by Dean Ing
Now she was staring at him, withholding her judgments, her little verbal lightnings. "Are you playing specialist games with me?"
"Just telling you what they're doing at the lab, and I'm not a specialist in this at all. If I can get specimens of everything, you'll have to be ready for them. It's not my fault, Mom." An old refrain, but this time with a new twist. He kept his eyes downcast, playing the role she wanted from him. Controlling her.
"I'll set the trees up in the annex," she said at last, referring to the unfinished house next to The Place.
"I want us to get on this right away."
He nodded, jingling Aletha's keys in his hand. It occurred to him suddenly that it might be nice to have a spare key for that station wagon, just in case. Spares to all of Mrs. Glamourpussy's keys, in fact, a secret empowerment he would probably never use beyond his own satisfaction in it. He no longer needed to masturbate; his mood soared quietly now with small secret triumphs over Aletha and Mom as well. "I'll drop in on you Wednesday after work," he promised.
Mom started for the door, then paused. "I was looking at your pets when you came in, Andrew.
Whatever happened to that big fluffy female?"
"They die," he said, shrugging as he opened the door. "Very short life spans, I'm afraid. Like your clients." He grinned to show that he was joking.
When Mom had walked off toward her car, he started the Taurus and sat for a moment, gunning its engine, enjoying the lusty sound. There would be time to get those keys copied. He savored the moment when he had told Mom what she'd have to do and then denied that he was, in her phrase, "playing games."
He had carried off several pretenses before his toughest critic, all of them successful. That counted as a rave review.
Driving back to the playhouse, he thought about other roles. In Briant, there had been a grubby old fellow who collected bottles and rags. One baleful glance showing that white pupilless eye and people tended to shy away. And in Clovis, for a time, citizens had grown used to the pudgy young woman with the pageboy cut and singsong voice who haunted shopping malls, talking childish nonsense to anyone who made eye contact, capable of studying a potted palm for a half-hour; mildly retarded, harmless, with a sad, reproachful smile.
Occasionally, the old man had taken verbal abuse. Occasionally, mall-security folk had spoken with the girl. No one had ever penetrated the fact that, under the handmade wigs, both of these social rejects had been Andrew Soriano.
13
MAY 1994
Early on Monday, Gary had trouble finding an open barbershop in Palmdale; but the town had its military types, and the flat-topped butch haircut was a common request. When Gary tried his emergency number, Paul Visconti was out. Gary promised to call again from Palmdale at noon. He lied.
Swede Halvorsen drove him, using Jan's 260Z, on to Newhall for the noon call because both towns were near enough to Los Angeles that his real base - Bakersfield - would seem a less-likely guess. And by using pay telephones, he made it easy for Visconti to verify that he was indeed calling from Southern California.
Swede still did not like driving the little Datsun. "Mountain roads or not, if this all turns to shit, your DEA boys are likely driving Broncos and such," the old man grumped. "In my ol' cast-iron Polara, we could bully 'em a little."
"Bullshit! You just want to light up the tires. Anyway, Jan's ten-speed wouldn't fit in this little bucket. She needs the Dodge more than we do."
"Couldn't light these tires up with a pail of gasoline," said Swede. "Good cafe in Saugus," he went on, pointing to a road sign along Highway 14.
"I called from a regular cafe before," Gary said. "Truck stop in Newhall changes our MG a little."
Swede's grunt was the nearest he would come to a compliment for this bit of subtlety on Gary's part.
He shook his head. "Where's that dumb young shavetail I used to know and love?"
"Give us a kiss and I'll tell you." Gary warded off a backhand slap that would have caught him across his cast. "You wanta watch that," he went on and brought his forearm down on the car's shift lever to hear the gentle thwack of it. "This is the Dodge Polara of casts Jan put on me; brass knucks up to my elbow."
"She learned that with Freddie," Swede replied. "Pity she didn't leave him when he started getting drunked up, drugged up, beaten up."
"Fucked up," Gary supplied.
"Naw, that's what Jan did when she married him."
Gary held his ground. "Isn't he drying out in a funny farm back east? I'd say that's about as fucked up as it gets."
"Close. What's worse is Jan's being brought up Catholic, married to a Freddie who's not dead enough to qualify for a plot, and not alive enough to divorce. Dumb mackerel snappers," the old man muttered.
"You're Catholic," Gary reminded him.
"I say I am. Priest has his doubts." He pointed up the highway. "How's this look?"
In the distance, big semi rigs stood tall and inert against the rolling hills, awaiting fuel or drivers or merely the orders of some distant dispatcher. "They'll have plenty of pay phones," Gary said.
They did - a row of phones in a broad hall adjacent to a restaurant that smelled of yesterday's french fries and decades of cigar smoke. Gary established that a nearby side exit door was unlocked, and chose a phone from which he could see Halvorsen sitting at the fast-service counter, watching his back.
He reached his ASAC on the second ring. "I nearly got offed Friday night," Gary said without preamble and found himself interrupted. "When I say I don't know who, you're getting the benefit of some doubt."
Pause. "Well, I'm banged around some, but what bothers me most is that, before it happened, Chuck Lane got a note saying it was one Paul Visconti who was setting me up for a long fall; literally, in this case. In a mine shaft! Paul, I've got to tell you I'm not coming in till I'm sure about that note."
This time he waited longer. He'd been afraid it would be like this, and now he did the interrupting:
"Make it quick, mister. If you're tracing the call, that's cool but I don't intend to be here ten minutes from now. Just wanted to make it official and for attempted murder of this federal agent, the Fresno office is the proper conduit - I've got reasons to be out of the loop awhile. Put me on medical leave, vacation, compassionate leave, whatever. Or fire me if you have to."
Another pause, nodding as if Visconti were facing him. His management of the next moments now would be important; enough time for a call trace to place him near Los Angeles, not enough to get a tail on him. "Okay, and thanks. But check out Chuck Lane's apartment in Merced and you'll understand. A few minutes after my place was hit, two women nailed me in the butt with a hypodermic while I was going for my BMW. . . Damn right, out in the open. Actually I'm not sure they were women. I've kept a urine sample, and I'd sure like to know what I was hit with. . . Oh, I'm not that paranoid, I'm mailing you enough to fill out a six. Also, just in case, I'm leaving duplicates and some evidence where it'll surface if I get taken down. . . To the Bureau, Paul. Politically, it's the worst thing I could do, and by then I'll be past caring. I'm feeling a little hard-nosed right now. . . Sorry, man. You can hope I stay healthy and this can all stay among friends. Assuming you're clean, you'll appreciate what I'm doing." And if you're dirty, you'll be scrambling for a cover-up.
After another pause, he laughed. "You're really not tracing my call? Sure, I can tell you: off I-Five near the summit, waiting for my ride to fuel up. . . Just ask yourself what you'd do in my place. . . When this is over, I hope I can apologize. I'll give you another noon call in a day or so. But don't expect me to take any more chances for a while, okay?"
Gary replaced the receiver and checked his wristwatch, nodding to Swede as he headed for the little car alone via the side exit. He'd been on the phone for a little over three-and-a-half minutes, long enough for a trace to verify his general location. If Visconti were behind the attempt on his life, he'd assume the worst; that Gary himself was running to L.A., a megalopolis where a man could hide
indefinitely. Paul - or whoever it was - almost certainly would have help. And if Paul Visconti knows I was dumped into a hole containing another body, right about now he'll be between a shit and a sweat wondering how to dispose of the evidence.
A dozen sticks of dynamite down the hole would do it nicely, he thought. That was why he had given Jan Betancourt such explicit instructions before she'd left Bakersfield that morning for Fresno, driving the Polara. He did not have enough details of the land contours where he had gone through that fence, but all he needed was a report of sudden activity nearby. Jan had claimed she could do that much from concealment across the road, biking the last mile or so, hauling her old Peugeot bike into the woods with her.
When Swede arrived to unlock the car, Gary slid inside without help. The arm was mending, but it could still remind him that it was fractured. "We mail this package at the truck stop. Go back the way we came and call Jan first," he said.
But the old man was already driving toward the mail drop, pulling on gloves to handle the package.
When he had pushed Gary's bulky package into the proper slot, he got under way again. "Hold on a few minutes," he urged. "I'm gonna go 'round the cloverleaf a couple of times and watch. Wouldn't it be interesting to see about three black-and-whites peeling off the freeway in the next few minutes, converging on that truck stop," he said, wheeling toward an on ramp.
"That would be good news," Gary said. It was beyond belief that the highway patrol would be on the wrong side as well, and it would probably mean Visconti was clean. "At least, I think it would." The two men shared a cynical glance at this final admission of uncertainty, then studied traffic as it swirled in broad patterns around the truck stop. When no marked cars approached after two circuits, Swede followed signs back to Highway 14, left Newhall behind, and stopped in the pass on a side road where the highway was both out of sight and almost out of earshot. Finally he lifted the cellular phone. Without the engine running, it was eerily quiet in the car, so quiet they could hear a constant breeze keening through the pass.
They had already agreed that Gary would not speak on their cellular link; and that, if confronted, Jan would link up to the Fresno County Sheriff's people instantly. Among the three of them, Jan had been the only one without a case of nerves over her part. "If I'm off the road, I won't be seen. If I'm seen away from the car, I'll be a biker on a back road. I do it all the time," she had said. "Besides, if I can't find a place to hide in a forest, I deserve to get caught."
Swede had demanded that they switch roles, with Gary seconding the idea; which only taught them for the umpty-umpth time that you didn't give orders to Janelle Betancourt. "I'm going to do it, Ampa," she'd said. "You can lump it, or you can like it."
Swede was lumping it as he waited for her to answer. "Hundred goddamn things could happen, her out there alone - Hi, Nellie," he said, voice shifting in mid-syllable to a sprightly tone. No one but her grandfather was ever permitted to use that particular nickname. "Can you talk?"
"Who is this, Joan Rivers? Never mind, Ampa, Trivial Pursuit was never your game. I've already found the gate, near that detached fender, but the phone won't work from there. I'm parked at the overlook to the dam on your map."
That would be Briant Dam. The way Swede held the phone, her words carried easily to Gary. "Good, that's miles from the gate. Tell her to get crackin'," Gary said.
"The call has been made. Time to grab your Ritz crackers and a book and hunker down," Swede told her. "Try and find a location where you can make a call while you wait."
"All set. And if I need to call and can't, I could pretend," she said. "Who's to know?"
Gary's quick grin said, Smart lady to Swede. The old man's return glance replied, I don't like this one damn bit. "If you have to strike out into the woods to avoid somebody, I'll buy you new wheels. You hear me, Nell?"
"Sounds like a good deal, Ampa. I may just fake it to get a new Peugeot. How's our one-armed bandit?" From her tone, Gary wondered if she were taking all this seriously enough. Like Halvorsen, he'd tried to impress on Jan that anyone she met near that gate of barbed wire might be as deadly as a Coast rattler, and that not meeting anyone was by far the best policy.
"He's dumb and he's ugly, like always, but I can't seem to ditch him," Swede said. "We're headed out now, arid I want a call from you at three, even if you have to leave your post."
"Ten-four, good buddy, or whatever it is you guys say." And with that, she broke the connection.
Swede sat without moving for a moment except for the tap, tap, tap of his fingers on the steering wheel. Gary said, "You're thinking, screw this, I-Five is faster - right?"
"Yeah."
"You're right, we can do seventy-five on that racetrack and have folks passing us. Let's do it. I know the connecting roads around Fresno. We can be there before five."
"And what's more," the old man said, spewing gravel, "you're as worried about her as I am."
She called a few minutes after 3:00 as Swede was driving past a vast set of livestock pens. "Just checking in. I found a nice spot a quarter of a mile from that gate and I want to get back to it so's I don't miss anything. Nothing to miss, so far. Eleven cars up the road in two hours isn't exactly a crowded freeway. You two boring each other to tears?"
"Naw, but there's a rank smell in here. I can't decide whether it's the cattle pens or my partner."
She laughed. "I know exactly where you are, then." That stretch near Kettleman City in central California was infamous for its eau de cowplop, and Swede cursed under his breath. He could not have broadcast his location any better with compass headings. Jan went on. "Oh - the car will be parked off the road near a little culvert, about three miles your side of the, uh, spot in question. And the breeze is pretty crisp around there. I'll come back here at six, okay?"
Gary, leaning over to hear while Swede held the receiver to help him, flashed his right hand up, all fingers open. "Make it five," Swede corrected. "We'll see you there."
Favored with light traffic along the lesser Route 41 into Fresno, they took the arterial directly through town. Commuters and traffic lights had them cursing near Clovis at 4:30, but almost on the stroke of 5:00
they fled through the countryside northeast of Fresno, tires chirping, past a familiar vehicle near a culvert.
Gary: "You see your car back there?"
Halvorsen: "I saw it. She's late, goddammit."
Gary: "Well take it easy. If she's on the way, you don't want her for a hood ornament."
"Shut up, Landis," said the old man, but he slowed his pace and, minutes later, they passed Gary's landmark fender at a leisurely pace. "Still no Janelle," Swede said.
"But no sign of anybody else either," Gary replied, pointing at the sagging old wire fence.
"Recent tire tracks," Swede noted.
"They were there before. Let's find a turnaround. You might try the phone again," Gary said.
"In OCID, that's what they called micromanagement. Knock it off, rookie," Swede rasped. He found a wide spot moments later and made an expert one-eighty, passing the gate again at a crawl.
Swede had just picked up the cellular phone when Gary let out a loud "Thank God! There she is,"
finishing with a shaky laugh.
She was removing twigs from the front spokes of her bike and had obviously seen them, but made no outward sign as if to prove her coolness in the field. Moments later she was pedaling away briskly, bent over old-style racing handlebars, buttocks appealingly raised in tight jeans.
"I don't wanta know what you're thinking," Swede said, watching his granddaughter's fanny undulate at thirty miles an hour.
"Wishing I had a peashooter," Gary said.
"Sorry 'bout, my temper, boy," Swede said after a moment.
"I had it coming."
"You did," the old man agreed. They maintained a hundred-yard deficit, speeding up as Jan did forty on the downhill sweeps. "She's really something, you know that," Swede said, low in his throat.
"I
always did," Gary said, shrugging as Swede glanced his way.
"Dunno how to say this, so I'll just say it, Gary: she's not seeing anybody, and I guess I'm glad. But if she's gonna complicate her life with some asshole, I'd just as soon it was one I trust."
Gary managed to avoid a grin. "Is this your way of telling me what an asshole I am?"
Now it was the old man who shrugged. "Always thought you knew," he said. They rode in silence for a minute or so before Swede went on: "Young woman on a ten-speed, no weapon; you realize just how vulnerable she was out here?"
"Yep. Were you going to stop her?"
"Nope. Hell, Gary, that's your job. If anyone could change her mind, it'd be the boyfriend."
"It might, if I enjoyed that status."
Swede shot him a disbelieving look. "After two days, you don't know?"
"No, and she doesn't, either," Gary insisted.
Now the old man laughed. "You know, I believe it; I believe I'm the only one who sees that. Ever watch one of those nature specials that show flamingos and peacocks? Well, listen: birds don't do any more dumb-fuck mating dances than you two. 'Course you don't know how she was before you came back here all stove up needing TLC and a hidey-hole. When she came back from the East Coast she'd pulled into herself a lot, got that job teaching aerobics to old ladies, little mobile home I had to crawl around under to repair water damage; a lot of solitary shit. I know for a fact she gets hit on by guys at her health spa, which is half meat market in my book. Now all of a sudden she's cracking jokes. Wearing lipstick. Combing her hair. And by God I bet she doesn't even realize it. Flamingos! I bet they don't see what they're doing, either." He laughed again.
Because Gary did not know what to say, he only grunted. Soon they descended into the valley with its inevitable creek and pulled up beside the sturdy old Dodge as Jan removed the front wheel of her bike for stowage.
"My God, you look like a football jock again with that butch cut," she said, and cocked her head. "Nice, in a Kojakish kind of way. Anyhow, nobody stopped. Nobody even slowed," she said as Gary unfolded himself from the Datsun. "Dull city."