Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

Dante bought him a late dinner at the old Golden Spike on Columbus Ave, where his dad had said you used to be able to get all the spaghetti you could eat and dago red you could drink for two bucks fifty. No more.

They sat in the back booth with the ancient deer head on the wall, ate pasta, drank wine. Geoff told him about the report.

“We’re taking this a little more seriously than we did before,” he said, slurping minestrone. “The guy was a shooter. He was using a scope, ten-power or better, and target-quality ammo, not something you’d buy off a gun shop shelf.”

“By target-quality I take it you also mean sniper quality?”

“Yeah. Lake City Match M852s, in. 270 caliber. Forensics Ballistics says fired from a Winchester Model 70, the old bolt-action center-fire jobbies that long-range shooters seem to prefer. Plus that particular gun has another great advantage.”

“What’s that?” asked Dante.

“They were manufactured in the tens of thousands. They’re a very common hunting rifle that would excite nobody’s notice during hunting season. October is hunting season.”

“It sure was for him,” said Dante.

They checked the dessert menu, both ordered cappuccino and biscotti. Dante was about to ask the FBI for a favor, always a touchy, usually a demeaning, proposition.

“Tim Flanagan and I worked out a sort of profile of what sort of guy he might be. I’d like to run it by you…”

“You got no standing in this case, Dante, nor does your pal Flanagan, even if he is Homicide. It’s federal, you know.”

Even with Geoff, a certain ration of shit. “Sure, Geoff, I know that. But you can’t blame me for being involved. I was right there when Abramson got it. I think it ties in with a homicide that is Tim’s baby, a woman named-”

“Margaret Dalton-I did my homework. So go ahead.”

Dante ran it down-probably a southerner, probably Vietnam vet, probably a sniper for some special unit, Marine or Army or CIA, probably would have been a mercenary after ’Nam, probably would have drifted into heavy lifting for the mob…

“Were you in Vietnam?” asked Hoskins. He would have been in his teens when that particular brushfire war had ended.

“I was just a kid,” said Dante. “Just a grunt. Shoot and get shot at. But it took me a year or two to get back to normal after they shipped me home. If I could see your computer files on ex-Vietnam, ex-mercs who have kept up their skills-”

Geoff was truly shocked. “You’ve got to be kidding!”

“Just guys fit the profile who have records that might suggest they had gotten involved with organized crime…”

“Jesus Christ, you don’t want much for a plate of spaghetti.” Then he chuckled. “But what the hell?”

A few days later, Dante got his printout. A month after that, fifty-seven names had become three, and on this Friday, the second of December, between the work the city of San Francisco was actually paying him to do, Dante eliminated the last of those. And decided he just wasn’t going to get at Raptor that way.

There was still the enormously complicated world of gun nuts and hand-loaders and shooting enthusiasts, but it was a million-to-one against turning him up there. Tim had been right-it was an appalling task. Raptor had not struck again, and nothing he had done so far was going to expose him. What Dante needed was little dancing men to spell out answers for him like in one of those Sherlock Holmes mysteries on the A amp;E channel.

Fucking Miss Pym had developed into an ever-changing mystery over the months. It was ten in the morning and right now she was on her knees, bent over the bed, arms out wide and twisting the top sheet in her passion as Kosta crouched over her from behind. When he’d exhausted every orifice she had, and all the casual cruelty at his command, she laid him back on the bed to work on him for one last serving of dessert.

Kosta wasn’t sure whether he had corrupted or been corrupted by her. He certainly had uncovered in her a hidden passion for both degradation and domination. It was as if the sixties had returned, when everybody took their sex seriously and orgasm ranked right up there with Zen archery as a topic of serious discussion. He had been struggling with his shipping line then, married to a stern Greek woman whose passion was business, so he’d missed the revolution.

Miss Pym had blasted Moll Dalton right out of his sexual consciousness, made him wish he’d never heard of Moll Dalton, made him glad Moll Dalton was no longer around. Miss Pym knew nothing of Atlas Entertainment business, but she was shrewd in her suggestions for besting his enemies.

Right now she was sprawled sideways across his thighs in utter exhaustion and abandonment, her pale hair lank with sweat.

“Champagne,” he snapped. She leaped up, he watched her bottom wobble-flex across the room. As she went through the open doorway to the hall, he yelled after her, “Hypothetical!”

“Hypothetical” was a new game between them. She kept going without response so that tomorrow he would chastise her for ignoring him. She liked to be chastised. He liked the sixties a lot, even on rerun. But he was not obsessed by Miss Pym.

Oddly enough, his new obsession centered around Dante Stagnaro. He knew it was all projection, the guy was just another fucking cop, for Chrissake; but he couldn’t shake the feeling he had to do something about the man before Stagnaro somehow got into the Atlas Entertainment books.

He couldn’t have Stagnaro taken out, Mr. Prince had spoken. So he had to diminish him as a force. As a man.

The guy’s wife. Do something to her, that would cut his nuts off, geld him. Well, ever since the random thought about screwing her had entered his mind, he hadn’t gotten it out. He doubted he’d have much trouble seducing her, he seldom did with women. But there was that fucking Stagnaro lurking around like a leopard in the bushes.

But he had a plan. That’s why he was here with Miss Pym today. To check out his plan with her. At this sort of thing, she was excellent.

She returned with two fluted glasses and an icy bottle of Cordon Rouge put in the freezer an hour before. Sitting naked and cross-legged on the bed, he stripped the foil and untwisted the wire, gripped the cork as he turned the bottle beneath it. The cork came out with a dull thunk! and no spilled champagne. He poured them each a glass. They tinked.

“All right,” she said, eyes alight. “Your hypothetical.”

“There is a business rival a man is having trouble with.”

“Personal or professional?”

“Both.” He drained his flute, refilled. She drained hers, held it out for more. “His business associates have ruled out physical recourse…”

“So, no direct attack. What does he hold dear?”

Kosta held up a hand, three fingers open, marked off the possibilities. “Job, family, wife. Job, he could be compromised, but it would be difficult. His reputation is good. Even if well done, it might not stick.”

“Family?”

A second finger was folded down. “A son at home, a daughter in her first year at Cal.”

“Berkeley can be a very dangerous place,” murmured Miss Pym, her rather horsy face serious with thought. She licked her lips. They were dry and chapped from the various uses she had been putting them to during the last two hours.

“I believe our businessman was thinking more along the lines of his rival’s wife,” said Kosta.

“You want to fuck somebody’s wife!” she burst out.

“Not me. Hypothetical. And not just fuck. Our hypothetical businessman wants to rape somebody’s wife.”

She was frowning in concentration. “One sort of man would blame the wife…”