guess was that the Lazaretti family had done this. They were the family that had the longest and deepest relationships with violent locals. Operating drug distribution rings wasn't the same as passing money to movie and music companies. The people you met were a bit more feral.
The man had been waiting in an area that was ambiguous. It was near the house of Tony Lazaretti, the one who ran the Lazaretti interests, but it was also about a block down the street from the Castiglione caretaker, Mike Bruno. The Balacontano faction's ambassador to the film industry was Jimmy Montagno, and his house was only a block to the east. The man had not been waiting at one of the houses; he had simply set himself up in the neighborhood to see if anybody came to look around. That was smart.
He couldn't let down his guard now. There were still police, and there was no guarantee that the shooter he'd killed had been alone. That was disconcerting and made him look again in all of the mirrors to be sure a second shooter wasn't in a car following him. His eye caught the little white card that had been stuck under the windshield wiper of the car. He picked it up from the seat.
He was expecting an ad of some kind, but one side was blank, and the other had small, neat handwriting in black ink. CALL ME. URGENT. The phone number was the one Elizabeth Waring had given him in the Chicago church: 202 555-8990.
She had found his car in this city thousands of miles from the place she'd last seen him. How? Was there a global positioning system the Justice Department had activated? LoJack? The car had an antitheft system. Maybe she had triggered it. Maybe in Chicago the FBI had taken pictures of the license numbers of all the cars parked around Vince Pugliese's building that night, and she had somehow narrowed down the list. He had driven to Los Angeles quickly, trying to get to the next target before everybody reacted to the deaths of the Castiglione brothers. He'd stolen some California plates this morning off a pickup truck that was up on blocks and covered by a tarp, but hadn't put them on his car yet. The Illinois plates were still on the car, and that would have made it easier to spot. But if she'd known this was his car, why hadn't there been a contingent of FBI agents waiting with body armor and automatic weapons?
He left the freeway in Silverlake, drove to a quiet hillside street where his car was shielded from the windows of the nearby houses, and removed his Illinois plates. He drove a few more blocks, stopped, and put the California plates on his car.
He coasted downhill and found a convenience store on the first major street and went to the pay phone on the outer wall. He dialed the number of Elizabeth Waring. He waited a long time while the number rang, and he knew she must have gone to sleep after she'd found his car. When her voice came on, she sounded groggy and disoriented. 'Hello?'
'What did you want?'
'I found out that the Lazaretti family hired a team of hit men to go after you.'
'Why didn't you try to trap me when you found my car?'
'It cost me years to intuit your existence, then to meet you and realize how much you know. I want you to live to tell me about your former friends. Meanwhile, I thought I'd better warn you about the hit men, or you might get killed.'
'I had already noticed a change in strategy. Thanks for the tip, though. It tells me a lot. Take care.'
'Wait. I'm in Los Angeles right now. I need to talk to you in person. Is there anywhere you're willing to meet me?'
'Where are you staying?'
'The Sheraton Universal.'
'I'll be in touch.' He hung up, already wondering why he had called her and regretting that he had implied that he would meet her. She was dangerous and distracting at a time when he needed to keep up the pressure on the bosses. He hoped one of them would panic and do something stupid, but no matter what, he had to keep them nervous and off balance.
He knew the flaw in his reasoning was that it committed him to a course that probably wouldn't end well. He might be able to get a couple of families to begin picking each other off, but making them that agitated would first require him to accomplish a slow-motion massacre. He would have to show up in an increasing number of places where people would be waiting for him. And if he managed to get through it, all of the families would be more interested than before in killing him. What he was doing was arranging his own last stand, not his escape.
He knew that Elizabeth Waring was not his ally and that pretending she cared about him was a police interrogation tactic she'd probably been taught in some training class. She wanted an informant, and to recruit him she needed him in trouble and desperate. She had delivered the warning about the hit team to add to the growing pile of evidence that he was not likely to make it through this without help. But that did not negate the fact that she was the only person in this hemisphere who actually preferred that he live rather than die. If he listened to her next pitch, maybe he would hear something he could use. And no matter what, she worked for the most powerful entity in this game.
He got off the freeway at Laurel Canyon Boulevard and drove along Ventura Boulevard to Lankershim, turned left and then right to go up the steep hill to the Universal Studios complex. He stopped his car on the circle at the front entrance to the Sheraton Universal Hotel, hurried inside, picked up a courtesy phone, and asked for her room.
'Hello?' she said.
'Come and meet me in the lobby. I'll be here for five minutes. If I see anything that makes me uncomfortable, I'm gone.'
'Can you give me ten minutes to brush my hair?'
'Do it in the elevator.' He hung up and went to sit in a velvet chair in an arrangement near the front entrance. The hotel lobby was all white and the floor yellow with black lines in geometric shapes. He scanned, looking at the people.
In the old days he could have picked out any FBI agents in something under two seconds. On jobs like this they would have been all male, and the ones who weren't white would have looked like black members of an all-star football team. Now FBI agents didn't look one particular way. He had to watch every human being within view, and if one of them let his eyes rest on Schaeffer for more than an instant, he became a possible enemy. The surveillance systems in public places like hotels should be good enough so they didn't even have to be here to see everything he did. He saw several sets of parents with kids, a couple dressed like they were on their way to the tennis courts, a group of young women who looked like the survivors of a bachelorette party.
He looked at his watch. Three minutes had passed. He turned his attention to the doors and the corridors extending out of the lobby in various directions. He had to be sure that if one of his ways out got suddenly blocked, the others were open. Then he heard a bell and an elevator door slid open.
Waring's head was up and her eyes were scanning as she stepped out. She walked toward him, and he put his arm around her waist and guided her across the lobby to the row of glass doors in front. She knew he was pressing close to her so federal officers couldn't shoot him without the risk of hitting her so she submitted to it.
They stayed together all the way to his car, and he drove off with her. As they coasted down the long hill to Lankershim Boulevard and then over the overpass to Ventura Boulevard, they were silent, each watching for signs that the other's friends or enemies were following. Finally he said, 'We can talk. I don't care if you're wearing a wire.'
'Thank you. I wasn't looking forward to being groped. I'm not wearing a wire.' She paused. 'I thought since you came for me so quickly, you might have had some kind of change of heart.'
'Not exactly. I thought that you deserved a tidbit for trying to warn me. I was with Sam Lonzio the night that Chickie Salateri died.'
'Sam Lonzio the Lazaretti underboss in New York?'
'Yeah. Salateri was sent out to Los Angeles to do some work for the Lazarettis.'
'I remember the case. Somebody reported him missing and the Los Angeles police looked for him for over a year.'
'When it's somebody like him, the cops have a way of looking where it's easy to look, not where the body's likely to be.'
'So you know what happened.'
'That night I was in L.A. because I had to do a job somewhere else, and I wanted to be far away from it. So I
