The Hit

Chapter One

The noon sun beat down on the road, on me, on the dry desert foothills. The road was narrow blacktop, snaking down by switchbacks toward the plain and the city. In the Jeep I was doing only twenty-five but the wind had a searing, abrasive edge against my face.

I was half stunned with fear: I had just left a meeting at which sentence had been passed on me. You’re not wearing our silks, Crane. Nobody cares what happens to you and the woman. Forty-eight hours to deliver or die.

My numb brain was making images of Joanne when I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw the chrome teeth of a big station wagon bearing down on me from behind. I had been too preoccupied with my own impending execution to notice it before; no telling how long it had been there. He was riding my tail with reckless arrogance; the dusty grille of the car seemed ready to take a bite out of the Jeep. He was a tailgating imbecile, driving with suicidal aggressiveness, not more than ten feet behind my bumper. All the rage and frustration of the past bouts climaxed in my gut; out of sheer malice, I hit the brakes — hard.

The station wagon swerved; I heard the indignant panic-stricken yelp of horn and then the big car wobbled past, just clearing me, with an arch swish of skidding rubber.

Instead of thundering away, the station wagon pulled to the curb. His brake lights dashed angry red and the wagon’s tail went up in the air. It stopped short, the door swung open, and the driver got out.

The road was too narrow to get by him. I pitched to a stop. Suddenly I wanted this stupid, meaningless fight with a total stranger; I felt like a fight, I wanted to kill the son of a bitch.

He was a good-sized man about my age, fair hair and a round boyish face. He looked scared: he wore the expression of a man who was about to burst into tears.

I climbed down from the Jeep. That was when I saw the .32 automatic in his fist, hanging at arm’s length. I stopped, bolt still.

He said, “You’re Simon Crane.”

It wasn’t till then that I recognized him. He might as well have said, You’re the bastard that’s been banging my wife.

He lifted the gun. I had an impulse to burst out in hysterical laughter.

I said, “Okay, Mike.”

Mike Farrell’s mouth worked; his eyes weren’t tracking well. He was as close to the thin borderline of madness as I was. He stood there, jaw working, no sound coming out.

I said, “You must have been staked out back there. This couldn’t be coincidence — you followed me down from up there.”

“Sure.” He got it out between his teeth.

“What for? To shoot me?”

He shook his head. “The gun’s just insurance.” He talked without moving his lips. Ex-cons are easy to spot. They talk in monotones; their body movements are slow and careful, their gestures muffled, expressions immobile, eye movements restricted. Mike had all the earmarks. His face, rigidly composed now, was betrayed by the restless, terrified eyes.

I said, “Insurance for what?”

“Turn around and lean on your hands.”

I glanced at his gun and obeyed, flattening my palms against the hot hood of the Jeep; I had frisked enough of them myself to know how it was done. I was wearing Levi’s and a yellow shirt; there weren’t many places I could conceal a gun. He went over me nervously and stepped back when he was satisfied I wasn’t armed. It was the second time today I’d been frisked.

“You can turn around.”

I straightened and turned. Sweat dripped from my forehead into my eyes. Mike Farrell said, “I got to talk to you. Will you listen?”

Will a dollar buy ten dimes? Mike was the only chance I had to get out from under the guillotine.

What I said was, “You’re holding the gun.”

He kept it pointed straight at me while he backed up to the open door of the station wagon. He took out a handkerchief and wiped the steering wheel, controls, door handles, ashtray; swung the door shut with his hip and came back to me. He walked around to the passenger side of the Jeep and got in.

“Come on. You drive.”

“What about your car?”

“I can’t use it any more — they can trace it to me. Come on, Crane, I need to get under cover.”

I got in. “Where to?”

“Just drive. I’ll tell you where to turn.”

We drove down the narrow snake of a road into the suburbs, hit an avenue and turned toward the city. He refused to talk except to bark directions at me now and then. He had the gun down at his side where outsiders couldn’t see it, but the hammer was back and I had no chance to jump him. Driving under the blistering sun, I was remembering the things Joanne had told me about Mike — that he was terrified but harmless. I wasn’t sure she was right. Prison changed a man’s attitudes toward a lot of things: I had seen enough of them, after they came out. For the weaker ones things had narrowed down to a habitual fight for survival — just staying alive in that cage of hardened cons, making sure nobody stuck a knife between your ribs. It could be like that with Mike: the residue of paranoia, hanging on like prison pallor. Or it could be guilt and the fear of discovery, if he’d done the hit.

Somebody had done the hit, that was clear enough. I had forty-eight hours to find out who. If I didn’t produce I was dead, and so was Joanne — and Mike was the only lead we had.

He told me where to turn. I went through adobe gateposts into a district known as Las Palmas, a onetime high priced residential neighborhood built in the late twenties by market speculators and bootleggers. At the time it had been a suburb, five miles outside the city; by now urban cancer had pushed the city limits ten miles beyond, and Las Palmas squatted forlorn in a sea of cheap stucco development shacks. The wealthy types had moved far up into the foothills, whence Mike and I had just come; half the huge white elephants in Las Palmas were deserted, boarded up — nobody had a use for houses with servants’ quarters any more. It was a good place to hide out.

It was a little cooler under the heavy trees that lined the curved roads. We bumped across potholes in the narrow lanes and went past one abandoned mansion being used as a pad by a troop of hippies; a dozen of them sprawled on the weedy lawn with guitars and joy sticks. Mike pointed out turnings and we picked a clumsy route through places hardly wide enough for the Jeep, swung past a forbidding oleander hedge nine feet high and opaque as a brick wall, and suddenly Mike said, “Hold it.”

I braked to a stop.

“Back up and turn in there.”

I did so, driving into a chuckholed gravel path that cut through the oleanders.

“Park it here.”

We were hidden from the street. He showed his gun and waved me up the narrow broken-flagstone walk toward the house. Once it had been magnificent. The roof was shingled with red half-pipe tiles, chipped and busted. The veranda had a gallery of Moorish arches, overgrown with brush and cactus. An empty oval swimming pool in the yard, rimmed with Mexican porcelains, was full of dead leaves and sand.

An Air Force jet went over with a sound like a long piece of canvas being ripped. Mike walked by me and gestured with his gun. I stepped over the broken glass on the porch and followed him inside, noticing that the warped chipped-paint door scraped across the floor when he pushed, leaving part-circle scratches where it dragged sharp bits of sand and glass across the concrete.

He backed in, holding the gun on me, looked around quickly and beckoned. The airless room was hot, thick with heavy body sweat. Mike, or somebody else, had spent some time in the place recently.

I said, “What happened to Aiello, Mike?”

“I think I’ll ask the questions. Come in here.”

I walked in. He made the mistake of letting me get too close, and I went for him.

I grabbed his wrist, got the left hand when he shot it up, and bore down hard. The gun was pointed at the ground and I held his right hand that way; I twisted, grinding the grip on both his wrists, forcing him to his knees. He wouldn’t let go. He made no sound; his breathing was quick and shallow, his eyes very large, his teeth grinding.

Abruptly I let go his left hand and batted across to the gun, wrenching it away. Curiously, he had removed his finger from the trigger, so it didn’t go off when I yanked. It wouldn’t have hit anything but the floor anyway; maybe he preferred to take a chance on me rather than run the risk of attracting attention with the noise.

He was on his knees, twisted down. I put my shoe in his chest and shoved. He went backward onto the stone floor. His head hit back with a blunt noise.

I reversed the gun in my grasp. The crack on the head hadn’t completely knocked him out but he was dazed, stunned; he would be limp and useless for a while. I peeled back one eyelid to make sure there was no concussion. He made little grunting noises with each breath.

There wasn’t much furniture — an old couch, a broken table, a lawn chair. An ancient refrigerator stood by one wall, its door crumpled and bent open on the hinges. I got him up and carried him over to the couch and put him down. There wouldn’t be any water in the place anyway; all I could do was make sure the skin wasn’t broken. Then I went back toward the door, where the air was better. I kept his gun in my fist.

From the open door I could hear only cactus wrens and robins and an occasional airplane; none of the city sounds reached this backwater neighborhood. For a moment faint voices reached me and I tensed before I realized what it was — the hippies we had passed, coming to me on the wind. I listened to their voices and guitars, soft-singing their cris de coeur of alienation in the heat, and turned to have another look at Mike. His eyes were closed; he breathed evenly. Haggard and sallow, he looked like a weak youth grown prematurely old. He was thirty, perhaps a bit older, but he appeared both younger and more ancient than that.

He would come around but it would take time. Jumpy and irritable, I felt his forehead and then settled down to wait in the lawn chair. Until I talked with him I wouldn’t know how this nightmare was going to end. It was possible all of us would be dead soon — Mike and Joanne and me. I sat watching him, remembering how this had begun, this morning, just a few hours ago.

The phone had rung. It had lifted me from a wallowing sleep; it rang three times before I shook off the fragments of a paranoid dream and groped for the receiver.

“Simon? Were you asleep?”

Shock of recognition: it was Joanne. Her voice, which I hadn’t heard in months, made me instantly defensive: “I still am.”

She spoke before I could get the phone away from my ear. “Please don’t hang up.” She sounded taut — agitated, close to the edge.

“What is it?”

I heard her breathing; after a moment, during which she seemed to pull herself together with an effort of will, she said, “No. You’re too groggy to listen. Wake yourself up — I’ll hold on.”

I grunted, put the receiver on the bed, got up and padded to the window. Slits of white light chiseled past the edges of the doubled Army blanket I used for a drape. I pulled it aside and blinked away the morning blaze that came in hard off the desert hills.

It took time before I could keep my eyes open without squinting. The blaze of lemon sunlight struck the window obliquely. Particles of mica and pyrites in the earth made the hills shimmer where they fell away toward the city, eight miles and two thousand feet below. The mountain-ringed city sprawled wide and flat, a pale checkerboard of shopping centers, cardboard houses, Laundromats, drive-in movies. The old quarter, Mexican adobe, was distinguished by heavy trees, green-gray in the distance. River and railroad sliced through on a bias, one pouring down from piney mountains to the northeast, the other rolling through from Texas to California.

It was a big town, dusty and low to the ground, and very, very hot. Two hundred thousand predigested people in three hundred square miles of standardized houses, cars, supermarkets and bowling alleys.

I blinked and stood grinding knuckles into my eye sockets, wishing I had never had a phone installed. The image through the window undulated in hazy waves, heat-smog over the city. Beyond, toward Texas and Mexico, the foothills were studded with dots of creosote, cactus, creek-bank cottonwoods; farther away the high ranges loomed, dark timber peaks slashed by faces of white rock that reflected the sun like fields of snow. The sky, dusty at the horizon, deepened into cobalt clarity overhead.

By the time I could look that high without squinting, I was awake. I turned back from the window.

The bed was rumpled from alcoholic sleep. I picked up the phone and glanced at the clock — it was almost nine. “Okay. Good morning.”

“That’s better. Are you all right, Simon?”

“Hung over some.”

Joanne said in her husky, practical voice, “I’d be flattered if I thought you were still tying one on because of me.”

Six months ago, I thought, she would have added a comma and “darling.” Now it was just a polite question, edged with remote concern and crowded by her obvious agitation. I had an image of her face, framed tight by short dark hair. Acidly resentful, I said, “I’m surprised they let you get near a phone. Where are you?”

“In a phone booth on Corral Drive. Simon, I have to see you — but now I think it would be better not to talk about it on the phone. Something’s happened at... at the place where I work.”

“I’m not having any, Joanne — I’m keeping out of it.”

“I don’t know if you can.” She did sound terribly subdued. “You may already be involved. Look, if it was just something personal — do you honestly think after what we went through last winter that I’d come running to you to hold my hand? Simon, if I could think of another soul on earth — God knows I don’t want to impose on you, but there just isn’t anyone else. I’m in trouble, I need help.”

“What is it, then?”

She said, almost in a whisper, “I’m shaking like a leaf.”

“Trouble with the organization?” I said stupidly.

“Trouble isn’t the word for it. Simon, you used to be a policeman, you’d know what to—”

“I told you,” I said dully, “I don’t intend to get within a mile of the cops or your boy friends, either one.”

“I can’t talk on the phone,” she said, sounding drained. “Please, Simon.”

I closed my eyes. “Suit yourself. I’ll be here.”

When she hung up I sat on the side of the bed with my eyes shut, pinching the bridge of my nose. After a stretch of time I batted into the bathroom to shower and shave and scrape thickness off my teeth. The face in the mirror was weathered more square than long, not remarkable. A textured face that took a dark tan and kept it; scarred and busted here and there because I was once a cop, subscribing to the idea of justice before realities had canceled my subscription.

They had retired me compulsorily on half pension “due to 20 percent incapacitation from bullet injury incurred in line of duty.” Encysted in my right thigh, under the crowfoot scars, were the fragments of two .357 bullets, special homemade softnoses that had splintered on impact. Now and then a twinge of sciatica lanced through the leg, but I was hardly among the walking wounded; the disability was more like .02 percent than 20 — a hardly perceptible limp on damp days. It had been an excuse, not a reason, for them to get me off the force.

The slugs had been put in me by a cop named Joe Cutter, by mistake — he said — one night when we had split up to come at a team of burglars from opposite ends of a hardware store. Cutter had a zealot’s pride in his .357 Magnum hand cannon. He had paid for it himself. He spent evenings in his soldier-tidy antiseptic apartment devising sophisticated recipes for homebrewed ammunition.

My retirement, which I had not fought, had been a separation without sorrow. They probably still had a dossier on me in the Inactive file: Simon Crane, 30, ht 6 ft 2 in, wt 185, eyes gray, hair black, unmarried, parents deceased. City grade and high schools, state university — bachelor’s in History, minor in Journalism, letters in tennis and in baseball the two years we’d gone to the College World Series at Omaha. University ROTC, two years an Army Intelligence lieutenant. Then three years a newspaper reporter while I decided what I really wanted to do with my life, to justify my existence. Finally, with zeal to the police force. Rookie to patrolman to detective 2/G — and back to patrolman. I had bucked too many bagmen.

There were a few others like me. Cops who cared about one or two other things besides grease and the pension you got after twenty years on the force. Cops who believed in the notion that the law was a fine precision mechanism designed to right wrongs. They learned. Some stuck it out, trying to reform from the inside; some quit, joined the FBI, became juvenile probation officers or set up their own private detective agencies; some, like me, forsook the rat race. They all quit for the same reason: they ran up against the organization. You got evidence on a hood and it looked ironclad and then the hood’s protectors stepped in: the organization’s battery of attorneys marched into the courtroom, the organization’s bagmen got to the judge. One honest cop’s testimony against the paid perjury of half a dozen hired witnesses — where could you find legitimate citizens to testify in Mafia cases? Good citizens didn’t know anything about the organization’s operations; how could they testify? If you had a corroborative witness, he was likely to be another hood, and the organization’s attorneys didn’t mind ruining his reputation to get the client off. Then it went to the jury — what Darrow called “twelve men of average ignorance” — and even if you got past that obstacle, got past all the obstacles of appeals and delays, achieved the nirvana of a conviction — even then you ended up with a judge who passed a sentence of fifteen weekends in the House of Detention on the hood, who laughed at you when he walked out of the courtroom. The public bought the mockery with the “It’s God’s will” sophistry of small minds; the legal system had been satisfied because the system thinks a lot about the rules of the game but never asks whether the game itself has any meaning.

In the end it became just another entry in a file someplace. You brought them in and they went right out again through the revolving door. You came to loathe the organization, and that kind of deep hate was a fervor that got stronger with time and frustration; there was nothing to do, in the end, except quit. To preserve whatever was left of sanity.

When I left the force, feeling as if I had lived through it merely because I happened not to have died from Cutter’s .357 fusillade, I considered going to work as a private operative — one of those eyes who investigate husbands who play golf when it rains. I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for the idea, or for going back to newspapering, a jungle of scrambled copy in which every edition ought to have eight-column banners on the front page: “ENTIRE CONTENTS FICTION.”

When I tried to explain it all to Joanne, she had told me my point of view was sophomoric and misanthropic. Maybe so. For six months I edited a slick regional monthly that sandwiched gorgeous color photos of southwestern scenery between articles that tried to justify the Paleolithic right-wing notions of the rich ranchers who owned the magazine. The views weren’t mine but the salary was high. I thought, at first, money would make a difference.

But after a while I sickened of the idea of spending money I didn’t have to buy things I didn’t need to impress people I didn’t like. That was when I gave up the job, and job-hunting, and took my indefinite sabbatical. I moved out of my downtown, semi-detached, split-level, modern, air-conditioned bungalow garden court apartment (with pool privileges), and bought the old rock fort in the hills with the last of my severance pay.

It came cheap; nobody wanted an ugly stone house so far off the main-traveled roads. No one seemed to know who had built it, or when. It was old, squatting sunblasted and craggy on the desert hill, with its own well and its six rooms, or seven depending on your method of counting, and its sizable population of centipedes and black widows which congregated in the seams between the rocks. The lights, refrigerator and noisy rooftop swamp cooler were powered by electricity from a small Koehler diesel generator bolted on a wooden platform in a lean-to against the back wall. The enclosure looked like the cover on a coal chute; the little two-cylinder engine sat two feet off the ground on its platform to keep dust out of the works. It thumped and clattered incessantly; it was an intolerable gnashing of pistons and valves, pulsing out unsteady direct current.

The nearest neighbor was three miles away; the hills were all rocks and dust and cactus. A hundred feet behind the house was a square stone shed that had once been a carriage barn. Inside it, I kept the rock equipment — tumblers, grinders, barrels, diamond saws, drills.

I supplemented my pension by rockhounding. As a business it was pointless — an individual with secondhand, backroom machinery couldn’t make much of a living... But its pointlessness was part of its beauty. Out of the tumblers came brilliant gems — for rings, pendants, earrings, rock-bolo desert neckties, all the gimcracks tourists picked up in curio shops. The rocks didn’t bring in much money but they made me a time and a place: time to wander the desert and mountains in search of the garnet and agate and countless other semiprecious stones that littered the canyons in uncut, unpolished disguise.

It was a land of heroic proportions. It was dangerous if you took it for granted; you shook out your boots in the morning before you put them on, to avoid scorpion stings, and you kept the legs of the bed in half-full cans of kerosene to dissuade the bugs from crawling in with you. The sun burned wherever it struck. But when you took a breath, it tasted clean and you knew nobody had ever breathed that lungful of air before you.

I poured a glass of milk — I have never liked coffee — and took it outside. The dry heat made my cheeks sting with shaving rash. I brooded on the rose bushes Joanne had planted along the gravel walk. She had left herself all over the place. The roses were starting to bloom again; in the desert you could get five or six blooms in a year if you kept them watered. I turned on the faucet and watched the water make mud, flowing along the shallow trenches from bush to bush. I had spent a month self-disciplining myself into the conviction that it hadn’t been important enough for me to bother tearing out all the reminders of her by the roots. But her phone call brought it all back, very whole, very sharp and vivid.

It was going to be a scorching hot day. In the shade on the front step I drained the milk and thought about what we had said six months ago. It had been one of those miserable conversations where neither of us could meet the other’s eyes. “Darling,” she had said, “I wish we could have kept it casual, the way you wanted it, but I’m not made that way. It’s my fault — I know you didn’t want it to get too intense.”

I had tried to persuade her to change her mind. She had lashed out (afterward I understood why): “Simon, you’re hiding away up here, you just can’t commit yourself to anything or anyone. You tried to fight city hall and you lost, so you quit. You haven’t got room left in you for me or anything else outside yourself. I’ve already had that with Mike, more than I could take. I haven’t the strength left.”

The Jeep had been packed with my rock chisels and canteen. I had acted tougher than I felt, because I couldn’t fathom my own contradictory feelings. I had climbed into the Jeep and she had walked over to me and said, “I won’t be here when you get back.” I had driven on down the hill without looking back to see if she was watching. It turned into a rotten day — I wanted to call her but wasn’t sure whether she wanted me to. Sometimes it was hard to be sure of Joanne’s meanings; she was changeable: sometimes she told you only part of the truth because she thought the whole truth would hurt.

I had seen her only once after that — a week later, an accidental meeting. She had let it slip; I never knew whether it was deliberate or an honest slip — She’d said something that had given me a foothold and I had pried the rest out of her, questioning her roughly like an interrogating cop, and finally there it was: Aiello. I was an ex-cop — an ex-honest cop — and Aiello had told her to stay away from me. She hadn’t told me before because she knew my temper; she didn’t want me to go gunning for Aiello because I wouldn’t have a chance against the organization.

I knew better than to ask her to quit working for Aiello. I had never even asked her how she’d got mixed up with the organization in the first place. Those were questions you just didn’t ask. It went without saying they had some hold over her. They always do.

I had told myself, angrily, it was her choice and I had to honor it. We had to avoid each other for however long it might take to blunt the edges of dangerous emotions. I had to acquiesce because I could not compromise her with the organization; Aiello was not an understanding or forgiving type and his organization played rough.

Now I saw the dust of her car coming up the dirt-road from the county highway. I felt ill at ease, betrayed; I had steeled myself against her absence but now she was coming back, not for the reason I would have wanted.

It was impossible to ignore my anticipation — I wanted to see her.

I waited in the shade until she drove the beige convertible into the yard and parked beside my Jeep. She had the top down; she turned and watched through her sunglasses as I walked out of the shade to open the car door. She didn’t smile. “Thanks for letting me come.”

Very gravely, I said, “Is it bad?”

“As bad as it can get.” She swung her legs out, stood and smoothed down the tight skirt — it was white poplin; she wore a green sleeveless blouse that clung to the curved undersides of her breasts and showed off her smooth brown arms. She had a dancer’s hard little body, superb legs; her face was small, heart-shaped and lovely.

The wind had roughed up her hair; there was a thread of moisture on her upper lip. She looked heat-flushed and scared. I couldn’t really make out her eyes through the big sunglasses. She looked faint. “I feel like such a fool. Nothing can happen on a beautiful day like this, can it?” Her smile was quick and nervous. She kept looking down the road, as if somebody were chasing her. “Can’t we talk inside?”

“Sure.”

She had a curious detached fortitude; I had seen it before: the world could be falling down around her and she would still have to set the stage, get everybody in position before telling them about the disaster. We walked toward the house. I was sharply aware of the quick rat-tat of her heels on the gravel and the nylon whispers of her thighs. Her head hardly came up to my shoulder; the skirt was tight, but she moved along quickly with crisp lithe strides.

I went inside after her and let the screen door slam behind me with a weatherbeaten, slapping sound. It made her jump; she smiled apologetically and slumped against the doorjamb, leaning against it with her shoulder propped up. She said, “I’m in a state of absolute utter panic,” and shoved herself toward the kitchen. She marched in and disappeared around the corner. I followed scowling, and when I reached the kitchen door she was filling the percolator.

“I don’t even know how to begin. I suppose that’s why I’m puttering around like a madwoman.” She put the sunglasses away in a pocket sewn in her skirt. Her big violet eyes were provocative, more from habit than design. She measured the coffee and put it on to boil.

I said, “Why don’t you sit down and get a grip on yourself. I’ll do that.”

“You’ve got no talent with coffee,” she said. “I’ve got to have something strong and hot or I swear I’ll collapse right here.” She shook out a cigarette and found a match by the stove. Her hands trembled violently. I took the match away from her; she clamped the cigarette in her teeth while I lighted it.

She shook her head in violent angry defiance, as if to clear it. She took a deep drag on the cigarette and let it out slowly; she gave the coffee a waspish glance, because it hadn’t already come to a boil, and when she had exhaled the lungful of smoke she said in a half-hysterical airily light way, “Aiello is gone.”

“What?”

“Gone. Just... gone. The house is empty and the safe’s wide open. Empty.”

She tipped her head far over to one side like a little girl and gave me a peculiar, savage grin. “Isn’t it lovely?”

My pulse thudded. “Great,” I agreed. “You’d better tell me about it.”

She waved a hand in an arch gesture and turned to face the stove; over her shoulder she said vaguely, “They’ll think I did it, naturally. Got rid of Aiello somehow and robbed the safe.”

“Naturally?” I echoed dryly. “Sure. Naturally they’ll pick you first — I mean, you being an expert safecracker and all—”

“Don’t make jokes,” she snapped.

I scraped a hand across my mouth. She lifted the coffee off the stove. I couldn’t see her face, but the line of her back was taut, tense, brittle, like a cornered animal.

The coffee smoked as it poured out of the pot; it was black and oil-thick. She carried the mug into my small living room.

I followed, stopping in the doorway. The roof cooler pushed a slow damp breeze across the room. I waited until she sat down on the couch and then I said, “All right. Go over it again — try to make some sense. What happened?”

She tucked her feet under her and held the coffee in both hands and blew on it. “I got to the house at seven-thirty, as usual. Aiello likes to work before ten and after four — he hates the heat, he spends the middle of the day in the indoor pool with the air conditioners blowing on his vodka collinses.”

“Only this morning he wasn’t there.”

“It isn’t that so much; he often spends the night out, but when he does, he always leaves somebody in the house on guard. This time there was nobody. And the safe, wide open and empty. Papers scattered around the office. The place has been ransacked.”

“Maybe he cleared it out himself and took the stuff somewhere else for safekeeping. Maybe he got word there was going to be a raid.”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I just don’t.” She looked up momentarily. “I know him — you don’t.”

“Uh. What was in the safe?”

“You’d be better off not knowing.”

I shook my head. “If it’s what you think it is, the mob will react. The kind of reaction will depend on what was inside the safe.”

She took a suicidal drag on her cigarette and stabbed it out in the ash tray. With smoke trailing from her mouth she said, “Let’s just say there was enough to make it worth their while to kill half the population of this town to get it back.”

“Cash?”

“A lot of cash. And files — the kind they couldn’t afford to see in print.”

“How much cash?”

“I never counted it,” she said, snappish. “It was a hell a lot, millions I suppose, but I don’t know. I’m supposed to be Sal Aiello’s secretary but there are a lot of things I don’t get to see.”

“Go on.”

“Look, Simon, I’m only part of the front. All the big shots try to look like legitimate businessmen, and part of the act is having a pretty secretary who doesn’t look as if she came out of a reform school typing course. Aiello has his finger in quite a few legitimate businesses, enough to keep me busy with correspondence and phone calls and filing. I know it’s all a front and he knows I know it, but it’s the kind of thing you never say out loud. I don’t get to see the books and I’ve never even been in the same room when he had the safe open. The safe isn’t in the office, you know — it’s in the library. But I’ve absorbed enough loose talk to know they keep dynamite in that safe. Aiello isn’t the only one who uses it. Vincent Madonna has things in it. So does Pete DeAngelo and any number of others. It’s like a central clearing station for all of them — it’s an old vault they bought from a California bank that went out of business.”

“How old?”

She blinked. “How should I know?”

“It’s not a silly question. If it’s old enough, it’s easy to crack — and they wouldn’t keep top-secret dynamite in a cracker box.”

“Of course they would,” she snapped. “My God, Simon, sometimes Aiello keeps a hundred thousand dollars in cash lying around the office in unlocked drawers. Nobody has the nerve to rob the Mafia.”

“Apparently,” I remarked, “somebody did.” It occurred to me this was the first time I’d ever heard her use the word Mafia. I said, “Who else knows about this?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they haven’t discovered it yet. What time is it?”

“Nine-thirty.”

“He didn’t have any appointments for today. But Madonna and DeAngelo drop around when they feel like it. So do a lot of other people; it’s like a clubhouse up there. I know I haven’t got much time — God, Simon, when I saw the mess I knew all of it, right in that split second, I knew I was in terrible trouble. I don’t know what to do.”

I watched her for a moment, then headed for the bedroom. “Stay put a minute,” I told her, and went to the phone by the bed. I dialed Nancy Lansford, my neighbor down the road, a two-hundred-pound spinster who lived on a small inheritance and spent the winters taking tourists and school children on nature walks in the desert. She owed me a few favors — her house was full of polished rocks I’d given her. She was a relaxing old windbag, tart and practical as only a fanatically conservationist old maid could be.

She answered breathlessly on the fifth ring; I identified myself.

“Oh, Simon, good morning, isn’t it a beautiful day?” She had a reedy, chirping voice. “I was outside watching a buzzard with my field glasses. Aren’t they remarkable birds? Why, only last week I—”

I cut her off: “Nancy, I need a little help.”

She answered immediately: “Name it.”

I grinned into the phone. “I may have some visitors this morning and I’d like to have a little advance warning if they decide to come. Would you let me know if any cars start up the road toward my place?”

“Of course. But why—”

“I haven’t got time to explain,” I said. “If anybody drives by your house, just dial my number, let the phone ring twice, and hang up. Don’t wait for me to answer, just hang up after two rings. Got it?”

“I’ve got it. I must say you sound very mysterious.”

“I’ll tell you about it later,” I said, thanked her and hung up.

When I looked around, Joanne was standing in the doorway, her eyes wide. She narrowed them and said, “I was eavesdropping.”

I nodded. “If they want to find you, this is one of the first places they’ll think of looking. I’ll feel better with a few minutes’ warning.” Nancy lived three miles away, at the foot of my road.

She said, “I’m glad — because I’m sure they’ll be after me.” She went back into the living room. When I got there she was back on the couch with her coffee, lighting another cigarette. She was addicted to menthol cigarettes and strong coffee.

She said, “You never asked me any questions, but I suppose you must have figured out that they had something on me, to keep me — loyal.”

“Yeah,” I said, without inflection.

“It was in that safe.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t want to tell you. What difference does it make? Papers, tape recordings, pictures, movie films. It was there. Now whoever took it has it, and I’m scared of what they may do with it.”

There wasn’t much for me to say. I waited. Presently she resumed: “Naturally they know I knew it was there. They’ll assume I wanted to get my hands on it so they wouldn’t have a hold over me any longer. And they’ll assume I told you about it, and you and I cracked the safe, to get it, and got rid of Aiello somewhere. They’ll assume that,” she added with a shudder, “because if fantasies came true, it’s exactly what I would have done.”

“You mean you were planning to burgle the safe?”

“Don’t be silly, I wouldn’t know how. But I wanted to — a silly dream, I guess, but it was the only hope I had. I even thought of conning you into helping me do it.” She slanted a smile at me, twisted and nervous. “The irony is, I didn’t do it, but they’ll blame it on me, anyway.”

She made a face, drew her shoulders together, and sat hunched forward with her elbows between her knees. “Simon, I’m scared to death they’ll kill me for something I didn’t do.”

I sat down by her and squeezed her arm. She pulled away, out of my reach. “Don’t — please. Don’t try to comfort me, I didn’t come here for that.”

“What do you want me to do, Joanne?”

She shook her head violently. “God knows. I’m just running blind. I ran to you because I thought you could protect me. Just another stupid dream — what can you do? Nothing. But here I am. Simon, I haven’t healed over — I’m still in love with you, if it has to be said — but I don’t want this madness to be an excuse for us to start things up again. I meant what I said last winter and I want to leave the air clear, not have that hanging between us, because I just don’t have the strength. That empty safe has nothing to do with the way you and I feel about each other, or did feel or will feel. I know we gave each other something we both needed — anyway, something I needed — to feel alive again and persuade myself there was some little bit of hope left somewhere.”

Her voice trailed off; she was tense, expecting an argument. I wanted desperately to give her one. But I had my own injuries. I looked down at her: she sat hunched, brooding, ready to jump, hating the dismal trap she was in. She couldn’t accept it with the bleak resignation of a tough alley broad because that wasn’t her style; she had never belonged in the world they had trapped her in, which was one reason, I supposed, why she was valuable to the mob. She was animated, tidy and alive, slightly vain, often careless with risks, ruthlessly amorous yet amazingly — even after all of it — innocent of malice. She drove too fast and drank too much; she ran a headlong race with life, graceful in spite of the daily bitterness she must have felt, chained to them; and incredibly, all of it had left few marks on her. I hadn’t seen her in months before this morning; she hadn’t changed at all, except for the tight lines around her mouth and eyes that were evidence of the strain of the moment. She was still, as always, girlish, lively, saucy, defiant. Remember me? she had said once — I’m the girl with the cauliflower heart.

I stood up. “All right,” I said. “Neutral corners — I’ll keep my hands to myself. Let’s get this figured out.”

She gave me a quick grateful look, and became smaller and heavier with relief, strain flowing out. She was looking with preoccupied anger into the coffee dregs and she was arrestingly beautiful in profile. I looked away and said, “If you want me to do you any good you’ll have to lay everything out on the table. You’re holding a lot back.”

“What is there to hold back? I’ve told you what happened. You always have to make things so damned complicated.”

“There’s got to be more than you’ve told me. Nothing you’ve said so far convinces me you’re in too much trouble. If the house is empty and the safe’s open, why not assume Aiello just skipped? Took the money himself?”

“Aiello? You couldn’t get him outdoors in this heat.”

“He disappeared in the cool of the night. Maybe he’s holed up with a nice cuddly air conditioner — or on a plane to South America.”

“He’d never get all that stuff through customs,” she said. “Believe me, he didn’t do it himself. He had no reason to. He’d have been stealing from himself, and from his friends. Vincent Madonna had things in that safe — Aiello wouldn’t have the guts to steal a ten-cent stamp from Madonna.”

I recalled the front-page stories of automobile death traps wired with bombs. The rubouts and hits, attributed to the Madonna mob but, of course, never proved. Madonna was the head of the local Family: the don vin done. Salvatore Aiello was his caporegime — one of his field commanders in the Cosa Nostra pseudo-military setup. I had heard rumors about rumors — that there was bad blood between them, for no known reason other than the fact that Madonna was Sicilian while Aiello was Neapolitan. But she was probably right: no hood like Aiello would risk the wrath of the entire international organization by absconding with his boss’s money. But what the devil could I do about it? Joanne couldn’t hide from them any more than Aiello could. What chance did we have?

I turned toward her, opening my mouth to speak, and that was when the phone jangled in the bedroom.

She shot off the couch. I froze. The phone rang a second time. I turned my face toward the bedroom.

After a minute I realized I was holding my breath. The phone had not rung again. Two rings, and silence.

I strode across the room. “It could be anybody at all,” I said, “but let’s not take a chance.”

“I’ll get out of here.”

“No. They’d see your dust.”

“Then I’ll hide.”

“Can’t hide your car,” I said. I had gone into the bedroom; I opened the footlocker. Cops have to buy their own side arms; I still had my .38 Police Special. I checked to make sure it was loaded, put it in the hip pocket of my Levi’s and went back into the living room. She was chewing her lip. I said, “We may as well face it now,” and opened the front door. “Stay behind me.”

I held the screen open for her and then walked down past the rose bushes and stood watching the dark blue Ford come snarling up the dusty grade toward us.