A chipped shelf supported a television set circa 1960. Despite its antiquated appearance, Hal knew that Drop Dead showed great movies, since he stole the satellite signals of all the major cable companies.
Melanie took in their surroundings with a disapproving frown. “This isn’t exactly the Ritz.”
“It is designed to resemble a prison rec room,” Hal explained. “Drop Dead likes his guests to feel at home.”
“I feel a little too much at home,” she said. “The only things missing are sheets on the windows and sand on the floor.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Never mind.” With a sleepy stretch that highlighted the soft roundness of her upper torso, Melanie indicated the doors on either side. “Unless I’m mistaken, there are two bedrooms. You want left or right?”
“Right will be fine.”
Before he could offer to help her get situated or fetch toiletries from the gift shop, Melanie walked into the room on the left and closed the door.
Feeling bereft, Hal stood alone. He wished now that he had taken his guest some place with luxurious furnishings, room service and only one bedroom.
Grimly, he picked up his suitcase and turned right. Inside his room, Hal flipped on the light and then stared in dismay.
A computer had been set up on the nightstand. The floor and bed were littered with men’s clothing and printouts showing columns of numbers.
Worn jogging shoes lay far apart on the floor as if kicked off at random; indeed, he thought he detected scuff marks where they’d hit the wall. What manner of individual had made such a mess?
Still gripping his luggage, Hal retreated. “Melanie?” He headed for the other bedchamber.
Before he got there, she popped out, wearing a flimsy camisole that barely reached her thighs. “I’m going to turn in before dinner, okay? Don’t bother buying me a toothbrush. I’ll make do.”
Hal felt a fierce possessiveness toward this helpless and seminude female of whom he had taken custody. “You should not step out in public like that.”
“This isn’t public.” Melanie’s smile took on a bedroom allure. “Besides, it’s the only thing I’ve got to sleep in.”
“The other room is occupied.” Hal regarded her apologetically. “I do not suppose there are two beds in there, by any chance?”
“No.” She shrugged. “I’m tired and my head hurts. If you want to lie down too, I doubt I’ll even notice.”
She retreated, leaving Hal with a painful dilemma. As a gentleman, he could not take advantage of her. On the other hand, neither could he leave the suite, even if he wanted to.
A strange man who threw his clothes on the floor occupied the opposing room. Sooner or later, he would return.
When he did, he must not find Melanie alone and unguarded. And while Hal had slept on many a couch in his day, the one from Alcatraz was most assuredly as hard as a rock.
Gritting his teeth, he followed his companion’s wake into her room. To his astonishment, she already lay tucked beneath the covers, by all appearances sound asleep.
With a mutter of resignation and not a little sneaking disappointment, Hal began to unpack.
IN THE DREAM, Melanie ran through a minefield with ammunition whizzing around her. Adrenaline pumped through her veins, and, laughing, she caught one of the bullets in her teeth.
Nearby, she spotted a hut and headed toward it without knowing why. As she entered the yard, it rearranged itself into the tiny house in Empire Lake where she had grown up.
The walls leaned and the roof was little more than a tin sheet. There had been no body of water in Empire Lake since the Late Jurassic, and there was no empire, either. Only California dirt and scrubby desert growths and a patched-up shack with torn sheets for curtains and scrawny chickens that pecked at her bare feet
Melanie tried to turn back to the battlefield, but an unseen force pulled her through the scarred door.
Inside, she found her sister Wendy, a bandanna wrapped around her hair, mopping the floor and looking old before her time. On the back porch, she could hear her two brothers arguing over a card game.
Melanie was six years old. She wished her mother would come back, but Mommy was gone and Wendy was only twelve and Daddy wouldn’t be home from work until late.
Irritably, Wendy shoved the mop into Melanie’s hands and went to start dinner. “When you’re done mopping, set the table,” she said. “Then help me fold the laundry, and after that…”
Melanie couldn’t breathe. She had to get out or she would suffocate. But the door was latched too high to reach, and yellow dust sifted through the windows. A racking cough burst from her, followed by the hopeless sobs of a child who knows something is wrong but can’t identify it.
Then, miraculously, two arms closed around her and a grown-up shoulder appeared beneath her cheek, and someone whispered, “It’s all right,” over and over.
The dream had never turned out this way before. Melanie wasn’t sure she wanted to wake up.
“No one’s going to hurt you.” Daddy never talked like that. He was always too tired. “You had a bad dream.”
She curled against a man’s chest, a very sturdy chest in which she could hear the reassuring thump of a heartbeat. If she pretended to be asleep, maybe he would hold her like this for hours and hours.
Melanie inhaled deeply of gangster cologne. It smelled like a real, secure, “Happy Days”-perfect home.
Home? She had no home. Or rather, the world was her home.
After working her way through Cal State Fullerton as a waitress, she’d sent out résumés and gone to a few interviews. But the prospect of sitting at a computer churning out routine stories made her feel as if she was back in Empire Lake.
She’d begun freelancing for an alternative newspaper and, later, a couple of hip magazines. The money was barely even adequate, but her expenses were low and her energy boundless.
Soon Melanie was scoping out ever-riskier assignments. Wherever danger lurked, she could be found, a tape recorder in one hand and a sleeping bag strapped to her back.
She yawned. At least if she had to snuggle up to a guy, she told herself, it suited her reputation to have picked a hit man.
Still lazily unwilling to stir, she blinked her eyes open and glimpsed the room through Hal Smothers’s armpit. How odd. The door appeared to be gliding open.
Something crept in, low to the floor. A spiny metallic thing jerked along like a giant cockroach from another dimension.
A scream rose in Melanie’s throat but she caught it midway. She refused to panic. “Give me your gun,” she said raspily.
“Excuse me?” Hal’s baritone rippled through her body like cello music.
“I’m going to shoot that thing.”
He rolled over, letting cool air wash across Melanie’s skin. “Good Lord, what is that?”
“Shoot first and dissect later,” she grumbled, sitting up. Her head must have grown while she slept; it felt like a bowling ball. “I’m not sure I can aim. You do it.”
“I regret that I do not believe a bullet to be the ideal solution.” The bed creaked, and his large masculine figure paced across the floor toward the invader.
“Rrrrrah! Rrrrrah!” With a hollow noise like a dog yapping from two miles down a sewer system, the gizmo skittered backward.
“It is not alive,” Hal announced. “It is the object we viewed in the living room.”
“Then why is it barking?” Melanie wondered if she was still dreaming, after all. Then she wondered whether the dream came with aspirin. It would be nice if she could get rid of this headache before she woke up.
“I believe this to be a robotic approximation of a dog.” Hal bent to scrutinize the thing, which stopped backing up and began to whine.
“What’s it for?” Melanie eased from the bed. “By the way, do you have any painkillers?” To be on the safe side, she added, “Legal ones?”
“The doctor provided a bottle of pills, which you will find on the bedside table.” Ha
l stared at the mechanical dog. “It appears to be thinking over the situation.”
Melanie reached for the bottle and, without bothering to read the label, swallowed two of the pills, dry. “Then it’s one up on a real dog.”
She came around from the side to get a better view of the thing. No matter where she stood, it looked like something a child might make from an Erector set
The robot snarled, and Hal straightened quickly. “Well, if it is a pooch, I wonder what it eats. I hope the answer is not us.”
The dog advanced. Hal took a step back. With a blissful yowl, the thing hurled itself forward and clamped its metallic jaws around his leg.
With a string of curses in which the names of Eliot Ness and J. Edgar Hoover figured prominently, Hal shook his leg, then grasped the attacker and pried it loose. It let out a series of high-pitched yips.
“Hey! Whoever’s in there, don’t you dare hurt that—” A skinny young man wearing nothing but thick eyeglasses and a thin towel pelted into the room. At the sight of Hal holding the fake dog, the man stopped dead.
His jaw dropped. He nearly dropped the towel, too. His thin, freckled face paled to the color of cheap vanilla ice cream.
“Oh my gosh.” His voice rose to an unexpected soprano on the word my. “Just, uh, forget I said anything, okay? I mean, did it hurt you, Mr. Smothers? Gee, I’m really sorry.”
The Iceman’s eyes narrowed. His mouth tightened. His chest expanded. Before Melanie’s gaze, he changed from an easygoing companion to a scarred, ruthless killer contemplating his next victim.
In that moment, she realized that she really, really wanted him. Maintaining her journalistic objectivity was going to be the hardest thing she’d ever done.
MANY THINGS became clear when Hal got an eyeful of Chester Orion III in a bath towel.
First, that these towels must have come from Alcatraz, too.
Second, that neither the end of adolescence nor four years at engineering school had improved the appearance of Grampa Orion’s only grandson.
Third, that there was definitely something afoot at Paraiso de Los Falsarios. Chet Orion never came to this island alone.
Grampa must be involved in whatever was going on. Also Drop Dead and the Swamp Fox, who had warned Hal off, but, as he now realized, not because Rita’s cruise would be passing offshore.
Could there be any doubt that the other senior members of Grampa’s crime family—John “Bone Crusher” Nichols and Sammy “Cha Cha” Adams—were also here? That would account for the occupancies of all four single rooms.
With the probably coincidental visitation by the McAllisters, that spelled one full house. For Hal Smothers, there was no room at the inn, or so his false friends had believed.
He did not think that they guessed the awful truth about him, that he was not like them. Judging by the sheer panic in Chet’s eyes, they believed him to be too deadly, too bloodthirsty to trust with their new endeavor.
He had to find out what was going on. Hal’s reputation and his self-respect demanded that he take charge of the situation and make these double-crossers regretful.
“So,” he said, “you have all come here without me. An interesting situation, would you not say, young Master Orion?”
Even Chet’s freckles were squirming. “It’s not what you think, Mr. Iceman,” he said. “It’s not, like…I mean, it’s all legitimate.”
“Legitimate?” Hal arched one eyebrow. He knew how to do so in such a way as to convey skepticism that could rapidly accelerate into murderous rage.
“Really!” In the young man’s throat, a well-defined Adam’s apple made a couple of quick elevator trips. “You know I’ve been studying at MIT. Grampa’s been waiting all this time, hoping I’d come up with something good, and I have! I mean…”
Chet had said too much already, Hal could see. But then, the boy had never had a stomach for confrontations.
As a teenager, he had shown no aptitude for crime. But he was smart. So Grampa had financed a college education in the hope that Chet would find a way to turn the latest technology to criminal uses.
The Orion crime family believed that life was passing them by. They longed for the golden age of gangsters, before the international business conglomerates had taken over most of Las Vegas.
Hal’s greatest fear had been that this aging gang of cutthroats would actually develop a plan. It might, in turn, require him to participate in some criminal action.
He craved their admiration and respect He enjoyed their rough-edged camaraderie and even their overcooked turkeys and underspiced stuffing. But he did not wish to have to break the law to get it
Chet said he had come up with something. And, now that Hal thought about it, he had not heard Grampa mention Chet in a long time. If Grampa had been deliberately keeping quiet, this meant the kid really might be on to a good idea.
“So everyone has come here to meet with you privately, have they?” he muttered. “It is like old times, a gangster summit”
Scarcely able to breathe, Chet nodded.
“Without me,” snarled Hal.
The youth started to nod again, then shook his head. “No! Mr. Palmetto said you were otherwise occupied. I’m sure they wouldn’t—I mean—oh, gosh, Mr. Smothers, you aren’t going to ice me, are you?”
In truth, Hal’s nickname did not derive from his reputation for putting people on ice. He had gained it as a clumsy preteenager one very cold winter when he was playing an impromptu game of ice hockey on a frozen pond.
With a stumble, a fall, a slide and a crunch, Hal had crashed through the ice into the freezing water below. There he had thrashed and struggled while his companions had simply watched him and laughed.
They had failed to realize that Hal’s clumsiness derived from the fact that, in only a few months’ time, his beanpole body had bulked up from an influx of natural toughguy hormones. They, however, had taken notice of this when he had heaved himself up out of the ice and had pitched them, one by one, into the water.
He had made sure they all emerged safely, but no one had ever dared to laugh at him again. Now it seemed the members of the Orion crime family needed to learn the same lesson as his other faithless pals.
“Does this mean you are inviting me to the summit?” he said in a low voice.
“Uh, yeah. Sure!” Chet resumed breathing. “But, uh, what about her?” He indicated Melanie. “Who’s she?”
Hal felt a prick of dismay. He could hardly abandon his charge. Nor could he drag her, headachy and complaining, into a tense meeting with a pack of wolves.
“I’m his gun moll.” Melanie struck a pose with attitude to spare. “Wherever Hal goes, I go.”
Gratitude surged through him. She was definitely sharp. If the whaling industry didn’t need her to write press releases or disrupt charity cruises, they could always use her as a harpoon.
“Well, I guess that would be all right, then,” said Chet.
4
WHEN THE THREE of them marched into the hardboardpaneled conference room and the scarred, mottled faces of the gangsters swiveled toward them, Melanie saw a side of Hal that she hadn’t seen before.
He seemed, if such a thing were possible, to tower even higher. To grow like the Jolly Green Giant looming over the Happy Valley. Or, in this case, the not-so-happy valley.
Dismay radiated from the gargoyle features of their hulking host, Arthur “Drop Dead” Cimarosa. Beside him, the dapper, sixtyish Sammy “Cha Cha” Adams, owner of the Jolly Roger cruise ship, gave a fidgety smile and glanced nervously at the chairman of the board, Chester “Grampa” Orion.
From the head of a long table, Grandpa sat staring fixedly at his perspiring grandson. Melanie could have sworn those small eyes beneath heavy eyebrows didn’t blink, not once.
Of the other two men, she recognized one as Louie “the Swamp Fox” Palmetto. Save for his pointed teeth and skin as pitted as an outlying moon of Jupiter, he might have passed for an ordinary businessman.
The fif
th man she had never seen before. With his stiletto-thin mustache and thick, rippling arms and hands, he matched the description of John “Bone Crusher” Nichols, Grampa’s enforcer, who was said to have once killed a rival with a strenuous handshake. At the moment, he looked as if he would like very much to shake hands with Hal.
Melanie’s fingers itched to snatch a notepad from her purse. Such a pantheon of underworld lords hadn’t been seen since the days of Al Capone, and she wouldn’t wish to miss one little detail in the story that she was going to write. Or the book. Or the miniseries.
She was weighing the risk of extracting the pad when Hal said, “Melanie, take notes.”
“Notes?” growled Grampa.
“My secretary,” said Hal. Confidently. Sternly. Massively. Then, over his shoulder, he gave her a glance of pure teddy-bear hopefulness.
He had taken quite a risk; he did not know that she carried a pad, or whether she would choose to cooperate. But so boyishly mischievous was his expression, in that moment unseen by the other gangsters, that Melanie would have taken notes on her fingernails if necessary.
“Yes, sir,” she rapped out, and snatched her pad into position.
Grampa’s glower fell on his grandson, who had moved slightly ahead of Hal. “You did not advise us that you were bringing guests.”
“Uh…” Chet hugged his oversize portfolio like a shield.
Hal pulled out a chair, turned it around and planted one foot on it as he confronted Grampa. “It is not the fault of young Chester that I have taken you by surprise. It seems to me it is you, my old friends, who owe me an explanation for holding this summit in my absence.”
“Summit?” said Grampa.
“Absence?” inquired Cha Cha.
“Hey!” The Swamp Fox spread his hands in a gesture of appeasement. “It was our innocent belief that you were otherwise occupied.”
“On some business of Rita’s,” added Bone Crusher. “You always was a pushover for broads.”
“Anyway, who cares?” growled Drop Dead. “We don’t owe you nothing.”
Melanie’s ears pricked at the mention of Rita. So her surmise was true; Hal did have some involvement in the woman’s scheme.
Kidnapped / I Got You Babe Page 4
