Lone Wolf #8: Los Angeles Holocaust (9 page)

Billings had been in front of the
Times-Mirror
building fifteen minutes before the meet, checking out the scene; five minutes before he went into the lobby where he had a good vantage point on the street, a good controlling view of everyone walking, out of sight himself. Calabrese would have taken him for a fool if he had done anything else, Billings thought. His maneuver might be risky here, entirely risky when going up against someone like Calabrese, but there was one thing he definitely was not and that was stupid. He figured that Calabrese would send at least two men into this meet, one of them dressed as per instruction, the other one supposed to merge into the crowds until the last moment and then emerge to overpower him … but he could figure at least one move ahead, at least at this primitive level. That he was ready for.

Anyway, Calabrese did not know Los Angeles if he thought that a man could be merged into the street scene here. In New York it would have worked well, Chicago too: there was always plenty of traffic on the street and in the middle of those eddies figures who simply loafed around, peanut vendors, bums, junkies, hippies cruising a handout, pimps, all of this was part of the downtown scene in the great metropolitan centers … but Los Angeles had no center, it was not a city. There were no crowds. The presence of a second man could not be concealed. So when a stranger had set himself up in an uncomfortable position across the street two minutes before the meet, shifting from one leg to the other, smoking a cigar, scratching himself in an armpit where a big Luger probably was holstered … Billings knew exactly what he was and even under the tension of circumstances was able to grant himself one thin grin. Calabrese was smart all right, the smartest of the old-line bosses, one of the true greats … but he had worked this one out along traditional lines. Billings had had him figured. Sure you could figure out these bastards; their reputations meant nothing, they had the same tricks that anyone else had, just a little more originality in the switches, that was all. Calabrese leaned tightly against the lobby, no movement here either, 11 A.M., lunch hour for no one, no traffic coming in, and a man in a business suit wearing a blue necktie came out from some abcess of the street and stood in front of the building. He had a high, dedicated look, the kind of look that a man might have, Billings thought, if he was about to sacrifice himself in the line of a better cause, or maybe it was merely the expression that the horseplayers at Santa Anita took on somewhere around the eighth race, the beginnings of the knowledge that they were battering themselves against the tote, the impermeable machineries of chance, but still, what could you do? It beat working for a living. Billings slowly disengaged himself from his position, moved through the doors.

The man in the blue suit looked at him and at the same time something else happened; the other one, the man across the street who was supposed to be part of the scenery except for the problem that no scenery existed, looked from right to left in a nervous, distracted manner and then began to pace, his arm moving within his clothing, drifting from chest to waist, then nestling in a pants pocket. Son of a bitch, Billings thought, they wouldn’t be that audacious. Still, on the other hand, when you were talking LA, who noticed? There was, strictly speaking, no street scene whatsoever in LA. If there was a murder right here, the few pedestrians, the people passing by in cars would probably take it as part of a shooting script, on-location shooting. With the breakup of the big studios, after all almost everything was being done on the cheap, on a shoe-string, in far-flung areas of the globe. A company could move out and try to get some location shots in front of the Los Angeles
Times-Mirror
building while a couple of extras sprouted fake blood. Why not? Everything was going into the countryside, Billings thought.

He had his hand on his own gun, the hard surfaces of the point thirty-eight whickering into his hand as he came from the building. The man in the blue tie and the black suit regarded him with steady attention. Then as Billings closed the gap he was already turning, making some kind of obscure motion to the man across the street. That man was trying to cross now but they had not calculated on the traffic; a pack of cars sprinted free from a traffic light up the block and began to overtake one another, moving for a little borrowed space as they hit the center of the block, and the man across the street was unable to get to the other side. He stood there, shaking his head, hands on hips, spitting and cursing. Well, Billings thought, these little frustrations were entirely natural. They were all part of the great game of life, which you tried to play right down to the end, as if it mattered. Maybe it did. That would be the joke: if life really counted, if it was serious, if everything that took place here did add up to something after all. That kind of thought could drive a man mad if he dwelt on it. Better to juggle the odds on the tote and to deal with the Calabreses. Nothing was serious.

“All right,” the man in the blue suit said in a hoarse, high whisper, “all right, all right.” He was in his fifties, modest, inconsequential, but his eyes rolled in the purest of drug spasms. Be damned, Billings thought with some amusement, but then again in this city of wonders you could take nothing for granted. Maybe, Billings thought, maybe Calabrese kept his forces stoked on shit as a fringe benefit. There were stranger things. An army of freaks. “All right,” the man said again, “have you got the stuff?” His hands moved restlessly, like little animals, through his clothing. “Here I am, have you got the stuff?”

Billings closed in on him; now they were almost belly to belly. The man across the street was still unable to cross, tourist buses moving side by side in the near lanes were tying up everything. “I’ve got what I need,” he said, “have you got what I need?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I mean ten grand,” Billings said. Sometimes it was best to be indirect and then again sometimes you had to come right to the point. Coming to the point could sometimes be the best tactic of all because these people were often not prepared for it. “I’m looking for ten grand.”

The man in blue shrugged. He looked despairingly across the street, then back at Billings, eyes still rolling. “It works two ways, doesn’t it?” he said. “You’re supposed to have something for me.”

“Yes, but yours comes first.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“You’d better know something about it. Ten grand,” Billings said, “I’m waiting for ten grand.”

The man in blue cast another desperate glance across the street. “He’ll make it,” Billings said, “the light is going to change up above and he’ll be fine. But that’s not going to change the situation. You owe me ten grand.”

“Ah—”

“Make an independent decision. Stand on your own, for once. Sooner or later you reach a point in your life where you’ve got to lay it on the line, where you’ve got to come to terms with yourself. Come on,” Billings said, “let’s do it.”

The other man, spotting gaps in the traffic, had begun at last to move across the street. The traffic had humbled him, the roar of the buses’ exhaust, the choking fumes which had spread through the air lying heavily now a few feet above street level. He might have been older than the man in blue but he moved more slowly in a gimpy stride. The man in blue gave him another desperate glance, then faced Billings. “Where are they?” he said.

“You’ll find out. Give me the ten.”

“I can’t do that until you tell me where they are.”

“He says he can’t do it until I tell you where they are,” Billings said as the other man came up to them, still limping, his face drawn with tension. The skin of the cheeks was like canvas stretched with a very uneven strain. “But you know he’s full of shit,” Billings said, “you’re the senior operator here; he’s just carrying the bag. So tell him to pay up and be reasonable.”

The other man shook his head, made gestures with his fingers, said nothing. Billings put his hands on his hips and looked at him in disgust. “Come on,” Billings said, “be reasonable.”

“That won’t get you anywhere,” the man in blue said. Suddenly he seemed almost cheerful. “He’s a deaf-mute. He doesn’t hear and he doesn’t talk. All that he does is watch.”

“That makes sense,” Billings said, “he sure as hell isn’t going to break silence to anyone, isn’t he?”

“I don’t give a shit,” the man in blue said. “That doesn’t matter to me. Maybe he talks to other deaf-mutes. I have definite instructions; you tell me where they are and—”

“And then I get shot in the gut,” Billings said, looking at the deaf-mute who was fondling something in his pocket. “No way. Give me the ten.”

The man in blue sighed in disgust. Starting at fifty, he now looked sixty. He reached into his pockets, fumbled with something, keys clanking, then came out with a rolled up wad of hundreds. No one was looking at them at all. There was no one on the street Another avalanche of traffic came from the far corner and staggered by them.

“Here,” the man in blue said, “now you tell me where they are.” Billings shook his head in disgust, reached for the wad, took it out of the man’s hand. It came reluctantly, bulging, greasy. Slowly he began to count it.

“It’s all there,” the man in blue said, “goddamnit to hell, what kind of an operation do you think this is?”

The deaf-mute began to make croaking noises. After a fashion they could make sounds; it was pretty much a myth that they were silent. He reached out, pawed the man in blue on the shoulders, then made menacing gestures with his free hand at Billings. The eyes were cold, private, reserved, the other hand still out of sight. Billings counted the hundreds slowly, patiently. There were quite a few of them. He got up to forty-five, then stopped counting. The uncounted amount seemed to be slightly larger than what he had already gone through. All right. The deaf-mute continued to regard Billings with unusual, acute interest; he felt a fix in those eyes of unusual intensity, sucking him in. Calabrese ran a hell of an operation all right. A stupid man might think that he had sent incompetents, a deaf-mute and a panicky type, to this assignment but that stupid man would not have seen the genius of Calabrese’s calculation. There were a substantial number of corpses floating or lying around who had thought that they could outsmart Calabrese.

“All right,” Billings said, stuffing the money into a pocket, “I’ll take you there.”

The man in blue said, “What the hell is this?”

“You got a car?” Billings said. “I’ve got a car. We’ve both got cars. Everybody has a car and I’ll drive you to where they are, point out the spot, and take off. You don’t think I’m just going to tell you now, do you? I’m not stupid. For ten grand I’ll take you to where they’re holed up, point out the place, and then I’m taking off. Call it safety reasons.”

“Those weren’t my instructions. That’s not what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to tell me where the fuck they are.”

“I will,” Billings said, “I definitely will. But this way everybody’s protected. You get your payoff and I get the hell out of there.”

The man in blue turned, looked at the deaf-mute. Oddly, the deaf-mute seemed to be the leader of the two. He was looking at Billings now with a low, cold expression, dementia at the edges. Deaf-mutes, Billings thought, weren’t supposed to hear anything, right? They were
deaf
, that was why they were called deaf-mutes. Also they couldn’t talk. But this one seemed to have taken in everything. The man in blue made vague signals with his hands. The deaf-mute nodded impatently, not keeping his eyes off Billings.

Billings turned. “All right,” he said, “let’s go,” and he then began to walk. This was the risky part of the deal, all parts of it were risky, but this was the most dangerous aspect because if he hadn’t handled this just right it was possible that Calabrese’s men would panic, become impatient, perhaps do something really impulsive and dangerous. If he could clear this moment. Billings thought, he could probably carry it off all the way, but this was risky. There was a vague itch between his shoulder blades right in the place where a bullet would be most likely to hit him. He shrugged it away, kept on walking. His car was parked up the block, he had it within vision now and he went into his pocket, burrowing beneath the bills, finding his keys, carefully extracting them without causing the bills to fall, flapping, all over the pavement. That would be really bright. That would be exactly what he needed.

Nothing happened. He got to the Ford, walked over to the driver’s side, slowly opened the door and wedged himself behind the wheel. Only then, the door slammed, the lock button depressed, did he look up. The two were coming slowly toward him staring intently, communicating in some way with one another, making no erratic moves. Billings sat frozen behind the wheel, let them draw up to him. They stood on the pavement outside the car for a while, watching, then they slowly moved on.

Billings suppressed a wild impulse to turn the key in the ignition, floor the accelerator, get out of here, and make a run for it. That was human nature; he had to understand that the impulse was within him but under no circumstances could he do it. No, that would blow everything; so far he had handled this right with the correct measure of courage and calbut the wild, panicky flight out of here with ten grand in his pocket would be the foolish thing to do. He simply would not get away with it. They had gone along with him up to this point simply because they did not know what to do, probably had no specific instructions for this, but he could not blow it now. Also, he thought, there was no chance to get back to higher levels, get some advice. They were playing it on their own; they were as disconnected as he was. For the moment they were all freelancers.

The men began to move again, trudged slowly down the block. Billings sat there, palm flat to the cushions, not thinking, not reacting, simply waiting. He had no intention of not delivering. Delivering on the promise was the key to the deal. Only a fool would not deliver. But it was better, it was much better this way. Not only did he have some protection, a chance to get away clean … but there was also a thin chance that the two of them, Wulff and his companion, might be able to get away through no fault of Billings or his information.