Like a carhop with a gun, Michael thrust the .45 through the window into the chest of the driver and without even getting a good look at the hippie behind the wheel, harshly whispered, “What the hell is this about?”
But the hippie behind the wheel was not a hippie.
He was a hood in his forties from Chicago in a bad Beatle wig and an old paisley shirt and tie-dye jeans and a fur vest Sonny Bono might have considered cool in 1966.
Jimmy Nappi was Giancana’s man, a driver on scores mostly, with tiny eyes, a long nose, a wide mouth, and plenty of pockmarks. He was not known as a tough guy, not somebody generally enlisted for killings, though he was a made man, so had killed at least once.
But if Nappi was here — parked just down the street from the “Smith” house, with his hands on the wheel of a van that tried much too hard to look like it belonged to hippies — it could only be for one reason.
No time for discussion; no reason to give Nappi a chance to go for the .38 on the rider’s seat beside him.
Michael buried the snout of the .45 in the hair vest and fired, and all that Sonny Bono fur served well as an impromptu silencer.
Heading around back of the house, Michael again stayed low, 45 in hand. With the Lincoln in the driveway, they would have figured he’d be home. He prayed he was not too late. He climbed over the fence and lowered himself to the cement patio by the pool. The sliding-glass doors onto the kitchen were locked, he knew, but another conventional door was down off the laundry room, and he used his key on it as silently as possible, easing the door open, making only the slightest creak.
Laundry room was empty.
Kitchen, too — just as he’d left it, right down to the dishes in the sink.
Padding through on his crepe soles, he could faintly hear Ed McMahon saying, “Heeeeere’s Johnny,” the audience responding with the usual applause; he’d left the TV on in the rec room, when he left. That might actually help — it would cover him...
In the trashed living room, standing next to the slashed, stuffing-spilling Chesterfield sofa, using a can of red spray paint on the wall, was another Giancana hood playing hippie (in a wig and jeans and Hendrix T-shirt) — Guido Caruso, a big fat-faced fuck who took pleasure in beating on deadbeat welshers, when they were smaller than him, anyway.
Sprayed across one of the abstract green-and-black-and-red-and-white geometric paintings, Guido had written: off the pigs! On the wall over the couch, he had already written heltar [sic] and had just gotten to skel when Michael blew the top of his head off and made another abstract painting on the wall, albeit lacking a frame and heavy on the red.
Michael barreled into the hallway and almost ran into the third “hippie,” this one with a fake beard to go with his Beatle wig and faded striped red-and-blue jeans and an American flag T-shirt — Frankie Inoglia, a sadistic enforcer in the Mad Sam mode. As skinny and wild-eyed as Manson himself, Inoglia had just exited the bedroom where Michael had left Pat not long ago.
Inoglia had a blood-dripping butcher knife in his Playtex-gloved fist, and when he saw Michael coming, he raised the blade high, a pearl of blood flicking off the poised-to-stab point onto Michael’s cheek like a single tear as he shot the intruder in the right kneecap, and — as Inoglia was going down — Michael shot him in the left kneecap, too, then kicked the knife out of the fallen, screaming man’s hand as he passed, heading into the bedroom.
Michael would relive this waking nightmare many times, but it would never be as vivid as in this moment.
The nightstand lamp was switched on, its shade spattered and streaked with red. kill the pigs was fingertip-scrawled in blood on the wall just over the headboard of their four-poster, and Pat, on her back, was slashed to ribbons on the bed itself, the sheets soaked, her black silk pajamas shimmering with the life that had been spilled. He stood beside her and looked down and saw that her throat had been cut, slashed ear to ear. The other wounds — save one, over her heart — were not so deep. They were window dressing, part of the hippie masquerade. The chest stab had killed her, and — judging by the placid expression on her lovely untouched face, eyes closed — in her sleep.
This small saving grace would be for Michael the only thing, in days ahead, that would stave off madness.
He kissed her forehead.
“Goodbye, baby,” he said.
In the hallway, he knelt beside Inoglia, who was still screaming in pain, the faux hippie an overgrown fetus now, grabbing first one ruined kneecap, then another, a process he kept repeating, mixing his own blood with what had already been on the dishwashing gloves he wore.
“She was asleep when you killed her?”
“Fuck you, rat! Fuck you!”
Johnny Carson was getting big laughs in the rec room.
“She was asleep?”
“Yes! Yes! Yes!”
“That’s why I’m doing you this favor,” he said, and shot his wife’s assassin through the left temple, the bullet smacking into the wall on the other side, its kiss puckering the plaster.
The shots and the screams — on the heels of Sid Parham’s paranoia about hippies in the neighborhood — would have the police here soon.
Never looking at his dead wife, he returned to the bloody bedroom and transferred the contents of the overnight bag into a larger suitcase, threw in more clothes, and made room for the briefcase with half a million dollars in it, which he retrieved from under the floorboards in the closet of his study.
From the same hiding place he took his Garand rifle — a souvenir the feds didn’t know he’d hung on to — which was field-stripped into barrel, buttstock, and trigger group, also tucked away were four boxes of .30 ammunition, twenty cartridges each. The parts of the rifle and the small white ammo boxes he wrapped up in various articles of clothing within the suitcase.
In the kitchen he grabbed the rest of his wife’s pill bottle, figuring the sedatives would come in handy. In the bathroom he peed, then checked to see if he had any blood on himself or his clothes, and didn’t. Finally he took a .38 long-barreled Smith & Wesson revolver off the corpse of Inoglia, and left this house, and the woman he had loved for over thirty years, behind.
A white-faced Parham was in the window across the way when Michael pulled out in the Lincoln, suitcase in the backseat, and four cop cars siren-screamed past him on US 89 on his way to the airport.
He had a red-eye to catch.
Nine
Under vaguely yellow lighting, Michael — in the black Banlon sport shirt and gray slacks with a dark blue windbreaker — parked the Lincoln Continental in the Tucson International lot, and got his suitcase out of the trunk.
Six weeks ago, the ’72 Mark IV had been deeded over to “Michael Smith” by WITSEC associate director Shore — a confiscated, luxury, low-mileage number poised to go on a federal auction block, where it would likely now end up again.
Just in case anyone was watching, Michael made a show of locking the automobile, although he would be walking away from what had once been a nine-thousand-dollar ride.
Michael did not relish entering the airport, and taking his red-eye flight, unarmed; but with the rash of skyjackings the last couple years, airport security had been beefed up. With these new metal detectors, and search of carry-on bags, he dared not tote his .45. The gun was in his Samsonite suitcase, along with his field-stripped Garand rifle, various boxes of ammunition, and a briefcase filled with half a million in cash.