Hour of the Assassins (9 page)

Entering Binion's Horseshoe, Caine was immediately struck, like any other gawking tourist, by the large glass display that contained one hundred $10,000 bills. The stern visage of Samuel Chase repeated itself across the felt like an Andy Warhol painting, and Caine tingled with the idea that he might soon be worth half of it. He was growing greedy, he thought. He would be willing to kill a hundred Mengeles for that kind of money.

Caine bought $10,000 in chips with the Wasserman money and wandered around the casino looking for Hanratty. The fat little man was dealing at a blackjack table. Hanratty dealt, with mechanical efficiency and all the excitement of an accountant doing a particularly boring audit, to two penny-ante customers, a middle-aged man and a young Japanese girl. Caine sat down at the table and began to play with ten-dollar chips. Hanratty had small black eyes set deep in rolls of fat. He wore a western string tie and a red vest bearing a tag that read, “Howdy, My name is Pete.”

After a while the middle-aged man shrugged and walked away. The girl looked like she was there for the duration, but finally she went bust getting hit on a showing seven, while Hanratty showed only a six. As she turned away, Caine put down a hundred-dollar chip and said urgently,

“A reporter friend of mine named Cassidy suggested we get together.”

“I'm off in twenty minutes,” Hanratty replied tonelessly, scooping up the chip after hitting Caine with a king to his thirteen.

“Buy you a drink at the bar,” Caine replied, and got up. He cashed in his chips and waited at one of the bar tables. Hanratty came over and ordered a J & B from the waitress.

“Cassidy sent you?” he asked. Caine nodded.

“Describe him,” he said, and Caine did so. Then as Hanratty nervously watched him, Caine told him what he wanted.

“When do you need it?” Hanratty asked.

“Tomorrow.”

“No can do. No, sir. No can do.”

“Bullshit,” Caine replied. “I never heard of a paper-maker who didn't keep something stashed away for a special job. That's what I want, your special.”

“You don't plan on using it here in Vegas?” Hanratty asked.

“No way,” Caine said. Hanratty closed his eyes and considered for a minute.

“I might have something special,” he admitted reluctantly. “But it'll cost you.”

“Naturally.”

“Three thousand in cash.”

Caine pretended to think for a minute and then agreed. Hanratty was chagrined. He should have asked for more.

“What about photographs?”

Caine pulled out three of the passport photos he'd had made up in Hollywood and tucked them into Hanratty's vest pocket.

“I got a clean passport and Nevada driver's license made out for a William Foster. He was a straight nobody and he's been dead for less than a year. No family to speak of. I used it to get a vaccination record and an international driver's license from the Triple A. Let's see, put you down for a birthdate in '43, make you thirty-six. Height?”

“Five eleven, weight one seventy, green eyes, light brown hair, occupation lawyer, birthplace Los Angeles,” Caine finished for him. Being a lawyer was one of those all-purpose covers that required just a bit of legal jargon to carry off and, like the law itself, it covered a multitude of sins. “All you have to do is fill in the blanks and seal the photographs. What else?”

“Do you want a different name?”

“How about Robert Redford?” Caine smiled and when Hanratty looked at him sharply, said, “William Foster is fine. Anything else?”

“Money,” Hanratty said, biting his lower lip.

Caine counted out $1,500 and passed it under the table. Hanratty counted it as quickly as a bank teller and stuffed it into his hip pocket.

“Tomorrow night, this time,” Caine added. “We'll make the switch in the john. If it looks good, you get the rest of the money.”

“Fair enough.” Hanratty smiled and started to get up. Caine stopped him by grabbing his sleeve.

“One more thing, Pete. After tomorrow night, you never heard of William Foster.”

Hanratty looked aggrieved.

“What do you take me for? I'm a professional. I got a reputation,” he protested and, yanking his arm away from Caine, waddled indignantly back to his blackjack table.

Caine laundered the rest of Wasserman's money at the Flamingo and walked back across the Strip to Caesars Palace. He debated between going to bed and catching Harry Belafonte's midnight show at the Circus Maximus. While he stood there indecisively, his waitress from the Bacchanale bumped into him and they decided to have sandwiches at the Noshorium.

He regarded her over the bagels and lox. She had long brown hair, dark eyes, a slim young figure with soft round breasts, and a pert uptilted Irish nose. He asked if she was a working girl.

“Part time,” she murmured.

“A hundred do it?”

“Not for the whole night.”

They finished their coffee and went up to his room. They undressed and she lay on the giant raised bed, a carnal offering to the gods. He played with her smooth round breasts, thinking not of Lim for the first time in a long time, but C.J. As he plunged into the girl, he remembered the feel of C.J.'s exquisite young skin, her gentle knowing touches, and was disturbed by the impact she had made on him. Something had passed between them all right, he thought.

Caine did all the things to the girl that he hadn't done to C.J., holding back his orgasm until after she had climaxed in a long series of shudders, moaning, “Oh, Daddy,” over and over. Then he spurted into her and lay exhausted on her soft white body, like a castaway thrown up on a distant shore. She offered to stay the night with him anyway, but he shook his head. She dressed and came back to the bed to kiss him good night.

“By the way,” she said. “My name is Nancy.”

“Good night, Nancy,” he said, thinking that he had to file away his feelings about C.J., that it was strictly business. He locked the door after the girl left and took a quick shower.

Before he slept, he called the desk and gave instructions for a 7:00
A.M.
wake-up call.

The soft burring of the phone woke Caine out of a restless sleep. He methodically went through the morning ritual of exercise, shower, and shave, then dressed in jeans and the cowboy shirt. He again set his hair in the style affected by Hillary in the license photo. Hillary had been striving for a Byronic effect in the photo, but he hadn't quite brought it off. Caine practiced the prissy smile from the photo and spent another half hour practicing the signature. Then he went down to the Circus Maximus and enjoyed a lavish champagne breakfast.

After breakfast he used all the standard flushes, but he was clean. Caine knew that from now on he could no longer afford anything that even smelled like a tail.

He found Hanratty's address in the phone book and parked across the street from a small white tract house. A little boy was riding his tricycle on the sidewalk in front. Caine snapped a few Polaroids of the boy and when a thin woman in curlers and a red house dress came out and dragged the protesting child back into the house, he got a good picture of her as well.

He drove around town, like a tourist trying to get his bearings, then headed northwest on U.S. 95. After a while he turned west onto State Route 39 and drove into the sparse scrublands of Kyle Canyon, counting signposts from the turnoff. Just past the sixth signpost he spotted a clump of mesquite cactus about twenty yards off the road. He pulled over and shut off the engine. The canyon was deserted and silent except for the slight rustle of the wind through the Joshua trees. Satisfied, he turned the car around the way he had come. On the way back to town he stopped off at a plant shop, bought a knee-high mesquite cactus and put it in the backseat.

One of the reasons he had come to Vegas is that Nevada is a western state, proud of its frontier heritage, and as such, buying a gun in Nevada is almost as simple as buying a pack of cigarettes. At the first gun shop he went into, he purchased a tiny Bauer .25 caliber stainless steel automatic, two six-shot clips, and a box of standard Remington shells. Unfortunately the only legal .25 bullets were hard-nosed, which wouldn't stop a determined mosquito at twenty-five feet, the gun's maximum effective range, but he would take care of that later. As Caine handed the Hillary license to the amiable gum-chewing gun dealer and signed the purchase form with the practiced signature, he smiled the prissy smile. But the gun dealer didn't even glance up at him to check the license photo. Caine felt a slight sense of chagrin at the wasted effort. Still, better safe than sorry. What was it some Soviet general had once said, “Train hard, fight easy.”

It was so easy, in fact, that he bought a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum revolver with a six-and-a-half-inch barrel from the same dealer. After some discussion Caine bought a box of Remington 240 grain hollow head bullets to go with the S & W .44. He figured he could easily blow away anybody at a hundred yards with it. Before he left the shop, he also purchased an official-looking bronze badge that read,
SPECIAL AGENT
.

He next stopped at the bus station and retrieved the large suitcase from the locker. As he walked into another gun shop, on Charleston Boulevard, he reflected that he wasn't really sure what the job would ultimately require and he was simply trying to provide himself with the tools to use for any possible opportunity to make the hit that might present itself.

This time he bought a Winchester Model 70 bolt-action rifle and a Browning three-to-nine-power variable scope. For a moment he debated between the .300 and the .338, but decided that he wanted range over power and picked the .300 caliber model. He bought Magnum hollow-point shells and had the dealer mount the scope. Caine tried the gun out on a range behind the shop and made some minor adjustments to the scope. By the time he left the shop, he was confident that, with the scope, he could bring down a fucking elephant at twelve hundred yards. Any hit on a man, no matter on what part of the body, would almost certainly be fatal.

At another gun shop on Main Street he got a black Colt AR-15 rifle to give him some accurate firepower in case he needed it. The light .223 caliber rifle was a semiautomatic civilian version of the M-16. The gun came comfortably into his hand and for a moment it brought the feel of Indochina back to him. But he shook it off as he smiled the Hillary smile. He considered getting a three-power scope for the handle mount, but calculated that with the flip rear sight he could hit anything within 300 yards, and he already had the Winchester for long range. Lastly he bought five thirty-round clips and two boxes of Super X soft-point 5.56mm bullets. All told, he had spent about $1,600 for the guns and accessories, he calculated.

That done, he checked into the Star Motel on South Fourth, a concrete and plastic affair with a big neon sign shaped like a star. After he locked the door and made sure the windows were closed and shaded, he turned on the TV and got to work. As an afternoon game show came on the tube, a pretty curly-haired housewife was screaming in ecstasy as she embraced the fatuously smiling MC. The announcer's voice solemnly intoned the virtues of the refrigerator she had just won. Jesus, it made you wonder, Caine thought. Still, he was as much a whore as anybody, he admitted as he opened the large suitcase and began to tightly wrap the guns and bullets, except for the Bauer .25 automatic, in lengths of plastic cut from the roll. When he was finished, he tightly packed the guns, shovel, and flashlight into the suitcase.

Next he mounted the vise on a small table and dumdummed the .25 caliber bullets, making careful crisscross cuts with the hacksaw. The Bauer still wouldn't kill anybody, unless he got lucky with a head or a heart shot, but the dumdums would certainly make anyone hit with them pause and reconsider, he mused.

After going to the bathroom to wash the sweat off his hands and face, he loaded the clips and wrapped them and the Bauer in the lead-coated film pouch and inserted them, with handkerchiefs for padding, into the film compartment of the Hasselblad camera. It should pass any customs or airport inspection, he decided after critically inspecting the camera. Most airport magnetometers only picked up ferrous metals and would not detect the stainless steel automatic. The Wong magnetometer would pick it up, but the inspector would naturally assume that the camera itself was causing the bleep and the camera sheathing and the Film Shield pouch would screen the gun from X rays. It would do, Cain decided, and put the Hasselblad back into the airline bag and cleaned up the room. He deliberately rumpled the bed, wet one of the towels, and shut the TV, silencing a smiling salesman pitching the recreational joys of buying worthless desert land. No one noticed him as he locked the suitcase and bag in the car trunk and drove away.

As soon as it got dark, Caine drove out of the artificial electric noon of the Strip back to Kyle Canyon. It was as if the canyon were filled with the utter darkness and silence of death itself, once he had shut off the engine and the car lights. The only light to be seen came from myriad stars sprayed across the darkness like a distant city in the sky.

In spite of the desert chill that seemed to come from the endless night of outer space, he removed his jacket and shirt before he buried the large suitcase just to the right of the mesquite clump he had spotted that morning. Periodically he stopped and looked around, but there was nothing. Once he heard the sound of a car headed into town and clicked off the flashlight, waiting in the darkness until the car lights were long out of sight. He planted the cactus he had purchased at the plant shop on top of the layer of dirt covering the suitcase and then buried the shovel and flashlight in a shallow hole a few feet away. He wiped himself clean with a hotel towel and then used it to smooth away any evidence of digging or footprints. When he turned the headlights on, there was no indication that anyone had been there. The guns would keep until he came back for them, when and if he located Mengele.