Joe Gores: Menaced Assassin

“You still have that big black stallion-”

“Mean as ever,” chuckled Tex. Prince was an excellent rider and could control the brute, and the old horse wrangler appreciated it. Most of the horses were for women or kids, but he kept a few feisty ones for guys like Mr. Prince.

“How’s the hip, Tex?”

Tex gunned his shot, jerked his head a little to one side and winked his faded blue right eye as the whiskey hit home. “Better here than up in el Norte, that’s a gut.”

The jukebox was playing, people were dancing. Talk was difficult. They played a game of darts; Prince won honestly, he was always a competitor. Tex said he thought he would turn in.

Restless, Prince drifted down the interior stairs to the main floor, to a shadowy alcove between the two dining rooms where there was always hot coffee. He poured himself a thick white ceramic mug full, drank it black, thinking.

Eddie Ucelli had been hit at the very instant Prince himself was giving him a pair of assignments. Which meant both men were still alive, but, more importantly, the timing couldn’t have been coincidental. Somebody inside the Organization had been sending a message to him. Him. Martin Prince. That fucking Gounaris. Had to be.

Well, there were other hitters around, and tomorrow he would reach out for one of them. Even if it was Christmas.

Laughter and singing and music were coming through the ceiling from the bar above. He heard giggling voices, stepped back further into the shadows. Two women, Anglos, had appeared on the tile patio beyond the windows. Obviously mother and daughter. They began dancing arm in arm to the music, laughing and tossing their heads. The mother was slender, with a deerlike grace. The daughter had a beautiful athlete’s figure and all the right moves, she had to be a professional dancer.

Even for a man like Prince it was a magic moment. He watched briefly, then slipped away so they wouldn’t know they had been spied upon.

He walked out into the sandy parking area. With no moon, the stars were huge and bright and close. He had a sense of impending adventure, as if something momentous was coming in his life. The lot was filled with cars, some rentals, some the cars of Americans who had houses down here. One was a battered yellow bug. His first car had been a VW Beetle. A long time ago.

He walked down the slanted walk toward the beach. The wind was cold on his face, sand gritted against his teeth. He stood facing the wind as it whistled up off the water, stood thick and blocky against it, tasting it, feeling its power, letting it feel his power, his immovability.

Out at the end of the dock was the three-pole tripod with its block and tackle, waiting patiently for its next upside-down marlin with glazing eyes and fading colors. Even on the dock, Prince could feel the thud and roar of the surf through the soles of his shoes.

He heard Tex’s uneven footsteps on the dock behind him, turned. In the starlight, he could just make out the tall Texan’s lanky form. He chuckled.

“I thought you were off to bed, Tex.”

Tex didn’t answer until he had come up within a couple of feet of Mr. Prince. He wasn’t Tex.

“Look at this,” the man who wasn’t Tex suggested.

Mr. Prince looked down involuntarily. The man’s hand, itself indistinct, held a huge glittering knife that faintly caught the starlight.

As Prince’s eyes locked on it, widened, the hand slid the wide, heavy blade into Prince’s gut. He felt slippery cold, felt the guard thump on his stomach, knew belatedly that the whole ten-inch blade was inside his thick trunk.

The hand ripped the blade upward, to his sternum. The man’s eyes watched his face with interest; they seemed to gather light from the darkness. He pulled out the blade, stepped back.

Prince’s hands couldn’t quite keep his own hot, steaming, jumbled intestines inside him; they spilled out over his wrists.

“I… they… mama… ”

He was a fetus lying on his side on the rough spray-wet planks. His legs jerked and kicked. A great darkness was behind his eyes, a great terror… He knew…

“ Ave Maria… piena di grazia… ” His sweet mother’s prayer, to the sweet Virgin… it was important. “ Il signore e teco… tu… ” He couldn’t hang on. He was going into fatal shock. “Sei… benedetta… ”

A final sigh… the soul leaving the body…

“What soul?” said the man who wasn’t Tex. He spat into the sand, wiped his knife on Prince’s shirt, sheathed it. Then he bent and grabbed Prince’s ankles, and with no trace of a limp began dragging the dead man along the dock.

It was the day after Christmas, no work for most because the holiday had fallen on a Sunday, but Dante was in his office reading the reports of the shooting attempt. He had a small neat square of bandage on his cheek where the chip of concrete had struck him; rage still coiled through him like a snake.

A. 38, a wimp’s gun in this era of Glocks, Magnums, and hypervelocity bullets. But it could kill you just as dead. Would have, if the guy had been any kind of a shot. No cars reported stolen in the appropriate time frame. No leads, no suspects, no witnesses who had seen the car racing away, no clues, no evidence, no nothing…

The lousy shooting took Raptor out of it, even if the Death Valley note hadn’t: I DO NOT KILL MY OWN KIND. No, had Raptor been behind the. 38, he and Rosie would now be dead.

Which meant Prince had hired himself a new shooter. Well, Dante was going to get on a plane to Vegas, go to the Xanadu, go up to that motherfucker’s suite, and tear his guts out.

The door opened and Tim’s stomach came in followed not too closely by Tim. He ambled over to one of the desks and hoisted his big buns up on the edge of it with a sigh.

“Way I ate yesterday, they oughta let me hibernate for a week or so,” he said. “I got a little something for you.”

Dante tensed up. He knew that tone of voice.

“Martin Prince. Christmas Eve. At a little fishing hotel in Baja called Hotel Pez Grande. Somebody gutted him like a fucking shark and hung him upside down by his ankles off one of those big-game-fish block-and-tackle arrangements. Guess a couple of early-rising honeymooners sort of lost their breakfasts when they found him.”

Tear his guts out. All of Dante’s theories were turned upside down once again. And when he got home…

“Our text today is from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea,” said the obvious English lit professor’s voice on his answering machine. “‘Those who had caught sharks had taken them to the shark factory on the other side of the cove where they were hoisted on a block and tackle, their livers removed, their fins cut off and their hides skinned out and their flesh cut into strips for salting.’ There will be a spot quiz on the meaning of this passage in the morning.”

Then the man laughed a whinnying English-professor sort of laugh, and hung up.

Well, sir, talk about your savagery! I let myself get carried away in the matter of Mr. Prince, don’t I? Yet what am I to do? I plot brilliantly to arrange an unexpected tete-a-tete with that capo di tutti i capi where I have surprise on my side and a weapon besides, and he has only empty hands. When I have it, I indulge myself. Is this fair — is this sporting? No. But it is prudent. I wish to gaff the shark, not be his meal.