“You think I’m being bugged for Christ’s sake?”

“I’m pretty sure you are.”

“Jesus … Hold on, I’m writin’ it down.”

“Now add up the two numbers. Don’t do it out loud.”

“I get you … OK. Now what?”

“Get to a pay phone and call me. You’ve got my number there.”

“Hey that’s damn smart, old horse. OK, take me five, ten minutes to get down there.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

He stepped out of the stifling booth and left its door open; he crossed the curb to the car. Vasquez said, “All right?”

“He’ll call back in a few minutes.”

“When he does, don’t soft-pedal it.”

“It’s hard knowing how to break it to him.”

“Tell him the complete truth.”

“He’ll have every right to tear me limb from limb.”

“It can’t be helped.”

“He’s probably in the middle of shooting that special. He can’t just walk out on it.”

“He’ll have to.”

“How? He’s under contract.”

“It doesn’t matter. He’ll have to do it—you’ll have to convince him.”

“Roger can be a stubborn guy.”

“So can you, Mr. Merle. Just bear in mind that several lives may depend on it.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Long Island Sound: 14 September

1

OUT ON THE SOUND A FLOTILLA OF SAILBOATS MADE BUTTERFLY patterns. Anna sat lotioned and lazy in her bikini on the transom of the Sandora, her face thrown back to the sun. She watched Sandy on the flying bridge guiding the cruiser under Frank’s watchful instruction. In the sport-fishing chair Nora was pretending she had a whale on her line.

The twin diesels made a guttural mutter in the water beneath the stern. Sandora curled slowly toward the forested banks of the inlet they’d chosen.

Frank shouted something and Nora bounded out of the fishing chair. Smiling, Anna watched her drop the anchor. The engines were throttled right down; she felt it when the cable brought her up; then Sandy switched everything off and there was no sound except the lapping of the water against the hull.

Frank came down the ladder. “You girls want to eat first or swim first?”

Sandy was still up top. She was shading her eyes, looking out toward the Sound. “Isn’t that our outboard?”

Frank went halfway up the ladder and squinted into the dazzle. “Jesus God. Can’t a man have a little privacy with his own family even on a Sunday afternoon?”

Anna stood up. “What is it?”

“The pest. Ezio.”

She made a face. Frank came back down onto the deck. “You kids better have your swim first.”

Nora pouted. “Is he going to stay for the picnic, Daddy?”

“Not if I can help it.”

The motor boat came slapping into the inlet leaving a shallow white vee of a wake; Ezio throttled back and brought it smoothly alongside.

Ezio was in a mood. “Why the hell don’t you ever turn on your ship-to-shore? I been trying to reach you for an hour.”

“I go on this boat to get away from telephones, Ezio.”

“You can’t just do that, Frank. What if something important comes up?”

“Then you’ll get in the outboard and come after me the way you just did. I left word where we’d be, didn’t I?”

“Took me half the afternoon to find this place. Suppose it was really urgent?”

Frank showed his exasperation. “You kids go for a swim, OK?”

Nora said, “I’m hungry. You make it short.”

“Damn right I will.”

Anna watched the two of them go off into the water like dolphins. They went cleaving toward shore, racing each other. It wasn’t much of a contest. Sandy’s crawl was smooth enough for an Olympic; Nora splashed great thuds and geysers.

Ezio said, “Maybe Mrs. Pastor wants a swim too.”

“What’s it about, Ezio? This Merle business?”

“Yeah.”

“Then she stays if she wants to.”

She nodded and stayed where she was. Ezio showed his resentment in a brief pinching of his lips. Then he sat down and retied the laces of his plimsolls. “Gilfillan took off.”

“Took off?”

“The whole family. Right into thin air.”

2

“We had two cars and a phone tap on those people, Ezio. Now what do you mean telling me they ‘took off’?”

“They had help, Frank.”

“Whose help? This Bradleigh?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Suppose you tell it from the top. And try not to blow my whole Sunday afternoon, all right?”

“I know you’re sore being disturbed like this, Frank, but we’ve got to decide how to handle this and the trail’s already getting colder while we sit here talking.”

“Then hurry up.”

“Well yesterday morning—Saturday—Mrs. Merle called the Gilfillans again the way she said she would last week. We had a tap on it. The call came in from a pay phone in San Diego county. No telling if it was the same pay phone she used last time. We’d played it the way you figured, we let Gilfillan know he had a tail Friday afternoon, so they told Mrs. Merle.”

“How’d she react?”

“I guess you’d say baffled, Frank. But it seems like she must have gone straight to where they’re hiding out and told Merle about it because a couple hours later Merle calls Gilfillan.”

Frank smiled. “I knew it. I knew it would bring the son of a bitch out in the open.”

“Well anyhow Merle calls and he just gives Gilfillan this code of some kind, a bunch of numbers that Gilfillan can figure out a phone number from. There was no way we could get that number, the way he did it. You want me to spell it out?”

“No. Just let’s have the meat.”

“Our guys follow Gilfillan down to a shopping center in Culver City, right? He goes to a phone booth, he makes a call. Then Gilfillan goes back home. Now it takes a little time for things to get relayed, Frank, you know how it is. A couple of hours later I get a call from Deffeldorf out there. I tell him to put a couple extra guys on Gilfillan and watch him like a hawk, right? So now we got three cars, six guys, watching Gilfillan’s place, and we got two more guys in the panel truck up the street manning the phone tap. Eight men on him. Four vehicles. Now that ought to be enough. I figured we had him sewed up.”

“So what happened?”

“So about four o’clock Los Angeles time Gilfillan backs his car out of his garage. It’s a Chrysler wagon. Him, his wife and his kid. Some luggage in the back, right? Our guys figure this is it, he’s heading for a meet with Merle. They’re on him like glue.”

“This is yesterday?”

“Yeah, it’s yesterday. They drive out to Riverside on the freeways. Maybe they know they’re tailed, I don’t know, but they don’t pull anything, they just drive out to Riverside, right? No trouble following them.”

“Ezio …”

“I’m getting there. So these Gilfillans pull in at this classy type restaurant out there. It’s maybe five-thirty. They park the wagon, the three of them walk into this restaurant. Our guys park their cars the right way—one goes around behind the place, the other two bracket the Chrysler. What happens, they hardly get time to settle down and the Gilfillan people come trooping back out of the restaurant. They’ve been in there ten minutes tops.”

“Making phone calls, probably.”

“All we know is they get back in the car and they lead our guys a merry goose chase over half of Southern California. They head out to El Centro, they cut back toward Santa Ana, they go all over the damn place. They stop for gas, our guys stop for gas. Our guys check in by phone when they get a chance but what the hell can I tell them?”

“Bottom line, Ezio.”

“Bottom line, yeah. They’re out in one of those boondock areas—little farm towns, secondary roads, citrus farms. You know, it gets to be maybe eleven o’clock at night. They stop at some café, one of those drive-in things, they get hamburgers, they kill some time. Midnight, they’re still driving around. Like they’re sightseeing, you know, only it’s the middle of the night. They turn down this farm road—dirt road—they go out of sight of our guys for a minute around a bend. Our guys hit the bend and there’s this U-Haul truck skewed right across the road. No way to get past it. Irrigation ditches on both sides of the road and it’s just one of those narrow little farm dirt-tracks, you know. One-lane wide. This truck right across the road.”