by Barry, Mike
He had picked up the trail at the trailer court and he had followed the guy into the track, laying back all the time, taking his chances, taking it slow. On a straight kill he might have been able to have taken the guy in the Cadillac out on the highway. Why not? That disguise and cover weren’t fooling anyone and if Wulff thought that they were it was only diminished alertness. The instructions filtered down from the top were very clear, shoot on sight, get him at any cost, but Billings had decided against it. If Calabrese wanted this man dead there would have to be far more guarantee than a bunch of vague promises passed down third-hand through a Los Angeles enforcer. No. He followed the man into the track. Take your time. Wait.
He didn’t know if he was still working for Calabrese or going freelance. It was hard to say; it depended upon conditions. Through forty-three years of life, some of it disreputable, most of it dull, Billings had cultivated one attitude: you went with the tide not against it. If it seemed the only way he could use his knowledge of the man’s whereabouts was to score him out then he would do it and settle for the low money, the hundred dollars and a bottle of Scotch that he would probably wind up with from the old man after the organization’s various levels had finished cutting in. On the other hand, the basic plan was to get out of this at the highest level possible; that meant freelancing if he could get away with it. Get away with the goods. But above all you remained flexible, you changed your outlook to suit the conditions, and you never panicked. Panic was deadly. There was always a way out if you could find it.
Billings used to shoot heroin but with great difficulty he had kicked it. He had decided ten years ago that horse didn’t pay; even at discount rates the habit was too expensive and it was undercutting his ambition. So he had gone into screaming fits in cold isolation for two weeks and walked out of the rooming house with the habit kicked but with the sullen knowledge that he would carry the desire for shit around him as long as he lived. All right. You could live with that, too; better wanting it all the time and living, being able to carry on, than having it and not wanting it and winding up OD’d out or in a sewer somewhere before your thirty-eighth birthday. But his years on horse had given Billings one overpowering insight which would not have been available to him otherwise: he knew all about the stuff. He could understand why a man or woman would get involved, would wind up dedicating the meaning of their whole lives simply to picking up the next shot or the next. It was powerful stuff. It beat all the hell out of ordinary living for the ordinary people and if he had had a choice he might have stayed on it. But no good. No good at all. He would have wound up dead and who would there be to funnel out the shit if all of the shitsellers were on the stuff themselves? That made simple sense: stick to hard liquor and sex, look for kicks anywhere else, but stay off that stuff. He had managed it for over nine years now, nine years, six months, two weeks, four days exactly and there had not been a morning of his life once in all of that time when he had not awakened, alone or with a woman in his bed, aching for one poke of the needle. So live with it.
He picked the big bastard up at the grandstand at Santa. He thought that he had lost him in the parking lot and that was a pretty panicky feeling, stumbling out of luck with the same haste with which he had stumbled in. But when he came frantically into the track convinced that he had lost him he had almost walked up against Wulff underneath the grandstand tote, the big man holding a hand in his pocket, looking nervously up at the tote every thirty seconds or so, which meant that he was waiting for a meet of some sort. Billings had measured the guy; he had looked rough all right but not quite as difficult as rumor had it. When you came right down to it he was just another man, another human being, and Billings knew all of the pressure points. Jugular, groin, nape of the neck, solar plexus, they all went down in the same way to the same trigger and they took bullets in the same way too, blood spreading out like flowers from the ruined flesh no matter who they were. That was the secret: all men were the same in the way that they died and Calabrese knew that secret too, this probably being the center of his power. Billings had looked him over, planning it, plotting it, deciding on the best approach. What he wanted to do, of course, was to find the shit and kill him straight off but since finding the location of the shit probably involved not killing the guy but instead dealing with him in some way, Billings calculated it from that angle. There had to be a level of approach. He would find it.
The guy was alert though. He was goddamned alert; well, maybe that was one of the advantages of having been an ex-cop, he sensed a tail, he sensed cover, and Billings became quite aware, early on, that the man had somehow become alert to the cover. Nothing to do then but to fade away; either that or kill him then and there with the silencer and better than an even chance of sneaking away through the crowds, but Billings had decided to wait on the silencer. He could do that anytime. If you were willing to pay the price, that was what the cliche was, any man could kill any other man anytime. You couldn’t stop killings, you could only punish them and by the punishment set a discouraging example. Maybe. The law had not had too much success with that concept for a couple of thousand years but you couldn’t blame people for poking ahead still trying.
Then the guy got on the window line, shuffled slowly forward, made a bet, went out into the crowd on the lawn. Billings had by that time faded far back, moved out of the guy’s range entirely, and he had almost lost him in the crowd, then he had picked him up, head bobbing, as he had gone toward the finish line. Billings closed in again. Here, possibly, was the place to do it. The audacious answer might be the right one. Shove a gun into the cat’s ribs and abduct him right on the spot, disarm him, get him to the parking lot or wherever the hell the goods were, and then dump him right there. It seemed reasonable and Billings who had never liked the racetrack was beginning to become jittery with the crowds, the heat, the light, the noise. Better get out of here. Maybe it would be better to kill the guy here and get away cleanly than to mess with him, he thought. It tempted him. But he reminded himself that this was only old Santa, pounding its madness into the bloodstream. Better not take this seriously. If he did something like that he would be panicking.
Then the situation had suddenly taken another turn. There was a black guy down at the finish line and this Wulff was talking to him. Suddenly the picture came clear to Billings, this was the meet that Wulff had been waiting for, that was no idle chatter, no black-white relations and understanding going on down there. The guy had a partner of some sort, the black guy must have been the one, and somehow looking at this and the way that the two of them were talking the situation became infinitely more dangerous to Billings; it was not just a question of doubling the antagonists but rather geometrically compounding the odds against him. The black guy was bringing something into the equation that had not been there before, the black guy was obviously some kind of a key to what Wulff was doing here and where he would go from now on because he could see that Wulff was looking for an exit hatch almost as soon as he had started talking to the black guy. He had accomplished what he had come here for. He wanted to get out as quickly as possible. It was the black man, probably more interested in horses than Wulff, who insisted that they stay, that was obvious. Billings felt a profound disgust looking at this but he also felt the beginnings of calm and understanding. They would be coming out soon now. They might stay one race, they might somehow stay even two, but they were going to come out of here shortly and there was only one exit from the grandstand into the parking lot, one into which all of the alleys and corridors of the grandstand staircases fed. He could cover it easily. He could wait. He faded out of there.
Waiting, one hand on his gun, leaning against a gate, covering everything carefully, the thought occurred to him for the second time that he was probably in too deep. This might be a job for Calabrese after all; Billings had his advantages and talents but the odds were enormous and if he blew this one it meant that not only Wulff and the partner but Calabrese himself was going to be after him. It meant tha
t even if he was successful he would just misdirect the heat meant for Wulff onto him. Better by far, maybe, to take a shot when he had a chance. They would be coming out of here soon. Okay. They would be coming out of here soon and with the silencer he would have a clear, clean shot and a good chance at escape before anyone even noticed that something was wrong. Who the hell looked at a couple of losers coming out of the track after the first or the second? At that time, the main flow was still the other way; hope money being toted in for the third, the fifth, the eighth, or ninth races. Take his shot and be done with it.
But he was in too deep, Billings thought. He had already made a decision and besides that, besides that he would admit it: the thrill of the hunt was upon him and beyond that the thrill of the ultimate hit. The two million dollars worth of Peruvian goods which this character had with him were authenticated, that much was clear. Calabrese would not call this level of attention into play unless it was true, because Calabrese was cheap. So there was two million dollars for the taking, and damned, Billings thought, if he would relinquish it so quickly. He had scuffled on the margins all his life while worse men had gone further. Now it was his turn. He kept his hand on the pistol and he waited.
After a while, as he had expected, the two men came out of one of the doorways, poked their way through the flowers and greenery of the track, and came onto the path facing him. Billings ducked behind a tree holding his pistol; he was completely concealed then behind a bench but the two men simply kept on walking, kept on talking. For all the difference that Billing’s presence made at this moment he might as well have not been there. Well it was obvious, Wulff had deduced inside the track that he was no longer being covered and now Billings was out of mind altogether. They were deeply involved in conversation; the black man was telling Wulff something. Good, better, best. Billings fell behind to a distance of two hundred yards and then he trailed them.
Coming into the parking lot the men split, the one heading off into the distance, the other, the black man, getting into a Ford sedan with a yellow U-haul behind it. The shit might be in there, Billings thought with vague excitement, it was quite possible, but he kept his eyes on Wulff who was trudging on, seeing him go at last into a beaten-up car of some sort parked all the way down, separated from the other cars by a gap of ten to twenty yards. No, Billings thought, no, the shit isn’t in the U-haul, that’s something else. The shit is in Wulff’s car and he parked it away from the others for that reason but he’s a goddamned fool because it just brings more attention to him. He watched as Wulff struggled with the trunk, opened it, looked inside, then closed it. Checking. The Ford with the U-haul was already backing out of the lot. Billings, hunched over behind a row of cars watched that one move, watched Wulff’s car move, and then as the two met somewhere in the exit path forming a file, he stood and sprinted to his own Volkswagon, not cautious at all now of being seen, simply desperate to reach his car, make the hunt. This was no time to worry about being seen. It would be insane to have gone this far, to have seen this much, only to lose them. He knew. Billings knew now. The shit was in the trunk of Wulff’s junker. And if he knew anything about this situation the U-haul was full of something else, rifles maybe. The black man was bringing in the ordnance. They were a beautiful team all right; oh boy, they were one magnificent team. Kill them both. Billings thought wildly, double your pleasure, grab some guns and shit. He picked them up on the highway outside of Santa.
Here, they had slowed, had tried to blend inconspicuously into traffic but that bright yellow U-haul stuck out like a needle from a junkie’s arm; Billings had no trouble at all picking them up then hanging back in traffic, letting the gap widen but never enough so that he lost direct sight, just hanging loose, digging in, and waiting to see what was happening. The trouble was that he was driving an unwieldy Volkswagen, not the car to take in the dense, alternately fast-and slow-moving traffic of the freeways. The four-speed transmission drove him crazy and it was impossible to set the car into a given speed range and track them. It was shifting up and down, cutting across lanes, changing speeds all of the time, and he had the panicky feeling twice that he was going to lose them as he got himself into a jam just as the U-haul broke free of it. It was stupid of him to have rented a car like this for the job. He should have gotten something larger with an automatic transmission but he had thought that a Volkswagen would be relatively inconspicuous. Live and learn. Everything was a process of learning, Billings thought. He was in trouble now, no question about it: he might have been able to take Wulff alone, risky business but despite the man’s reputation at least possible, but the black man, the black man was a new element altogether and a dangerous one. Billings was convinced that the U-haul was filled with ordnance. It was the only explanation that made sense. But what the hell did they plan to do with all of this stuff? Blow up LA? Make a frontal attack? They were in no position to do so … but Wulff was crazy. Everyone knew that; his track record was one of constant attack when he should have been mostly on the defensive.
Billings couldn’t figure it out, but then again, he thought, there was no reason why he should. Five miles out of Santa the traffic thinned, he was able to set the car down at fifty miles an hour, and track them easily. He would follow them where they were going. Eventually they would get there and then he would decide. Then he would decide what he was going to do. He did not want to get in touch with Calabrese for instructions—the fact that he and only he knew their whereabouts and had some inkling of what was going on was like a rare precious pearl in his grasp—but maybe he would have to contact the old bastard after all. Two million dollars was better than five hundred, sure … but life was better than death, too.
XI
Calabrese said into the phone, “I do not bargain. I do not negotiate. That is not my policy. Tell me where they are and the matter will be handled from there on in. If the information is correct you will get your share.”
The voice said, “I don’t think that’s good enough. Their whereabouts are worth so much to you; there ought to be something on the front end.”
“Front end?” Calabrese said. “You do not even identify yourself. I’m talking to a disembodied voice without a name or a location. What do you think that this is worth to me?” He began to tap on the desk restlessly. The man who was sitting in the room with him stood, looked at Calabrese with some nervousness, and began to pace. Calabrese focused his attention on the phone. “You must think I’m a fool,” Calabrese said.
“No,” the voice said, “I don’t think that you’re a fool. I respect you a great deal.”
“You have to take me for a fool,” Calabrese said. “You won’t identify yourself, you say you have definite information on their whereabouts, you ask for some tribute paid immediately, and yet I don’t even know who to send it to. What am I supposed to do? Send you a money order care of general delivery someplace?”
“No,” the voice said, “that wouldn’t work.” If Calabrese had intended any irony here the voice seemed to have decided to pass it over. “Obviously you can’t send a money order general delivery and Western Union doesn’t work anymore anyway. What I suggest is that you have someone meet me, carrying some money. I’ll identify myself, he’ll turn over the money, and then, afterwards, after I’ve gotten back to a safe place I’ll call you and tell you where they are. Originally I was going to try and take them myself but it’s too tough. It’s out of my class; I think that they’ve got enough weapons now to fuel the Seventh Army for a month. It’s a job for you.”
“And how do I know your information is trustworthy?” Calabrese said. “How do I know that you have the location of these people, that this is not a double-cross simply to extort money from me?” He tapped the desk again. The man in the room stopped pacing as if shot and looked at Calabrese with stricken eyes. “It’s ridiculous,” Calabrese said, “just ridiculous.”
“Listen,” the voice said, “I obviously know something because I know you want him and the other one and I know your num
ber. So I’ve got information, you can tell that.” The voice paused, seemed to swallow, then went on. “This is the only way it’s going to work, Calabrese,” it said, “the other way, a payoff after you hit them is too chancey. I won’t get a dime of it.”
“All right,” Calabrese said. That was the way you had to be if you were truly able to run a shop; you had to be able to follow your instincts, work with the moment, obey impulse. “All right. I won’t argue with you; you’re right. I want them very badly. Tell me where they are.”
“Bullshit, Calabrese. Cash on the line. I’m not giving you a thing over the phone.”
“What am I supposed to do? Stuff the fucking bills through the receiver?”
“No. I didn’t think that would do it. Let someone meet me out here; have him wear an identifying mark so that I’ll recognize him. Tell him to bring money. He pays, I tell, you move in.”
“I don’t like it,” Calabrese said, “I don’t like your plan of action at all.”
“You don’t have to like it. I didn’t ask for any opinions about it at all. The question is, will you do it?”
“I don’t know,” Calabrese said. He looked up at the pacing man, made a violent gesture with closed hand, and the man stopped pacing, looking at Calabrese wonderingly, then settled into a couch at the side of the room. “All right,” he said after a pause, “All right, you’re giving me no choice every step of the way. You cross me, I’ll kill you. I’ll find out who you are and you’re done for.”
“Fine. That’s a chance to take. I’ll write it down as a business risk.”
“Give me a description of yourself. Tell me where you want to meet.”
“No way. No way you’ll get a description. You have your man wear a blue suit with a black tie; let him be carrying a brown attache case in his left hand. We’ll meet in front of the Times-Mirror building.”
