would have chosen.
“You still have the extra piece clipped under the dash?”
Gus grinned. He had beautiful dentures; all his teeth had been knocked out during a garment district organizing beef.
“Don’t leave home without it, Mr. Abramson.”
“Good. I’m sure he’ll make you put your gun down on the blacktop and return to the car while we talk. As soon as I have his employer’s name, use your backup piece on him through the windshield. We can tell the garage at Furnace Creek something flew off a truck and hit us.”
Twenty minutes later, Gus turned the heavy Mercedes sedan into the little blacktop rest area half a mile beyond Sand Dune Junction. It was deserted except for them, the plastic-stalled chemical toilet, and a litter basket. Gus got out leaving his door hang open.
“Check the toilet and the litter basket,” said Gideon.
Gus did, the basket first, then the empty toilet stall’s ceiling and comers, even down the hole, for explosives.
“All clear, Mr. Abramson.”
Gideon got out, leaving his door open also. Gus opened the rear doors and the trunk lid according to Raptor’s instructions. The first car since they stopped came by from the same direction they had come, but the lone man behind the wheel didn’t even turn his head as he zipped by. The sky was achingly blue, unclouded. Far overhead, a pair of turkey vultures glided in silent circles, great wings spread to catch the updrafts, binocular eyes seeking the dead and dying.
Behind the pancake of blacktop the creosote-studded base of a broad alluvial fan sloped gradually up, narrowing toward the base of the series of flat-topped hills and deeply eroded canyons at least a mile away. No worry of sniper fire from there.
Gideon turned and looked the other way, across the road down toward the sand dunes. At least a thousand yards away. Otherwise, just the empty road. Desert flatness.
A good choice. Raptor was nobody’s fool.
Neither was Gideon Abramson. Once he knew who had hired Raptor for all the killing, he would know where he stood, whether in safety or in jeopardy. And then Raptor would be dead, a threat erased, that insult about his mother avenged.
“Uh… whadda we do now, Mr. Abramson?”
“We wait, Gus. Give him a good chance to look us over. He’s probably in that little parking area down by the dunes.”
The parking area by the dunes, Dante thought as he drove right by Abramson’s Mercedes, off the road with all four doors and the trunk lid open. He didn’t even turn his head. Didn’t want Abramson spotting him because he was inquisitive. The dunes parking area was where Raptor would be, checking out the site.
He turned down the little dirt road he was getting to know by heart. Raptor’s car would be among those parked there. He stopped, backed and filled to turn around a hundred yards from the highway, got out his glasses. Raptor would have to drive by him to get back to the turnout where Gideon waited.
A quick check through his glasses. Gideon and the chauffeur were both well clear of the car. When Raptor drove up, he could just circle it to see nobody was hiding within.
Now it was a waiting game.
A half hour later Gid said, “We’ll give him fifteen more minutes, Gus.”
This wasn’t just some exercise in control, was it? Would there be a call on his car phone, trying to send him off to some other remote area of the Valley, and then another, and another?
Gid wasn’t going to play. When he left here, that was it.
Unless it had been set up by Stagnaro to get him away from his room. Go through it, plant a bug? He chuckled at the idea. Gideon Abramson had never left anything incriminating, never said an incriminating word, in an unswept room in his life.
“It’s a no-show, Gus. I’ll take a leak, then we’ll go.”
Gid entered the hot little chemical toilet stall. Even out here in the desert it didn’t smell very good. And it was hot as hell. Instant sweat broke out on his forehead, upper lip, and the backs of his hands as he unzipped and directed a good healthy stream down the hole. No prostate trouble for Gideon Abramson. He was going to live forever.
Maybe Raptor was booby-trapping his room while he was gone. Gus would check it out as Gid sipped ice tea on the terrace-
A huge bumblebee bit him on the arm with shocking power but no pain. It had come right through the plastic wall, leaving a small neat drilled hole through which sunlight poked. The air was full of bees. The plastic rattled and quaked with their buzzings. Gideon’s dick dissolved in his hand into a gory splash of flesh. One bit him in the upper chest, knocking him down. His arm went down the hole. He started to scream. Struggled upright, shoved open the door, stumbled out…
A high-powered round went through the tendons at the back of his neck, burst his face outward like a ripe melon. Gus was down on one knee, seeking a target, but there was none. Just bullets to keep him pinned down and clip the car, smash a headlight, skip off the pavement. Two more drilled Gideon’s body as he sprawled there on what was left of his face.
But Gideon Abramson had produced eight grandchildren. Biologically, he died successful.
Dante, through his glasses, saw the holes appearing in the walls of the chemical toilet, saw the thin plastic shudder and quake under the supersonic needle-sharp assaults. He was already ramming the accelerator to the floor by then, slewing up the dirt road toward the highway.
It was over by the time he got there. Gus was behind the Mercedes. Dante already had his badge in his hand.
“You got a phone in that thing?” he snapped, without waiting for an answer, added, “Try to raise the Stovepipe Wells Hotel-they’re closer than Furnace Creek-”
“Took a round,” said Gus laconically of the car phone.
Dante began slamming his fists down on the hood of the Mercedes and cursing. “Of all the goddam…”
He ran down. He hadn’t even drawn his piece. Neither he nor Gus could even tell from which direction the fusillade had come. Just… somewhere up on the alluvial fan. Raptor obviously was a crack shot, he could lie up there in the creosote and cacti, three, four, even five hundred yards away, take a tripod or sandbag rest, set the elevation on his scope, wait for the right moment. If it didn’t come, just fade back into the desert without anyone ever knowing he’d been there. But it had come.
Probably left his vehicle on the road that led up through Daylight Pass. Beatty was only twenty-five miles away, the Nevada border half that. Or he could have just driven se dately back to Furnace Creek to take a swim. Or gone hiking up some canyon. Nobody knew his car or his face.
What they had all forgotten was that the seemingly table-smooth barren featureless desert was as seamed and pitted as an ancient Indian’s face, a maze of little washes and gulleys and dry runoffs that furnished impeccable cover. Hell, it’s why they had called ambushing “dry-gulching” in the Old West.
Now it was really personal. For all the good that did.
It wasn’t until the next morning that a Shoshone tracker, working from the angle of fire, found Raptor’s place of ambush 403 yards from the rest area. The assassin hadn’t made any mistakes. No spent brass, no rifle, on that flinty ground no footprints-just a few dried branches broken down to give a clearer field of fire and incidentally mark his position.
Dante stayed overnight to give and sign his statement. Of course Gus had a license to carry-hell, he was a deputy sheriff in Palm Springs! Mr. Abramson had received threats, etc. Dante knew more about the killing than Gus did, but only gave the locals that he’d been passing by. Gus didn’t contradict him.
Dante got back to San Francisco in the middle of the night after a day of hard driving. As expected, Raptor’s message was waiting on his phone machine.
“This Jewish mother is talking with her son’s teacher, she says, ‘My Gregory is very smart. If he’s a bad boy, slap the boy next to him-Gregory will get the idea.’”
Gideon Abramson’s voice. Raptor must have somehow gotten him to tell one of his pathetic goddam Jewish jokes over the phone, taped it for his message to Dante, making a joke of it.
