Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

“Not this man,” said Kosta.

She met his gaze. “But… should he and his wife get an endless series of naughty phone calls afterwards, spelling out in precise detail exactly what was done, and how…”

“Excellent, Miss Pym!” Kosta cried. He fell silent, picturing it, all of it, his gaze turned inward.

“May I watch, then?” she asked, her eyes gleaming like a wolfs by torchlight.

“All of this is hypothetical, remember?”

“I insist you describe it to me afterwards, in detail.”

“Why-since it’s hypothetical?” he asked. She smiled almost shyly, and put her hand between her own legs. “Yes, of course.” The thought of watching her while he told her about it was exciting to him.

“Will it be soon?”

“Soon.” He could have told her tonight but didn’t.

His member was stiffening at the thought of what he would do tonight. Miss Pym gave a low throaty laugh and tossed aside her champagne flute to reach greedily for Kosta’s flute.

Martin Prince was getting a massage also, but it wasn’t sexual. The masseur gently pummeling him at the Xanadu’s health club was a black ex-NFL linebacker who had blown out his knee in a divisional game against Dallas three years before.

“A little on the backs of the legs if you could, Troy.”

Troy laughed and bobbed his head. “Overdid it on the thigh-curling machine today, Mr. Prince.”

“I can’t hide anything from you, Troy.”

“What I’m here for, Mr. Prince. What I’m here for.”

Prince relaxed, let his mind drift.

Half his Family’s income was legitimate these days; companies like Atlas Entertainment gotten for money-laundering purposes had proved to be income-producers in their legitimate guise. There would be more money to launder in the new year also, with the upsurge in heroin, dust and crank usage. The Latinos had no foothold in those areas.

Nothing more on the Gideon Abramson matter, and it had been two months. Myra had called to tell him that Gounaris had gone to Gideon’s wake or whatever the Jews called it, after Prince’s strict orders not to. Significant. But since no Family people had been there, Atlas Entertainment hadn’t been compromised.

But even so, now that Gideon was no longer around to keep him in line, Gounaris was a loose cannon. The cop, Stagnaro, less of a one. But still bothersome. Sounded like he was smart and got on good with the feds. Maybe… maybe he was a problem Prince didn’t want around any more. After the first of the year he’d have to make hard decisions about both of them.

Meanwhile, in another two weeks he would be in Hermosillo, dove hunting. Where he went, there were no bag limits. You stepped out of the plane, threw fifty pairs of sneakers on the blacktop beside the plane, local kids rushed in to grab them. Then you killed until your shotgun felt red-hot. Fifty, seventy-five, a hundred a day-it didn’t matter. The kids, in return for those sneakers, flushed the live birds, collected the dead ones. He went every year, he loved it. Maybe he’d buy a new shotgun for it.

Then, La Paz to meet the new governor of Baja, pay his respects. His seventy-eight-foot powerboat Tosca would take him from La Paz to the little sport-fishing hotel Pez Grande, forty miles north of Cabo, where he always spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s fucking and fishing while Tosca waited for him at Cabo. Last year he’d boated a record blue, had made the sports section of the LA. Times standing in front of his huge strung-up fish with Tosca in the background.

Time to send Red Grant to L.A. to make sure the boat was ready and then take it to Cabo as he did each year.

Finally, back to Vegas the first week of January to start the new year of work. Maybe he should make those hard decisions now, so his holiday season would be a carefree one. With the shift in emphasis, maybe this would be the last time he’d have to resort to such old-fashioned remedies…

His mind drifted off as Troy pummeled gently away.

It was 10:00 p.m. and Greenwich Street slanting down the side of Telegraph Hill was silent and deserted. The night was clear, cold. Kosta, dressed in black and with a black ski mask rolled up on his head like a Navy watch cap, was waiting in the deeply shadowed entryway of the three-unit apartment building uphill from the Stagnaro house. Stagnaro rented this building’s garage for Rosa from the Chinese landlord, street-parked himself.

Kosta had broken the bulb over the inset door so it was dark. If anyone entered or exited the building, he would abort, but everybody was in for the night. Lights in the Stagnaro house, too. The boy, Tony, home studying. On Monday nights Rosa was out until ten, so Stagnaro caught up on paperwork at the Hall of Justice. Got home an hour after she did, steady as clockwork. A devoted husband.

Which was why this would work.

A car turned uphill from Stockton; Kosta scrunched back a little deeper in the inset doorway when the turn signal went on. It was Rosa. He felt her in his groin. He pulled down the ski mask to cover his face.

Her lights swept across the entryway as she turned in at the garage of the building where Kosta waited, but their probing eyes couldn’t quite reach into his angle of wall and door. She stopped the car crosswise over the sidewalk, killed lights and motor as she took her keys to unlock the garage door.

Kosta suddenly realized he really wanted to fuck her, not just to take Stagnaro out of the equation, but because he wanted to rip her panties off and open her legs cruelly wide and…

She fumbled her key into the garage lock, turned it. He tensed. When she pulled the counterweighted overhead door open, he would move. He had rehearsed it in his mind a thousand times.

Dart forward, shove her into the garage, pull the door shut. Leave the car where it was, on these San Francisco hills where parking was at a premium, many residents left their cars across the sidewalks all night.

Thirty minutes of doing anything he wanted to her.

The door creaked up. Now!

And Kosta Gounaris slammed himself back into the blackness of his little alcove.

A car coming down Greenwich from Grant had stopped behind Rosa’s. The driver called across to her through the open window.

“You leave your car there like that, lady, I’m gonna have to ticket it.”

“You’re home early!” exclaimed Rosa in delight.

“Just wanted a little extra time with you,” said Dante. “I’ll go find a place to park.”

Kosta stayed crammed back in his little triangle of darkness. The fucking bastard, somehow he’d known! Had known, had come home early.

Kosta watched Stagnaro’s taillights disappear down the hill, watched Rosa, unaware, drive her car into the garage.

What if Stagnaro’s intuition went further, centered on him as his own fucking obsessions had centered on Stagnaro, gotten him into this mess? Maybe he needed another hypothetical with Miss Pym. Maybe he needed to kill Stagnaro no matter what Mr. Prince said.

“It ain’t gonna kill you, suck my dick a little make it hard,” Eddie said to Mae in an almost plaintive voice.

“He’s gonna call any minute,” she said. She was astride him in her queen-size bed upstairs over Mae’s Place, both of them nude. “He said he’d call about one.”

“But afterwards,” insisted Eddie.

“Afterwards you won’t need it,” said Mae with a wink.

Oh, she’d given plenty of head in her day, nobody in her line of work hadn’t, it just had never been her favorite fuck.

The phone rang. “Yessir, Don Enzo, he’s right here.”

She handed it to Eddie, took his flaccid cock in her hand. It was pointing at her bush like a flabby little sea slug.

“Eddie,” said Eddie into the phone.

He listened to the squawks from the other end of the line. Mae began flexing her fingers expertly. Eddie put his hand over the phone mouthpiece.