No Immunity

his boss to call me here from California. Grady could be lying off the road somewhere bleeding to death.” He strained for any sound of acquiescence. “If you know Grady as well as I do, you can imagine him taking a shortcut that leads him fifty miles from the main road and getting stranded there. Without food or water.” Still no response. He was sweating. Why didn’t the woman trust him? What proof— “Grady and me, we were in college together. Maybe he mentioned me? Did he ever mention the raid on Tasman Hall across campus when ten of us pushed a VW bug up the stairs to the fourth floor? Not easy around the corners. Took all ten guys. And then—this is the Gradyism of it—we get to the top and there’s only a little person-sized door. Not even a landing for the car. No place for us to leave it. So, we have to lower the thing down again, all four flights. That’s real work when you’ve gone all out pushing the damned thing up. And of course when we got down to street level, the campus cops were waiting.”
    Behind the door Louisa sounded like she was choking.
    “Any lead, Louisa.”
    “Street News!” a man called from the parking lot. “Hey, man, you got your issue of Street News ? Just off the presses.” He ambled toward him.
    Tchernak waved him off. “Louisa, any lead’.“‘
    “Grady had two deaf teenaged boys he brought back from Yaviza.”
    “Were they here?” Tchernak asked.
    “They were until Grady broke in and took them. He got them an apartment three blocks north, half a block to the right. Number One.”

CHAPTER 18

    “ That true? “ Cecil McGuire kept the point of the knife against Louisa Larson’s throat. Damned woman was bigger than he was. But he’d taken her by surprise. They called him the Weasel, and he was good at finding holes and passages, but when it came to springing like a cat, dead quiet with fangs ready to slash, hell, there was no one better.
    This lady doc, she thought she was street-smart. Lot to learn for this one. She didn’t open the door right up wide like a hooker looking for trade. She figured she was smart just cracking it an inch.
    Smart? Yeah. Open’s open. She put up a helluva fight, but the stupid broad broke half the pictures and beakers and glass gizmos herself. And then she told him where the tape was, like he was going to do like he said and not tie up. Stupid broad. Then the dick’s banging at the door. His pulse is banging at his skin. All the doc needs to do is scream. But she don’t. She plays it smart. If she’d been that smart to begin with... But she was too scared then. “I said: Was it true, what you told him?”
    She didn’t answer.
    He pricked her skin. Scare her some more.
    She didn’t even gasp. He ached to do another, dig the knife in deeper, but good sense stopped him. He hadn’t made it all these years in Vegas, when big guys were going down all around him, by being stupid. “Don’t fool with me, lady. You don’t give me the truth, I won’t be giving you just a scar. Get it?” He levered her around so that she was looking into the upended chairs, smashed pictures, broken glass. “What you told the dick, that true?”
    “Yes!” He could feel her body lurch forward as she let out the word. He yanked her back by the wrists. His free hand was ready to slap over her mouth, but she didn’t scream.
    “These kids, they know where he is?”
    “I don’t know.”
    He hesitated. “Maybe I better take you with me. Let you get them to tell me.”
    She turned her head toward him. And then the damned bitch laughed. “By the time you do that, they’ll be gone. That private eye’ll have them halfway to L.A. by then.” He gave her a good cut for that, a slash right beside the eye where she’d remember it. She gasped at that one. Then he ran for his car.

CHAPTER 19

    The Gattozzi Sheriff’s Department was not much bigger—or better—than the picture of the century-old Pioche lockup on the sheriff’s office wall. The whole affair was one storefront wide, with a counter blocking entry to two cells, bathroom, and the twelve-foot-square office in which Kiernan sat. The cells in the old Pioche jail were tiny windowless rooms with metal bed slabs and low openings barely large enough for a meal tray. The other half of the dank slab building was the “exercise room,” whose Main features were the drain in the floor and the big metal £ye for shackling prisoners. Lest the rustlers and card cheats conjure thoughts of