by Dick Lochte
If what Corrigan had told him was even a half-truth, Tiny had been partnered with Russian mobster Maxil Brox. The two clowns who’d taken Angela had said they were working for Brox. He should have realized that with the first accented syllables to spill out of Gulik’s gold-toothed mouth. And yet there was something about the man with Gulik . . . Reacting in surprise to Mace’s comment about them working for Jerry Monte, the guy on the bed had momentarily lost his Russian accent, had, in fact, substituted “wit”’ for ‘with’.
There was no rule saying Brox had to hire only his countrymen. But that didn’t explain why the guy had pretended to have a Russian accent. Was it possible that Gulik had been faking his accent, too, but was a better actor?
Mace was keeping it at a cop-free fifty-five miles per hour along the nearly vacant Pacific Coast Highway, letting the cool, damp morning air clear his head. He understood that, by continuing to focus his thoughts on Brox and his two bully-boys, he was avoiding the one thing that meant the most to him: Angela’s place in the puzzle. From the jump, he’d assumed she was not merely an innocent pawn in the plan to hijack the coin. Someone – the odds were on Tiny – had put her up to romancing Paulie to find out the shipping information.
But how deep was her involvement in everything that had happened since the theft? When Mace had walked in on her the night of Tiny’s death, she’d been in bed, druggy and naked. But the silk panties he’d picked up from the carpet had been still warm from her body. Why had she stripped down just before he arrived?
At the time, he’d wanted to believe the gunshots had awakened her from a drug dream long enough to remove her clothes in anticipation of the arrival of her lover, Tiny’s bodyguard, Carlos. Now he wondered if the whole thing hadn’t been a charade to distract him from following Tiny’s killer. Was it possible she had set up Tiny for the kill? If so, on whose orders? Brox?
His thoughts were interrupted by high beams filling his rear-view and lighting up the Mustang’s interior. The vehicle was overtaking him much too quickly. He felt very vulnerable sitting in the topless car. He swung into the right lane and slowed a little, braced for the worst.
The speeder, an old souped-up Bonneville, zoomed past, twin exhausts roaring like a dragon in heat. About one car-length behind was a Highway Patrol sedan, it’s red light flashing.
Just another LA car chase. But, because of the early hours and the light traffic, it would probably not even make the morning news. Still, it had spooked Mace enough that he stopped the Mustang at the side of the road and put up the top.
He was aware of how little protection a canvas cover offered. But it made him feel safer. He recognized this as a symptomatic trend. He was putting too much emphasis on feelings, too little on logic. That was courting disaster, with an emphasis on courting. He followed the PCH as it melded into the Santa Monica Freeway. With dawn drawing a bright white line along the horizon behind him, he forced himself to continue to rework the puzzle parts.
He knew Tiny, knew the fat man was greedy enough and arrogant enough to think he could slide a fast one past his Russian mobster partner, especially if Brox was a bit wary of setting foot on US soil. But Brox had evidently considered the coin worth the risk.
His presence helped to explain a thing or two. Sweets had claimed that ‘the fat man’ had sent him to kill Paulie. But, as Paulie noted, if that had been true, it was doubtful that his limo mate, Thomas, would have accepted a contract on Tiny. If the limo trio were working for Brox, however, Paulie’s murder would have made sense. The Russian could have seen him as a loose end that needed clipping. At the same time, Paulie’s murder would have served as a warning to Tiny to stay in line. And, if Brox was thinking about opening a California branch, as some of his competitors had done on the East Coast, a weakening of Montdrago’s operation would have made Paulie’s removal even more appealing.
But Paulie hadn’t been killed. And Tiny . . .
Mace was distracted by a jackass in a Toyota van behind him hitting his horn. He moved to the far right lane and let the guy zoom past. He noticed that the sky had gone from black to a charcoal gray and traffic was picking up.
He took the exit that carried him to the San Diego Freeway and even more traffic heading north.
Focus, he demanded of himself.
The attempt on Paulie’s life had failed. And Tiny, who was trying to cut Brox out of an incredibly rich payday, had to be dealt with. How to do that and still tie Montdrago and Company to the fat man’s murder?
He’d already considered the possibility that Thomas and his crew hadn’t picked him up by chance at Point Dume. Sweets had seen Mace parked by the side of the road and recognized him as the guy who’d snapped his wrist. They’d grabbed him with the idea of setting him up for Tiny’s death. If he hadn’t escaped, he might have been left dead or dying at the crime scene accompanied by ‘evidence’ that he’d been hired to kill Tiny Daniels. Paulie would have been in the frame, too, the man who’d brought Mace to LA for the hit. Even Montdrago might have been ensnared, as an accessory before and/or after the crime.
Brox was the puppeteer, pulling all the strings, Mace thought. But where did that leave Angela?
Was she on the Russian’s payroll? Had she been the one who’d knocked him out at the deserted motel where she’d insisted they stay? Everything he’d ever learned or experienced, behind bars or on the street, told him that the answer to both questions was ‘yes’. But if she was playing it straight with him . . . or if he’d misread the signs, or forgotten something crucial . . .
No! Fuck the what-ifs. You spent a few hours with her. In bed, for Christ’s sake, when everything seems possible. A week ago, you didn’t even know she existed. Use your brain. Stop thinking with your dick.
FORTY-ONE
He almost overshot the Mulholland exit, had to swing in front of an early morning commuter who was lucky enough to have good brakes, but unlucky enough to have been drinking from a coffee mug. The Mustang was a peppy little car and Mace pushed it past the Skirball Center and up along the drive. He was going to have more than enough time to retrieve the coin before Brox’s call, but he felt some need for speed.
He concentrated on the road, a good thing because it wound up beside a deep valley and some of its curves were extreme. He arrived at Paulie’s shortly before six, just as dawn was breaking, painting the ranch-style home and the area with a warm golden glow that seemed so out of context it almost made him laugh.
He parked the Mustang on the cement slab beside Paulie’s SL55 and Range Rover and a black Cadillac convertible with tinted windows.
The Caddy was locked up tight. There was a small pink rental sticker on the left hand corner of the windshield. The newborn sun hadn’t begun to burn off the dew that covered the three cars. The Caddy had been there a while. Maybe it belonged to a lady Paulie had met in the night, but it made Mace cautious enough to avoid the front door.
He circled the house, taking quick peeks through the windows. There wasn’t much of interest to see until he reached the glass doors that separated the living room from the red brick patio and the fake jungle pool and waterfall.
He’d been wondering why anybody would want a waterfall in their back yard. All that splashing. His current state of anxiety had been doing a good enough job of aggravating his bladder. The constant gurgling water was pushing the need to urinate past the need for caution.
Inside the living room, the too-modern chandelier was blazing.
He scanned the room – the darkened widescreen TV, the slightly rumpled carpet, the empty chairs and sofa. He had almost decided to move on when he saw the tip of a man’s shoe poking out from behind the corner of the sofa.
Nothing stirred in the room.
Mace moved to the far edge of the glass door, but he could see no more than the whole shoe and an inch or so of the man’s stocking. The foot was too large for it to be Paulie’s.
Mace continued his tour of the building’s exterior until he came to a door flanked by garbage b
ins. The door was closed but somebody had used a pry on it, leaving the frame splintered and the lock useless. He pushed the door open and several horseflies deserted the bins to try their luck inside the house. Mace followed them into a kitchen that smelled of lemons.
It was a smart, modern-looking room, complete with a skylight above a fancy food-prep island. There was pale wooden cabinetry, an empty metal sink, a shiny metallic space-age refrigerator. A stove/oven big enough to handle dinner for the UCLA football team.
The flat black floor tiles were made of a rubbery material that gave Mace’s step a little bounce. Everything looked store-display new. He wondered if Paulie had ever fixed a meal there.
He checked his watch. 5:52 a.m., over an hour before Brox’s promised phone call. He listened again for any stray sound. Just the buzzing of the flies, probably wishing they’d stayed with their friends.
He moved around the island and paused only briefly at a door leading to the rest of the house. A swinging door. He pushed it open soundlessly and carefully eased it back into position behind him. He followed the short hall to the entrance to the living room, where he stood, listening again.
The foot belonged to Drier. It and the rest of the man’s body lay sprawled on the carpet beside the sofa. His head rested against the bottom of the sofa, twisted at an ugly angle. There were bruises on his neck. His eyes were open, but they weren’t seeing much. The blood on his chin was not fresh.
Mace knew the man was dead, but he checked anyway. Cold corpse.
He turned from it and approached the giant TV screen. He ran his hand over the upper edge until he found the coin he’d stuck there, embedded in a wad of Wylie’s chewing gum. The gum had dried out and popped free cleanly.
He moved back to Drier. The flies had found him. He shooed them away long enough to check the dead man’s shoulder holster. It was empty but whoever had killed him had left his wallet, a small multi-bladed knife and a brass ring with an assortment of keys, including an electronic car starter with a Cadillac logo.
Mace pocketed the keys and used one of the knife’s blades to scrape the gum from the coin. He put the knife and coin in his pocket. Then he flipped open Drier’s wallet. He was surprised to find, hidden behind a French driver’s license, an ID card with an angry eagle. Drier and – he presumed – Corrigan weren’t ex-CIA. They were active agents.
He guessed he’d been wrong in assuming the men emerging from the van at the Florian had been private security.
But was CIA involvement a bad thing?
That depended on what the spooks were after.
He took the coin from his pocket and turned to the dead man whom the flies had again embraced. ‘Level with me, Drier. Is this coin a real wiggle worm, or just a shiny lure to hook my pal Paulie? Or is Brox the big fish you were after all along?’
He stepped back and tried to postpone his bathroom visit long enough to get a sense of what had happened in the room.
The cushions on the leather couch were askew, but it didn’t look as if there’d been a great battle. A beer bottle was on its side not far from the dead man, some of its contents forming a stain on the carpet. There was something under a table. He bent over slowly, more conscious than ever of his full bladder, and picked up the object.
He recognized the Samsung brand name, of course, but he didn’t know much more than that. He thought it was a cellular phone but it was considerably sleeker and wider than the one Gulik had left him.
Paulie’s Samsung. Probably performed all sorts of technological magic, he thought, placing it on the table.
He figured that Drier, and presumably Corrigan, had been paying Paulie a late-night visit, one friendly enough for them to park their vehicle out front. So, they’d been in the room, one of them drinking beer, when they’d been surprised by the sound of the back door being jimmied. Drier, the guard dog, would have gone to check it out. He’d been taken down, strangled and manhandled hard enough to break his neck.
Mace wondered if Gulik or his pal would be capable of that. His money was on Timmie. There was no lingering smell of cordite, ergo no gunfire, and it would take a lot to stop Drier’s trigger finger long enough for someone to disarm and throttle him.
So, it had been Brox’s hit squad – Timmie, Thomas and Sweets – that had crashed the party and departed with Paulie. And Corrigan? Had they taken him, too, or was his body somewhere else on the premises?
Not really his problem.
He checked his watch again. An hour before the call.
He used the guest bathroom to empty his bladder. He washed his face and then exchanged his torn trousers, filthy shirt and scuffed leather shoes for rumpled slacks, a black short-sleeve sport shirt and tennis shoes from his two-suiter. He placed the phone Gulik had left in his shirt pocket. Then he did the minimal packing necessary and closed and locked his single piece of luggage. Whichever way the day went, he wasn’t going to be returning to this address. Definitely not with a dead CIA agent in the living room.
Looking at himself in the full-body mirror on the back of the closet door, he realized he needed sleep and a shave. He needed weapons more.
Forty-nine minutes to go.
He went to Paulie’s bedroom, hoping to find a handgun. A rifle. Something. No luck.
Carrying his two-suiter, he returned to the living room and took a final scan of the room. He wasn’t proud about leaving a corpse in Paulie’s living room, but that wasn’t his problem either. If Paulie came out of this whole thing alive and kicking, taking care of Drier would be a small price for him to pay.
He left the house by the front door and walked quickly to the black Cadillac. Using Drier’s remote key, he popped the trunk and was about to place his bag in it when he saw an aluminum suitcase lying on its side.
He liked the looks of the metal case.
He found a non-electronic key on Drier’s ring that unlocked the lid. Inside the case were a Sig Sauer P226 handgun and a BXP, a South African sub-machine gun, nestled snugly in a foam bed.
He thought the BXP an interesting choice, as if Corrigan and Drier had been expecting to bump into an army of terrorists. Or, to fit the craze of the day, zombies or vampires. The weapon was even capable of launching a grenade, though Mace didn’t see either the launcher attachment or any grenades.
Too bad.
He pried the Sig Sauer from its nest, used the butt release to drop the magazine. He unlocked the slide and pulled it back, ejecting the round that had been in the chamber. The magazine had been at near full capacity, fourteen rounds. He snapped them back into place and fed the magazine into the gun, being careful to press the decocking lever.
He wondered if he should return to the living room to get the harness that Drier no longer needed. Forty minutes to go. When the call came, he wanted to be ready to roll. But he had time.
He ran back into the house with the Sig Sauer.
One look at the dead man’s holster told him that it was too small. Annoyed, he tucked the weapon behind his belt.
And noticed Paulie’s phone on the table.
Had Paulie been trying to call someone? Had he made the connection, said something to the other party that might help Mace?
He picked up the shiny gizmo and moved it around,
trying to figure out how it worked. Reminding himself of King Kong studying a tiny automobile, he began pressing buttons along its side. A screen lighted up. On it was a picture of Al Pacino as Scarface. The ‘Say hello to my little friend’ pose. Typical Paulie.
Along the bottom of the screen was a drawing of an old reel-to-reel recorder. Mace did the King Kong thing and pressed his index finger against the drawing. There was a click. For a second or two, nothing happened. Then the screen was taken up by a larger reel-to-reel image and ‘Voice 002’. At the bottom of the screen were two choices, a red button labeled ‘Record’ and a square filled with parallel lines labeled ‘List.’
He opted for ‘List.’
That brought him to a black screen with the line
‘Voice 001’ followed by the day’s date and time stamp. Just a few hours ago.
He pressed the ‘Voice 001’ line and the screen changed once again. This time a glowing line began moving across the bottom of the screen and Mace heard a tinny, hollow-sounding voice. ‘Don’t kill him, Timmie.’ Thomas’s voice.
Then a voice that had to be Paulie’s, begging Timmie not to kill him.
Thomas asked about the coin and a gruff voice, Corrigan’s, replied that, he, Mace, had it.
That prompted a brief discussion about Mace’s whereabouts and the probability of his being with Angela, which prompted Thomas to ask about the tracking device in her car.
Paulie refused to cooperate. There were screams. And then he told them what they wanted to know.
‘You gonna kill me, now?’ Paulie asked.
‘Not now,’ Thomas said. ‘Your eventual fate will be up to Mister Mason. Come, Timmie, and bring our friends. Time to depart.’
‘We going to the studio, Thomas?’ Timmie asked. ‘I hope so. I’m getting sleepy and that bed on stage three is soft as feathers.’
‘You’ll be on your feather bed soon enough,’ Thomas said.
‘And I don’t like this costume any more. Tomorrow I wanna be a cowboy again.’
‘What studio is he talking about?’ Paulie asked.
‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ Thomas replied.
That was followed by the sound of a door opening.
‘Hey!’ Paulie yelled. ‘You don’t have to shove. I can walk all by myself.’
The door slammed shut.
It would have been nice if they’d mentioned the name of the studio. But no matter. Southern California was studio central, but Mace thought he knew the one on Timmie’s simple mind. And if he was wrong? Well, nothing ventured . . .
