Streetlights cast a pale, garish light on the parked cars and the row houses with their little stoops and their flowerpots on second-floor windowsills. This neighborhood was much like home. Here they felt comfortable in a way they never would in the sprawling suburbs with huge lawns and tree-shaded dark places and the winding little lanes that went nowhere in particular.
Tony checked his watch. Thirty minutes or so to wait. Vinnie fondled the shotgun. Tony adjusted the rearview mirror and his testicles and settled lower in his seat.
Twenty-six minutes later a yellow cab slowly passed. Tony watched in the driver’s door mirror as the brake lights came on and the cab drifted to a stop in the middle of the block.
“It’s them,” he said as he started the engine. “Remember, not the woman.”
“Yeah. I’ll remember.”
Vinnie got out of the car and eased the door closed until the latch caught. He held the shotgun low against his right leg, almost behind it, and waited.
Tony watched a man and a woman get out of the cab and the cab get under way. Vinnie started across the street.
No one else on the street. The wind was beginning to pick up and the temperature was dropping. Tony turned in the seat and watched Vinnie cross the street and stride toward the couple, now standing on the stoop, the woman digging in her purse.
Vinnie stopped on the sidewalk fifteen feet away from the couple, raised the shotgun, and as the man turned slightly toward him, fired.
The man sagged backward. Vinnie shot him again as he was falling. The victim fell to the sidewalk, beside the stoop. Vinnie stepped around the stoop and shot him three more times on the ground.
The shotgun blasts were high-pitched cracks, loud even here. The woman stood on the stoop, watching.
A pause, then one more shot, a deeper note.
Now Vinnie was walking this way, replacing the .45 in his shoulder holster, the shotgun held vertically against his left leg.
Anselmo eased the car out of its parking place and waited.
Vinnie Pioche just walked. Lights were coming on, windows opening, a few heads popping out. He didn’t look up. He opened the car door and took his seat, and Tony drove away, in no hurry at all.
Just before he turned the corner. Tony Anselmo glanced in the driver’s door mirror. The woman was unlocking the door to her town house and looking down off the stoop, down toward the dead man. Well, she had been paid enough and she knew it was coming.
CHAPTER TWO
On the flight from Dallas-Fort Worth, Henry Charon sat in a window seat and spent most of his time watching the landscape below and the shadows cast by cumulus clouds. Sitting in the aisle seat, a young lawyer with blow-dried hair and gold cufflinks occupied himself by studying legal documents. He had glanced at Charon when he seated himself, then forgotten about him.
Most people paid little attention to Henry Charon. He liked it that way. People had been looking around and over and through him all his life. Of medium height, with slender, ropey muscles unprotected by the fat layers that encased most other forty-year-old men, Henry Charon lacked even one distinguishing physical feature to attract the eye. As a boy he had been the quiet child teachers forgot about and girls never saw, the youngster who sat and watched others play the recess games. One teacher who did notice him those many years ago had labeled him mildly retarded, an unintentional tribute to the protective shell that, even then, Henry Charon had drawn around himself.
He was not retarded. Far from it. Henry Charon was of above-average intelligence and he was a gifted observer. Most of his fellow humans, he had noted long ago, were curiously fascinated by the trivial and banal. Most people, Henry Charon had concluded years ago, were just plain boring.
Although the lawyer in the aisle seat had ignored his companion, Charon surveyed him carefully. Had he been asked, he could have described the young attorney’s attire right down to the design on his cufflinks and the fact that the end of one shoelace was missing its plastic protector.
He had also catalogued the lawyer’s face and would recognize him again if he saw him anywhere. This was a skill Charon worked diligently to perfect. He was a hunter of men, and faces were his stock in trade.
He hadn’t always been in this line of work, of course, and as he automatically scanned the faces around him and committed them to memory, in one corner of his mind he mused on that fact.
He had grown up on a hard-scrabble ranch in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. His mother had died when he was three and his father had died when he was twenty-four. The only child, Charon inherited the family place. Weeks would pass without his seeing another person. He did the minimum of work on the ranch, tended the cattle when he had to, and hunted all the rest of the time, in season and out.
Since he was twelve years old Henry Charon had hunted all year long. He had never been caught by conservation officers although he had been suspected and they had tried.
Sagging cattle prices in the late ’70s and a thrown rod in the engine of his old pickup changed his life. A banker in Santa Fe laid reality on the table. Unless he devised a way to earn additional income Charon was eventually going to lose the ranch. That fall Henry Charon became a hunting guide. He advertised in the Los Angeles and Dallas newspapers and had so many responses he turned people away.
In spite of his taciturn manner and introspective personality, Henry Charon enjoyed immediate success at his new venture. His gentlemen nimrods always saw trophy animals, sometimes several of them. When one of the corporate captains with his shiny, expensive new rifle needed a little help bringing down his deer or elk, the crack of Charon’s .30–30 was usually unnoticed amid the magnum blasts. Stories of successful hunts spread quickly through the boardrooms and country clubs of Texas and Southern California. Charon jacked his rates from merely high to outrageous and was still booked for years in advance.
The event that changed his life came in 1984, on the evening before the last day of elk season, as he drank coffee around the campfire with his client, who this year had come alone and paid without quibble the entire fee for a party of four. That was the client’s third season.
The client was looking for someone to kill a man. He didn’t state it baldly but that was the drift of the conversation. He didn’t ask Charon to undertake the chore, yet somehow in the oblique conversation it became unmistakable that the demise of a certain board member at the client’s savings and loan would be worth fifty thousand dollars cash, no questions asked.
The client got his elk the next morning and Charon had him on the plane in Santa Fe by six p.m.
Intrigued, Henry Charon thought about it for a week. Really, when one thought about it objectively, it was hunting and hunting was the one thing that he was extraordinarily good at. Finally he packed a canvas bag and headed for Texas.
The whole thing was ridiculously easy. Three days of observation established that the quarry always took the same route to work in his black BMW sedan. Charon went home. From a closet he selected a rifle that one of his clients from the year before had brought along for a backup gun and had left behind.
Three mornings later in Arlington, Texas, the quarry died instantly from a bullet in the head as he drove to work. The police investigation established that the shot must have been fired from a salvage yard almost a hundred and fifty yards away as the victim’s car waited at a traffic light. There were no witnesses. A careful search of the salvage yard turned up no clues. Asked to assist, the FBI identified several dozen ex-military snipers as possible suspects. These men were all discreetly questioned and their alibis checked, to no avail. The crime remained unsolved.
Two weeks later the money arrived at the ranch in the Sangre de Cristo in a cardboard box, mailed first class without a return address.