Mostly Murder: A Short Story Collection

Raptor

At eleven p.m., Spiro Gounaris, a hawk-nosed man carrying fifty years and forty extra pounds, locked the door of the second-hand store which fronted his treasury book. He crossed the sidewalk to the phonebooth, as he had done for six nights in a row. As he dropped his dime and tapped out the Federal Prosecutor Task Force number, Raptor came bopping along in shades and a floppy beret — on my way home from an early gig, man.

Unlike the previous nights, Raptor saw no other pedestrians on the street. Gounaris was saying, “Seven-thousand two-hundred and eighty” into the phone when Raptor pressed the muzzle of the short-barreled .357 Magnum against the back of his head and pulled the trigger...

At three minutes to midnight, Raptor walked into a gas station three miles away and laid five twenties with a note clipped to them on top of the pump the night man was locking up.

“The pay phone,” said Raptor.

The phone was saying, “Hello, this is Dunstan Trevis speaking,” as the night man, a kid in his twenties, came up tentatively. Raptor handed him the receiver to hear the rest of the message. At the tone, the kid cleared his throat and read from the note, “Uh... this is Raptor. Uh... I gave the gentleman the message. It... uh... really blew his mind.”

Dunstan Trevis was a compact man in his thirties, a shade over five-ten and under 170, with tired dispassionate eyes behind bookish hornrims in a cool, uninvolved face. He switched off the phone machine’s playback mechanism and walked through the apartment to his bedroom.

How now! A rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead!

He drew a mental line through Gounaris, S. on the list he carried in his head. Five dead rats in the two-plus years he’d been controller for Prince Industries. He felt as he always did when there was a message from Raptor on the machine: ready to throw up, yet determined to go on. No one on the Board knew it, but he’d set Gounaris up so that going to the Feds must have seemed the only way out. And so the Board had ordered the hit.

Trevis undressed and got into bed. Only five years before he’d been a computer software designer for United Electrodata, with a brilliant future, a growing portfolio, some very nice stock options, and a wedding date set.

Then Teresa had died.

Out of that terrible time had come his resolve. He started drinking, methodically, destructively. The folio dwindled, the options lapsed, the future disappeared. Once he was far enough down, he dried out, found a bookkeeping job with the Dahlgren subsidiary of Prince Industries, and in two months was head bookkeeper. He was made controller of Prince Industries when they realized he had a remarkable ability to invent new and startling ways to launder illicit cash.

Now, Trevis slept.

the dum dum smashed through her skull.

He came up out of it screaming. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he wiped the sweat from his face with a corner of the sheet. Always the same, it never varied — except they were more frequent.

He courted sleep, as usual, with Miyamotu Musashi’s Book of Five Rings, the great Seventeenth Century guide for samurai intent on defeating their enemies in battle. But sleep continued to elude him. It wasn’t fear of death — too much of him had died with Teresa for that. It was that he had to change the equation. When you cannot see the enemy’s spirit, said Musashi, make a feint attack to discover his resources. He will show his long sword, thinking he sees your spirit.

Risk everything in a feint, in hopes of uncovering whoever had been responsible for Teresa’s death.

But meanwhile, sleep. One of his functions was to act as the Board’s buffer man. Through him people who didn’t want to meet while conducting business didn’t have to. Hence, he was the buffer between Raptor and the Board. And between the Board and Letter-man, their tame cop who had fingered Gounaris to the Board. Tomorrow he had to meet Letterman, and Letterman would be howling.

Lieutenant Jack Letterman of the city’s Organized Crime Squad had a hard, lined face and doleful blue eyes tipped down at the outer corners like a bloodhound's. His suit was not quite expensive enough to raise questions about his income. He entered one of Vince O’Neill’s porn parlors past the garish yellow and red sign: HOT STUFF — 25¢ ARCADE — FANTASY IN FLESH! Covering the walls were intimate photos of women wearing nothing but expressions seldom seen in full daylight. In a raised change-cage, a stout middle-aged woman reading that morning’s Wall Street Journal said, “The-hottest-show-in-town-have-a-good-time” without looking up from her stock quotations.

Letterman entered the labyrinth of coin machines where mobile masks of light flickered over the features of the male viewers peering into the eyepieces. Perfumed disinfectant gave it a county-jail smell. In the rear was Trevis, showing no slightest interest in what he was seeing. Letterman fed three quarters, good for three minutes, into the machine next to his.

“I didn’t expect a hit on Gounaris,” he complained. “The boys down at the federal building are really burned. There’s going to be too much heat for me to pass anything on for a while. I’ve got a pension to protect.”

Trevis shrugged almost sullenly, handed him a newspaper with his blood money folded inside, and walked out.

Milton Prince was in his mid-fifties, dynamic, corrupt, kept fit by massages, saunas, and heroic avoidance of the pasta he loved. His name had once carried extra syllables — rhymes with spaghetti had been the schoolyard taunt of the predominantly Irish kids at St. Paddy’s across the river. The syllables had been dropped just about the time some of those erstwhile youthful taunters had started walking funny, or seen their businesses torched, or watched with a gun at their heads while three or four strangers entertained their wives.

“How was the weekend?” he asked Trevis.

Trevis removed his glasses to ponder the question, as he always did. He finally admitted, “I tried the intermediate run for the first time, Mr. Prince.”

Prince chuckled. “You? Skiing! I just can’t—”

But the time for small talk was past. The glasses had gone back on. Trevis, sorting through his paper-stuffed briefcase, said, “You’ll find Raptor’s payment on the Gounaris matter under Write-off Against Depreciation on page six of the printout.” He paused. “Our friend downtown tells me the Feds were very upset to lose their star informant before they could get him in front of the grand jury.”

Prince’s eyes sharpened. “How upset is very?”

“Letterman is trying to back away from us.”

“And if the Feds find out he’s on the pad?”

“He’ll get into bed with them.” Then, because Letterman, while venal, was not on his mental list, Trevis added, “I recommend no action by the Board at this time, Mr. Prince. It would remove the immediate problem but create a long-term one. The police are very stubborn when one of their own is taken.”

Not that Trevis expected Prince to follow his recommendation. Prince would do exactly as he wished. Prince was answerable only to the Board, locally.

“Uh... this is Raptor,” said the cassette player on Prince’s desk. “Uh... I gave the gentleman the message. It... uh... really blew his mind.”

“I got it off Trevis’s answering machine yesterday,” said Eddie Ucelli. He was a skull-crusher who had worked his way up from union strongarm to made-man to a member of the Board.

“My friend at the police lab voice-printed it,” said Otto Kreiger, the firm’s corporate counsel and also on the Board. “Another different voice — just like all the others.”

“Raptor doesn’t make mistakes,” said Prince in admiration. “He doesn’t give us a handle on him.”

Nearly three years earlier, the Board had determined to put out a contract on Christiansen, who was getting too ambitious, but before they could a man named Raptor hit him — for free. A sample of his work. Since then, he had carried out four other impeccable internal eliminations for the Board, but they knew absolutely nothing about him. From the first he had insisted on a buffer man and a series of mail cut-outs beyond the buffer. The Board had chosen Trevis as buffer man, and it seemed a safe arrangement. But they still kept trying to find out about Raptor, just for insurance.

Ucelli tossed a newspaper clipping on the desk. “I thought I’d snoop Trevis’s desk while I was there, and I found this. Maybe it don’t mean nothing, it’s five or six years old, but she used to work for the Dahlgren subsidiary—”

A woman named Teresa Bianca had been shot and killed instantly in a downtown bar by an unknown assailant who escaped into the Christmas-shopper crowds. One of the dozen listed witnesses was a Dunstan Trevis.

“I remember the case,” said Kreiger. “A very professional-seeming hit. But the Board never ordered—”

Prince was nodding. “Not one of ours.” He shrugged and crumpled up the clipping, tossing it into the wastebasket.

But after the other two had gone, Prince recovered it and smoothed it out on his desk blotter. His shirt was suddenly stuck to his back. Teresa Bianca, Whittington’s secretary and a snoopy little broad. No, the Board hadn’t ordered the hit on her. It hadn’t ordered the hit on Whittington either, but he’d been lucky because everyone bought that as an accident, pure and simple.

Put Driscoll on Trevis, that was it. Driscoll was a small-time private eye owned by Prince. Nothing would get back to the Board from Driscoll, but Driscoll could find out if there was anything to worry about with Trevis. Meanwhile, just for his own peace of mind, he wanted to find a way around Trevis to Raptor, direct, without anyone else on the Board knowing about it. To do that he would have to call a Board on Letterman.

It was a full Board, very formal and full of all that man-of-respect drool they had picked up from The Godfather. Held in the executive boardroom, because who wanted to meet in a drafty warehouse or upstairs over a pizza joint when this was comfortable and secure? Prince, as capo, presided. Around the table were the men who controlled shylocking, porn, whores, drugs, garbage, linen, jukeboxes, trucking, and gambling in the city and the southern half of the state.

“Mr. Ucelli is recommending a contract be let on Lieutenant Letterman,” said Prince. “Our buffer man, Mr. Trevis, opposes such action at this time.”

Trevis, not being a member of the Board, was not present, of course, but his view had its adherents. Gideon Abramson, loan shark and a grandfather eight times over, said, “There is a great deal of heat over this Gounaris thing. The Feds have so many people on the street my collectors keep tripping over them. To hit an Organized Crime Squad cop at this time—”

“He talks, he can hurt us bad,” objected Spignola, garbage and linen.

“Who? Who can he take down?” Friedman’s street-drug sales were being curtailed by the federal heat. “The buffer man? Trevis? Big deal. Mr. Nobody, am I not right?”

Prince, who was worried by the possibility that he wasn’t right, waited while Kreiger made the point that Raptor might not want to hit someone outside the organization itself, then said smoothly, “I believe it should be put to a vote. All those in favor so indicate.” And he raised his own hand.

Following the Board’s directive, Dunstan Trevis typed Mr.Porter Edwards, Edwards’ Tow Truck and Wrecking Service, 4853 Harbor Drive on a six-by-nine manila clasp envelope with first-class postage already affixed. In this he put a small sealed unaddressed white envelope containing a three-by-five index card on which he had typed:

As always, he was using one of the public typewriters in the third-floor stacks of the public library. As he stood up, a young woman with an armload of books ran into him. Her books flew in every direction. She seemed to be in her early twenties and wore no bra under her see-through blouse.

“I’m really sorry,” she said in a flustered voice, retrieving his fallen envelope as he picked up her books.

He assured her it was all right and departed to mail the envelope. The girl, who was actually a woman in her thirties, dumped her books on the floor and dictated the Porter Edwards address into her micro-mini cassette recorder before she forgot any of it. That night, well after dark, her employer Larry Driscoll delivered the cassette to Milton Prince.

Jack Letterman was two-fingering a report while trying to remember if counselor — as in attorney — had one “1” or two when the phone rang. Picking up and barking, “Crime Squad, Letterman,” he heard the high-pitched, high-speed delivery of Burkie, one of his snitches, which could be stemmed only by interruptions.

“This one’ll cost you, sweetheart, it’s hot, in writing. You can use it to cool out the Feds if they come down on you—”

“The usual place?”

“Yeah, the door’s sticking, you gotta almost kick it—”

“Fifteen minutes.”

Letterman checked out a car and drove to Burkie’s latest drop, another deserted tenement. Burkie was just a voice on the phone who had started selling Letterman information about a year and a half before. For the first few times Letterman had gone into the condemned buildings in a rush, with his piece drawn, but there was never anything except envelopes of incredibly good intelligence for which he left envelopes of cash and which he peddled to the Feds and the wise guys with even-handed impartiality.

Letterman huffed up the narrow exterior back stairs to the third-floor landing, where he rammed the sticking door with his shoulder when it refused to open.

Tiny flames spurted from the kitchen matchheads stuck between the edge of the door and the thin strip of flint paper fixed to the frame. With a whoosh, gas from the ruptured line just inside the door ignited.

The explosion rocked the deserted building. Raptor, wearing a repairman’s bulky overalls and a flowing bandido mustache, had to duck back into the ground-floor rear entryway across the alley to avoid being hit by part of Letterman. He was boarding a city bus two blocks away when the first police and fire units arrived on the scene.

I was working late, clearing my desk, and Mr. Whittington left with this man. An hour later he was dead. They’re saying it was an accident, but, Dun, I don't believe that. And now I’m afraid there’s someone following me...

He laughed at her fears.

And be was late for their Christmas-shopping excursion.

Walking into the bar, he saw her welcoming smile, but then the man who’d walked in ahead of him shot her once in the head from a foot away. It was such a heavy caliber the man’s arm flew a foot into the air with the recoil.

Someone is following me. I’m frightened. Help me, darling.

He’d actually laughed.

She'd actually died.

Trevis came awake, hearing the slug enter her brain, feeling it bulge her laughing eyes. He read Musashi. Musashi said: Become the enemy. Musashi said: The enemy, shut up inside his own spirit, is a pheasant. You, becoming him, are a hawk. Consider this deeply, Musashi said.

Prince paced. He absently put down Driscoll’s reports, and paced. It was raining; water streamed down the outside of his study windows. Nobody had ever turned up Trevis’s connection with the Bianca broad because until Driscoll’s sieve job nobody had looked.

Prince built himself a strong drink and paced the sumptuous study while he sipped it. The shape of it all was easy to see, now he had the facts. Six years before, he’d gotten in deep and had had to start skimming — using Whittington, bookkeeper of the Dahlgren subsidiary. But Whittington had gotten scared. If he’d talked, the Board would have canceled Prince’s ticket, so Whittington had to go. But then his secretary, Teresa Bianca, got suspicious, so she had to go, too. Afterward, the whole thing seemed to have blown over.

But she must have told things to Trevis before she was hit. So he turned into a drunk just so he could get fired from where he worked and then sober up and get himself hired by the Dahlgren subsidiary. And then, as he was using his brilliance to burrow into the guts of the organization, trying to find out who had ordered the hit, the Board had made him buffer man and had given him Raptor, the ultimate killing machine. He didn’t have to dig any more. He just had to start setting up the men who’d been on the Board when she was killed, one after the other, using Raptor as a personal hit man. And he’d just keep on manufacturing evidence and having Board members killed until he reached Milton Prince anyway. By accident.

Only now it wasn’t going to happen. Because now Prince could reach the killing machine without putting Trevis’s finger on the trigger. He sat down to compose his letter to Raptor.

Porter Edwards was a big easygoing black who ran a one-truck tow service from his junk yard on the mud flats near the river. As he tore open the six-by-nine manila envelope to remove the smaller white envelope, he felt not the slightest curiosity about what was inside. He got twelve hundred bucks a year to not be curious. That money had kept the truck running lots of times, and had paid for the birthing of their fourth child. He wrote a name and address on a manila envelope just like the one he had tom open, and posted it.

The sign said CISCO’S TEXAS TACOS. Cisco shoved the small sealed unaddressed white envelope into a new six-by-nine manila and remembered. Three years ago, three-thirty in the morning, the place deserted and the door open to let out the hot grease smell of deep-frying taco shells as he swept up. A man dressed in black, with black gloves, and wearing a Porky Pig Halloween mask, had come in and taken a stool. Then he had taken a gun with a silencer screwed onto it out of his pocket. His voice had been distorted by the mask.

“Are you interested in a hundred dollars a month, payable twice yearly?”

Cisco, transfixed by the silenced muzzle, managed to say, “Yes.”

“I thought you would be.” And Porky Pig had put the gun away.

The squat man tried to kick Tommy Yet in the stomach. Tommy blocked the kick outward with his left forearm, simultaneously countering with a right forward kick which would have ruptured his opponent if Tommy hadn’t stopped it two millimeters short.

They dropped their arms and bowed. The students clapped.

Tommy Yet was a slight, compact man who could break bones and mangle flesh, smash bricks with his fists, knock down walls with his feet. He also was a Zen Buddhist who revered all life and dealt, not in violence, but in discipline and control.

Unfortunately, three years before, his daughter Perching Bird — named after one of the stylized movements of the Great Circle — had been born with pyloric stenosis. This narrowing of the stomach, which prevented the ingestion of any food, cost ten thousand dollars to correct surgically. When Tommy couldn’t keep up on the loan shark’s three-for-two vigorish, men came around to tell him what they were going to do with his wife and child the following week if he didn’t pay them.

Tommy cast the Ching, which confirmed that he must kill them upon their return, and then kill himself to wash away the stain of the dishonor. But an hour before they showed up, a man walked in with fifteen thousand dollars in cash for the loan shark. All he asked in return was that Tommy forward to a certain post-office box any mail that might come for him.

Tommy never saw the man again.

He locked up the dojo and went out to the car when his wife honked the horn. He asked her to stop at a mailbox on the way home so he could drop in a six-by-nine manila envelope.

At one fifty-four a.m., Raptor leaned forward and thrust a twenty-dollar bill and a long-shanked brass post-office key to the driver through the plexiglass partition which had on it, Thank You for Not Smoking in My Cab. The box to which Tommy Yet had mailed the manila envelope had an automatic forwarding on it to this box. There was a message waiting from Milton Prince.

Prince read it in the newspaper a week later.

Trevis left the office at one-thirty Saturday afternoon with his usual bulging briefcase and trudged across the deserted acre of blacktop company parking lot to find Mr. Prince waiting in the front seat of his two-year-old Datsun hatchback. Prince was wearing heavy clothes and hiking boots.

“I want to go up to that ski lodge of yours, Dunstan.”

Trevis was silent for a few moments. “Well, to tell you the truth, Mr. Prince, it’s more a shack than a—”

“I came prepared,” said Prince jovially and gestured at the pile of equipment in the back of the Datsun. He dropped his voice and leaned closer. “I want to talk to you about something I don’t want the rest of the Board to know.”

When they reached the snowline, where the sleet of lower elevations turned to large wet flakes that hit the windshield and slid down, Prince was still talking.

“In the last few years five of our top people — members of the Board — had to go because they put self-interest ahead of their commitment to the organization. So I need someone at the Board meetings I can trust — someone logical, who understands business practices.”

Trevis pulled off onto the shoulder of the road just beyond a flip-down sign which read, CHAINS REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT.

“I’m not a made-man,” he pointed out.

“There’s a way around that. If I can get national approval to expand into the northern half of the state we’ll have to fill Gounaris’s empty seat on the Board. I want you to have that seat, Dunstan.”

He sat in the car, soaking up the heater warmth, as Trevis moved around outside fixing the chains through the thickly falling flakes. That notion of expanding, that was actually a hell of a good idea. Maybe after Trevis was eliminated he’d fly down to the Bahamas, get some sun, put out a few cautious feelers with Bruno as to how the national organization would react to such a move.

After Trevis had got back in, bringing icy air with him, Prince listened to the chains thump in their even, hypnotic rhythm, and wondered how Raptor would do it. This one, he knew, he wanted to watch.

The cabin was a big central room with a couple of little bedrooms partitioned off, and a tiny kitchen in back with a three-burner kerosene stove. Prince wandered around looking at the pictures on the walls with his hands in the pockets of his fancy new down jacket while Trevis got the fine started. The photos were of skiiers, hunters, fishermen, and hikers who had used this place and seemed to enjoy it, all grins and rough clothes.

As the iron potbellied wood stove started to take the chill off the room, Trevis pumped up the kerosene pressure lamp until the double mantles glowed white-hot.

“I’ll close the shades,” said Prince. “They’ll keep the heat in.”

He went from window to window, pulling down the cheap roller shades and staring out through the cold glass of each window. It was two minutes to seven.

Are you out there waiting somewhere, Raptor? Are you ready, Raptor?

Raptor checked the luminous face of his watch.

6:59:01 and:02 and:03...

It was time.

Trevis heaved his bulging briefcase up on the table and opened it “I’ve got some printouts here, Mr. Prince, that might suggest some avenues for initiating expansion.”

Prince stopped him with a wave of the hand. He had an unpleasant smile on his face. “You won’t need those, Trevis. I’ve had a full report on you and Teresa Bianca. I know what you’ve been doing these past three years.” He chuckled. “You’ve finally found the man you’ve been looking for.”

Trevis slowly let the papers he had started to bring out slide back in the case. His face was very white.

“I used the Letterman hit to bypass you, Trevis. Raptor is going to kill you. Here. Tonight. Right now.”

As he spoke, Trevis’s eyes shifted beyond him to the door. His eyes widened.

Prince looked at the door, almost feeling the icy blast from outside. The door was still closed. He turned back to see Trevis’s right hand come out of the briefcase holding a Walther MPK machine pistol. The muzzle of the Walther, extended by a gas cylinder silencer, was pointed at Prince.

“I couldn’t stomach any more random killing, Prince, so I put that newspaper clipping where Ucelli would find it. I hoped it would bring whoever I was after out into the open.” He paused. “I’m Raptor.”

Prince’s face felt suddenly bloodless. His mouth was without saliva. He thrust out his hands, palms forward. “Money...”

The silenced sub-machinegun made a series of earnest busy clicking sounds. Blood and bone leaped from the front of Prince’s head. Splinters and chips flew from the wall behind him. The gun followed him down, clicking and chattering to itself until the magazine was empty.

Raptor stood for a long moment with the machine pistol hanging straight down at his side. Even an excised tumor leaves a felling of loss.

Trevis returned the gun to the briefcase, shut it, and with his gloved left hand turned the pump on the lantern. There was the hiss of escaping pressure. By the mantles’ dying glow, he picked his way across the unfamiliar room he’d rented by phone, in Prince’s name, earlier in the week, and had paid for with a cashier’s check. He had never been skiing in his life.

Outside, the snow had stopped. Stars crowded the black sky. A nice night for a drive down the mountain. Then he thought: To what? Wasn’t he by this time so steeped in blood that—

But then, in a sudden blinding moment of insight, he understood the ultimate truth in Miyamotu Musashi’s book which had eluded him until now. The Fifth Ring, said Musashi, was the final strategy. The Fifth Ring was the way of the Void. In the Void was only virtue, without evil.

Raptor was in the Void. Raptor was of the Void.

Two men had died back there in the cabin.

Trevis was now free of both of them.