Lonely Millionaire (26 page)

Hope expired when he glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw the black mass of the Mercedes jerking to a stop directly behind the van, blocking its escape. The car’s rear door opened and a man emerged. He held something in his right hand that was obscured by some kind of cloth draped over it.

At that moment Tom’s goal became simpler:
let’s not worry about getting away just now, let’s just stop the man.
If he could get the van’s engine started maybe he could back up and ram the guy back into the car. He found the key in his pocket and pulled his hand out so fast the change sprayed across the console.

As he jammed the key into the ignition he heard the man shout several words. The driver shouted back; Tom briefly wondered why he wasn’t understanding the discussion, until he realized that it was not English.

After a short and heated exchange, the man dove back into the car and slammed the door. But the car remained motionless. The window opened and the big man leaned out, making sure he had eye contact with Tom in the van’s huge side mirror. He made a series of hand signals. First he covered his eyes, then his mouth. Finally he drew a finger across his throat, following through with an arc that left it pointing at Tom, to whom the meaning was painfully clear. Tom vigorously nodded to the man, who nodded back. The Mercedes surged forward.

A moment later a Cherokee wagon slowly turned into the lane and moved past the van. As it passed, Tom looked at the occupants, an elderly white-haired couple. He wondered if he should thank them for saving their lives.

The Cherokee slowed, then stopped. The driver was looking down at the object beside the K-BLAST van, which Tom still had not seen from inside the vehicle. The wagon’s window opened.

“What do you
mean
, drunk?” she demanded, incredulous. “
You saw him get shot!
Why didn’t you tell the truth?”

“Too much happened, too quick. There’s too much to explain. Look at us. We’re both half naked, there’s a dead guy with a bullet in him leaning against the van. You know, I’m not even supposed to be out in the van. I was supposed to take it straight to the station soon as I got back from Tahoe.”

As he fought with his shirt, looking for the other sleeve, Tom told Pam about the sinister hand signals from the thug in the Mercedes, and immediately regretted it when Pam began wailing. He held her tightly and tried to soothe her with assurances that she had never been seen by anyone, but it was a wasted effort, she continued shaking as if having a seizure.

Once they were reasonably decent, both piled out of the van to view the object of their dread: the body slumped against the Windstar’s rear tire.

With great reluctance, Tom reached down and took the man’s hand in his own. With the other he found the wrist, appalled at its heavy limpness. Even though he’d been a radio/TV newsman for nearly a year, this was the first corpse of his career.

“I don’t feel anything.” He released the lifeless hand and it thudded to the pavement like a piece of meat.

“What’ll we do?” said Pam. “Let’s go inside right now and report it.”

“Are you kidding? Didn’t you hear what I just told you? They’ll come after me. If they find out you were here, they’ll be after
you
next.”

“But how can they? They don’t know who you are.”

Tom laughed harshly. “They don’t? What about that?” He jerked his thumb at the garish foot-high lettering angled across the side of the van:

K-BLAST 107

Music and News Radio
- RENO

“Oh my God, I forgot,” Pam wailed in a voice on the edge of hysteria. “
We’re riding around in a billboard!
”

She went silent for a moment in disbelief, her mouth open, wide blue eyes fixed on Tom.

“But
there’s a
dead man here!
Are you saying we’re just going to
drive away?
”

“Look, this is probably some kind of a gang murder. You saw those guys. They were
hoods
. I think the car had a California plate. They’re probably on their way back there already. First thing we need to do is quit standing here over the body. Get in the car. We’ll go somewhere to think.”

Tom dragged the body away from the van and they got inside. They both avoided looking at it as he backed out of the space. Scanning the lot for the Mercedes, he drove to the other side of the casino and parked near the employees’ entrance. At least a dozen people were walking in and out of the guarded doorway, and it made both of them feel safer for the moment.

It was two a.m. when Pam emerged from the employees’ entrance and warily looked around. Tom could see the relief in her face when she recognized him and saw that he was in his own car now. She quickly walked toward him and got in.

“How’d it go?”

“OK. It seemed a little unreal, but it’s pretty much always unreal around here anyway. What’d you do with the van?”

“What I should've done as soon as I got back to town. I took it back to the station and picked up my car. I guess you’re ready to go home.”

Tom steered the car toward the giant electric sign at the front of the parking lot, which had mostly emptied after the last show. The few scattered remaining cars belonged to graveyard-shift employees and the random drunks and other sad souls who linger in the casinos until the sun rises. The two peered over toward the scene of the incident without coming too close, but saw nothing.

“Where is he? I don’t get it,” he said. “Either he’d still be there undiscovered, or he’d have been found by now and there’d be a dozen police cars. Coroner. Press. But there’s nothing.”

“No. We’ve been circling around here so much already it’ll make people suspicious. If we go right up to the spot it’ll be a dead giveaway. Please...”

Tom sensed the lack of resolve in her voice and ignored the plea. In another few seconds the car crawled almost directly under the monstrous sign, its million bulbs flickering with frantic energy. Tom stared at Pam.

“Nothing. Not a trace. Are we crazy? Did we imagine it?”

“Let’s get out of here.
Now
. Please.”

Pam’s voice was quavering. Tom turned the car out onto the street. He watched the rearview mirror all the way to Pam’s apartment. When she told him she was going to immediately take a double dose of pills and get some sleep, he didn’t argue.

“I’ll give you a call tomorrow,” he promised; they kissed quickly and she closed the door.

January mornings in Reno can be crisp and cold, especially at five thirty, the time Tom usually left his apartment to do the Sunday sign-on shift at the radio station. The town was still and quiet, most people still in their beds, the clamor of the day yet to start. Often a thin mist hung over the city, as the sky over the desert hills began showing the first hints of sunrise. Normally he enjoyed this first hour of the new day, before the city came to life.

But this morning was different. He’d awakened several times during the night, reliving the scene in the parking lot, groggily wondering if it would still be a reality in the morning. Sure enough, it was. His peace of mind was gone, and he wondered how long before it returned.

Leaving the apartment and going to his car he was sure he was being watched. He turned on the radio, tuned it to the only 24-hour station that gave news headlines, to see if there was anything about the murder, but the only local story concerned a big-rig jackknifed on 395 south of town.

He drove through the dark streets as if on autopilot, numb to his surroundings, looking only for the dark Mercedes, expecting at any moment to see it in the rearview mirror. After nearly rear-ending a garbage truck at an intersection, he snapped out of it and shook his head violently, as if trying to climb out of a bad dream.

Look, it’s over
, he muttered to the steering wheel.
It had nothing to do with me.…nothing at all…I just…wonder who that guy was…

It was worse when he pulled into the station parking lot and stopped the car a couple of spaces from the van – the same van from which he and Pam had witnessed a murder. The van with foot-high red letters flaunting its identity to everyone in the neighborhood. It was impossible that they would not know how and where to find it, if and when they wanted to. He sat frozen in the car, fingers at the ready to start up and race away at the first appearance of the death car. It was ten to six, barely light. The station had to be on the air in ten minutes, with him reading the headlines. Only force of will pushed him out of the car; he walked briskly to the steel security door of the KBLAST studio, disarmed the burglar alarm, and went in, locking the door behind him.

The normalcy of the sign-on routine helped calm him. Go into the control room, flip the breakers, key the password into the transmitter remote control, and send the signal that powers on the filaments in the transmitter. Thirty miles away, atop Slide Mountain, the transmitter comes to life, its blower spinning up, the filament in the melon-size ceramic final output tube glowing orange. Next, go to the kitchen and load up the coffeepot. A minute before six, switch on the carrier, bathing the Reno-Tahoe-Carson City area in its FM signal.

Read the sign-on, then the news headlines off the wire (again, no mention of a dead body), start the music. Pour the coffee, sit back, read the meters, and make the first log entries of the day.

Thank God, everything was beginning to feel normal again. At nine o’clock Mike Turner would come in for his show, Tom would hang around to read the hourly news. With a little luck, the surreal experience in the Mountain Palace parking lot would gradually fade into memory and nothing more would come of it.

After all, this was Reno. It wasn’t anywhere near as crazy as Vegas, but weird things did happen. This kind of stuff happens in a casino town. His mood brightened: chances are, the casino itself cleaned up the mess, and is keeping it quiet. Corpses in parking lots are never good for business.

For a moment he dwelled on the irony of his being a broadcast news person, with possibly the biggest story that would ever almost literally fall into his lap, and he couldn’t use it.

Right after the noon newscast he called Pam. She sounded withdrawn and remote, and he couldn’t blame her. She turned down his dinner invitation, after which he made the mistake of offering to get some takeout and bring it over.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I’m kind of…kind of tired. I think I’ll just stay in and watch some TV. I think I’ll stay around the house for a while. And you…maybe you should do the same. I mean at your house.”

Tom got the message. He had become radioactive. The Mercedes guys hadn’t seen Pam, had no reason to believe she was even in the van, no reason to go after her. But for Tom, maybe it was only a matter of time.

“You don’t want me to come over for a while, is that it?”

“I think that makes a lot of sense, don’t you? I mean, until we know they’re not going to…to come after you.”

They’re probably going to come and kill you
, he heard in her voice,
and I don’t want to be there when it happens
.

The thought of being deprived of Pam, of her warmth next to him in bed, of her lithe dancer’s body with its energy and unbelievable sexual appetite, was almost as abhorrent as his fear of the killers. That week away from her in Tahoe was bad enough, how long would this last?