Dreams Die First (18 page)

“Couldn’t be better.”

“Your shirt is split,” Verita said.

“I’m getting another one.”

“When are you going to do something about your hair?”

“I should be back here by ten thirty. We’ll fix it then.”

“I’ll get some stuff. Meet me at my apartment.”

“No, you’ll stay here. We’re not playing with children. I don’t want them coming back for you after they hear what happened to their men.”

“I will take her to my house,” Julio said. “My mother will be glad to see her.”

The Chicano came in with a faded blue mechanic’s shirt, which I exchanged for mine. It was big enough for two of me. I let it hang out over my jeans.

I checked my watch. It was 2:45 A.M. “Time to go,” I said.

Verita got to her feet. “Be careful.”

I kissed her cheek. “Always.” I turned to Julio. “Thanks.”

His face was serious. “It’s okay. I always pick up my markers.”

“Thanks anyway.”

“Just take care of my boys.”

“I will.”

I went up into the garage and walked toward the car. “Did you get the mattress?” I asked the Chicano.

“In the back seat of the car like you said.”

“Good.” I looked in. Even folded over, the mattress took up the whole back seat. “One of you can come with me. The others will follow in the van.”

“I’ll come with you,” he said.

***

There was no traffic either in town or on the freeway. I pulled to a stop in front of Ronzi’s warehouse in Encino at twenty minutes after three. The van pulled in behind me.

The nearest building was another warehouse at the end of the block. The street seemed deserted. I got out of the car. The Chicano followed me out and one of the boys from the van joined us.

“Wait here,” I said. “I’m going to check for the night watchman. If you hear any noise, don’t hang around. Just get out of here.”

The Chicano nodded.

I cut across the street, climbed up on the truck-loading platform and looked in the window. There was a light coming from the office at the back of the warehouse, but I couldn’t see if anyone was in there. I jumped off the platform, went to the back of the building and up the steps to that entrance. Through the window I could see into the office. It was empty.

I had counted on that. Ronzi had to feel damn secure. With his connections he figured that no one would rip him off.

I came down the steps, cut around the side of the building to the parking lot and counted the delivery trucks. There were fourteen. I went back across the street.

“It’s clear,” I said. I took the cans of rubber cement from the floor in the back. The boys gathered around me. “I want you to put about a quarter of a can of this stuff in the gas tank of each one of those delivery trucks.”

“What’ll it do?” one of the boys asked. “Blow them up?”

“No. It’ll just fuck up the engines.”

“You mean they won’t start?”

“They’ll start okay, but they’ll croak when they get about five or ten miles from here.”

They laughed. “Jesus! They’ll all be going crazy.”

“Get moving,” I said, opening a can. “I want to be out of here in ten minutes.” I turned to the Chicano. “I want one of the boys behind the wheel of both cars so that we can take off as soon as we get
back.”

He nodded and said something quickly in Spanish. One boy walked disconsolately back to the van. He turned back to me. “You wait here with the car.”

“No, I go with the boys. Someone else waits here.”

He nodded and gestured to another boy, who got behind the wheel of my car. We raced across the street to the parking lot. “We work in teams,” I whispered. “One opens the tank. One pours.”

The boys acted as if they had been doing it all their lives. We were finished and away from there in less than fifteen minutes.

***

By four o’clock we were back in Los Angeles and in front of the Silver Stud. I turned the car up the side street and the van followed. Halfway up the block I stopped.

“Okay,” I said to the Chicano.

He nodded, knowing what he had to do. He got out of the car while I reached for the crash helmet and put it on. He climbed in the van and they moved down the block and parked across the street next to the Silver Stud. The front of the van was facing me.

I pulled the mattress from the back seat, propped it up in front of the passenger seat, then slid behind it. I reached behind me, pulled the safety harness across my chest and locked it into place. I leaned across the wheel and signaled with my lights.

The van signaled back. One flash. They were ready. I put my left foot on the brake and pressed the shift lever into low; then, leaning sideways so I could hold the wheel, I waited.

It seemed like an hour, but it couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes. Finally, the signal came. The brights went on and off twice in rapid succession. The street was clear enough for me to make it across. I took my foot off the brake and hit the gas pedal.

I crossed the street and jumped the curb at almost thirty miles an hour. I had just enough time to pull the mattress down over me when the car hit the front doors and crashed through with an explosive sound. The hood buckled and the sound of breaking glass mixed with the screaming of a burglar alarm. The little car plowed into the saloon, through the bar and into the wall mirror before it came to a stop.

I sat there stunned for a moment, then automatically reached for the key to switch off the engine. The saloon was a shambles. Furniture had been thrown all over the place. Quickly I pulled off the harness. I kicked open the jammed door with both feet and got out. I took a last look at the car before I left it.

Nader couldn’t have been right. The windshield hadn’t even cracked. I ran out. The van was already moving as I climbed into it.

“Hey, man!”

“Some driving!”

“He’s a real
bracero
!”

“
Silencio!
” the Chicano shouted from behind the wheel. He turned to me. “Now what do we do?”

I looked at my watch. It was four thirty. We had to wait four hours for the next project. “Let’s find a restaurant and get some food,” I said.

***

It was ten minutes to nine when I pulled the van in front of the house on Mulholland. I leaned out and hit the signal button.

I heard the whir of the closed-circuit camera, then the voice. “Who is it?”

“Flower delivery.”

I saw the camera move and survey the truck. I knew they were reading the sign on the panels. “Okay.”

The gates swung open and I drove up to the front of the house. I got out of the van, went to the back and opened the rear doors. The boys watched me as I picked up the giant basket of flowers and went up to the front door.

The door was opened by a heavyset man before I had a chance to ring the bell. I pushed the flowers toward him. He took them automatically in both hands. His mouth opened in surprise when he saw my gun.

“Not a word!” I said in a low voice, shoving the muzzle in his face. I pushed him back into the house. A moment later the boys were all behind me with baseball bats in their hands. The Chicano gave me my crash helmet and I put it on.

The man’s face was white with fear. I guess the sight of all of us in crash helmets with the visors down was not very reassuring.

“If you put the flowers down and don’t make any noise, nothing will happen to you,” I said.

He set the flowers on the floor.

“Where’s the master bedroom?” I asked.

“Upstairs.”

“Okay. Facedown on the floor.”

He stretched out and in less than a few seconds he was taped hand, mouth and foot.

I turned to the Chicano. “One of you wait here; the others come with me.”

He nodded and I went up the steps two at a time. There were only two doors on the upper floor. I opened the first door. It was a combination office and study. Empty.

I found him in the next room. He was sitting up in bed, sipping orange juice through a straw that was stuck through an opening in his still-bandaged face. “What the hell?” he mumbled, reaching for the button next to him.

I pointed the 9mm at him. “The only thing that button will do for you is open the gates of hell.”

He pulled back from the button as if it were a snake. “What do you want?” he asked in a trembling voice.

Without answering, I nodded to the Chicano. The boys knew what to do. One went into the bathroom; the others except for the Chicano scattered through the house. A moment later we heard the sounds of destruction.

I walked over to the bed, took the panic button and put it out of his reach.

“There’s no money or jewelry here,” he said.

“That’s not what we’re after.”

“Then what?”

I saw the scissors lying on the table beside the bed. I gave the gun to the Chicano. “Hold it on him,” I said, picking up the scissors. I leaned over him and began to snip the bandage away from his face.

“What are you doing?” His voice became shrill.

“I just want to see the kind of job they did on your face, Kitty.”

For the first time he seemed to recognize what was happening. “You?”

I flipped up the visor. “Hello again. Surprised?”

He stared at me, unable to speak.

I had all the bandages off now. I looked at his jaw. “I wonder what would happen now if someone should decide to pull out those wires?”

He shrank away from me. The Chicano turned to me as the boys began to come back into the room. “They’re finished.”

I took the gun from him. “Okay. Leave me alone with him. I’ll meet you downstairs.”

“Gonna blast him?” one of the boys asked.

I didn’t answer.

“
Vamos!
” the Chicano said.

I waited until they were gone; then I spoke. “This was just to convince you that I have friends. You have until six o’clock tonight to let me hear you canceled the contract. After that you’re a dead man. And if anything should happen to me before that, you’re dead, too. So you’d better start praying that I stay healthy.”

I raised the gun and put a bullet into the headboard over his head. “Understand?”

There was no point in my waiting around for him to answer. He had fainted when I pulled the trigger.

I left the room and made my way through the mess. There wasn’t a piece of furniture in the place that had been left unbroken.

They followed me out to the van. On the road into town the boys were quiet. Finally, one of them couldn’t keep it in any longer. “Did you kill him?”

“No. But I scared him a lot.”

He was silent for a moment. “You know, I never seen a house like that. It was so pretty that I kind of hated to break it up.”

CHAPTER 26

I fell into the couch in Julio’s office and didn’t open my eyes until two thirty in the afternoon. Julio was sitting behind his desk, watching me. I rolled over and sat up.

Silently he got to his feet and opened a closet door. From an electric coffeepot on top of a small refrigerator he filled a coffee mug and brought it to me.

I took a sip of the scalding black liquid and began to come alive. “Thanks.”

“
De nada
,” he said, going back to his desk. “Lonergan’s turning the town upside down for you.”

“What does he want?”

He shrugged. “
Quién sabe?
Lonergan doesn’t talk.”

I took another belt of the coffee. “I think it’s time I gave him a call. Mind if I use your phone?”

“Be my guest.”

The girl who answered told me he was unavailable until she heard my name. A few seconds later he was on the phone.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Not in Hawaii, that’s for sure. I hear you’re looking for me.”

His voice didn’t change tone. “Have you gone crazy? What are you trying to pull?”

“One thing I learned in Vietnam—if you turn and run in battle, the only thing you get is a bullet in your back.”

“Is that why you put me on the list last night?”

“You made a deal for the paper the minute you thought I was on my way out of the country.”

“I made a deal for your life.”

“It wasn’t good enough. Those blasters and the M-One waiting for me outside my girl’s apartment didn’t do much to convince me that they had pulled out.”

He was silent for a moment. “I didn’t know about that.”

“You’re slipping, Uncle John. I thought you made it your business to know everything.”

“The queen canceled his contract, but they’re still angry with you back East and Ronzi says he’ll personally tear you apart when he sees you.”

“You can tell Ronzi that he got off easy last night. If I had wanted to, I could have blown the whole place sky high. They have a million-dollar business to protect and if he and those mustaches still want to play, it’ll cost them. If they do the arithmetic, they might figure I’m not worth the hassle.”

“You sound pretty cocky,” Lonergan said.

“They’re out in the open, easy to find. I’m the Vietcong. I can hit and run before they even know I’m there.”

“What makes you so sure you can get away with it?”

“I learned something in the time I spent at Reverend Sam’s mission. The swords of the righteous are mighty. And I’m on God’s side.”

“The mission backing you up?”

I laughed. “You know better than that, Uncle John. Their motto is ‘Peace and Love.’”

“What will you settle for?”

“Tell Ronzi I’ll take the deal he offered me. One hundred thousand dollars and he can have the paper, lock, stock and barrel. I’ll go away quietly.”

“Call me back in an hour.”

I put down the telephone and looked at Julio.

“You got
cojones
, Lieutenant,” he said. “The minute you walk out of here, you’re a dead man.”

“How much time do I have?”

“When are you calling him back?”

“In an hour.”

“Until then.”

The door opened and a boy came in, carrying a large covered tray. He placed it on the desk and went out. Julio removed the cover from the tray, which was filled with tortillas, enchiladas, hamburgitas and bowls of hot, sweet-smelling chili. “Hungry?” he asked.

I nodded, my mouth watering. He turned the tray toward me as I pulled up a chair. The condemned man ate a hearty meal.