A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(49)

The driver blocking the left lane pulled forward to block the space that had opened up in the middle of the road.

Jane saw a wash of white light projected onto her dashboard from behind, and didn’t have to look into the rearview mirror to know that the SUV that had been following her for miles was coming up fast behind her.

In another second she was at the roadblock, flashing past with two wheels on the road and the other two on the pavement of the gas station behind the left SUV. She narrowly missed the first gas pump and adjusted her trajectory to make it back onto the road to avoid the telephone pole at the end of the lot.

The black SUV that had been following her shot past in the space between the two other black SUVs that had formed the roadblock, and began to gain on her.

Jimmy turned around in his seat to watch the vehicle behind. “I can’t believe this. Who the heck are these guys?”

“I can’t tell. They don’t seem to be good at stopping people without killing them.”

Jane was driving hard now, accelerating steadily, trying to hug the inside of each curve and straighten to aim at the next one. Jimmy looked at the speedometer and watched the needle climb over ninety-five miles an hour, a hundred, and still move higher. The broken white lines on the pavement streaked toward them like tracer rounds.

“You’re going too fast. What if a cop sees us?”

“What if two carloads of armed thugs catch up with us on a deserted highway?”

“Can we ditch the car somewhere and slip off on foot?”

Jane kept glancing in the mirrors, her hands gripping the steering wheel to keep the car from spinning out. “If I see the right place, we can try. I haven’t seen one yet. We’d have to get far enough ahead so they can’t see us bail out, and if I can accomplish that, we’re better off in the car.”

“But you’re going—”

“Jimmy.” She said it quietly, but he understood that she didn’t intend to argue. The car was going so fast that when she reached a slight rise, the car rose on its springs to be nearly airborne at the crest, and then burrowed downward into the shallow trough beyond it. Jimmy gripped the armrest, his teeth clenched so his jaw muscles bulged whenever he felt a bounce or a rocking of the car, but he was clearly determined not to remind her that what she was doing was dangerous.

Jane glanced in the mirror again. She reached a long, straight stretch, and kept her eyes on the mirror for a long time.

Jimmy turned in his seat and looked. “I don’t see them anymore.”

“Neither do I. Keep watching, in case one of them is crazy enough to follow us without headlights.”

She kept going, but she let up on the gas pedal a bit. They hurtled through the night for another ten minutes before she lowered her speed again, this time to only ten miles an hour over the speed limit. “Okay,” she said. “We’re looking for Route Twenty-two now. There should be signs.”

“Who do you think those guys are?”

“Enemies. Watch for the signs for Route Twenty-two.”

“Where will that take us?”

“Away from them.”





12



This is pitiful,” said Teddy Mangeoli. “Dreadful. I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life. What am I going to say?”

“I’m sorry, Teddy,” said Donato. “I’m sorry. I sent six really good men. The idea was to avoid shooting up the whole city and making a lot of trouble for everybody, right?”

“Right,” said Mangeoli. “Was that too tall an order? Six picked men can’t go to a hotel where we know some guy is staying, and put him down quietly? This was a favor for a very important and respected man, a near neighbor we might need on our side someday soon.”

“It wasn’t too tall an order. We just didn’t know some crucial things, and it made all the difference. Nobody mentioned that the guy had a girlfriend with him in the hotel. She happened to go down to the lobby while Santoro and Molinaro were talking to the desk clerk, and made them somehow. By the time Santoro and Molinaro got upstairs to take the guy out, the guy and the girlfriend were out and driving away in a car.”

“Michael. My very good friend. Take a step back from all these details. Think about the magnitude of what’s happened to us. Our thing here in Cleveland was a force for a hundred years, an organization to be admired and feared. This was where Big Joe Lonardo put together the corn syrup monopoly. He dominated the corn liquor business during Prohibition.”

“And lost it in the corn syrup wars.”

“I’m talking about the size, strength, and importance of the Cleveland organization. Hell, the Statler Hotel was where the first national sit-down took place in 1928.”

“Well, it never actually took place,” said Donato. “Every-body got arrested before it got started.”

“That doesn’t matter. They all came, didn’t they? The most powerful, important men in La Cosa Nostra. They came here from New York, Chicago, Florida, everywhere. And in those days, you couldn’t just hop on a plane. You had to be sincere enough to spend a couple of days on a train. The point is the Cleveland organization was respected. Now we can’t take out one Indian from Buffalo and his girlfriend. We can’t do a simple favor for a very important ally. We’re a sad, diminished thing. We’ve got more guys in jail than on the street.”