Menaced Assassin (29 page)

“Hey, just fuck off, okay?” said Tony.

Red’s beeper went off. The two buttons started away through the trees. When they had disappeared from view, the bird-watcher sought a point of vantage facing the inn.

Dante kept out of sight behind a palm tree while he glassed the windows of the suite the inn’s front desk had told him was rented by Kosta Gounaris. Yes, people in there, but he couldn’t see who. So he refocused on the inn’s sweeping stone steps. Most of the front turnaround was taken up by a black stretch limo with a black-uniformed chauffeur lounging against the fender.

Tony was just a stupid button man, but with a couple of short and seemingly casual questions, Red had elicited why Dante had binoculars, that he actually could identify the bird flying out of the tree, and that he knew it was not a year-round resident at the Furnace Creek oasis. The redhead was canny and quick-witted, dangerous, which meant the man who paid him was also dangerous.

The chauffeur opened the back door, came to attention. Dante ground the glasses against his eyes; heat shimmers slightly distorted his view through the lenses, but he knew the four men coming down the wide stone front steps of the inn. Shaking hands with the two who obviously were depart
ing was Gounaris. No surprise, since the fact he was flying himself down here was why Dante had been here before him.

Dante had studied the second man’s face ranging from his 1960 passport photo to an FBI surveillance picture taken a week ago poolside at the Tallpalms Country Club in Palm Springs. It was Gideon Abramson.

The other two were astounding. First, the legendary Don Enzo himself, out from Jersey. Probably flown openly into Vegas by private jet, then whisked out of some underground garage in this anonymous limo and would go back in the same way so the surveilling feds would think he’d never left the hotel.

The fourth was The Man himself, Martin Prince. Marcantonio Princetti. Dante could recite the man’s biography in his sleep.

The limo disappeared around behind the hotel toward Highway 190 which eventually would take it back to Vegas. A cream Lexus followed, stuffed with Red and Tony riding shotgun. Dante considered alerting the feds, rejected it; the meeting was over. Nobody knew he was here, he wanted to keep it that way.

Gounaris and Abramson were sitting down at one of the tables on the inn’s broad patio for a drink under a sun umbrella. He’d have given a year’s pay to hear what they were saying, but he couldn’t get close: Gounaris would see him, and he wanted to be the one doing the viewing.

What was important enough to drag frail old Garofano out here from Jersey? The doubleheader on Kreiger and St. John? Was somebody within the Family trying to take down its leaders one by one, grab control? Did Prince call this meeting because these were the only men he could trust within the Organization? Or because he thought one of them was behind the murders?

Or was he playing some dangerous game of his own?

“I tell you he’s playing a fucking game, Uncle Gid!” exclaimed Kosta Gounaris. He was drinking beer in the thin dry desert air. Gideon was having iced tea.

“To what point, Kosta? He already has all the power.”

“To set me up for unsanctioned killings he ordered himself!” Gounaris mimicked, “‘I’m suggesting that the same man
ordered
both hits.’ He’s just putting on a show for the old man so there won’t be any heat when I get hit.”

Gideon chuckled. “Who’s the unhappiest man in New York?”

“New York? What the hell does New York—”

“A man with an Irish psychiatrist and a Jewish bartender.” Gideon stirred his tea, sipped it. “Mr. Prince setting you up makes no sense. What does make sense is Kreiger having St. John hit, using Popgun. Ucelli is an old-timer, he would do it and deny it afterwards. And get away with it, because he’s tight with Don Enzo and St. John was not a made man.”

“Then who had Kreiger hit?”

“I fear Mr. Prince is starting to feel that perhaps you did. Out of ambition, a desire to move up… Let me tell you how he thinks. The killing was clever. You are clever. The killing was on your turf, San Francisco, where the Organization has very little influence. You fly your own plane, so he might even suspect you of Spic’s murder.”

“That’s crazy! It’s all crazy!
He
had Spic hit!”

“You know it’s crazy. I know it’s crazy. But Mr. Prince…” He shrugged. “In the morning—”

“I’ve got to fly back up in the morning, Uncle Gid.”

“Then let’s play a round of golf this afternoon.”

With obvious relief, Kosta said, “I’ll get my clubs.”

Gid thoughtfully watched his protégé stride lithely across the patio toward his suite. So tough, so strong—but in many ways still so naive. Was his Kosta naive enough to be getting ambitious? Or was he maybe skimming, starting to panic and trying to cover it up with a little flurry of killings that would suggest a Mafia power struggle was brewing?

Or was Kosta right about Mr. Prince being behind the killings? The trouble was that Gideon didn’t know enough about what was going on; so he would just stay here in Death Valley for a few days, tell jokes, play golf, until things got resolved. Gid was the ultimate survivor.

Dante watched them tee up, then set out to explore a little of Death Valley. He wouldn’t have been there except that in collecting data on Kosta Gounaris he’d found out about the single-engine Mooney 250 turbo Gounaris had bought for over a quarter million cash in Los Angeles two years before.

The Mooney was tied down at Marin Ranch Airport, a private airfield off Smith Ranch Road just north of San Rafael. Dante had spent a couple of hours poking around the little field with its tin-sided hangars and tiny office. With a twenty-dollar bill he’d recruited the skinny, engaging youth who pumped aviation gas into the planes. At seventeen, he had braces still on his teeth and was a chain-smoker. He had told Dante that Gounaris wanted his plane serviced and checked out thoroughly because he was planning to fly down to Death Valley midweek.

Dante went to Zabriskie Point. It was only four miles down Highway 190 from the inn, and he’d loved the music in the movie of the same name. He turned right into the parking lot, climbed the short trail to the overlook. It was breathtaking. Soft layers of what looked like mud hills rather than rock stretched in every direction. Below the low wall of the overlook the bare tan dusty earth was crisscrossed with trails. Youthfully energetic hikers of all ages panted their way up them, dwarfed by distance.

A slight sun-blacked man in his seventies, dressed in baggy red shorts and leather sandals and whose black T-shirt read GRATEFUL DEAD—WORLD TOUR came panting up the path leading to the overlook. He stopped to wipe his face with a red bandana and grinned at Dante. His skull showed beneath his leathery lizard’s skin like the Dead’s logo skull on his T-shirt.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Breathtaking—if I knew what I was seeing.”

“You’re seeing ancient lakebeds that have been upended and eroded into sandhills.” He flung out a long skinny arm. “Those yellows and tans and browns are mostly from iron minerals that have been weathered by exposure to the air.” He pivoted to jab a forefinger to their left, where the softly serrated hills ranged from gray-green to dark gray. “Those, the color comes from volcanic ash and ancient lava flows sometime between 9 and 3 million years ago.”

“You seem to have spent a lot of time here.”

“My favorite spot in the world. I’m a retired geologist. In Death Valley Mother Nature lifts her skirts and shows you everything she’s got.”

The little sun-dried raisin of a man headed down for the parking lot; Dante followed shortly. On his way back to the inn, he was surprised to see the old geologist walking along the shoulder of the two-lane blacktop. He stopped and opened a door.

“Hop in. It’s too hot out here to walk.”

The man slid gratefully into the car. “You’re right, it’s that afternoon sun. I parked at the foot of Golden Canyon, hiked up past Manley Beacon to the Point. Only about a mile and a half but mostly uphill. I do it every year. I tell myself that when I can’t make it any more, I’ll quit coming to the Valley.” He stuck out a hand. “Charles Thornton. Everybody calls me Chuck.”

They shook. “Dante Stagnaro. Tell me, what’s the best thing to see if you’ve maybe only got one day?”

“The sand dunes, just before dusk. I’ll show you.”

The vast sloping floor of the valley was smudged with
cloud shadow. Harsh dark mountains rimmed it to the west, stretching up a mile or more into the stunning blue sky and reaching great hands of denser shadow out across the sunken valley floor.

“The Panamints,” said Chuck. “Death Valley isn’t the result of erosion, it’s what geologists call ‘basin and range’ huckcountry. The same forces that cause the California earthquakes are pushing the Black Mountains higher in the air and tilting the Panamint Range higher up on its side.”

“Dropping Death Valley down lower and lower in between?”

“Admirably put. Less than two inches of rain a year, evaporation a hundred times that, mean summer temperature readings the highest on earth. It’s a true desert. Lowest point in the United States is Badwater, south down the valley a ways—two hundred eighty feet below sea level. Dante’s View, straight above Badwater, is more than a mile
above
sea level.”

“Dante’s View because you’re looking down into hell?”

Chuck grinned at him. “A minority opinion, I assure you.”

They drove twenty miles north through the clear late afternoon light, with Chuck pointing out things they were passing.

“Gravel road to the left leads to the Harmony Borax Works. That’s where the twenty-mule teams left from—eighteen mules and two horses, actually. Round trip to Mojave and the railhead was three hundred miles and took three weeks. The teams pulled two wagons and a water tank, total weight close to forty tons.”

The road led across the lower slopes of alluvial fans spreading out from valleys in the Funeral Mountains to the east. The fans were dotted with desert holly, creosote bushes spaced out by massive ground-surface root systems stretching forty feet in every direction, and turtleback—great spreading bushes that looked much like their namesakes.

At Sand Dune Junction they went north. Here the Cottonwood and Grapevine mountains forced the winds to switch
direction, swirl and slow enough to drop the load of sand they were carrying from their sweep across the valley floor.

“Hence, the Sand Dunes,” exclaimed Chuck. “Fourteen square miles of moving, billowing sand that look like ocean waves—but aren’t going anywhere. Oh, they shift around constantly, but because the winds turn on themselves here, the dunes never move far before getting pushed back.”

Dante passed a little turnout to the right after Sand Dune Junction, blacktopped and with a single chemical toilet standing in lonely splendor. At Chuck’s direction, a hundred yards further he turned left on a narrow dirt track toward the yellow-white amazement of the sand sea.

“Takes us to the original stovepipe well,” Chuck said as they bounced along the sandy track pursued by their own dust cloud. “It was an important water hole on the old cross-valley trail in the days of the mining towns of Rhyolite and Skidoo, so they set up a way station. Long gone now. Park here.”

Dante pulled up and stopped. Their dust overtook them, gritting between their teeth and in the corners of their eyes. Theirs was the only car in the little parking area. They got out, stretched, started across the level sandy desert floor toward the great sloping dunes that rose up suddenly ahead of them. Chuck stopped at a rusted capped-off pipe.

“Here’s the well—they don’t use it any more.”

“Why stovepipe?”

“Used to be a literal stovepipe stuck down through the sand to the natural spring so they could get at the water. That rusted away many long years ago, of course.” They started out across the billowing desert dunes. “Lucas shot a lot of
Star Wars
here in Death Valley. Used these dunes a lot.”

Dante could see why. Fifty feet from the edge of the dunes, there seemed to be only sand for miles in any direction. Chuck said most of it was tiny fragments of quartz, buried, uncovered, reburied thousands of times as the sand shifted and flowed under the pressure of the wind.

The dunes themselves had an eerie beauty in the late slanting light. Long smooth sweeps of sand with crests like blunt
sword edges, breaking suddenly to fall away in delicate blue-gold shadow toward the ground far below.

As they labored along one of these sword blades, Chuck panted, “They call this the cornice of the drift—it keeps collapsing under the pressure of more sand brought by the wind. That steep slope they call the slip face, with an angle of repose usually somewhere around thirty-five degrees. Come on!”

He started to run down it. Dante followed, sinking in almost to his knees at each stumbling, giant step. Sand whipped and stung his face. Each step splashed out a miniature avalanche of snowlike sand.

They collapsed in the cut between two massive dunes, to share Dante’s canteen and the scraggly shadow of a creosote bush half-buried in drifting sand. Their faces were covered with sand stuck to their drying sweat.

The ground was a flat layer of dried mud, cracked by a summer of sun into patterns and shapes often unlike the usual triangular segments Dante expected. Here were circles and swirls, the edges eroded by wind so each segment looked like a miniature mesa. Other circle patterns looked like the dinosaur hide on the models at Marine World in Vallejo.

Around scraggly clumps of tough dry bunch grasses, poised for a winter rainstorm so they could shoot up, seed, and replenish themselves with dazzling speed, were circular drag marks where the wind had swept them against the sand.

“Tracks and sign,” said Chuck. “Let me show you.”

Both dried mud and sand carried wildlife tracks with great clarity, though Dante didn’t know what he was seeing until Chuck pointed them out.

“Those sort of delicate ones with a pad and four toe marks are bobcat. Don’t get too many in here.”