A Nasty Piece of Work (22 page)

Nothing visible suggested life.

The headlights of the car coming from the direction of Nipton came over a rise. They looked a lot like the headlights of the Ferrari I’d seen in my rearview mirror when I was following Gava from in front. The car braked to a stop a football field down the road from Kelso Depot.

Friday flipped onto her stomach. “What’s happening?”

“I’ll give you my educated guess.”

A man emerged from the car. I remembered Awlson’s description of Gava: The Wrestler was six foot even, one hundred seventy-five pounds, with good shoulders and a narrow waist.
He held his head at an angle as if he was hard of hearing in one ear.

The figure of the man coming down the highway matched the description Awlson had given me to a T—and looked a lot like the house dude on the high stool on the fourth floor of the Whistlestop gambling operation. I passed the goggles to Ornella. She adjusted them on her head. “It’s him,” she said flatly.

I asked her how she could be so sure.

She only repeated, “It’s Emilio. I’d know him anywhere.”

“Why do you keep calling him by his first name?”

I could feel her looking at me in the darkness. “That’s what I called him when I posted the bail bond.”

“Keep watching,” I instructed her. I had a pretty good idea what she would see.

“Okay, he’s climbed onto the hotel porch,” she whispered. “He’s looking around. He’s studying the desert skyline—oh my God, he’s looking directly at us. Do you think he can see us?”

“No. But he knows I’m out here somewhere.”

“He’s taken out a big envelope. He’s waving it over his head at the desert. He’s turned and gone into the hotel … I can see the faint beam of a flashlight inside flickering on the windows that still have panes. Ah, he’s come back onto the porch. He’s jumped off onto the sand path and starting up the road toward the car.” I heard Ornella catch her breath. “It’s not the same man, Lemuel. It’s not Emilio. The man going back to the Ferrari is roughly the same height but he has a completely different way of walking. How can that be?”

“I figured Gava would still be in the hotel when I came to get the money,” I said. “Didn’t know how he’d pull it off. I was dumb not to think of the train. He had one of his cronies jump off the slow-moving Union Pacific when it passed Kelso Depot. It was the guy who jumped off the train who’s going back to the car.”

“Which means Emilio is waiting for you in the dark inside the hotel. He’s surely armed. Oh my God, you can’t go in there, Lemuel. Forget about taking him back for trial, forget about my losing the damned bail money.” Friday sat up abruptly. “I don’t want to lose you.”

“I have the night-vision goggles,” I reminded her. I took them from her and adjusted them on my head. The shadowy barefoot contessa crouching next to me on the tarpaulin materialized in her underwater bluish green majesty. For a moment I entertained the fantasy that I was sitting next to a mermaid. “I want you to make your way back to the Toyota in the wadi,” I whispered. “I want you to wait for me there.” When she didn’t move, I said, “I’m asking you to do this.”

“Why?”

“Why did you call him Emilio?”

I could see the mermaid look away. “What will you do?” she whispered.

“I’ll make my way down to that pathway that runs from the hotel to the road. There are small dunes there. When I don’t turn up in the hotel to retrieve the envelope, he’ll get impatient—my guess is he’ll give it an hour, two at the most. Then he’ll come out on the porch in his stocking feet and look around. Then he’ll sit on the edge of the porch, where the rail fell away, and put on his shoes. He’ll figure I chickened out. He’ll start up the pathway. That’s when I’ll take him. I’ll have surprise on my side. I’ll have the advantage of being able to see in the dark. He’ll be blinder than a blind bat.”

“You know how to do that kind of thing,” she breathed. “You know how to deal with someone like … someone like Gava?”

“You were going to say Emilio.”

“You didn’t answer my question. You know how to take on Emilio?”

“I’ve been trained,”

“Who trained you?”

“Some very talented killers employed by the United States government.”

She reached for my hand and pulled it under the fabric to her heart again. Her skin was cold to the touch, her heart racing, her body atremble. “I badly need to talk you out of this,” she whispered.

That wasn’t going to happen. The anger had risen in me along with the adrenaline. Fact is I’d been startled the first time she called him Emilio, fact is I didn’t appreciate her calling him Emilio all the time, fact is my imagination had filled in gaps in her story, fact is I supposed a lot of things. Fact is I was no longer weighed down by facts.

Fact is I was aching for a fight.

A fight is what I got.

I counted on him staying in the lobby for at least an hour, so I took the long way around, coming back up the pathway until I found a hidey-hole behind a small dune and a stump of a long-deceased tree. Gava held out in the dark of the lobby of the abandoned hotel for five hours and twelve minutes, according to the luminous dial on my father’s Bulova. He was clearly a hoodlum with a lot of street savvy. He knew I was out here somewhere. He was waiting with a stalker’s patience for me to come to him. I began to worry about that stalker’s patience of his. I began to worry he’d wait until first light tinted the east, at which point my advantage—my ability to see in the dark—would be gone. When I finally spotted the shadow of a man standing on the porch of the hotel, I bottled up a sigh of relief for fear he might hear it. I carefully slipped the Bulova from my wrist and folded it into my handkerchief and buried it deep in my pocket.

Now I’ll do the fight, or what I remember of it.

I have this memory of Gava coming along the pathway, all the while looking over his shoulder as if he couldn’t believe I hadn’t turned up; as if I might still turn up. Keeping my shoulder low, I slammed into him from his blind side (from the way he angled his head it may have been his deaf side, too). I heard the wind explode out of him along with a yowl of rage. I saw him sprawled on his back in the bluish green desert sand groping for the pistol in a shoulder holster when I kicked him hard in the groin and, dropping to my knees, brought my shoulder up into his chin. I thought I felt his jaw splinter under the impact. In my rage to draw blood, I am sorry to say I lost it—I lost whatever control I had on the caveman anger not far below the surface of all of us, I lost my dignity, I lost my memory of who I was trying to be since I’d stopped being who I was. I reared back and tried to hack the side of my hand down on the side of his neck but Gava was too young and too fast and too strong. Howling with pain, he rolled away from me and brought a knee up into my thigh and managed a karate chop to my upper left arm that sent a current of pain shooting down to my wrist, leaving it numb. He was scrambling to his knees breathing hard and prying his pistol out of its holster when I heel-stomped him in the back of one of his knees and kicked the pistol out into the desert and backed off to one side in the hope of socking him when he came off the ground. But he never came off the ground—he rolled and came up in a crouch groping for something taped to his ankle, which is when I remembered the sweet little two-shot derringer. I saw it in his fist but I have no memory of hearing it go off. He must have pulled the trigger because I felt the wasp-sting of the bullet grazing my neck—and I had this crazy thought, now I had another wound for Friday to lick. Before Gava could get off a second shot, I hit him with one of the combat moves I’d learned the hard way—I’d been on the receiving end of it in the back alley of a souk in Peshawar. I plunged in low and hard, crunching into his rib cage with my head. The brittle sound of ribs cracking reverberated through the bluish green emptiness of the night. With my arm that still had feeling below the wrist I bunched my fingers into a fist and swung up where I thought his jaw ought to be, and nearly broke my wrist when my knuckles connected with something rock hard. I heard Gava trying to vomit. With the wind and the fight knocked out of him he melted into the desert floor, groaning in agony. I kicked him hard in his good ear to be sure he wasn’t faking.

He was not faking.

I have a dim memory of looking for his pistol and not finding it, of retrieving the derringer from the pathway, of tying Gava’s feet in a makeshift sling using the sleeves of my khaki jacket and dragging him back down the pathway, feet first, to the hotel. I wrestled him onto the porch and into the hotel and propped him against what had once been the check-in counter, then secured his wrists behind his back with a coil of telephone wire I’d spotted under the staircase. I folded back his legs and lashed his ankles to his wrists for good measure, put the night-vision goggles and the derringer on the check-in counter and went outside to the barrel filled with rainwater and splashed some on my face and wasp-wound. Then I soaked both my hands in the barrel up to the elbows for a long moment. When I pulled my hands free I noticed the fourth finger of my right hand hanging limply from its joint—the tendon had been busted when I slugged Gava in the jaw. I jury-rigged a splint with a sliver of wood from the porch railing and wrapped my handkerchief around the splint and the finger and splashed more water on my face and neck. I felt a certain after-shock calmness returning. My breathing wasn’t normal but it was going in the right direction. I shook myself the way a dog does when it comes in from the rain. First light was starting to smudge the horizon in the east when I heard a muffled cry of terror and then the sound of gagging coming from the lobby. I went inside to discover Ornella Neppi kneeling over the Wrestler, her skirt whipped back, her bare knees clamped against his ears, the derringer clutched in her small fist and jammed into Gava’s mouth. With her free hand she pulled a blonde wig from that silver astronaut knapsack of hers and set it askew on her head.

And to my everlasting regret the missing pieces of the awful puzzle fell into place.

Friday was the blonde bombshell girlfriend that Gava took back to his condo and beat up while he was making love to her.

“
Now do you recognize me
?”
Ornella asked Gava in an ugly whisper.

Gagging on the barrel of the derringer in his mouth, he managed a terrorized nod.

I found my voice. “Don’t do that,” I called softly.

“He hurt me,” Friday sobbed. “He hurt me so much there is no me, there’s only the hurt.”

“I’ve seen the welts—I never swallowed the story of a car accident.” I took a step in her direction. “Killing him won’t solve your problem,” I said.

She never so much as glanced at me. “Killing him will make him vanish from my dreams,” she said in a dead voice. “Killing him will make me better.” And she angled the barrel so that it was pointing toward the endless expanse of universe over our heads and she pulled the trigger. Gava’s skull exploded, splattering brain matter on everything within a fifteen-meter stain radius.

I thought I’d seen it all but here was something I hadn’t seen—me sinking back on my haunches wiping someone’s brains off my face with my sleeve, me suddenly suffocating under the dead weight of the endless expanse of universe over my head, me trying to remember who I’d been after I’d escaped from my first stain radius back in the Hindu Kush Mountains.

Twenty-seven

You didn’t have to be Philip Marlowe to understand I was in a jam. With a corpse instead of a prisoner on my hands, the situation was delicate, to say the least. I could almost hear the prosecutor summing up to the jury:

Fact: Ornella Neppi engaged the accused, Lemuel Gunn, a former CIA agent who was expelled from the Agency for reasons too secret to spell out in open court, an occasional private detective working out of a mobile home in Hatch, New Mexico, a reject from society, to track down Emilio Gava so she wouldn’t be out the $125,000 she posted as bond.

Fact: Somewhere along the way this same Lemuel Gunn became Ornella Neppi’s lover.

Fact: He noticed the welts on her rib cage and discovered that Emilio Gava had brutalized her during a six-month liaison.

Fact: In a jealous rage, he lured Gava to an abandoned hotel, overpowered him, breaking several of his ribs and his jaw in the process, and then cold-bloodedly jammed a derringer into the mouth of the bound victim and fired a bullet into his brain.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is commonly called first-degree homicide.

I don’t know how much time passed before Friday joined me on the hotel porch. I was sitting with my back to the wall squinting into the sun rising over the Kelso dunes. Without a word, she settled down next to me, her shoulder touching mine. “I didn’t intend to—”

“You should have stayed in the Toyota like I—”

“I heard a shot, I thought he might have killed you—”

We were talking past each other, not to each other.

“We need to notify the authorities—”

“—wrap the body in the tarpaulin and bury it in the desert. Nobody will be the wiser—”

I shook my head. “Listen up, Friday, we have to take our chances with the police.”

She turned on me and I couldn’t miss noticing that her face and hair were speckled with Gava’s brains and blood. “Can’t you see, Lemuel, I won’t
have
a chance. If I’d killed him when he was abusing me, a jury would have been sympathetic. But this will look like premeditated murder. Look, there never was a girlfriend named Jennifer Leffler with a deed to a condo. I was the girlfriend. I put up bail without collateral because he was my lover, because he swore he would beat the charge and we would go away together. When I realized he was going to jump bail and run out on both the $125,000 bond and me, something in me snapped. When I asked you to find him, I didn’t give a damn about the $125,000. I wanted you to find him so the Corsican in me could kill him.”

“You need to tell your story to a judge,” I said softly. I found myself talking to her the way you talk to a child coming off a tantrum. “I’ll find you a good lawyer. You need to show the jury the welts. You need to convince them—”