The thing was, he had made some mistakes. Maybe a lot of mistakes. Maybe the worst of them was tipping his hand to that Keating woman. But who knew there was going to be a shooting? If it hadn't been for that— There was no point in thinking in that direction; it had happened, and the shit had hit the fan. There was a time to cut your losses, and it was getting close to that time.
"I could just keep on driving like you said, Danny," Joel called, "but the driving's pretty hairy. Why don't I just park for a while?"
"Park, park!" Danny barked. "What do I care if you park? Just shut up, will you?" He looked around. They were on Wilshire, in the middle of the Miracle Mile, and there were very few cars in sight in the driving rain. Danny realized it wasn't just the weather; my God, it's still Christmas weekend! He wrenched his thoughts back. Cut your losses. How? He had a little time, he realized; this Christmas stuff wasn't a bad thing, because no business was being done anywhere. If the scam was irreparably damaged it would be a day or two before it could be felt. And a lot could be done in a day.
If you had the cash.
"Joel," he yelled. "Head for the freeway."
"Sure thing, Danny. Are we going home?"
"No, we're not going home! Just shut up a minute." He was thumbing through his private address book for a number he had never really intended to use. "Yeah, okay, here it is. Out Brentwood way. And move it, you hear me?"
The security was everything that Danny's own pretended to be and was not. The gate across the driveway had the same voice communications and electric lock as his own. It also had more. It had a closed-circuit television system— no, it had two of them! Two separate cameras! One peered inside the car while the other swiveled down to check the license number. A voice said something, and Danny gave his name to the air.
There was no answer, but after a moment the gate slid into its housing to let them in. Watching everything, it was not lost on Danny that four rows of tire spikes retracted themselves into metal plates on the roadway at the same time. Now, that was security. You could break through the gate, maybe. But you couldn't get much farther.
But what a house! Danny wrinkled his nose at the simple ranch house that appeared at the bend in the driveway—a two-bedroomer, one fifty, one seventy-five tops. It wasn't until he was inside the building that he realized this could not be Boyma's home. A place for admitting visitors, maybe, especially visitors Boyma didn't specially want. No doubt the place where Boyma actually lived lay farther within the estate, and no doubt Danny Deere was never going to see it.
No one frisked him, but the man who let him into the living room did a good job of looking him over. He was kept waiting for twenty minutes, then admitted to what had obviously been built as one of the bedrooms and was now Boyma's office. The mobster was behind a desk, but not sitting down; he was standing, seesawing up and down on his toes, his hands clasped behind him. "You saved me a trip, Deere," he said approvingly. "That's nice, for a friend."
"You were coming to see me?" Danny wet his lips. "Oh, about my source into that committee? Well, that one dried up, but I, uh, I'm working on a new one. What I came for, I want to borrow some money."
"Oh, you want money?" Boyma nodded, playing with the zipper of his maroon jogging suit. "How much?"
"A lot, Mr. Boyma," Danny said. His lips were very dry and he looked longingly at the wet bar at the side of the room. "Maybe as much as half a million dollars." It was easier to say than he expected it to be, but still—half a million dollars! He had never thought of asking anybody for that kind of money before.
"You got big ideas," Boyma said, letting go of his zipper. "You know what that would cost you? I got to go for ten points, you see."
"Ten per cent a week?" Danny yelped.
"It's inflation, Deere. You heard of inflation. I could put the money in the bank and get what we used to get on the street. Not counting you're a bad risk. First there's your guys shooting women—"
"No, Jesus, really, Mr. Boyma! I had nothing to do with that!"
"—then there's this other thing. I wanted to be friendly, Deere, but look what my friends found in that joint of yours." He opened a drawer and passed over a white flyer, letter-size paper, with a picture of the very condominium that blighted Danny's life every morning he looked out the window.
"Jesus, Mr. Boyma, I didn't know that was yours," he said, rubbing his throat.
"Nice little circular, right? But the units haven't been moving the way they ought to be, and what I found in that place of yours was this one. Somebody stole like two hundred of them and fixed them up, see?"
He passed over another, identical circular, but someone had mimeographed over it in green ink. It was now an underwater scene. Green fishes were swimming in and out of the upper stories, and wavy green lines overhead told the story. Across the bottom, in the same blurred green ink, a legend read: Don't you know IT'S OVER?
"I didn't know you were in it," Danny said desperately.
"Oh, yeah, I'm in it. I'm in it twenty-six million dollars worth, Deere."
"I'm sorry. Look! I'll go right down to the ashram now and tell them to lay off—"
"You won't have to do that, Deere, because I already had my boys put them out of business. No. You can forget about them. What we're talking about now is you. You're going to quit depressing the real-estate market. It isn't good for business, Deere, and it isn't good for you personally."
When natural gas is found with oil in remote parts, it is often flared off in immense, permanent flames. The only way to save the energy is to freeze the gas to -260° F and ship it as Liquid Natural Gas, or LNG, to where it can be used. The first LNG plant was built in Cleveland, Ohio, and in 1944 the storage tanks turned brittle from the extreme cold. They cracked. The liquid gas spread quickly into gutters, sewers and cellars. Eventually it reached a flame. The firestorm that followed cremated 128 people and incinerated three hundred acres of the city of Cleveland. The present LNG plants are very much better constructed than that in 1944. They are also very much larger.
Sunday, December 27th. 7:00 PM.
It was not only gritty, grimy weather, it was a gritty and grimy world, and how suddenly it had become that way! Rainy Keating pushed the vacuum cleaner over the rug, with one eye on the window, and sometimes one eye on the telephone, and her thoughts grimier and grittier than anything else around. It was over an hour since Tib had called to say that he was coming over. She, wished he would get there. It was not a reasonable wish, because she only had to look out the window to see what was keeping him. But she wished. Failing that, she wished the phone would ring, even if it was only Tinker. But not even Tinker had called her that evening.
Rainy hadn't known Myrna Licht at all, really. Not as a human being, anyway. Only as a subject for offhand gossip, like any other of Tommy Pedigrue's girls. And then, when the shooting happened, she had been much too astonished to feel anything for the young woman whose life had been terminated. It was like any prime-time cop show. It was not a thing that happened to real people. It was a TV series, full of uniformed police and plainclothes detectives and ambulance orderlies and all sorts of stock characters from the casting offices. There had been no sense of personal involvement. Certainly none of fear—though the murderer obviously was not going to give any further trouble, with that black man sitting on him.