“Come in,” called Buenadella, and Dr. Beiny walked in, looking disgruntled and sleepy. But that was the way he always looked—except for those moments when he’d got himself in deep water again, when he would look wide awake and terrified.
Calesian said, “How is he?”
“Breathing,” the doctor said. “That’s about all.”
“What about the finger?”
Dr. Beiny looked puzzled. “What finger?”
“You’re supposed to take one off.”
The doctor looked to Buenadella, and Buenadella said, “I told him not to, Hal.”
Mutiny? Calesian said, “What the hell for?”
“He said it was too dangerous, the guy could die of shock maybe. And we don’t know where Parker is, how to even send the thing to him.”
The pleading note in Buenadella’s voice reassured Calesian; not quite a mutiny. And it was true they didn’t know where Parker was, or how to get in touch with him. Messages had been left at Al Lozini’s house, and with Jack Walters and Nate Simms, but so far the guy hadn’t popped to the surface anywhere. Maybe he wouldn’t, maybe he’d had enough and just ran away. Calesian tried to suit that action to his memory of Parker, and as time went on, it seemed to him more and more likely that a run-out was just what Parker had done. So, magnanimously, he told Dutch and the doctor both, “That’s okay, then. We’ll leave the guy alone for now. But, Doctor, if we hear from Parker I want you on tap. I want you to get over here with your little saw double fast.”
“Whatever you say.”
Buenadella said, “But what if it kills him?”
”After tomorrow,” Calesian said, “we don’t need him alive anyway.”
“I don’t want to hear that,” Dr. Beiny said. He was suddenly in a nervous hurry. “I’m going home,” he said. “If you need me. call me and I’ll come right back.”
Calesian gave him a mocking smile. “Good of you to make house calls, Doctor,” he said.
Beiny bowed himself out, closing the door behind him, and Dutch said, “You figure to kill him, don’t you?”
Thinking the doctor was meant. Calesian frowned at Dutch and said, “What? What for?”
“You keep saying we don’t need him alive after tomorrow.”
“Oh, Green. Well, what the hell, he’s dead already, isn’t he? If it wasn’t for our doctor, he’d be dead a long time ago.”
“He’s alive, Hal.”
“Not if nobody takes care of him,” Calesian said. “Besides, we don’t have to kill him. All we have to do is pick him up out of that bed, put him in a car, and drive him out of town. Leave him beside the road, the way he and Parker left poor Mike Abadandi. Mike died, didn’t he?”
“A lot of people are dying,” Buenadella said gloomily. “And where the hell is Frankie Faran?”
“Under a rock,” Calesian said. “He’s deep in hiding, a bottle and some broad. Don’t you worry about Frank Faran, that’s one guy that runs when he sees the whites of their eyes.”
“He should have said something.” Buenadella fidgeted with papers and pencils on his desk. “He shouldn’t just run away like that.”
“Relax,” Calesian told him. “We’re on top of it. Tomorrow’s the election, and then it’s all over.”
“I wish it was Wednesday,” Buenadella said.
Calesian laughed. He wished the same thing, but he couldn’t admit that to Dutch. So he laughed, and condescendingly said, “Poor old Dutch,” and walked over to gaze in easy unconcern out the French doors at the floodlit lawn. He looked up toward the sky, but the bright lights kept him from seeing anything but blackness. He kept looking up anyway, his stance deliberately carefree as he gazed upward as though watching a milk-white full moon ride across the sky.
Forty three
It was the night of the new moon: no moon. Earlier in the evening a pencil-line arc of white had denned the lightless moon’s location in the sky, but by eleven-thirty that line had narrowed to nothing. Stars shimmered in the heat haze, surrounded by black sky.
State Highway 219, angling northwest out of the city, was as dark and unseeable as the pine woods through which it cut. A man walking along the road would have had to guide himself by what was under his feet—the hardness of concrete, the rattle of gravel, the yielding texture of dirt—rather than what was in front of his eyes; except when an automobile would come along, following its own headlights through the dark.
At quarter past eleven a recently stolen Mercury Montego drove by, northbound, driven by Mike Carlow, with Stan Devers beside him and Wycza spread out on the back seat. Ten minutes later Nick Dalesia followed, with Hurley and Mackey both next to him in the front seat of their just-stolen Plymouth Fury. Occasional cars passed them southbound, but they overtook no one else going north.
Seven miles north of the Tyler city line, in a blaze of red and yellow neon that kept the night slightly at bay, was a rambling two-story white clapboard farmhouse now operating under different management. The sign out by the road that said
TONY FLORIO’S
R
I
V
I
E
R
A
Dining — Dancing
Appearing Nitely
Paul Patrick
and
The Heat Exchange
might have been airlifted by helicopter directly from the Strip in Las Vegas. The pine trees visible across the road in the sign’s glow looked unreal, a clumsy stage setting, as though the sign had a greater vitality and truth than they, and had overwhelmed them.
Monday was a good night at Tony Florio’s Riviera; in fact, every night was a good night there. The blacktop parking lot out behind the main building was over half full when, at twenty past eleven, the Plymouth drove in and joined the Mercury already parked there.
Inside, Tony Florio himself was on hand to greet his regular guests and to give a smile and a friendly word to any passing transient who recognized him. A one-time light-heavyweight contender, Florio’s body had grown rounder and bulkier since the days when he’d made his living in the ring, but the pockmarked square-jawed face hadn’t changed much at all, and with the steady secret use of hair dye, the mass of tight curly black hair cascading over his forehead was just the same as it had been in the days when it was the trademark used to identify Tony Florio by all the sports-page cartoonists. Florio’s eyes were clear, his handshake strong, his manner expansive and confident, and so far as most of his customers knew, this was Tony Florio’s own place, set up and paid for out of the money he’d earned during his years as a professional boxer. Very few people knew that Florio, like most professional boxers, had been in his heyday nothing but a commodity, pieces of him owned by individuals and groups from all over, every fight purse being sliced up a hundred different ways, and with the federal government the first in line. Whatever had been left in those days Florio had spent himself, at once, in places very like this Riviera.
But what difference did it make who owned the place, so long as it was fun to go? And for the older male patrons, Tony Florio was still a recognizable name, and to shake his hand was a pleasure of a kind not often available in a backwater like Tyler.
When Dalesia and Hurley and Mackey walked in, Florio looked them over from his casual spot near the headwaiter and did a saloonkeeper’s rapid fix on them: They were strangers, new to this place. They didn’t give the impression of being local citizens, so they were more likely to be traveling men, passing through town and wanting an evening’s entertainment. They would have a few hundred on them, but they would neither make nor break the bank. It was possible that a cabdriver in town had steered them out here for a late dinner in the main dining room—called, obscurely, The Spa—but not likely. They were definitely not the type for The Corral, where younger local couples danced to the rock music of The Heat Exchange. Were they for upstairs? If so, they would have a card with them, from one of the six desk clerks, nine bartenders, and seven cabdrivers in town whose judgment Florio trusted.