Fugitive Nights (36 page)

“I suppose you want me to run down to the hotel and watch over
him
”

“I kinda worry maybe he'll try to take Ibañez by himself. He's emotionally involved, what with the guy puttin him in the coffin.”

“Do you
all
take something like a Masonic secret oath, or what?” Breda asked.

“Who?”

“Men,” she said. “You men. Clive Devon's worried about the smuggler because he's a very gentle man. Jack Graves, he's worried about Clive Devon, who's a frail and timid man. Lynn, he's worried about you, and you're worried about him, and nobody in this entire world's worrying about me!”

“Don't you know why, Breda?” Nelson Hareem asked, just as John Lugo got out of the trap but sent the ball in the general direction of Arizona, to the delight of a gallery loaded with rack-and-thumbscrew types.

She showed him her defensive grin and said, “Can you tell me, Nelson?”

“Sure,” he said. “It's because you're so capable. You're such an independent person, nobody has to worry about people like you. The rest of us, we all need somethin. We're all more …”

“If you say
vulnerable
, I'll rap you in the mouth,” Breda warned.

“Okay, I won't.”

“Let's start scanning this crowd for a dark bald husky guy about forty years old who's as capable and independent as me,” Breda suggested. “Instead of having the guy arrested, I oughtta marry him.”

At 11:10
A.M.
Lynn was craving a cup of coffee, and decided to go downstairs to get one. He stopped by room 529 and listened at the door just in case Francisco Ibañez had come back in the four minutes it took him to run to the John an hour earlier, but he needn't have worried.

He was getting into the elevator at the same moment the other elevator arrived at the fifth floor. As Lynn's door slid shut he heard a woman giggle. A man with a heavy Spanish accent said, “You weel love the view from my room, Jennie.” Only he said
Yennie.

Lynn mashed the open button, but too late! Then he punched the button for the fourth floor, and when the elevator stopped he ran out, down the hallway to the interior stairs, then back up to the fifth floor three steps at a time. He crept along the empty hallway with his hand under his aloha shirt, resting on the butt of the Colt.

Lynn listened at the door but could hear only more female giggling. He thought of all the sensible things he could do. Instead, he took an impulsive course of action. He knocked, and said, “Room service.”

The door was opened by a woman already partly undressed. Lynn hadn't planned on her opening it, and since he didn't look like room service he simply shoved the door open and stepped inside with his hand under the shirt.

“Sweetie!” the woman yelled.

Francisco Ibañez ran from the bathroom wearing only his shirt, shoes, and a semierection. He wasn't bald, he wasn't dark, and he wasn't husky. But he
was
terrified.

Lynn looked from Ibañez to the woman, who had hooker written all over her.

He said, “I'm with hotel security and we were told there was a prostitute and a john using this room. My mistake. Sorry.” Nobody spoke when Lynn closed the door, saying, “Enjoy the continental breakfast, compliments of the house.”

Five minutes later he was in his Rambler on the way to the golf tournament, where he hoped to find Nelson, Breda and John Lugo, all in one piece.

*   *   *

Before Lynn arrived at Indian Wells Country Club, all hell broke loose. It happened after Breda went to a refreshment stand to buy a couple of soft drinks, and a hot dog for Nelson. She thought she could leave him alone while the Lugo foursome teed off on number seventeen.

Breda was carrying the refreshments in a cardboard tray when she heard the gallery over on the eighteenth green start to scream. She thought somebody must've eagled the hole. But what they were screaming at were not the exploits of a finishing foursome, but the exploits of Nelson Hareem.

Nelson had been getting hot and tired and cranky. The gun strapped to his thigh was chafing his crotch, so he surreptitiously reached inside his trousers to move it around. He was only the second most miserable guy in the vicinity, the first being John Lugo, who'd double-bogeyed three in a row. Lugo had been swinging wilder and harder on each shot. He'd taken off his sweater-vest, and his shirt was hanging out. He'd chewed his cigar stub to shreds. He hadn't had a par since number eleven.

The man didn't arouse Nelson's curiosity until he moved through the gallery in the general direction of John Lugo's party at the seventeenth tee. It was the way he bumped his way through, not like a golf fan at all, more like a Los Angeles Raider fan. He was middle-aged, burly, dark, and wore a red golf cap. It was a Bob Hope Chrysler Classic cap that he'd obviously just bought.

Nelson took a hard look at him, and yes, he
could
be Mexican, but somehow with that Semitic curve to his nose he looked more like the photos of Nelson's grandfather. He looked more like an Arab!

Nelson got even closer and watched the guy bump into yet another fan in the gallery. The guy smiled and said, “Excuse me.” He didn't seem to have an accent, but the little cop couldn't hear him very well.

Nelson looked around for one of the uniformed deputies or a security officer, but there was none in sight. And Nelson wanted to be more sure. Nelson wanted to make the guy talk, so he shouldered his way through the gallery, managing to get right in the guy's face, and said, “Pardon me, sir, but …”

Just then the holster he'd moved around on his thigh broke loose and slid down his leg, thudding against the ground. In plain view, right in front of his suspect.

The guy looked down at the holstered gun, then at Nelson. Then he turned and burrowed through the gallery, knocking people helter-skelter, and in a few seconds he was racing behind the clubhouse, then clattering up the yellow metal stairway to a catwalk leading from the clubhouse to the man-made rock promontory overlooking the eighteenth green!

Nelson jammed his gun in the pocket of his baggy pants and went pounding after him, but when he got to the top of the catwalk he couldn't see the guy anywhere. He was
gone!
Nelson was frantic until he looked on the other side of the leader board and spotted the guy scrambling down the rocks, along the eighteenth green, under the TV cameras, in plain sight of the viewing stands and the Fuji blimp overhead, as well as a whole lot of people in the tented VIP seats.

And Nelson Hareem had to put on his game face and
go!
He sprinted after the guy, in a zig and zag, juke and jibe, and a plunge through startled tournament marshals in white hats and striped shirts, as well as shocked contestants finishing at number eighteen!

And then he hurtled straight down the cart path under the stands, past three security officers (Canadian pensioners who came down every year for this event), darting out toward the throngs gathered at number-one tee.

But he wasn't gaining on the guy. That old bastard was leaving him in the dust!

He bumped, jostled, whirled through a kaleidoscope of golf shirts, dazed hordes gawking at Fuzzy's sweet cut shot, or Curtis's knockdown wedge or Payne's bold putt. Nobody paid any attention to Nelson Hareem's desperate pursuit! Nelson was spouting adrenaline, and with blistered lungs he plunged headlong after his man and nobody gave a shit! Somebody actually tried to
stop
him, to ask if Desi Drive was named after Lucy's husband!

They ran, mouths agape, back into the mountain cove of number-three fairway, where at last Nelson's man showed some fatigue. He leaped into a pearl-gray Rolls-Royce golf cart belonging to a pair of amateurs who were looking for an OB ball on the hillside. Next thing the amateurs knew, their golf cart was plunging down the fairway away from the green!

One of those seigneurs of Corporate America ran after it for thirty yards, when all the veal chops, pasta and bread sticks caught up with him. Then he stood holding his chest and screamed, “That's a genuine crocodile golf bag I won at the Bing Crosby clambake, you thieving fuckhead!”

But he was shocked into silence when a
second
golf cart, belonging to his playing partners, got stolen by a
second
thief, who went flying after the first! The second thief was a little redhead with a demented expression, who yelled at everyone in his path: “Playing through! Playing through!”

The cart chase was on! Nelson's guy went screaming across the wash by number eight and across the fairway, almost getting smacked by a whistling wood shot hit by a CEO from New York who made five million a year in bonuses that gave him only moderate pleasure, but was in heaven because he'd just hit a 250-yard drive, thereby justifying the ten grand all this had cost him.

But as the CEO drove his cart toward that thing of beauty, a golf cart buzzed across the fairway, mashing his all-world tee shot into the ground! And causing him to cry in horror: “Official! Get me a ruling, goddamnit! Official!”

The chase ended on number nine where a foursome was on the fairway playing in. Nelson's man appeared to be banking on a disappearance among the masses around the clubhouse. He scattered the mud hens in the lake as he sped by, but he didn't scatter the intrepid gallery. He couldn't straighten out at the last minute, and drove the cart into the same lake that had punished a duck-hook three minutes earlier. His was the
second
car in the lake, the first being a white Chrysler on a display platform.

The guy got out limping and dripping, and with his head down, plowed into a fan from Billings, Montana, provoking a beer-bath and a popcorn blizzard. But then he was pounced on by Nelson Hareem, who'd daringly maneuvered his golf cart alongside the runner and leaped, like a cowboy bulldogging a steer.

When deputies and security people and tournament marshals finally got to the scene of the crash-and-splash, there were fifty golf fans encircling the antagonists and enjoying the battle. Nelson had the guy in a choke-hold and was scissoring the guy's ample waist with his stubby legs. The chokee's hat had fallen off and Nelson was delighted to see that the guy was balding! Nelson had a mouse under his eye and his shirt was almost torn from his body. The pocket of his trousers was ripped, but he still had his gun and his pluck.

Nelson looked up at a uniformed sheriff's deputy who'd just arrived and was trying to figure out who the hell was the good guy, or if there was one. “This is the guy you been lookin for!” Nelson cried, meaning the airport fugitive.

But to Nelson's great surprise the suspect croaked, in unaccented American English, “Get this red-headed kangaroo off me! I'm not gonna give ya no trouble!”

The deputy dragged the suspect to his feet, patted him down, and found three wallets inside his Jockey shorts, all of them belonging to sadistic golf fans who'd been enjoying John Lugo's misery.

Nelson was exhausted and confused and decided not to tell them much at all, except his name, and that he was an off-duty policeman.

The deputy handcuffed the pickpocket and said to Nelson, “We'll take your statement as quick as we can and let you get back to the tournament. That was a great piece of work. This guy musta been going through that crowd like dysentery.”

As a second deputy helped Nelson to his feet, a uniformed Palm Springs policeman ran up. He was Bob Hope's driver and bodyguard for the day.

The Palm Springs cop said, “Kinda ruined your tournament, didn't it?”

“Gotta be a cop twenny-four hours a day, I guess,” Nelson mumbled.

“We need more guys like you on
our
department,” the Palm Springs cop said. “What's your name, Officer? Maybe you'd like to meet Mister Hope? If I know him, he'll say something like, ‘That pickpocket ended up with a
real
bad lie!'”

It was reported on the news that one of the contestants and witnesses, former astronaut Alan Shepard, was asked if he'd ever seen a more remarkable sight in all his golfing experience.

He said, “Not since I hit that golf shot on the moon.”

When he awoke on Saturday morning he had actually thought of attending Mass, but then it seemed a sacrilegious thing to do on the day that he was to carry out his mission. He thought a long time about it. Would God have more pity on him or less if he went to Mass? Would God even look with favor on a prayer for protection, or be angry that he'd offered it, under these circumstances?

Finally, he'd decided
not
to attend Mass. He had dressed, shaved and gone downstairs to the hotel's breakfast room for coffee. He bought the
Los Angeles Times
, a huge newspaper by his standards, and began searching for stories about U.S. crimes in order to reassure himself that what he was going to do was correct, that they would have been laughed at if they'd taken their scanty information to the U.S. authorities and said: “Here, solve the murder of a good policeman, our friend Javier Rosas. And more importantly, provide his family and friends with
retribution.
” That this was their only chance for justice in a country that releases men on parole after they mangle or murder children.

The police in his country knew how to deal with men like that. In his country they could even prosecute one of their own citizens for committing a crime in the United States, but how many gringo criminals had
ever
been extradited to Mexico for trial? And yet everyone knew that it was common for U.S. lawmen to ask favors of the
judiciales
, who would often arrest a wanted Mexican and deliver him to the U.S. authorities at the international border. Of course, the gringos could never return such a favor because their laws wouldn't permit it, because they were morally
superior.

Yet the fugitive couldn't place all of the blame on the gringos, No, it was nearly as much the fault of the corruption within their own system, especially within the Federal Judicial Police of Mexico.