Menaced Assassin (18 page)

“Raptor like in bird of prey?”

“Yeah. He said he was the one who’d killed her.”

“In a comic German accent?”

“That’s why I thought it was a crank call. So I just, uh, erased it off the tape.”

She met his eyes, held them with her own. Her face was serene and beautiful in the candlelight.

“And it wasn’t a crank call,” she said softly.

“I’m not sure. I got another call after Lenington was killed. This time it was a black talking, but it was a message from the same guy. He called himself Raptor again.”

“And you haven’t told Tim.”

“I had a hell of a time telling you, Rosie—that first call was probably Raptor himself. Now he’s using other people to make his calls so I’ll never get a voiceprint of him.”

“Don’t be too sure,” said Rosa. “These men have egos. He’ll call you again.”

“You think so?”

“I would.” For a moment, her black eyes penetrated his
soul, then she gave her chuckle that was almost a giggle, and stood to start putting on her coat. “Haven’t I always?”

She led him back, hand in hand, to the house in Greenwich Street where he had first dreamed of her.

In Vegas, Enzo Garofano had been seduced into his first dribbling orgasm in almost two years by the
cantatrice
Martin Prince had sent up to his penthouse atop Xanadu. Seduced as much by the memory of her fiery rendition of Carmen’s “Habañera” as by suckling like an infant at her magnificent
meloni.

She had departed with his promise of getting her into a good opera company back east, and Enzo, after he had recovered from his sexual labors, had set out to honor his private arrangement with Martin Prince.

Mae’s Place had started life in the thirties as a roadhouse on the way to the Columbia turnpike, with good steaks on the first floor and high stakes on the second. Just “the Roadhouse” then, a rambling white frame building set in a nice grove of eastern white pines, plenty of parking. From her late teens Mae had been the hostess with the mostes’ in the downstairs lounge, and after legalized gambling in Atlantic City made the Roadhouse a losing proposition, bought in and changed the name to Mae’s Place.

Mae made the steaks even thicker downstairs, closed the unprofitable gaming rooms, and started running a different kind of beef on the second floor. Her girls were Grade A, some were Choice or even Prime, scrupulously clean and low-cholesterol. And her local protection was firmly in place: the county sheriff came out every Friday night for a thick T-bone and a thin blonde, on the house; and Mae had an excellent video of the reform mayor serving as the high-price spread between two of her girls, one whole wheat, one white bread.

Mae was now forty-nine, still flame-haired with a little help from her hairdresser, heavy-hipped and heavy-breasted,
rings on every finger, expensive musk dabbled deep in her sensational cleavage, pink and voluptuous as a Rubens nude, randy as a goat. She indulged herself freely with a few old friends: if you were fortunate enough to be offered Mae, you didn’t pay.

One of her oldest friends was Eddie Ucelli. His company supplied her steaks, but he himself usually only came around when she called him, because she was his contact for the nowadays rare hits he was asked to perform. But sometimes he would come out for a sirloin with his wife, and Mae would sit down at their table to chat about the old days. And Eddie would get all steamed up.

So on nights such as this, Eddie would see his wife home, leave her in front of Jay Leno, and loop back for a little stroll down memory lane. Mae’s memory lane.

Because even though Eddie was fifty-seven years old, a little too squat, a little too wide, and naked a little too hairy, ah, good Christ, Mae could remember him when. Eddie had popped her cherry for her on a rooftop with a view of Manhattan across the East River when she was just entering her teens and he just leaving his. Even now, Mae could coax him alive as no other woman could—and most nights he needed a lot of coaxing even from her.

The phone call caught him on his back under Mae, who wore only her push-up bra pushed up so one of her enormous breasts was in his mouth seemingly by accident—Mae was inventive in ways like that. When she leaned back to take the call, Eddie slid a thumb into her luxurious bush and began rolling her clitoris because it took him a long time to get one of his partial hard-ons and he hated to lose his rhythm. Stifling a moan of pleasure, Mae leaned down to wedge the phone between his shoulder and chin.

“Ucelli,” he said into it.

He listened. His thumb stopped moving inside her. Mae didn’t mind; she could always get herself off if Eddie couldn’t do it for her. She sat placidly astride him; this was not the first of the many such phone calls that Eddie had taken himself here at Mae’s Place. He always came around to celebrate
with her after he had completed his contract, but by then his sexual fervor inevitably had ebbed.

Now, before he hung up he said, “I understand. The Feebs got a fuckin’ tap on my line, I gotta duck ’em but it’s no problem.” He added in a guttural voice, “When the time’s right, I’ll do it right.”

At that same moment Mae felt something thick and heavy pressing up against her belly as it hadn’t in years.

“My God, Eddie!” she exclaimed in amazement. “You’re as hard as an iron bar!”

She quickly impaled herself on it, and then, ever so slowly and lasciviously, slid down the pole and started rolling those ample hips as if they were on oiled ball bearings. As she started to breathe very quickly, Mae knew they were both in for the fuck of a lifetime before she would let him die the little death.

Salvador Madrid was
muy borracho.
Shitface, in fact.

Spic was drunk because this night he’d had to put out a hit on Manuel Monteluego, one of his wife’s many nephews, and it made him sad and nostalgic at the same time. The hit was to be disguised as a drunken Saturday night stabbing outside a rural dance pavilion in Coates, a tiny crossroads place a score of miles south of the Twin Cities on Minnesota 62. Spic had rented the barnlike wood frame building for a
baile
following a wedding that afternoon only so that he could logically send Manuel down to Coates to pay for everything. And there be made to die.

“Can’ let her know,” he explained in drunken seesaw English to his bodyguard Alejo. He took another hit of tequila. They were alone in the shabby little bungalow on Robie Street that he used as an office. “She keel me dead she fin’ out.”

“Es verdad
_y
jefe,”
agreed Alejo obediently; he knew Spic was referring to his wife, Maria. Alejo was another nephew, but that was all right, he was from Spic’s side of the family in Guadalupe, Nuevo León; the soon-to-be-dead nephew was a
hijo de puta
from Sonora and there was little love lost between them.

Normally none of Spic’s people would be caught dead (pardon the pun) at Coates. But few of these would have green cards, so they would all melt away at the discovery of
the body soon to be lying on the frozen ground between the dance hall and the gas station. Anyone
estúpido
enough to be picked up by the county sheriff would
no tengo, no entiendo,
and would soon walk—or be deported as an illegal alien. Either way, no loss.

“Tol’ ’em to do eet while I am here at th’ offeece,” Spic explained. When he was
borracho,
his English became the slurred wetback English of his youth. “Tha’ way Maria, she gonna know I deent have notheeng to do weeth eet.”

Since Maria would eventually learn there had been friction between husband and nephew over missing receipts, Spic had arranged that she would hear of Manuel’s death almost as quickly as he would. She would call him here to wail over the phone; and later, learning of the estrangement, she would remember her husband had been nowhere near Coates when Manuel had died.

This was necessary because the only person on earth Spic Madrid feared was his wife. Not Maria as Maria, short, wide, mother of his five children. Rather, he feared her spiritual powers, renewed daily at mass. Family was
muy importante
to Maria; if she knew he’d had her nephew killed, she would put God’s curse upon him, and Spic would surely wither and die.

Por Dio,
where was the call? In his mind he could hear the Mexican band (originally from Chihuahua) he’d hired for the wedding. Horns, guitar, bass, accordion, fine-tuned Peavey cranked to the max, bowing out the dance hall walls with “Las Mariposas.” He was nodding his head in time to the unheard music. Stamping feet, whirling bodies… flashing knife…

The phone rang, an unknown voice said,
“Es muerto.”

Spic hung up. So. It was done. Now Maria’s call.

She would be at their rambling frame house on Marshall Ave in St. Paul, far from the west side where he did his business. When they had married twenty-two years ago, she’d been tiny and skinny; during their wedding dance, he in his rented black suit, she in her rented white wedding gown, she had clung to him as if she were an appendage of his body.
He had been the strength she had needed, the realization of her dream of El Norte.

In turn Jose, their two-year-old son, had clung to her white skirt with both his little brown hands as they had danced. At the time of his conception and birth, they had been afraid to get married lest they be caught in the system and deported.

Three years before that, at seventeen, Spic had been a
mojado
muling kilos of raw heroin taped to his ribs across the Tortilla Curtain at El Paso, until one night some
maricón
pusher tried to pay him off with a switchblade. He left the man dead under a mesquite bush, minus his head, which Spic left in the middle of the road with the tongue sticking roguishly out.

He fled north all the way to St. Paul where what he now termed “a shit job the
gringos
wouldn’t take” was arranged for him by a man named Cisco Monteluego. For his new life he took the name Madrid because Madrid was in Spain, not Mexico, thus had no echoes of his
pachuco
past.

During his two years washing dishes in the restaurant where Cisco cooked, he had met Cisco’s niece, Maria, and their son had been born. After he and Maria had married, he started calling Cisco “Tío,” and together they started selling tacos at county fairs during the summers. The next year, they opened a taco stand on Concord Street in St. Paul’s mostly Latino west side, and during the next few years prospered in a modest way.

Awaiting Maria’s call, Spic shut his eyes and remembered…

It was three-thirty in the morning, and the tiny four-stool place was deserted with the door open to let out the hot grease smell of deep-frying taco shells. The sign over the door said TÍO’S TEXAS TACOS. Tío Cisco was sweeping the floor and Spic was in the minuscule storeroom opening a hundred-pound sack of corn flour. A man dressed in black, with black gloves, and wearing a Porky Pig Halloween mask, came in and took a stool.

“We are closed, sir,” said Uncle Cisco in his invariably courteous way. “If you come back tomorrow…”

But Porky Pig took from his pocket a gun with a silencer screwed onto its muzzle. His voice was distorted by the mask.

“You want to be closed forever, or you want to pay us a hundred dollars a week so nobody comes around bothering you?”

“Señor,” began Uncle Cisco in a terrified voice, staring at the gun, “a hundred dollars a week will take all of our profits.”

“That’s one,” said Porky Pig.

Spic was drawn to the storeroom door by the voices. Porky Pig turned his stool to give the short skinny Mexican a measuring look, swinging the lethal silenced gun Spic’s way as he did, then turned back to Uncle Cisco as the main man in the equation.

“That’s two,” he said.

“We will pay, we will pay,” said Uncle Cisco very quickly.

“No, no pagamos
,” muttered Spic sullenly.,

But Porky Pig must have understood Spanish. He said, “That’s three,” and the silenced gun said
pfft pfft pfft
, like that. But not at Spic.

Instead, Uncle Cisco seemed to leap backward, his feet coming up off the floor, the broom flying from his hand. He caromed off the end of the counter to sprawl facedown on the faded linoleum, his limbs jerking and twitching, then still.

Porky Pig stood up and began unscrewing the silencer from the gun. Death had loosened Uncle Cisco’s sphincter so the smell of shit overrode the hot grease smell in the little room.

“Whew!” he exclaimed in his muffled pig voice, “smells like something crawled up there and died.” He chuckled. “Must be all that hot Mexican food.” Spic hadn’t moved from the doorway of the minuscule storeroom. To him, Porky Pig added, “Remember, beaner, one hundred dollars a week, starting Friday.”

Then he was gone, leaving Uncle Cisco dead on the floor.
Before calling the police, Spic took all the money from the cash register and from the body and hid it under the floormat of Uncle Cisco’s dilapidated Chevy. That way the cops would treat it as a simple robbery and would not look very hard for the killer.

Uncle Cisco, dead upon the floor.

Tonight, Uncle Cisco’s son Manuel, dead upon the sere yellow grass and frozen ground beside the Coates Pavilion.

Spic felt tears hot behind his eyelids. Leadership was a stern mistress. He opened his eyes, looked at his nephew Alejo across the scarred and battered wooden tabletop. The tequila bottle was empty, his limes and salt were gone. His drunkenness had passed. He wanted to be alone to mourn the death of Tío Cisco’s son at the hands of unknown assassins.

“Go get me another bottle of tequila, Alejo.”

“I s’posed stay with you, guard you,
jefe
.”

With a chuckle, Spic made the sign of the cross over him. “I absolve you.” He threw money on the table. “And more limes.”

Spic had paid protection for five weeks, always leaving the cash drawer ajar with a single hundred-dollar bill in it, staying in the storeroom until Porky Pig had come and gone. Then he began closing the store to follow Porky on his rounds, finally to the house where Porky lived under his real name of Alex Jones. One night after the wife had gone to bed, Spic cut off Porky’s head and set it on top of the TV set, tongue protruding, for Mrs. Jones and their two children to find in the morning.