Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 01 (18 page)

Chapter Twenty-five

From the crest of Las Lomas, you could see all around. The high moon’s beams glowed bluish-white off the white mansions. A red hue still washed the sea, from the shoreline a quarter-mile out, and the Islas Coronados five miles off looked so close you could see caves in their hillsides. About three miles north lay Tijuana’s downtown in its dim, smoky light.

Hickey, Tito, and two Yaquis sat in the Jeep, on the crest trail a few hundred yards above the del Monte place. They had evaded the private cops who stood sentry at a gate on the road to Las Lomas by driving farther south, then four-wheeling straight up the hillside.

The Yaquis shared a Coca-Cola. Tito sat holding one of the two-way radios, a pack the size of a lunch box that hung from a strap with a phonelike receiver. He started bouncing his chin rhythmically.

Hickey put on his glasses.

There were a dozen mansions spaced across Las Lomas and half of them belonged to old del Monte and his sons. Big, square colonials with lots of ironwork and balconies, and a couple low-slung joints, like mausoleums. Each yard had a tended garden of an acre or so, surrounded by a high block wall. Between them spread dry land covered with tumbleweeds and sage, except on the east side, where the fairways of a golf course ran up the hill, beside the resort hotel at the hot springs, where the Agua Caliente Casino used to be. Just down from that lay the paddock and stables of the racetrack, a quarter-mile from where the Lomas road crossed Revolución—by the supper club where Leo’s Packard waited.

The radio crackled, then Leo’s voice barked, “Get moving up there, huh? It’s almost breakfast time.”

Hickey grabbed the radio mike, squinted at his watch. 2:50. “Nag, nag. We got ten minutes to go.”

“Well, I got four cars full of Indians and they’re acting like they never stayed up past dark. Crispín’s right here snoring like a bull.”

“Pinch his nose.”

“Tom, my heart’s been thumping too loud, too long. It’ll be tenderized if we don’t get moving soon.”

“Nervous, huh?”

“Sure. I figure if we die and go to hell, it’ll stink like the Club Paris.”

“Okay. Let’s move, then,” Hickey said quietly. “We’re gonna wait until you get past the gate and start up the hill. Listen, keep yourself out of the battle, old man—if I get it, you hafta run this crusade. Right? Hey, and you gotta take care of the girls, so the least thing goes wrong, or looks wrong, you bail out. Hear me?”

“When’d you get so bossy?”

Hickey switched off the radio. He grabbed for his pipe, in a hurry to catch a last smoke, but the wind blew out every match he lit, until finally he slung the lousy briar fifty feet into a sage bush. Then he switched the radio back on and relayed orders to the Yaquis he’d sent to keep watch on the west slope of the Lomas, in case the Army got alerted and started to move from their base on the coastal plain below.

“Matches?” Hickey asked Tito.

The cabbie sat munching peanuts. Now he rifled through the pockets in his dark brown and orange Hawaiian shirt and his khaki trousers until he came up with five matchbooks. He took out a cigarette, lit it the first try, and gave it to Hickey. “Maybe you a little nervoso, no?”

“No. Maybe you got better matches.”

“Sure. I bet that’s how it is.”

Downhill to the east, Leo’s Packard Phaeton crept toward the gateway to Las Lomas. A block behind came a Ford and a taxi. The Packard stopped at the gate. Suddenly all four doors flashed open. Bodies swarmed out and seemed to devour the guards. Then two Olmecs dragged the limp guards off the road, and the other Olmecs piled back into the Phaeton as the trailing cars caught up. All three cars came speeding up the hill.

The Yaquis and Tito piled into the Jeep beside Hickey. He pushed the starter pedal. The motor sputtered and caught. In a second they were bounding across the hill. They met the road seaside from the crest, just before the other cars got there. Hickey waved. All the cars rolled slowly, quietly down and pulled to a stop, single file on the shoulder about three hundred yards up the hill and around a turn from the del Monte place.

Hickey ran to the Packard and met Leo climbing out. The old man looked cooler than he’d sounded on the radio. He leaned over the door, resting his chin on the frame.

“Stay here,” Hickey said, “and keep a few boys with you. If there’s trouble and you need to take the Jeep, just do it. Don’t think.”

“Go on,” Leo grumbled.

Hickey gave a glance around while Tito shooed the sad-faced Otomis out of the Ford. Two of them opened the trunk and took out a couple of thin cotton mattresses. Tito sent them down the road to cross on the far side below the estate and proceed in from the west. The Olmecs he sent straight across, with two mattresses, to scale the east wall. Hickey drew a long breath, then ran back to the Kickapoos, around the cab and the Studebaker. They looked ready, gassed up and primed, waiting for the spark. He said, “You all got the plan? Okay. Now, shoot if you have to. Make up your own mind. Let’s go.”

Hickey led the way. They ran across the road, started down toward the gate along the eight-foot-high wall topped with shards of broken glass. About thirty yards up from the gate, they walked more softly, listening, and just before the gate, they stopped—at a sign from Hickey, two Kickapoos strapped their rifles across their backs, pulled hunting knives and set them between their teeth, took leather gloves from the pockets of their jeans and pulled them on. Hickey made another sign. Two more Kickapoos hoisted those first ones up the wall. One on each side of the gate. Light, wiry, and strong, the Kickapoos flew over the wall. They fell like ghosts beside the two blue-shirted mestizo guards at the door of the Casa.

One guard yelped, whirled, and fell with a knife in his back. The other, clobbered by a rifle butt, toppled against the wall and down. A Kickapoo threw open the gate. Indians with ropes and gags dragged the fallen guards into a garden of succulents and started binding them, in case they sprang alive, while Hickey clicked on his radio. “Send the rest of ’em in.”

On the west side, the Otomis scaled the wall, over the mattresses, and dropped, quiet, barefooted, onto a patio beside an Olympic pool surrounded by statues of naked athletes and gods. The desert Otomis gazed in awe at the cobalt blue water. Finally Sergeant Guillermo whistled and waved. They scampered quietly over to the dark shadow of a bathhouse. They looked through a kitchen window and the open kitchen door, where a couple of servant women leaned over a sinkboard.

Guillermo talked softly into his radio and glowered at the thing a minute before he remembered to switch it on. “Capitán, we okay.”

“You in the yard?”

“
Pues, si
.”

“Anybody there?”

“
En la casa
. Two señoras. It’s all.”

Crispín in the lead, Olmecs had scaled the north wall. The mattresses they crawled over shredded. But they wore huaraches, and with their short, strong bodies that had gotten fed the last few days since Hickey came along, they scaled the wall like gymnasts. Only a few tore their knees on the glass. They ran past the servants’ quarters, shacks in a corner of the yard, past two cabañas, and through a grove of citrus trees. They huddled close to the house beneath a balcony on the bedroom wing. Somebody above them wheezed. Crispín clicked on his radio. “We ready, Señor.”

On the porch, Hickey looked up from Tito’s radio, and studied the faces of his Kickapoos. They stood pressed against a wall on the west side of the front porch. Something looked wrong. No resistance. It could be that the loud wind had given them cover. Or maybe a few platoons of Germans waited inside, with machine guns aimed at the door.

He turned to the cabbie. “Whatta you think?”

Tito stood hunched with his hands on his knees like any second he’d vomit. “Why you ask me? You the general.”

A cramp jabbed Hickey’s stomach, hardened to a knot. He wondered how a loser like himself had got to run this deal. Phony, he thought, you crazy faker. Who the hell are you, risking twenty lives?

When Guillermo yelped into his radio, “Here they going,” Tito jerked up tall.

“Now, boss.”

Hickey slowly flicked on his radio. “They bit, old man. We’re going in.”

The knob turned easily but the door must’ve weighed five hundred pounds. Hickey shoved hard. It swung and banged against a wall. He stepped inside. Behind him came Renaldo, the biggest Kickapoo, with a Browning machine gun. The rest jumped in and fanned across the entryway that led to an enormous white room. With not a soul in it.

A blue-shirted guard posted in the foyer had heard a shout from the porch, looked through a peekhole, seen Hickey and the Kickapoos. He’d raced through the main hall to the gaming room, chasing the ricos and women outside, the back way. They’d swarmed across a lawn, through the citrus grove to where the cabañas stood near the stables and the servants’ quarters. About a dozen men in dress clothes, uniforms, or silk guayabera shirts staggered, cussing, while the women, in evening gowns and coiffed hair studded with jewels, yelled and stumbled on high heels, until they saw the wild Indians. So many ricos and whores gasped at once, it sounded as if they’d rehearsed.

Dreadful Indians stalked toward them from both sides with bayonets raised, herding them across the citrus grove, past the cabañas, up against the wall. One man tried to flee. He sprinted east along the wall. Guillermo the Otomi kneeled, fired, hit the target just below his ribcage. The man hopped ten feet farther and fell. He pounded a leg on the ground.

Inside, the Kickapoos started crossing the great hall, which Hickey recognized—a replica of the ballroom, where he’d played sax, at the Agua Caliente Casino. The floor was a shiny mosaic of small wooden blocks, oak, teak, mahogany in patterns of stars, pyramids, and moons. In front of the sofas and chairs upholstered in velvet and suede lay fine Persian rugs. Tapestries and paintings covered the walls—Chinese landscapes, Renaissance merchants, a gaunt horseman by El Greco. The mahogany dining table, big as a dance floor, took up only a corner. In another corner was the bandstand. Glittering chandeliers of crystal and enough bulbs to wake a whole city hung from the ceiling two stories up. The mezzanine’s railed landing stretched down the whole east side—from there the first three shots blasted.

Two bullets splintered the floor. A Kickapoo yelped. He dropped his gun, grabbed his shoulder, staggered back into a wall and let himself down. The other Kickapoos wheeled and fired.

A guard toppled over the rail and crashed onto the dining table. Another fell and writhed on the landing with a foot and leg sticking through the rail. But the last gunman escaped up a mezzanine hallway.

Hickey told a Kickapoo to tend the one who was shot. He sent two others and Tito to search the first floor beneath the mezzanine, through the doors that led off the great room. He ordered Sergeant Jack, Renaldo, and four other Kickapoos up the circular stairs to the mezzanine. Then he led the other three Kickapoos across the great hall. They spread out, peering behind sofas and chairs. They kicked over chairs and end tables, knocking drinks on the Persian rugs. One picked up crystal glasses and threw them at the walls. Hickey walked slowly with an eye on the far doors.

At the end of the great hall, through one door on the right, was a powder room with three marble sinks and fixtures of silver and a small mauve alcove with a toilet and bidet. Another door led to the parlor full of stuffed velvet chairs and candlelight tinted gold from the shine off picture frames and candlesticks. Beyond the parlor, a long archway led to the gaming room, white carpet so fine and deep it looked like ermine, walls mosaiced in tile renderings of naked brown angels floating toward the sky. There were six card tables with maroon felt, two roulette tables littered with half-full drinks and stacks of chips.

Hickey and two Kickapoos stepped through a door on the left, into the kitchen that looked like an outbuilding. It had a floor of dark, splintery pinewood. Stained walls hung with cast-iron pots, stalks of chiles. Big sinks, long cutting tables, the smells of beans and masa.

They cut through the pantry and outside, ran across the back yard to Crispín and Guillermo. Hickey stood gazing at the crowd.

A few blond men. At least two—the short, gray-faced guy, and the older one with liver spots—Hickey’d seen before when they were wearing uniforms with velvety maroon hats and gold buttons, in Hell. The old fellow had collapsed. A middle-aged, portly doll, and an Indian beauty so young she might’ve been a kid playing dress-up, held the old man by the arms. Hickey scanned the whole crowd, looking for Zarp. Maybe the Devil stood at an upstairs window, drawing a bead on his skull.

But the rest couldn’t scare a chipmunk, between them. They were a flock of tweety birds, now that a gang of poor Indians stood between them and their substance. Hickey turned to the nearest Kickapoo, motioned toward Crispín and Guillermo. “Tie these clowns back to back and throw ’em in the pool.”

Two shots cracked. From inside. Hickey’s army spun and aimed at the noise. But there was nothing to see, and all you heard now was shouts and the blustering wind. Hickey and the Kickapoos ran back to the house through the kitchen into the great hall and found Tito and his men with their guns aimed at the landing. Hickey ran up and yelped, “Who’s shooting?”

“Don’t know, boss,” the cabbie whispered. “But you gotta see what’s out there. A garage, so big like for trains. And six limousines. We don’t find no gold, it’s okay, hombre, we got six limos.”

Hickey ordered them to follow and ran to the spiral stairs.

On top, two hallways led off the landing. Two bedroom wings, each with six carved hardwood doors. Hickey sent the cabbie and his band down the south wing, and started with his own squad down the north wing but as they got ready to turn the corner, his radio sounded.

“Tom, who’s shooting?”

“That was five minutes ago. You just waking up, Leo?”

“I been on the other radio.”

“Yeah. Well, we’re okay, so relax.”

“Relax, hell. I think we’re in a mess, Tom. A cruiser’s on the road. Our boys at the gate got ’em stopped but don’t count on that for long. Find your damned gold yet?”