she could do now was pursue it until he refused to go on.
“No,” said Palermo, “what they did was kill Castiglione and leave me alone in the open when the war started. They didn’t warn me, they didn’t protect me. Nothing. It was the other families who killed Ferraro and would have killed me.”
“Aren’t you afraid?” said Elizabeth. “When they know you’ve come to us, won’t they send this specialist after you?”
“They might, if you let them know,” said Palermo.
“But we don’t know what to do about a professional like that,” said Elizabeth. “Look at all the assassinations. We can’t protect you from that kind of killer unless we know who he is, or at least what to look for.”
Palermo shook his head, solemnly. He said, “Jesus, you must think I’m stupid, pulling that on me. The specialist? Shit, him I’d give you for free if I could. Problem is, I can’t. I never saw him, and I don’t even know his name. When they talked about him they just called him ‘the butcher’s boy.’ ”
“Nice name,” said Elizabeth.
“Yeah,” said Palermo. “Isn’t it?”
28What he was most worried about was time. Las Vegas was probably the most difficult place in the world to hide in. It was full of people who were in the business of noticing every new face and searching it for the means of extracting a profit: greed, lust, gluttony, stupidity. Plenty of them had seen him before, and whoever noticed him first would feel fortunate—they didn’t have to cajole or deceive him or cater to his sexual appetite. All they had to do was mention that he was there. The only things in his favor were the huge number of newcomers that arrived each day—tens of thousands of them—and the fact that he wouldn’t be expected.
Even taken together, the two didn’t represent much of an edge, he thought. He’d have to find a way to reduce the chance of his being spotted to practically nil. He’d have to stay away from the big hotels. No, any hotel, he decided. There was no way to predict who really owned what, and who was a friend of whom. The airport and the bus station and the restaurants were out too. It would have to be done by a quick visit to town in a single night, and then more forays later if they seemed productive. He had to keep the time he was visible to a minimum.
He wished there were some other way. If only he’d been more careless he’d know more, he thought. That was the irony of it. He’d always avoided personal connections with his clients. He never saw them more than once if he could help it, and never let them know where he lived. His post office box was all they’d known about him, and often he’d known even less about them. His lack of curiosity had been a form of protection. He let the middlemen, the brokers like Orloff, accept the danger of knowing. But now he wished he’d been curious, just this once.
Maureen had been helpful, he thought. Why wouldn’t she be? She’d made fifty thousand dollars in less than a week. She couldn’t have carried all that hardware on an airplane anyway. But it all helped, everything would help now that was done right. Weapons that couldn’t be traced and hadn’t turned up in a ballistics report would contribute something to his peace of mind, if nothing else. He knew the car was more important. There was no chance anyone would make a connection between him and a used car bought for cash by a single woman who’d just moved to Illinois to take a job in the local school system. The fact that in the fifteen-minute drive between the dealer’s lot and the Illinois Department of Motor Vehicles the name A. Blake on the ownership papers had been changed to Mr. A. Blake would mean nothing to anyone.
He liked driving at night. He was a little disappointed when the sky began to acquire the blue luminescence that meant dawn would break soon. It was as though the sun were in a race with him, and now it was just behind him. In an hour i
t would catch up, and an hour after that it would be daylight in Las Vegas. He’d still be a day away.
IT WAS GETTING LIGHT now, and Elizabeth could see the pink, craggy mountains jutting abruptly around the flat, empty basin that seemed to contain nothing but the road and billboards. She hadn’t noticed when the change had come. She’d gotten used to the advertisements for Las Vegas, and then she’d looked again and they were all for Reno and Lake Tahoe. The pictures were the same—a gigantic girl decorated with a few feathers and rhinestones, her impossibly long legs and ripe breasts taking more space than the suggestion of an opulent building behind her—but the location was different. They had left the gravitational field surrounding Las Vegas, and entered the one that pulled cars into the complex in the north. They had passed some invisible boundary in the darkness.
She knew she should be feeling elated. Whatever value the man beside her turned out to be in court, he was a real asset already. At this moment she knew more than anyone about what was happening, and he hadn’t even been interrogated yet. And what was more gratifying was that he’d confirmed most of the theories she and Brayer had developed. There was a war on between the families, and the key to it was Fieldston Growth Enterprises. One of the capos had even killed Castiglione over it. And Palermo knew who it was and might even be able to convince a jury. But almost as important for Elizabeth was that he knew what was going on at FGE. It didn’t matter anymore that she’d let the company records slip away. She was bringing in something better, a man who could tell them anything the papers would have revealed, and more. Maybe she’d feel better after she’d eaten and slept.
Right now she felt a headache preparing to strike as soon as the sun rose high enough to pierce through the side window into her eyes. It had been over ten days since she’d begun shuttling around the country, and she’d gotten used to being exhausted. But the strain on her nerves had culminated in the arrival of Palermo in the middle of the night. And there was Palermo himself. She knew that was part of it. He was the break they’d been needing but hadn’t dared hope would ever appear. He’d be more thoroughly protected than a visiting head of state, then resettled and watched and pampered for the rest of his life. In a way he was an admission of the hopelessness of it all. The Justice Department was just a better patron this week than whoever he’d been working for last week. And none of it seemed to change anything, really, she thought: if they weren’t more afraid of each other than they were of the Justice Department, we wouldn’t even have this man. And he’s getting a free ride. The deal of a lifetime.
She felt the headache beginning to assert itself, and decided to think about something else. She was doing her job, and that was all anyone could do. There was another billboard. This time the girl was naked except for two pasties shaped like stars and a pair of net panty hose with a star on the crotch. It was the star on the crotch that made it ludicrous, she decided. Why couldn’t the girl just be naked?
Palermo put on a pair of sunglasses. He was obviously prepared for the trip. There was probably a toothbrush in his coat pocket too. She turned away to watch for the next billboard. The drive was beginning to seem impossibly long. All of the proportions in the west were wrong. You could drive for hours and see nothing but empty, harsh, hot land populated only by smiling giantesses in their feathers and sequins.
“Oh, shit,” said Palermo. “Oh, shit,” he repeated.
“What’s wrong?” said Elizabeth.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he said in rising cadence. He had begun to accelerate rapidly, looking anxiously from the road to the rearview mirror and back. “Somebody’s following us.”
“Are you sure?”
He was still accelerating, his head bobbing frequently to look in the mirror. Elizabeth turned to see the car herself. In the distance behind them was a car, still tiny, but definitely gaining on them.
“They know,” he said pitifully. “Who cares how?” She could see he was terrified. He had the gas pedal to the floor now, the car straddling the broken white line in the pavement. Elizabeth looked behind again. The car was still gaining. It looked from the front like a Cadillac or maybe a Lincoln or a big Chrysler. She couldn’t tell the difference. But it must be going at least ninety, steadily gulping up the distance that separated them from it. The white line in the road was just a blurred ribbon that snapped and quivered in front of her. She didn’t dare look at the speedometer but she knew they must be going about as fast as their car could go. Behind them, the other car was still approaching. She took the gun out of her purse and checked the load.
“Shoot the bastards,” said Palermo. “Now, before they get close.”
“But we don’t know who it is,” said Elizabeth.
“Jesus Christ, who do you think it is?” shouted Palermo. “They’re going over a hundred. Shoot the bastards!”
The car was close now. Elizabeth could see it was a Cadillac. The dark green hood had an immaculate gleam that threw the sunlight back into the sky. It was drawing up behind now. There were two men in the front seat. She knew that at this speed all she’d have to do was hit the car. A punctured radiator or a blown-out windshield would stop them—maybe kill them. But what if it wasn’t what Palermo said? What if it was just two morons opening up a big new car on a deserted highway? She said, “No. Wait a minute.”
Palermo just repeated, “Shoot them! Shoot them!” as Elizabeth watched the big car pull up behind. The car honked twice, and then the driver leaned on the horn.
Palermo had subsided into a muttered litany: “Shit, shit, shit. Shit, shit, shit.”
Elizabeth watched the two men. If one of them pulled out a gun, or even looked as though he were about to she knew she’d have to shoot. The car pulled abreast. Palermo yelled, “Hold on!” and stepped on the brake. Elizabeth saw the Cadillac flash past as her right shoulder hit the dashboard.
Palermo was gasping, slowing the car as the Cadillac diminished into the distance. Elizabeth managed to regain her balance, but only with difficulty. Palermo pulled to the side of the road and stopped.
The world sounded strangely quiet. Elizabeth watched as Palermo opened the door and walked out around to the back of the car. Her heart was pounding and her lungs didn’t seem to be able to take in enough air. Then she heard it. She didn’t have to look. Behind the car Palermo was throwing up.
When he came back to the car she didn’t say anything to him. He sat quietly while she drove. When she saw the little outpost a few miles down the road she still didn’t say anything to him, just pulled off the highway and stopped at the gas pump. Palermo climbed out of the car and disappeared into the men’s room.
The station attendant was young, probably just out of high school. His long blond hair was still wet from his morning shower, and his blue work shirt was crisp and clean. He yawned as he topped off the tank. The station must have opened at seven, she thought. Probably there wasn’t much business out here at seven. You’d have to leave home at five to get here from anywhere.
She paid the boy and looked for Palermo. She almost felt sorry for him. No doubt he was in the men’s room, white and shaking, his stomach turning itself inside out. She wasn’t feeling too great herself. She parked the car away from the pump and went to the ladies’ room. It was too late to prevent the headache, but aspirin might make it bearable until Carson City.
When Elizabeth returned she expected to see Palermo sitting in the car, most likely in the driver’s seat. He wasn’t. She got into the car to wait, a little angry. The longer he took, the longer it would be before she turned him over to the section chief in Carson City and went somewhere to sleep.
She wasn’t particularly surprised when the green Cadillac pulled around the building and onto the highway. It was perfect that they should go that fast, only to stop in that godforsaken coffee shop. They’d probably make up the time by covering the next hundred miles in less than an hour. She watched them accelerate rapidly, diminishing into the distance at a speed she didn’t feel able to estimate. Idiots.
Palermo. What was keeping him? This is what men are supposed to be built for, she thought. Big feats of strength and speed in a momentary emergency. Quick action, the massive infusion of adrenaline, and then a long period of repose. Not like women, built to last, the damned extra layer of fat for heat and cold and hunger, the nervous system tougher to stand pain. Babies.
Elizabeth looked at her watch. It was almost seven thirty. She remembered what he’d looked like when he left the car—pale skin, gasping for breath, his heart probably racing—oh God, his heart. That would be just about right. A heart attack in this place, fifty miles from the nearest doctor, probably. And nothing to do about it. Coffee and doughnuts. Air in your tires, sir? Better let me check your oil.
She got out of the car. The sun was warming the still air already. She walked to the gas station, past the boy, who was in the garage staring upward in consternation at the underside of a car on the hydraulic lift. She knocked lightly on the men’s room door, listening as much for the approach of another man as for Palermo’s answer. She heard nothing, so she tried again, this time louder. There was something absurd about it—no, everything about it was absurd. If she’d been a man she could have gone right in, or even gone with him in the first place. Maybe she should have anyway. At this hour, in this place what difference did it make? But he wasn’t really a prisoner. After the third knock she tried the doorknob. It was locked.
At the garage she said to the boy, “I wonder if you could do me a favor? The man with me went into the men’s room. I’m afraid he may be sick. Will you go in and check on him?”
The boy looked at her with sullen disapproval, then stared back up at the undercarriage of the car. It must be his, she decided. Then he said, “How long has he been in there?”
She said, “A half hour.”