Brian Garfield
The Hit
Chapter One
The noon sun beat down on the road, on me, on the dry desert foothills. The road was narrow blacktop, snaking down by switchbacks toward the plain and the city. In the Jeep I was doing only twenty-five but the wind had a searing, abrasive edge against my face.
I was half stunned with fear: I had just left a meeting at which sentence had been passed on me. You’re not wearing our silks, Crane. Nobody cares what happens to you and the woman. Forty-eight hours to deliver or die.
My numb brain was making images of Joanne when I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw the chrome teeth of a big station wagon bearing down on me from behind. I had been too preoccupied with my own impending execution to notice it before; no telling how long it had been there. He was riding my tail with reckless arrogance; the dusty grille of the car seemed ready to take a bite out of the Jeep. He was a tailgating imbecile, driving with suicidal aggressiveness, not more than ten feet behind my bumper. All the rage and frustration of the past bouts climaxed in my gut; out of sheer malice, I hit the brakes — hard.
The station wagon swerved; I heard the indignant panic-stricken yelp of horn and then the big car wobbled past, just clearing me, with an arch swish of skidding rubber.
Instead of thundering away, the station wagon pulled to the curb. His brake lights dashed angry red and the wagon’s tail went up in the air. It stopped short, the door swung open, and the driver got out.
The road was too narrow to get by him. I pitched to a stop. Suddenly I wanted this stupid, meaningless fight with a total stranger; I felt like a fight, I wanted to kill the son of a bitch.
He was a good-sized man about my age, fair hair and a round boyish face. He looked scared: he wore the expression of a man who was about to burst into tears.
I climbed down from the Jeep. That was when I saw the .32 automatic in his fist, hanging at arm’s length. I stopped, bolt still.
He said, “You’re Simon Crane.”
It wasn’t till then that I recognized him. He might as well have said, You’re the bastard that’s been banging my wife.
He lifted the gun. I had an impulse to burst out in hysterical laughter.
I said, “Okay, Mike.”
Mike Farrell’s mouth worked; his eyes weren’t tracking well. He was as close to the thin borderline of madness as I was. He stood there, jaw working, no sound coming out.
I said, “You must have been staked out back there. This couldn’t be coincidence — you followed me down from up there.”
“Sure.” He got it out between his teeth.
“What for? To shoot me?”
He shook his head. “The gun’s just insurance.” He talked without moving his lips. Ex-cons are easy to spot. They talk in monotones; their body movements are slow and careful, their gestures muffled, expressions immobile, eye movements restricted. Mike had all the earmarks. His face, rigidly composed now, was betrayed by the restless, terrified eyes.
I said, “Insurance for what?”
“Turn around and lean on your hands.”
I glanced at his gun and obeyed, flattening my palms against the hot hood of the Jeep; I had frisked enough of them myself to know how it was done. I was wearing Levi’s and a yellow shirt; there weren’t many places I could conceal a gun. He went over me nervously and stepped back when he was satisfied I wasn’t armed. It was the second time today I’d been frisked.
“You can turn around.”
I straightened and turned. Sweat dripped from my forehead into my eyes. Mike Farrell said, “I got to talk to you. Will you listen?”
Will a dollar buy ten dimes? Mike was the only chance I had to get out from under the guillotine.
What I said was, “You’re holding the gun.”
He kept it pointed straight at me while he backed up to the open door of the station wagon. He took out a handkerchief and wiped the steering wheel, controls, door handles, ashtray; swung the door shut with his hip and came back to me. He walked around to the passenger side of the Jeep and got in.
“Come on. You drive.”
“What about your car?”
“I can’t use it any more — they can trace it to me. Come on, Crane, I need to get under cover.”
I got in. “Where to?”
“Just drive. I’ll tell you where to turn.”
We drove down the narrow snake of a road into the suburbs, hit an avenue and turned toward the city. He refused to talk except to bark directions at me now and then. He had the gun down at his side where outsiders couldn’t see it, but the hammer was back and I had no chance to jump him. Driving under the blistering sun, I was remembering the things Joanne had told me about Mike — that he was terrified but harmless. I wasn’t sure she was right. Prison changed a man’s attitudes toward a lot of things: I had seen enough of them, after they came out. For the weaker ones things had narrowed down to a habitual fight for survival — just staying alive in that cage of hardened cons, making sure nobody stuck a knife between your ribs. It could be like that with Mike: the residue of paranoia, hanging on like prison pallor. Or it could be guilt and the fear of discovery, if he’d done the hit.
Somebody had done the hit, that was clear enough. I had forty-eight hours to find out who. If I didn’t produce I was dead, and so was Joanne — and Mike was the only lead we had.
He told me where to turn. I went through adobe gateposts into a district known as Las Palmas, a onetime high priced residential neighborhood built in the late twenties by market speculators and bootleggers. At the time it had been a suburb, five miles outside the city; by now urban cancer had pushed the city limits ten miles beyond, and Las Palmas squatted forlorn in a sea of cheap stucco development shacks. The wealthy types had moved far up into the foothills, whence Mike and I had just come; half the huge white elephants in Las Palmas were deserted, boarded up — nobody had a use for houses with servants’ quarters any more. It was a good place to hide out.
It was a little cooler under the heavy trees that lined the curved roads. We bumped across potholes in the narrow lanes and went past one abandoned mansion being used as a pad by a troop of hippies; a dozen of them sprawled on the weedy lawn with guitars and joy sticks. Mike pointed out turnings and we picked a clumsy route through places hardly wide enough for the Jeep, swung past a forbidding oleander hedge nine feet high and opaque as a brick wall, and suddenly Mike said, “Hold it.”
I braked to a stop.
“Back up and turn in there.”
I did so, driving into a chuckholed gravel path that cut through the oleanders.
“Park it here.”
We were hidden from the street. He showed his gun and waved me up the narrow broken-flagstone walk toward the house. Once it had been magnificent. The roof was shingled with red half-pipe tiles, chipped and busted. The veranda had a gallery of Moorish arches, overgrown with brush and cactus. An empty oval swimming pool in the yard, rimmed with Mexican porcelains, was full of dead leaves and sand.
An Air Force jet went over with a sound like a long piece of canvas being ripped. Mike walked by me and gestured with his gun. I stepped over the broken glass on the porch and followed him inside, noticing that the warped chipped-paint door scraped across the floor when he pushed, leaving part-circle scratches where it dragged sharp bits of sand and glass across the concrete.
He backed in, holding the gun on me, looked around quickly and beckoned. The airless room was hot, thick with heavy body sweat. Mike, or somebody else, had spent some time in the place recently.
I said, “What happened to Aiello, Mike?”
“I think I’ll ask the questions. Come in here.”