house. Stagnaro rented this building’s garage for Rosa from the Chinese landlord, street-parked himself.
Kosta had broken the bulb over the inset door so it was dark. If anyone entered or exited the building, he would abort, but everybody was in for the night. Lights in the Stagnaro house, too. The boy, Tony, home studying. On Monday nights Rosa was out until ten, so Stagnaro caught up on paperwork at the Hall of Justice. Got home an hour after she did, steady as clockwork. A devoted husband.
Which was why this would work.
A car turned uphill from Stockton; Kosta scrunched back a little deeper in the inset doorway when the turn signal went on. It was Rosa. He felt her in his groin. He pulled down the ski mask to cover his face.
Her lights swept across the entryway as she turned in at the garage of the building where Kosta waited, but their probing eyes couldn’t quite reach into his angle of wall and door. She stopped the car crosswise over the sidewalk, killed lights and motor as she took her keys to unlock the garage door.
Kosta suddenly realized he really wanted to fuck her, not just to take Stagnaro out of the equation, but because he wanted to rip her panties off and open her legs cruelly wide and…
She fumbled her key into the garage lock, turned it. He tensed. When she pulled the counterweighted overhead door open, he would move. He had rehearsed it in his mind a thousand times.
Dart forward, shove her into the garage, pull the door shut. Leave the car where it was, on these San Francisco hills where parking was at a premium, many residents left their cars across the sidewalks all night.
Thirty minutes of doing anything he wanted to her.
The door creaked up. Now!
And Kosta Gounaris slammed himself back into the blackness of his little alcove.
A car coming down Greenwich from Grant had stopped behind Rosa’s. The driver called across to her through the open window.
“You leave your car there like that, lady, I’m gonna have to ticket it.”
“You’re home early!” exclaimed Rosa in delight.
“Just wanted a little extra time with you,” said Dante. “I’ll go find a place to park.”
Kosta stayed crammed back in his little triangle of darkness. The fucking bastard, somehow he’d known! Had known, had come home early.
Kosta watched Stagnaro’s taillights disappear down the hill, watched Rosa, unaware, drive her car into the garage.
What if Stagnaro’s intuition went further, centered on him as his own fucking obsessions had centered on Stagnaro, gotten him into this mess? Maybe he needed another hypothetical with Miss Pym. Maybe he needed to kill Stagnaro no matter what Mr. Prince said.
“It ain’t gonna kill you, suck my dick a little make it hard,” Eddie said to Mae in an almost plaintive voice.
“He’s gonna call any minute,” she said. She was astride him in her queen-size bed upstairs over Mae’s Place, both of them nude. “He said he’d call about one.”
“But afterwards,” insisted Eddie.
“Afterwards you won’t need it,” said Mae with a wink.
Oh, she’d given plenty of head in her day, nobody in her line of work hadn’t, it just had never been her favorite fuck.
The phone rang. “Yessir, Don Enzo, he’s right here.”
She handed it to Eddie, took his flaccid cock in her hand. It was pointing at her bush like a flabby little sea slug.
“Eddie,” said Eddie into the phone.
He listened to the squawks from the other end of the line. Mae began flexing her fingers expertly. Eddie put his hand over the phone mouthpiece.
“He’s gonna patch me through to Mr. Prince!” he whispered to her in hoarse, awed tones. It was like being introduced to royalty. His cock was stiffening just in anticipation.
“Yessir, this is Eddie, yessir…”
Mae lifted herself so that Eddie’s now-hard member could slide inside her. She started to rock almost dreamily on top of it as Eddie listened to his instruction.
“I gotcha, Mr. Prince! Both of ’em! Yessir! It’ll be a pleasure, Mr. Prince…”
Eddie, his call finished, had shut his eyes, going to work on her in earnest, starting to groan in anticipation. The door opened silently and the fucking freak, that P.W. guy, came shambling into the room! What a fuck of a time for him to do his google-eyes act on her! The asshole didn’t even seem to see Eddie, just kept staring at Mae in that intense, puzzled way he’d done with each of the girls in turn.
“Soo Li?” he asked her in his broken voice.
Eddie heard, opened his eyes, snarled, “Who da fuck-”
But the muzzle of a Jennings J-22 like the ones that had killed Moll Dalton and Spic Madrid and Skeffington St. John was already against the bridge of his nose. It said pop! as it spit another of those hypervelocity hollow-point Remington Viper rounds through Popgun’s brain and out the back of his head.
At the same time, the P.W.’s other gloved hand gently covered the mouth Mae opened to scream. He dropped the Jennings onto Eddie’s chest and then put the forefinger of that hand to his lips in the shushing motion Mae had seen so often, shook his head sadly, backed out of the room and was gone.
Mae started to reach for the telephone, then jerked back her hand. The man was a psycho, probably standing outside the door listening right now. She crawled heavily off Eddie’s corpse. The pillow was a red halo around his ruined head.
Eddie, deflowerer of her youth. Dead in her queen-size bed. Dead before they’d finished. The sight of Eddie dead excited her in a perverse way. Well, what the hell, he was gone and she was still here, and it was going to be a long night what with the cops and all that. So Mae, being au fond a practical soul, finished herself off before calling the Organization and then the cops, in that order. It was her best in years.
The sheriff found the P.W. gone, along with his sleeping bag. He found nothing else. No fingerprints; for the weeks he’d lived in Mae’s cellar, he’d always worn his gloves. No usable description apart from what the girls told him: big, shambling, blue eyes.
They kept at Old Mose until dawn without result, never thinking to inquire after Dietrich, the massive Rottweiler. When somebody did notice that Dietrich was gone, Old Mose said he’d run off two days before by hisse’f, yassuh, he mos’ surely did, dam’ fool dog run off into the night, yassuh…
Dante got Raptor’s phone message alerting him to the fact that another one had died before he even knew who. He only got Eddie’s name later, off a routine FBI printout.
The message was a quite creditable impression of Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront.
“I could’ve had class,” said Brando’s voice. “I could’ve been a contender. I could’ve been somebody. It was you, Eddie. You was my brother. You should’ve looked out for me a little bit…” A heavy, thuggish laugh. “I looked out for him tonight, Dante.” That laugh again. “Like I looked out for good old Gid in Death Valley…”
Hymie the Handler said it was yet another new voice.
PART SEVEN
Whosoever you be, death will overtake you, although you be in lofty towers.
