Payback (27 page)

Well … that was that.

He stood for a moment and peered around the path, observing the beauty of the pine-covered forest and the swift acrobatics of a red-breasted bird. He grabbed another moment just to breathe in the air of the exceptional morning. Then he shrugged and rode off.

***

They got back to the Jeep again and headed down the silent pine-bordered road, made the turn at Saguaro, and looked for an opening to take them to the sea. About three klicks farther, beyond Billy's villa, the road went flat again and skimmed along a beach. They parked and made their way over huge white boulders to a white strip of sand.

Mack said, “We should've fought the Spanish Civil War.”

“You like the turf,” Mitchell said.

“Beats hell out of Nam. You could fight, take a little time off, take a swim.…” Mack picked some stones up and tossed them at the sea. They were heading in the general direction of Billy's. There was no one on the beach.

“Thing is …” Mitchell said, “I
still
don't know what I'm doing.”

Mack looked at him. “I thought you were fighting for your company. Protecting the Allegedly Innocent.”

“No, I mean
doing
,” Mitchell said. “Specifically. Practically.”

“Oh.” Mack peppered at the sea again. “That. Well … offhand … I'd say the battle plan's a bushwhack—isn't it? We wouldn't want to handle them in the house. There'd be guns there. Goons. Gizmos. Shit we wouldn't know about—right?”

“Okay. Pretty much what I was thinking,” Mitchell said. “Keep going.”

“We come back when it's darker,” Mack said. “We assume for the moment they'll be watering in town. We jump them on the road. Make a barricade with the Jeep and then—”

“What?” Mitchell said. “
Then
what?”

“We kill 'em.”

“Short of that.”

“Short of that … they kill us.”

“Well … I'd like to widen our options,” Mitchell said.

They continued in silence. He glanced up ahead to where the rockline veered again and angled to the sea. Climbing to the top of it, they saw what they were in for: the beach disappeared; the flat sheet of water made a bed against the rocks, very shallow, very clear. They could see Billy's wall, like the walls of some fortified castle on the hill. On the opposite horizon, a solitary sailboat scudded on the breeze.

They sat on a boulder now, shucking their boots off and squinting in the glare.

Mack said rhetorically, “
What
other options?”

“I don't know,” Mitchell said.

“I do,” Mack said. “There's the quick and the dead, man, and nothing in between.”

He handled the Mag again, switching it over from his boot to his belt.

“There's jail,” Mitchell said.

Mack looked at him ironically. “Yeah. So there is:”

“Billy—” Mitchell switched the .38 to his sweater. “What do you think he'd get?”

“He'd get F. Lee Bailey.”

Mitchell laughed. “I guess you're right.”

They started wading through the cove, concentrating only on the motion and the shock.

“Fucking
freez
ing,” Mack said. With the water to his kneecaps, he lit a cigarette. “Fucking polar expedition.”

“Change your mind about Spain?”

“Land of the snow-capped cojones,” Mack said.

“Keep hackin' it, soldier.”

Mack started humming, “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” They were still a good four hundred yards from where the rocks jutted outward from the shore, arriving at a saw-toothed angle as they went, like a prehistoric alligator nosing out to sea.

Mitchell said insistently, “Suppose we got some evidence.”

Mack stopped walking now and stared at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Evidence. You know. Exhibit A, Exhibit B …?”

Mack wagged his head again and moved. “I repeat.”

“I don't know,” Mitchell said. “Suppose we got into the house.”

“Sure. Okay. And sup
pose
,” Mack said, “we find a bottle in the kitchen says ‘TMF.'”

“‘TMF Used in Naturalite Killings.'”

“Absolutely,” Mack said. “Except by that time we're dead. We've been imploded by the Uzi.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Even so. What then?”

“Then … I was thinking of a citizen's arrest.”

“Beautiful. Except you're not a citizen, asshole. You're a foreigner.”

“True.”

“
Worse
, you're a wetback. You didn't get a stamp on your passport, remember?”

Mitchell didn't answer.

“Are you settled in your mind? Do you know what you're doing now?”

“Punting,” Mitchell said.

The rocks curved around again and offered them a beach. This one was Billy's—a half-moon of sand between the rim of the water and the sheer face of rock. The frontage looked to be about a hundred and thirty feet, about sixty going in. Above them, at the top of the weed-sprinkled cliff, the wall gave over to a low iron rail and to something very much like a fire escape platform, the stairs in a zig-zag pattern down the rock, where they stopped—midair about forty feet up. After that what you'd need would be the upended ladder that retracted to the roof.

He raised the binoculars and panned along the rock. Not a foothold in a mile. He focused on the low iron railing at the top and then down around the balcony and over to the stairs. He took it from the top again and watched it like a hawk.

None of it was wired.

Either that, or it was wired too subtly to see.

“So?” Mack said.

“So we take 'em on the road.”

30

“First of all, he doesn't go out,” Joanna said. They had a table set up on the terrace of their suite at La Punta Hotel. Sitting in the sun eating cold spiced chicken and hot cornbread and tomatoes as God had intended them to taste, and a chilled Spanish wine.

Mack speared a leg. “You mean he doesn't date girls?”

“I mean he doesn't leave the house.”

“You mean never?”

“Pretty close.” Joanna was enjoying her moment in the sun. She'd played out the morning in the hot little office of the local
La Prensa
. “According to my good friend the editor-in-chief, whom I also have on tape”—Joanna pulled out her little four-inch recorder—“in case you don't believe me—
Exigente
doesn't budge. You remember that joke? Rich-bitch dame that's got her kid in a wheelchair? Someone says, ‘Aw. Poor thing. Can't he walk?' and the woman says, ‘Yes, but thank God he doesn't have to.' Like that,” Joanna said.

Mack looked at Mitchell. “Well … shoots hell out of catch'-em-on-the-road.”

Mitchell sipped his wine. There were red Bermuda onions and he speared himself a thick pale juicy-looking slice. He was thinking that sometimes you got to make your own dumb desperate decisions, and sometimes life kind of dumped them on your plate. He was aware of Joanna, how she looked at him—eyes like a disapproving doe. Like Bambi's aunt. He loved her that moment with a cumulative passion.

“According to my sources …”—she kept her voice even—“he gets everything delivered. Food … women … Uzis …” She paused and said, “You're not going in there.”

Mitchell didn't answer.

“He's a gun collector.”

Mack took another piece of chicken.

“With a huge ex-wrestler and a guy that kind of doubles as a bodyguard driver.”

“That's all?” Mitchell said.

“He's supposed to have a maid.”

“A maid,” Mitchell said. “We're familiar with the maid.”

Mack said, “
Every
one's familiar with the maid. Make you a deal.” He turned to Mitchell. “
You
fight the other guys, I'll fight the maid.”

“Will you
stop?
” Joanna said.

They were silent, eating.

Mitchell looked up at her. “I can't,” he said soberly. “I'm backed to a corner.”

“That's bull,” Joanna said. “First of all, for one thing, why don't you call the cops?”

“I explained about the cops.”

“Why don't
I
call the cops?”

“Because he owns them,” Mitchell said. “A guy like Billy, the cops're the first thing on his marketing list. He buys them before he buys orange juice and bread.”

“So what about Ortega?”

“What about him?”

“You like him. You could tell him what you know, he gets Interpol and a warrant.”

“That easy,” Mitchell said. “Like that.”

“Why not?”

“Because you can't get a warrant until you've got the evidence and you can't get the evidence until you've got the warrant.—Give up,” he said, “huh?”

Joanna shook her head. “Pay the goddam money.”

He looked at her awhile. “I can't,” he said flatly. “Even if I wanted to. The company's on the edge. He's got me busted, Joanna. So I either stop him now or start folding up the tents.”

Joanna rolled her eyes and said, fold the damn tents.

Mitchell didn't answer. He stood up silently and ambled to the rail. He couldn't give it up because once in a while there were things you had to stand for aside from your own skin. The psychos and the sharks had been eating up the world, and everybody else rolled over and went to sleep. There were times you had to fight.

He paced, looking over at the fisherman's harbor with its three-fingered dock, a few dozen boats still tethered and bobbing. Mack said eventually, “So … what now?”

***

She stood on the balcony and watched them for a while as they headed for the docks. She wanted to believe that it simply wasn't likely, after all this time, that she'd find him, that she'd cross her stars with him again, and then lose him again.

But then if you wanted to extend that notion, you'd have to believe in a moralistic plan, in a guardian angel, Individual Attention from the planetary eye, which ought to, if it kept its eye out for anything, keep it on The Bomb.

She leaned against the rail, watching as Mitchell moved farther away from her, becoming a small blue figure on the docks. So he'd try to get a boat. Okay. She hadn't asked him how he planned to climb the cliff. And even if he did, if he made it to the house … a big strange house in the pitch dead of night and they wouldn't know the layout. She thought: they'll be killed.

She went back to the room again and paced around the bed.

At least there was time. They'd be back around six—or they'd told her they'd be back. But in any case they'd have to come back before they sailed because Mitchell'd left his goddam pistol in the drawer.

And the goddam Cartier phone book on the desk.

She stared at it awhile.…

***

Billy'd been snorting when Consuela came out to the recliner by the pool and said, “Señora on the phone.”

“Señora?” Billy said. “Señora who?”

He got a shrug.

Servants, Billy thought. They either didn't do windows or they didn't do phones. Or they didn't give head. You had to compromise a lot.

Indifferently, he picked up the phone and said, “
Moi.
” Feeling his Cheerios, feeling the little round Oh-Oh-Oh's doing cartwheels in his head.

He listened for a while. Listened to the voice, very serious and sexy with a catchy little catch, going “Mr. McAllister? My name's Joanna Reese and I'm doing an article for
Entrepreneur
…”

Billy almost laughed. So they hadn't forgotten him over in The World. He listened to the voice tell him flattering, tantalizing, elevating things, and then he listened to it listen. It wanted, it
hung
ered to listen to him speak. It panted, it
lust
ed for McAllister's opinion.

Billy said, “How about … quarter after six.”

31

The boat smelled of fish, a good gutty smell. Mitchell breathed it in and went down through the hatch again and looked around the shelves at almost everything he'd need—enough fishnets and rope to answer a lot of problems. And a grappling hook anchor—small, two-pronged. He brought it through the hatch.

Mack was on the deck, unraveling a long coil of nylon filament that stretched between his hands, the left hand holding it loosely, like a cup hook; the fingers didn't close.

“How's it coming?” Mitchell said.

Mack nodded. “Thirty-five …” He kept counting as he worked. “I got forty-five feet.”

“Another yard,” Mitchell said. He lit a cigarette and then paced around the deck, looking at Mack who had the line around his wrist; he stretched it, holding it in tension with his foot and then slashed it with his knife. It was lightweight nylon but tougher than a nail. He tossed it to Mitchell. “You think it's gonna work.”

“In theory.” Mitchell sat and then threaded it through the anchor. “Want to try it?”

“Not me, kid. I flunked it in Basic. I'm serious. We had a sergeant—Francis Xavier Ryan. I said to him, Sergeant—what do you expect from a kid that learns baseball from a nun?”

Mitchell laughed, tied a knot, a good strong anchor knot that almost ripped his hands. “This is only Plan F. Can you think of something else?”

“A Huey,” Mack said. “With a couple of door gunners. No.” He paced around. “When do we meet whatsisname—the guy with the rifles?”

“After ten,” Mitchell said. He folded a fishnet and tied it with a rope. Somebody sitting on the deck of another boat had started playing a guitar, very Spanish, very sad, and he suddenly thought about the beach house in Baja, Leo on the phone going, “Listen—there's a private detective in New York …” Cy doing blackmail. He looked up at Mack. “I want to ask you something.”

“Shoot.”