Menaced Assassin (32 page)

Probably left his vehicle on the road that led up through Daylight Pass. Beatty was only twenty-five miles away, the Nevada border half that. Or he could have just driven se
dately back to Furnace Creek to take a swim. Or gone hiking up some canyon. Nobody knew his car or his face.

What they had all forgotten was that the seemingly table-smooth barren featureless desert was as seamed and pitted as an ancient Indian’s face, a maze of little washes and gulleys and dry runoffs that furnished impeccable cover. Hell, it’s why they had called ambushing “dry-gulching” in the Old West.

Now it was
really
personal. For all the good that did.

It wasn’t until the next morning that a Shoshone tracker, working from the angle of fire, found Raptor’s place of ambush 403 yards from the rest area. The assassin hadn’t made any mistakes. No spent brass, no rifle, on that flinty ground no footprints—just a few dried branches broken down to give a clearer field of fire and incidentally mark his position.

Dante stayed overnight to give and sign his statement. Of course Gus had a license to carry—hell, he was a deputy sheriff in Palm Springs! Mr. Abramson had received threats, etc. Dante knew more about the killing than Gus did, but only gave the locals that he’d been passing by. Gus didn’t contradict him.

Dante got back to San Francisco in the middle of the night after a day of hard driving. As expected, Raptor’s message was waiting on his phone machine.

“This Jewish mother is talking with her son’s teacher, she says, ‘My Gregory is very smart. If he’s a bad boy, slap the boy next to him—Gregory will get the idea.’”

Gideon Abramson’s voice. Raptor must have somehow gotten him to tell one of his pathetic goddam Jewish jokes over the phone, taped it for his message to Dante, making a joke of it.

End of the Cretaceous

65 m.y. ago

The Way of the warrior is resolute acceptance of death
.

Miyamoto Musashi
A Book of Five Rings

Murder is never a joke, I grant you—but what is all this darkside nonsense I spout when last we chat? I feel wonderful—Gideon Abramson, dead in such a comical way, no longer pollutes the world with his presence. Oh, what a sly fellow is Raptor!

Meanwhile, I have become obsessed with the intricate-puzzle aspect of my assassinations. Not the
fact
of the deaths, but with their psychological impact. What are they thinking—the remaining people on the list? And what did those already erased think in that flashing instant when they went down?

They can’t stop me, but do they know I am coming? Do they know why? Do they refuse to believe it if they do know? Surely they must know I am coming after
somebody
next time around, but do they know it is
their
appointment in Samarra that draws nigh?

When I have executed boring old Will, when the list lies crumpled in the wastebasket of my mind… what then?

I cannot worry about that now. Until then, I kill, and that is enough. And it is time to go kill again.

But before I do, I must tell you about friend Gideon. He lives in Palm Springs, is a member of the Tallpalms Country Club. A membership card from a club in Scottsdale gets me a reciprocal guest membership at Tallpalms. The members’ bulletin board gets me the information that Gideon is a
demon bridge player. In the card room I get my first look at him—he has never seen me, there is no danger of recognition.

In the bar I hear he has somehow winkled ownership of a Mercedes agency away from a former club member, Charlie Hansen, that he drives a new S-600 Mercedes sedan that retails for $135,000, and that he has a penchant for terrible jokes no one dares find unfunny. Perhaps rumors of his former profession and current affiliations have filtered through the club like fecal matter through the baffles of a sewage treatment plant?

On the putting green, I learn that he will be leaving midweek to play golf at Death Valley. A call to Furnace Creek as Mr. Abramson’s travel agent gets me his arrival date and that he will be in one of the two luxury suites at the inn.

I drive over ahead of him, get a modest cabin in the old section of the ranch, and reacquaint myself with Death Valley’s possibilities for ambush. I have never planned an assassination there, but I know the Valley well and its splendid isolation suggests easier disposal of Gideon than on his home ground.

Imagine my surprise when I discover that he is here only peripherally for golf, primarily for a meeting with his Mafia associates. One of them is Gounaris. I observe from afar; some of the newcomers can recognize me. I do not worry about missing: from his booking, Gideon will stay behind when they leave.

I get a nasty shock, however, while wandering through the inn’s beguiling date plantation; I come almost face-to-face with Dante Stagnaro, skulking about in the guise of a birdwatcher.

I save myself by turning away to contemplate one of the grove’s clear bubbling streams, my face shaded by a long-billed fishing cap. His sleeve brushes me as he passes. I have made him dangerous to me by goading him as a picador goads a bull, doing everything short of taking his ear as a trophy.

I watch surreptitiously past the long bill of my cap as he is stopped by two obvious thugs because he has a pair of binoc
ulars around his neck. They talk of birds. One of the pair is just a thug, but the one called Red is intelligent and probing. One of Prince’s creatures, no doubt.

Paradoxically, I must now spend most of my time following Stagnaro about so I will know where he is and won’t risk another face-to-face confrontation. I assume he is here because of Gounaris, and will leave Death Valley when Gounaris does.

Thus I am his shadow as he talks with the Mafia goons, at Zabriskie Point, at the stovepipe well, at the dunes. Returning to the ranch, I get my second nasty shock: by the grossest of coincidences we are sharing the same cabin! He the left-hand unit, me the right, with a common front stoop.

This unexpected proximity drives me to decisive—perhaps foolhardy—action. I have not yet figured out how to kill Abramson, so I decide to precipitate matters, as one precipitates a chemical reaction in a retort. I will let Stagnaro know that Raptor, Fantômas to his Inspector Juve, is here in Death Valley. If nothing else, I will learn much of Stagnaro; always valuable with a man so dangerous to my enterprises.

Will he see Gounaris, or Abramson, as my prey? Will he let them know he has them under surveillance? Will he alert local authority with its powers of search and seizure? Or will he do nothing at all, despite his policeman’s
protect and serve
oath?

I filch a few sheets of stationery from the office after seeing him safely in the cafe for supper, return to my room and, wearing gloves so I will leave no prints, use a heavy marking pen to write on a sheet taken from the center of the sheaf:

I DO NOT KILL

MY OWN KIND

RAPTOR

I am about to shove it under the door of his unit when I see him returning. I barely get back into my own room in
time. I could leave it under the windshield wiper on his car, but it is parked in front of his window. I must wait until he retires.

Through the thin walls, I hear him moving around. I can sympathize: as Raptor, I have many bad nights. But then, at midnight, he leaves again. What is he up to, driving off into the dark emptiness?

He returns to the dunes. I park my car up near the highway and follow on foot. Halfway up a dune I find him, sleeping like a baby. Death Valley’s stark beauty seems to have given him profound tranquillity: I shall take it back.

My RAPTOR note still in my pocket, a safety pin in the compact first-aid/notion kit I always carry in the field, I think myself into my coyote-trickster mode for stalking game. He will not sense me. I approach, tie his shoelaces, pin the note.

I return to the ranch. Stagnaro returns at 4:16. He paces, paces, leaves again at first light. I follow. We both see Gounaris off. Perfect—our appointment will be at another Samarra, later. Stagnaro joins Abramson at the breakfast table; a man of honor indeed, I know how he hates all mobsters’ guts.

In a flash I see my method of execution. I call Abramson on the phone,
tell
him I am scheduled to kill him next, admit I fear for my own life and will make a deal with him. I say a nasty thing about his mother, to enrage him and thus keep him from thinking clearly; emotion always clouds reason. I offer him a meet. He leaps at the chance.

The rest is mere execution. The site is admirably chosen, I have the necessary rifle and scope in the trunk of my car—I have been a hunter, a shooter, all my life. It is manufactured the year I am born—a Winchester center-fire Model 70 in .270, bolt action, which I can work in a blur because I have fired thousands of rounds through it. My scope is a Leupold 10X, my ammunition is Lake City Match M852s. I have come to shoot.

I am about to squeeze off the killing round when Abramson enters the toilet stall. To equate his death with his ultimate evacuation is too delightful to pass up. I lay down a
barrage, take him out decisively, slip away when Stagnaro shows up.

Abramson’s is the first killing I have actually enjoyed. Am I getting callous? Losing my soul? Or is it because this is longdistance rifle shooting, the kind of shooting I have been doing at targets and game most of my life? You are no longer man and rifle, it is no longer scope and target, it is spot-weld of cheek to stock, it is nonverbal, it is…

Or is it just that the colossal hypocrisy of Gideon Abramson’s life makes his death—the sixth in the series—the most satisfying?

“The sixth day of creation,” said Will. “Tomorrow, the God of Genesis rests. Today… well, today is a long day indeed for Him. Tough to cram all that creating into twenty-four hours. In science’s terms an even longer day, stretching from the late Paleozoic a bit over 300 million years ago to this evening’s mighty reckoning in this little room.”

Another hint, thought Dante, that Will had returned knowing Raptor was going to be waiting for him.

“Genesis: ‘And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.’

“That’s it, folks. Shazam! Cattle, creepings things, beasts of the earth.
Everything
except His final creation, man, made and then instructed during the balance of the sixth day.

“But we need the fossil time frame, not a few minutes of a single twenty-four-hour day, to explain what went before to shape us with all our terrible and glorious complexities and contradictions.

“As vertebrates we had gained a bony skeleton, a jointed spine, muscle and nerve systems that oxygenated and circulated the blood. As amphibians we became tetrapods: air-breathers with no more than five digits on each of our paired limbs.

“The amphibians were most successful for their day, some getting to be a few feet long and shaped like a silly-looking
crocodile drawn by a five-year-old. In less than 100 million years they developed into the earliest reptile, proto-reptile, what we could call the base reptile, so successful that the amphibians today have been reduced to barely enough frogs and newts, as William Howells notes, ‘to keep a witch in brew.’

“By changing to proto-reptile, what did we gain over the amphibian ancestors we so closely resembled? We became amniotes. Only mammals, reptiles, and birds—which wouldn’t appear for sure until the flying feathered dinosaur,
archaeopteryx
, in the late Jurassic 170 million years ago—are amniotes.

“Amniotes have their fetal development either in an egg or in a womb. The amnion, and other protective membranes, supply the fetus with food and oxygen.

“Successively more advanced models followed that base reptile of 300 million years ago. They became the first of four ‘Megadynasties’ that Robert Bakker, a maverick dinosaur guru who has stood paleontology on its ear a score of times, suggests have existed during the history of life on land.

“Megadynasty One, the proto-reptiles, had great staying power—these early reptiles ruled for 20 million years with two types of beasts. Big quick predators, dimetrodons—popularly, ‘sail lizards’ because of tall webbed spines on their backs—and big slow vegetarians.

“Near the very end of the Paleozoic era, maybe 260 m.y. ago, one line of these sluggish and decidedly cold-blooded proto-reptiles split into two basic new vertebrate life-forms. One, called thecondonts, became the modern reptiles, the dinosaurs, and their descendants, the birds.

“The other became mammal-like reptiles called therapsids—some call them synapsids, although I doubt they had very many synapses to help them along—that formed the second of Bakker’s Megadynasties. They dominated the thecodonts from the late Permian through the Triassic, ranging from early bone-headed proto-mammals to, at the end of
their reign, very advanced dog-faced cynodonts just a knife blade away from true mammals.

“They had become warm-blooded—mammal-like bony palates separating the mouth and nose cavities in some of them suggest this—but the mass extinction 249 m.y. ago at the Paleozoic/Mesozoic boundary finished them. They already had spawned the true mammals, however, tiny mouse-like things that had to wait their turn because the reptiles moved first, evolved faster, to grab all major Mesozoic ecological niches.

“These Archosauria—true reptiles—the most successful early model being the so-called crimson crocodiles, were soon weighing in at a half-ton or so, and the third Megadynasty, the Age of Reptiles, was under way. Through the Jurassic and Cretaceous right up to the end of the Mesozoic 65 m.y. ago, dinosaurs and other reptiles reigned supreme. Their story is not our story, but they were a tremendous success.

“They ruled the earth as tyrannosaurs, as stegosaurs, as ceratopsians, as massive sauropods like diplodocus and brontosaurus who reached eighty tons in weight and a hundred feet in length. Truly thunder lizards. They reentered the sea as plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and mosasaurs. Soared the skies as pterodons, pterosaurs, and pterodactyls, in sizes ranging from a robin to a jet fighter.