The Eyes of Darkness (28 page)

They reached the funeral home without incident.

For a few seconds they paused, touching each other briefly, gathering their courage.

Elliot took the pistol out of his coat jacket and held it in his right hand. With his left hand, he fumbled for the two safety catches, released them. His fingers were stiff from the cold. He wondered if he’d be able to handle the weapon properly if the need arose.

They slipped around the corner of the building and moved stealthily toward the front.

At the first window with light behind it, Elliot stopped. He motioned for Tina to stay behind him, close to the house. Cautiously he leaned forward and peeked through a narrow gap in a partly closed venetian blind. He nearly cried out in shock and alarm at what he saw inside.

A dead man. Naked. Sitting in a bathtub full of bloody water, staring at something fearsome beyond the veil between this world and the next. One arm trailed out of the tub; and on the floor, as if it had dropped out of his fingers, was a razor blade.

Elliot stared into the flat dead gaze of the pasty-faced corpse, and he knew that he was looking at Luciano Bellicosti. He also knew that the funeral director had not killed himself. The poor man’s blue-lipped mouth hung in a permanent gape, as if he were trying to deny all of the accusations of suicide that were to come.

Elliot wanted to take Tina by the arm and hustle her back to the car. But she sensed that he’d seen something important, and she wouldn’t go easily until she knew what it was. She pushed in front of him. He kept one hand on her back as she leaned toward the window, and he felt her go rigid when she glimpsed the dead man. When she turned to Elliot again, she was clearly ready to get the hell out of there, without questions, without argument, without the slightest delay.

They had taken only two steps from the window when Elliot saw the snow move no more than twenty feet from them. It wasn’t the gauzy, insubstantial stirring of windblown flakes, but an unnatural and purposeful rising of an entire mound of white. Instinctively he whipped the pistol in front of him and squeezed off four rounds. The silencer was so effective that the shots could not be heard above the brittle, papery rustle of the wind.

Crouching low, trying to make as small a target of himself as possible, Elliot ran to where he had seen the snow move. He found a man dressed in a white, insulated ski suit. The stranger had been lying in the snow, watching them, waiting; now he had a wet hole in his chest. And a chunk of his throat was gone. Even in the dim, illusory light from the surrounding snow, Elliot could see that the sentry’s eyes were fixed in the same unseeing gaze that Bellicosti was even now directing at the bathroom window.

At least one killer would be in the house with Bellicosti’s corpse. Probably more than one.

At least one man had been waiting out here in the snow.

How many others?

Where?

Elliot scanned the night, his heart clutching up. He expected to see the entire white-shrouded lawn begin to move and rise in the forms of ten, fifteen, twenty other assassins.

But all was still.

He was briefly immobilized, dazed by his own ability to strike so fast and so violently. A warm, animal satisfaction rose in him, which was not an entirely welcome feeling, for he liked to think of himself as a civilized man. At the same time, he was hit by a wave of revulsion. His throat tightened, and a sour taste suddenly overwhelmed him. He turned his back on the man whom he had killed.

Tina was a pale apparition in the snow. “They know we’re in Reno,” she whispered. “They even knew we were coming here.”

“But they expected us through the front door.” He took her by the arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

They hurriedly retraced their path, moving away from the funeral home. With every step he took, Elliot expected to hear a shot fired, a cry of alarm, and the sounds of men in pursuit of quarry.

He helped Tina over the cemetery wall, and then, clambering after her, he was sure that someone grabbed his coat from behind. He gasped, jerked loose. When he was across the wall, he looked back, but he couldn’t see anyone.

Evidently the people in the funeral home were not aware that their man outside had been eliminated. They were still waiting patiently for their prey to walk into the trap.

Elliot and Tina rushed between the tombstones, kicking up clouds of snow. Twin plumes of crystallized breath trailed behind them, like ghosts.

When they were nearly halfway across the graveyard, when Elliot was positive they weren’t being pursued, he stopped, leaned against a tall monument, and tried not to take such huge, deep gulps of the painfully cold air. An image of his victim’s torn throat exploded in his memory, and a shock wave of nausea overwhelmed him.

Tina put a hand on his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

“I killed him.”

“If you hadn’t, he would have killed us.”

“I know. Just the same . . . it makes me sick.”

“I would have thought . . . when you were in the army . . .”

“Yeah,” he said softly. “Yeah, I’ve killed before. But like you said, that was in the army. This wasn’t the same. That was soldiering. This was murder.” He shook his head to clear it. “I’ll be okay.” He tucked the pistol into his coat pocket again. “It was just the shock.”

They embraced, and then she said, “If they knew we were flying to Reno, why didn’t they follow us from the airport? Then they would have known we weren’t going to walk in the front door of Bellicosti’s place.”

“Maybe they figured I’d spot a tail and be spooked by it. And I guess they were so sure of where we were headed, they didn’t think it was necessary to keep a close watch on us. They figured there wasn’t anywhere else we
could
go but Bellicosti’s funeral home.”

“Let’s get back to the car. I’m freezing.”

“Me too. And we better get out of the neighborhood before they find that guy in the snow.”

They followed their own footprints out of the cemetery, to the quiet residential street where the rented Chevrolet was parked in the wan light of the street lamp.

As Elliot was opening the driver’s door, he saw movement out of the corner of his eye, and he looked up, already sure of what he would see. A white Ford sedan had just turned the corner, moving slowly. It drifted to the curb and braked abruptly. Two doors opened, and a pair of tall, darkly dressed men climbed out.

Elliot recognized them for what they were. He got into the Chevy, slammed the door, and jammed the key into the ignition.

“We
have
been followed,” Tina said.

“Yeah.” He switched on the engine and threw the car in gear. “A transponder. They must have just now homed in on it.”

He didn’t hear a shot, but a bullet shattered the rear side window behind his head and slammed into the back of the front seat, spraying gummy bits of safety glass through the car.

“Head down!” Elliot shouted.

He glanced back.

The two men were approaching at a run, slipping on the snows-potted pavement.

Elliot stamped on the accelerator. Tires squealing, he pulled the Chevy away from the curb, into the street.

Two slugs ricocheted off the body of the car, each trailing away with a brief, high-pitched whine.

Elliot hunched low over the wheel, expecting a bullet through the rear window. At the corner, he ignored the stop sign and swung the car hard to the left, only tapping the brakes once, severely testing the Chevy’s suspension.

Tina raised her head, glanced at the empty street behind them, then looked at Elliot. “Transponder. What’s that? You mean we’re bugged? Then we’ll have to abandon the car, won’t we?”

“Not until we’ve gotten rid of those clowns on our tail,” he said. “If we abandon the car with them so close, they’ll run us down fast. We can’t get away on foot.”

“Then what?”

They arrived at another intersection, and he whipped the car to the right. “After I turn the next corner, I’ll stop and get out. You be ready to slide over and take the wheel.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’ll fade back into the shrubbery and wait for them to come around the corner after us. You drive on down the street, but not too fast. Give them a chance to see you when they turn into the street. They’ll be looking at you, and they won’t see me.”

“We shouldn’t split up.”

“It’s the only way.”

“But what if they get you?”

“They won’t.”

“I’d be alone then.”

“They won’t get me. But you have to move fast. If we stop for more than a couple of seconds, it’ll show up on their receiver, and they might get suspicious.”

He swung right at the intersection and stopped in the middle of the new street.

“Elliot, don’t—”

“No choice.” He flung open the door and scrambled out of the car. “Hurry, Tina!”

He slammed the car door and ran to a row of evergreen shrubs that bordered the front lawn of a low, brick, ranch-style house. Crouching beside one of those bushes, huddling in the shadows just beyond the circle of frosty light from a nearby street lamp, he pulled the pistol out of his coat pocket while Tina drove away.

As the sound of the Chevy faded, he could discern the roar of another vehicle, approaching fast. A few seconds later the white sedan raced into the intersection.

Elliot stood, extending the pistol in both hands, and snapped off three quick rounds. The first two clanged through sheet metal, but the third punctured the right front tire.

The Ford had rounded the corner too fast. Jolted by the blowout, the car careened out of control. It spun across the street, jumped the curb, crashed through a hedge, destroyed a plaster birdbath, and came to rest in the middle of a snow-blanketed lawn.

Elliot ran toward the Chevy, which Tina had brought to a stop a hundred yards away. It seemed more like a hundred miles. His pounding footsteps were as thunderous as drumbeats in the quiet night air. At last he reached the car. She had the door open. He leaped in and pulled the door shut. “Go, go!”

She tramped the accelerator into the floorboards, and the car responded with a shudder, then a surge of power.

When they had gone two blocks, he said, “Turn right at the next corner.” After two more turns and another three blocks, he said, “Pull it to the curb. I want to find the bug they planted on us.”

“But they can’t follow us now,” she said.

“They’ve still got a receiver. They can watch our progress on that, even if they can’t get their hands on us till another chase car catches up. I don’t even want them to know what direction we went.”

She stopped the car, and he got out. He felt along the inner faces of the fenders, around the tire wells, where a transponder could have been stuck in place quickly and easily. Nothing. The front bumper was clean too. Finally he located the electronics package: The size of a pack of cigarettes, it was fixed magnetically to the underside of the rear bumper. He wrenched it loose, stomped it repeatedly underfoot, and pitched it away.

In the car again, with the doors locked and the engine running and the heater operating full-blast, they sat in stunned silence, basking in the warm air, but shivering nonetheless.

Eventually Tina said, “My God, they move fast!”

“We’re still one step ahead of them,” Elliot said shakily.

“Half a step.”

“That’s probably more like it,” he admitted.

“Bellicosti was supposed to give us the information we need to interest a topnotch reporter in the case.”

“Not now.”

“So how do we get that information?”

“Somehow,” he said vaguely.

“How do we build our case?”

“We’ll think of something.”

“Who do we turn to next?”

“It isn’t hopeless, Tina.”

“I didn’t say it was. But where do we go from here?”

“We can’t work it out tonight,” he said wearily. “Not in our condition. We’re both wiped out, operating on sheer desperation. That’s dangerous. The best decision we can make is to make no decisions at all. We’ve got to hole up and get some rest. In the morning we’ll have clearer heads, and the answers will all seem obvious.”

“You think you can actually sleep?”

“Hell, yes. It’s been a hard day’s night.”

“Where will we be safe?”

“We’ll try the purloined letter trick,” Elliot said. “Instead of sneaking around to some out-of-the-way motel, we’ll march right into one of the best hotels in town.”

“Harrah’s?”

“Exactly. They won’t expect us to be that bold. They’ll be searching for us everywhere else.”

“It’s risky.”

“Can you think of anything better?”

“No.”

“
Everything
is risky.”

“All right. Let’s do it.”

She drove into the heart of town. They abandoned the Chevrolet in a public parking lot, four blocks from Harrah’s.

“I wish we didn’t have to give up the car,” Tina said as he took their only suitcase out of the trunk.

“They’ll be looking for it.”

They walked to Harrah’s Hotel along windy, neon-splashed streets. Even at 1:45 in the morning, as they passed the entrances to casinos, loud music and laughter and the ringing of slot machines gushed forth, not a merry sound at that hour, a regurgitant noise.

Although Reno didn’t jump all night with quite the same energy as Las Vegas, and although many tourists had gone to bed, the casino at Harrah’s was still relatively busy. A young sailor apparently had a run going at one of the craps tables, and a crowd of excited gamblers urged him to roll an eight and make his point.

On this holiday weekend the hotel was officially booked to capacity; however, Elliot knew accommodations were always available. At the request of its casino manager, every hotel held a handful of rooms off the market, just in case a few regular customers—high rollers, of course—showed up by surprise, with no advance notice, but with fat bankrolls and no place to stay. In addition, some reservations were canceled at the last minute, and there were always a few no-shows. A neatly folded pair of twenty-dollar bills, placed without ostentation into the hand of a front-desk clerk, was almost certain to result in the timely discovery of a forgotten vacancy.