Strip

34

AT 1:30 in the afternoon, Voinovich parked the big SUV on the street around the block from Kapak’s vast backyard. There was a grove of bamboo trees in that quadrant. They were thirty feet tall, with trunks that were at least five inches thick at eye level and tapered to thin whip-tips at the ends. In the slight breeze the only sounds were the thousands of small leaves whispering, the creaking of the trunks, and the occasional clack when two flexible waving shafts touched.

The three men moved deep inside the shadowy grove so they couldn’t be seen. Voinovich spoke in a whisper. “I’ve never been back here before. Why are we coming in this way?”

Jerry Gaffney said, “This is the way Joe Carver came to see him and then got away. You can’t say that about any other way in.”

Jimmy said, “I thought we were going to talk him into coming with us, not sneak in his backyard. What’s he going to think?”

“We talked about this. Don’t you remember?”

“No. Who talked about it?”

“We did. We’ll tell him it’s safer for him if he gets into the habit of doing things in less obvious ways.”

“Why?”

“So if something goes wrong in there, then when the police ask questions, there won’t be eight neighbors who say they saw Kapak leave with us.”

“I mean, what do we tell Kapak the reason is?”

“Jesus, Jimmy. The man is under siege. There’s Joe Carver robbing him once a day, with his crazy girlfriend yet. And didn’t you hear the news about Rogoso on the radio? The evil son of a bitch got killed last night. If somebody got him, then Kapak could be next. He’s the one who had Rogoso’s money taking round trips. Kapak has a hundred reasons to lay low.”

Jimmy thought for a moment, then nodded. “All right. He has reasons to be careful. I didn’t know Rogoso was dead.”

“You must have been in the bathroom or something when we talked about it. Anyway, we’re here.”

Jerry and Voinovich put on their ski masks and checked the loads in their guns. Jerry produced a small hand-held device.

“Is that a stun gun?” Jimmy said. “A stun gun? Are you crazy?”

Jerry slid a switch with his thumb, a small light went on, and the device crackled in his hand and gave a hum, then switched to a higher frequency, then off. “Yes.”

“What’s it for?”

“Don’t worry. It’s just a precaution.”

“You zap a fat sixty-four-year-old with that and you’ll be thumping his chest to restart his heart.”

Voinovich was impatient. “Can you two talk about this later?”

“Yeah,” said Jerry. “Let’s go.”

Jimmy breathed audibly through clenched teeth as he followed.

They emerged from the bamboo grove and walked into the sunlight, up the winding path toward the guesthouse. Voinovich stopped. He whispered, “Hold it. Stop.”

The Gaffney brothers turned to look at him. He was motionless, his head cocked slightly to the side, his hands in front of him clutching his gun. “I heard something.”

“What?”

“Leaves rustling. Somewhere up there.” He gestured toward the guesthouse. “Like something moving into the underbrush.”

“You serious?”

“Of course he’s serious,” said Jerry. “Kapak doesn’t have a dog, right?”

There was a long moment of deep silence, when even the fluttering of the bamboo leaves was muted. In the middle of it there was a sound of metal sliding on metal. The three men turned toward the guesthouse.

There was the loud roar of a shotgun, and the dust of the path in front of Voinovich puffed upward in a cloud. Voinovich had been in firefights, and he knew enough to instantly calculate two values: the time it would take to find and kill the shooter, and the time it would take to get behind something. He dove, rolled, and was on his feet, running with his head down. He crashed into the grove between two tall bamboo stalks, his momentum carrying him through the narrow space and a few feet deeper, where the shooter could not see him.

The Gaffney brothers ran the other way, making a sprint for the guesthouse. The cover of a brick building seemed much better to them than bamboo. They reached the porch at the same time and hurled themselves against the wooden door, but it didn’t budge. Jimmy turned the handle as Jerry threw his shoulder against it again, and it flew open and swung into the wall as he sprawled on the living room floor. He got to his feet to join Jimmy in his rush to the windows on the far side of the house. As he ran, Jimmy had a moment when the extremities of his body felt icy. The window he was running for was already open.

It was too late to change course now. He reached the low window, sliding along the last three feet of hardwood floor on his knees and then stopping hard, already scanning through the window to see the shooter. He saw nobody. The tall pines on the far side of the yard had no foliage near the ground to hide anyone, and nothing about the low, leafy plants in the tropical garden seemed to hold any menace. He leaned outward and craned his neck.

Blam! It was a roar so loud that it seemed to be a part of a larger reality, like an explosive charge going off. He did not duck back so much as allow the surprise of it to propel him onto his back on the floor. He said quietly, “What the fuck.”

Jerry started firing his pistol out the other window, volleys of three shots each, an insistent staccato pop-pop-pop! Each time he paused, the three brass casings ejected to the right clattered on the hardwood floor.

“Where is he?” Jimmy cautiously peered out his window.

“Out there!” Jerry fired two more volleys, one to the right, and the next to the left.

“Did you even see him?”

“No, but he’s there.”

“Hold it. Stop firing.”

Jerry held his fire, ducked back in to release the magazine of his pistol and slip in a new one, then pull the slide back to let the first round into the chamber. “Why stop? The bastard’s shooting at us.”

“Think, for Christ’s sake. He must have been in here and we startled him, sneaking into the yard with ski masks over our heads. He doesn’t recognize us.”

“That was a shotgun. Know what you’ll look like if he hits you with double-ought?”

“We don’t want to kill him.”

“Did I mention he’s shooting at us?”

“I’m not talking about that. I mean he’s not worth anything to us dead. He can’t pay if he’s dead. Nobody will pay if he’s dead.”

Kapak had heard the gunfire coming from the back of his property. He stood in the small room off the kitchen staring at the security monitor. He had been there since it started, trying to make out the shooters and figure out how to avoid them. He could see there were at least three men wearing masks and windbreakers intended to hide their faces and their gear. They charged into the guesthouse, and then he lost sight of them.

He had not expected Rogoso’s friends to know enough to come after him this quickly, less than a full day after he’d killed Rogoso. He also wondered who was down there fighting them off with a shotgun. He hoped it wasn’t one of the gardeners, some innocent who had simply been cornered and found the gun in the cabinet. He supposed it was possible Spence had not left after he had dropped Kapak off. Maybe he’d just gone down to the guesthouse to watch the rear of the property—to watch Kapak’s back, as he had said. Spence was a real soldier.

Kapak was worried. After the second shotgun blast, he had heard a series of three-shot bursts, one after another, only one gun firing. Had they killed the defender? Blam! The shotgun. He was still alive.

Kapak squinted, trying to make out human shapes in the backyard foliage. Suddenly the guesthouse door flew open and two men dashed out, sprinting across the open lawn into the invisible dim spaces of the bamboo. The shotgun was silent, as though the defender felt he had done all he wanted by making them retreat. He apparently didn’t want any bodies in the yard. That would be like Spence, and he was grateful once again to the man. Killing one of the invaders would have created a new problem.

There were already enough problems. Spence had to plant the bloody relics of Joe Carver to prove he was dead and imply to the people in the club scene that it was Kapak’s people who had done it. There was also the continuing problem of the police. Lieutenant Slosser clearly knew he had killed Rogoso, and by now his detectives were talking to people who had been at the club last night, trying to break his alibi. They would also talk to Rogoso’s people to establish that he had reason to kill Rogoso. When they had enough, they would arrest him.

He hurried to the other end of the house, picked up the pistol from the nightstand by his bed, put it into the inner pouch of his briefcase, threw on a summer-weight jacket, and looked around for anything else he might need to bring with him. He unexpectedly knew several things that he hadn’t before. One was that he had never actually liked the big house, only the gardens that had attracted him to the property in the first place and the guesthouse that he had built. If he had seen clearly before, he would have put an office in the main house, stationed a couple of men there for protection, and lived in the back of the lot in the guesthouse.

Another thing that he now knew was that if today had happened to him when he was thirty, forty, or even fifty, it would have meant little to him. One place was the same as another. He had moved to one country and then another with a few briefer stops in between. Each move had involved a wrenching departure, a great deal of effort, a period of getting used to strangeness and language difficulties. But each, in the end, had left his life improved.

Now he was getting old and feeling reluctant to face the upheaval again. It wasn’t the effort so much as the time. He couldn’t help making rough estimates. Did he have five years to waste while he was getting settled again? He felt his mouth contract into a sad smile. There were already assassination squads sneaking around his house on a sunny summer afternoon. There was little choice.

He filled his briefcase with financial papers from the filing cabinets in his office, locked the door, and hurried to the garage. He got into his Mercedes and drove. As he reached the first turn, he looked in the rearview mirror, but not at his house. He was only looking to see if his death squad was following, or the police.

After he turned the corner, he heard a siren a few blocks away, and looked behind him once more. He saw nothing but clear pavement.

Voinovich made it through the bamboo to the street long before the others. He sat at the wheel of his Sequoia with the motor running, listening to the last sounds of gunfire with his eyes closed, picturing what must be going on by the guesthouse. It didn’t sound good to him. He had confirmed the fatalism that was natural to his temperament through a lifetime of error and disappointment. Whenever he was on the edge of great fortune, he found that something unexpected made all efforts laughably inadequate. Some ideas, some places on the earth, some souls, were simply doomed.

When the gunfire stopped, he heard the sound of feet running down the narrow path through the bamboo grove. He calculated the relative likelihood that the footsteps were the Gaffney brothers and decided it was a one in five chance. Instead it was probably some new security men that Kapak had hired, or some of his regulars, possibly Spence and Corona.

If they had killed the Gaffneys, they’d be coming for him. He reassessed how much faith he had in the Gaffneys, then pulled the mask back over his face, chambered a round, and aimed his gun at the open end of the path.

To his amazement, it was the Gaffneys. He withdrew his gun from the window, tugged off the hot ski mask, and pressed the button to unlock the doors. The first Gaffney swung the back door open and dived onto the back seat. The second scrambled in, slammed the door, and shouted, “Go!”

Voinovich stomped on the gas pedal and accelerated away from the curb abruptly, so the two Gaffneys were pinned to their seats before they could get into a sitting position.

“Jesus,” Jimmy muttered.

“Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all the saints in California,” said Jerry. “I’ve never been so shocked in my life. I thought the old man would just be sitting there alone in his kitchen having lunch or something. What the hell was that?”

“It was an ambush,” said Voinovich.

“An ambush set up for whom—us?” said Jimmy. “How could Kapak know we were coming? We weren’t even sure we were going to do it until an hour ago.”

“I don’t tell people things,” said Voinovich.

“What are you looking at me for?” Jerry said. “I only talked to you two.”

Voinovich shrugged. “All right. Then it was the old man.”

“He told himself?”

“He’s been around for a long time. When he was coming up, it was a different world. In the Balkans, where he lived, you couldn’t close your eyes. People hated you for things your great-grandfather did. Anybody who lived must have gotten good at figuring out what other people were going to do before they did it.”

“He figured out that we would come for him?”

Jimmy said, “How could he?”

“He knows us, he knows that his luck has been disappearing fast,” said Voinovich. “Maybe he knew that the next thing was going to be that his own people would turn on him. He didn’t have to know who it would be.”

“Wait a minute,” Jerry said. “We can’t just assume something like that. We’d have to do something—leave the state, kill him—and we wouldn’t even have any proof that he knew it was us.”

“If he’s smart enough to know what we were going to do before we knew, then how are we going to get him to admit he knows it was us?”

“I don’t think we want to just show up at the front door right now.”

“Call him.”

“On the phone?”

“What else is there?”

Jerry reflected. “Maybe we should. If we do it now, we sound like we couldn’t be the ones who just came to his backyard. And he doesn’t have time to think things through and make a plan to trap us.” He held out his iPhone. “Here. Call him.”

Voinovich didn’t look at it. “Did you notice I’m driving?”

Jerry held the phone out to his brother.

“Not me. You two were the ones who have this great plan to call him. Your second great plan of the day, by the way.”

Jerry scowled, pressed an icon on his phone, and smiled. “Hey, boss. It’s me, Jerry.”

The others watched him for a moment while he listened. His facial muscles relaxed. He looked relieved, then actually smiled. “I’m out trying to find out what I can about the other girl who told us about Joe Carver. I’m pretty sure Carver will show up at her house sometime.”

Jerry’s eyes widened. “Wow. Scratch that, then. Anything else you want me to do now?”

“Tell him we’re here too,” said Voinovich. “It’s not just you.”

“I’m with my brother and the Russian,” he said. “I felt sorry for the poor bastards, getting humiliated like that last night, so I’m taking them to lunch. You want to come?” The expression on Jerry Gaffney’s face was vulpine. He was staring intently, his green eyes open and a toothy smile occupying his lips and baring his teeth. “Oh. Okay, I’ll see you at the clubs tonight. Siren first? Okay.”

He put the telephone away. “He doesn’t know. He wasn’t home. Can you believe it? He wasn’t even at home when it happened. He knows nothing. Zip.”

Jimmy said, “I can’t believe you tried to get him to come with us even now.”

“Why not? He doesn’t know. We could have scooped him up and it would be like the regular plan we already had.”

“But he didn’t go for it, right?” said Voinovich.

“No. He’s busy, running some errands today,” Jerry said. “But we’re okay. We’re safe. He doesn’t suspect anything.”

“Thank God,” Jimmy said.

Voinovich’s head gave a sudden twitch. He looked in his left mirror, then the right. “Cops.”

“Oh my God,” Jimmy said. He whirled in his seat and stared out the back window. “I think he wants you to pull over.”

“How can I? We have loaded guns and ski masks and body armor.”

“You have to,” Jimmy said. “You can’t outrun a police car in this fat-assed mammoth-mobile.”

Voinovich hit the gas pedal and the SUV’s hood rose as though the vehicle were about to angle off into the sky. The back of Jimmy’s head slapped the headrest and stayed there.

Jerry took out his gun, released the magazine, and seemed to count the rounds he had left.

Jimmy said, “No. You are not going to get in a gunfight with the police. This is still something we can live through, maybe even with nothing but fines and probation.”

“Don’t be stupid,” said Jerry. “If they search this car, we don’t want anything to be loaded or strapped to us. Unload yours and then Vassily’s.” He leaned forward with difficulty as Voinovich took a quick turn. “See if you can get us to a curve where we’ll be out of their sight for a few seconds. We can toss the guns.”

“Right.” He handed his gun over the seat to Jerry, then turned his body to face ahead again. He drove faster. The police car’s siren began to blip, and its lights flashed.

Jerry gathered the guns on his lap, stuffed two of them into his ski mask, the others into Jimmy’s. He opened the window beside him. “I just figured out where to go,” he said. “We can’t make it up to Mulholland. Go along Ventura Boulevard to Carpenter and head for Laurel Canyon.”

“By the elementary school?”

“Yes.”

Voinovich sped along Ventura Place to the Boulevard, zigzagging in and out of the cars. He moved into the left-turn lane, then cut into the right and onto Carpenter. It was a narrow, quiet road where cars had to pull to the side to let each other pass, but he was going over fifty past the elementary school and through the stop sign at the intersection. Just past the school, the road turned and narrowed, and there was a high wooden fence to the right.

Just as the road curved to the right, Jerry hurled the first bundled pair of guns, then the second over the fence. He could see them fall, and then bounce down the hill twenty feet into a tree-lined chasm at the edge of a big estate, where a small, rocky stream bed meandered. He remembered the gun on his ankle, tore the Velcro fasteners of the holster, and threw them both and looked back.

Two seconds later, the police car appeared again, and it was coming close to the back of the SUV.

“Better stop now,” said Jerry. “He’s getting ready to hit us to spin us around.”

They made it around the last arc of the curve and saw there were already two police cars ahead, the officers sheltering at their sides, ready to shoot.

Voinovich stopped.

There was a swarm of angry policemen, dragging them out of three doors and onto their faces on the pavement. Cops knee-dropped onto their backs, twisted their arms behind them, and clicked handcuffs on their wrists.

“Lie still. You’re under arrest.”

“What for?”

“Stealing that SUV, for starters.”

Voinovich, a few feet off, yelled, “I didn’t steal it. It’s mine.”

“It was reported stolen early this morning, and the thieves are armed robbers. That got anything to do with you?”

“I reported it, and the Pasadena police found it and gave it back. I’m Vassily Voinovich.”

Jimmy Gaffney lay on his belly in silent rage. The cop who had handcuffed him said, “You want to tell me why you’re all wearing bulletproof vests?”

“Vassily and I were robbed last night. My brother was robbed two nights ago. It’s not safe around here.”

An older police officer who had not taken part in wrestling them to the pavement called, “All right. Get these guys ready for transport. Feldman, Gaithers, start back along the road on foot and see what they threw over the fence back there near the school.”

Kapak drove to Siren, went into the manager’s office, and asked if he could borrow his car.

He drove the manager’s car, parked it across the street from Sherri Wynn’s duplex, and climbed the exterior wooden steps to her apartment. He knocked, rang the bell, and waited. He looked at his watch. It was nearly 2:00 in the afternoon. He had been pretty sure that Sherri would have caught up on her sleep by now, and be up.

He took out his wallet to look for a business card, then any piece of paper. He wrote his cell phone number on a credit card receipt. His name was already on it. Then he hurried to the car to drive to the Bank of America. He pulled into the covered parking lot in the back of the building, so the car was difficult to see. He walked to the side door and went inside.

He withdrew twenty thousand dollars in cash. He got four electronic transfers made out to the four entities he owed money to—the Alcohol Control Board to keep his liquor licenses current, his credit card company, the liquor supply company, and the accounting firm that handled his business accounts.

The next banks were all along Ventura Boulevard. He went to Wells Fargo, City National, Citibank, and United California Bank. At each he withdrew thousands of dollars in cash, then ordered wire transfers to a company called Claudius Enterprises. At the last bank he sat in a quiet private office to prepare instructions for his attorney, Gerald Ospinsky, then called him and told him to get to work on certain arrangements.

Finally, he called Spence. “It’s me. I want you to get a clean rental car. Then I want you to drive it along Moorpark Street, past the public library. Park as close to the library as possible. Then walk to Ventura Boulevard, pick up Skelley’s blue car in the municipal lot behind the Bank of America, and drive it to Siren. Do not carry a gun or anything that’s illegal on you, because you might get stopped by the cops. My car is at Siren. When you go home, leave Skelley’s car and take mine. Do you have all that?”

Spence said, “Sure. Is something wrong that I don’t know about?”

That answered Kapak’s question. The man with the shotgun in Kapak’s backyard could not have been Spence. It must have been one of the gardeners. “I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think I needed to. Don’t go to my house today.”

“Okay.”

“If they do pull you in, just be careful and polite and don’t get involved.”

“All right. I’ll try to have the car at the library in an hour.”

“Good. Thanks.”

He hung up and took his briefcase full of money, left Skelley’s car on Ventura, and walked to the public library. He was glad to be in an air-conditioned building after the walk. He used a computer at the library to make some reservations for flights and hotels, e-mailed more instructions to his accountant and his lawyer, and then took a short afternoon catnap, resting his head on the briefcase full of money. When he awoke, it was 3:00, about an hour since he had talked to Spence.

He went into the men’s room, combed his hair and splashed water on his face, and went outside. He walked the block to the corner and found the car. It was a new Acura with the rental company’s perfect wax job on it. Kapak got in, reached behind the visor, and found the keys. He drove off down Moorpark, staring occasionally in the mirrors to see if he could spot a follower.

He made a series of quick turns in the maze of small residential blocks north of the library, then stopped in the middle of a row of cars in the lot beside the baseball field at Beeman Park, but nobody arrived to join him.

He turned the car north and drove up Fulton, feeling secure and anonymous behind the car’s tinted glass. When he reached Sherri’s duplex, he parked around the corner and came back on foot. He climbed the stairs, but before he got to the top, the door opened and Sherri stood waiting for him. She was wearing a T-shirt, a pair of jeans, and some sneakers. It occurred to him that before last night he had never seen her when she wasn’t wearing her work clothes: high heels, stockings, the short black pants, and the white top. “Where have you been?” she asked. “I’ve been calling and calling.”

He took out his phone. “Oh. I guess I turned my phone off while I was at the bank and forgot to turn it back on.”

“How old are you again?”

“Not that old” Suddenly he felt as though that weren’t true. What was he doing? How could he imagine this was the sensible thing to do?

She took his arm and tugged it so he would come inside. She closed the door and kissed his lips. “So what’s going on?”

“I don’t have much time to tell you that. I guess you would say I’ve been having a bad month, and now this week seems to be turning out worse. The only good thing that happened lately is you.”

“What bullshit.” He could tell she was pleased. He could also tell that no matter how smart she was, she couldn’t be anticipating anything like what he was thinking.

He said, “I have to leave for good. Forever. I would like you to come with me. I’ll understand if you won’t. Here.” He searched the inside of his briefcase. “It’s an e-ticket.”

She looked at it. “Paris?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to go now. If you want, meet me at the airport at the Delta terminal at around five-thirty. Don’t call anybody before you leave, and don’t leave anything here that you care about.” He opened the door. “Do you even have a passport?”

“Yes, but—”

“I’m sorry, Sherri. I’ll be there. If you aren’t, I’ll understand.” And he was gone. He hurried to his car, already dialing Spence’s cell phone.

“Yes?” Spence’s voice sounded guarded.

“It’s me. I have a lot to tell you fast, so you’ll need to listen closely. I’m making some big changes in my life, and because of that your life will change, and so will everybody else’s. First, you’ve got to call a meeting of all the people who work for me. Call Temptress and Wash, and have them call their people together just before the shift changes at four. Here’s what you’ve got to tell them…”