Road to Paradise

by Max Allan Collins

  Now, however, the answers to those questions would come. In minutes, perhaps moments, she’d know just how their life would change, and learn the reality behind the words “we might have to run.”

  And for the first time since she had begun taking the little yellow pills, she felt the urge for a smoke. She dug out her pack of Virginia Slims and fired one up. On the table before her, in the bank waiting area, were various magazines, and on top was Better Homes and Gardens; also in the array of periodicals were Ladies’ Home Journal and Life.

  And it occurred to her, as she drew the smoke into her lungs, that right now she had none of that: no home, no life. No garden, either—just an empty swimming pool.

  Michael, in a gray suit and darker gray tie, entered with a large black briefcase in his left hand, his dark raincoat over his right arm; quickly he spotted her, motioned for her to join him.

  She stubbed out her cigarette and did.

  Within three minutes, they had signed the safe-deposit slip with the required signature (Michael’s) and followed the young female clerk into the vault, where the large box was unlocked, using both the clerk’s master key and the one Pat had brought from home.

  The clerk, a brunette in her twenties with too much green eye shadow and a green-and-yellow floral pop-art-pattern dress, said to them, “You can stay here in the vault, if you’re just putting in or taking something out.…”

  “We’d like to use one of the cubicles, please,” Michael said.

  “Certainly.”

  “If I recall, one of them has a jack for a phone.”

  “Actually, two have that capability, yes, sir. Shall I bring you a phone?”

  “Please.”

  Michael had to kneel to get at the unlocked box, which he slid out from its niche, using the raincoat-draped arm to cradle and carry it out of the vault, Pat right behind.

  Soon, with the door to the cubicle shut, Michael set the briefcase on the table, then—still cradling the deposit box under his arm—dropped the raincoat on an extra chair, revealing a strange-looking gun in his hand, a skinny automatic with an aluminum tube on the barrel. He placed the gun on top of the raincoat, then rested the metal box on the table, next to the telephone the clerk had set there. He sat on one side and Pat on the other, as if about to partake of a meal.

  Pat had never seen the contents of the box. She knew their vital papers were kept in a wall safe at home, and had no idea why Michael had felt the need to maintain a safe-deposit box for all these years. Sometimes she had complained about the annual expense, and Michael had merely said, “Please pay it,” and she had.

  Now, as Michael lifted the lid, she suddenly understood, drawing in a sharp breath.…

  …as she beheld the tightly packed stacks of banded bills—twenties and fifties and hundreds.

  On top of the money, like a bizarre garnish on a green salad, rested a .45 automatic, which she recognized as the weapon Michael had brought home from the war.

  Her eyes large with the green of the money—and the gun—she noted that the bands on the bills were not new, in fact were browned with age, though the bills themselves had a crisp, unused look. This box seemed to have been filled for some time.

  She said, “How muuu…?”

  He said, “Much? Half a million and change. Not a fortune, but plenty to start over somewhere. It’s cheaper in a lot of countries than here.”

  “What? Where…?”

  “Not sure. Haven’t thought that through yet. Mexico. South America. Even Canada’s a possibility. That might be easier for Anna.”

  Her brain struggled to process all of this; the medication was not helping. “Really start over. Really truly start over.…”

  “Yes.”

  “Anna.…” And then, despite the medication, the words came out in a rush: “She’s a senior, Michael, she has prom coming up, and graduation.…She’s Maria in—”

  He reached across the table, past the metal box of money, and touched her hand. “I killed two men today, Pat.”

  “…What?”

  “Two men who were sent to kill me.”

  Again, she struggled to process the information, shaking her head, slowly. “I don’t understand. Why, after all this time…? What have you done to them that…?”

  “It’s what I didn’t do.”

  Briefly, he explained that Sam Giancana had come to him, just over a week ago, demanding that Michael perform an assassination.

  “By refusing,” he said, “by turning my back on the Outfit, I’ve put us in this position. Pat, I’m sorry.”

  She was shaking her head again, but quickly now. “No, no, don’t say that. I wouldn’t have wanted you to—you’re not one of those…those people, anymore.”

  “But I have to be, now. I have to protect us.”

  Her brain whirled; her eyes could focus on nothing, the green forgotten. “How, Michael? How…?”

  His hand was still on hers. He squeezed. “We may have lost Mike—but we won’t lose Anna.”

  Her forehead tightened; and she tightened her grip on his. “No, no, we can’t lose Anna! We can’t.…”

  “We agree. She’s the priority.”

  “Anna. Anna. Yes. Yes.”

  “Pat, if Mike comes back.…”

  “When Mike comes back.…”

  “When Mike comes back, we’ll contact him. We’ll bring him into our loving arms again, I promise you that. But for now we have to put Mike aside, and concentrate on keeping Anna safe.”

  She began to nod. “How do we start?”

  “You start by transferring that money into my briefcase. I have a phone call to make.”

  He hauled the briefcase up onto the table, snapped it open—it was empty. She began filling it while her husband plugged the phone into the jack above where the table was flush to the wall, and he made a collect call to a name she didn’t recognize.

  Someone answered right away.

  “Vinnie, it’s Michael Satariano.…Don’t pretend nothing’s wrong.…Are you on a secure line?…You have five minutes to call me back. Here’s the number.”

  After Michael hung up—Pat still stacking the banded stacks of cash into the briefcase—he removed the weapon from the safe-deposit box. He was checking it over, examining the clip of bullets, testing the mechanisms, making sure everything was working properly, she supposed, and then the phone rang, and she jumped a little.

  Michael held up a hand to her, in a calming fashion, almost as if in benediction; then he answered the phone.

  “Hello, Vinnie.…I called you because you, like me, were Paul’s man. Are you orphaned, too?…Really? Well, good. It’s good you’re in solid with the new bunch, because you can pass this message along to them.…First, I didn’t kill Mad Sam.…I don’t care who says they saw what, think it through: Would I do a hit for Mooney Giancana?…You’re right, Momo’s a crazy prick, keep in mind he’s also a lying prick. Much as DeStefano needed killing, much as he deserved to suffer for days and days and then die, I didn’t do the honors.…I’m glad you believe me. Question is, can you make anybody else believe me?…Here’s the thing: Sam’s boys Tommy and Jackie came around to the Cal-Neva to see me this morning.…Right in my goddamned office, is where.… Where are they now? In that passage Sinatra built, between the office and Momo’s favorite cabin.…Going anywhere? Not unless Christ comes, and resurrects their sorry dead asses.”

  Task almost finished. Pat glanced over at her husband; this was a tone of voice she barely recognized, a kind of talking she knew not at all, coming from Michael. His eyes were tight, the right one as hard and cold and unreadable as the glass one. Only the faintest trace of scar remained from the long-ago war wound, a teardrop of flesh at the outer corner of his left eye—Pat had made him get plastic surgery decades ago.

  “Vinnie, I’m giving you boys the opportunity to clean up after yourselves.…All right then, it’s DeStefano’s crew, but shit runs both up and downhill, in our thing. I’m a made guy, Vinnie, they didn’t do that without a
pproval way up the food chain.…I find it hard to believe Joe Batters would sanction that myself, but he must have—do you see Tommy and Jackie doing this under their own steam?…Good. Good, you see my point.…Do about it? Whether I ever go back there or not, the Cal-Neva is not well-served by dead goombahs cluttering up the joint. What kind of heat do you think is gonna come down, they’re found?…Probably they were gonna haul my dead ass through the Sinatra tunnel, and stick me in their trunk and dump me, how the fuck should I know?…What do I suggest? I suggest you get one of your Sicilian clean-up crews out here, toot sweet, and get Tommy and Jackie checked out of the Cal-Neva.…You’ll find Jackie’s wheels in the parking lot of the Christmas Tree.”

  That was a well-known local restaurant.

  “No, Vinnie, I’ll call you.”

  And he hung up the phone.

  He looked at her. “Ready?”

  She nodded. All the cash had been transferred.

  “My Corvette’s back at the Cal-Neva,” he told her. “I don’t dare retrieve it. Drive to the high school. We need to pick up Anna.”

  “It’s the middle of her school day.…”

  “When we get there, it’s the end of her school day. You up to driving?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” He stood, and so did she. “Pat, be strong for our girl, okay?”

  “Okay, darling.”

  He smiled a little; he seemed to like hearing her call him that.

  “I’m relieved you’re not mad at me.”

  “I love you, Michael.”

  “I love you, baby. We’re gonna be fine.…but the next days, weeks, even months, may be a rough ride.”

  He punctuated this news by shoving the .45 automatic into his Sansabelt waistband, where it wouldn’t show under the gray suitcoat.

  “Could you carry the briefcase, dear?”

  She said she could.

  He closed the case and pushed it to her, and she took it.

  A few minutes later, after the (now empty) safe-deposit box had been locked pointlessly away, Michael—the raincoat again over his arm, hiding his hand holding the automatic with the silver snout—followed Pat to the station wagon. She noticed that he seemed to be looking everywhere, though she doubted anyone else would have picked up on that.

  He asked her to take the wheel, which she did, after depositing the briefcase on the seat between them. The sun was shining, and the small pseudo-rustic downtown—surrounded by mountains, under a perfect blue sky with smoke-signal clouds—seemed to her idyllic to the point of irony.

  At Incline Village High, Michael slid over and took the wheel as the car waited at the curb, Pat going in to tell them at the office that a family emergency had come up, and she needed to collect Anna.

  When Pat walked her daughter down the endless sidewalk to where Michael waited in the buses only lane, Anna let go a barrage of questions.

  The seventeen-year-old—in her denim pants suit with floral iron-ons and bell-bottoms, lugging her books before her in both hands—didn’t mind getting out of school (what teenager would?); but she immediately jumped to a false conclusion.

  “It’s Mike, right? Is it good news? If it’s bad news you can tell me, Mom.…Mom? What’s going on? What is going on?”

  But Pat could only think to say, “It’s all right…it’s all right.… Your father will tell you.”

  Then Michael was driving them home, and Anna was sitting forward behind them, asking questions that Michael was answering evasively.

  “We have no news about Mike,” the girl’s father said. “But we’ve had something serious come up, and we’ll sit and talk about it at home.”

  “Did somebody die? Some relative or something? I didn’t know anybody was left!”

  Mama and Papa Satariano had both passed away well over ten years ago (Papa first, Mama two weeks later); and Michael had no brothers or sisters. Well, of course Pat was aware of the one brother, who had died a long, long time ago.…

  “Daddy, I have a right to know what is going on in this family!”

  “Yes, you do,” he said.

  But that was all he said.

  Their daughter was in full pout mode (“Fine!”) by the time Michael pulled into the driveway—slowly; he was looking all around again, less subtly now. A few neighboring homeowners were out in their yards, one filling the air with the army-of-bumble-bees buzz of a Lawn Boy.

  Down the block a ways, two men in khaki jumpsuits were also doing yardwork—one trimming bushes, the other seeding. A panel truck, about the same shade of avocado as Pat’s pants suit, sat at the curb; bold white letters proclaimed green thumber’s lawn care with a cartoon thumb as an apostrophe and a Reno-exchange phone number.

  Michael, his eyes on the jumpsuited men, said to Pat, “Aren’t Ron and Vicki off somewhere?”

  “Yes. Fifteenth anniversary. Hawaii.”

  “Do they usually have their yardwork done? I thought they did their own.”

  “No, they get help, this time of year.”

  “Do you recognize that service?”

  “It sounds familiar. From Reno, I think.”

  “That who Ron and Vicki regularly use?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  Michael grunted something noncommittal.

  Anna said, “Is this the big news? The Parkers are getting their lawn looked after?”

  Michael turned to her. “Do you remember what I talked to you and Mike about?”

  Anna’s upper lip curled in a kind of contempt reserved only for parents of teenagers, by teenagers. “Sure, Dad—I remember the time you talked to Mike and me.…Little more help, please?”

  Michael’s expression had a terrible blankness. “I went over this subject more than once—I think the last time was right before Mike enlisted. About the kind of people I work for. And the problems that could lead to.”

  Anna’s smart-ass tone vanished. “Oh, Daddy.…Is that what this is…? Is something bad…about the people you.…Daddy, don’t scare me.”

  “Right now,” he said, “being scared is not such a bad idea.”

  And he took the tube-snout silenced automatic out from under the black raincoat—folded between him and Pat in the front seat, on top of the briefcase—knowing Anna, leaning up in the backseat, could see it.

  The girl sat back, hard and quick; then she covered her mouth with a pink-nailed hand.

  “We’ll put the car in the garage,” he said.

  Pat used the remote opener for him, and the Country Squire slid into place, Michael’s eyes everywhere; the door closed behind them. They sat in near darkness for a few moments.

  “I’m going to check the house,” he said to Pat.

  She nodded.

  He looked back at his daughter. “Anna, I’m going to leave this with you.…”

  And he handed back the silver-snouted weapon.

  But Anna was shaking her head, holding her hands up and shaking them. “No way, Daddy—no way.”

  He half-crawled over the seat and pressed the gun in her hand and held her eyes with his. “Your mother doesn’t know how to use this. You do.”

  “Daddy.…”

  Somehow Pat’s own protestations could not make the trip from her mind to her mouth. This was why Michael had insisted his two children become familiar with firearms, despite all her objections. And he’d been right, hadn’t he?

  Just as now he was right to give the gun not to his wife, but to his seventeen-year-old daughter, who was after all trained to use the goddamned things.…

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” father was telling daughter. “This is…just in case.”

  Anna swallowed; her dark eyes were huge and unblinking. “I’ve never shot at anything but a target, Daddy.…You know that.”

  With a nod, he said, “If someone tries to harm you or your mother, that’s your target. Do you understand?”

  She swallowed again, and nodded; the pistol was in her two slim hands, its grip in her right, silver tube cradled in her left.r />
  Michael turned to Pat. “I need you behind the wheel. If something happens in the house, you don’t think about it—you just get out of here.”

  “Michael, I’m waiting for you.…”

  “No. If you hear gunfire, you get out—now. Drive to the end of the block—Country Club Road? You can still see the house from there. Wait three minutes. If anyone comes out of the house but me, go. Go.”

  Mind whirling, shaking her head, Pat asked, “And what then?”

  “Head to Reno.”

  “Reno!”

  “Yes—the church parking lot at St. Theresa’s. Wait there for two hours. If I don’t show, check into a motel somewhere.”

  “Where somewhere?”

  From the backseat, Anna was saying, “Daddy, please, please, you’re scaring me.…”

  Michael said, “Good.…Pat, any motel anywhere, but drive at least two hundred miles first.”

  “How will I know…?”

  “Watch the papers, TV. If the news about me is…bad, then you take this briefcase and.…Remember, Pat, what we talked about, at the bank. Okay? And you two…you two’ll be fine.”

  Pat didn’t think she could cry, not as long as she was on this medication; but now she began to.

  He did not comfort her, exactly—he just put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “Time for that later. Right now, be strong. For yourself and for Anna.…Anna, you be strong, too, for you and your mother. We may have many moments like this—when I walk into that house, it’s probably going to be empty.”

  Pat got out a Kleenex from her purse and nodded and dried her eyes and her face.

  Anna wasn’t crying. She’d found resolve somewhere, and just nodded once, curtly.

  He smiled at them, one at a time—Pat first. “I love my girls.”

  “I love you, Michael,” Pat said quietly.

  “Daddy, I love you.”

  “See you in a minute.”

  And Michael, looking every bit the respectable resort manager in his gray suit and tie, got out of the station wagon, moved to the door that connected with the kitchen, and, just like always, stepped inside the Satariano home.