SEVENTEEN
The rented Taurus sped across the frozen Nebraskan plain and deRocco flexed his arthritic fingers, his knuckles crackling and popping like Rice Crispies in milk. Even at 85mph, this journey was taking forever, but his partner had only found one shoe and footprints leading back to the main road. Somehow Tempo had survived a flurry of bullets and now deRocco was stuck driving across country in the dead of winter.
He took out a cellular phone and dialed Kev's portable. The signal was transmitted to a nearby CC tower, bounced up to a geostatic satellite hovering over the USA, and zapped down to another tower in LA to be reinforced by a booster to the called number. When the other end finally answered, no one spoke and DeRocco asked, "Kev, that you?"
"He can't come to the phone right now,” the man on the other end informed him.
Kev's banging a rent-boy, while he had been stuck in this rented car for the last day didn't improve deRocco's mood and he spat, "Get him on the phone, you fag."
"This is me."
"Yeah, what's up?" deRocco recognized the voice, though Louie answering Kev's phone meant his partner had screwed up yet again and he could only hope Kev had kept his mouth shut about the fuck-up with Tempo.
"Listen, your friend went a little crazy, thinking I was going to stiff him." Louie spoke in a very guarded tone, since there was always a good chance of the police playing electronic Gestapo. "We had to sedate him."
"You sedated him?” A civilian like Louie Sinreich getting the drop on Kev spelled out the end of a stone-cold killer in big letters.
"I had to soothe the savage beast the only way I could and you wouldn’t want the other way?"
"No, I don't want anything bad to happen to him."
deRocco caught Louie's drift, but no Hollywood sleazeball like Louie Sinreich was going to whack Kev. deRocco divided the remaining 1800 miles by 80mph. The numbers added up to more than 30.
"I'll be out in another twenty-four hours, maybe less. Take care of him until then and I don’t want to hear nothin’ ‘bout not havin’ the money. I’m not as forgivin’ as my friend.”
"There's a little hitch. The job never made the paper."
"So you're in LA."
"No, it didn't make the Vegas papers."
"So what are you saying?"
"Just like sometimes things aren't what they seem, that's all."
This job was getting more and more hinky, for the only murders the media did not crawl over like maggots are those where there is no body for anyone to find and staging an alien abduction had never been part of the plan.
"You still there?”
"I'm here." DeRocco gazed enviously out the window at the sleeping farms, then said, "Whatever the problem, I'll make it right."
"I can count on that?"
"Like you can count on your fingers." DeRocco's intuition was taunting him with the premonition of things getting a lot messier and he signed off, saying, "I'll call you real soon."
"Good, I'll be waiting."
deRocco put away the phone and searched for the bottle of aspirins in his jacket.
Everything was fucked.
Kev had flipped out. Tempo was loose with the wallets tying them to five murders. The hit in Vegas might have been faked and Louie Sinreich was possibly reneging on the twenty-five Gs. "What will you do? What will you do?” echoed in his head and for a minute no solution seemed feasible, but only because the answer was more obvious than the big Hollywood sign telling you where you were.
Pencils had erasers and deRocco planned to use his version once he was in LA. Resolved to this task, he settled into the seat and figured out how hours it would take to reach Las Vegas.
Somewhere around twenty-five.
LA couldn't be much further.
He lit up a cigarette and, after taking a single puff the world, stepped on the accelerator. Only one thing was for sure. The faster he reached LA, the faster he could make things right, even if he had no idea what 'right' meant to him. Someone had to know that answer. All he had to do was time the right person to ask the right question and LA had millions of people. One of them had to be right, even if the odds were a million to one.
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