Menaced Assassin

by Joe Gores

“But it’s just between us girls.” Dante leaned forward across the table, focusing his energies, and Gideon suddenly understood the reputation of this seeming buffoon. His first impression had been right: here was a dangerous man. “I think your life is in danger, Mr. Abramson.”

  That broke the spell. Gideon said, “So this woman goes in to buy a fresh chicken. She lifts a wing and smells underneath it; then she lifts the other wing and smells. Then she spreads apart the chicken’s legs and sniffs again. She turns to the butcher and she says, ‘You meshugga, this chicken is no good.’ The butcher says to her, ‘Lady, can you pass a test like that?’”

  Dante didn’t crack a smile. Instead, he said, “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, you stink worse than the butcher’s chicken. I suppose Mr. Prince is going to have me killed, so I must scurry to you as my passport into witness relocation.”

  “I don’t know who wants you dead. I don’t know who wanted Spic Madrid or Otto Kreiger or Skeffington St. John dead, either. But I know that the man who killed them is here in Death Valley. Gounaris is gone and he’s not after me.”

  For a moment, Gideon was shaken. The man was very good!

  “Then why don’t you arrest him?”

  “I said I know he’s here, not who. He left me a note.”

  Dante laid Raptor’s note on the table. Gideon leaned forward, scanned it without touching it. No fingerprints.

  “‘I do not kill my own kind. Raptor.’” He looked up at Dante. “Raptor?”

  “It’s what he calls himself.”

  The waitress was at his elbow. “Mr. Abramson?” He turned. “You have a telephone call. Would you like me to bring-”

  “No, thank you.” It was probably some ploy the meshugge cop had set up, he wasn’t going to give the man the satisfaction of listening in. “I’ll take it at the desk.”

  “I’ll have some more coffee while I wait,” said Dante.

  Inside at the phone alcove, Gideon picked up without hesitation; nobody would call him on business at an open phone like this. The voice was thick, heavy, Bronx-accented.

  “This is Raptor, tell me one a ya fuckin’ hebe jokes.”

  Anger swelled Gideon’s chest. “ Hebe jokes?”

  “I gotta know I’m talkin’ to the right guy here. I never met you, but you’re famous for them terrible Jew jokes you tell.”

  This made sense. His fury dissipated. “Ah… okay. This Jewish mother is talking with her son’s teacher, she says, ‘My Gregory is very smart. If he’s a bad boy, slap the boy next to him-Gregory will get the idea.’”

  “Yeah, they’re right,” said the heavy voice. “Terrible. Now, ditch the fuckin’ cop.” This call was local. Somebody in the building-or down the road a half mile with binoculars and a car phone. A heavy chuckle. “I left him a note.” Then he said, “I did them all.” When Gid didn’t answer, he added impatiently, “All of them. Starting with the broad. You’re supposed to be next.”

  It was just so goddamned pat; another simpleminded gambit by the cop to either frighten him or compromise him in some way. But Stagnaro was not a simpleminded man. If he came up with a gambit, wouldn’t it be a convoluted one, instead of children’s games like the note, this phone call?

  Could both note and call be genuine? Was he talking with the man who had hit all the others? Gid couldn’t help it, he heard himself asking, “For whom are you supposed to do this?”

  “I tell you that, I got nothing to sell.”

  “Why would I want to buy it?”

  The caller gave a harsh chuckle. “To stay alive, pal. To stay alive.” Gideon felt a finger of dread down his spine.

  “Why would you want to sell it?”

  “I think he’s got me on the list after you.” When Gideon hesitated, the voice added, “Make up your fuckin’ mind, I gotta get somebody between me an’ the light. You don’t wanna play I gotta go to the fuckin’ cop.”

  “No, no. I’m in the market. It’s just that I… I need some protection, a place where I can feel safe.”

  “You think I don’t? I want it flat and I want it wide open. I know all about you, Abramson. You’d fuck your dead mother so you could steal the pennies off her eyes afterwards.”

  He was truly, blindingly angry for a moment. Retired or not, nobody talked that way to Gideon Abramson.

  “Men talk like that end up drinking a Drano cocktail.”

  “Twenty years ago, old man, maybe. Now you’re just pissing in the wind. So we’ll play this my way…”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  When Abramson returned to the table, he paused just long enough to sign the chit and add a tip and his room number.

  “Raptor?” ventured Dante. “Wanting a meet?”

  Gideon met his eyes guilelessly. In the old days, many a cutter in the garment district had been seduced by the limpid honesty in those eyes, always to his sorrow.

  He gestured to his chauffeur. “Gus.” To Dante, he said, “Admit it, Lieutenant. Raptor is a figment of your overactive Latin imagination. I have a twosome scheduled, that was my partner on the phone. He’s at the first tee and waiting.”

  Dante gave an elaborate shrug. “I warned you, that’s all I wanted to do.”

  Alone, Dante poured the last of the coffee, doctored it to taste. He should have thought of the possibility that Raptor was here to make a deal, not a hit. The old mobster had been shaken by the Raptor note, had been a little scared when he left the table. To come back confident. Only a sellout by Raptor could make a canny guy like Abramson go to a meet backed up only by muscle like Gus.

  It would have to be a mutually safe place. That meant no canyons to hide a sniper in the rocks above. No sand dunes-they would be an ambusher’s dream. Someplace flat. Just about anywhere in Death Valley. The golf course itself? No. Flat and isolated. Abramson would have to leave by car, go either north or south-there were no east-west roads from Furnace Creek, and Abramson’s Mercedes wasn’t all-terrain.

  Easy to tag along. There was traffic on the roads and Abramson didn’t know Dante’s car. He’d hang back, move in when the meet went down.

  Gus had some kind of cannon under his arm, but Gideon had told Dante the truth: he didn’t know much about guns. As a young, tough, brash enforcer on the Lower East Side streets of New York, his tool of choice had been a baseball bat.

  Later, when he’d moved up to middle management, he’d stopped getting blood on his clothes. As a capo, he’d had his soldiers adapt the IRA’s treatment for suspected informers: kneecapping by electric drill, not bullet. A drill was not a felony weapon, you couldn’t go down for carrying one in your car.

  But guns had their place, and Gus was damned good with his. So Gideon explained to Gus how he wanted it played while they drove to the meet. The place Raptor had chosen was exactly the sort of place Gideon himself would have chosen.

  “You still have the extra piece clipped under the dash?”

  Gus grinned. He had beautiful dentures; all his teeth had been knocked out during a garment district organizing beef.

  “Don’t leave home without it, Mr. Abramson.”

  “Good. I’m sure he’ll make you put your gun down on the blacktop and return to the car while we talk. As soon as I have his employer’s name, use your backup piece on him through the windshield. We can tell the garage at Furnace Creek something flew off a truck and hit us.”

  Twenty minutes later, Gus turned the heavy Mercedes sedan into the little blacktop rest area half a mile beyond Sand Dune Junction. It was deserted except for them, the plastic-stalled chemical toilet, and a litter basket. Gus got out leaving his door hang open.

  “Check the toilet and the litter basket,” said Gideon.

  Gus did, the basket first, then the empty toilet stall’s ceiling and comers, even down the hole, for explosives.

  “All clear, Mr. Abramson.”

  Gideon got out, leaving his door open also. Gus opened the rear doors and the trunk lid according to Raptor’s instructions. The first car since they stopped c
ame by from the same direction they had come, but the lone man behind the wheel didn’t even turn his head as he zipped by. The sky was achingly blue, unclouded. Far overhead, a pair of turkey vultures glided in silent circles, great wings spread to catch the updrafts, binocular eyes seeking the dead and dying.

  Behind the pancake of blacktop the creosote-studded base of a broad alluvial fan sloped gradually up, narrowing toward the base of the series of flat-topped hills and deeply eroded canyons at least a mile away. No worry of sniper fire from there.

  Gideon turned and looked the other way, across the road down toward the sand dunes. At least a thousand yards away. Otherwise, just the empty road. Desert flatness.

  A good choice. Raptor was nobody’s fool.

  Neither was Gideon Abramson. Once he knew who had hired Raptor for all the killing, he would know where he stood, whether in safety or in jeopardy. And then Raptor would be dead, a threat erased, that insult about his mother avenged.

  “Uh… whadda we do now, Mr. Abramson?”

  “We wait, Gus. Give him a good chance to look us over. He’s probably in that little parking area down by the dunes.”

  The parking area by the dunes, Dante thought as he drove right by Abramson’s Mercedes, off the road with all four doors and the trunk lid open. He didn’t even turn his head. Didn’t want Abramson spotting him because he was inquisitive. The dunes parking area was where Raptor would be, checking out the site.

  He turned down the little dirt road he was getting to know by heart. Raptor’s car would be among those parked there. He stopped, backed and filled to turn around a hundred yards from the highway, got out his glasses. Raptor would have to drive by him to get back to the turnout where Gideon waited.

  A quick check through his glasses. Gideon and the chauffeur were both well clear of the car. When Raptor drove up, he could just circle it to see nobody was hiding within.

  Now it was a waiting game.

  A half hour later Gid said, “We’ll give him fifteen more minutes, Gus.”

  This wasn’t just some exercise in control, was it? Would there be a call on his car phone, trying to send him off to some other remote area of the Valley, and then another, and another?

  Gid wasn’t going to play. When he left here, that was it.

  Unless it had been set up by Stagnaro to get him away from his room. Go through it, plant a bug? He chuckled at the idea. Gideon Abramson had never left anything incriminating, never said an incriminating word, in an unswept room in his life.

  “It’s a no-show, Gus. I’ll take a leak, then we’ll go.”

  Gid entered the hot little chemical toilet stall. Even out here in the desert it didn’t smell very good. And it was hot as hell. Instant sweat broke out on his forehead, upper lip, and the backs of his hands as he unzipped and directed a good healthy stream down the hole. No prostate trouble for Gideon Abramson. He was going to live forever.

  Maybe Raptor was booby-trapping his room while he was gone. Gus would check it out as Gid sipped ice tea on the terrace-

  A huge bumblebee bit him on the arm with shocking power but no pain. It had come right through the plastic wall, leaving a small neat drilled hole through which sunlight poked. The air was full of bees. The plastic rattled and quaked with their buzzings. Gideon’s dick dissolved in his hand into a gory splash of flesh. One bit him in the upper chest, knocking him down. His arm went down the hole. He started to scream. Struggled upright, shoved open the door, stumbled out…

  A high-powered round went through the tendons at the back of his neck, burst his face outward like a ripe melon. Gus was down on one knee, seeking a target, but there was none. Just bullets to keep him pinned down and clip the car, smash a headlight, skip off the pavement. Two more drilled Gideon’s body as he sprawled there on what was left of his face.

  But Gideon Abramson had produced eight grandchildren. Biologically, he died successful.

  Dante, through his glasses, saw the holes appearing in the walls of the chemical toilet, saw the thin plastic shudder and quake under the supersonic needle-sharp assaults. He was already ramming the accelerator to the floor by then, slewing up the dirt road toward the highway.

  It was over by the time he got there. Gus was behind the Mercedes. Dante already had his badge in his hand.

  “You got a phone in that thing?” he snapped, without waiting for an answer, added, “Try to raise the Stovepipe Wells Hotel-they’re closer than Furnace Creek-”

  “Took a round,” said Gus laconically of the car phone.

  Dante began slamming his fists down on the hood of the Mercedes and cursing. “Of all the goddam…”

  He ran down. He hadn’t even drawn his piece. Neither he nor Gus could even tell from which direction the fusillade had come. Just… somewhere up on the alluvial fan. Raptor obviously was a crack shot, he could lie up there in the creosote and cacti, three, four, even five hundred yards away, take a tripod or sandbag rest, set the elevation on his scope, wait for the right moment. If it didn’t come, just fade back into the desert without anyone ever knowing he’d been there. But it had come.

  Probably left his vehicle on the road that led up through Daylight Pass. Beatty was only twenty-five miles away, the Nevada border half that. Or he could have just driven se dately back to Furnace Creek to take a swim. Or gone hiking up some canyon. Nobody knew his car or his face.

  What they had all forgotten was that the seemingly table-smooth barren featureless desert was as seamed and pitted as an ancient Indian’s face, a maze of little washes and gulleys and dry runoffs that furnished impeccable cover. Hell, it’s why they had called ambushing “dry-gulching” in the Old West.

  Now it was really personal. For all the good that did.

  It wasn’t until the next morning that a Shoshone tracker, working from the angle of fire, found Raptor’s place of ambush 403 yards from the rest area. The assassin hadn’t made any mistakes. No spent brass, no rifle, on that flinty ground no footprints-just a few dried branches broken down to give a clearer field of fire and incidentally mark his position.

  Dante stayed overnight to give and sign his statement. Of course Gus had a license to carry-hell, he was a deputy sheriff in Palm Springs! Mr. Abramson had received threats, etc. Dante knew more about the killing than Gus did, but only gave the locals that he’d been passing by. Gus didn’t contradict him.

  Dante got back to San Francisco in the middle of the night after a day of hard driving. As expected, Raptor’s message was waiting on his phone machine.

  “This Jewish mother is talking with her son’s teacher, she says, ‘My Gregory is very smart. If he’s a bad boy, slap the boy next to him-Gregory will get the idea.’”

  Gideon Abramson’s voice. Raptor must have somehow gotten him to tell one of his pathetic goddam Jewish jokes over the phone, taped it for his message to Dante, making a joke of it.

  PART SIX

  End of the Cretaceous 65 m.y. ago

  The Way of the warrior is resolute acceptance of death.

  Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Murder is never a joke, I grant you-but what is all this darkside nonsense I spout when last we chat? I feel wonderful-Gideon Abramson, dead in such a comical way, no longer pollutes the world with his presence. Oh, what a sly fellow is Raptor!

  Meanwhile, I have become obsessed with the intricate-puzzle aspect of my assassinations. Not the fact of the deaths, but with their psychological impact. What are they thinking-the remaining people on the list? And what did those already erased think in that flashing instant when they went down?

  They can’t stop me, but do they know I am coming? Do they know why? Do they refuse to believe it if they do know? Surely they must know I am coming after somebody next time around, but do they know it is their appointment in Samarra that draws nigh?

  When I have executed boring old Will, when the list lies crumpled in the wastebasket of my mind… what then?

  I cannot worry about that now. Un
til then, I kill, and that is enough. And it is time to go kill again.

  But before I do, I must tell you about friend Gideon. He lives in Palm Springs, is a member of the Tallpalms Country Club. A membership card from a club in Scottsdale gets me a reciprocal guest membership at Tallpalms. The members’ bulletin board gets me the information that Gideon is a demon bridge player. In the card room I get my first look at him-he has never seen me, there is no danger of recognition.

  In the bar I hear he has somehow winkled ownership of a Mercedes agency away from a former club member, Charlie Hansen, that he drives a new S-600 Mercedes sedan that retails for $135,000, and that he has a penchant for terrible jokes no one dares find unfunny. Perhaps rumors of his former profession and current affiliations have filtered through the club like fecal matter through the baffles of a sewage treatment plant?

  On the putting green, I learn that he will be leaving midweek to play golf at Death Valley. A call to Furnace Creek as Mr. Abramson’s travel agent gets me his arrival date and that he will be in one of the two luxury suites at the inn.

  I drive over ahead of him, get a modest cabin in the old section of the ranch, and reacquaint myself with Death Valley’s possibilities for ambush. I have never planned an assassination there, but I know the Valley well and its splendid isolation suggests easier disposal of Gideon than on his home ground.

  Imagine my surprise when I discover that he is here only peripherally for golf, primarily for a meeting with his Mafia associates. One of them is Gounaris. I observe from afar; some of the newcomers can recognize me. I do not worry about missing: from his booking, Gideon will stay behind when they leave.

  I get a nasty shock, however, while wandering through the inn’s beguiling date plantation; I come almost face-to-face with Dante Stagnaro, skulking about in the guise of a birdwatcher.

  I save myself by turning away to contemplate one of the grove’s clear bubbling streams, my face shaded by a long-billed fishing cap. His sleeve brushes me as he passes. I have made him dangerous to me by goading him as a picador goads a bull, doing everything short of taking his ear as a trophy.