The Informant

30

HE DROVE OFF the circle and onto the driveway, watching her in the rearview mirror as she turned, walked into the hotel, and disappeared. He felt a small twinge of regret as he turned from the driveway onto the sloping road down the hill. He had begun to feel a kind of interest in her. It wasn't affection, just a kind of sympathy for her position in this mess. He thought about the little he knew about her. She had, about twenty years ago, signed on at the Justice Department. Since then, she had apparently given her job an honest effort. She had lost her husband somehow—cancer, if he remembered right—before he had even become aware of who she was, and she had raised her two kids alone. He was glad she hadn't done anything foolish to try to get him captured. He would have hated killing her.

He coasted down the long hill from the Universal complex, keeping his speed from increasing too quickly. The steep road headed due west to Lankershim Boulevard, then flattened and crossed it onto the bridge over the freeway. As he reached the level pavement at the bottom of the hill at the intersection, he looked in his rearview mirror and saw something that disturbed him. The car coming down the hill behind him was a dark blue Ford Crown Victoria. There was a driver wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, a tan short-sleeved shirt over a black T-shirt. A man in the passenger seat wore a brimmed cap that was a drab beige. He had a moustache and wore a pair of yellow shooting glasses.

It was this man that disturbed him. He was fiddling with something that rested on his lap. The fact that the car was pointed downward on the hill allowed Schaeffer to see through the windshield over the dashboard into the front seats. What the man in the passenger seat had on his lap appeared to be a small automatic weapon with a long silencer fitted on the short barrel. It looked like an Ingram MAC-10. He lifted it slightly, barrel upward, and slid a long magazine into the handle. Then he turned the weapon slightly and fiddled with the selector lever.

The light turned green, but Schaeffer didn't cross Lankershim. Instead, he quickly turned right just as the first of a large group of pedestrians was stepping off the curb into the crosswalk that led to the Universal Studios entrance from the bus and subway station across the street. He glanced in the mirror and saw that the stream of people that had spilled into the wake of his car had blocked the blue Crown Victoria. He memorized the car's exact color and shape as he sped up Lankershim.

He veered to the right at the fork onto Cahuenga, then turned right again to try to lose himself in the residential streets on that side. He had no real knowledge of the neighborhood, but he had the sense that in the flats of the east valley, there was a grid of north-south streets crossed by the big east-west boulevards—Ventura, Moorpark, Riverside, Magnolia, Burbank. He made a zigzag pattern as he sped away from Universal. He turned right on Riverside and drove east. He remembered that in this direction were Griffith Park and Burbank and Pasadena.

He had to find a telephone. As he drove along Riverside, he saw a Marie Callender's restaurant. He swung into the parking lot, trotted into the building, and put coins into the pay phone by the men's room. He dialed Elizabeth Waring's cell number. He heard her say "Hello?"

"It's me," he said.

"Have you changed—"

"No. Just listen. When I drove away from your hotel, two men in a blue Crown Vic pulled out after me. If they don't belong to you, then they're more shooters."

"How can you be sure?"

"One of them has what looks like a MAC-10 with a silencer. Are they yours?"

"No."

"They didn't follow me to your hotel today. I was watching for somebody like them. That means they knew where you were staying, and after they lost me in Pasadena this morning, they went to your hotel. They must have assumed that at some point I would show up."

"I can call the—"

"Don't call anybody. You've got to get on a plane and go home now. Right now. As soon as they realize they've lost me, they'll be back at your hotel. You're all they've got. So go."

"But I—" Even as she began to argue, she knew she was talking to dead air. She pressed the button on her phone, stepped to the closet, laid each outfit in her suitcase, and folded it over once. She went into the bathroom, got her toiletry kit, set it in the suitcase, and shut it.

She lifted the suitcase off the stand and set it on the floor, extended the handle, then picked up the hotel phone and punched the number for the front desk. "This is Ms. Waring in room 802. I'm checking out now. Could you please hold a cab for me? I'll be going to LAX."

As she rode the elevator down to the lobby, she reviewed what had just happened and what she was about to do. She was satisfied. She had no doubt that the Butcher's Boy, of all people, would recognize a pair of professional assassins if he saw them and would make a reliable guess about how they had come to be where they were. If professional killers knew who she was, then he was right that it was best for her to leave Los Angeles. If he lost them—when he lost them—they could only go back to her hotel looking for her. They seemed to see her as their easiest link to him. They probably assumed she would be a valuable hostage, or at least bait for an ambush.

They obviously didn't get it. They had no way of knowing that he was incapable of forming personal ties to people like her and that, most of the time, he cared very little which people died and which didn't. For him, death had always been a commodity to sell and be paid for. At the moment he was only interested in killing as many of the men who had voted to kill him as he could.

She strode quickly to the front desk, accepted the printed bill, and said, "Leave it on my credit card." The clerk at the desk said, "Your cab is at the door, Ms. Waring. Have a pleasant flight."

"Thank you," she said, and kept going. She had not exactly stopped, just walked along the counter on the way out. As the driver put her suitcase into the trunk, she sat in the back seat and scanned the lot, the sidewalks, the long drive. The driver got in and asked, "Which airline are you going to?" and she answered, "United. Terminal Seven." As he drove, she looked out the back window for a long time, hoping that the absence of the team of shooters didn't mean that they had caught up with the Butcher's Boy.





Schaeffer walked out of the restaurant with his head down and crossed the parking lot. He got into his car and pulled out of the lot onto Riverside Drive and headed eastward. He drove with determination, but was careful not to go too far over the speed limit. No matter what was chasing him, he couldn't afford to be pulled over with about a dozen stolen guns, all of them loaded, and some of them the property of dead men.

He drove to Victory Boulevard, turned right and then left onto the long parkway into Griffith Park. The speed limit was twenty-five, but the road was nearly empty at midday on a weekday, so he went forty. He took the long curve around the parking lot of the Los Angeles Zoo, but when he was nearly around the curve he looked across the lot and saw the blue Crown Victoria just starting toward him at the beginning of the curve.

He sped up, goading the Camry along the straight stretch that bisected the golf course. There was a stop sign ahead, and it looked like the perfect spot to hide a police car, so he stopped for it. As he did, he saw a sign that said CAROUSEL. He cranked the wheel to the right and drove up the side road in the direction the arrow pointed. There was a rise, and then the road dipped and turned into a little vale. There was a parking lot to the left, over a low grassy hill away from the carousel. He parked, got out of the car, took his messenger bag full of guns and ammunition, and ran for the wooded hillside above the carousel. He took cover and looked down at the lower ground. The carousel looked like the real thing, a relic of the early 1900s that had been restored at some point by people who at least cared how it looked. The horses had a layer of bright, shiny paint, and the brass poles were worn by hands but polished. A few feet away from it was a small ticket booth, and beyond that was a snack bar, but he couldn't see anyone inside either structure. Finally, he saw a sign on the booth that said OPEN WEEKENDS with smaller print beneath that was unreadable from this distance. He supposed that when school was in session, there was no reason to keep the carousel running.

He was still dressed in the gray hooded sweatshirt and jeans he'd worn to case the houses in Pasadena before dawn. He judged that the outfit would keep him from standing out much in these wooded hillsides, but he kept moving, climbing to improve his cover while he watched for the blue car. He didn't want to go too high, where the short live oaks were sparsely spread and there were stretches of empty brown grass. He crouched in thick brush about three hundred feet away. As he looked down on the scene, he sensed a presence, or maybe realized he'd seen something without identifying it, and moved only his eyes in that direction. It was a scrawny, intense-eyed coyote standing thirty feet off, the sunlight dappling its fur. After a few seconds, the coyote seemed to sense some change it didn't like and skulked off into the tawny brush higher up the hillside.

The dark blue Crown Victoria pulled up the drive into the lot and stopped. The two men got out and slammed the doors, then walked toward the carousel. They stood and looked at it for a minute or two, and then the one with the MAC-10 stepped to the left to the ticket booth. He craned his neck to look at the window, seemed to despair of seeing inside, and gave up. He raised his MAC-10 with its silencer on the barrel and fired a line of rounds across the front of the booth about six inches from the ground, then a second line back across the booth about two feet up. The noise was barely audible, just the gun's hot, expanded gas spitting out bullets, and the bullets punching through the wooden-board wall. The gun was so fast that after it was still, the ejected brass casings clinked as they all fell on the asphalt, bounced once, and rolled. The man removed the long, straight magazine, put it in his coat pocket, and inserted a fresh one.

Thirty rounds. If Schaeffer had been closer, he could have counted holes in the ticket booth, but he was pretty sure the man was using thirty-round magazines. The second man kicked open the door of the ticket booth, looked inside, and closed it again, but it was hanging on one hinge so he just propped it shut.

They moved to the second, larger building, the snack stand. It was hardly more substantial than the ticket booth, but they didn't spray the wall. They went to the door, and the man with the MAC-10 fired a short burst at the door lock and then shouldered his way inside. The two spent a minute or two looking behind things, but found nothing.

Schaeffer could see the MAC-10 had altered their behavior. It was such an overpowering weapon that they seemed to have forgotten that it couldn't do everything. And they seemed to think it made them bulletproof. He began to move down the hill closer to them while he waited for his moment to come. The two men came out of the snack stand and moved to the carousel. They stepped into the center where the motor was and satisfied themselves that he wasn't hiding there. While they were occupied, Schaeffer crept closer.

They walked up over the grass-covered hill to the parking lot and toward his parked Camry. They seemed not to feel any urgency about what they were doing. Schaeffer watched the one with the MAC-10 raise it and fire short bursts at the tires on the far side, then shoot out all the glass. His magazine was empty again so he put in a third. This time he aimed at the engine and fired. He walked around to the other side to get the last pair of tires. He had not noticed that the car no longer shielded him from the brush-covered hillside; he was standing in the open.

As the man began his burst, Schaeffer rested his right arm on the low horizontal branch of an oak tree, took careful aim, and fired. His first shot caught the man with the MAC-10 in the back and spun him around. As the man began to buckle, Schaeffer fired another shot and caught him in the chest. The man sprawled on the pavement.

His companion, the driver, snatched up the MAC-10, ducked, and stayed low as he scuttled to the far side of Schaeffer's car. When he got there, he learned what Schaeffer already suspected. The third magazine was empty.

Schaeffer shifted his aim to the second man. He rested his arm on the tree limb and fired whenever he saw a slice of the man appear over the hood of the Camry as he tried to spot the man who had shot his companion.

When Schaeffer had exhausted the bullets in the Beretta's magazine, he reached into his messenger bag for another pistol. He aimed it carefully at the far edge of the hood of his gray car, directly above the flat front tire. The man would be crouching there to keep from having a shot ricochet under the car and hit him. He counted to five, then began to squeeze the trigger. His trigger finger had already traveled about two-thirds of the pull when the man raised his gun hand and his head above the edge so he could return Schaeffer's fire. He was still raising his head when Schaeffer's firing pin touched off the next round. The shot barely nicked the surface of the Camry's hood, ricocheted upward slightly, and pounded into the man's forehead.

Schaeffer knew he had little time left. The MAC-10 was silenced, but his pistols were not. He ran from the woods, past the carousel, across the little parking lot, and stood over the driver, the man he had just shot. Schaeffer kicked the man's pistol away from his body, patted his pockets, and found the keys to the blue Crown Victoria. He noticed a tag on it that said ABLE SECURITY. He stepped to the car and set his messenger bag on the floor in front of the passenger seat, beside a clipboard with papers on it. He stepped back to the Camry, opened the trunk, took his suitcase, tossed it onto the back seat of the Crown Victoria, and drove.

He regretted the destruction of the gray Camry because it had been a good car for driving unnoticed and unremembered. The Crown Victoria was less common, but it had a powerful engine, and from a distance it looked like a plain-wrap police car or a fire commander's car. He took it down the park's side road away from the carousel to the main road and turned right toward the south.

Once he was on the main road through the park, he felt less urgency and tension. The park police would take a few minutes to isolate the source of the shots and then drive there and find the two bodies. There would be at least a few minutes while they tried various ways of fitting together what they saw. There were two men with guns lying nearby, one of them an automatic weapon with a silencer. Had they killed each other? Once the cops learned enough at the scene to reject that idea, they would start calling to shut down park exits, but he would be gone.

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.

He stepped to the library window, reached up to unlatch it, opened it and pushed the screen out, sat on the sill, and swung his legs out. He could hear rapid footsteps on the staircase. He dropped to the garden. The first sounds of pounding on the locked library door reached his ears as he stood outside the window. He leaned into the room, fired six rapid shots through the upper panels of the door, then turned and walked quickly across the lawn to the driveway he had blocked. He got into the blue car and drove off toward the freeway.

He got on the 134 Freeway, drove to an off-site parking structure near the Burbank Airport, took his messenger bag and suitcase, and walked to the airport. He flagged a cab and had the driver take him to a big Holiday Inn on Century Boulevard, right outside Los Angeles International Airport.

As soon as he had checked in, he called for a reservation on a flight to Baltimore/Washington airport. Then he went to work preparing to travel. He laid out all of the pistols he had in his messenger bag. After examining all of them, he unhesitatingly selected the Kel-Tec PF-9 that he had taken from one of the guards at Vince Pugliese's building in Chicago. It was a nine-millimeter pistol with a single-stack magazine that held seven rounds. It was under six inches long and less than an inch wide. He dismantled it and examined the pieces, measuring them with his fingers. Then he went shopping.

He walked along Century Boulevard to a computer store on Sepulveda Boulevard, and bought a backup drive for a computer. It was only a small black metal box with a power cord and a USB connector. He saw from the one that was on display that when it was plugged in, all that could be seen was a glowing green light. He paid cash for it, and then went to a grocery store down the street and bought a few essentials—a tiny screwdriver for repairing eyeglasses and a roll of aluminum foil.

When he was back at the hotel, he used the small screwdriver to open the backup drive. He took each of the pieces of the PF-9 pistol, wrapped it loosely in aluminum foil, and then put it inside the metal housing. He took little care with the memory components, only watching to see if crushing or removing things would make the green light go out. When he had all of the pieces inside the housing, he used the screwdriver to close it. The green light still glowed. He unplugged the device, put it back in its original box, and put the box inside his suitcase. Then he took his messenger bag and went out again. He went for a walk, placing his other guns inside plastic trash bags in the Dumpsters he found at the backs of hotels and stores. When he had none left, he threw away the messenger bag too.

It was six o'clock. He had only four hours left before his red-eye flight to Baltimore/Washington, so he took a two-hour nap, showered and dressed, and took a shuttle bus to the airport. He checked his suitcase in at the desk and then went through security and walked to his concourse to wait for his flight. He spent much of the half hour he had left in the back section of an airport bookstore looking at books because he couldn't be seen from the concourse there. At boarding time he bought a book, walked to his gate, and scanned the passengers who were lining up to be sure none of them was familiar.

On the plane he kept his seat straight up, leaned his head back into the padding, closed his eyes, and thought about Washington and the things he would have to do when he got there. The plane roared, then tilted backward as it climbed rapidly into the sky, and when it leveled off, Schaeffer was asleep.