Road to Paradise

Two Months Later

Six

The Michael Smith family of Tucson, Arizona, lived in a development known as Paradise Estates four miles southwest of the city. Theirs was one of fifty homes, red-tile-roof pueblo ranch-styles from a short list of cookie-cutter designs, each with a swimming pool and a generous lawn of Bermuda grass that required a lot of watering.

In fact, the first thing Anna had said, when they’d emerged from their new family vehicle (a wine-color Lincoln Continental), was: “Paradise Estates, huh? Paradise with crab grass.”

They had come from Tucson International Airport with only the bags they’d packed that first sudden night in Crystal Bay, having lived out of them for two weeks in various motels and one hotel, all deemed “safe” by WITSEC.

And what a surprise it was to walk into their new home and find their old furniture waiting.

Among the missing were any personal items — identification, snapshot albums, letters, bills, and no clothing other than what had been frantically packed. The furniture was arranged in essentially the same manner as in their Lake Tahoe place, including a spare bedroom that had already been set up as Michael’s study, complete with books on the shelves (missing any that had been inscribed to him as gifts). Even his precious sixteen-millimeter film collection had made the transition (though framed signed photos to him from Sinatra, Darin, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, and Keely Smith had not).

Later Michael asked Harold Shore about the surprise party their old furniture and household goods had thrown for them.

“Well,” Shore said genially as they sat in the living room area of a hotel suite in Phoenix (where Michael had flown for a Sunday meeting with his federal friends), “our movers went in the morning after we took you out. They crated everything up and lugged it over to a storage facility in Reno, which we watched until we were certain no one else was... And then another set of movers hauled everything to a military base — you don’t need to know where — until finally the crates were delivered and unloaded to your new home at Paradise Estates. We even sent along a female agent to lend a woman’s touch.”

“Slick,” Michael said. “If you weren’t followed.”

“Oh, we take great care,” the fleshy fed said, those eyes buggy behind the goggle-like black-rimmed glasses, flecks of spittle on his terrible smile. “You’re very valuable to us, Michael. We have big plans for you.”

“So does the Outfit,” Michael reminded him.

Initially the three family members had been taken to a motel near San Francisco and kept under discreet but heavy guard by that blue-eyed Apache called Hughes. Then the Satarianos — not yet Smith — were flown to Washington, DC, where the family was put up in a nice hotel, again protected by Hughes and other marshals.

Hughes made an interesting point, early on, to Michael: “Tell your family to be careful around my guys. We’re on strictly a need-to-know basis. Keep that name ‘Satariano’ to yourselves. I’m the only one privy to who you really are.”

“Thanks for the tip, Don. Don’t you trust your own people?”

“It’s not that, Michael.” The voice coming out of that sharp cheekboned face seemed genuinely concerned for the little family. “Director Shore will tell you the same — even in the OCRS, only a handful are in the know. We’re up against dangerous people. But I guess I don’t have to tell you that.”

“No. But I don’t mind hearing that you feel that way, too.”

At first, Pat and Anna just ate room service and watched television (Days of Our Lives and Match Game among the favorites) while Michael answered question after question in Room 2730 at the Justice Department. A few days in, however, mother and daughter began working with a female agent, who briefed them about their new identities.

Standard operating procedure was that family members would retain their real first names, with a new last one providing the familiar initial. This helped prevent slip-ups, giving the rechristened Satarianos a chance to catch themselves if they started saying or writing their old names.

Or, as Anna said, “Saves on monograms.”

When Michael returned to the hotel room each evening, he, too, would study the fake backgrounds provided them. Fabrication was kept simple, just the basics, should new friends or employers or teachers or whoever ask the usual innocent questions.

The Smiths needed to know where they were from (St. Paul, Minnesota — a city none of them had ever even visited) including street address and description of home and neighborhood, also some key names (of nonexistent grandparents and real schools, including colleges for Pat and Michael).

And “Michael Smith” had to be familiar with various things about the assorted businesses he’d worked for over the years, and be aware of his undistinguished military service — he’d been stateside during WWII, a company clerk (oddly, the same fake post their son, Mike, had fooled his mother with, when he’d really been in combat).

A blond, bland, friendly OCRS agent named Michael Reddy counseled the family, individually and as a group, on various difficult aspects of the WITSEC program.

“You can’t maintain contact with any relatives or friends,” Agent Reddy said. “You’d put them — and yourself — in danger.”

“But what about when our son comes back from Vietnam?” Pat asked.

“We’ll bring you together, of course. He’ll be over twenty-one, so joining you in your new identity would have to be his own choice.”

“I understand,” Pat said, apparently mollified.

Privately, however, Reddy admitted to Michael that the US Army did not hold out much hope for Lieutenant Satariano’s return — apparently, WITSEC had checked the missing soldier’s status, as a matter of course.

“How frank you want to be with your wife,” the agent said, “I’ll leave up to you... You might not want to put her under any more pressure right now than necessary.”

Reddy also told Michael, privately, that exceptions were often made to the “no contact” policy where parents and grandparents were concerned. Letters could be forwarded on, sans return address, and even phone calls arranged through a Justice Department switchboard; but since both Michael and Pat had lost their parents, this service would only be made available, discreetly, to Pat... should she want to maintain contact with her sister, Betty.

Pat and Betty were not close — the once wild Betty was now a Republican, and married to a born-again pastor — but “Mrs. Smith” did arrange for one call to be made, just to keep Betty from being concerned.

The biggest problem, of course, was Anna, who was going steady with a boy named Gary Grace.

“You’ll have to watch her like a hawk,” Reddy said. “She is a teenager.”

“No kidding,” Michael said. “Can’t she even write the kid a goodbye letter?”

“We advise not. Make it a clean break. Right now.”

“Do you have any kids, Agent Reddy?”

“Why, yes.”

“How old?”

“Grade school — third and sixth.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“Until she’s twenty-one you can control her, of course, and...”

“You really don’t have teenage kids, Agent Reddy.”

“...And if you want to allow her to write the boy, her letters will have to be read by both you and your wife, and by WITSEC personnel. There can be no hints of where your daughter has moved.”

“I understand. Let’s not even give her that option.”

“That’s a good call, Mr. Smith. A very good call.”

Another trauma dropped at their feet was the need to make a legal name change. They wouldn’t just be pretending to be the Smiths; they would legally be the Smiths... Satariano no more.

Shore himself explained this to Michael: “We can’t have you lying when you fill out legal documents, real estate documents, for instance, or loan papers. The Justice Department can’t be party to fraud. You will have to use your real name... which is now Michael Smith.”

Court records would be sealed, protecting the old and new identities alike. Pat and Anna hated this whole legal-name-change thing, though Michael didn’t really care. He’d been through it before.

The intensive combination briefing and debriefing lasted almost two weeks. Toward the end a stream of new official papers flowed: birth certificates, Social Security cards, driver’s licenses, even school and college transcripts. The Smiths had history.

They had documents.

They were real.

Pat and Anna were in a better mood working at memorizing their new backgrounds than they’d been watching TV, a hotel-room existence which had in particular begun to bore Anna, whose every other sentence was a report of what would be going on back home (“Prom committee is meeting now — right now!”). That, and “I can’t believe that The Waltons is the best thing on!”

Michael was not told who he’d first be testifying against, and in what trial, just that it would be at least six months before he had to take the stand, though thereafter he’d likely be involved in at least one trial a year for the foreseeable future. Just having a foreseeable future seemed a good start to Michael.

He would testify as neither Michael Satariano nor Michael Smith, rather as “Mr. X.”

Suddenly I’m starring in a Saturday afternoon serial, he thought.

That the government had been able to make Michael the manager of a restaurant that Uncle Sam owned (due to an IRS takeover) made it particularly easy for their witness to miss work. He had no monthly stipend from WITSEC because the restaurant salary (forty thousand dollars a year) outstripped it.

The meetings with Shore in Phoenix would be occasional, perhaps once a month, never longer than a single afternoon. Shore had to fly in from DC for these, and Michael was only one of dozens, perhaps hundreds, in WITSEC the associate director was dealing with.

“We’re going to let you hang on to that .45 auto of yours,” Shore advised Michael, on the first of these Phoenix confabs.

“It’s sort of a family heirloom,” Michael said, unaware they knew he’d kept it. Did they know about the half-million, too?

“I can understand you wanting some protection at hand,” Shore was saying, “but no other guns, Mike. Don’t make your new home a fortress or an arsenal. If you have a problem, if you have any suspicion that you’ve been made, let us handle it.”

“Harry, all due respect — you don’t even have an office in Tucson.”

“No, but I can send a marshal, straightaway. One thing they have plenty of in Arizona, Mike, is marshals. You’ll have a ‘panic number’ to call.”

“Let’s say I call it. What happens then?”

Shore shrugged. “Marshals will swoop down, and you and your family will be whisked away to safety again.”

“What... to start over? New names and...?”

Shore’s nod was somber. “Yes, Michael. You may have to relocate several times. We hope that won’t be the case, and we haven’t broached the subject with your family... But it may happen.”

“Christ.”

“But know this: we’ve never lost a witness or a family member in WITSEC. Never.” The awful smile formed. “We wouldn’t be in business long if we did.”

Michael was shaking his head, a sick feeling in his belly. “I’d feel better if you were using FBI, not these damn marshals.”

Marshal Don Hughes was not in the room with them; he was in the bedroom next door, but did not sit in on the conversations between Shore and Michael.

The WITSEC director’s face dropped in disappointment; he almost looked wounded. “Michael, they’re good people!”

“Harry — you and I both know that these marshals are the bottom of the Justice Department barrel. Just because you’re sending us to Arizona, don’t go thinking this is my first time at the rodeo.”

“Our marshals have—”

“No standards for employment — they’re former city cops or sheriff department deputies with enough political clout to land themselves a federal plum... Am I lying, Harry? Or exaggerating?”

Shore’s normal shit-eating grin was nowhere to be seen. “No. No, Michael, you’re not. But I handpick these men, from what’s available.”

“From what’s available.”

“I go over their records, thoroughly. We have the best of—”

“A bad crop? Harry, just know this: if you can’t protect my family, I will.”

Shore leaned forward. “I can protect them, Michael. I can protect you and them.”

“Okay, then.” He smiled just a little and locked eyes with the fed. “I’ll do my end of the deal. You better do yours.”

Breathing deep, Shore reared back. “You know, Michael... with all we’re doing for you? I don’t think threats are called for.”

“With all I’m doing for you, Harry? I do.”

So only a little over two weeks after their midnight exodus from Crystal Bay, the Michael Smith family walked into a living room set up remarkably like their previous one had been. Even the layout of the house was similar, right down to a patio off the kitchen with a pool.

Anna had taken time out between bitch sessions to take her father by the arm and, in a little-girl voice, say, “Daddy, it’s weird — it’s so weird. I feel like a ghost, haunting my own house.”

He slipped his arm around her shoulders. “Annie, it is odd — no getting around that. But maybe it’ll help us, you know... get back in the swing.”

She said nothing, but hugged him and went off to her room — one of the few moments with Anna in this house that he would treasure.

Michael knew how hard it was for her — missing the last two months of her senior year, taken away from her friends, her boyfriend, no Sound of Music, no prom that she would have been queen of. For a girl her age, could anything be worse?

She wouldn’t even be valedictorian of her class. The transcripts from St. Paul that would eventually go to the University of Arizona would have a 3.7, so Anna would have a strong academic record without attracting the attention such an honor would bring. Strangest of all, she wouldn’t really finish high school — it was too late in the year to transfer to anywhere in Tucson, so WITSEC would cook up a diploma for the girl from Minnesota, saying she’d graduated early in anticipation of the Arizona move.

All of this served to put Anna in limbo, not to mention a deep sulky funk.

In addition to homesickness for her boyfriend and the life she’d had to run out on, Anna was annoyed that she was a “prisoner in her own home.”

She had made this clear to Michael when he took her for an afternoon drive in the Lincoln around the university campus, an oasis of learning in a residential section between Speedway and East Sixth. Wearing a yellow tube top and cut-off jeans, her long dark hair in a braided ponytail, Anna would fit in fine with the kids on this endless acreage — she already had a dark Indian tan, and they’d only been here a week.

As father and daughter wound through immaculately landscaped drives, rambling red-brick buildings nestling among sunshine-dappled trees and shrubs, he extolled the virtues of the school, with its great programs in the arts; she’d have every opportunity here to pursue her music and acting...

“I feel like goddamn Gilligan,” Anna said suddenly, slumped against the rider’s side window.

“Who?”

“Gilligan! Stranded on his island with the Skipper and a bunch of other idiots?... Daddy, here I am eighteen, and you’re driving me around like I’m a little kid.”

“Honey, you know I intend to buy you your own car, in the fall, when you start college...”

The dark eyes flared. “If I behave myself, you mean!”

“I didn’t make any conditions... That’s the auditorium over there — largest in the Southwest. You’ll be on that stage, before you know it.”

“I’d rather be on the first stage out of this hick town.”

“Annie...”

She cast an outrageously arch expression his way. “And why, pray tell, will I need a car?”

“Well, Annie... because Tucson sprawls all over the place. You’ll have to be able to get around.”

“If I was living in one of the dorms, I could get by without a car. But you don’t want me living in a dorm, do you, Daddy? Like any other real college student! You want me at home... under your thumb.”

He pulled over in front of a three-story red-brick building, the library, leaving the car and its air-conditioning going. He looked at her hard and yet lovingly, though her gaze flicked from him to this and to that, her half-smirk digging a dimple in one pretty cheek.

“I’m not trying to smother you, sweetheart. You know this is no game — we’re in danger, all of us. I have to make sure we’re safe.”

“Will we ever be safe?”

Not really, he thought, but he said, “I think so. But let’s just... settle in, okay? And make a new life for ourselves?”

She grunted something that wasn’t exactly a laugh. “What, I’m supposed to make a new life for myself in my bedroom? You make me leave everything behind but you won’t let me replace it with anything!”

“It’s early, Annie... Day at a time, okay?”

“Easy for you — you’ve got a job, a really real new life! I’m just at home with Mom, who these days has about as much interest in life as one of these cactuses or cacti or whatever the fuck!”

He sighed. “Your mother will adjust.”

“You really think so? She’s just this, this zombie Donna Reed, anymore.”

“She’ll adjust. And so will you. You’re already making friends, right?”

“Yes, and if it wasn’t for Cindy living across the street, I’d be insane by now!”

“And I haven’t stopped you from going out with Cindy and her friends, right?”

She swallowed and granted him a look that acknowledged him as a human being. “No. I appreciate that. I do. And it’s fun out here, sort of.”

“You liked the horseback riding, right? You said that riding trail was really beautiful...”

“It was okay. It was fine.”

“And you and Cindy and those kids went off together, and I didn’t have any trouble with that, I wasn’t a jerk about it or anything, right?”

“Right.”

“It’s beautiful out here. You know it is. We can make a new start here, all of us.”

“I know.”

“We can go out for golf. You wanna go golfing with your old man?”

“Sure, Dad.” She seemed worn down by the conversation. “Let’s keep looking. At the campus.”

“Sure, sweetheart.”

But Anna was right about her mother; this Michael knew.

Pat was going through the motions, not much else. Her grooming remained typically immaculate, even if she did look like she’d aged ten years in the last few months. Her uniform had become pale pastel pants suits, the colorful, western-style clothing of Tucson not to her tastes; she looked as pale as her clothes, sitting by the pool sometimes, but in the shade, avoiding the sun.

She did the cooking and the shopping and even the cleaning, saying she’d prefer not to have any housekeeping help. All of the housewifely stuff she took in stride, and seemed to get lost in.

When she wasn’t keeping house, she sat and drank orange juice (she promised him it was just orange juice, since alcohol with her medication was not a good idea) and read paperbacks she’d picked up at the supermarket or watched television. She had gotten hooked on several soaps, particularly General Hospital, during the Washington, DC, hotel stay; and she liked some game shows, the ones with celebrities like Hollywood Squares and The $25,000 Pyramid.

“Did you ever meet Peter Lawford, dear?” she asked him once. “He was on the Pyramid today.”

“Yeah, a couple of times.”

“He’s an idiot, isn’t he?”

“Pretty much.”

This was what her life had become — TV, housework, cooking, the occasional inane comment. She had made no move to get involved in anything political or with a church. Her political impulse seemed limited to saying, “Fucking Nixon,” whenever the president came on the TV screen; and they had not yet found a church, which was a major shift for the Satariano... the Smith... family.

“Wouldn’t you like to join somewhere?” he’d asked her one evening, at the supper table, after Anna had gone off to her room to listen to Deep Purple (the rock group, not the song).

“I don’t think so,” his wife said, drinking her coffee, not looking at him, or anything, really.

“Several nice possibilities on this side of Tucson. We could even go to one of these funky old mission churches.”

“No.” She made a slow-motion shrug. “We’re supposed to keep a low profile, right?”

And that was all she’d say on the subject.

He hoped Pat would indeed adjust. And he would do his best to help her. He knew she was lying about the orange juice, because the vodka bottle in the cupboard wasn’t draining itself; and he doubted Anna was snitching it. Right now, so early in this new life, he didn’t have the heart, the will, to confront his wife about it.

But he would. He would. Gently. One of these days. Nights.

He felt almost guilty about how well he was adjusting himself. He had made harder adjustments before — when he and his father left their house in the middle of the night, several lifetimes ago, they’d had more than just a threat of violence hovering: they’d left behind the corpses of Mama and brother Peter. Going to a great town like Tucson in a beautiful state like Arizona was hardly as hard as living out of a Ford and sleeping in Bonnie-and-Clyde motels and robbing banks, on the road to Perdition.

He’d been Michael O’Sullivan, Jr., a kid in Rock Island, Illinois. He’d been the Angel of Death’s getaway driver, written up in newspapers all over. He’d been Michael Satariano, a teenager in DeKalb. He’d been Michael Satariano the war hero. He’d been Michael Satariano the mob enforcer. And he’d been Michael Satariano the casino boss.

Being Michael Smith, the restaurant manager, was no strain.

And Tucson — its nine square miles stretched over the broad desert valley of five mountain ranges — was a great city, the best place he and his family had ever found to live; the girls would surely come to love it as he already did. He found the stark, arid city strangely soothing, and relished the dry heat, the wide-open sky, the horizon jagged with mountains of ever-shifting shades of red and deep blue.

The Tahoe area had wrapped itself in a pretend frontier feeling; but at heart it was a great big tourist trap. Tucson, on the other hand — with its wide paved streets, dotted with pepper and orange trees, feather-leafed tamarisk, and even Italian cypress — had a genuine easygoing vibe, informal, unhurried, blue jeans and short skirts year around. In his suits and ties, Michael was a regular dude in this culture, with its Spanish, Mexican, and American Indian roots; cowboy hats and sombreros were common in Old Pueblo, as the longtime residents called the town.

Other old-timers had another name for Tucson: “Paradise of Devils.” This dated back to outlaw days, when the horse thieves, gunslingers, gamblers, and other “varmints” called Tucson home; the Clanton gang, Wyatt Earp, and Doc Holliday had walked these streets when dusty hard dirt had been underfoot — that is, when they weren’t over in nearby Tombstone (Earp had been a marshal, too).

Michael related to this, on a deep, secret level — hadn’t he and his father been among the last of the great outlaws? He remembered when an old-timer at Tahoe had told him that Baby Face Nelson and John Dillinger had used the Cal-Neva as a hideout in their heyday; and he’d thought, You mean... in my heyday...

The Cal-Neva, of course, was history — as ancient as Baby Face and Dillinger. If Michael no longer had the responsibility of a casino resort and all its wide-ranging problems — and its considerably bigger paycheck — he was nonetheless content with his new command, a restaurant on trendsetting North Campbell Avenue.

Vincent’s — whose namesake had been an embezzler and tax dodger, hence the current owner being Uncle Sam — was, as the boys back in Chicago would say, a class joint. Floor-to-ceiling windows provided a view of the city lights in a hacienda-style facility, though the cuisine was not Tucson-style Mexican, rather Continental specialties like lamb Wellington and veal Sonoita. The chef — a Russian Jew who called himself Andre — was four-star, and made a salary equal to Michael’s... and worth every penny.

Michael, like most men of his experience, had expected to walk in and immediately begin making notes about sweeping changes. Instead, he’d found nothing not to like, and his gaze took in only perfection: fine china with pale-pink linens, fresh flowers, classical music. Everywhere he looked he saw elegance — from the beamed vaulted ceiling with its glittering chandeliers to the stone floor, from the framed western landscapes to a massive fireplace, which saw action only in winter.

He was a general stepping in to take over an army from a retiring general of great skill. Vincent may have been a crook — with a gambling habit — but he had certainly also been a fine restaurateur. Michael could not have hoped for a better situation. The job took time and expertise, but for all of that was not stressful.

The staff had been so well-trained by the former owner that the place — overseen by the assistant manager for six months — was running quite well on fumes. The only person having difficulty was that overworked assistant, who was glad to be relieved of some of her duties, anyway.

The assistant, Julie Wisdom — a lovely divorcée in her early forties — was aptly named but for a troubling tendency to flatter and flirt with her new boss. He found himself attracted to this intelligent brunette, and fought stirrings that weren’t helped by Pat’s somnolent behavior at home.

Michael had always been a faithful husband, but with the world at work so much more pleasant and fulfilling than the one at home, he was tempted. Already he was falling into justifications and rationalizations... With what I’ve been through, with the stress I’ve been under, who could blame me?

But he had not yet acted on these impulses. Perhaps he was still “Saint” Satariano, at heart; or maybe he just still loved his wife, the woman who had taken this dangerous road with him even though he had warned her of his deal with the Chicago devil, the woman who had given birth to Mike and Anna, the pretty prom queen from DeKalb he had fallen in love with so many years ago...

On a Thursday evening, two months into their new life, Michael took Pat to Vincent’s for a romantic dinner. In part, this was to send a signal to his flirtatious assistant manager; but he also wanted to encourage Pat to rejoin the world. His world. Their world.

While not Pat’s first visit to Vincent’s, this was the first time their daughter hadn’t been along. Tonight Anna was staying with the neighbor girl, Cindy — desert-trail riding followed by a slumber party. And Michael and Pat were anxious for Anna to expand her circle of friends.

They shared Chateaubriand and an especially expensive bottle of French wine from Vincent’s cellar of over one thousand. In the candlelight, against a window of sparkling city lights, Pat looked lovely and even happy. They mostly talked about Anna, since Pat didn’t have anything else going in her life right now, except television and the household.

“This is going to be a hard weekend for our little girl,” Pat said.

“Really? Why?”

“Saturday night — back home? Prom.”

“...Oh.”

Pat sipped her wine. Then she shrugged with her eyebrows and said, “She still carries the torch for that Gary.”

“Well, he’s a handsome kid, nice enough. Star quarterback, president of the class... Hasn’t been any contact, has there?”

This time Pat shrugged her shoulders, which were bare; she wore a chic white dress, lace over a satin shell. “If so, she’s hiding the letters well. I’ve been through her things a thousand times.”

“Terrible.” He shook his head.

“What choice do I have?”

“Oh, I’m not being critical. It’s just... what this... situation reduces us to.”

She sipped her wine.

He nodded toward the cityscape in the window beside them and said, “Pat, if you gave this town half a chance, you’d really love it.”

“I don’t have any problem with this town.”

“Honey, you’ve barely seen it.”

“I’m just keeping a low profile, that’s all. Aren’t we supposed—”

“Actually, we’re supposed to live our lives.” He reached across the linen-covered table and took her hand. “And, darling, you need to start living yours. We need to start living ours.”

She smiled just a little. Her eyes flicked toward the assistant manager, who wore a white shirt with tux tie and black trousers, mannish attire that made her no less a strikingly attractive woman. “Has she moved in on you yet?”

“...What?”

“Your little minx assistant. Has she made her move yet? She’s had her eye on you from the beginning.”

He waved that off. “Don’t be silly. I’m not interested in anybody but you.”

Her mouth twitched a bitter knowing smile. “I wasn’t talking about you, Michael. I was talking about that little predatory bitch.”

He sighed, gave her half a grin. “Let’s just say I haven’t let her make a move.”

“Don’t.” Now she reached her hand across and squeezed his. “I know I... haven’t been very romantic lately...”

They’d made love perhaps half a dozen times since moving in at Paradise Estates, strictly perfunctory.

“No problem,” he said.

She shook her head. “No. No, I’ll make it up to you. Michael, I will make it up to you...”

Several hours later, she did.

Like all the Paradise Estates backyards, theirs was fenced off. Just a little drunk, they swam nude in their pool under a swatch of blue velvet flung across the sky, scattered with jewels, held together by a big polished pearl button. He dogpaddled after her and chased her and cornered her and kissed her, sometimes on the mouth. They crawled out, and without drying off lay on a big beach towel on the Bermuda grass and necked and petted like teenagers.

He sat on the edge of the towel, heel of his hand wedged against the cloth and ground beneath, and he gazed down at his still-lovely wife, with her slender fine body pearled with water, the breasts full firm handfuls, the legs sleek and long and soon to be wrapped around him.

“I love you, Patsy Ann O’Hara,” he said.

As she lay on her back, her blonde hair splayed against the towel, her pale flesh washed ivory in the moonlight, she held her arms open, her legs, too, and her eyes were wide, her lips parted, in an expression perched at the brink of smiling, or perhaps crying.

“I love you, too, Michael Satariano,” she said.

He lowered himself into her embrace, and indeed those legs locked around him as he entered her, and he kissed her mouth and her neck and her breasts, and she laughed and sobbed and held on to him so tight, it was as if she were trying to meld herself with him, disappear into him.

He came harder than he had in many months, perhaps years, and her cries of pleasure may well have alarmed the neighbors. They lay together, laughing quietly, stroking each other’s faces, and kissed a while.

“Everything but the fireworks,” he said.

“Huh?”

He played with a lock of blonde hair. “In the moonlight, you remind me of that first night, after I got back from service?... We were in your father’s Buick, backseat, parked by that cornfield...”

“Fourth of July!”

“Yes, and we could see the fireworks.”

“Oh, Michael...” She smiled at him, and her look was so loving, she broke his heart even while warming it. “...I saw the fireworks. Didn’t you?”

The coolness of the night got to them after a while — Arizona could get damn cold after dark — and they padded into the kitchen. She got robes for both of them — after all, Anna was just across the street at Cindy’s — and they sat and had decaf.

He was trying to find the words for something when she said, “What, Michael? What is it?”

“Would you... please think about starting to go to mass again? And getting involved with a church?”

Her face fell. “Oh, Michael.”

He leaned forward, patted her hand. “Honey, it would be so good for you.”

She smirked. “You mean, keep me busy?”

“Is that bad? It’s not busywork, it’s... meaningful.”

She studied him; she was almost staring. “Don’t tell me... Oh, Michael, don’t tell me you still believe.”

“What do you mean?”

Her eyes were huge. “You believe in God? After all this, you really still believe in God, and the fucking Catholic Church, and all that pomp and circumstance?”

He shrugged; oddly, he felt embarrassed. “Tradition isn’t a bad thing. It gives things an order. Puts a framework on.”

She laughed humorlessly. “Then you don’t t believe. It’s just... social. Like a country club without the golf. A nice thing for a family to do. A way to expose your kids to a moral outlook on life, and give them some... some structure.”

He was shaking his head. “You’re wrong, darling. I do believe there’s something out there, something bigger than us, a father who loves us and understands us. And forgives us.”

She arched an eyebrow. “If so, He hasn’t exactly been breaking His hump doing anything for either the Satarianos or the Smiths.”

“Pat...”

She sighed, then leaned forward, and her smile was not unkind. “Michael, if it makes you feel better to believe this ridiculous superstitious nonsense, go right ahead. Just don’t ask me to go along with you.”

“Then you have lost your faith?”

She reared back. “Are you for real? Whatever ‘faith’ I had died when we got that telegram about Mike! Jesus, Michael — look at our life! Look at your life! Your mother and brother, shot down like animals. Your father dead on a kitchen floor. These gangsters you’ve worked for, for so many goddamn years, they’re ankle deep in blood... knee deep!”

He cradled his coffee cup in both hands, couldn’t look at her. “None of it’s God’s fault.”

“Whose fault is it, then? Ours?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, because we’re born sinners? Give me a break...”

“My father chose his path. I chose mine.”

She grunted. “Revenge?”

“Yes.”

“Would you do it any differently?”

“What?”

She shrugged. “You wanted to kill the men who killed your father. Just like your father wanted to kill the men who killed your mother and Peter. Would you do it any differently today than thirty years ago?”

“...I don’t know.”

She sipped her decaf, thought for a moment, then said, “You told me once that you thought it was sad that your father felt he could commit murder, then walk into a confessional, fess up, get forgiven, and walk back out and commit murder again.”

“I remember.”

“Is that how you see it?”

“I... I don’t know how I see it. I... I haven’t had to see it, look at it, for a long, long time. We’ve had a good life, Patsy Ann, for a lot of years now. We had two great kids.”

“Have two great kids.”

“Have two great kids. All I’ve been doing over the years is trying to keep my head down and provide for us. And all I’ve been doing these past couple months is trying to keep my feet under me.”

“Me, too. Me, too.”

“But I don’t think I could do that, if I didn’t think that... that there was something out there, bigger than this, better than us. A heavenly father. Forgiveness.”

She shook her head, smiled distantly, but her eyes were locked on to him. “You really do still believe.”

“I guess so.” His eyebrows went up. “But I never thought you’d think less of me for it.”

Her expression dissolved into concern, and she reached both hands out and took one of his. “Oh, I don’t, darling. Really I don’t. I think it’s... sweet. Naive. Kind of cute.”

“Cute?”

She shrugged. “Or maybe I envy you. Because if I believed what you believe, I could handle the days better. And the nights.” She sipped the decaf again. “Maybe even... face the thought that I may never see Mike again.”

“It’s not a crutch, Pat. It’s—”

Shaking her head firmly, the blonde locks bouncing, she said, “No, Mike, it’s a crutch. It is a crutch. And God knows I could use a crutch. Because, Mike — most of the time? I feel like I’m falling down.”

“I’m here to catch you, baby.”

“I know. And I do love you. You’re not gonna let that little bitch at the restaurant come between us are you?”

“No. Hell no.”

She smiled; there was love in it. “Good. Take me to bed, why don’t you? Let’s fall asleep together in our four-poster bed like the old married people we are. And we won’t talk religion anymore. Or bitches.”

“I can dig it,” he said.

“Ha! Aren’t you the hepcat?”

She was laughing as they walked arm in arm to the bedroom. Pat hadn’t laughed like that for a long time, and Michael found the sound pleasing, and chose not to recognize the desperation in it.

Seven

In the shimmering distance, a dazzling white edifice seemed to hover over the beige expanse of desert to meet a violet ragged ribbon of mountains and rise into cloudless blue.

The castle-like Mission of San Xavier del Bac was no mirage, rather a Moorish monument whose stately dome and proud parapets contrasted sharply with an otherwise stark Arizona vista. In the midst of the hell of an American Sahara, the church promised paradise, burning bright and white, stucco covering adobe bricks to conspire with the intense desert sunlight to create that ghost-like glimmer.

Michael had driven out Mission Road, onto the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation, through a severe landscape of tiny houses and tilled fields that made Paradise Estates seem a world away, not just a few miles. The White Dove of the Desert, as the mission was called, was a tourist attraction, but it was also a working church, holding mass daily, four times on Sunday.

This was Friday, the morning after Michael and Pat had discussed religion, among other things, and he’d asked her to come along, and she, in her robe at the kitchen table with coffee and a cigarette, had declined.

“But by all means, darling,” she said, “you go.”

And she’d waved a hand in a regal fashion reserved for monarchs, popes, and wives.

Things had gone so well the night before that he knew getting back into the touchy subject of church attendance — much less the existence of God — was no way to start their day. But he had gone to mass regularly for as long as he could remember; even on the road with his father, all those years ago, they’d stopped at churches, if not for mass, for confession and to light candles for those Michael’s father had dispatched to final judgment.

Almost two months of no mass had put Michael into a kind of spiritual withdrawal. He needed a God fix.

The mission sat on a slight elevation — to call it a hill would be an exaggeration — which had encouraged that optical illusion of hovering that Michael had, from a distance, noted. The parking lot was about half-full, separating the mission buildings from a plaza of craft shops and stalls selling American Indian snacks, the fragrant food aroma and displays of pottery, jewelry, and baskets emphasizing the tourist aspect of San Xavier.

But the churchgoers making the pilgrimage to the mission for mass were a mix of sightseers and locals, the latter comprised of Indians and Mexicans.

Many of these wore suits and ties, however humble, while the tourists wore sport shirts and slacks and sundresses, including western-style apparel picked up on their Tucson trip, right down to cowboy hats and brand-new boots. Michael — the only Anglo in a suit and tie — could not avoid feeling he was, with these other whites, invading the land of the natives once again.

On the other hand, the collection-plate contributions would stay here, in this parish, just like the money made across the way, selling fried bread and friendship bowls.

At the edge of the parking lot, Michael paused to take in the magnificent wedding cake of a structure, which was a series of arches and domes, every surface elaborately decorated. The only use of wood he could see was in the window frames and doors; otherwise, all appeared to be burned adobe brick or lime plaster.

Twin towers — one lacking a crowning dome, as if to say God’s work is never finished — bookended the finely carved Spanish baroque stone entry, which was a weathered red in contrast to all the surrounding white, embellished by gifted if naive native artisans with arabesques, shells, and swirling scrolls.

Past the weathered mesquite doors, Michael felt a welcoming warmth that was in part his relief to again be inside a church but also this particular church, with its ornate carvings, painted statues, and faded frescoes. Even if the colors had dimmed over time, indications of a vivid interior remained, as on the corner supports of the dome before the sanctuary, where large wooden angels perched, bearing bright banners.

He slipped into a well-worn wooden pew at the rear, on the aisle, next to a Papago family, the father with his straw hat in the lap of his threadbare brown suit, the mother in a dark blue dress touched gently with lace at collar and cuffs, and two boys, perhaps nine and eleven, in black confirmation suits that hadn’t had a chance to get worn out yet. They were obviously comfortable here, in this warm and lived-in sanctuary, suffering the presence of tourists with quiet dignity.

The church interior was more elaborate than your typical Spanish mission church. Colorfully painted religious statues filled niches, and on the ceiling and walls were panels detailing Christ’s life and death and resurrection. The somewhat crude execution indicated these were likely the work of primitive painters, but though the faces held little expression, Michael found the depictions deeply moving.

When he took Communion, Michael got a closer look at the altar, which — beneath the wide sanctuary arch — was vividly painted, polychrome with gilt touches, and arrayed with images of the patron saint Xavier and of the Virgin, as well as scrolls and cherubs. The altar itself was backed by an intricately carved brick and stucco retable.

The service lasted forty minutes, but Michael lingered afterward, sitting alone in the sanctuary but for an occasional tourist, who climbed to the choir loft for a better look and to flash photos.

He prayed for his family. He prayed for forgiveness for himself and his father. He prayed for a miracle for his boy, Mike. But mostly he prayed for guidance and strength. When he settled back in the pew, he felt a presence beside him — it was Father Francisco, a Mexican American in his late forties with a dark-brown face, creped by sun and responsibility; his eyes were large and dark and kind.

The father sat beside Michael in the pew and said, “You don’t look like our typical tourist.”

“I’m not a tourist, Father.” He introduced himself, shaking hands with the priest, then said, “I’m local. My family and I just moved here.”

“And you’re looking for a church?”

“We are. But I’ve missed mass for a few weeks, and I’d heard about your lovely church... It really is quite beautiful... and, well—”

A wonderful smile broke through the leathery face. “You needn’t apologize for stopping by to see us, Mr. Smith. And you and your family would be welcome here.”

“My wife has lost her faith.”

It just came out.

The kind dark eyes did not tense. Gently, the priest said only, “Why?”

“Lot of reasons. Starting with our son is MIA in Vietnam. And... we got rather violently uprooted from our old life, and dropped down here in Arizona, kind... kind of like Dorothy in Oz.”

The priest nodded. “A move takes adjustment. And the loss of a son is an adjustment we never really make. It’s the kind of wound that doesn’t heal. But if your wife could find her way back to the loving embrace of our Lord, that would be a start.”

“I know. I know.”

“If you’d like to take confession—”

“No! Uh, no. Thank you, Father. You really do have a beautiful church here at San Xavier. Pleasure meeting you.”

The priest took his cue and rose and allowed Michael out of the pew. “As I said — you and your family are always welcome here. We do have several Anglo families who are members.”

“Thank you, Father.”

Outside, Michael moved quickly to his Lincoln in the parking lot. Across the way, tourists were buying trinkets and finger food — somehow it cheapened the experience. No way would he give confession, though he had two more killings on his conscience, Tommy and Jackie, those DeStefano crew would-be hitters he’d taken out at Cal-Neva.

But that had been self-defense, or at least in defense of his family (admittedly he’d pretty much just whacked Jackie), and he felt he could sort that out with God personally. He would make do without an intermediary in a collar. Besides, even after all these years, he had vivid memories of the pale faces of the priests who emerged from their side of the confessional after his father, the legendary Angel of Death, had dropped by to cash in his latest sins for forgiveness.

Still, Michael felt refreshed somehow, as he drove back to Paradise Estates. Relieved that he and the Man Upstairs were on speaking terms again. He found the pageantry and the Latin liturgy and the Host on the tongue all reassuring; he was taken back to his childhood, before his mother and brother were gone, when the world was big and unknowable but his life had been small and secure.

A stray thought popped into his mind: after Connor Looney killed Mama and Peter, his father had gone to the Looney mansion, to beard the lion in his den; but, before leaving the boy to sit in the car in the dark, Papa had given him a gun and said, “If I’m not back in an hour, go to Reverend Dodd at First Methodist for sanctuary.”

Papa did not want Michael going to Father Calloway at St. Pete’s, because mob money had built that church.

“No sanctuary there,” he’d said.

And one other thing Papa had made very clear: heaven was the next life; this life was hell, and just navigating through its flames was enough to keep a man busy.

When Michael pulled the Lincoln in the drive, Pat came flying out the front door, a whirlwind in a yellow pants suit. For a split second he thought she was glad to see him, and wanted to rush into his arms as a result of last night’s rekindling.

And she was glad to see him, but not because their love had been renewed or that she’d reconsidered about joining a church...

Her eyes were wide and hysterical, and her voice quavered with terror: “Oh, Mike — Anna’s gone! She’s gone!”

She gripped his arms with steel fingers.

His hands found her shoulders. “Easy, baby, easy. Go slow.”

The words were a rush: “I called across the street, at the Parhams’... to see if Anna wanted to have lunch with us.”

“Right. She and Cindy and some girlfriends were having a slumber party...”

“But they weren’t!” Her eyes and nostrils flared, and words streamed: “Molly Parham said she thought Cindy was staying with us last night — Molly’s fit to be tied, too, but she isn’t part of the Witness Goddamn Fucking Protection Program, with gangsters wanting to kill her and her whole fucking family!”

He took her into his arms and patted her gently, saying into her ear, “Settle down, honey, settle down — it’s nothing. Just a couple of high school girls putting one over on their parents. Just a bunch of kids trying to...” He remembered Anna’s words. “...Get out from under their parents’ thumbs for one night.”

Pat pulled away to look at him, her dark blue eyes showing red-tinged white all around. “No, no it’s worse than that. She’s gone, Michael. She’s run off!”

“What makes you think that? Did she leave a note?”

Pat shook her head, her blonde locks flouncing, as if the hair itself were as hysterical as its owner. “No... but come inside, Mike. Come inside.”

His wife dragged him by the hand through the living room and down the hallway to the bedrooms, and into Anna’s. She yanked the closet open, dramatically, and then opened several doors, and showed him.

“Most of her clothes are gone,” Pat said, working to control herself now. Making her case. “Not everything — she left enough for me to maybe not notice, right away. And her little powder-blue suitcase, that’s gone, too.”

Michael drew in a breath, let it out as he took in the room. “How did she sneak the stuff out of the house?”

“I don’t know! She says we patrol her like Nazis, but it’s not really true. I’ve left her here alone lots of times, when I’ve gone to the store or whatever.”

He moved closer to Pat. “Do we think that girl across the street helped? Cindy?”

She shrugged helplessly, saying, “Maybe. Cindy told her parents the same lie Anna told us.”

“What about Cindy? Is she gone?”

Eyes flared again. “Well, she’s not home!”

“No, honey, I mean — has Cindy run off, too?”

Pat threw up her hands. “I don’t know... I don’t know. I only know the Parhams are pretty upset.”

“Let’s go talk to them.”

They did.

Sid Parham was in life insurance, and his wife was a substitute grade school teacher; they were solid citizens, and wonderful, generous parents, whose daughter hated them.

But Cindy’s clothes were all present and accounted for, as well as her suitcase. The Parham girl did not seem to have taken off with Anna, though probably had aided and abetted the getaway.

The two sets of parents sat in the Parham kitchen, which was much like the Smiths’, looking out on a familiar fenced-in backyard with pool.

“They took off together yesterday afternoon,” said Mrs. Parham, a slender, not particularly attractive strawberry blonde in a blue-and-white floral-print-shorts outfit, “in Cindy’s new little red Mustang.”

“We bought Cindy a Mustang,” Sid Parham said pointlessly, a bald heavyset Uncle Fester — ish fellow, dressed for yardwork. “For graduation.”

“She hasn’t graduated yet,” Michael pointed out.

“Well, there are a lot of things going on this time of year,” Parham said defensively. Suddenly Cindy having a car seemed to be the problem. “Her having it early made sense. Senior parties and prom and—”

“Prom,” Pat said.

Michael looked at her, and their eyes locked. He said, “Tomorrow night’s the prom, back at—”

But he stopped. He’d come very close to saying Crystal Bay.

“Back where you used to live?” Sid said, finishing Michael’s statement with a question. “St. Paul, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Michael said. “St. Paul... If you hear from Cindy, let us know right away. Right away!”

“You’ll be the first,” Sid said.

“Don’t be worried,” Mrs. Parham said. “Cindy does this kind of thing all the time.”

Back in their own kitchen, Michael and Pat sat and held hands, tightly.

“You think she’s gone back home for prom?” Pat asked, shaking and on the verge of tears. Hope and despair fought for control of her voice as she said, “She’s gone back for prom, hasn’t she?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“Where else could she have gone?”

“It is a real possibility.” He sighed and shrugged. “But it’s a long damn drive... twelve, thirteen hours.”

Shaking her head, Pat said absurdly, “She doesn’t have that kind of driving experience!”

“Easy, Pat — remember, she doesn’t have a car. If Cindy didn’t drive her, she’d have to take a bus or plane. A girl her age can’t rent a vehicle... unless she has fake ID, which I suppose—”

Pat squeezed his hand so hard it hurt. “What are we going to do? Oh my God, Michael — what in hell can we do?”

“I’m not sure.”

“That panic button!” Her eyebrows climbed her forehead. “We’ll call the federal panic button, and they’ll go get her!”

“We could do that. Are you prepared to move again?”

Pat, half out of the chair, froze. “What?”

“If I call our friend Assistant Director Shore, he’ll help us out — send marshals to Lake Tahoe to grab her up... if our assumption is right... but in any case, they will consider our cover blown.”

Still frozen, she asked, “So what?”

“So... it means another name change. Another move. Another city. Another new life — for all of us.”

She sat heavily down. Her eyes stared at nothing. “Oh, Christ... but what else can we do?”

“If we’re right about where Anna’s gone, we retrieve her. I’ll drive or fly back home, and get her. The prom isn’t till tomorrow night.”

Pat was looking at him now, guardedly hopeful. “We’ll go together?”

“No. I think... I think the first thing we do is call some people back home.”

Nodding decisively, Pat said, “I can do that.”

“No.” He held out a cautionary palm. “I don’t want those calls on our long-distance charges. Hell, for all I know, the feds have our phone tapped.”

Indignation tweaked her expression. “I thought we were the good guys!”

“No — we’re not the good guys, and we’re not the bad guys. We’re the poor bastards getting squeezed between... I’ll go to a phone booth, and call every neighbor back there I can think of, to see if anyone’s seen Anna.”

Nodding again, frantically, she said, “Start with the Grace house! She’s gone back to be with that Gary, I just know she has!”

He nodded, too, but slowly, reassuringly. “That’s where I’ll start. Can you think of anyone who lives next door to the Graces? Or even in their neighborhood?”

Her eyes tightened. “No... No, his family lives in Incline Village. That Pineview development, but I don’t know anybody there. Damn!”

He held his palm up again. “Pat, it’ll be all right. Do we have a picture of Anna since we moved here?”

Turning her head toward the hallway, she said, “There are some snapshots on her mirror, from when she and her wonderful-great-good-friend-that-little-bitch-of-a-brat Cindy went horseback riding.”

“Get me one, will you?”

“All right.” She stood, then hovered. “...What are you going to do with it?”

“I’m going to hit the bus stations, train depots, and the airport.”

“You make it sound like... like she’s a runaway.”

“She is, sort of. But just for the weekend, I think. This is just about prom.”

Again her eyes tightened, in confusion this time. “But didn’t Cindy drive her...?”

“We don’t know that. And that’s a long way to drive, whether Cindy’s along or not. The picture?”

“All right.”

Rising, he said, “I’ll be in my study.”

She eyed him with mild suspicion. “Doing what?”

“Getting something.”

“Getting what, Michael?”

“Pat — just fetch the picture, okay? And stay calm. Stay steady.”

She went off to Anna’s room, and he slipped into his study and from a locked desk drawer got the .45 automatic — the gun his father had taken on the road, the gun he had taken to Bataan, the gun he’d used as an Outfit enforcer — and slipped it in his waistband, in the small of his back, covering it. He wasn’t sure he would need it; he wasn’t even really sure why instinct said to take it with him.

But that’s what instinct said.

And he listened.

He’d just finished snugging the gun away when he heard Pat in the hall. Then she was standing framed in the doorway, holding up the snapshot.

“Everything else we have of Anna,” she said glumly, “didn’t make the trip from Crystal Bay.”

She stepped into the study, and he took the snapshot, dropped it into his suitcoat pocket, then wrapped her up in his arms and looked earnestly at her.

“Darling,” he said softly, “it’s going to be fine — she’s just a teenager who didn’t want to miss her senior prom. Can you blame her?”

Frustration and something like anger colored her face. “Doesn’t she know what she’s done? How she’s put us all at risk?”

“No. Like I said, she’s a teenager... And even when we get her back home, safe and sound, we may have to seriously consider telling Shore all about this.”

Alarm again widened the dark blue eyes. “You said bringing WITSEC in was dangerous...”

“It may be more dangerous not t moving on to another identity. I’m going to want to talk to Anna and her boyfriend about just how much contact they’ve maintained, and how they did it. And then, remember... we have another option.”

Confusion tensed her forehead. “Which is what?”

“We still have our half-mil nest egg. We can start over like we were planning to, before WITSEC stepped in — a new life in Mexico or Brazil or some damn place. Without the federal safety net, but also without the federal hassle.”

Her eyes were so tight with thought, they were almost closed. “What will Anna think about that?”

He smirked. “What does she think now?”

She fell into his arms and held on to him tight and shivered. “I want to go with you.”

“Back to Tahoe?”

“Everywhere — to the airport and—”

He held her away, just a little, and locked her eyes with his. “No, honey. You need to stay here. By the phone.”

She thought about that, then said, “You’re right.”

“Anna may call, or the Parhams may hear from Cindy, or Cindy may show up and—”

“You’re right. Go.” She managed a crinkly smile, somehow. “Get out of here and find our little girl... ya big lug.”

“I love it when you call me that.”

“Find our daughter.” The smile from a moment ago was ancient history. “I couldn’t take... Find her.”

He nodded, and then he kissed her lightly.

She clutched his face in one hand, roughly, in an almost accusatory fashion, and then kissed him — hard.

“I love you, Michael. You’ll come through for us. You always come through.”

“I love you, Patsy Ann,” he said, and kissed her.

And went off to find their daughter.

Eight

Michael started with the Greyhound Terminal on South Church, talking to every clerk and vendor and even a guy with a broom. The snapshot of Anna was fairly close up, and she was an attractive girl whose heart-shaped face, big dark eyes, and endless brown mane made her distinctive enough to be remembered. But no one did.

American Trailways on East Tenth drew the same disappointing results, though Michael did catch one slight break. The same clerks were working today, at both terminals, as had been on duty yesterday afternoon. Which was exactly when his daughter would have come around to buy a bus ticket (based on when Cindy’s parents saw the girls drive off in that red Mustang).

Otherwise, Michael would have had to spend much of the day tracking down off — duty bus-station tellers, all over Tucson.

The identical combination of good and bad luck awaited him at the Southern Pacific railroad station on East Toole: same clerks on duty as yesterday, none of whom recognized Anna’s picture. This was repeated at Tucson International, six miles from the city, out US 89, though it took a while — he had to query busy clerks at American Airlines, TWA, and half a dozen other lines major and minor.

From a pay phone at the airport, already pushing four p.m., he called the Parhams to see if they’d heard anything from their daughter, Cindy. They had not.

So he called home.

Pat answered the phone with a painfully eager, “Yes?”

“Just me, sweetheart.” From the sound of her voice, he knew the answer to his next question, but he asked, anyway: “Hear from Anna?”

“No. Any luck with the snapshot?”

“Afraid not.” He quickly filled her in about the air, bus, and train terminals. “I think we can be reasonably sure she didn’t travel that way. I just called the Parhams and they haven’t heard from Cindy, either.”

“You think Cindy drove Anna to Tahoe?”

“Well, it’s just the idiotic kind of road trip a couple of teenagers might take. And with that many hours facing them, two drivers, trading off behind the wheel, would suit the plan.”

“Michael, we don’t know for sure she went home...”

“No, we don’t. She and Cindy could be hanging out with some of their friends at some mountain cabin, taking their rebellion out with beer or pot or something.”

“That doesn’t sound like Anna.”

“Not to me, either, but a kid frustrated about her life... on the weekend of the prom she can’t attend... could behave seriously out of character.”

“Oh, Michael... what now?”

The frustration and desperation in his wife’s voice broke Michael’s heart, but he kept his own tone positive.

“Do me a favor, sweetheart. Call across the street and get that Parham woman to phone the parents of every friend of their daughter’s she can think of. If Anna’s still in Tucson, we need to find out...”

He left unstated:... before I go running around the Tahoe area, breaking our cover, looking for her. Just in case the feds were tapping the Smith line...

“Yes,” Pat was saying, “yes, that makes sense. I’ll get her to do that right away... What about those calls we talked about?”

Pat, too, was being cautious about what she said on the phone. She was referring to the long-distance calls to friends in Tahoe that Michael had said he’d make. Good girl, he thought.

“I’m doing that next... Listen, I know it’s no picnic for you, staying home by the phone. But it’s important.”

“I know it is. And I love you, Michael, for... for springing into action like this.”

“Listen, she’s fine. You just hang in there, baby. I love you, too.”

They said goodbye and hung up.

Before he left Tucson International, Michael bought a ticket on the red-eye to Reno — the flight, on American, would leave at one a.m.; in Reno he would rent a car and spend Saturday in Crystal Bay and Incline Village, tracking down their wayward daughter; and would she be thrilled with her father, when he pulled the prom rug out from under her...

On Congress he found a drive-in bank that stayed open till five, and just made it in time to trade paper money for rolls of nickels, dimes, and quarters.

His next stop was the library on South Sixth. In the massive two-winged red-brick building, he found a wall of shelves with out-of-town phone books — including one labeled lake tahoe area. He hauled the relatively slender directory out onto a stone table in the library patio and sat in the sunshine for twenty minutes copying numbers onto a piece of scratch paper.

At a pancake house on Stone, he pulled in to the parking lot and soon was making phone calls in a nearby booth.

He’d already prepared a speech for these friends and acquaintances who’d been abandoned when WITSEC whisked the Satarianos into the Smiths’ new life.

“Yeah, well, I got this job opportunity on the East Coast and I had to jump at it. Didn’t mean to leave you folks in the lurch.”

That was all he intended to share, other than, “Look, I promise I’ll call again under better circumstances, but Pat and me, we’re crazy with worry, trying to find Anna. We think she got homesick and ran back there to go to the senior prom. Have you seen her?”

This, with minor variations, was how he steamrolled over any questions, and elicited support, since most of those he called were also parents. Then when whoever-he’d-called said he or she hadn’t seen Anna, Michael would say, “Thanks, anyway, sorry, gotta keep looking, ’bye,” and hang up.

This approach was successful in all ways except the key one...

...No one had seen Anna.

Worst of all: no answer when he dialed the number of boyfriend Gary Grace’s parents. And he tried them in between every other call, getting nothing but an endless ring and then the coins rattling back down.

The need to keep the calls brief prevented gathering any other information, such as whether the Graces were out of town. But some information Michael already had: for example, he knew that little groups of the kids always went out to dinner before the prom, nothing organized by the schools, just cliques, socializing, and that after prom, parties (mostly at the homes of various kids) would go on till dawn.

Sometimes the prom itself was held in the Incline Village High School’s gymnasium, but all the crepe-paper streamers in the world couldn’t turn that echoey, sweat-sock-smelling cavern into the kind of romantic wonderland the students had in mind. So most years, the Prom Committee found some other, more appropriate venue in the area; and of course Tahoe offered many nice possibilities.

Several months (that seemed like years) ago, Michael had taken the booking himself, helping out his daughter, who after all had been on the committee: the 1973 Incline Village Senior Prom would be held in the celebrated Indian Lounge of the Cal-Neva Lodge.

This fact may have eluded Pat; in any case, Michael had no intention of reminding her...

When he emerged, unsuccessful, from the phone booth, night had settled over Tucson, and the neon sambo’s sign had replaced the sun. Still in the suitcoat, he raised the lapels against a cool evening that threatened to turn cold.

He pulled into the driveway just after seven.

Pat met him at the door, a beautiful woman who looked terrible, her makeup long since cried off, her eyes webbed with red, her usually carefully coiffed ’do a tangle of greasy blonde worms and snakes; only the yellow pants suit looked crisp, polyester holding up under any tragedy.

He had never seen her look worse, nor loved her more.

“Nothing from the calls,” he said.

“Not a word from Anna,” she said, voice cracking.

He looped an arm around her and walked her into the house, nudging the door shut. Her head leaned on his shoulder.

They settled onto the Chesterfield couch in the front room, their target-like abstract paintings seeming particularly ugly to him at the moment.

“Have you heard from the Parhams lately?” he asked.

She swallowed and nodded. “Yes, Molly claims she called everybody she could think of, going back to friends Cindy had in junior high. All the parents were supportive, of course, but nobody knew anything.”

“No big party last night?”

“No. And no other lies about a slumber party at somebody else’s house. This looks like strictly a scheme of Anna’s and Cindy’s.”

“Really looking that way.”

Pat craned her head. “Do you think Anna went somewhere else?”

“Other than Tahoe, you mean?”

“Yes. I mean, if she’s really fed up with us, maybe she went out to California or something. Lot of kids live on the street out there — Haight-Ashbury or something?”

He shook his head. “Our girl’s no hippie. She likes her creature comforts. Really, we’re probably overreacting.”

She reared back. “How can you say that?”

“I mean... because of our specific... situation, we’re reacting in a way that... makes sense.” He shrugged. “But if you take WITSEC out of the equation, Anna’s just a teenager whose parents moved and made her miss prom.”

“You mean... she hasn’t run away for good, just to go back to prom?”

“Right. If we didn’t do a thing, she’d probably come strolling in that front door tomorrow night or Sunday, and face the music.”

Pat’s eyes narrowed. “You could be right. I think... I think you are right. She’s just run away for the weekend. But with our... like you said, ‘situation’... it’s so very awfully terribly dangerous.”

“Yeah.”

He held Pat, and she cried into his chest.

For a long time he squeezed her, patted her, and then he said, “Should we eat something? I haven’t eaten all day.”

“Could you eat? I don’t think I could eat any-thing.”

“We probably should.”

He was thinking of keeping her busy; but he was also thinking about keeping himself sharp and straight — he’d be flying via that red-eye tonight, after all. With a big day tomorrow...

Fifteen minutes later they were eating ham-and-Swiss-cheese sandwiches at the kitchen table. Pat was drinking a glass of milk, Michael a Coke.

“Funny,” he said.

She smirked humorlessly, half-eaten sandwich in hand. “I can’t imagine what’s ‘funny.’”

“Took me back a second. When we were kids in DeKalb... teenagers like Anna... this is what we’d drink. Woolworth’s soda-fountain counter. Glass of milk for you, Coke for me.”

Her smile was bittersweet. “We’ve been together a long time, Michael.”

“I know. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

She reached across and squeezed his hand. “What now? I’ll go crazy, waiting.”

He told her about the ticket on the red-eye.

“You have to stay here,” he said.

She arched an eyebrow. “Hold down the fort?”

“Home fires burning,” he said, nodding. “I’ll keep you posted, every step of the way.”

“I know you will. But I... I...”

She put her sandwich down and began to cry again. He got up and went around to her, knelt by her, slipped an arm around her shoulder, and said, “I know it’s hard to be strong. And there’s not much you can do, now. You really should get some sleep.”

“Sleep? I don’t think that’s possible.”

“You didn’t think you could eat, either, and what happened to half of that sandwich?”

She laughed a little. “I still have those pills, from when... when we heard about Mike.”

She meant the sedatives.

“Can you take those, along with the, uh, other?”

“Valium, Michael. It’s not a bad word. Yes. The same doctor prescribed both, nothing to worry about.”

“Okay. Well, I’ll feel better on that plane, not thinking you’re tossing and turning and, uh, just...”

“A mess?” She sighed, managed a small smile. Then she yawned. “My God, I am tired, at that...”

She took the pills at the kitchen counter, and he walked her into the bedroom. She got undressed and into her preferred nightwear, baggy black silk men’s pajamas. Either the time they’d spent talking and eating, or the medication, had relaxed her.

He took her in his arms. “You look beautiful.”

“Oh yeah, right.”

“But you do.” He kissed her on the mouth, tenderly. “Get some rest. And I’ll hold down the fort...”

“Love you,” she said, and got under the covers of the four-poster. She switched off the nightstand lamp, and he slipped out of the dark bedroom into the hall, closing the door, tight.

He went back and finished his sandwich. Considering what she’d been through, Pat was doing all right; he was glad she’d had the presence of mind to get some sleep, even if a somewhat medicated one. He cleared the kitchen table, put the dishes in the sink, and ran water over them. He got out of the suit he’d been wearing all day and into a black Banlon shirt, some gray Sansabelt slacks, and crepe-sole loafers. Then he took some time getting an overnight bag together, including a change of clothes, some toiletries, and a box of .45 ammunition.

Though exhaustion was nipping at his heels, he didn’t allow himself to fall asleep; he sat in his recliner in the rec room, sipping another Coke (the caffeine was just the ticket), and watched television, volume low so as not to bother Pat. The Rockford Files he enjoyed — Jim Garner was just doing Maverick again, but that was okay with Michael — but halfway through Police Woman, he was thinking that Angie Dickinson’s good looks weren’t enough to justify this nonsense when, on the end table beside him, the phone rang.

He looked toward the hall, and the bedroom, wondering if it would wake her, expecting Pat to come rushing out.

“Smith residence.”

“Say,” an amiably gruff male voice said without preamble, “it’s Sid Parham. Listen, Cindy’s come home.”

He sat up. “What does she say about Anna?”

“Why don’t you come over and talk to her yourself. She says Anna’s fine, but...” Embarrassment colored the perhaps too-friendly voice. “...You come talk to her yourself.”

He went in to tell Pat, but she was sound asleep.

Deciding not to disturb her, he shut her back in, and soon stepped out into another chill, clear night, though the streetlamp on this block was out and the full moon was on its own. Almost running, he crossed the street to the Parhams; on the front stoop, he glanced at his watch, thinking about the red-eye flight: quarter till eleven.

Stocky bald Sid Parham, in a two-tone burnt-orange leisure suit (was he going skydiving?) met Michael at the door and led him, once again, to the kitchen. Molly was wearing an identical leisure suit. And parents these days wondered why kids rebelled...

All four chairs were taken at the square glass kitchen table, mother and father framing the daughter, with Michael across from the girl, a small, petite blonde who had drawn the best features from both her parents, and still wasn’t pretty.

But maybe that wasn’t fair — the girl looked tired, and sat slumped with more than just sullenness. Her light blue eyes were hooded, emphasizing her robin’s-egg eye shadow, their industrial-strength mascara matched by dark circles that could pass for Halloween makeup.

She didn’t look at him, at first. He’d seen this teenager with his daughter numerous times, and she’d always been well-groomed, for the type; but tonight her hair — blonde with dark roots, straight to her shoulders — looked unwashed and bedraggled. She wore a green tank top, which flattened the perk out of her small breasts, and cut-off denim short-shorts and sandals.

She was playing with her car keys.

Had he been her father, Michael would have already taken those away from her.

But he kept his voice friendly. “Cindy, what’s the story? Where is Anna?”

“How should I know?” Cindy asked.

Her father said to her, “You told me she’s all right.”

“Well, she is.”

Michael said, “When did you see her last?”

“Yesterday.”

“Where is she?”

Half a smirk dimpled a cheek. “When was I put in charge of her?”

“You weren’t. Where is she, Cindy?”

A weight-of-the-world sigh came up from her toes; my gaaaawd, adults were stupid! “Look, I dropped her off at a Denny’s on Speedway yesterday evening.”

“Why?”

“She met up with some friends in the parking lot. They were going to a party.”

“What friends? What party?”

“I don’t know — I didn’t go to it. And they were her friends, not mine. I had this other party to go to.”

Michael shook his head; but he kept all anger and irritation out of his voice. “Cindy, you’re Anna’s only friend, her only contact in this town. We’ve only been here six weeks.”

“What’s the problem?” She looked up in mock innocence and batted her eyelashes at Michael, which might have worked if he were eighteen and her baby blues hadn’t been so bleary. “Didn’t she come home or something?”

“You know she didn’t.”

Her father said, “Cindy! You told us Anna was fine!”

She gave him a dirty look and went back to playing with her keys.

Michael said, “You do know where she is.”

The girl said nothing.

“Where is she, Cindy?”

“I told you I don’t know.”

“Would you rather talk to the police?”

She looked up sharply. “What did I do?”

Michael shrugged. “My daughter’s been gone long enough for me to file a missing-persons report. You’re the last known party to’ve seen Anna. So you’re the first they’ll be talking to.”

“...What if I do know where she is?”

“Then you should tell me.”

She shook her head. “I’m not going to tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Because I promised her. You guys are terrible to her.”

“Then I’ll tell you. She’s in Lake Tahoe.”

Cindy said nothing, but her eyelids flickered.

Sid Parham said, “Where have you been since yesterday, Cindy?”

“Driving.”

Molly Parham said, “Driving where? You’re going to get in trouble, young lady!”

Michael closed his eyes.

Then he opened them and said, “Cindy, I know Anna went back to Crystal Bay so she could attend prom.”

Sid Parham said to Michael, “You’re from St. Paul.”

Michael said, “Sid, I know I’m a guest in your home. But you need to let me handle this.”

“Well... sure... but...”

Michael rose, gave Parham a nod to come talk to him, out of the girl’s earshot. Near where the kitchen fed the living room, Michael said softly, “I have a big favor to ask, Sid — and I’m asking as one father to another. May I please talk to your daughter alone?”

“Oh, now, I don’t—”

“I’m not going to browbeat her, and I certainly won’t touch her. But I think having you and your wife there makes it harder for me to get through to Cindy.”

“Why would that be?”

“Kids this age take an attitude with their parents around. I’ve talked to Cindy half a dozen times, and she’s never been like this with me before. I think I can get her to relate to me... one-on-one, if you’ll give me the chance.”

Parham drew in a deep breath, looking more than ever like Uncle Fester; when the man finally spoke, Michael half-expected it to be in a high-pitched whiny voice.

But the voice was Sid’s usual baritone, and so gentle as to be almost sweet. “Listen, Michael — I know you love your little girl. Like we love ours. And I know all about how difficult it can be... So you go ahead.”

“Thank you, Sid.”

“Understand, if it gets loud, I’m coming in!”

“I understand.”

Parham nodded. “I’ll talk to Molly... Give me a minute.”

The man of the house went over, whispered in his better half’s ear; she frowned, started to say something, but he whispered again. And finally, reluctantly, she nodded.

Sid, walking his wife away from the kitchen table, a gentle guiding hand on her elbow, said, “We’ll be in the front room, if you need us.”

“Thank you,” Michael said.

As they left — looking like janitors in an art museum in those leisure suits — Cindy frowned. She seemed confused and perhaps a little worried.

Michael said to her, “How much did Anna tell you?”

Cindy looked past him and shrugged.

“Did she tell you that she was putting herself in danger?”

Cindy looked at her keys, fiddled with them.

He plucked the keys from her fingertips and set them down, with a small clunk, out of her immediate reach.

“Did she tell you that she was putting her mother and me in danger?”

Cindy folded her arms over her small flattened breasts. “She wanted to go to her prom. What’s so dangerous about that?”

Relieved to finally have confirmation of his theory, he asked, “How did she get there?”

The girl shrugged. Her emotions seemed on the verge of breaking through the sulk; the tiredness helped — it took energy to maintain a good pout, even for a kid.

“Did she tell you everything?”

“...Maybe.”

“Did she tell you the kind of people this involves?”

The girl looked away.

Were her eyes damp?

“You didn’t drive her there. If you had, you’d still be in Tahoe, staying till after prom, to make the round trip.”

She smirked, but the curled lips quivered. Somehow the blue eye shadow and mascara only made her look younger.

“What did you do, Cindy?” he asked, casual. “Meet the boyfriend halfway?”

The girl’s forehead tensed a little.

Thinking out loud, Michael said, “You drove halfway, and met Gary at a rest stop or gas station...? And he drove her the rest of the way, right?”

“Why ask if you know?”

“Not a rest stop. I’m going to say... Las Vegas. That’s about halfway, and that sounds like fun. But all that desert driving, it’s no picnic, is it?”

Tiny chin jutted. “What if I did drive her? I’m eighteen.”

“Without stopping it’d be maybe six, seven hours to Vegas. With pee breaks, and grabbing quick bites at diners, maybe eating in the car. You must have air-conditioning in that little Mustang your folks got you...”

“So what if I do?”

He sat forward. He kept his voice even, flat, only vaguely threatening. “Why are you back so late? Why didn’t you stay in Vegas longer?”

“You’re so smart. You tell me.”

“...Well, it sounded like more fun than it was. You’re right, you are eighteen, and you have to be twenty-one to get into the casinos. And those security boys can spot a fake ID at a hundred yards.”

Her eyes tensed; she was staring down through the glass table.

“So you drove up and down the Strip, taking in all those bright lights, and you had some food, drive-in maybe, and maybe shopped a little. Couple nice new malls, there. Did Anna and Gary spend the night in Vegas?”

She said nothing; but she swallowed.

“And then you kids fooled around Sin City this morning, nice breakfast, maybe a little shopping — there’s a record shop Anna likes there, with lots of British releases...”

Her eyes flashed a little. He was obviously dead-on. Seemed to frighten her that he had Anna pegged like that.

“I’m not psychic, Cindy. Our family’s spent a lot of time in Vegas, over the years, is all — I’ve even worked there. So the two of them headed out for Tahoe today, about midafternoon maybe? Three or four? Some more nasty desert driving ahead for ’em. But they ought to be there, by now. Like you’re here.”

She leaned an elbow on the glass table, rested her head against a hand.

“Where are they staying, Cindy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Cindy, how much did she tell you?”

“What do you mean? About what?”

“You know what I mean. And about what.”

She swallowed again; she was trembling. “Everything, I guess. That, that you... you ran casinos and stuff. And you’re testifying against these Corleone-type guys, so you’re, like... hiding here? In Tucson?”

“Right. And now Anna’s actions... and your actions... have put her and Gary, and me and Anna’s mother, and even you and your parents, at terrible risk.”

“What? That’s crazy.”

“It is crazy. These people are ruthless. They take a human life like you might swat a mosquito. Means nothing to them.”

She covered her face with a hand whose hot-pink nails were chipped a little. “I... I really don’t know where they’re staying... I just know they... they’re in Tahoe. I just know... just know Anna wanted to go to her prom.” She looked up with eyes soaked with tears, the mascara streaming in dark ribbons. “Why is that so wrong? Who’s gonna care about that, but her stupid parents?... S-sorry.”

“Anna told you not to tell anybody about us — about my being a witness, didn’t she?”

“Y-yes.”

“Well, that includes your parents, Cindy. Do you understand? That includes your parents.”

The girl nodded a bunch of times, then rose to get some Kleenex from a dispenser on the kitchen counter. He rose and went to her, put a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m not mad at you.”

She was still crying, but not hard.

“I know you were just trying to be Anna’s friend.”

“I... I am Anna’s friend.”

“And that’s why you’ll keep everything we talked about between us — just you and me, Cindy.” He took her face in a hand, gently. “Just you and me? Friends?”

She swallowed and nodded. “Friends.”

He was going off to join her parents when her voice called out, “Mr. Smith!... I’m sorry. Didn’t you ever do anything stupid, when you were a kid?”

“No,” he said, and smiled at her.

She laughed a little, choked on snot, blew her nose, and was crying at the glass table again as he stepped into the living room.

Molly, reading House Beautiful magazine, was seated on a squat low-backed red-and-black sofa that was like a massive unhealed wound against the pale-pink walls. A squat ugly cactus decorated an end table, and a pop-art print of a crying comic-book woman was framed on one wall next to shelves of stereo gear and LPs, opposite another wall of silvered panels reflecting the room back at itself, distortedly.

Sid was at the front picture window, the dark-pink drapes drawn, peeking around an edge. “Goddamned hippies,” he was saying.

Michael stood beside him. “Cindy gave me the information I needed. She was very helpful... What’s wrong, Sid?”

He nodded toward the street. “I noticed this pothead scum earlier today, driving around the neighborhood.”

Leaning in next to his neighbor, Michael looked out and saw a van parked just down the block, almost directly under the burned-out streetlamp, straddling where the Smith property ended and their next-door neighbor’s began... an old faded red panel truck with flowers and peace symbols and the KEEP ON TRUCKIN’ guy painted on it, badly.

Sid’s upper teeth were showing, and he wasn’t smiling. “What are they doing, coming around a respectable neighborhood like this for, anyway? Making their goddamn drug deals...”

The back of Michael’s neck was tingling, but he said, “Don’t worry about it,” and patted Parham on the shoulder. “I’ll check it out.”

“Would you, pal? You, uh... want me to go with you?”

Michael smiled and shook his head. “No. I’ll just run over and tell ’em to go peddle their papers someplace else.”

“Rolling papers, you mean!”

He managed a polite laugh, and said, “Why don’t you two check on your daughter? She’s a little upset.”

Parham nodded, and he and Molly went off in their unisex uniforms, toward the kitchen.

Michael turned off the front stoop light before slipping out of the house.

That van had not been here when he’d crossed the street half an hour or so before. Head lowered, he walked down the sidewalk on the Parhams’ side of the block, away from his house. When he came up from behind, along the driver’s side of the battered van, he stayed down, hoping not to be picked up noticeably in the side mirror.

Like a carhop with a gun, Michael thrust the .45 through the window into the chest of the driver and without even getting a good look at the hippie behind the wheel, harshly whispered, “What the hell is this about?”

But the hippie behind the wheel was not a hippie.

He was a hood in his forties from Chicago in a bad Beatle wig and an old paisley shirt and tie-dye jeans and a fur vest Sonny Bono might have considered cool in 1966.

Jimmy Nappi was Giancana’s man, a driver on scores mostly, with tiny eyes, a long nose, a wide mouth, and plenty of pockmarks. He was not known as a tough guy, not somebody generally enlisted for killings, though he was a made man, so had killed at least once.

But if Nappi was here — parked just down the street from the “Smith” house, with his hands on the wheel of a van that tried much too hard to look like it belonged to hippies — it could only be for one reason.

No time for discussion; no reason to give Nappi a chance to go for the .38 on the rider’s seat beside him.

Michael buried the snout of the .45 in the hair vest and fired, and all that Sonny Bono fur served well as an impromptu silencer.

Heading around back of the house, Michael again stayed low, 45 in hand. With the Lincoln in the driveway, they would have figured he’d be home. He prayed he was not too late. He climbed over the fence and lowered himself to the cement patio by the pool. The sliding-glass doors onto the kitchen were locked, he knew, but another conventional door was down off the laundry room, and he used his key on it as silently as possible, easing the door open, making only the slightest creak.

Laundry room was empty.

Kitchen, too — just as he’d left it, right down to the dishes in the sink.

Padding through on his crepe soles, he could faintly hear Ed McMahon saying, “Heeeeere’s Johnny,” the audience responding with the usual applause; he’d left the TV on in the rec room, when he left. That might actually help — it would cover him...

In the trashed living room, standing next to the slashed, stuffing-spilling Chesterfield sofa, using a can of red spray paint on the wall, was another Giancana hood playing hippie (in a wig and jeans and Hendrix T-shirt) — Guido Caruso, a big fat-faced fuck who took pleasure in beating on deadbeat welshers, when they were smaller than him, anyway.

Sprayed across one of the abstract green-and-black-and-red-and-white geometric paintings, Guido had written: off the pigs! On the wall over the couch, he had already written heltar [sic] and had just gotten to skel when Michael blew the top of his head off and made another abstract painting on the wall, albeit lacking a frame and heavy on the red.

Michael barreled into the hallway and almost ran into the third “hippie,” this one with a fake beard to go with his Beatle wig and faded striped red-and-blue jeans and an American flag T-shirt — Frankie Inoglia, a sadistic enforcer in the Mad Sam mode. As skinny and wild-eyed as Manson himself, Inoglia had just exited the bedroom where Michael had left Pat not long ago.

Inoglia had a blood-dripping butcher knife in his Playtex-gloved fist, and when he saw Michael coming, he raised the blade high, a pearl of blood flicking off the poised-to-stab point onto Michael’s cheek like a single tear as he shot the intruder in the right kneecap, and — as Inoglia was going down — Michael shot him in the left kneecap, too, then kicked the knife out of the fallen, screaming man’s hand as he passed, heading into the bedroom.

Michael would relive this waking nightmare many times, but it would never be as vivid as in this moment.

The nightstand lamp was switched on, its shade spattered and streaked with red. kill the pigs was fingertip-scrawled in blood on the wall just over the headboard of their four-poster, and Pat, on her back, was slashed to ribbons on the bed itself, the sheets soaked, her black silk pajamas shimmering with the life that had been spilled. He stood beside her and looked down and saw that her throat had been cut, slashed ear to ear. The other wounds — save one, over her heart — were not so deep. They were window dressing, part of the hippie masquerade. The chest stab had killed her, and — judging by the placid expression on her lovely untouched face, eyes closed — in her sleep.

This small saving grace would be for Michael the only thing, in days ahead, that would stave off madness.

He kissed her forehead.

“Goodbye, baby,” he said.

In the hallway, he knelt beside Inoglia, who was still screaming in pain, the faux hippie an overgrown fetus now, grabbing first one ruined kneecap, then another, a process he kept repeating, mixing his own blood with what had already been on the dishwashing gloves he wore.

“She was asleep when you killed her?”

“Fuck you, rat! Fuck you!”

Johnny Carson was getting big laughs in the rec room.

“She was asleep?”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!”

“That’s why I’m doing you this favor,” he said, and shot his wife’s assassin through the left temple, the bullet smacking into the wall on the other side, its kiss puckering the plaster.

The shots and the screams — on the heels of Sid Parham’s paranoia about hippies in the neighborhood — would have the police here soon.

Never looking at his dead wife, he returned to the bloody bedroom and transferred the contents of the overnight bag into a larger suitcase, threw in more clothes, and made room for the briefcase with half a million dollars in it, which he retrieved from under the floorboards in the closet of his study.

From the same hiding place he took his Garand rifle — a souvenir the feds didn’t know he’d hung on to — which was field-stripped into barrel, buttstock, and trigger group, also tucked away were four boxes of .30 ammunition, twenty cartridges each. The parts of the rifle and the small white ammo boxes he wrapped up in various articles of clothing within the suitcase.

In the kitchen he grabbed the rest of his wife’s pill bottle, figuring the sedatives would come in handy. In the bathroom he peed, then checked to see if he had any blood on himself or his clothes, and didn’t. Finally he took a .38 long-barreled Smith & Wesson revolver off the corpse of Inoglia, and left this house, and the woman he had loved for over thirty years, behind.

A white-faced Parham was in the window across the way when Michael pulled out in the Lincoln, suitcase in the backseat, and four cop cars siren-screamed past him on US 89 on his way to the airport.

He had a red-eye to catch.

Nine

Under vaguely yellow lighting, Michael — in the black Banlon sport shirt and gray slacks with a dark blue windbreaker — parked the Lincoln Continental in the Tucson International lot, and got his suitcase out of the trunk.

Six weeks ago, the ’72 Mark IV had been deeded over to “Michael Smith” by WITSEC associate director Shore — a confiscated, luxury, low-mileage number poised to go on a federal auction block, where it would likely now end up again.

Just in case anyone was watching, Michael made a show of locking the automobile, although he would be walking away from what had once been a nine-thousand-dollar ride.

Michael did not relish entering the airport, and taking his red-eye flight, unarmed; but with the rash of skyjackings the last couple years, airport security had been beefed up. With these new metal detectors, and search of carry-on bags, he dared not tote his .45. The gun was in his Samsonite suitcase, along with his field-stripped Garand rifle, various boxes of ammunition, and a briefcase filled with half a million in cash.

This was a bag he hoped the airline could manage not to lose.

Michael checked it with an attractive blonde in stewardess mufti at the American Airlines counter in the outer terminal, who set it down with another half-dozen bags. Then he headed for the nearby bank of telephone booths — he had a long-distance call to make.

This time not even a dime was required, much less an elaborate handful of change; he closed himself in, sat, and dialed O, asked for the charges to be reversed...

...and gave the operator the “panic button” number.

“Yes?” a male voice answered.

“A Mr. Michael Smith calling,” the operator said, “station to station — will you accept the charges?”

“Yes.”

Michael said, “I need to talk to Associate Director Shore immediately.”

“Where can you be reached?”

Michael read the number off the phone.

“He’ll be with you in five minutes.”

“Make it sooner.”

It was — about three.

“What’s wrong, Michael?”

Anxiety undercut the pleasant business-like surface of the WITSEC director’s tone.

“You haven’t had any reports?”

“No. What’s wrong, man?”

Michael gave Shore a brief dispassionate description of what had gone down at the Smith residence.

“Oh my God,” Shore said, sounding not just shaken but genuinely saddened over Pat’s murder.

After completing the story — the only details he skipped were such private matters as packing guns, money, and sedatives — Michael said, “Don’t ask me where I am. You probably already know.”

“I don’t, but of course it would be easy enough to find out. Let’s agree to work together in this dark hour. You stay put, and—”

“No. I don’t like your level of protection.”

“Michael... I can understand that... Jesus Christ, I can understand that, but nothing like this has ever happened before in the program! I swear to you!”

“Imagine how comforting that is to hear.”

“I... I can’t imagine what you’re going through. How’s... how’s your daughter taking it?”

Unless Shore’s acting rivaled George C. Scott’s, the fed was honestly unaware of the girl’s disappearance, a state Michael was not about to spoil by sharing information.

“Her name is Anna, Harry, and how do you think she’s doing? Her mother was butchered.”

“Michael... I guarantee your safety. Yours and Anna’s.”

“I thought you already had.”

The words came in a fevered rush: “I don’t know what you have in mind, but you can’t make it alone out there. You need us. You... need... us.”

“No. You need me, maybe. This is just a courtesy call, so you can clean up out at Paradise Estates, if you want. And to, you know, say so long and fuck you.”

A sigh breathed through the receiver, then: “Michael, you have to come in from the cold, you just have to...”

“I like the cold. Getting colder.”

Shore tried another tack. “You said these were Giancana’s men? Not DeStefano crew, like before?”

“All Giancana insiders. Hard asses. Formerly.”

Shore’s words continued to leap desperately out of the receiver: “Michael, since last week, Giancana is back in the United States — our intelligence indicates he’s trying to position himself for a return to power. That’s why he’s done this — he thinks you’re a threat to him.”

“He’s right.”

“I meant in court.”

“Don’t worry, Harry — he’ll be judged.”

“Michael, no. What happened at your home was self-defense. Anything you initiate now—”

“Do we know how Accardo feels about this? Would he have sanctioned this hit?”

“...Not likely. Accardo rules from the sidelines, through weaker men he can control. He’s probably telling his people that Giancana’s time is over, but—”

“But what he’s thinking is, Mooney’s too strong.”

“That, and the Big Tuna probably doesn’t like having somebody as high-profile as Mooney Giancana back in the press.”

“Since when is Giancana making headlines?”

A brief pause in the fed’s fast flow of words indicated, perhaps, that Shore had to consider whether or not to share what he said next: “Mooney’ll be a media darling again, within days — he’s set to testify at a committee meeting in Washington next week.”

“What committee meeting?”

“Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. It’s that old rumor about the CIA working with the mob to assassinate Castro.”

“Not to mention Jack Kennedy,” Michael said.

Shore ignored that, and blurted, “We have a golden opportunity here, Michael! Giancana is no Mad Sam DeStefano — he’ll be testifying under oath, selling out the CIA, but revealing nothing at all about the Outfit. Omertà runs deep in an old made guy like Giancana.”

“So, Harry, you see my wife’s murder as a golden opportunity?”

“No, no, no... It’s just, Giancana is full of himself, thinks he’s smart and clever; but he will perjure himself in the process... and with you on our side, Michael, with your knowledge, your testimony, we’ll take him down.”

“On perjury.”

“That will just be a start!”

“I’m looking for the finish, Harry,” Michael said, and hung up.

The metal detector was a tunnel four or five feet long, and he had to walk a ramp up inside, and back down. On a trip to Hawaii six months ago, before everything went wrong, he and Pat had talked about how airline travel just wasn’t fun or special anymore; once upon a time, two or three years back, passengers wore suits and dresses, and the food was decent, and the stewardesses were friendly, and anyone with the price of a ticket was a kind of jet setter. Now you had to submit yourself and anything you carried onto the plane to a frisk.

“Like a common criminal!” Pat had said. “All the romance is going out of it.”

His wife and her voice in his mind, Michael walked casually toward his gate and didn’t spot Marshal Don Hughes until nearly too late.

The lanky, Apache-cheeked Hughes, his back to Michael, was at the check-in counter talking to a stewardess, showing her something — a picture of Michael probably. Two other guys in off-the-rack suits and snap-brim hats — who the fuck wore hats anymore, but feds! — were bookending Hughes, and fortunately both men also had their backs partly to Michael.

One marshal began to swing around, probably on the lookout for Michael, who lowered his head and fell in with a few other passengers, and moved on past the gate.

The airport was fairly dead this time of night, and it wasn’t as if a crowd was available to get lost in. But finally he found another small group to walk with and headed back. He watched in the reflection of a closed newsstand’s window to see if Hughes and/or his Joe Fridays were on to him.

Apparently they weren’t, because soon Michael had made it back out into the terminal lobby, his mind clicking through a thousand things, including wondering if Shore had been keeping him on the phone so Marshal Hughes could arrive and nab him.

Then he stopped in his tracks. Oh shit, he thought, sick with visions of his money and his guns catching the plane without him, going to Phoenix to make the connecting flight on their way to Reno...

He went directly to the American Airlines counter, where he sucked in a relieved breath as he saw his Samsonite still waiting amid half a dozen others to be passed through for loading.

“I’ve got a sick kid at home,” he told the woman at the counter. “I have to scrap this flight. Can I get my bag back?”

He waved his boarding pass.

“No problem, sir,” she said, with a friendly apple-cheeked smile. The blue-eyed blonde looked just a little like Pat — or was he reading in? “I remember you — you seemed distracted. I hope your, uh... little boy?”

“Little girl.”

“Hope she gets better. You can use your ticket at a later date, no problem.”

Within two minutes he was again in the yellow-lit parking lot, unlocking the driver’s side of a wine-color Lincoln that he had never expected to see again. He unlocked and opened the back door, and threw the Samsonite in on the seat. He clicked the suitcase open, got the .45 out, stuck it in his waistband, closed the case, and soon was driving out of Tucson International Airport.

The terrible reality was he had only one option: driving to Lake Tahoe. The trip would take at least a dozen hours, possibly more, and he’d already had a long traumatic day. His soldier’s detachment had saved him so far, but fatigue could eat away at that, and emotions could get out of their cage...

Right now, as he headed north, he tried to decide whether Anna was in any immediate danger.

She was not Giancana’s target. But if the “Smith family” cover had been blown due to Anna keeping in touch with Gary Grace, the girl’s current whereabouts would be known to the Outfit. The nastiest scenario he could come up with was Giancana goons snatching her and using her to get at Michael. If they already knew where she was, such a kidnapping had probably already taken place.

Bad as that was, she stayed alive.

Associate Director Shore seemed unaware of Anna’s status, although admittedly that could have been a scam. If WITSEC did know about the girl running away, and where she’d gone, Michael could do nothing about it. And the feds were no threat to her, really.

Perhaps he should call that panic number again, and send Shore after Anna, to protect her in case Giancana sent his forces after her...

...But what if it hadn’t been Anna’s indiscretion with Gary that had blown the Smiths’ cover?

What if WITSEC had sprung a leak?

Pushing the panic button in that case meant handing Anna over to their betrayer.

No.

His only option was to go after his daughter himself; and she wasn’t going anywhere, not until after prom, which was Saturday night at eight p.m.

At Cal-Neva Lodge.

One eleven a.m., still near the airport, he pulled into a Standard station and told the gawky high-school-age attendant, “Fill ’er up.”

The Lincoln’s gas tank was what, twenty-one gallons? But he was getting around ten miles to the gallon. So he bought a canister of gasoline and two quarts of oil, as well as several big jugs of water, and put them in the trunk.

The coveralled kid, in the process of cleaning the windshield, grinned as he chewed his gum and said, “Must be gettin’ ready to do some desert driving.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you’re smart to do it at night.”

“Not sure ‘smart’ is the word. You got any coolers? Something on the small side?”

“Sure.”

“Throw some ice in one, and toss half a dozen cans of Coke in there, too. And a couple Snickers bars.”

“Sure thing!”

He gave the kid a twenty-keep-the-change, and then bore north on 89, going straight up through Tucson, barely noticing the slumbering city. He started with the windows rolled up and the air conditioner on low — cool enough outside without it, but he didn’t relish the rush of wind. Wasn’t like he was setting out in a buckboard into the wilderness — the Lincoln had comfy bucket seats, a Cartier clock, and plenty of headroom, not to mention horsepower.

Washed ivory in moonlight, the open plains of the desert, bordered by blue-tinged mountains, had a soothing, otherworldly beauty. Few other cars were on the road, and he had the two-lane stripe of concrete mostly to himself, often driving straight down the middle. He and Pat had taken this route to Vegas now and then, because they liked to spend the quiet time together, listening to music, enjoying the strangely peaceful landscape and the feeling that they were the only two people in the entire world.

He thought about her, various little incidents over the years, jumping from high school to just last year, from their early days in Chicago to Crystal Bay — nothing major, just tiny anecdotes that his mind kept playing for him, one memory triggering another and another.

An odd detached calmness settled over him as he drove and drove and drove. Whenever he came to a gas station, he would stop and fill up, since one never knew in the desert; many of these stations were twenty-four-hour, but the desert didn’t listen to reason, so better to keep the tank as full as possible.

Some stations had diners still open, but he didn’t eat, other than a Snickers bar about two hours in; and he drank Cokes, their caffeine helping out, and would stop and pee alongside the road, feeling weirdly serene as he sent a yellow arc into the ivory landscape under a vast sky of stars.

The third roadside pee break, he had his first bad moment. He looked up at the sky and said, “She was right, wasn’t she? Either you’re not fucking up there at all... Or worse, you are up there and we’re just some goddamn ant farm you lost interest in! Fuck you!”

He yelled all of this, and it sounded hollow in the night, not echoing exactly, more floating.

Despite the caffeine, he was getting tired, and about four hours in, the monotony stopped helping and started hurting. Suddenly he was weaving and ran off on the soft shoulder and woke himself up. He reached into the cooler on the otherwise empty rider’s bucket seat, and got another can of Coke going. He turned the air conditioner up until the car’s interior was damn near freezing. Then he stuffed a random four-track into the tape player, and Johnny Mathis came on.

“Chances are,” Mathis sang, and Michael remembered how much Pat liked the song — wasn’t her favorite or anything, just a song that when it came on, she’d always say, “That’s so pretty,” and he began to cry.

Losing control of himself and the vehicle, he had to pull alongside the road and get out, and he knelt on the sandy desert floor in the big empty cathedral of the night, cacti here and there like prickly votive candles. He wasn’t praying. He was weeping.

Ten minutes later he got shakily to his feet, pouting like a kid who suffered an unfair parental spanking, flashed the sky a middle finger, and again got behind the wheel.

The idea had been to tough out the whole twelve or thirteen hours, but by just after dawn, when the Lincoln rolled through suburban Henderson into Vegas, Michael had decided he needed a new plan.

His route didn’t take him to his one-time home away from home, the Strip, where the Vegas of the Sands and Stardust and Sahara was in the process of displacement by the overblown-themed likes of Circus Circus, Caesar’s Palace, and the MGM Grand. Howard Hughes had talked of Vegas becoming a “family” town (not meaning “family” in the Syndicate sense, either), a concept that longtime casino manager Michael knew had great potential.

In some respects the Cal-Neva had anticipated that, with its genuine resort-in-the-mountains attributes, boating, hiking, horseback riding; yet a certain nostalgic fondness for the Rat Pack glory days lingered in Michael even now, perhaps because on his periodic Vegas stints, he and Pat had shared laughter and love in this neon paradise, hobnobbing with celebrities, enjoying fine food and the lush life.

Near downtown, practically in the shadow of that leering electric cowboy Vegas Vic, he pulled into the Lucky Seven Motel, one of those space-age two-story courtyard affairs with glass flecks in the cement serving as glitz.

The young man at the desk was skinny with bored brown eyes and an untrimmed mustache and shaggy dark hair, and seemed less than thrilled with the short-sleeve white shirt and snap-on blue-and-red striped necktie he was required to wear. “Stairway to Heaven” was playing a little too loud on a cheap radio behind him.

Michael spoke up, requesting a room on the first level as far away from the street as possible, and the clerk complied, possibly because that was the easiest thing to do. After signing in as John Jones, the former Michael Smith paid the twenty-five dollars in advance, and said to the clerk, “I need a nine a.m. wake-up call.”

The clerk frowned in thought, which was an obvious inconvenience. “Tonight you mean?”

“No — a.m.”

“Oh, you mean tomorrow morning?”

“This morning.”

The frown deepened. “Three hours from now?”

“Right. Will you still be on duty?”

“Yeah, just came on. So what?”

Michael summoned a smile for the sullen young man. “Because if I get that wake-up call, nice and prompt? I’ll be another twenty-five bucks grateful.”

The clerk brightened. “No problem, Mr. Jones!”

Locked inside the room, curtains drawn tight, air conditioner up, Michael placed the .45 on his nightstand, stripped to his underwear, slipped between cool sheets, and was asleep in seconds.

He dreamed he was driving.

Dreamed he was back on the endless highway through the desert, following the ribbon of concrete under a beautiful star-flung sky and a moon-bleached landscape. Pat was next to him, smiling over at him, wearing that lacy white dress from their evening at Vincent’s.

As dreams went, it wasn’t a bad one, other than his mind providing him with more of the same experience that had sent him into this motel room; a kind of delirium accompanied it, giving him an awareness of being in a dream but no power over that dream. Still, having Pat beside him, not talking, just smiling over at him, occasionally touching his shoulder or leg or hand, Johnny Mathis singing a nonexistent love song on the four-track, was comforting.

Then he glanced over at her, and she was someone else, another woman he’d loved once, a long time ago. They had killed Estelle in a terrible way, tortured her and burned her to death, and he had found her body, when he was just a kid in his early twenties who had admittedly seen horrible things in war but nothing to compare to a beautiful woman tortured and burned. Only in the dream Estelle was pristine in her loveliness, blonde and green-eyed with a ’40s hairstyle and makeup and a blue gown with sequins on the bosom; and then she was Pat in the ’40s hairstyle and makeup and blue gown, and his eyes returned to the highway, and then to her; only Pat was smiling like a skull now, her hair a fright, a wig with clumps yanked out and her face battered and bruised, nose bloody-broken, mouth punched to a pulp, one eye slashed, icepick punctures on her cheeks, throat cut ear to ear, bare arms a welter of welts and gashes and contusions until finally the lower half of her was a charred mass dissolving to cinders, and he drove off the highway and the phone rang shrilly and he sat up in bed, sweating in the air-conditioned room.

But he’d had his rest, and the long-haired clerk (sullen no more) got his twenty-five, “Stairway to Heaven” playing again (or still?), and Michael set out — on Highway 95 now — for Reno.

The Pineview development in Incline Village ran to rustic lodge — like dwellings built against a rising wall of pines, a stylistic world apart from the rambling ranch-styles of the Country Club subdivision with its golf-course view where the Satarianos had lived.

Typical of these, the Grace home had a driveway that swung around to a side double-garage in the basement, sloping landscaping designed to give the first floor a nice elevated rear look at the green scenery. This enabled Michael to pull in and park his car on a downward slant of cement, the Lincoln out of sight of anyone passing by.

The desolate drive from Vegas to Reno had taken over seven hours; with full-bore June heat beating down, he’d been careful not to overwork the air conditioner — Highway 95 skirted the edge of Death Valley — and again kept his gas tank topped off and his eye on the radiator. He even had a meal around two, a diner that would serve you breakfast any time of day, which was what he craved.

He’d listened to music, tapes mostly, Sammy Davis, Ella, Bobby D., Joanie Sommers — he’d pitched his Sinatras in Walker Lake, during a fit of anti-Outfit pique — and he’d again fallen into a groove of monotony that worked for him, the traffic scant all the way to Sparks. Long though the drive and the day had been, he came sharply awake when he hit Reno, “biggest little city in the world,” and his familiar home area. This sensation only increased on the half-hour drive to the Tahoe’s North Shore.

Now he was peering into the Graces’ garage — no cars. He cautiously walked around the rough-wood-sided house — he’d slung a dark gray sport jacket over the black Banlon to hide the .45 in the waistband of the slacks — and checked windows. Within five minutes he was convinced the house was empty.

Steps up to an elaborate wooden deck took him to glassed-in sliding doors onto the kitchen that, for all the rustic trappings of the mini-lodge, were the same as in the last two homes Michael had lived in. He forced the door open, without having to break the glass.

The interior of the home was phony farmhouse, starting with a mostly pine kitchen interrupted by calico wallpaper, avocado appliances, shelves of flea-market crocks, and a window of various wooden spoons hanging vertically and horizontally.

A sink filled with dirty dishes announced the aftermath of meals prepared for two. A wastebasket brimmed with empty cans of Tab, his daughter’s drink of choice. A big calendar with a picture of a covered New England bridge had bold notations, including a line drawn through five days today and tomorrow — “Bob and Janet/Caribbean!”

So Bob and Janet Grace had gone on a cruise and left high school senior Gary — the only one of the three Grace children still at home — to fend for himself for a few days. And Gary had done so by driving to Vegas to bring his girlfriend back here to shack up and go to prom...

...a theory the girlfriend’s father confirmed when he got to Gary’s room and found a double bed that had been slept in on both sides. In this all-pine room, with exposed beams, the walls wore posters of the Beatles walking across Abbey Road, the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, O. J. Simpson in his uniform grinning as he cradled his helmet under an arm, and Muhammad Ali in boxing trunks and I-Am-the-Greatest grimace, raising a padded-gloved fist.

He felt parental rage rising as he noted the open box of Trojan rubbers on the nightstand, as casual as a pack of open cigarettes; four ripped-open individual packets were tossed there, too, like chewing-gum wrappers. But a luxury like fatherly disapproval wasn’t available to Michael right now.

He found her powder-blue overnight bag, with various articles of clothing in it, all clean — she’d done her own laundry, apparently, even if she hadn’t done the dishes — but one item was conspicuous by its absence: no nice dress for the prom, much less a formal.

Which meant that though it was now only a quarter to six, she had already dressed for the prom; she’d already left here — for the Cal-Neva? Then he remembered: the Incline High kids usually went out for a nice dinner before prom. So Anna and Gary were probably dining somewhere in North Tahoe.

He returned to that nightstand, where earlier his eyes had only been able to focus on those condoms; now he noted the football-shaped phone and a small message pad.

On the pad it said: reno sat reservation — 5 pm!!!

Which meant Anna and her rubber-sporting beau were at a restaurant in Reno, or on their way back, or possibly even were already at the Cal-Neva...

But Gary’s otherwise specific note (the handwriting was not Anna’s) did not indicate what restaurant...

He sat on the edge of the bed, but for just a moment, standing up as if the sheets had been hot; he looked back at the rumpled bedding and shuddered. As he left the boy’s bedroom, he knew that any hope of heading them off here, at the Grace home, before the prom, was as empty as those Trojan wrappers.

The house he’d already prowled before checking the bedroom — making sure he was truly alone — and had seen enough slate floors, knotty pine, rush-matting, and cane-seating to last a lifetime. But back in the kitchen a pile of unopened mail on the counter tweaked his interest; among various bills, he found one from the phone company.

Within seconds he was staring at the Graces’ monthly Ma Bell damage — which included ten long-distance calls to the number of the Smith family in Tucson, all in the last two weeks, juxtaposed beside dollar-and-cents figures sure to dismay the Graces when they got home... unless four-hundred-buck-plus phone bills were the norm around here.

He helped himself to some sandwich meat in the Amana fridge and settled for a can of Tab to wash it down. Then he gathered his daughter’s overnight bag — carrying it in his left hand to leave his right free for the .45 if need be — and returned to the Lincoln in the driveway. He stowed her bag in back with his Samsonite, which he opened, withdrawing a white shirt and a dark blue tie, putting them and his gray sport jacket on; he stuck the dirty clothes in the suitcase and snapped it closed.

Poised to get in on the driver’s side, he looked at the sky. Dusk had given over to night, and the same clear starry tapestry with full moon that accompanied him across the desert was waiting for him at Tahoe.

He said silently to the sky, This isn’t a prayer. But if Pat was wrong, and you are out there, not dead like some people say... I could use any help you want to give me, getting Anna out of here to safety.

Dispensing with the “amen,” but this time not giving God the finger at least, he left the Grace home and Pineview development and headed for Crystal Bay. Driving up the pine-framed “strip” of Lake Tahoe, the familiar glowing garish neons — crystal bay club, nevada lodge, bal tabarin, cal-neva — welcomed him home; but they seemed unreal. Was he asleep behind the wheel of the Lincoln, out in the desert, dreaming and about to run off the road...?

The Cal-Neva lot was brimming with luxury cars; but here and there a Chevy II or Plymouth Fury or GTO nestled between vinyl-topped Eldorados and Rivieras — one indication of the prom going on in the Indian Lounge tonight. Another was the steady stream of sideburned guys in tuxes (red or white or light blue, never black) with ruffled shirts and bow ties the size of small aircraft, arm-in-arm with shellac-haired gals in frilly pastel Guinevere gowns heading into the A-frame lodge under a banner shouting: welcome class of ’73!

Near the front a Mercedes pulled out and glided off, and Michael slipped the Lincoln into the spot, gaining a perfect clear path to the front entry; then he sat in the dark watching teenage couples go in, and considered his options.

If Anna and Gary weren’t back from Reno yet, he could simply wait for them, and grab the girl on the Cal-Neva doorstep. But that Reno reservation was for five, and the two kids could have eaten and made it back to the Cal-Neva by as early as six thirty or seven.

And it was almost eight o’clock now...

Michael exited the Lincoln, his manner seemingly casual, but keeping his right hand ready for the .45 in his waistband. He strolled around the side of the building where fir trees and darkness conspired with a recession in the building, between added-on sections of the lodge, to allow him to climb a drain pipe to the slanting roof, walking Groucho-style up to where it flattened out.

Sinatra’s most grandiose excess awaited Michael — a rooftop heliport atop the Celebrity Showroom that had not been used since the days (and nights) when the Chairman of the Board had flown Jack and/or Bobby Kennedy in from Sacramento, or Dino or Marilyn or the McGuire Sisters from Hollywood. As the moon lengthened Michael’s shadow across the rooftop, he ran on those quiet crepe soles to the dormer housing a doorway to a stairwell.

Padlocked on the other side, the door had panels so weathered and thin that Michael tapped one with an elbow and it splintered.

The unlighted stairs were not difficult to navigate; they led to a landing with off shoot stairs down to performer dressing rooms as well as a side door to the Sinatra Celebrity Showroom. The main stairs, however, took Michael below to the cement-block-walled tunnel with its indoor-outdoor carpeting and nest of overhead pipes. From this juncture the tunnel snaked under the kitchen, casino, and Circle Bar, coming back up to provide a pathway to what had been Michael’s office.

As far as Michael knew, the last time the secret stone-pillar fireplace “door” had been used, an assassin had come into the office and got immediately shot and killed for the trouble. He hoped the new Cal-Neva manager, whoever that might be, wasn’t as quick on the trigger; at least he knew the Garand rifle wasn’t over the mantel anymore — it was in the suitcase in his car, in pieces.

The scraping of stone on stone was unavoidable, so Michael shoved it the hell open, and burst in the office, fanning the .45 around what appeared to be an empty room, illuminated only by the picture window filtering in moonbeams and their reflection off the lake.

The new manager wasn’t here, at least not in his office. Nothing much seemed to have changed, but for a wall arrayed with celebrity and politician photos; they were hanging crooked, which was nothing new for the politicos, anyway.

He cracked the door and looked out into a dark hallway of offices; busy casino noise, and the laughter of those high school kids, echoed down from the lodge — the Indian Lounge was nearby.

He recalled what Anna had said about their home in Paradise Estates — that she felt like a ghost haunting her own house. Michael had that same bizarre sensation setting foot in the Indian Lounge again — his ten years at the Cal-Neva had been his single longest stint at any one facility, and no job had pleased him more; no workplace could have been a better fit.

Now the most familiar face at Cal-Neva over the last decade relegated himself to the shadows of the lounge, which was suitably darkened for the occasion. That was why he’d put on the shirt and tie with sport jacket, to better fit in with the parent chaperones who would be staying on the sidelines, not bugging the kids.

The lounge had the usual streamers and crepe-paper balls in green and gold, the school colors, and another banner over the stage — where a cover band in pirate shirts and bell-bottoms bellowed, “Slow Ride, take it easy!” — said, prom ’73 — highland fling! (the school teams were the Highlanders).

But the open-beamed lounge’s natural decor would have overwhelmed the most ambitious decorating committee, with its black California/Nevada state line painted on the floor through the massive sixty-foot granite-boulder fireplace, and natural wood walls arrayed with deer, elk, and bear trophies and Indian art and blankets.

At least fifty couples were out on the dance floor and at the round tables with gold or green cloths, and the sea of red, white, and light blue tuxes and froufrou pastel gowns made the kids fairly interchangeable in the dim green light. The cover band was doing a badly out-of-tune “Bridge Over Troubled Water” now, but the couples clutching each other out there didn’t seem to mind. He moved along the periphery, trying to get a better vantage point, hoping to spot Anna and Gary...

“Mike!”

He turned and saw the father of one of Anna’s friends from chorus — Dan Miller, an insurance agent from Incline Village — grinning and shoving a hand at him like a spear.

“Dan,” he said with a smile, shaking the moist hand, “nice to see you.”

“So you decided to let Anna come back for the prom!”

“Yes — yes.”

“White of ya! Couldn’t just pull her out of school a few months ’fore the end of her senior year, and expect her to forget her whole damn life! You’re a good parent, Mike. Good parent.”

“Thanks.” Maybe the punch was spiked. “Have you seen Anna?”

“I think they’re up near the stage, her and Gary. Great to see you! Where are you folks again, these days?”

“Great to see you, too,” Michael said, working his voice up, as if having trouble hearing over the band.

And he edged down the wall, getting nearer the front.

There she was.

His beautiful daughter, looking so much like her mother, her head nestled against the chest of blond athletic Gary, one of the few boys here with shorter hair. They stayed in one spot, moving in a barely perceptible circle, both with eyes dreamily closed, lost in a loving embrace.

Anna wore a white dress with none of the silly frills of these other girls, adorned only by a sheer shawl and the orchid corsage at her wrist, her long brown hair braided and ribboned here and there. Gary’s tux was white with slashes of black lapel.

Michael lurched reflexively toward them, then stopped himself. An empty table — its rightful claimants probably out on the dance floor — presented a chair for him to flop into, which he did. Suddenly he felt tired. Old. His eyes filled with tears, and he swallowed hard. Beautiful. How beautiful, how sweet she looked. Sweet and alive...

Even the thought of those Trojans on the nightstand only made him smile. Hadn’t he and Patsy Ann screwed like rabbits in the backseat of her daddy’s Buick on prom night? What had been so awful about that? He had loved Patsy Ann, and she loved him.

He would let them finish their dance.

“...bridge over troubled water...”

At least the guy was back in tune for the finish. Applause rewarded the band, and most of the kids stayed out there for “Right Place, Wrong Time,” a growly fast number. A few other couples threaded back toward their seats, Anna and Gary among them.

The table where Michael sat remained otherwise empty, and while it didn’t belong to Anna and Gary, the couple’s own seats were nearby apparently, because she spotted her father on the way over.

Freezing.

Emotions, in a rapid wave, traveled her features: anger, worry, terror, indignation, frustration, sadness, even regret.

Gary — petrified beside her, holding her hand — only gazed at Michael blankly. The father knew the look — this boy loved this girl, and he would be a man about any decisions he’d made regarding her, would not be afraid to stand up to Daddy.

Anna started to pull away, but Gary shook his head and walked her over to his girlfriend’s father, who remained seated.

The couple just stood there looking at him, Gary pretending to be calm, Anna with chin defiantly up.

Gary said, “We couldn’t let you keep us apart. We... I... really meant no disrespect, sir. But—”

“Please sit down,” Michael said, his voice calm.

Anna and Gary locked eyes.

“Kids — please. Sit. I’m not angry. Really. Just relieved.”

“I’m sorry if you were worried,” she said, her words cold, her chin crinkly, “but my life isn’t about you and Mom, anymore, Daddy. My life is about me, and Gary.”

“Honey — sit. Gary? Help me out here?”

Gary nodded and guided the girl into the chair beside her father. Still, she sat as far away from him as she could manage.

“Please listen to me, both of you,” he said, firmly but with no anger, nothing judgmental. “I understand what tonight is about — I was...”

“You were a kid d yourself once,” she said snippily.

Gary said, “Anna, please... Give him a chance.”

“Thanks, son. Annie, back home, our—”

“This is home.”

He sat forward. “Sweetheart, our new identities have been exposed.”

She frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“Our cover’s been blown, back in Arizona. Very bad people know the Smiths are really the Satarianos. You’re in danger. Right now. Right here.”

Her eyes flew wide. “My God... Is Mom okay?”

He said, “Baby, we need to leave. Cal-Neva’s just about the worst place on the face of the earth for us, right now. Gary, you should probably stay.”

“I’m going with you,” he said.

“Gary, that’s not—”

“Daddy!”

Her hand was clutching his arm. Tight. Her eyes were big and wet. Her lips were trembling.

“Daddy... Is Mom... is she...?”

“We lost her, baby,” he said gently, and he began to cry. He covered his face with a hand. “I’m sorry... I’m sorry... I have to be strong for you...”

And his daughter was in his arms, holding him tight, and she was crying, too. “Oh, I’m sorry, Daddy, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry...”

He held her away from him. Shrugged off the emotion. Cold again, he said, “Listen to me — this was not your fault. You didn’t do this to us, to your mom. If anyone did, it was me.”

“Daddy, Daddy...”

“Listen!” And he shook her, just a little. A few eyes were on them now, so he kept his expression neutral and his voice soft. “We don’t have time for recriminations. We don’t have time to take any blame. A very long time ago, I sat where you’re sitting — I thought I’d caused my mother’s death.”

“Gran’ma... Satariano?”

“No — my real mother.” He turned to Gary, who looked like he’d been pole-axed. “Son, I told Anna and Mike that I was adopted, but I lied to them about something. I didn’t tell them that I knew my real parents, that I grew up with my real parents.”

Anna was shaking her head, tears streaming, ruining her makeup. “I can’t... I can’t... I can’t...”

“Baby,” he told her, “my father told me, ‘It’s not your fault — it’s the business I’m in.’ He told me I wasn’t responsible for my mother’s death, and that neither was he.”

But I am responsible for their retribution, the Angel of Death had said, so long ago...

This memory Michael did not share with his daughter.

“Right now,” he said, “we have to survive. We have to leave this place, and we have to go somewhere else, somewhere safe.”

“Where is safe, Daddy?”

“Anywhere. Anywhere is safer than here... Gary, you shouldn’t come with us. We’ll contact you. You have to trust me, son, you have to believe me.”

The boy was shaking his head. “I love Anna, sir. I can help you. Let me help you.”

“Gary, please.”

“No. I’m coming with you.”

No use arguing with him here. Michael would get Anna out of here, and deal with the Gary problem later.

“I’m sorry to spoil your prom,” Michael said, “but we have to leave this very moment... You two go on out. I’ll meet you in the front lobby.”

Gary nodded and, then, so did Anna.

The hundred or so kids in tuxes and formals were dancing slow again, to “The Morning Aft er,” which sounded even worse when a male sang it.

Michael hugged the wall, kept his head down, hoping no other chaperone would recognize him, among these numerous familiar faces — other parents, and some teachers, too.

In the front lobby, he joined the boy and girl. Behind the check-in desk, an assistant manager of his, a pretty young woman named Brandi, squinted at him; he shook his head at her, and somehow she got the signal. She said nothing, God bless her.

“The car’s close, right out front,” he said to the young couple, standing between them, a hand on each one’s shoulder. “I’m going out first. If there’s no problem, I’ll pull right up to the door... Gary, open the front for Anna, Anna you get in, and Gary climb in back, it’ll be unlocked.”

Gary nodded. “And we’ll book it out of here.”

“We will indeed,” Michael said, and squeezed the hand on the boy’s tux shoulder. “Just look after my little girl.”

Their eyes met.

Gary understood: if Michael didn’t make it, Anna would be his responsibility.

“Be careful, Daddy,” Anna said.

He kissed her on the forehead and went out.

Trotting to the parked Lincoln, he swiftly scanned the lot for anything suspicious. A few casino goers, couples, were heading for their own cars. Some kids from the prom were out front catching a smoke in the cool crisp pleasant breeze.

Behind the wheel of the parked Lincoln, he made sure the seat was clear in back for Gary, moving the suitcases over; he unlocked the doors on their side, and powered down the window on his own side, and Anna’s.

Then he started the car, backed out, and swung around, pulling right in front. Gary came out first, Anna right behind him, and the boy opened the door for her. She climbed in, and Gary’s head came apart as the gunshot, probably a .45 or maybe .357, caught him in the forehead. His eyes didn’t have time to register shock.

Anna screamed, and Gary fell away, a mist of red taking his place, as Michael hit the gas, steering with one hand, yelling, “Close that door, baby!” which somehow, through her screaming, she managed to do, and two little men with big revolvers, Giancana guys who Michael recognized, a stocky kid named Vin and a skinnier one named Lou, came up out from among the parked cars, and were aiming the weapons at the Lincoln when Michael shot Vin and Lou with the .45, bang bang, turning their heads into mush and mist, much as they had Gary’s.

Anna kept screaming, and the Lincoln was screaming, too, careening out of the parking lot and then flying down the curving mountain highway, leaving behind the dead boy and pair of Outfit corpses and Cal-Neva and neon signs until only the pines and the night and the twisty road and the sobbing girl were his companions.

“Oh, Daddy, Daddy,” she said finally, horror and hysteria turning the lovely face grotesque, “we just left him there; we just left him there!”

When he could risk it, he pulled over and took her into his arms, and sobs shook her as he said, “We had to leave him. He was gone, baby; he was gone.”

“Oh, but you don’t understand... you don’t understand...”

“I swear I do, sugar. I swear.”

“But you don’t.” She drew away from him a little, and her eyes and face were drenched with tragedy, her voice a tiny trembling terrible thing, so much older than it had ever been and yet much, much too young.

“That was my husband we left back there, Daddy,” the girl in the white prom dress said, gasping, gulping. “Last night in Vegas... Gary and... we... we... we... got... married...”