Dolan's Cadillac

Dolan's Cadillac

Revenge is a dish best eaten cold.

Spanish proverb

I waited and watched for seven years. I saw him come and go - Dolan. I watched him stroll into fancy restaurants

dressed in a tuxedo, always with a different woman on his arm, always with his pair of bodyguards bookending him. I

watched his hair go from iron-gray to a fashionable silver while my own simply receded until I was bald. I watched him

leave Las Vegas on his regular pilgrimages to the West Coast; I watched him return. On two or three occasions I

watched from a side road as his Sedan DeVille, the same color as his hair, swept by on Route 71 toward Los Angeles.

And on a few occasions I watched him leave his place in the Hollywood Hills in the same gray Cadillac to return to Las

Vegas - not often, though. I am a schoolteacher. Schoolteachers and high-priced hoodlums do not have the same

freedom of movement; it's just an economic fact of life.

He did not know I was watching him - I never came close enough for him to know that. I was careful.

He killed my wife or had her killed; it comes to the same, either way. Do you want details? You won't get them from me.

If you want them, look them up in the back issues of the papers. Her name was Elizabeth. She taught in the same

school where I taught and where I teach still. She taught first-graders. They loved her, and I think that some of them

may not have forgotten their love still, although they would be teenagers now. I loved her and love her still, certainly.

She was not beautiful but she was pretty. She was quiet, but she could laugh. I dream of her. Of her hazel eyes. There

has never been another woman for me. Nor ever will be.

He slipped - Dolan. That's all you have to know. And Elizabeth was there, at the wrong place and the wrong time, to

see the slip. She went to the police, and the police sent her to the FBI, and she was questioned, and she said yes, she

would testify. They promised to protect her, but they either slipped or they underestimated Dolan. Maybe it was both.

Whatever it was, she got into her car one night and the dynamite wired to the ignition made me a widower.
He
made me

a widower - Dolan.

With no witness to testify, he was let free.

He went back to his world , I to mine. The penthouse apartment in Vegas for him, the empty tract home for me. The

succession of beautiful women in furs and sequined evening dresses for him, the silence for me. The gray Cadillacs,

four of them over the years, for him, and the aging Buick Riviera for me. His hair went silver while mine just went.

But I watched.

I was careful - oh, yes! Very careful. I knew what he was, what he could do. I knew he would step on me like a bug if

he saw or sensed what I meant for him. So I was careful.

During my summer vacation three years ago I followed him (at a prudent distance) to Los Angeles, where he went

frequently. He stayed in his fine house and threw parties (I watched the comings and goings from a safe shadow at the

end of the block, fading back when the police cars made their frequent patrols), and I stayed in a cheap hotel where

people played their radios too loud and neon light from the topless bar across the street shone in the windows. I fell

asleep on those nights and dreamed of Elizabeth's hazel eyes, dreamed that none of it had ever happened, and woke up

sometimes with tears drying on my face.

I came close to losing hope.

He was well guarded, you see; so well guarded. He went nowhere without those two heavily armed gorillas with him,

and the Cadillac itself was armor plated. The big radial tires it rolled on were of the self-sealing type favored by

dictators in small, uneasy countries.

Then, that last time, I saw how it could be done - but I did not see it until after I'd had a very bad scare.

I followed him back to Las Vegas, always keeping at least a mile between us, sometimes two, sometimes three. As we

crossed the desert heading east his car was at times no more than a sunflash on the horizon and I thought about

Elizabeth, how the sun looked on her hair.

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I was far behind on this occasion. It was the middle of the week, and traffic on US 71 was very light. When traffic is

light, tailing becomes dangerous - even a grammar-school teacher knows that. I passed an orange sign which read

DETOUR 5 MILES and dropped back even farther. Desert detours slow traffic to a crawl , and I didn't want to chance

coming up behind the gray Cadillac as the driver babied it over some rutted secondary road.

DETOUR 3 MILES, the next sign read, and below that: BLASTING AREA AHEAD TURN OFF 2-WAY RADIO.

I began to muse on some movie I had seen years before. In this film a band of armed robbers had tricked an armored

car into the desert by putting up false detour signs. Once the driver fell for the trick and turned off onto a deserted dirt

road (there are thousands of them in the desert, sheep roads and ranch roads and old government roads that go

nowhere), the thieves had removed the signs, assuring isolation, and then had simply laid siege to the armored car

until the guards came out.

They killed the guards.

I remembered that.

They killed the guards.

I reached the detour and turned onto it. The road was as bad as I had imagined -packed dirt, two lanes wide, filled with

potholes that made my old Buick jounce and groan. The Buick needed new shock absorbers, but shocks are an

expense a schoolteacher sometimes has to put off, even when he is a widower with no children and no hobbies except

his dream of revenge.

As the Buick bounced and wallowed along, an idea occurred to me. Instead of following Dolan's Cadillac the next time

it left Vegas for LA or LA for Vegas, I would pass it - get ahead of it. I would create a false detour like the one in the

movie, luring it out into the wastes that exist, silent and rimmed by mountains, west of Las Vegas. Then I would

remove the signs, as the thieves had done in the movie

I snapped back to reality suddenly. Dolan's Cadillac was ahead of me,
directly ahead of me,
pulled off to one side of

the dusty track. One of the tires, self-sealing or not, was flat. No - not just flat. It was exploded, half off the rim. The

culprit had probably been a sharp wedge of rock stuck in the hardpan like a miniature tank-trap. One of the two

bodyguards was working a jack under the front end. The second - an ogre with a pig-face streaming sweat under his

brush cut - stood protectively beside Dolan himself. Even in the desert, you see, they took no chances.

Dolan stood to one side, slim in an open-throated shirt and dark slacks, his silver hair blowing around his head in the

desert breeze. He was smoking a cigarette and watching the men as if he were somewhere else, a restaurant or a

ballroom or a drawing room perhaps.

His eyes met mine through the windshield of my car and then slid off with no recognition at all, although he had seen

me once, seven years ago (when I had hair!), at a preliminary hearing, sitting beside my wife.

My terror at having caught up with the Cadillac was replaced with an utter fury.

I thought of leaning over and unrolling the passenger window and shrieking:
How dare you forget me? How dare you

dismiss me?
Oh, but that would have been the act of a lunatic. It was
good
that he had forgotten me, it was
fine
that he

had dismissed me, better to be a mouse behind the wainscoting, nibbling at the wires. Better to be a spider, high up

under the eaves, spinning its web.

The man sweating the jack flagged me, but Dolan wasn't the only one capable of dismissal. I looked indifferently

beyond the arm-waver, wishing him a heart attack or a stroke or, best of all, both at the same time. I drove on - but my

head pulsed and throbbed, and for a few moments the mountains on the horizon seemed to double and even treble.

If I'd had a

gun! I thought. If only
Id had a
gun! I
could have ended his rotten, miserable life right then if I'd
only
had a
gun!

Miles later some sort of reason reasserted itself If I'd had a gun, the only thing I could have been sure of was getting

myself killed. If I'd had a gun I could have pulled over when the man using the bumper-jack beckoned me, and gotten

out, and begun spraying bullets wildly around the deserted landscape. I might have wounded someone. Then I would

have been killed and buried in a shallow grave, and Dolan would have gone on escorting the beautiful women and

making pilgrimages between Las Vegas and Los Angeles in his silver Cadillac while the desert animals unearthed my

remains and fought over my bones under the cold moon. For Elizabeth there would have been no revenge - none at all.

The men who travelled with him were trained to kill. I was trained to teach third-graders.

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This was not a movie, I reminded myself as I returned to the highway and passed an orange END CONSTRUCTION

THE STATE OF NEVADA THANKS YOU! sign. And if I ever made the mistake of confusing reality with a movie, of

thinking that a balding third-grade teacher with myopia could ever be Dirty Harry anywhere outside of his own

daydreams, there would never be any revenge, ever.

But
could
there be revenge, ever? Could there be?

My idea of creating a fake detour was as romantic and unrealistic as the idea of jumping out of my old Buick and

spraying the three of them with bullets - me, who had not fired a gun since the age of sixteen and who had never fired a

handgun.

Such a thing would not be possible without a band of conspirators - even the movie I had seen, romantic as it had

been, had made that clear. There had been eight or nine of them in two separate groups, staying in touch with each

other by walkie-talkie. There had even been a man in a small plane cruising above the highway to make sure the

armored car was relatively isolated as it approached the right spot on the highway.

A plot no doubt dreamed up by some overweight screenwriter sitting by his swimming pool with a pina colada by one

hand and a fresh supply of Pentel pens and an Edgar Wallace plot-wheel by the other. And even that fellow had

needed a small army to fulfill his idea. I was only one man.

It wouldn't work. It was just a momentary false gleam, like the others I'd had over the years - the idea that maybe I

could put some sort of poison gas in Dolan's air-conditioning system, or plant a bomb in his Los Angeles house, or

perhaps obtain some really deadly weapon - a bazooka, let us say - and turn his damned silver Cadillac into a fireball as

it raced east toward Vegas or west toward LA along 71.

Best to dismiss it.

But it wouldn't go.

Cut him out,

the voice inside that spoke for Elizabeth kept whispering.
Cut him out the way an experienced sheep-dog cuts a ewe

out of the flock when his master points. Detour him out into the emptiness and kill him. Kill them all.

Wouldn't work. If I allowed no other truth, I would at least have to allow that a man who had stayed alive as long as

Dolan must have a carefully honed sense of survival - honed to the point of paranoia, perhaps. He and his men would

see through the detour trick in a minute.

They turned down this one today,

the voice that spoke for Elizabeth responded.
They never even hesitated. They went just like Mary's little lamb.

But I knew - yes, somehow I did! - that men like Dolan, men who are really more like wolves than men, develop a sort of

sixth sense when it comes to danger. I could steal genuine detour signs from some road department shed and set them

up in all the right places; I could even add fluorescent orange road cones and a few of those smudge-pots. I could do

all that and Dolan would still smell the nervous sweat of my hands on the stage dressing. Right through his

bullet-proof windows he would smell it. He would close his eyes and hear Elizabeth's name far back in the snake-pit

that passed for his mind.

The voice that spoke for Elizabeth fell silent, and I thought it had finally given up for the day. And then, with Vegas

actually in sight - blue and misty and wavering on the far rim of the desert - it spoke up again.

Then don't try to fool him with a fake detour,