Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

“Now I send you to see your husband, my little tart-now that I know you will think only of me as you do it with him.”

So here she was in Bella Figura drinking her second Midori sour and thinking that Kosta knew her all too well. She indeed was planning, with a nasty little frisson in her soul, to get Will into bed tonight. Kosta had hurt her a little and scared her a lot with his wildness; she needed Will’s tender loving strength to restore her.

The stranger in the light topcoat and tinted glasses came up behind her at 7:39. Expecting Will, Moll turned on her stool with a welcoming smile just as his gloved hand pressed a. 22 pistol against the bridge of her exquisite nose and pulled the trigger. During the nanosecond of searing pain as the bullet passed between her wide, beautiful eyes, she knew That’s why he was so wild, he was excited by

Moll thudded to the floor, a brain-splattered bundle of ruined designer clothes. The assassin put the coup de grace into the base of her skull before staring around at the surrounding patrons frozen on their stools.

“Dead men tell no tales,” he said. “Live men too, if they got any smarts.”

He laid the empty. 22 on the bar beside Moll’s purse, and strolled out stripping off his topcoat. As he rounded the corner into Front, he handed it to a homeless man poking around in a trash barrel at the edge of green block-square MacArthur Park.

Back in Bella Figura the screaming had begun, after several long moments of silence during which they all had looked at one another and then guiltily away. By the time the police arrived, no one had seen anything significant.

Live men tell no tales. Nor, of course, dead women.

Will had been held up on the Bay Bridge by a four-car crash blocking all lanes on the upper deck into the city. He got to Bella Figura just after the first black-and-white. When Homicide Inspector Tim Flanagan arrived, Will was cradling Moll’s ruined head in his arms and crying all over the crime scene.

“Who the fuck is he?” Flanagan demanded of the uniformed team who had answered the original squeal. “The fucking Pope?”

“The husband.”

“Whyna fuck ya let him near the body?”

The black patrolman said, with exaggerated courtesy, “’Cause we couldn’t come up with any way to keep him away from her, Inspector, short of shooting him in the fuckin’ head too.”

Flanagan, who had a heavy round red face and a swag belly and pink tightly waved receding hair, looked and sounded like every casting director’s concept of the beefy, stupid, venal Irish cop with his hand out. He had, however, a degree in criminology from USF and was totally devoted to police work. His dumb act was strictly professional.

He told them to secure the crime scene-and he did mean getting the fucking husband away from the corpse-and went to call Dante Stagnaro at home even though Dante wasn’t Homicide and Tim was, so this was his beef entirely.

It was just that this looked professional, just the sort of homicide that Dante, with his surprisingly moralistic stance toward crime and murder in particular, especially professional murder, loved to get in on early.

That was fifteen months ago, and Lieutenant Dante Stagnaro, head of SFPD’s Organized Crime Task Force, still didn’t have anyone in the cage for Moll Dalton’s murder. Oh, he had a self-confessed assassin who called himself Raptor and left messages on his phone machine, and he was pretty sure he knew who had hired the guy-but he was as far from an arrest as when he had started.

Dante drove around the block because the parking lot for the Institute of Human Origins was off Euclid just north of the Cal-Berkeley campus. Will Dalton’s green 4Runner with its license plate HABILIS was parked in the lot: the damn fool had shown up. On his own car’s bumper was a sticker put there by his sixteen-year-old son, Antonio, that he hadn’t had the heart to

scrape off: BAD COP-NO DOUGHNUT.

Organized crime in San Francisco didn’t mean the Mafia as it did in New York-traditionally, the mob didn’t have a strong enough presence in the Bay Area to merit a task force. What he and his two inspectors investigated was organized criminal activity in San Francisco of any sort-drug trafficking, chip theft and sales, car thefts, alien smuggling. Even murder, if there was a demonstrably organized conspiracy behind it.

A sign directed him through a gate and along a walk to a doorway and the basement of the Graduate Theological Union. Dante found it either ironic or touching-he’d never made up his mind which-that IHO was housed with the Union. Some of the Union’s vocally Christian primates just had to be appalled by the Institute’s strictly Darwinian view of life. Tight budgets made strange bedfellows.

On a stage, students and a faculty director were rehearsing a drama with song and modern dance that said something about God, man, and the human soul. At a desk alongside the stage, IHO was taking money and checking in attendees-$3.00 for members, $5.00 for non-for Will Dalton’s lecture in the next room on similar subjects from a very different perspective.

Dante laid down five bucks and went into the lecture hall, checking the possibilities for ambush with a professionally careless glance. Behind a lectern and a stand-up mike was a slide-projector screen on a round raised box. Off to the side was a video camera to record the lecture. Several feet behind the lectern and screen, curtains. The wall on the right was a plasterboard partition with a couple of bright watercolors on it; the other three were brick, the windows in the left one recessed and covered with drawn drapes.

Rows of folding chairs in the body of the hall were filling up. In the rear were tables for hawking books, brochures, Institute T-shirts, calendars and the like.

The audience was students and adults ranging from the mid-twenties to old white heads, wearing suits, dresses, sweatshirts and jeans. Dante knew the type from other lectures; most of them were vocal, well spoken, self-possessed. A university crowd, very unlike the students at his community college over twenty years before.

Rosie said he had a better mind than any of them, but Dante always felt inferior in such gatherings. A sham. As if he had come in with a hick grin and mud on his shoes, tugging at a shoulder strap of his Can’t-Bust-Ems.

Anyway, danger points: the curtains behind the lectern; the recessed windows. He casually wandered around behind the lectern. No exit. Raptor would never risk boxing himself into such a dead end. And the window drapes were pulled back.

A shot from outside through the glass? No. Raptor had never endangered innocent bystanders; in that he adhered to the largely abandoned values and traditions of the Mafia when they only killed each other. But Dante was sure that his code could not exempt the dead Moll’s living husband. Dalton just had to be Raptor’s prime-indeed, final-target. Nothing else made sense. And if he was wrong?

Then Tim Flanagan would get a few more belly laughs. Tim had the belly for it.

The windows would be safe enough unless someone closed the drapes so Raptor could slip behind them. Checking them, he caught his own fleeting reflection in one of the panes. Early forties, medium height, an athlete’s body under slacks and jacket, narrow jaw, high cheekbones, black hair generously shot with silver, brown eyes under heavy brows.

He turned away; Dalton had come in with a knot of other scientists; they had paused near the tables.

Dalton hadn’t changed much during the fifteen months he’d been gone-five-eleven, 180, brown eyes, brown hair, still something of the real West about him, very tanned and fit, the brown hair shorter than when he’d left, almost brush-cut, the brown face leaner, harder than before, more closed.