Westlake, Donald E - Novel 41 (33 page)

 
          
 
It wasn't till they were far from shore, out in
the empty middle of the bay, that Banadando slowed the boat again and Levine
could tailk to him, saying, "Friends of yours back there?"

 
          
 
"Friends of his," Banadando said,
his voice vibrating like a guitar string. Tension had bunched the muscles in
his cheeks and around his mouth, and his lips were thin and bloodless.

 
          
 
Levine said, "I wasn't followed, I can
tell you that. My back-up would have known."

 
          
 
"The supermarket," Banadando said.
"I can't even go to the supermarket. This is rotten luck, rotten
luck."

 
          
 
"Now he knows about the boat."

 
          
 
"He can put people all around this bay,
Giacomo can," Banadando said. "If he knows there's a reason. And now
he knows there's a reason."

 
          
 
"I'll just mention police protection
once," Levine said.

 
          
 
Banadando nodded. "Good," he said.
"That was the mention. Look here."

 
          
 
From an enclosed cabinet under the wheel,
Banadando pulled out a Defense Mapping Agency book of Sailing Directions, found
the pages he wanted, and showed Levine what he intended to do. "
Long Island
's a hundred twenty miles long," he
said. "From where we are here, there's like another seventy miles out to
the end. But I can't stay on the
South
Shore
any more, so here's what I'm gonna do. I
don't have to go all the way out to
Montauk Point
at the end of the island. Here by Hampton Bays I can take the
Shinnecock
Canal
through to
Peconic
Bay
, then I only have to go out around Orient
Point and there I am on the
North
Shore
. Then I head west again, across Long Island
Sound. Look here on this
map,
west of Mattituck Inlet,
you see this little dip in the coastline?"

 
          
 
"Yes."

 
          
 
"There's a dirt road there, comes down
from
Bergen
Avenue
. I know that place from years ago. There's a little wooden dock there,
that's all.
Nobody around.
That's where we meet tomorrow,
let Giacomo and his boys search the
South
Shore
all they want."

 
          
 
Looking at the maps, Levine said, "That's
a long way to go, in a small boat like that."

 
          
 
"A hundred miles," Banadando said,
dismissing it.
"Maybe less.
Don't worry, Levine,
I'll be there. Between now and Wednesday, let's face it, the only way I stay
alive is to do things Giacomo thinks I won't do or can't do."

 
          
 
"You're right," Levine said.

 
          
 
"I'm always right," Banadando said.
"I can't take you back to your car. I'll drop you at Center
Moriches,
you can take a cab back."

 
          
 
Levine made that day's pick-ups with no
trouble, and that evening, as rain tapped hesitantly at the windows, the four
policemen who knew about Banadando —being Levine and Jack Crawley and
Lieutenant Barker and Inspector Santangelo —met in the lieutenant's office at
the precinct to ^ decide what to do next.

 
          
 
Jack Crawley, a big beefy man with heavy
shoulders and hands and a generally dissatisfied look, had no doubt what he
wanted to do next: "Bring in everybody," he said. "Inspector,
you bring in your whole Organized Crime Unit, we bring in plainclothes anrf
uniformed people from the precinct, and we surround that mother. I don't want
Abe to spend any more time in the middle of some other clown's argument."

           
 
"I’m already in, Jack," Levine said.
"We're on the verge of getting some very useful information. I think
Banadando actually is as smart as he thinks he is, and that
hell
manage
to elude Polito for the next two days. It’s only until Wednesday,
after all. The minute I step off that boat on Wednesday you can phone Inspector
Santangelo at Organized Crime, tell him Fm out of the way, and send in the
entire police department if you want."

 
          
 
"He'll be long gone by then,"
Crawley
said, and Lieutenant Barker said, "I
tend to agree with Jack."

 
          
 
"Fm sorry," said Levine, "but I
don't. In the first place, he won't be long gone. I believe he actuadly will
make it around the island tonight, but it won't be
zn
easy trip. Those litde boats always feel like they're going fast, but they're
not. What's the top speed of a boat like that, on choppy open water?
Twenty miles an hour, maybe a little more?
And they gobble
up gasoline, hell have to stop once or twice at marinas. This rain will slow
him down. Traveling as fast as he can, on a small boat pounding up and down
over every wave, hell be lucky if it only takes him seven or eight hours to get
around to where he's supposed to meet me tomorrow."

 
          
 
Lieutenant Barker said, "Meaning what,
Abe? How does that connect?"

 
          
 
"Meaning," Levine said, "he
can't disappear from us all that easily."

 
          
 
Santangelo said, "That's not such good
news, Abe. If we could find Banadando just like that, why can't'Polito?"

 
          
 
Levine shrugged. "Maybe he can, I hope
not. But we have the entire law enforcement apparatus behind us, to help, and
Polito doesn't. We can bring in the Coast Guard, Army helicopters, anything we
need."

 
          
 
Smiling, Santangelo said, "Not
necessarily at the snap of our fingers."

 
          
 
"No, but it can be done. Polito can't
begin to match our manpower or our authority."

 
          
 
Crawley
said, "Never mind all of that after-the-event stuff,

           
 
Abe.
What it comes
down to is, Polito's people got to that pier today within an hour
o(
you getting there. What if they'd been an hour
earher?"

 
          
 
"A lot of different things could have
happened," Levine said.

 
          
 
"Some of them nasty,"
Crawley
told him.

 
          
 
Santangelo said, "The decision has been
Abe's from the beginning, and it still is. Abe, I'll go along with whatever you
decide. But I have to say, there's a lot in what your partner says."

 
          
 
"I'll stay the course," Levine told
him.

 
          
 
Santangelo said, "There's something else
to consider. If something goes wrong, if Banadando gets killed or slips through
our fingers, we could all be in trouble for not reporting the situation right
away."

 
          
 
Levine spread his hands. "If you're
worried about that, you do rank me after all, you could take the decision out
of my hands."

 
          
 
"No, I don't want to," Santangelo
said. "I think we're handling it right, but I want you and Fred and
Officer Crawley to know there could be trouble for all of us down the line.
Within the Department."

 
          
 
Lieutenant Barker said, "Let's count that
out of the decision-making."

 
          
 
"Fine with me," Santangelo said.

 
          
 
The Long Island Expressway ended just short of
Riverhead, seventy-five miles from
Manhattan
but still another forty-five miles from the
end of the island at
Montauk
Point
. The last
dozen miles the traffic had thinned out so much that on the long straightaways
Levine could see in the rearview mirror Jack Crawley's car, lagging way back.
The rain had stopped sometime during the night but the sky was still
cloud-covered and the air was cooler and still damp. In mid-morning, the sparse
trafl&c here at the eastern end of the Expressway was mostly delivery vans
and a few private cars containing shoppers, the latter mainly headed west
toward the population centers.

 
          
 
The land out here seemed to imitate the
wave-formations of the surrounding sea; long gradual rolls of scrub over which
the highway moved in easy gradients, long sweeps steadily upward followed by
long gradual declines. It was on the upslopes that Levine would catch glimpses
of Jack Crawley's dark-green
Pontiac
far behind, and on the downslopes that he
was increasingly alone.

 
          
 
At the Nugent Drive exit, two miles before the
end of the highway, a car was entering the road, a black Chevrolet; Levine
pulled accommodatingly into the left lane, passed the car, saw it recede in his
mirror, and a moment later was over the next rise. Signs announced the end of
the road.

 
          
 
The Chevy reappeared over the crest behind him
so abruptly, moving so fast, that Levine had hardly time to register its
presence in his mirror before it was shooting past him on the right and there
were flat cracking sounds like someone breaking tree branches, and the wheel
wrenched itself out of Levine's hands.

 
          
 
He'd been doing just over sixty. The Chevy was
already far away in front, and Levine's car was slewing around toward the right
shoulder, the wheel still spinning rightward. Levine grabbed it, fighting to
pull it back to the left,
his
right foot tapping and
tapping the brakes. Blow-out, he thought, but at the same time his mind was
over-riding that normal thought, was telling him. No! They shot it out! They
shot the tire!

 
          
 
Banadando! They found him, they're going after
him! They cut me out of the play!

 
          
 
He was recapturing control, of his emotions
and his thoughts and the car, when its right tires hit the gravel and dirt
beside the road and tried t9 yank the steering wheel out of his hands again. He
hung on, his foot tapping and tapping, pressing down harder sis they slowed,
daring to assert more and more control until at last, in a swirl of tan dust of
its own creation, the car jolted to a stop, skewed slightly at an angle toward
the highway, seeming to sag in exhaustion on its springs.

 
          
 
Levine opened his mouth wide to breath, but
the constriction was farther back, deep in his throat. He leaned forward,
resting his forehead on the top of the steering wheel, feeling its bottom press
hard into his stomach. His trembling hand went up to cup his left ear, the
position in which, he had
learned,
he could best hear
his heart.

 
          
 
Beat, beat beat —

 
          
 
Skip.

 
          
 
Beat, beat,
beat —

 
          
 
Skip.