by John Case
So that was out. And anyway, the Rover was between him and the soccer field, him and the police. Which left . . .
The bicycles in front of him. There was a long rack, crammed with bikes of every kind, and he moved toward them in a crouch. Going from bike to bike, he finally found what he was looking for: a derelict English racer whose owner hadn’t bothered to lock it up.
Still, getting out of the parking lot unseen was not going to be easy. But if the Mattress and his friend were focused on his car, they might not look twice at someone on a bike. Then again, they might – and if they did, the whole business would be over very quickly. They’d just shoot him in the head and drive away.
He hesitated, but in the end, there wasn’t any choice. If he moved quietly enough, he might get past them. Taking a deep breath, Lassiter swung his left leg over the bike’s bar and pushed off with his right, pedaling hard. As the bicycle rolled toward the Rover, picking up speed, it began to make a terrible clatter.
Swip
Swip swip Swip swip swip
Swipswipswipswipswipswipswip
Glancing behind at the noise, he saw the problem: the bike’s owner had clamped the ace of spades to the frame, using a clothespin, so that the spokes clipped the playing card as the wheel turned. Making an insane racket. Fuck! The Rover loomed and . . .
Suddenly he was past it, heading out of the lot, home-free. Or so he thought, until he heard the engine turn over with a roar. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the car’s headlights flash on, and a moment later the Rover lurched toward him.
He was out of the lot by now, and still picking up speed as he headed downhill, pedaling furiously. The road coiled around the mountain like a corkscrew, spiraling toward the plain below in what, for Lassiter, was a vortex of centrifugal force. He couldn’t tell how fast he was going, but the ride was terrifying. Even so, the Rover was far enough behind that all he could see was the light from its headlamps. The car itself was halfway around the mountain, and – the good news – it wasn’t gaining.
He touched his brakes from time to time, leaned into the curves and let gravity do the work, praying he wouldn’t fly off the mountainside. His heart was pounding, the wind was stinging his eyes, and the playing card was hitting the spokes so quickly that it hummed.
Slowly, the plain began to rise, and he could tell that his descent was leveling off. Soon the ground would flatten out and gravity would start to work against him. He’d lose his speed, the Rover would be on him and –
Suddenly, he was there. On the flat. He came off the mountain like a bowling bowl, flying across the valley floor toward the little tree plantation that he’d seen earlier. It was less than half a mile ahead, but by the time he reached the clearing at its edge, he was pedaling hard and the Rover had him in its lights.
He beat the car to the clearing and pedaled even harder to reach the trees. Vanishing into the darkness of the woods, he coasted for as long as the bike would carry him. When it came to a rest, he let the bike fall and limped even deeper into the woods.
This was an unnaturally tidy place, a deciduous forest in which each of the trees was equidistant from every other, and about the same size. There was no underbrush, and all of the branches were trimmed to about seven feet above the ground.
Turning, he saw the Rover pull into the clearing with its headlights on high beam. It sat for a moment, facing the woods with its engine idling. Then the lights cut out, the doors flew open, and the Mattress and his partner emerged.
Lassiter stood where he was, incredulous at what was happening. He didn’t belong here. He had too many connections to wind up hiding behind a tree in somebody else’s forest. He had a world of information at his disposal, and corporations trying to buy him out. There were hard men on three continents who’d do anything to work for him – and here he was, scrambling through the woods, having just escaped from church on a bicycle.
Fuck, it’s cold, he thought, and with this ankle . . . He could tell it was badly swollen. But it wasn’t broken, and either his endorphins were kicking in or the sprain wasn’t as bad as he thought. He could walk on it. All he had to do was stand the pain.
In the distance he could hear the river running, and he made for it, thinking the noise might give him cover. And if worse came to worst, he could always dive in, swim downstream, and –
Drown. The water temperature was probably less than fifty degrees.
Behind him, he heard a pile of twigs crunch, and turned. Camelface was coming toward him with his eyes on the ground, walking with the cocky, pigeon-toed gait of a predator. Lassiter stepped behind a tree, maybe thirty feet away, and waited. Suddenly, the man stopped, glanced to each side, and unzipped his fly. With a long sigh he turned against the trunk of a tree and began to relieve himself.
Lassiter could see the steam rising, and knew that the man was at his most vulnerable. If he was ever going to take him down, now was the time. With a deep breath, he stepped from behind the tree and rushed him from behind.
If he’d been able to move normally, he’d have covered the distance in four or five steps and cold-cocked the Italian with a roundhouse to the back of the head. Lassiter had a big swing, and if he’d done it right, Camelface would have gone down with his dick in his hands, facing the wrong way.
But it didn’t work out. Lassiter’s ankle was too weak to take him anywhere very quickly, and too painful to let it happen silently. By the time he covered the distance between them, the Italian had stepped to the side and turned. And then, suddenly and unexpectedly, Lassiter was on his stomach with his right cheek pressed against the ground. Camelface’s right arm was hooked under his right shoulder, with the palm of the man’s hand against the back of his neck. The man’s left arm held Lassiter’s left wrist as he used his head to bulldoze the American’s face to the ground.
Lassiter twisted and thrashed, but he didn’t know how to break the hold – which was anything but improvised. This guy’s a wrestler, he thought, and a good one. He could hear the man’s breathing, and smell his sweat.
For a long moment they lay like that, tensed against one another, struggling silently and without motion. Suddenly, the Italian relaxed his grip and let go of Lassiter’s left wrist. He reached for something, and as he did, his weight lifted. Lassiter swung an elbow at him, to no effect, and the man grabbed the hair on the back of his head and jerked it backward. The moon flashed in front of Lassiter’s eyes and he thought, He’s going to cut my throat.
The Italian muttered something in a supercilious, almost seductive voice that told Lassiter he had about a second left to live. Almost growling, Lassiter clenched his teeth and lowered his head, resisting the hand pulling on his hair. His chin sank toward his neck and then, without warning, he threw his head backward, driving it into the Italian’s face.
The man yelped and rolled away as Lassiter scrambled to his feet. From the clearing a plaintive voice called, ‘’Cenzo!?’ And then louder: ‘’Cenzo!?’ The man in front of him climbed to his knees and shook his head to clear it. With the practiced step of a goalkeeper, Lassiter approached his head as if it were a soccer ball and, with all the malice he could muster, drove his instep into the man’s mouth, half expecting to see his head take off for the moon. But Camelface surprised him. He rolled across the forest floor and came up spitting teeth, the knife still in his hand.
Slowly, he came toward Lassiter, holding the knife low, his eyes locked with the American’s. There was nowhere for Lassiter to go, and nothing much that he could do. He held his ground until the Italian swung at him, slashing the forearm of his leather jacket. He jumped to the side, and again the Italian swung, a backhanded flick that threatened to empty Lassiter’s stomach on the ground.
The voice from the clearing came at them again. ‘’Cenzo? Smarrito o qui?’
Camelface kept his eyes on Lassiter’s, circling in for the kill.
‘Dove stai, eh?’
It was too much. For an instant the Italian turned his face in irritation toward the voice, and whe
n he did, Lassiter waded in, landing five punches in two seconds. Then he stepped back to let him fall – which turned out to be a mistake, because the Italian lunged at him instead.
The rush took Lassiter by surprise, but even so, he was able to hit Camelface again, and this time the knife flew out of his hands. Lassiter dove for it, came up with it, turned and was flattened. In less than a second he was on his stomach in a paralytic hold that immobilized him from the neck down. The only parts of his body that he could move were his arms, and those only weakly, flailing backward from the elbows in a sort of triceps curl.
But with the knife in his right hand, it was enough. He felt the point of the blade dig into something hard, and Camelface gasped. He pumped his arm again and again, hitting something each time, but never too deeply or hard. Finally Camelface screamed and rolled away. And, as he did, Lassiter swung in an arc with the knife, cutting something that felt like string. Then he rolled to his feet and stared.
The Italian was sitting on the ground, his hands in his lap and a look of surprise on his face. One of his eyes was a socket of gore where Lassiter had stuck him, and gouts of blood pumped from his throat like oil from a can.
Then he fell over and died without a word.
Lassiter got to his feet, panting, and started to limp away, heading toward the river. Fight or flight. In his case, both. He was sky high with adrenaline, and somehow it made him thirsty. But before he could reach the river, a powerful light swept through the woods in an arc, moving left to right, right to left.
Lassiter turned and stared.
The Rover had a searchlight next to the driver’s window, and the Mattress was swinging it through the woods, looking for him and his partner. The light was penetrating enough that he would certainly have seen ’Cenzo if ’Cenzo had been on his feet. But he wasn’t, and wouldn’t ever be again. ’Cenzo was on his back, and as for Lassiter, he was moving at an angle to the searchlight, using the trees as screens.
The Mattress listened for a bit, then fixed the searchlight to point at a spot in the woods. That done, he pulled a handgun from the belt at the small of his back and crossed the clearing to the woods. Lassiter was surprised by his quickness. He didn’t think a man that big could move that fast, or that gracefully, outside the NBA. And he was heading directly for his dead partner.
Lassiter didn’t think about it. He just started walking, moving as quietly as he could toward the edge of the clearing. It took everything he had not to run, and when the Mattress cried ‘’Cenzo!’ in a voice that was filled with shock, Lassiter was all tapped out. He gimped toward the Rover as fast as he could and, reaching it, jumped in, desperate to find the keys in the ignition or a gun on the seat.
He was disappointed.
A bellow came from the woods as Lassiter looked for the keys, pulling the visors down, opening the glove compartment and –
There was another bellow from the woods and, looking up, he saw the Mattress running toward him, lit up like a silo by the searchlight. And then he glimpsed the keys, lying on the floor. Grabbing them, he tried one, and then another, and then a third, before the engine turned over. By that time the Mattress was at the edge of the clearing and beginning to raise his gun.
Lassiter ground the Rover into reverse and powered backwards toward the road. Even as the Mattress receded in his headlights, he began to fire, with a calmness that was terrible. The first shot took out one of the car’s lights. The second put a spiderweb in the windshield, and the third ricocheted off the hood. Lassiter swung the car around and threw it into first as a fourth and fifth shot crashed into the chassis.
Head down, he leaned on the accelerator and roared away, imagining where the road must be. He stayed down for four or five seconds, until he heard a high-pitched noise dopplering toward him and saw the night begin to flicker. Raising his head above the dashboard, he felt his stomach drop as a truck roared directly at him, high beams flashing on and off, horn blaring.
Instinctively, Lassiter ripped the wheel to the right, and when the truck blew past, he let out a long, stuttering breath. Wrong side of the road, he thought.
So shoot me.
29
TODI OR MARSCIANO?
The Rover idled at the stop sign, deep in the middle of nowhere. Left or right? North or south? Impulsively, Lassiter jerked the wheel to the left and headed toward Marsciano – wherever that was. As long as he didn’t end up on the mountain road to Spoleto or, worse, heading back to Montecastello.
The town was a trap, a dead end – easy to defend, but hard to escape. And that is what he was doing: escaping. From the Mattress, certainly, but also from the police. The priest was dead, and Lassiter knew that by morning he would be a suspect. Nigel and Hugh would hear of Azetti’s death, and they’d recall that he’d been on his way to meet the priest – after which their guest had disappeared, without collecting his belongings.
He could go to the police, of course, and explain everything: from Bepi to Camelface by way of Azetti. But driving to police headquarters in a stolen car, with blood on his clothes and ten words of Italian, did not seem like a good idea. At a minimum, he’d be answering questions for days – and, as he’d already decided before he jumped on the bike, he didn’t like his chances in the local jail.
Arriving at another crossroads, he turned toward Perugia, heading north. Away from Umbria. Away from Rome. Away from anywhere he’d ever been before.
What he wanted was a telephone, and a place to clean up – which wasn’t going to be easy. There were a lot of public lavatories in Italy, but there weren’t many that Lassiter could walk into, looking the way he did, without people screaming. A gas station might be okay, but so far he hadn’t passed one that was open.
He reached the outskirts of Perugia and followed a sign to the A-1, Italy’s autostrada. This was a toll road with no obvious speed limits, and full-service rest stops that straddled the highway. The rest stops had gas and groceries, telephones and rest rooms. The only problem with them was that they were brightly lit.
Not that he had much choice.
He was hurtling through the dark at ninety miles an hour when a gust of wind rocked the car and, moments later, it began to rain hard. Suddenly, he was driving blind, and yet he felt unnaturally calm – as if all the adrenaline had been drained out of him. Which, he supposed, was probably the case.
Checking the rearview mirror and seeing no lights, he pulled over to the side of the road and methodically worked all of the buttons and levers on the car until he found the one that operated the windshield wipers. Then he got back on the road.
The rest stops were not as numerous as in the U.S. It was midnight before he found one, a few miles south of Florence, and pulled into the parking lot. Most of the cars and trucks were parked as close to the building as they could get, so he drove the Rover to the outer reaches of the lot, where there was less chance of an encounter. Then he flicked on the overhead light and took a look at his face.
It was worse than he’d thought. His shirt collar was soaked with blood, though whether it was his own or someone else’s, he couldn’t tell. His cheeks were cross-hatched with cuts and scratches from the long fall down the mountain, and there was a gash on the side of his head that he didn’t remember receiving. He touched it with his fingertips and quickly drew them away: it was still oozing, and the hair around it was stiff with blood.
Snapping off the interior light, he opened the door and stepped outside, into the freezing rain. A quick glance told him that his clothes were hopeless. There was blood on his jacket, blood on his shirt, blood on his pants. Azetti’s blood, his own blood, the blood of the man he’d killed.
What to do? If he stood in the rain long enough, would it wash him clean? No, he thought, it would just give him pneumonia. So he did the best he could. He stripped down to his T-shirt, which was almost clean, and soaked his dress shirt in a puddle of oily water. Though the oil nauseated him, he used the shirt to scrub the blood from his face, and finally from his jacket.
That done, he put the jacket on over his T-shirt and opened the hood of the car. The engine was remarkably clean, but there was enough sludge on it to cover the bloodstains on his pants with a mixture of grease and oil.
Then he limped across the parking lot in the rain, and climbed the stairs to the restaurant above the highway. Coming the other way, a businessman gave him an odd look but said nothing. Which was encouraging.
Inside, he came upon a smorgasbord of symbols, pointing toward various services. One depicted a stick man next to a stick woman, and he followed the arrow to a set of doors.
The men’s room was vast and – mirabile dictu – replete with showers. Seeing him enter, the attendant looked him up and down and jerked his head to the back of the room. Then he raised his hand above his head and signed for showers, trickling his fingers down through the air.
He was a Turk, or maybe a Bulgarian, but stingy with towels, in any case. Lassiter wanted six. He offered two. Finally the attendant frowned and wrote numbers on a sheet of paper – so much for the shower, so much for each towel. He raised his eyebrows and pantomimed shaving, gesturing to a tray of items – packages of soap, disposable razors, aftershave, and something for the hair. Lassiter took what he needed and waited for the attendant to add up the bill. When he presented it, the American gave him twice the amount, and grazie.
The shower was sensational until he began scouring his cuts with soap. Then it hurt like hell. He scrubbed the blood out of his hair and washed his pants as best he could, rolling them up in towel after towel to squeeze the water out. In the end the pants were soaked and stained, but it was no longer obvious that the stain was blood.
When he left the men’s room, he saw himself in the mirror and thought, I look like the man who lost the war.
It was after midnight, and if Roy was home, he was asleep, because the answering machine cut in after five rings. He pushed the card into the telephone and tried a second time. And again.
There was a clatter at the other end of the line, and then: ‘Dunwold.’