Menaced Assassin (30 page)

“How can you tell it’s not a coyote or a dog?”

“Retractable claws.” He pointed. “
These
are coyote.”

The tracks were larger but quite similar to Dante’s untrained eye, except they indeed had made distinct claw marks in the sand. Running across them were delicate X-shaped tracks that went up over the lip of a shallow sand drift.

“Roadrunner.”

“Beep-Beep?”

“You got it. And these—‘Quoth the raven.’”

They looked somewhat like the silhouette of a swept-wing jet fighter, except the toes making the winglike marks pointed forward rather than back. Rather confusing spraylike tracks with a line drawn in the sand between them had been made by a lizard dragging his tail.

“Here’s one nobody gets.”

The tiny double row of endless pinpricks in the sand went from nowhere to endless nowhere. Running between the pinpricks was the lightest of pencil lines drawn in the sand.

“Stink beetle,” said Chuck. “The line is drawn by its dragging abdomen.”

Daylight was failing. They started back. Dante was hopelessly lost, turned around, disoriented.

“If the wind doesn’t blow ’em away, you can always follow your own tracks back out in daylight. Or get to the top of a dune to see the mountains and most likely a road.”

“I wouldn’t know which mountains or which road.”

“Don’t matter so long as they get you out of here.”

They crossed a vast stretch of low-lying dune that was rippled by the wind like the bottom of a stream rippled by flowing water. There were other wonders: the energy-filled bounds of leaping kangaroo rats; the delicate mincing trot of a big-eared kit fox; the talon marks of an owl dug into the sand where an unwary rabbit had died, surrounded by the giant brush marks of its wings beating predator and prey aloft again.

Most evocative of all was a series of long parallel scroll marks, each somewhat offset from the mark before it so the scrolls moved across the sand at an angle.

“Sidewinder,” said Chuck. “Desert rattlesnake, you don’t see them very often.”

Not very often was fine with Dante.

They sat for a time in the car with the motor off, watching the sunset over the western mountains. The clouds turned first gray with gold foil edges, then golden, then an incredi
ble bloodred herringbone pattern, finally fading off to delicate silver.

“Show’s over,” sighed Chuck at last. Dante started the engine. “Full-moon nights, sometimes I come out here and just sit on the lip of a dune and listen. You can hear everything that goes on, can hear yourself think.” He paused. “Can hear yourself
blink
”

Dante’s lights caught a tiny kit fox, great ears standing out in alarm, as he trotted into the sand dunes for the night’s hunt. He looked gray in the headlights. On the way back to Furnace Creek, they saw a coyote loping away from the road into the rock-strewn desert.

A memorable day.

But still Dante couldn’t sleep.

He had a hamburger and fries and berry pie at the Furnace Creek Ranch cafe, on his own time here, feeling a little guilty. He went to the front office and used the pay phone to call Rosa and tell her he was okay and that he loved her.

It should have sent him to bed relaxed and satisfied. But when he walked the dim roadway back to his room, the palm trees tossing and shivering against the full moon in the evening wind woke the familiar restlessness the full moon used to raise in him as a kid in San Francisco. Out his bedroom window he would go, to climb Telegraph Hill in moonlight, or run along the silent wharves of the Embarcadero, or race the night’s final cable car up the California Street hill.

He returned to the little bungalow cabin and went to bed. The cabin was wood frame, built during the depression by the WPA after Death Valley had been made a national monument in 1933. Dante liked this old room with its feel of days gone by, when a motel really had still been a motor hotel. Linoleum floors, no phone or TV, just a clock radio, a desk and chair and twin beds set a prim distance apart. A joint front porch with the sister unit.

Dante tossed and turned like the ferny tamarind leaf patterns the moon laid across the windows. Tried to read a guidebook, put it aside, thought about his case.

Hymie the Handler had told him that Otto Kreiger’s death had been managed. A section of gas line had shown a recent, deliberate rupture. A fragment of door frame had a strip of sandpaper adhesived to it. And a persistent but invisible Ed Farrow the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency had never heard of had phoned to demand a meeting with Kreiger in the condemned building just an hour before the explosion.

Ed Farrow was obviously Raptor. If Raptor was real. Raptor. A thought to murder sleep like who was it—Macbeth? He sat up and looked at the clock. Midnight. Moonlight.

Dante got up and got dressed, got his heavy jacket, found his way to the stovepipe well again. A zillion stars dimmed by an unwinking eye of moon. Back up at the highway, the lights of another car slowed, started the turn into Dante’s dirt road, then disappeared. The wind kept him from hearing any sound of its engine if sound there was to hear.

He lighted his way into the dunes with his flashlight, stumbling and floundering and killing his night vision, a city boy in the open. The wind pulled at his hair, blew sand grit into his eyes, then dropped like a stone.

Sudden, total silence except for the hiss and slither of sand around his shoes, his panting breaths. Thirty feet up the side of a dune from a huge creosote with dozens of crannies between its half-exposed roots, the sand around it covered with tracks, Dante sat down and turned out his light. The sand was cold on his butt through his jeans. He shifted around for a comfortable position, quit moving to listen. And listen. No sound except for the creak of his jacket with his breathing.

Night blindness gone, he could see the creosote bush, see the dark scribbles of the largest tracks beneath it. He could have read his guidebook by the moonlight. Could hear himself breathing. Could hear his eyelashes coming together, the sound of the separate hairs meshing, parting. Chuck had been right. He
could
hear himself blink.

His head dropped and he slept.

In his dreams a scarred old coyote came trotting in from the flat ground around the stovepipe well, wary and clever and carrying Dante’s upwind scent in its nostrils. It circled
him, sidled softly and sideways up to him, stuck a nose close to his face to breathe in his strange scent.

Predawn desert chill awoke him. The moon was low on the horizon; Dante needed the luminous face of his watch to see it was nearly 3:00
a.m.
He’d fallen asleep and hadn’t heard, hadn’t seen a damned thing. Nothing at all. Except something in a dream about a coyote.

He groaned and creaked his way to his feet. Something yipped as it ran off from under the creosote bush. He started down the dune, pitched forward on his face and slid down the sand in the half-darkness, flailing and thrashing.

Dante swung around and sat up and turned on his flashlight. His goddam feet had gone to sleep, his…

Somebody had tied his shoelaces together while he slept.

A primitive dread shot through him. He remembered his dad’s tales of the Fiji Scouts in World War II, who would infiltrate the Japanese lines and slit the throat of one soldier in a two-man trench, leaving the other alive. Untying and retying his laces, Dante knew how that survivor must have felt when he awoke to the sight of his dead partner.

Chuck? No, the old geologist might have been capable of moving that silently through the night, but he wouldn’t…

When Dante stood up, something crackled against his chest. He jerked around in a circle, beating at himself, terrified by thoughts of sidewinders slithering under his jacket for warmth. But his spastic hands found only paper. Paper?

A note was fastened to his shirt with a safety pin.

Dante unfastened it carefully, his flesh almost crawling at the knowledge that another human being had been able to get that close to him in the night while he slumbered peacefully.

The note was on Furnace Creek Ranch letterhead. He read the heavy ballpoint printing by the beam of his flashlight:

I DO NOT KILL

MY OWN KIND

RAPTOR

Kosta taxied his Mooney from his tie-down spot to the southern end of Furnace Creek’s 3,000-foot paved airstrip. It was just after 8:00
a.m.
and there was nobody except a pilot getting his Aztec filled with aviation gas, and the airport mechanic who was pumping it.

Kosta released the brakes and the plane surged forward, left the ground. He took off northwest, banked to the left, rising sharply to get over the saw-toothed Panamints toward Owens Lake. Below was the golf course where he had played eighteen holes with Gid the day before—losing about $500 to the old shark. It was emerald green in the slanting morning light, bounded by slim irrigation ditches and a small lake lined with weeping willows.

The engine’s steady roar faded into longtime familiarity. He tuned to Castle Rock and asked Flight Following to advise him about other traffic in his vicinity. There was none; apart from private fliers like himself, the only planes that came into Furnace Creek were charter bush flights from Lone Pine or Vegas.

With the turbocharger he could have flown over the high mass of the Sierra lying between him and California’s hot interior valley, but he chose to go up the Owens Valley and down the Tioga Pass. He liked the hazards of flying the passes: it challenged him more urgently than anything except sex.

Sex. Diana Pym would be waiting at Marin Ranch Airport with no panties on under her skirt, hungry for degradation in the back of his closed van. He would have liked her with him on this trip, but he hadn’t wanted
any
of them, Mr. Prince or Don Enzo or even Uncle Gid, to be reminded of the fact that it was a woman close to him who had started this whole damned mess.

Not that he wasn’t planning to get a great deal out of it, maybe even the brass ring with his dangerous game. Proving to himself he wasn’t afraid of them? Simple greed? Lust for power? Those big balls of his youth again?

Anyway, there was Uncle Gid yesterday, almost believing Prince’s suspicions about him. Was it just the usual Outfit paranoia, where everyone was always slightly suspect? Or was it something more concrete?

And then there was the cop, Stagnaro, showing up at the Greek Film Festival. Subtle harassment that couldn’t be answered by a lawyer’s cease-and-desist letter: after all, the man was just there with his wife, some Greek friends…

The plump pretty black-haired woman next to him would be the wife. For a wild moment, Kosta thought of seeking her out, getting her to fuck him and abase herself for him, as he did any other woman he wanted. But the fucking cop might shoot him in return. Still… she was there, desirable, that ever-potent hostage to fortune that made vulnerable all men who loved…

No. Dangerous and unnecessary. Dante knew nothing.

Dante had joined the two men topping off the Aztec’s tanks just as Gounaris’s plane had left the ground.

“That a Mooney that just took off?”

“Yeah,” said the mechanic, wiping his hands on a faded red rag that looked greasier than his knuckles. “Turbocharger, cabin heater, the works. A beauty.”

“Do you fly yourself?” asked the pilot.

Dante shook his head. “Can’t afford to.”

“I can’t afford not to,” grinned the pilot.

Dante had been up and around at first light, after a mighty struggle with his cop’s instincts had called the inn and asked to be connected with Kosta Gounaris. But Gounaris had checked out. And was now well away and, for the moment, safe.

Because Raptor was here in Death Valley, given pith and substance for the first time by the note pinned to Dante’s shirt. No longer just a series of sly phone messages on his machine, detailing the stalk of Dr. Death through the ranks of the Mafia.

Following him out to the dunes, turning into the dirt road by the stovepipe well, killing lights and engine, jogging in, picking up Dante’s tracks into the dunes—an awesome bit of fieldcraft. And an act of either sheer bravado or sheer contempt,
letting Dante know that he was herel
Scorning him, showing him he was helpless against Raptor’s omniscient ways.

But
was
he scorning Dante? I DO NOT KILL MY OWN KIND. Or acknowledging him as a fellow hunter? Raptor was Dante’s prey; but who, here, was Raptor’s? Not Dante; he could have had Dante out in the dunes last night. Not Gounaris, Gounaris was safely away. But Gideon Abramson was still here. Dante would warn him, then start the long drive home.

Death in Death Valley. Almost corny. Almost.

Gideon had finished his early-morning laps in the heated pool, now was on the terrace of the inn, drinking orange juice while waiting for his decaf and toast. A beautiful morning for eighteen holes of golf. He had slept like an angel despite the questions going around and around in his mind until his head had hit the pillow.

He regretfully put aside consideration of what to get his favorite granddaughter for her birthday—a five-foot stuffed purple Barney had the inside track at the moment—to return to the previous night’s churning thoughts. He hadn’t told Kosta that he secretly agreed Mr. Prince was probably be
hind the Madrid and Kreiger killings, because he felt that Mr. Prince
was
looking at Kosta as a possible threat somewhere down the road.

A pretty young waitress came with his toast and coffee. He watched her hips glide like oil beneath the oddly erotic uniform as she walked away. Could he possibly… No. He went to Vegas for that. Outside Vegas these days he was decidedly avuncular.

If Mr. Prince was not behind the killings, then who?
Could
it be Kosta? Could he have set up the hit on Moll Dalton with a phony fuck-up confession, so the rest of the killings could be seen to grow out of that?

Where should he stand should there be a confrontation between these two?
Gross Gott
, he knew the answer to that. Stand with Kosta, fall with Kosta. Gid planned to live forever: he had seen enough men die to know there was nothing worse than dying, nothing on this earth. If Mr. Prince gave him the order today to set up a hit on Kosta, by morning Kosta would be dead.