Spiral (32 page)

"Stu, you gonna be home later? I gotta talk to you." Dystal's voice was conciliatory, but Haydon knew that he had better make himself available.

"I'll be there," he said.

"It could be late."

"That's fine," Haydon said. "I'll see you later."

Chapter 32

BLAS
and Rubio sat at a window table in a Sandwich Chef on the corner of Kirby and Norfolk and studied a city map as the streetlights flickered, then came alive along Kirby and on the overpass of the Southwest Freeway two blocks away. It had been two days since they met with Professor Ferretis, received the money, and were told to either hurry it up or call it off. They had had no contact with him since, though Bias continued to drive by the dead drop in the mornings and at night to see if a signal had been posted.

Because there were only the two of them now, it had taken considerably more planning and an excessive amount of vigilance to tail Gamboa. They had stayed with him all day Wednesday, Wednesday night—except for the few hours when they had bought the RDX from Waite on the ship channel—Thursday, and now Thursday evening. They had taken elaborate precautions, renting no fewer than four cars, each a different color and make, keeping them scattered in parking areas throughout the western part of the city where Gamboa moved in a relatively confined geographic area. They switched cars frequently so that Negrete's men, more vigilant now than before, would be less likely to tag them. Both Bias and Rubio had had a lot of experience at tailing, and they were smooth at it. They used powerful hand-held radios and made clipped, coded transmissions.Bias knew Negrete, and he was amused at what had been happening during the past two days. He could easily imagine the mercenary's frustration at being employed to protect a man whose ego got in the way of strict, sensible security. Despite Negrete's conscientious attention to detail, he had not been able to overcome the ingrained confidence of a powerful and wealthy man who could not conceive, not
really
believe, that he would be killed by assassins. Gamboa was probably agreeing to adhere to all Negrete's preventive precautions, up to a point. This was only apparent because Bias had the benefit of Ireno's scouting reports, which he had accumulated over a three-week period before Bias and the others had even arrived in Houston. Gamboa did vary his routes of travel, but over a period of weeks it was clear that only a small number of routes were used. He did vary his dining establishments, but he used only a small number of restaurants. He did vary his timetables, but only by an hour at most.

Bias guessed that deep down Gamboa had allowed his belief in his own importance to supersede reality, just as a young man placed his concern about his own fate in the hands of the statistical odds and rarely gave death a thought. Gamboa probably regarded the possibility with a lack of serious credulity. Besides, Negrete, a man with an extraordinary capacity for venality, was being paid extremely well to keep him alive. If nothing else, Gamboa probably felt safe because he knew the mercenary he had hired to protect him would go to great lengths to preserve such a lucrative resource. It was obvious that Gamboa had more arrogance than wisdom, or he would never have remained in the city.

But the assassination attempt had caused a few blips in the record that Ireno Lopez had kept of the limited variability of Gamboa's routine. In the past two days there had been additional bodyguards in the limousine, and now a car of them traveled in front of, as well as behind, Gamboa. Security around the house itself was beefed up. And there had been a deliberately visible increase in patrolling police cars.

The most troublesome change, however, was something else. Twice, both Bias and Rubio had observed cars of bodyguards with binoculars and radios sitting alongside Inverness a block in either direction from Gamboa's home. They were taking license numbers, and there was no doubt the numbers were being spot-checked. Even though Bias and Rubio had rented four different cars from four different agencies to decrease the risk of being spotted, this new effort by Negrete could tap them. If the spot checking identified an increase in the number of rental cars traveling on Inverness, it could trigger an inquiry. So now Bias and Rubio had begun passing by on cross streets, and would loop back and make a run down Inverness only if there was no sign of stakeout cars.

But the waiting was almost over. As Bias hunched over the map and sipped at the dregs of his fourth cup of coffee, he was formulating his final plans after having spent a dozen long hours poring over the notes Lopez had accumulated about Gamboa's travel routes, as well as their own surveillance in the two days after the assassination attempt. It was true that you could not predict where he would be or when, but there were only so many ways for him to get where he was going. Even in a city this size. On the average, the shortest routes were used most often.

Gamboa conducted a lot of business—and pleasure—in the Greenway Plaza area and among the office buildings along Post Oak. Between the River Oaks and the Southwest Freeway, there were only four east-west streets that went straight through to Post Oak: San Felipe, Westheimer, Alabama, and Richmond. There were no back ways, no quiet residential streets to travel unobserved. From Inverness, San Felipe was the nearest route. Sooner or later, in the course of any twenty-four-hour period, Benigo Gamboa's limousine could be seen taking advantage of it.

The exact point along San Felipe at which to make the hit required considerable planning. The RDX would take up roughly the same amount of space as a couple of shoe boxes, though it would have to be kneaded into a shape that would guide and enhance the force of the explosion. And that was a large part of the trouble. To do its best work, the RDX should be directly under the limousine when it was detonated, and there was little way of doing that on a public street as busy as San Felipe. Alternatively, it could be placed in a mailbox, or a trash can beside the street, but more than half the amount of the explosive force would be wasted in a direction away from the car, greatly reducing its effectiveness.

It could be placed in the gutter, disguised as some form of trash—a ragged cardboard box, a torn paper sack—which would get it closer to the passing car and would guide the initial explosion in a ninety-degree radius in the car's direction. An improvement. However, the explosive might have to be left in place for as much as twenty-four hours, and in that length of time it was likely to be picked up by city cleaning crews, or accidentally detonated by a passing vehicle.

Rubio looked at his watch. "I have to go," he lisped. "I want to see if he has any visitors tonight. The old bastard doesn't move much after the sun goes down. He huddles up like a crow after dark."

Bias nodded, and looked at the map they had been studying. "We've got to settle on something," he said.

"That is your problem, huh? I will do my part." Rubio grinned crookedly; his bottom lip did not behave the same on both sides of the deep notch. The nerves had been damaged on the left.

"I'll make a decision tonight," Bias said. "We can't afford to put it off any longer."

"Bueno
." Rubio pushed back his chair as he wiped at his mouth one final time with a paper napkin. He stood and walked out of the shop without another word, or even a glance back.

Bias watched him leave. He had never heard Rubio say goodbye to anyone, not even a casually polite "See you later." Bias had decided long ago it was a superstition. When Rubio walked away from you, you could never tell by his attitude whether he would be gone five minutes or a year. And you learned nothing from the Indian's broad, thick back.

Bias signaled for the waitress to bring him a refill, and watched her as she finished writing up the check for the one other customer in the shop. Then she went behind the counter to get the coffeepot off the hotplate. She was a Mexican girl, and when Bias and Rubio had first come in, her friendly, quick smile had not been wasted on him, though he had been unresponsive, and otherwise ignored her. He had his map to study. By the time she had served them their third cup without so much as a glance from either of them, she had gotten the message and didn't even bother to smile anymore.

But now, as she came up to the table and started to refill Rubio's cup, he stopped her with a quick gesture.

"No, he's not coming back."

She shrugged, poured his coffee, put down a plastic container of cream, and started to turn away.

"What is your name?" he asked.

She looked at him, surprised. A tentative smile.

"Yolanda." A savvy city girl. No last names to strangers. She wore her waitress uniform well, and held her long, girlish hair in an upward sweep at her temples with simple white barrettes. Her mouth was large, and pretty. She had one dimple.

He said something to her in Spanish. She grinned, a little embarrassed.

"I don't speak Spanish," she said, cocking one hip as she stood in front of him.

He wasn't surprised, but he was disappointed.

"You were born in Houston?"She nodded. "Right." She was still smiling, pleased at hi; attention.

"Have you ever been to Mexico?"

"Just to Matamoros." She seemed to wish she could have tol< him Acapulco, or Cancun, or Mexico City.

"You have family there?"

"In Brownsville. My grandmother lives there."

He nodded, and smiled back at her, but was already decidin that it wasn't any good. He shouldn't have started it. She was sti standing there with the coffeepot, but she could see it slipping too, little puzzled by it.

"If you need anything else..." she said.

"No," he said, opening the plastic container of cream. "Just coffee right now. Thanks, Yolanda."

"Sure," she said with a slight shrug again. His use of her fii name seemed to soften a little of the disappointment. Her smilm flickered again, faintly sad this time.

Bias was angry with himself, but he didn't dwell on it. He dumped the cream in his cup and stirred, then sipped carefully. The coffee was hot, but strong. When the temperature was in the 90's, hot coffee was not in great demand in sandwich shops. He put down the cup and looked back at the map. He felt tired, very tired. Or again, he traced his pen back and forth along San Felipe. From River Oaks Boulevard to the West Loop there were exactly a dozen points at which side streets intersected San Felipe. Some of them did not cross, but came to a dead end there. He was sure Negrete's men would pay particular attention to these.

Then his pen froze, and he stared hard at something on the map as if he were seeing it for the first time, though it must have been hundredth. He was amazed he had not recognized its potential long before. It was the perfect site, so perfect that he had a tremendous sense of relief. He had no doubts now that they would be able pull it off.

CHAPTER 33

AFTER
hanging up the telephone, Haydon opened the door so the light would go off and leaned against the glass of the booth. He thought about Mooney. It was so damned unreal. He would have been inside the store now, buying a couple of sweet rolls for a snack, buying something for the little girl with gold earings as naturally as if she had gone in there with him, and watching out of the corner of his eye to see if the two boys who had left their bikes outside were going to lift a package of gum over in the candy aisle. Instead, he simply didn't exist, didn't play any part at all. Except that he was a part of the puzzzle, or rather, his death was. He was a number in a larger equation, an unknown factor. A candidate for an interview with the extraordinary Detective Voyant. Christ. How had he thought of that? It was freakish.

Mooney used to do a little routine in which he satirized the "if-only-the-dead-could-talk" wish of frustrated homicide detectives. He became the famous female Detective Claire Voyant. Detective Voyant tried to solve her cases by interviewing the dead, taking statements from the victims, the only people in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred who knew who had killed them. This would have seemed the answer to a homicide detective's prayers, but as it turned out, the bewildered Detective Voyant invariably discovered that the ghosts of the victims—in Mooney's words—"didn't know Jack shit" about who had killed them. Claire was the supremely frustrated investigator, and in all the years Mooney had been relating her stories, which were drawn larger than life with Mooney's special brand of irreverent humor, she never cleared a single homicide case through her unique ability to interview the victims.

It occurred to Haydon, standing in the telephone booth and staring out through the lemon light, that he had heard the last of

Detective Voyant. However, it seemed to him that had she tried her technique in one last case, that of her creator and fellow detective, she would have appreciated the irony in the fact that even Ed Mooney, really, didn't know Jack shit about who had shot him that dark night from the impenetrable wall of black bamboo.

Haydon was burning up in the booth, but stood there, sweating, thinking. He remembered the swell of Mooney's stomach as he lay on his back. He remembered the sound of the gunfire, and his own mental image of what it meant, Mooney's appalling death grunt, the heat and brilliance and roar of the blasts lifting him off his feet and hurling him backward in darkness to the dirty sidewalk where he died staring up to the night sky until one darkness overcame another and he, the profane and contentious and likable and terrified Ed Mooney, stepped across that awesome border into eternity.