Joe Gores: Menaced Assassin

“Just a bodyguard. I’m going to follow you home.”

“I’m too tired to argue.”

They walked out to the now nearly deserted parking lot, Dante with his hand on the butt of his Sig-Sauer. Nothing. He swept his pocket flash under the 4Runner, in the backseat, before letting Dalton get in.

“Lock your doors. I’ll be right behind you.”

The big old rambling house was warm and homey; Dalton obviously had slipped in and turned the heat on even though ducking Dante all day. Homey, but empty. Waiting for the voice it would never again hear, the footfall it would never again feel on its polished hardwood floors. A fire was laid; Will crouched before it, lit the newspaper under the kindling, stood up, brushed off his knees.

“Cognac good, Lieutenant?”

“Cognac is fine.” Dante wandered around the living room, looking at books on the shelves, touching artifacts from Will’s travels. “I saw your folks last month.”

“They told me.”

“They didn’t tell me anything. Not even when I said your life was in danger.” He accepted the brandy snifter from Will’s hand. “Do you think your life’s in danger?”

“No.”

Will reached into the inside pocket of the sports jacket he had worn to his lecture, brought out a 3.5? floppy disk. He laid it on the coffee table in front of the couch where he had been sitting the last time Dante had been in this room.

“There’s the disk that got Moll killed, Lieutenant.”

Dante stood looking down at it, forgotten brandy snifter in hand. “Now you give it to me,” he said bitterly. “If you’d done this before you left, a lot of people would still be alive-”

“Moll wouldn’t. And now you can shut Atlas down. That’s your job, isn’t it, Stagnaro? Organized crime? Not murder?”

“Hard to tell the two apart sometimes,” said Dante.

His beeper went off. Will moved his head slightly, almost as if he had been expecting it.

“The phone is there.”

The police dispatcher said she’d patch Dante through to Tim Flanagan. Tim’s big voice boomed over the phone.

“Gounaris is dead at his tootsie’s place.”

“His tootsie?” Dante’s own voice sounded strange to him.

“Diana Pym. They were gonna have a party, but when she got home from Victoria’s Secret with a lot of fancy underwear without any crotches in it, a fax was waiting for her.” There was

some paper-rattling, then Tim read to him: “‘GO TO MY APARTMENT AND WAIT FOR ME THERE. DO NOT CALL ME AT THE OFFICE. THE POLICE HAVE BEEN HERE AGAIN.’ So she goes there and waits, about an hour ago she gets pissed with waiting and comes back here…”

He stopped. Dante said, “And?”

“Gounaris was here. Strangled with a wire garrote, pulled so tight it almost severed his neck. Then he was draped over an easy chair with his pants off, so he’d be the first thing she saw when she got home.”

“Nasty,” said Dante in his strange voice.

“Typical.” Tim gave his big laugh. “I think he spent a lot of time that way. His office log shows the killer got him up here with a phone call-”

“From Raptor?”

“From me. Musta been a good impersonation, huh?” His braying laugh. “Pym’s takin’ it a little hard, but what the fuck? Maybe Raptor’ll die of old age before he kills us all.”

He hung up. Tim was finally pissed off about Raptor-fifteen months too late. Dante returned his own receiver to its hooks.

“Gounaris is dead. Murdered. With a garrote.”

Will was meeting his eyes. “You want tears?”

Dante began, “If I didn’t know it wasn’t possible…” then trailed off.

“Anything’s possible, Lieutenant,” said Will with sudden decision. “In fact, if I were a betting man…”

Dante grabbed up the phone again, jabbed out the number he knew best. Rosie would still be at Greek Dance, or at coffee afterward. He added the code to activate his phone-machine playback. There was a single call.

“Remember the end of Hamlet,” said the voice, “when everybody’s dead and only Horatio is left to tell the tale?

“… let me speak to the yet unknowing world

How these things came about: so shall you hear

Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts,

Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters,

Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause…

“Just ask me, I’ll tell you. This is Raptor.”

It was Will Dalton’s voice.

Dante automatically pressed the combination to save the tape, hung up. He began in a hushed voice, “But your… the Raptor message after your wife’s… after Moll was murdered…”

“I’d deciphered the disk by then. It told me who was involved in Atlas Entertainment, and I knew they’d murdered her. You’d told me she’d been promiscuous for our whole marriage… I was crazy with grief and love and hate… and guilt. If I’d been there on time she wouldn’t have died. If if if… I had to do something. Had to…” His voice was anguished. “I had all the money coming from Moll’s life insurance to spend, the name Raptor just came to me, so I used it… He was a sort of shorthand… Somebody who could do what I couldn’t do myself…”

Dante remembered giving Dalton his card on that other visit to this house, his card with his unlisted home telephone written on the back. He was still struggling with belief, assimilation.

“But… Tim and I talked to you on the phone. In Kenya. After Jack Lenington was hit…”

“I’d just gotten there the day before.”

“I put you on the plane myself-”

“To L.A. I didn’t fly on to Africa until after I’d killed Lenington.”

“I checked the plane manifests.”

“Kampala, not Nairobi. Uganda, not Kenya.”

Dante hadn’t moved from his place at the phone. He had only to pick it up, call for backup. His gun was on his belt, Dalton-Raptor-was relaxed in the leather easy chair.

“You flew back again to do Spic Madrid?”

“Not mine. Not involved in Moll’s death.” Will was on his feet, suddenly pacing, gesticulating, as if everything he had bottled up inside was bursting out after fifteen months. “I was still in Nairobi, saw a filler about it in the international New York Times, got a priest at a mission down the road from where I was staying to make the phone call.”

“The fucking dog!” Dante exclaimed suddenly. “That was what I missed at your folks’ place! The dog! He was the one at Mae’s Place that disappeared after…”

“I couldn’t leave him there. He’d come to depend on me.”

“Then your folks knew that…”

“That I was back from Africa some months ago, that’s all. What they might have guessed beyond that…”

“The fucking code of the West,” said Dante bitterly.

“The genetic code, more likely,” snapped Will. “My father killed men in the war. He said it never bothered him for a moment. He always felt that’s what soldiers did. I was in a war, too. They’d swatted Moll like a fly. To protect their fucking empire. So I pulled their empire down any way I could.”

“Just like that,” said Dante softly. He’d spent his whole professional life trying to do just that; Dalton had done it in fifteen months. Let me speak to the yet unknowing world… of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts… “Of course you killed a lot of people in the process…”

“People?” Will paced again, gesturing, face distorted. “Yes. Of course. You’re right. They were people, weren’t they? After Lenington I quit. I couldn’t stand it. I’d never known that killing another human being would be so… so hard… ”

“But you got used to it,” said Dante coldly. He was waiting for the wave of hatred, of revulsion for this murderous bastard to hit him, but it hadn’t yet. Maybe now it would.