never rains in Southern California. They looked comfortable and at ease and more than a little drunk. None of the men was Domingo Duran. The man with the hat laughed loudly, then grabbed the breast of the nearest woman. She swatted him away and he laughed louder. He had a flat, round face and a nose with jagged scars from the time someone had tried to bite it off, and he dressed like a hick from back east: black lace-up shoes, Sears pants, and a lime green golfing sweater over a white Arrow shirt, all of which went beautifully with his crushed gray felt hat. I looked at him and smiled and said, “Well, well.”
“What?” Pike said.
“You see the gentleman in the hat?”
“Yeah.”
“Rudy Gambino.”
“What’s a Rudy Gambino?” Pike refused to keep himself current on underworld figures.
“Mobster from Arizona. From Newark originally, until his own people sent him out west because they couldn’t control him. Duran’s connected with him. Buddies.”
Pike said, “I like his nose.”
Inside the poolhouse, two young thick-necked Chicano kids in black suits leaned against a pinball machine and smoked. Muscle to keep Uncle Rudy safe.
We went back past the guest house, slipped along a narrow shrub-lined walk, and edged up against the side of a fountain behind pale red oleander. The drizzle had stopped altogether now, but the clouds were still dark. We had a clear view of the front of the guest house, as well as the pool and the poolhouse and the back side of the main house. As big as the guest house was, the main house was larger. An enormous white Spanish Mediterranean, heavy-walled, with quarry-tiled patios and red-tiled roofs and oversized beams. The patios were covered and partially hidden behind lush landscaping. A man in a trench coat sat at a small glass table, well out of the rain. He was holding a paperback copy of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone but he wasn’t reading. A Remington over/under shotgun rested on the table. Arizona muscle.
A guest house had three separate facing doors, like a triplex. The door farthest away from us opened and two thugs came out with Perry Lang between them. The boy was blindfolded and his left hand was heavily bandaged. He walked the way you walk when you haven’t slept well in a while. I felt Pike shift next to me. Good luck, and bad. Good luck, that the boy had been brought here. We wouldn’t have to force his whereabouts out of anyone. It wasn’t smart for them to have him here, but Sanchez said they’d moved the boy this morning. They’d probably been keeping him in a safe house, but decided to bring him closer in case something went wrong with the ambush and they needed a little extra leverage. Maybe I should call Poitras. I could tell him the kid was here and he would act on it. But maybe by the time I got to a phone and called the cops and the cops got here, the Eskimo would’ve come and gone and taken the boy with him, maybe not quite as alive as last reported.
Bad luck because of Gambino. How many Arizona soldiers did he have hanging around the guest house and the main house and the garage? What would Gambino do when Pike and I made our move? Normal business practice would be noninterference. But he was a guest in Duran’s home. They were friends. Besides that, he wouldn’t know for sure if we weren’t coming for him. Shit.
Gambino left the barbeque and sloshed across to the main house. He carried a Coors and belched so loudly we could hear him sixty yards away. Classy. He didn’t bother with the walkways. Guess he didn’t give a shit if he tracked messy into his good friend Domingo Duran’s home. Maybe he figured Mexicans didn’t mind.
The two guys holding Perry stopped outside of the guesthouse, talking, then one of them continued on with the kid across to the main house. The second one came our way, toward the garage. We dropped along the row of oleander until we were out of sight of the rear yard, then came out onto the walk.
“If we’re going into the main house,” Pike said, “we’re not going to do it through the back. Too many people.”
We were zipping along, backpedaling along the walk toward the garage. “Did you see a way in through the front?” I said.
“Sure. Windows. Doors.”
Smartass. “You always carry lipstick in your truck?”
“You wouldn’t believe what I got in there.”
The walk ended at a door off the rear of the garage in a nice circular spot strewn with pretty white rocks. There was a heavy adobe wall to the right, as thick as but lower than the main wall, extending from the garage to the main house. To the left the grounds sloped away to an open rolling lawn. It was through the door or across the lawn. On the lawn, we could be seen. The door was locked.
We stepped back off the walk into the shrubs and waited. There were footsteps, then the second thug came along, hissing air through his teeth and digging in his pocket. When he stopped at the door and took out a silver key, I stepped out and hit him once in the ear, hard. He sat down and I hit him again. Pike picked up the key. “Not bad.”
I waffled my hand from side to side. “Eh.”
Pike put the key in the lock and opened the door. A short Mexican with a broad face and a gray zoot suit took one step out, pushed a gold Llama automatic into Pike’s chest, and pulled the trigger. There was a deep muffled POP, then Pike came up and around with his right foot faster than I could see. There was a louder sound, what you might hear if you drop an overripe casaba melon onto a tile floor. The Mexican collapsed, his neck limp. Pike looked down at himself, put one hand over a growing spot high and to the right of his chest, then sat down. “Keep going,” he said. “Get the kid.”
I felt like I might scream. I looked at him, nodded, then pushed through the door. Forward. Never back up.
There were three Cadillac limos, two Rolls-Royces, and a bright yellow Ferrari Boxer in the garage, but no more thugs. I went out to the edge of the motor court and looked at the front of the house. Another limo was there. A service drive branched off the motor court and ran around to the side of the house, then looped back around to the garage. That would be the kitchen. I walked out across the motor court to the service and followed it around to the side of the mansion. Maybe the way to get the kid was to walk up to things and shoot them and when I ran out of things to shoot I’d either have the kid or be dead.
The service drive led to a carport attached to the house. There was a single door there, and a little metal buzzer. When I pushed the buzzer a tiny woman, as nicely browned as good leather, opened the door. She looked disgusted. “? No mas comer! ” she said.
“Do you speak English?”
“No, no.” She shook her head and tried to push me out of the door. Probably thought I was one of Gambino’s goons.
I showed her the gun and jerked my head out toward the front gate. “Vamoose!” Then I went into the kitchen.
Manolo was eating a sandwich at a chopping block table. His jacket was off and he was wearing a shoulder holster over a blue shirt with white collar and cuffs. When he saw me, he clawed at his gun. I shot him twice. The hollow-points picked him up and kicked him back off the stool. The 9mm high-velocity loads echoed like a cannon in the tile kitchen.
I went out through a serving hall and into a living room that made Barry Fein’s place look like a phone booth. Gambino’s hood was coming in off the. balcony with his shotgun. When he saw me he said, “What the hell was that?”
I said, “This,” and clubbed him in the side of the face with the gun. He stumbled and dropped the shotgun but didn’t pass out. I pulled him up to his feet and shook him and pressed the muzzle up under his jaw. “They just brought a kid in here. Where?”
“I swear to God I don’t know. I swear.”
I hit him in the mouth with the butt of the gun. His teeth went and blood sprayed out along my arm and he went down to his knees. “Where?”
“Shwear to Chri I dunno.” Hard to talk with a ruined mouth.
“Where’s Duran?”
“Offishe. Upshtairs.”
“Show me.”
I could see out the elegant French doors, across the patio and the lawn to the poolhouse. If they’d heard the
