Macklin said nothing. Davis wasn’t calm. His voice wobbled and the hand holding the receiver was shaking. His fear saved his life, or at least prolonged it. Macklin didn’t trust coolness under the gun. What he didn’t trust, he got rid of and saved his regrets for later.
“I dialed nine-one-one when that business outside started, then hung up. They’ll trace the call, and when the police realize where it came from, they’ll be through that door in two minutes. You might say they have a presence in the neighborhood.” He tried to smile, but the muscles in his face wouldn’t cooperate. “I can call them back and convince them it was a mistake. I used to be a con artist.”
“I know.”
“Yeah, I guess you would. You probably know some things about me I forgot. Well, I don’t know anything about you. Not your name, or who sent you, but my guess is you’ve done this before, a lot. After that Schevchenko guy, they’d trade up, and if you don’t mind my saying so, you’re a little old for the work. That tells me you’re good. Otherwise you’d be dead, right?” He cleared his throat, as if that was the reason he’d paused and not because he expected agreement. “I’ve got a pretty good idea who didn’t send you. If I’m right, they won’t let you leave San Antonio. Not alive.”
Macklin made no response. He regretted making the one he had. You couldn’t be human at work. It didn’t make that much difference to the mark, he was dead, and that was how you thought of him from the time you were approached. When you reacted to language, when you acknowledged you were an intelligent thing instead of something that could not be stopped once it had started, you admitted to yourself you weren’t a machine. You second-guessed yourself. You made mistakes.
“A man named Spanish Rivera,” Davis said, “whose name isn’t Rivera and who isn’t Spanish, puts his stamp on whatever goes down in this part of Texas that doesn’t get into the tourist pamphlets. If it’s for money, he takes his cut off the top, and if it’s something else, he makes sure it’s worth risking a setup it took him forty years to—well, set up. If I’m right about what I’m going to say, I’m going to ask you to put down the gun. I’ll call off the cops and we’ll talk.”
He’d decided to shoot him as soon as he stopped talking, if he ever stopped talking. But the shouting outside had quit. The Corvette owner had surrendered, and Macklin’s window of opportunity had shut. The shot would be heard. Whatever further mistakes he made that night, they would all stem from the one he’d made when he spoke to a dead man. He’d been away too long.
Davis took his silence for encouragement. He didn’t know how close he’d come.
“I kept going over and over this at first, wondering whose toes I stepped on. I couldn’t think of anyone, because there wasn’t anyone. Not bad enough anyway to kill me and wake up the cops and probably the feds to the fact the Alamo’s not the only thing making money in this town. Well, they know, but for a long time they haven’t had any reason to do anything about it. The graft gets paid, the bodies don’t fuck up the traffic flow. That’s why I was picked. I wasn’t rocking the boat, and someone wanted it rocking, big time.
“Rivera didn’t order the hit on me,” he said. “He’s the target. He’s got the most to lose from a contract killing in this zip code. This is coming from out of town. I’m guessing way out, because the state’s not big enough for two Riveras, like they say in the cowboy pictures. But not so far out that Rivera Number Two doesn’t know how much money there is to be made here. One of the new breed, without honor or pretense of it. As if there was ever anything more to it than talk. This guy won’t even bother with that. A hyena. Am I close?”
The bookie was babbling. The sense he made impressed Macklin more that way than if he’d laid it out straight, the way a good con artist would if he were selling wooden lightning rods or gasoline pills, making plenty of eye contact. This one kept looking at the gun. His sweater was too thin to conceal one of his own, even if he’d managed to score another after the police had taken away the first one, like a stern parent confiscating a child’s water pistol. More than anything else, it was that image that moved Macklin to lay his .38 on an end table.
Davis took a deep breath and let it out. His hand shook as he called back 911.
EIGHTEEN
The clerk at the American counter ran Laurie’s credit card and handed her a ticket and boarding passes for the 4:46 to Dayton, with a change in Denver and a stopover in Chicago. Laurie told the woman she wasn’t checking anything through and when asked if her luggage had ever been out of her sight she said no. The clerk didn’t seem to notice she wasn’t carrying any luggage.
She felt more in control on her feet than she would have riding in one of the electric carts, so she walked the mile and a half to her gate. She passed through security without tripping the alarm and found a seat for the ninety-minute wait. She’d stopped at a newsstand to browse through magazines, but she couldn’t concentrate on the articles, so she bought nothing. Once, glancing up from People, she’d seen a man in a Stetson hat approaching down the terminal and her heart had jumped. But he was years older than Abilene, with gray handlebars and a paunch, carrying a scuffed leather suitbag from a strap over one shoulder. She’d felt a rush of relief.
Now, she decided the diversity of the traffic at LAX was entertainment enough. Families in Mickey Mouse ears carrying stuffed Goofy dolls bought or won at Disneyland, hippified couples in retro tie-dyed Tshirts and bell-bottoms groping each other as if they were alone, red-eyed refugees from the gaming tables in Las Vegas, timid old men in garish caps being barked at by their wives, unsupervised children, Mexicans and Asians traveling in groups, and teenage boys with backward caps on their close-shorn heads and the crotches of their pants flapping between their knees tramped past in both directions or peeled off to claim whole sections of seating at the gate with their piles and piles of carry-ons. Laurie heard more foreign languages than she’d thought existed. Even the announcements over the P.A. system were broadcast in English and Spanish. She felt that the life she’d lived until now was embarrassingly provincial.
“‘Wretched refuse,’ that’s what it says on the Statue of Liberty,” Abilene’s voice said, close by. “Bet you never thought they’d wash this far west.”
He’d slid noiselessly into the chair next to hers. The cowboy hat was absent. His long-skulled head with its band of untanned skin two inches above the eyebrows struck her as indecently naked, the thinning, wheat-colored widow’s peak almost pubic. The skeejawed grin was in place.
She gripped the arms of her chair, but he made no move to hold her down.
“That’s the thing about airports,” he said in his lazy drawl. “No place to run. Can’t catch your plane from the ladies’ room.”
She forced her heart rate to slow down. By degrees, as hundreds of pairs of feet whispered down the terminal and the clerk at the desk went on processing the passengers lined up to check in, she realized she was as much in control of the situation as he. They were in a secure area. He couldn’t have gotten his wicked knife past the metal detector, and he couldn’t threaten her with his fists in public. A big U.S. airport in the age of terrorist paranoia was the safest place on the planet.
“How did you find me?” She spoke calmly.
“You didn’t go back to the hotel. I checked. You don’t know anybody in L.A. Back home I never did shoot a pheasant on the fly when I knew where it was fixing to roost.”
“You didn’t know which flight.”
“I figured Michigan or Ohio. One just left for Detroit. You weren’t on it, and there ain’t another to either place for two more hours. You should of picked someplace else, but most folks don’t think when they’re scared. They run home.”
A distorted voice came on over the P.A. system announcing boarding of a flight to San Francisco. She used it as an excuse to be silent.
“Ohio’s nippy this time of year,” he said when it finished. “I bet you ain’t even been to the beach out here. What you going to tell folks when they ask where’s y
our tan?”
“I’m not leaving with you.”
“Sure you are.”
The grin was gone, discarded as easily as his hat, and Laurie realized how closely his face resembled a skull. The bony sockets of his eyes stood out under the skin and his face fell off sharply below the cheekbones, forming the keyhole shape found on poison labels and black leather jackets.
An airline employee, a flight crew member from the visored cap he wore with his uniform, stood nearby, waiting but not in line. He was holding a square fabric-covered case with the American Airlines double-A logo on the side. He had thick curly hair and a baby fat face and looked too young to be a pilot. Laurie raised her voice in his direction. “Sir?”
As the young man’s head turned, Abilene leaned forward, and she thought he was getting up to leave. He pulled up the right leg of his jeans as if to adjust it, straightened, and turned his body into hers, sliding a hand under the arm of her chair. Something pricked her ribs.
Her breath caught. The point of the knife had passed through the fabric of her blouse as if it weren’t there.
“Stuck it down in my boot.” Abilene was whispering. “It set off the alarm, but a hard-on will do that. The lady with the wand stopped looking when she got to the metal cap on the toe. Bet you’re glad I ain’t an A-rab.”
“Yes, miss?” The man in uniform smiled, appreciating her looks.
She shook her head with a tight smile. Any more motion than that and the blade would break her skin. He gave her a puzzled look and withdrew into his earlier boredom.
“Let’s go,” Abilene said.
She looked across at the family of well-fed Mexicans seated facing them, forted inside a half-circle of canvas bags. They were staring into the middle distance.
“You won’t try anything here,” Laurie said.
“Tell that to Jack Ruby.”
“The place is crawling with security.”
“They’re to keep people out, not in.” The point prodded her. A drop of moisture crawled down her side into the waistband of her slacks. It might have been sweat.
They stood up together. He withdrew the knife to clear the arm of the chair, then pressed it into the same spot. The move was so quick she hadn’t time even to think about breaking away. The Mexicans looked at them, four broad brown faces moving up with them as they rose. Laurie felt a flash of hope. Then she realized their curiosity had only to do with the fact that she and Abilene were the only people there without luggage.
The journey to the ticket counters and the exit beyond seemed twice as long as the walk to the gate. They rode up escalators and walked past flower stands and souvenir kiosks, huddled close like lovers. Abilene was whistling softly between his teeth, some tune he had probably picked up from a country-music video, rendered shapeless by his tin ear. Twice, passing guards in uniform, big black capable-looking men with revolvers in flap holsters, she took in her breath to cry out, but the knife moved slightly and she exhaled without words. She was frightened more by sharp objects than guns. Could Abilene know she’d spent an hour in an emergency room with a gash in her scalp from a fall when she was little? He seemed to know everything else. She’d heard these people had dossiers on their victims: medical charts, family histories, friends and associations. She felt naked, as if in a nightmare in which everyone else was clothed.
A bunch of senior citizens—a tour group, probably, from their uniform flowered shirts and Mother Hubbards—clogged the security checkpoint, struggling to hoist their bags off the conveyor and setting off the metal detector with their pacemakers and gobs of jewelry and steel pins in their hips. A big-haired, withered apple of a woman wearing black wraparound cataract glasses stood to one side with arms spread while a short woman in uniform passed a handheld wand over her from head to toe, the device emitting beeps at almost regular intervals. The crowd-babble was excited and louder than usual to compensate for hearing deficiencies. When Laurie hesitated, looking for a way through, Abilene pressed in tight. The pressure of the knife was a constancy in her side.
She pushed back suddenly. The knife broke the skin and she felt the bleeding, but she gritted her teeth to keep from flinching away and followed through with all her weight, as she had when she broke out of the toilet stall at the restaurant. Abilene stumbled against the woman passenger and the security guard. Laurie ran through the arch of the metal detector from the wrong side, twisting sideways to avoid a collision with a white-haired man in trifocals who was preparing to come through opposite. He gasped something in Yiddish.
She picked up her pace, shoving a path through aging flesh and loudly printed fabric with both hands. Abilene shouted something in his nasal twang, the metal detector bonged. He’d followed her through the arch, still holding the knife.
“Halt! Security!”
She didn’t know if the cry was directed at her or her pursuer. She was clear of the crowd now, running up the wide terminal. The P.A. blared something in a tone not usually employed to announce arrivals and departures, but her own heavy breathing and the slugging of her heart in her ears drowned out the words.
She didn’t slow down until she reached the ticketing area. There she fell into a brisk stride, and without looking right or left passed through the automatic doors onto the sidewalk, where she joined the line waiting for cabs. Her heart hesitated a beat when a man in a police officer’s uniform trotted toward her, but he went on past and entered the building. Shuffling forward in line, she kept her left arm pressed to her side to cover the stain of blood on her shirt.
NINETEEN
“I’m not sure as to the host’s responsibility in this situation,” Johns Davis said. “If you were any other visitor, I’d offer you a drink.”
“I’m not thirsty.”
Davis nodded, as if he’d expected that answer. Actually, he couldn’t guess what the man in his living room would say or do next. He was calm in a way that invited Davis to supply the unease the setup demanded. There was nothing particularly fierce about the man. His tone was almost polite, and when Davis spoke, he seemed really to be listening, which was more than could be said even about the people he considered his friends. He’d been conditioned—by movies and popular fiction, he admitted—to expect flamboyance, or at least some show of understanding on the part of the man that he was something to be frightened of. This ordinary-looking fellow, with thinning temples and the tired aspect of someone who’d been too long in middle management, beyond hope of advancement and years to go until his pension, was more the stuff of Arthur Miller than Quentin Tarantino. Yet Davis knew, with the insight of a man who had felt a brush from the black wing, that this was death in its everyday clothes.
“I’m not thirsty either, but I need a drink. You can come out with me to the kitchen, if you think I might come back with something else.”
“Or not come back at all.”
Everything the man said was a conversational dead end.
Outside, a siren swung into the block. Davis jumped. His visitor didn’t. The surveillance team had called for a unit to take away the Corvette owner. The car alarm had been going for so long it sounded like silence.
“Can I get that drink?” Davis asked.
“Not just yet.”
Suddenly the car alarm stopped. Real silence boxed his ears. It was as if those three words had broken the mood of the whole block. Davis nodded, like his concurrence mattered.
“We may be interrupted,” he said. “They’ll want to know if anything went on here while they were busy outside. Maybe they’ll just call, but they might send someone to the door. You can stand in the kitchen with the light off and keep the gun on me. Or do they just do that in the movies?”
“Sometimes the movies get it right.”
He had a way of responding to questions without actually answering them.
The telephone rang, and Davis almost dropped the cordless receiver. He’d forgotten he was holding it. He looked at the man, who gave him nothing back. He found the TALK button with his th
umb, hesitated, then pressed it.
“Yes?” He watched the man. The revolver the man had brought remained where he’d put it on the end table near him.
“Mr. Davis?”
He thought he recognized the voice, although he couldn’t place it. It was polite, pleasantly deep, with the barely perceptible Southeastern twang he associated with black men whose families had lived in the North for several generations.
He said “Yes” again.
“This is Lieutenant Childs. I just thought I’d call and see if everything’s all right.”
He almost said “Yes” a third time, then thought his visitor might wonder what questions the caller was asking. “Everything’s fine, Lieutenant. We had a little excitement outside just now.”
“I heard about it,” Childs said, and at that moment Davis knew he was calling from inside the panel truck in front of the house. “Just a domestic disturbance. Well, I thought I’d check. After the Alamo, you’re our chief preservation project just now. Ha-ha.”
“Ha-ha. Thank you, Lieutenant. You make me feel safe.” He disconnected. “Prick. He’s using me to flush someone out.”
“It worked. Here I am.” It sounded almost friendly.
“The age of electronic miracles, and they can’t get nine-one-one to coordinate with the Criminal Investigation Division. He doesn’t even know I called.”
“He will.”
“At the end of his shift.” Davis knew he was contradicting himself, but he didn’t want to panic the man into action. He changed the subject. “I’d really like to sit down.”
“It’s your house.”
“Not alone. It makes me nervous. That is, more nervous than I already am. Can we both just sit?”
The man seemed to think about it. Then he walked around the end of the sofa and sat next to the armrest.
Physically, nothing changed. The gun was still inside reach. But Davis felt he’d won a stay of execution. If the dynamic changed again he thought that if he paid attention he could at least present a moving target. Any motion of the man’s right arm would be the signal.
Something Borrowed, Something Black Page 13
