Thursday's Child (15 page)

Whenever possible, he liked to make the trip at night. It was just after midnight now and the miles were slipping away almost painlessly.

Beau had been asleep in the passenger seat for most of the trip, but suddenly he was awake again. “What kind of business are we going to Las Vegas for?” he asked.

Robert accelerated around a truck. “Have to find a man named Tony Drago,” he said. “A gambler. Very low-level kind of guy.”

For a moment, he thought that Beau was going to ask him something else about Drago and Robert didn't know what the hell he would say. But instead, Beau said, “I'm hungry.”

“Again?” Christ, there wasn't any satisfying his appetite.

They went another two miles or so and then spotted a diner. Robert pulled into the lot, parking between a truck and an old Pontiac. Right inside the door, two state cops were having coffee and doughnuts at the counter. At the sight, Beau stiffened and looked at Robert. He ignored them and chose a table by the window. “Sit down,” he ordered.

Beau dropped into a chair, still looking at the cops.

“Knock it off,” Robert said.

“They don't scare you?”

“No, they don't. Not a fucking bit.” He yanked a menu from the plastic holder. “I'll tell you what does scare me,” he said.

“What?”

“You. You scare the shit out of me, Beau.”

Beau blinked, bewildered. “Me? How come?”

Robert didn't answer.

After a moment, Beau reached for the other menu.

He really did hate Las Vegas.

The insistent neon, noisy casino-hotels, the glitzy broads all decked out in sequins. And everywhere you looked, the clusters of tourists in their polyester clothes, propped like Robotrons in front of the slots. It all came together in such a cacophony of sound and light that he wanted to run the other way as quickly as possible.

Instead of doing that, however, he drove directly to a motel on Tropicana Avenue; it was a place where he could always get a room, even with no reservation. They knew him and they knew the people who were his clients. They called him Mr. Turchek and always gave him the best room in the place.

It was nearly 4
A
.
M
. by the time they hit the room. Beau went into the can and came out a few minutes later, wearing his undershorts and T-shirt. He sat on one of the beds.

Robert sat on the other bed and looked at him. “Beau, there's something I have to tell you.”

“Sounds like bad news,” Beau said, smiling faintly; his eyes, however, were darkly solemn.

“It's not good or bad,” Robert said. “It's just a fact. Something you need to know now, because I can't take a chance on having you freak out later.”

“I don't freak out much.”

“Yeah, well.” Robert lit a cigarette. “I told you before that I'm here to see a man named Drago, remember?”

“Yeah,” Beau said tentatively.

“Well, when I find him, I'm going to kill him.”

Beau bit his lip and didn't say anything for a time. “Did he have something to do with Andy getting killed? Like the hooker?”

Robert shook his head. “I'm not going to lie about it. This killing is different. This is just business.”

“What kind of business?” Beau said in a low voice.

“
My
kind. That's what I do, Beau, I kill people. For money.”

“Why?”

“Who the hell knows? Mostly because I'm good at it, I guess. And it pays well, if you're good at it.”

Beau shook his head. “But I like you. You don't seem like a killer.”

“The truth is the truth. Sorry if this shatters any illusions.” Robert stood and went into the bathroom. He leaned over the sink and splashed cold water into his face. Maybe he was just giving the kid a chance to take off if he wanted to. Robert knew that if Beau did leave, he wouldn't go after him. It might be stupid and dangerous, but life itself was a crapshoot. Somehow, he had the feeling that even if Beau did run away, he wouldn't squeal to the cops. Robert thought he was a pretty good judge of character.

He stripped down to his Jockeys and went back into the other room.

Beau was in bed, with the blanket pulled up to his chin. He didn't say anything, but his eyes watched Robert cross the room.

Robert got into his bed and switched out the lamp.

“Robert?” Beau said into the darkness.

“What?”

“I don't understand. How come you do this?”

“Life just turns out that way sometimes.” Robert sighed. “Look, Beau, I was only a kid when I hit L.A. with Andy. We needed money to live on, just like everybody else, and it seemed like the only people willing to pay me enough wanted me to do things that weren't quite legal.”

“What things?”

“Hot-wiring cars. Heisting merchandise. Running numbers. Bill collecting. Little things that got bigger and bigger. Then one day I killed a guy, mostly by accident.” His voice was low; nobody had ever heard this story before and Robert didn't quite know why he was telling it now to Beau. “Somebody heard about what I'd done and wanted me to do it again.” Even though Beau couldn't see him, Robert shrugged. “That's just the way it happened.”

“It makes me feel funny,” Beau said. “Sort of nauseated.”

Robert didn't say anything.

“Who do you kill?” Beau asked then.

“Mostly whoever they pay me to. We're not talking your regular kind of folks here,” he said. “It's basically the scumbags of the world. Bad guys. They ask for it, most of them.”

“Like Drago? Did he ask for it?”

Robert snorted. “Yeah, you could say that. I mean, how stupid do you have to be to run off with the wife of one of the biggest gangsters in the whole fucking state?”

Beau was quiet for so long that Robert thought he had fallen asleep. Then, suddenly, he spoke again. “You wouldn't just go out and kill somebody good, would you? Like my parents?”

What to say? Robert sighed. “No, kid. I wouldn't just go out and kill people like your parents.”

“Okay.”

That was all Beau said.

It took Robert a long time to fall asleep.

Beau woke up first.

It took him several beats to remember where he was. And why.

He rolled out of bed and went into the bathroom. As he peed, he wondered just how he ought to be feeling about all of this. And how he really
did
feel.

Probably he should be scared. But he wasn't, really. Not of Robert anyway. Maybe the
situation
scared him a little. But if he wanted to be completely honest with himself—and Jonathan had always said that telling the truth to yourself was the most important thing—well, then, he had to admit that it was all sort of exciting.

Most of it, anyway.

Seeing that woman get shot hadn't been a whole lot of fun. It brought back some very bad memories. But he could accept Robert's reasons for why she had to die.

The rest of it was harder to understand.

Robert was a paid killer. It sure didn't make any sense. But Beau decided that he just had to accept Robert's explanation for why the people almost deserved to die. They seemed to be asking for it most of the time. Like this Drago. Dumb, very dumb.

Of course, Beau admitted to himself, what choice did he have
but
to accept what Robert said and did? Unless he wanted to find himself out on the street again, or back with Saul. Or maybe even dead himself. None of those things sounded good to him. So, if Robert said somebody had to die, deserved to die, then that was pretty much how he would see it, too.

After all, good people (like his parents, for example) got shot down every day for absolutely no reason at all. Why waste tears on jerks and creeps like this Drago?

Still, it was a scary thing. Robert wasn't like the people who had killed his folks, was he?

Then Beau shook his head firmly. No. This was a much different thing. It was. What seemed real strange to him was that Robert—who was about as different from Jonathan as anybody could be and still belong to the same species—treated him much as his father always had. Like a person. Like somebody who mattered.

Beau went back into the bedroom. Robert's eyes were still closed. The holstered Magnum was resting on the nightstand next to his bed. Beau walked over and bent down for a better look at the weapon. He touched it carefully.

“Don't do that,” Robert said unexpectedly.

He pulled his hand back quickly.

Robert sat up. After a moment, he got out of bed and walked over to the window. Parting the draperies a little, he peered out at the sun-bleached scene. “God,” he said, “I hate this city. I want to find Drago today and get the hell out of here.” Then he walked into the bathroom and closed the door.

Beau didn't touch the gun again. Instead, he turned on the television and watched “Scrabble” as he dressed in some of his new clothes.

“Now I know why you don't like this city,” Beau said with a sigh. They had spent a very long day going in and out of bars and casinos looking for Tony Drago.

Robert just grunted. He was used to this kind of thing. There were easier ways to find people, but those ways were also more dangerous, because they called more attention to what was going on than was healthy. He crushed out the latest in a long chain of cigarettes. “Well, come on, Tonto,” he said. “We're not done yet.”

He was trying to get a reading on just how Beau was feeling about what he'd found himself in the middle of, but it was hard to do. On the surface, at least, none of it seemed to matter to the boy. He was acting just as he had before finding out that the freaking Lone Ranger was a hired gun. But every once in a while, Robert would look up suddenly and see two very blue, very speculative eyes on him. It was unsettling.

Less than an hour later, he finally spotted Drago, who looked pretty much the way he had in his most recent mug shot. The man was fat and balding, with the few strands of hair he had left combed up and over his naked scalp. It didn't help. Neither did the sport jacket he wore, which looked as if it would be more at home covering the back of a Kentucky Derby loser. Gold chains, of course, and a broad with more boobs than brains hanging on his arm. That was not a woman Robert would give up his life for. But Tony Drago was going to.

They watched the happy couple at the craps table for a while, then went back outside to the car. Beau was looking a little nervous now. “What next, Robert?” he asked, tapping on the dashboard.

“We wait,” Robert said, reaching for still another cigarette. “And hope like hell that Drago leaves alone.”

Their hopes paid off, because Drago and the woman parted company, with obvious anguish, in the parking lot. After all, he was a family man. Drago got into a shiny black Porsche and took off. Robert followed at a discreet distance.

Beau was tapping again.

Before very long, they had left the lights and glitz of the city behind and were driving through a quiet residential neighborhood. A nice place to raise a family, probably. It was at one of the largest houses on the block that the Porsche turned in.

Robert parked on the street, leaving the engine running. “You wait here,” he said quietly. “Don't move, understand?”

Beau just nodded.

He got out and walked quickly up the driveway. Drago was still standing by his car, locking the door when Robert reached him. “Drago,” he said pleasantly.

Drago whipped around. “Jesus,” he said with a nervous laugh. “What you trying to do, asshole, give a guy a heart attack or something?”

Robert just smiled.

“Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“My name is Robert Turchek. Maybe you've heard of me?”

After a moment, Drago nodded. “I know who you are. But I don't know what the hell you're doing here.”

“Ah, man, think about it for a minute. Did you really and truly think that you could dip your wick into a bitch belonging to somebody like Nicky Whalen and just walk away clean? Are you that dumb?”

Finally it sank into Drago what was happening here. “Hey,” he said, “I got family in the house.”

“Maybe you should've thought about them before you started fucking Nicky's girl.”

“What're you gonna do to me?”

“You said you've heard of me. What the hell do you think I'm going to do?”

Robert brought the gun up from the shadows and fired.

A light went on inside the house. He wiped the gun quickly and dropped it on top of Drago's body, then he turned and ran back up the driveway to the car. Beau was slumped down in the seat, hands covering his ears. They drove away at a moderate speed.

On the way back to the hotel, Robert stopped to buy a bucket of fried chicken and then a six-pack. At the last minute, he remembered Beau, waiting in the car again, and added some Coke to his purchases.

Back in the room, they sat on his bed and ate the meal while watching an old episode of “Barney Miller,” which was brand-new, of course, to Beau.

During one of the commercial breaks, Beau stopped chewing long enough to ask, “Can we go home now?”

Robert used a wadded-up paper napkin to wipe chicken grease from his chin. “First thing in the morning,” he said.

“Good.” Beau turned back to the television.

3

Robert stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around himself. He shaved quickly and opened the door to let Beau know the bathroom was his.

Beau was sitting huddled on his bed.

There were four men in the room. Robert knew only one of them by name but he was the only one who mattered very much, even though it was the other three who had guns, two trained on him and one on Beau.

Robert swallowed a couple of times and then forced a smile to his face. “Well, hello, Mr. Marcello. This is a little early for a visit, isn't it?”

“Maybe it's a little late,” the old man corrected him gently. “When people come into my town and start eliminating my employees and I don't know anything about it until after the fact, then maybe it's a little late.”