The Hit

Chapter Ten

A few times in my life I have done things for which I would like to have taken credit, as if I had reasoned them out beforehand, prepared for them and accomplished them with cool deliberation, unruffled and supreme. The truth was, in each case I acted with unthinking reflex, and it happened to work. Call it luck; call it fate. Call it a natural endowment of good reflexes.

Behrenman swung his car against me. We were both streaking toward a sharp right-hand bend, with the 2,500-foot drop at my left. I hit the brakes hard and it was those unthinking reflexes that made me crab the wheel — not away from him, but toward him.

He was expecting it but he was a shade slow reacting. My bumper banged along the side of his car with a garbage can racket. He slammed his brakes and slewed across the road at an angle, trying to shove me off the cliff with the superior weight of his big car. He might have done it, if the Jeep had had a longer wheelbase. I heard the crack and roar of his pistol. A glazed star appeared in the windshield before me. I was crabbing the wheels over hard, fighting the weight of his car, and as he slid forward the protruding edge of the Jeep bumper swung into the scalloped fender opening over his left rear wheel. There was the sudden sharp stink of burning rubber as the bumper shredded his back tire; then the hooked edge of the bumper caught the inside of his fender. I held the brakes down hard. The green car skidded, swiveling on the pivot. He spun left. His front wheels went over the edge — I saw terror on his suddenly white face. The .45 boomed and roared. In that broken instant of time my reflexes sent messages to feet and arms: I gunned the Jeep forward, got free of his fender, spun around with my rear wheels skidding to the right.

The gun was still thundering. A ricochet screamed off the Jeep’s hood. Freed of bumper-hook restraint, the green car pitched forward over the rim and turned a slow somersault.

The Jeep shuddered and stopped, skewed across the road at an acute angle. My front wheels were inches from the edge. I jammed the shift into reverse, backed onto the pavement and set the hand-brake. I got out on wildly trembling legs and made my way to the edge. I could still hear the bang and crash of the tumbling car.

It was still falling. The cliff was not quite perpendicular; the car went down end-over-end, each somersault slow and ponderous. It was hardly recognizable as an automobile — squashed, foreshortened, both ends pleated like an accordion’s bellows.

Four hundred feet below, it pitched out over a rock outcrop, hung suspended in the air, and crashed down like a pancake on a reverse-turn of the highway. From where I stood it didn’t seem to bounce at all. It hit the pavement flat, on all four wheels, with a sound I never forgot — deafening, but more crunch than crash. Like the amplified crump of a distant field mortar.

Pieces of sharded glass winked in the sunlight down the length of the car’s vertical path. One door lay intact, hardly dented, forty feet below me. One wheel, with part of an axle, teetered on the lip of a rock a few yards below that.

I retreated from the edge and braced both hands on a flat fender of the Jeep, taking deep breaths. After a while I opened my eyes and climbed numbly into the seat, got the Jeep moving and crawled downhill at a feeble pace. My arms shook violently. My mouth was sticky with dry fright.

The unrecognizable remains of the green car were splashed across the width of the road, more or less in one piece fused together by impact. The thing was upright but the final blow had driven the remaining wheels and underparts up into the body; it was squashed almost flat, not more than three feet high at any point.

It was a useless gesture, but I tried to pry into the wreckage to find him. All I could find was a hand, severed, the fingers locked around a mangled pistol. I went to the side of the road and vomited.

The wreck blocked the road. I would have to move it. I unwound a length of cable from the winch-drum on the front bumper of the Jeep, found a corner of the wreckage on which to set the hook, went back to the Jeep, set the brakes and worked winch levers.

It was no good. The wreck had smashed completely into the pavement. The only way to move it would be to get above it with a wrecker and lift it out.

I caught myself uttering a blank monotone of curses. I clamped my mouth shut, rewound the winch cable, and turned around to drive back up to the top. There was another highway that would take me around, past Baragray’s ranch and down another cliff road thirty miles to the north. It would cost me three hours.

I phoned the Highway Patrol from a lonely filling station to report the wreck, giving them a fake name, and went on. Driving through the mountains, threading menacing dark stands of pine, I put my mind on Ed Behrenman, who had not tailed me up to Baragray’s from the city but who had known where to ambush me, and by the time I started down the steep canyon highway I knew where to look for Aiello’s killer and where to start looking for the $3 million.

Only it wasn’t my day for speed. Halfway down the canyon a tire went flat.

I turned the lurching Jeep into a graveled cliffside overlook and got out, cursing loudly now, to change the tire. It was easy to see what had caused the flat — somewhere in the tangle with Behrenman’s car the tire had been raked by steel, the sidewall cut almost through.

Changing the tire was a half hour’s work. I went around the Jeep to inspect the other tires but found nothing to alarm me; and went on my way, uneasiness turning to a sour belly-taste of fear as the sun moved steadily toward the mountains across the desert. There were a lot of places to search. I knew who had the money, but not where.

It was well after five when I left the freeway and crossed town on the Strip. I had seen the address some time ago and hadn’t forgotten it. Blue, lime, red and pink neon winked and flashed along the Strip. Girls and uniformed men in cars went recklessly fast, squealing into broad parking lots in front of the places where they could spend or otherwise separate themselves from their money. I went by the Moulin Rouge without slacking, thinking momentarily of Mike Farrell — I thought I had that figured out, too, but it would take checking and I didn’t have time for that.

Near six o’clock, after fighting the outbound traffic rush and two miles of unsynchronized traffic lights, I turned up a quiet street and drove slowly, seeking house numbers. Going past one house I saw a television screen, blue through the window, flickering as an airplane went overhead, an old woman sitting there, bending toward the set, trying to hear. The house I wanted was next door. I stopped the Jeep and put my hand in my hip pocket, on the Beretta.

There was wrought-iron furniture on the front lawn. I went up a curved pavement to the door and tried the knob without knocking. It was locked. I pushed the doorbell and heard chimes inside. After a minute without response I backed up and walked around the side of the house into the gravel driveway. There was a two-car garage. I looked into it through a side window. There was one car inside, a Jaguar coupe with a slinky look of speed. I went back to the side of the house and looked in. The view through the kitchen showed me part of the living room beyond, and I saw a woman walking toward the front door, not steadily, belting a bathrobe around herself and brushing back uncombed hair.

I went back around to the front and was there when she finally opened the door; evidently she had stopped to put away her hairbrush before answering the chimes. Her mouth was sucked in with a tight look of disapproval. She barred the door with her body, a feline redhead with an amoral half-drunk look. What had been a pretty face ten years ago had hardened.

She swept me up and down with a practiced look, and stepped back. “Come in.” She hadn’t asked me who I was or what I wanted — just, Come in.

I came in and pushed the door shut, looking around past her. The place was decorated in Miami Modern, expensive but hideous. Had I been in any condition to do so, I might have reflected at some length on the fact that the sole original meaning of the word luxury, in Elizabethan times, was lust. The house, with its careless, tasteless opulence, and the woman before me would have told me all I ever needed to know about the master of the place, even if I had never met him.

I said, “I’m looking for your husband. I assume he’s your husband.”

“Won’t I do?” She ran her tongue along her lips. “I’m Sylvia.” Heavy-breasted, she twisted her ungirdled hips, wanting sensation. She sat on a Naugahyde couch and plucked a cigarette from a case on the coffee table. She eyed me as if I were a side of beef and said, “Mix me a drink and we’ll talk about my husband. Mix yourself one while you’re at it.”

“Where is he?”

Her shoulders stirred. Her breasts handled the bathrobe seductively. “You’re a lovely man.”

“Where is he?”

“Who knows? There was a phone call. An emergency case, he said. He’s got my car, his is broken down. He’ll probably be gone most of the night, as usual. I don’t think I even want to be bothered to know what her name is. You don’t know, do you? Her name?”

“No,” I said, biting it off. As I looked around the room it occurred to me he might have the loot hidden right here in the house. A good place to start looking — but she, Sylvia, could make it difficult. I said, “I’ll mix drinks, but let me use your bathroom first.”

“Sure.” She smiled and pointed vaguely.

In the bathroom medicine cabinet, as I’d suspected, there was an assortment of medicines. I found the one I sought, dumped six capsules into my palm, flushed the toilet and went back to the living room with the capsules in my closed hand. “Where’s the bar?”

“I’ve got an open bottle in the kitchen. Scotch — I hope it suits you because my husband keeps the bar locked when he’s not home.” She tittered. “Make mine straight, one ice cube.”

As I crossed to the kitchen I saw she had sat back on the couch and adjusted the bathrobe. She had nothing underneath but skin. The lapels were parted, displaying a wealth of pale, soft breast. A lot of men I knew chose their wives with less care than their barbers. In the kitchen I made drinks and emptied the contents of the capsules into hers. I stirred it up and took the drinks into the living room, gave hers to her and was about to retreat to a chair when she patted the couch beside her. “Sit here by me. What’s your name?”

“Simon.”

“That’s nice. It’s — different, you know? Sexy.” She picked up her drink, watching me over the rim of the glass, and slugged down a good big swallow. “The way you came in, I thought you might be the wronged husband of some broad he’s shacking up with. But you said you didn’t know her name.”

“That’s right, I don’t.”

“So you’re not the wronged husband. Who are you?”

“Does it matter?” I said. “You’re sure you don’t know where I might find him?”

She shook her head, giving me a while-the-cat’s-away leer. Her upper body stirred, twisting toward me as she set the drink down; her nipples made hardened dents against the robe. When I didn’t react in keeping with the invitation she pouted with her mouth and looked down at her drink. “I’ll bet he’s keeping one of those cheap Mafia broads — some gangster’s gun moll. He’s thick as thieves with the mobsters, did you know that?”

“Yeah. I know that.”

“Why, I’ll bet you’re one of them.”

“One of what?”

“A hoodlum. Is that what you are?” She seemed more excited and pleased than alarmed. She laughed. “That would just serve him right, wouldn’t it?” Then, quickly, she shifted her seat and tugged at the cloth belt. Her garment came apart; the heavy breasts burst free. She touched her damp palm to my cheek and whispered, “I’m a woman, Simon. I need what every woman needs.”

“Right now,” I stated truthfully, “I feel like having sex about as much as I feel like having a cucumber sandwich.”

“In that case,” she said, undismayed, “I’ll just have to seduce you.” She gripped my shirt collar and pulled me close.

I extricated myself and stood up. She growled a hoarse obscenity and reached for her drink, and upended it defiantly. Her expression didn’t change. She said, “I drink a lot. Do you mind? It helps keep your guts in.” Her tongue was starting to thicken.

I said, “Tell me about him and the Mafia. You said he’s thick as thieves with them.”

“Did I?” Her head was slightly tilted. She put the burning cigarette in the corner of her mouth and it sent a thin slow jet of smoke past her half-shuttered eye. Squinting up at me, she said, “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“An interested party.”

“You’re one of them. I knew it. A hoodlum. You want to find him so you can kill him.”

“Why should I want to kill him?”

“You know perfectly well.” She was glazed, mumbling in thickening syllables. “He told me he had some kind of — he called it a beef, against the Mafia. He said he had a lot of evidence against them and if he can’t straighten things out with them he’ll release some of it to the newspapers. He says it’s enough to blow the Mafia sky-high, and a lot of politicians with it.”

The stuff I had put in her drink, chloral hydrate from sleeping capsules, wasn’t supposed to act as a truth serum, but it seemed to be having that effect. Either that or the alcohol had entirely wiped out her inhibitions against disclosing dangerous secrets. Or maybe she was just getting revenge on him.

It didn’t matter any more; she crumpled slowly and lay inert. I straightened her out on the couch, tested her pulse, closed the bathrobe around her, and began to subject the house to a painstaking search.

The sun threw a last burst of light along the horizon. I emerged from the house empty-handed except for a key case I’d lifted from Sylvia’s purse. I used it to let myself into the garage, and spent ten minutes climbing rafters and seeking cubbyholes. Nothing. I went back to the house and put the keys back in her bag. Where else? His office, I supposed. Or the car he was driving — her car, she’d said. There was no question in my mind what kind of car it was. I’d never seen it but it had to be a Cadillac and it had to be pink

I left her on the couch, snoring, and let the lock click shut behind me when I went outside. In plum-colored dusk I drove up toward the foothills. I stopped once, to telephone Nancy’s house and talk to Joanne. I told her, in a voice so weary it alarmed her, that I was on a warm trail and would see her soon. “Don’t set fire to your hope chest just yet,” I said lamely, and hung up, and got back in the Jeep to climb the foothill street.

On the way up I paid no attention to the bright neon display on the flats below. It was fully dark by the time I drove across the deserted parking area, past the brightly lit windows of the expensive shops that were closed for the night but lighted against burglars. I didn’t park in front this time; I found the service road and drove around back, out along the narrow asphalt path that hugged the rim of the hill the way the mountain road hugged the cliff where Ed Behrenman had made his plunge. Quite a bit of light flowed up here from the illuminated city below.

The back door of a pharmacy had a neon sign that spattered and fizzed.

The pink Cadillac four-door sedan was parked at the end of the service road. I rolled the Jeep to a quiet stop behind it. The adrenalin pumping through my body made my hands shake.

I had to walk past the Cadillac to get to the back door of the place, but I was interrupted by the sight of the man slumped in the driver’s seat of the big car. I stopped, lifted the Beretta, and gingerly reached inside to shake him. It was Dr. Fred Brawley, but what the hell was he doing asleep in the Cadillac?

He wasn’t asleep. He was dead. When I touched him he pitched over on his right shoulder and didn’t move. I opened the door and examined him by the light of the dash and map lights. He had been shot in the back of the head by a bullet of sufficiently small caliber and low velocity to lodge in the skull; it had made no exit wound in front.

I felt sinking disgust and a coiling tension in my groin, the acid sense of failure. Somebody had beat me to him. Somebody else had found him out, killed him and taken the loot. I was right back where I’d started.

The corpse was still warm; he hadn’t been dead more than a few minutes. Maybe there was still a chance. I withdrew from the car, glancing into the back seat — a suitcase and an overcoat. I opened the suitcase: just clothes. Brawley had been traveling light.

The quadrangular medical office building had been locked up for the night, I supposed, but when I glanced up at the corner picture-window ten feet above my head I saw the wink of a small light traveling across the glass in reflection. Someone was inside Brawley’s office with a pencil flashlight. Blood pumping, I walked around the Cadillac to the back door of the building.

The metal door had been jimmied open; it stood slightly ajar. I pushed softly inside, taking the Beretta off safety and holding it at ready. As I climbed the stairs toward the upper floor — that was the ground floor if you entered from the front; the pitch of the hill made the difference — my nostrils detected the lingering firecracker scent of cordite sulfur.

The stairwell was dark. I went up on tiptoes. At the head of the stairs the door stood wide open, giving out into the long corridor. At the end of the hall I could see the faint reflections of the moving flashlight around the corner in the office. I went forward along the soundless carpet, gripping the Beretta, taut with the knowledge that if the man was still searching for it then he hadn’t found it.

I eased up to the open office door and slowly put my head around the jamb, and saw him.

He had his back to me. He was trying to get the safe open. He had tools; the pencil light was in his teeth and he was using both hands on the tools. The little electric drill was whining with the particular whine of a diamond bit. I had a drill like that; I use it on rocks.

There was a click as the drill plunged through, and as he withdrew the bit and set the drill down on the chair beside him, I heard him grunt — a breathy, falsetto sort of grunt caused by the old injury to his larynx.

I said, “Stand still, Pete. Freeze.”

DeAngelo wheeled. In the flickering strange light of the tumbling flashlight I had a glimpse of his grin, a spasm of clenched teeth and drawn lips. His hand, as quick as a diamondback’s strike, was spinning a silencer-weighted pistol toward me.

He wasn’t allowing any argument. I pulled the trigger, too much in haste, and saw vividly the jump and puff of his shirtsleeve as the flesh received the bullet. It stung him but he was still moving, diving toward the desk. The automatic in his fist made a little puff of sound and I heard the solid whack of the bullet driving into the wall above my head. I wheeled back, flattening against the outside of the doorjamb; slid down to the floor and went into the room on my belly, gun out in front. But he took me by surprise: he launched a chair through the picture window, and in the crashing confusion went out through the jagged opening.

He had a ten-foot drop to the ground. I got my feet under me and crossed the room fast. The leg of a chair, unseen in the dark, tripped me; I sprawled, cursed, got up and peered down through the shattered window.

I had a glimpse of him, running with a limp past the neon drugstore sign, his face a twisted ugly mask of fury. He stopped and fired at me, just once; I ducked, put my head out again and watched him disappear at a shambling run. The only explanation I could think of was that he must have been running out of ammunition.

He would probably summon help from the nearest phone. I didn’t have much time. I went to the wall safe.

Luck, this time in my favor. He had broken the lock with his drill just before I had surprised him. The door swung open. I picked up his pencil light from the floor and played it around the inside of the safe.

There was only one thing inside that hadn’t been there when I’d looked inside this morning. The addition was a gun — a Walther 9 mm automatic.

I took it out, checked its loads, and put it in my pocket.

I tested the safe for false walls or bottom, but it seemed sturdy, and there was no money in it. I looked around quickly, going through drawers and the brown filing cabinet. The loot wasn’t in the office. I spent only five minutes going through the rest of the examining rooms and closets; what I sought was bulky and I didn’t waste time on small enclosures. There was no money, and as far as I could tell there was no evidence lying around that could, in Sylvia Brawley’s words, blow the Mafia sky-high.

It had to be somewhere. Brawley had had it; DeAngelo hadn’t found it.

I went back outside, very scared now, but remembering what Joanne had told me — the loot might have fitted into the trunk of a car. I got Brawley’s keys from the ignition and went back and opened the trunk, all the while keeping my senses alert for sign of DeAngelo’s return or the arrival of reinforcements.

It was all there, stuffed into the trunk of the pink Cadillac, crammed tight into every inch of space.

From the linen closet of Brawley’s office I took a stack of folded bedsheets, the kind that nurses used to cover the examination tables. They weren’t too large but they had to do. I opened the sheets one at a time and made laundry bundles of the money from the Cadillac trunk, tying the sheets up by their corners. I put them all in the bed of the Jeep and put the metal lockboxes, seven of them, on top to weight the sheets down; I slammed the Cadillac trunk, tossed the keys on the seat beside the dead man, and went around the Cadillac wiping fingerprints. I did a fast job and headed for the Jeep with a gun in my hand — I had spent far too much time here.

Then a sound rocked my head back: the wail of a siren’s idiot laughter, somewhere close by.

I backed the Jeep down the service road to a wide spot, turned around, and headed up toward the shopping center plaza, which was the only way out.

I came out from between two buildings in second gear, pushing the gas, but the police car slithered across my path and squealed to a halt. The door slammed open and the driver leaped out — Joe Cutter, lifting his .357 Magnum.

DeAngelo must have called him in. I ducked my head, spun the wheel and braked the Jeep. Cutter’s gun boomed. My windshield took another bullet hole, the second for the day; by then I was out, diving flat, hitting the asphalt painfully on one shoulder and rolling. I rolled past the Jeep in time to see him shift his aim toward me; he had the Jeep’s headlights in his eyes and he was squinting with a ferocious scowl crouching down on one knee to aim. I used Brawley’s Walther pistol. My steady, firm pressure on the trigger made it go off. It caught me almost by surprise, as it should. Magically, as if by stop-motion photography, a dark disc appeared on the side of Cutter’s heavy face. Blood burst from his cheeks; his head snapped to one side under the bullet’s impact.

He pitched to the pavement, full in the cone of the headlights.

I sprinted across the fifty feet that separated us. The hole in his cheekbone was rimmed by droplets of crimson froth. His expressionless eyes blinked twice and stayed open, focused on my knees.

There didn’t seem to be anyone about. I turned a circle on my heels to make sure. As I completed the turn, my eyes fell on Cutter’s heavy .357 revolver. Of all the people I’d known, Cutter had been most likely to die by the sword. Sometimes I had thought he was just batting around seeking a place to die. He had found it.

I picked him up and put him in the squad car, put the Magnum in his hand and drove the squad car through the alley; I parked it behind the Cadillac and left Cutter dead behind the wheel. Then I walked over to the pink Cadillac and pressed the Walther pistol into Brawley’s dead hand. Paraffin tests would prove Brawley hadn’t shot him, but a superficial investigation would suggest he had. And I had no doubt the Walther was the same gun that had killed Aiello. It had been in Brawley’s safe and I presumed it was registered to Brawley. Let the cops figure it out. There was nothing to tie me in, except DeAngelo, and he wasn’t likely to finger me for the cops.

I had things in mind for DeAngelo. I walked back out to the Jeep and drove away; in the bed behind me, wind rattled the bedsheet bundles of money.