It was a second before he realized what was happening, but when the two cars pulled up on either side of the cab he recognized the face of the man in the cowboy shirt. The man was out of his own car and reaching for the door handle of the cab already. The one on the other side was a pace or two slower. He chose that one.
He didn’t feel the pain when he tore the pistol off his belly, just a sensation of cold where the tape had covered him and his shirt was open. The gun blast jerked the man backward a few feet, but he was out the door and had the pistol in the cab driver’s face before the body toppled on its back. The cab driver’s face had an expression of surprise when he squeezed the trigger. He knew the cowboy was on the ground somewhere behind the car, but there was no time. He jumped into the front seat past the steering wheel, threw the cab into gear and hit the gas pedal hard with his left foot. The cab jerked forward as he struggled to control it without showing his head above the seat. He heard shots as he wheeled out onto the Strip, but the sound of the cab’s engine accelerating drowned out whatever he could have heard of the bullets smacking into the side of the car. He took the first right turn off the Strip and waited to see if the other cars had followed. After a few seconds he knew they had stopped to pick up the bodies, so he drove the cab into a parking space behind a closed gas station and got out. “Jesus,” he said aloud. “So it was the taxis.” They had offered him one outside each casino. And that was why they’d picked the casinos so far apart.
Damn them!
There was nothing he could do now except get out quickly. He’d have to make his way to the car in Caesar’s parking lot and get out. But damn them! They hadn’t needed to do it in the first place. He wouldn’t have been a threat to Carl Bala, sitting up there in the Frontier surrounded by a dozen concentric circles of hotel security men and policemen and the syndicate faithful, all watching each other watching him. And he didn’t even know if Bala was the one who’d ordered it. He loped along behind the buildings, moving parallel with the sidewalk out on the Strip, looking out at each alley to see if there was anyone to walk with, but each time seeing only empty sidewalk and the flash of passing cars. God! The stupidity of it! They could have sat there and done nothing, and he wouldn’t even have known who owed him the money. He sure as hell wouldn’t have shown up with his hand out at Carl Bala’s door. If he had, he would have deserved this, for being a fool. They had wasted his life for nothing at all, as if he were some poor sucker who’d happened to be standing too close when a numbers runner came in for a handoff. It was a joke.
He was now behind the MGM Grand. Caesar’s parking lot would be just a block up and a block over, but there didn’t seem to be any way to get there. It was just too much empty pavement to cross alone and on foot if they were cruising the Strip in cars.
Behind the MGM Grand he had a thousand cars to choose from. He selected one he would feel comfortable with if he got stuck with it for the night, a dark blue Chevrolet. He hotwired it. He was out of the lot in a few seconds. At Caesar’s nothing looked peculiar. There were still gamblers wandering from aisle to aisle looking for their cars, and even a few late arrivals pulling into the lot. He knew that for the moment they would be searching for him on the freeway only. They would think he was still in the cab until they found it behind the gas station. In a little while if it didn’t turn up they might have the cab company report it stolen.
He glided up the driveway and found a parking space near his rented car, sat there and waited. Something about the place made him hesitate to disentangle the ignition wires of his stolen Chevrolet. The rented car was only thirty feet from where he sat, but that thirty feet would be enough for them if they’d thought to wait for him. And if they’d managed to find out about the rented car sometime during the week, it was all over anyway. They’d be sitting somewhere out of sight waiting for him to turn the key and blow himself into a hundred thousand spoonfuls of hamburger. So he sat there with his lights off and his motor idling, staring into the darkness around him for any of the signs—a parked car with the silhouette of a head in the driver’s window, a man alone and on foot who didn’t find his car right away, a car that circled instead of swinging out into the driveway at the end of an aisle.
He glanced at his watch. It was two ten already. By now the fire should have started in his room. The smoke sensor should have gone off. The fire engines should arrive in a few minutes. At this hour they’d roar down the Strip at fifty or sixty, their flashing lights visible for a mile or more, not downshifting once until they were abreast of the giant sign that said Diana Ross. He tried to spot the window of his room, scanning the fourth strip of glass up from the parking lot for a flicker of light. Damn them! They weren’t thorough, they weren’t smart, but there was no way to make yourself a break with them because there were so damned many of them, lumbering around like so many baboons. It didn’t matter what you did, the weight of their stupid single-minded brutish persistence would advance behind you—either slowly like a glacier or fast like an avalanche and obliterate all your tricks and contrivances and you with them. It was too late to be cautious, too late even to be afraid. Somebody powerful, maybe Carlo Balacontano sitting in his suite in the Frontier, had become annoyed with Orloff, so Orloff and everybody in his vicinity must cease to exist. It was a miracle they hadn’t torn Orloff’s building apart the same day to eradicate every sign that such a person had ever walked the earth.
It was time to move. If he didn’t do something soon there wouldn’t be time to get out. He felt in the lining of his sleeve for the keys to the rented car, and clutched them in his left hand. He killed the engine, reached under the dashboard until he felt the line of fuses, and plucked them out of their clips one by one. There was no time to figure out which circuit controlled the dome lamps. When he opened the door he didn’t want to be bathed in light.
He was out the door and moving quickly now. He heard no engine start, no sign of life as he accomplished the thirty feet to the car. If they were about, they hadn’t moved. He bent down as though to tie his shoe or check a tire or pick something up, and scanned the surface of the asphalt around him for feet. While he was down he unlocked the door and waited.
Suddenly he could hear the thin, whining sound of the sirens somewhere down the Strip, screaming into the vast night sky that practically swallowed their shriek into its emptiness. But there was no question what it was. “The cavalry,” he chuckled to himself. “The fucking cavalry.” From here on it would be timing.
The sound of the sirens swelled as the trucks approached. He crouched, straining to prepare. At the moment when the first of the trucks flashed into view he slipped into the car, the interior flickering with light for only a second. If there were watchers they would be staring at the trucks, if only for that second; there was no way they could stop themselves. The first truck, a long hook-and-ladder rig, bounced up the driveway doing at least thirty, its siren wailing to a stop as though out of breath as the truck pulled up in front of the covered portico. Another like it burst into the parking lot by the side entrance and pulled around the building out of sight. Smaller trucks were materializing now, but he didn’t watch them. Instead he scanned the parking lot.
He saw them at once. Three cars lit up to reveal the shapes of men swinging out to their feet. He ducked down and listened for the sound of running, but the noise of the big diesel engines was now flooding the air to replace the sirens. He saw one of the men dash past his window, but the man’s eyes were fixed on the doorway of the casino. Now the fire trucks were all in place according to some prearranged contingency plan the fire department worked by. The watchers would be at the hotel entrances waiting for him to try to slip out with the frightened guests.
He had a moment of residual terror when he turned the ignition key, but he already knew there was no bomb. They would never have sat in the parking lot to watch it go off. He backed out of the parking space and drove onto the Strip. If any of them noticed him it was too late for them to be sure what they were looking at, because already there were four or five others driving away from the hotel as he’d known they would. The hotel guests would stay to clog the sidewalks and the parking lots and crowd the firemen, but the visiting gamblers would be heading for their cars to go someplace where there damn well wasn’t a fire to close down the tables just when their luck was about to return to them.
He was out now, in a clean untraceable car with a full tank, carrying about two hundred thousand dollars stuffed into his coat. But as far as they were concerned he was dead already. He had been from the moment some old man’s mind had settled on him and declared him a possible irritant. All that had remained was the mechanical, automatic translation of the thought to accomplishment, and the old man had probably lost interest in specifics of that sort years ago. Having given his frown or his nod or said, “Take him out too,” his mind would have moved to other matters.
So he was dead. Well fuck them. He wasn’t going to take that. They were damned well going to know he wasn’t dead.
