He glided past a pony ride and a little train station with a midget train circulating on a narrow track that wound through a grove of trees. The road emptied onto Los Feliz Boulevard, and he sensed that he had emerged in another part of the city. He drove south as steadily as he could, making it through the traffic signals on the green and turning right when they were red, then correcting his course when he could do it without slowing down. In five minutes he was three miles away and still moving.
He thought about what had happened today. He had been ambushed and attacked twice, and it was time to counterstrike. Judging from the car keys, the clipboard, and the car model, the two men he had just killed had been working for something called Able Security Service as a cover. He tried to guess what the rest of the shooters would do next. They wouldn't fall back to some defensive position. They weren't bodyguards hired to protect somebody. They were killers hired to find him and kill him. They would be out looking for him.
He got onto the Golden State Freeway, merged onto the 134 Freeway going east, and drove hard. He got off at the Lake Avenue exit and turned left at San Pasqual Street. He turned into a long, narrow parking lot that ran behind a row of stores, cruised up the back aisle searching for a parking space, and finally found one. He was in a busy shopping area, and shoppers were constantly leaving their cars or coming back to them, so he had to be careful not to let any of them see what he was doing. He picked up the clipboard from the floor and looked at the papers clipped to it. The sheet said ABLE SECURITY PATROL LOG. He went to the Crown Victoria's trunk, set the clipboard inside, opened his suitcase, pulled out a sport jacket, and put away his gray hooded sweatshirt. He brought the messenger bag to the front, selected two pistols, checked their magazines, and hid them in his coat. He pulled out of the lot and drove out to Lake Avenue, then turned off again.
He skirted the busy streets to stay in the quieter neighborhoods. He made it back to Marengo and studied the houses. He thought about the blue Crown Victoria he was driving. It was one of the reasons why he had suspected the shooters worked for a security company. The car looked like a police car, and they would have wanted to take advantage of that resemblance. It would be the sort of thing that would make some opponents panic, and others do what they were told.
Using the car was probably worth a try if he did it quickly and insistently enough. It was now early afternoon. He had seen Lazaretti once or twice, but he was sure Lazaretti had never noticed him. He lifted his messenger bag onto the passenger seat and found the Justice Department identification wallet he had stolen from Elizabeth Waring in Chicago and put it into his coat pocket.
He pulled in front of Tony Lazaretti's driveway and parked at an angle, blocking it the way cops did. He walked at a brisk pace to the front porch, rang the bell, and knocked loudly at the same time.
The man who came to the door was about twenty-five years old and had the watchful eyes of a store security guard, but he was wearing a black sport coat and a pair of jeans, with neoprene-soled deck shoes on his feet. "May I help you?" He said it with a scowl of contempt: this middle-aged cop, or whatever he was, had no idea who he was bothering.
Schaeffer took out the leather identification wallet with its deeply embossed Department of Justice seal and flipped it open. "Elliot Warren, Department of Justice. I'd like to speak with Mr. Anthony Lazaretti, please."
"What's this about?"
"It's about him not going to a federal prison for the meeting in Arizona last week with a couple hundred Mafia guys who were conspiring to commit murder. Think he'll be interested?"
The young man's face went blank, like a curtain falling to end a play. "Please wait here." He turned and hurried up the staircase in the middle of the foyer. The house was old, with thick wooden fixtures squared off in the California Craftsman style and a large stained-glass window that cast a glow over the first landing. As Schaeffer stood watching the young man disappear, he thought about the risk he was taking. He had never met Tony Lazaretti. But if there was somebody here who had seen him in the old days, Schaeffer would have a problem. He would be caught standing alone in this open foyer, with no escape but through the front door and down the open driveway to the car.
He kept looking up the staircase, then from the foyer where he was to the long hall that led past the staircase to the kitchen and the back of the house. There were wide doorways on either side of the foyer, and he decided he needed to know where they led. He stepped deeper into the house and looked to his right. Beyond the doorway was the formal dining room with a single long table down the center of the room. It shone like the back of a violin. He looked to his left and saw a library. It had floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books. But they weren't books for reading. They were books of the sort that decorators bought by the truckload-big old volumes in leather bindings. There was a big globe on a stand, and a small mahogany table with a copy of the entertainment section of the Los Angeles Times open on it.
He decided that must be where the kid who had come to the door had been stationed when he'd arrived. He lingered in the doorway, looking up the stairs at the second-floor landing. He heard a door shut and footsteps, and a moment later three men appeared at the top of the stairs. Two of them stood at the railing and looked down at him, while the other descended. When Schaeffer had seen Tony Lazaretti years ago, he had looked like what he was-a kid of college age who had been brought up thinking he was a prince, somebody who could never be harmed, never be required to do anything, but would always be in charge. He'd had the look of the Lazarettis, the thick curly hair at the top of his head and the pointed chin at the bottom so he looked like an inverted triangle.
As Lazaretti came down the steps, he said, "Mr. Warren? Or is it Agent Warren?"
"It's Mr. Warren. Can you spare me a few minutes alone, please?" He held up his Justice Department identification wallet, then put it away.
"What's this about?"
"In here?" Schaeffer pointed at the library. "Is this a good place to talk?"
"Yeah, sure," said Lazaretti. "That's fine."
They walked inside, and Lazaretti closed the big wooden door. Schaeffer stepped to the door and flipped the small lever above the handle to lock it. Lazaretti looked puzzled, but seemed not to know what to say.
"Mr. Lazaretti, I understand you were at the meeting in Arizona a week ago."
"I was in Arizona, yes. I wasn't at any meeting. If somebody else happened to be there at the same time, that's just what happens at high-end resorts. I was on the French Riviera when the Cannes film festival was going on, but that doesn't make me an actor."
"When Frank Tosca called for an agreement to help him kill a man he'd been searching for, you voted for it. Since you came back, you hired a team of hit men to go after him."
Lazaretti looked pale, and his forehead seemed to be getting damp. "You've got me mixed up with somebody else. Lazaretti sounds a lot like some other names, especially if you're listening from far away."
Schaeffer took out one of his Beretta pistols and aimed it at Lazaretti's chest. "I just wanted you to know what your mistake was. Some people like to know."
"What? What do you mean?" He instinctively backed away, but bumped against the tall, immovable bookcase behind him.
"I mean I would have left you alone until the end of time." He fired two rounds into Tony Lazaretti's chest, watched him fall, then fired a round through his head.