“You’re not serious.”
“The place I took them, it’s not just around the corner.”
Determined not to round it up with a tip, Gottfrey takes six twenties from his wallet, but he has no one-dollar bills. Rupert provides a dollar, and Vince has two quarters.
“We’re fine from here,” Gottfrey tells Fettwiler. “Thanks for all your help.”
“I was planning to stay with you on this next part.”
“Unnecessary. We’ve got it.”
Fettwiler is gone as if he never existed.
In his Rhino GX, with Rupert and Vince in the Jeep Wrangler behind him, Gottfrey follows the GMC Terrain out of the parking lot.
They haven’t gone a block when his smartphone rings. The call is from the leader of his cell, Judge Sheila Draper-Cruxton.
The conversation that Gottfrey had with her the previous night, during his cab ride to the Hyatt Regency in Houston, was so pleasant that he looks forward to speaking with her again. Until she starts to chew him out for the screwup at the Longrin place. Janis Dern clearly had psychological problems. Gottfrey should have recognized her instability. He never should have included her in the operation. In fact, considering that she represented a grave potential risk to the revolution, he should have taken her someplace quiet and put a bullet in her head long before this. Yada, yada, yada. The judge assures him that his failure in this matter will have consequences and warns him not to fail to capture Ancel and Clare Hawk, because if he doesn’t get his hands on them pronto, the consequences will be serious, indeed. “Were you shtupping the bitch?” she asks.
“What bitch?”
The judge is incensed. “What bitch are we talking about? Janis! Is that why you couldn’t see she had a screw loose—because you were so busy putting new screws to her?”
“No, sir. No, ma’am, judge. I’m not like that.”
“You better stop wasting your testosterone, Gottfrey. Keep your pants zipped, man up, start breaking heads, and get the job done.”
Judge Sheila Draper-Cruxton terminates the call.
Following Tucker Treadmont to whatever unpleasant surprise will come next, Egon Gottfrey sourly wonders what the Unknown Playwright intends by layering on all these frustrations, what Gottfrey is meant to intuit about the direction his role should take.
He has so badly wanted to bludgeon so many people recently, not least of all Vince Penn and Tucker Treadmont. Judge Draper-Cruxton’s tirade suggests that in this regard if in no other, Gottfrey intuits what the Playwright wants of him. Maybe it’s time to be ruthless. If someone frustrates him, maybe he should answer them with violence. The previous night, he dreamed of shooting Ancel Hawk and slitting Clare’s throat. Now that he thinks about it, the Unknown Playwright has spoken to him in dreams before when Gottfrey has been floundering in his role, and thereafter everything was all right again.
4
PALM SPRINGS TO RANCHO MIRAGE, through Indian Wells, past La Quinta, Jane Hawk in a world of sand traps and water hazards, more than one hundred world-class golf courses in the six up-valley towns, but with no time for leisure, living now for one purpose, with one task at which she must not fail …
Indio was less about leisure, a center of industry and farm-servicing companies. Much of it looked dusty, weathered, and weary here on the edge of the San Andreas Fault.
Ferrante Escobar, nephew of Enrique de Soto, operated his legit business—customizing limousines, high-end SUVs, and other vehicles for wealthy clients—out of a four-acre fenced-and-gated property in an industrial area. The manned guardhouse and the tight security had less to do with the value of the vehicle inventory than with the illegal weapons business conducted from a secret basement under one of the three large concrete-block-and-corrugated-metal buildings in which vehicles were being rebuilt.
The workers started at seven o’clock. Jane arrived shortly thereafter in the pixie-cut chestnut-brown wig and the stage-prop glasses with black frames, her blue eyes made brown by contact lenses. She told the guard, “Elinor Dashwood to see Mr. Escobar,” and presented a California driver’s license.
The guard directed her to the third building. By the time she parked the Explorer, Ferrante had come out to greet her.
Slim, good-looking, well barbered, he had the lithe movements and erect posture of a matador. He stood where the shadow of the building and the morning sun together scribed a territorial boundary on the pavement. His soft, musical voice matched his smile: “I’m so pleased to meet you. So very pleased.”
He had a boyish quality, a fresh-scrubbed wide-eyed innocence that didn’t comport with his second career as an arms dealer. South of thirty, he was young to have created such a successful business. But of course his Uncle Ricky had floated him the start-up money.
He knew who she really was. There were no secrets between him and Enrique.
Jane said, “I appreciate the risk you’re taking by letting me put this thing together here. I’m grateful.”
He nodded. There was something shy about the nod, a kind of deference in the way he stood, a coyness in his stare that seemed simultaneously to engage her and retreat from her.
His handshake was firm. But when she met his eyes, he looked away. “The vehicles from my uncle will be here by eleven. Meanwhile, we have a comfortable client lounge. Coffee. Doughnuts. TV.”
“Ricky told you I’m also in need of a handgun?” She preferred to have two at all times. She’d disposed of the gun she had used to defend herself in Tahoe on Sunday, because it could be tied to the death of a major Arcadian. “A Heckler and Koch Compact .45?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. Do you want to arrange that now?”
“Best get it out of the way. I’ll have a lot to do later.”
“Then, please, follow me.”
She got her tote from the car. It now contained the package of $120,000 for Enrique de Soto and $90,000 additional.
Ferrante led her out of sunlight into shadow.
As they stepped into a hallway, he said, “This building is devoted to the storage of vehicle parts, supplies, and my office.”
Ferrante’s sanctum was perhaps thirty feet square, with a fourteen-foot ceiling. The frosted-glass windows were ten feet off the floor, as if to ensure privacy even from drones. When he closed the door, an electronic lock shot home a deadbolt with a loud clack.
Jane saw two other doors, perhaps one to a bathroom and the other an exit directly to the outside.
The room featured sleek modern furniture—teak, steel, glass, black leather upholstery—all spotless, gleaming. Everything was of the same style except for an unusual bristling sculpture on his desk, presented on an acrylic plinth, and four disturbing four-foot-square paintings that formed a giant art block on one wall.
Each painting depicted a human heart in realistic detail: the glistening muscle so lovingly rendered that Jane could almost see it contract and expand. Blood dripped from three hearts, squirted in a rich stream from the fourth. Each organ was festooned with different severed veins and arteries: aorta, superior vena cava, descending aorta, pulmonary artery, inferior vena cava.… Every heart was bound and cruelly pierced by a woven cincture of thorny brambles.
Enrique said his nephew was devout. These images were the sacred heart of Christ, but not as usually portrayed. The over-the-top details and lavish gore seemed to mock the subject, though if Ferrante was truly devout, mockery was out of the question.
“What do you think of the artist’s work?” Ferrante asked.
She said, “Striking.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“Bold.”
“Some people don’t get it.”
“Colorful,” she said.
“If they don’t get it, I never preach at them.”
“That’s wise.”