Макс Коллинз - Road to Paradise

“Ask yourself if Mom would want us to give up,” he said. “Ask yourself if Gary would want anything to happen to you.”

She nodded, numbly, and shuffled off.

When he emerged from the bathroom, she was sitting on the edge of her bed, facing his, slumped, legs apart, hands laced together hanging between her knees. Staring at the floor. Her handbag — an off — white crocheted jute shoulder affair — was next to her.

From the nightstand, he removed the .38 and handed it toward her.

“I want you to carry that in your purse.”

She didn’t argue. She took the gun and unsnapped the bag and slid the big weapon in among cosmetics and Kleenex.

“Guess all those gun club years are finally comin’ in handy, huh, Pop?”

He sat across from her. “Couple details. Couple realities... not any fun, I’m afraid.”

She looked up with an eyebrow raised. “Oh — is the fun over already?”

“Gary’s parents will’ve been called back from their Caribbean trip by now.”

She hung her head again, shaking it. “Those poor people... poor, poor people...”

“I’m assuming they knew nothing about the marriage?”

“Not any more than you and Mom did.”

“...Is there anything in the house — marriage license, photos, anything that might come in the mail, that would tell them about you two...?”

“Getting hitched?” she said archly. “No. I don’t think so.” She frowned at him, confused. “Why?”

“I’m thinking... there’s no reason for them to know about it. I’m thinking it would just complicate things. All they know right now, from talking to people who were there, is that you sneaked back to go to the prom with Gary. And that he was an innocent bystander in some kind of gangland violence that broke out in the parking lot of a casino with that kind of history.”

She was thinking. “Maybe... maybe it would be better this way. Just be harder on them, knowing... and they’d just be... madder at us.”

“I guess that’s right.”

“D’you suppose his funeral’s today?”

He nodded. “Or tomorrow.”

His father had led him to the bed where his mother’s body lay, where Papa had tucked her in. “Bid her Godspeed now, Michael — there’ll be no attending the services for us... no wake... no graveside goodbyes.”

He said, “We could have flowers wired. Would you like that?”

Looking at the floor, she swallowed. Sighed. Nodded. “What... what about Mom?”

“I called Aunt Betty. They’re handling it.”

“We won’t be going to her funeral, either, will we?”

He shook his head.

She grimaced. Then her face softened into a blank pretty mask. “Daddy, what is the plan?”

“A safe place and a fresh start for both of us, but, first... I have to do something back in Chicago.”

“What kind of something?”

“Do you want me to tell you?”

Her dark eyes flashed up from the floor. “I’m fucking asking, aren’t I?”

He held those eyes with his. “The monster who did this to us — who caused your mother’s death, and your... your husband’s. He has to die.”

“You have to kill him.”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to Chicago to kill him.”

“Yes.”

She nodded. Shrugged. Said, “Can I help?”

At a Denny’s across from the motel, they both ate modest breakfasts, but at least they were able to eat. Michael checked the Los Angeles newspapers to see how much coverage the Cal-Neva incident was getting.

Much as he’d outlined it to Anna, the papers reported that at Lake Tahoe, the Cal-Neva, “which had attracted headlines in the days when singer Frank Sinatra was an owner,” had been the scene of “mob-style” violence. Gary Grace, eighteen, had taken a bullet intended for the unidentified male target of two mob assassins who had been killed by said target. The names of the dead men were being withheld by federal authorities, although an unnamed source linked them to “notorious” Chicago gangster Sam Giancana, “recently returned from Mexico and said to be contemplating a comeback in organized crime circles.”

No mention of Michael by name or even description, though the cops would surely know about the Lincoln. A small mention of Anna: “The young victim had been attending the prom with a teenaged girl who had moved away recently and returned for the event.” His daughter’s name — and that she’d got in the car with the “unidentified target” prior to the bystander teenager’s killing — was not mentioned.

Had the feds withheld that info, or didn’t they know? Maybe the eyewitnesses hadn’t seen Gary open the car door for Anna, and her get in, their attention not attracted until the gunfire began. In the midst of weapons blazing in the night, and the Lincoln screeching out of the Cal-Neva lot, perhaps no one noticed the girl in the front seat. Of course, she had been screaming...

They drove down a commercial strip toward Palm Springs and stopped at a florist, sending flowers to the funeral home in Incline Village for Gary. Then Michael trawled for just the right used-car lot, found it, and traded his Lincoln in on a three-year-earlier model Eldorado, a deep-blue vinyl-top number with sixty thousand miles, paying the guy eight thousand cash. In reality, the used-car salesman should have been paying Michael a couple grand, but this was a no-paperwork, off — the-books transaction.

Father and daughter transferred their possessions to the big boat of a Caddy — everything from the rifle to their suitcases to the four-track tapes — and soon were heading up North 95 to connect with Interstate 40, east.

As they sat in air-conditioned comfort, listening to Bobby Darin sing “The Good Life,” his daughter said, “These aren’t the most inconspicuous wheels I ever saw, Daddy.”

“They’re less conspicuous,” he said, “than that Lincoln, considering I got it from the government... and we were seen in it at the Cal-Neva.”

“Ah. But, still...”

“Baby, I hardly have the heart to tell you, but—”

“Oh, bad news now?”

He sighed. “We have three days of driving ahead of us, ten or twelve hours a day.”

She frowned. “If we’re going that far, and were getting rid of our car, anyway, why didn’t we just fly? Or take the train or something?”

“The G-men may be watching the airports and train stations for us.”

She laughed. “Did you just say ‘G-men’?”

He smiled, embarrassed. “I guess I did. Kinda dates me, huh?”

“Only to around the turn of the century.”

The first day took them home, in a way — Arizona, the turnpike cutting through endless stretches of mesas and buttes dotted with yucca and sagebrush. Heat and clouds conspired to turn the desert shades of yellow, pink, brown, and gray, overseen by ragged barren mountains.

They didn’t talk much in the morning, Anna catching naps, the depression breaking through a few times, and she’d cry softly into Kleenex, though neither would comment.

At a gas-station greasy spoon on the Seligman turnoff, they had delicious cheeseburgers and french fries and Cokes, and Anna offered to take the wheel awhile.

“Let me help out,” she said. “I’m used to it.”

She was referring, obliquely, to the driving she’d done when she’d gone with Cindy Parham to meet Gary in Vegas, and then on with Gary to Tahoe.

“That’d be good,” he said.

The start of the afternoon took them into a forest preserve, the world green suddenly, pines and firs and oaks and spruce and piñon.

“What’s the rest of the plan?” Anna asked. Behind the wheel, now.

“After Chicago, you mean?”

“Yes, after Chicago.”

“Assuming all goes well, I’m thinking Vancouver.”