Devil's Redhead Read online

  The Devil’s Redhead

  David Corbett

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media Ebook

  This book is dedicated to

  Cesidia Therese Tessicini.

  My Terribones, my goony-bird.

  My bride.

  You died too young. Too hard.

  Who is this coming up from the desert.…

  .… stern as death is love,

  relentless as the nether world is devotion;

  its flames are a blazing fire.

  __……………

  PROLOGUE

  1 9 8 0

  He blew into Las Vegas the first week of spring, primed to hit the tables, sniff the wildlife and, basically, cat around. Given his focus was pleasure, not business, he saw no need for an alias. His real name was safe enough—though, like many accidents of birth, it created problems all its own. He stood there waiting at the hotel desk as the girl working check-in struggled with pronunciation.

  “Old Italian tongue twister,” he offered finally. “Try emphasizing the third syllable. Abba Tan Jel-O.”

  The girl nodded, squinting as she tried again. “Daniel … Sebastian … Abatangelo …”

  He shot her an encouraging wink. “We have ourselves a winner.”

  Her eyes lit up and she broke into a helpless smile, swiveling a little at the hip. “Sounds pretty,” she said, holding out his room key. “I mean, not when I say it, when you do. Bet a lot of people just call you Dan.”

  “Oh, people call me all sorts of things,” he said, smiling back as he took the key from her.

  He went up to his room—the usual decor, meant to set your teeth on edge—and showered off the road dust, hoping to relax a little from the trip and order a light dinner from room service before heading back out. After a prawn cocktail and a fruit plate chased by Heineken, he hit the Strip, searching out luck—the right house, the right table—plying his way through the bus-delivered crowds and the metallic clamor and the popping lights, a deafening maze of kitschy pandemonium dedicated to full-throttle indulgence: chance, a little flesh, the mighty buck. Years later, he would reflect that the only thing louder than a Vegas casino at night is the inside of a prison.

  About eight o’clock, he took a seat at a twenty-one table at Caesar’s, picking this one out among all the rest because of the woman dealing the cards. Her hair was red, her eyes green, and she had the kind of smile that said: Gentlemen, start your engines. She had that tomboy build he had a thing for, too. Maybe she’ll let me break even, he thought, settling into his chair.

  “Good evening, Lachelle,” he said, reading her name tag: LACHELLE MAUREEN BEAUDRY—ODESSA, TEXAS. “Five thousand in fifties, please.” Licking his thumb, he counted out the cash for his chips.

  Four hours later, they stumbled through the casino’s massive plate-glass doors and onto the Strip, sides aching from laughter, each of them gripping the bottle neck of an empty magnum of Taittinger Brut. Their hair, their skin, their clothes were soaked and sticky, and as they stood there, taking stock of the situation and gathering their breath, a small posse of flinty, helmet-haired security guards glared at them through the dark-tinted glass, barring reentry. They’d just been thrown out for playing hide-and-seek in the casino, chasing each other around the slots, screaming through the crowd and across the vast red gaming floor, spraying each other with champagne whenever “It” found “Guess Who.”

  Out on the sidewalk in the open air, a thinning crowd of tourists, lucklorn and numb, tramped past amid the riot of neon. Shel, still in her dealer’s uniform, unclipped her barrette and shook out her thick red hair.

  “Unless I’m sorely mistaken,” she said, “showing up for my shift tomorrow would be a major waste of time.”

  It’s midnight in Las Vegas, he thought, watching her. The witching hour. In the town that never sleeps. She shot him a knockdown smile, standing before him like a dare—You will love me forever, she seemed to say, or die trying. He reached across the space between them to remove a strand of hair which was glued to her cheek with champagne. Sensing an opening, she moved in and landed that first kiss. He felt her lips move against his own—warm, soft, like high school—the taste of her lipstick mingling with the smell of her hair and her breath and her sticky skin. Then came that liquid heart-stopping thing not even movies get right.

  He made a few calls, and from a nameless friend wangled access to a condo up north, near the ski resort on Mt. Charleston. On the drive Shel put her feet up on the dash and let the desert wind run riot through her hair as she told him a little about herself. It was her second year in Vegas, she said, after ten years wandering around the desert southwest—El Paso, Tucson, Flagstaff, Lake Havasu, Bullhead City. She’d fled Odessa as a teenager, running away from what she called “a small-town roach campaign.” Then came the long hard haul of working her way up from waffle houses to roadside diners, cocktail lounges, racketeer-run deadfalls and the bleakest nightclubs on earth, a few of the topless variety—where dusty men came out of the desert at night to drink hard, say nothing and stare at you, like you were an angel, or a curse—starting as a skinny kid at minimum wage and ending a wise old woman of twenty-eight at a fifty-dollar table at Caesar’s.

  “You know The Music Man?” she said. “There’s this song Professor Harold Hill sings, ‘The Sadder but Wiser Girl for Me.’ Always been my favorite part of the movie.”

  Abatangelo let that sit for a moment, studying her in sidelong glances. Did I mention she was perfect, he thought, like a jailer whispering to the prisoner caged inside his heart. And her hair smells great.

  “So what’s that make me?” he asked finally. “Some out-o’-town jasper?”

  He gave it his best Robert Preston. Her brow furrowed as she tried to place the line.

  “Oh, we got trouble,” she said at last, vamping.

  “Terrible, terrible trouble,” he confirmed.

  She dropped her head, giggling, and hugged her knees. “Oh please please please,” she shrieked, stamping her bare feet on the dash, “please don’t tell me you’re gonna fall for the fussy little librarian.”

  The laughter in her voice, it was heat lightning, goofy, who-the-hell-cares. Like everything else about her.

  “Librarian?” he said, coming back to it. “God, no. Might as well chase after my sister.”

  He turned east off the highway toward the mountain and they pulled up to the condo just after two in the morning. The place was woodsy, plush and remote, with the forest dissolving on all sides into moonless black. Abatangelo retrieved a key from the hiding place he’d been told about, opened the door and switched on the light. Shel ventured inside on tiptoe, like a nymph in some French ballet, and glanced around.

  “You could do terrible things to me here,” she said. “Cut me up like a chicken. Nobody’d ever know.”

  Abatangelo, following her in, closed the door and tossed her the key—gently, so she’d catch it. “Gee,” he said. “We’ve only just met and you already know me so well.”

  They spent the next three days holed up alone, curtains drawn, door locked, phone off the hook. Outside, in a freak spring heat wave, desert temperatures rose to record levels. Inside, they tumbled, roiled, laughed, clinging to each other, their sweat running milky and slick. Later, naked and tasting of each other, they’d lay there bleary on drenched sheets, staring at the ceiling fan in wonder.

  From Vegas they flew to San Diego for the sake of the ocean breeze, taking a room at the Hotel Americana on Shelter Island. Here at last they began to show themselves in public, taking in the sights, the nightlife. From time to time Shel found herself glancing sidelong at this new man in her life, wondering, Who is this creature? How did he make it all happen so fast? In the looks depar
tment he was better than average, but not so slick he could gloat. He was tall, though, always a plus, with the kind of build only swimming provides. And my, but the man could swim. In the mornings she’d sit poolside in a hotel lounge chair as he swam laps, fanning herself with the breakfast menu and marveling not only at how gorgeous and strong he looked in the water, but how much she enjoyed just sitting there, watching him. I’m a schoolgirl at summer camp, she thought, lusting after the lifeguard.

  Truth be told, she liked everything about him. He could be shy as a boy one minute and then click, the eyes came on, the mind snapped to and nothing got past him. They entered a room and heads turned, not because of one or the other, but the two of them together. Never happened like that before, she thought—maybe your luck’s changed, with men at any rate.

  He had with him some serious-looking cameras, and Shel assumed he was a photographer of some sort. One with money to spare. He was generous with it, too, spending it on her with the giddy finesse of a man embarked on a winning streak. When she pressed him once—You do this for a living?—he offered a demented little grin and called himself an artiste mauvais.

  “Oh, gee, well—doesn’t that just clear the whole thing up,” she said.

  “Like Rimbaud,” he explained. When she just stared at him, he added, “French poet, disciple of Baudelaire. He gave up poetry and ended up running guns in Abyssinia.”

  She sensed something in his voice. “You gonna tell me that’s what you do?”

  It took him a moment to answer, and all he said was, “I don’t like guns. Don’t like what they do to people.” Smiling finally, he added, “And Abyssinia no longer exists.”

  To change the subject, he told her he’d had gallery shows in Mendocino, Carmel; he’d joined a few group exhibits in Tahoe and San Francisco. He had a carrying case with him for his prints, and he took it out and showed her his work.

  “Jesus,” she said, looking. He had a real knack for faces, an eye for contrast. He could capture the riddle in an empty street, an old man’s hat, a woman alone at a bus stop. “You’ve really got something,” she said. “These are good.”

  He said nothing, just looked back at her with an impossibly sad smile, the kind to break a girl’s heart.

  The following day, he came clean. They were sitting alone beneath a cloudless sky on the dock outside the hotel. Sipping champagne and nibbling on Korean barbecue, they licked the sauce off each other’s fingers, watching the yachts sail out past Ballast Point. Shel trailed her feet in the water, her back resting against Abatangelo who sat in a deck chair behind her. Using a yawn for subterfuge, he collected something from his pocket, reached around her, opened a black felt box with satin lining and presented his gift—a necklace of fine gold filigree, with an amethyst shaped like a wine-colored teardrop resting in a white gold setting.

  “Holy … cow …,” she whispered, her hands held out, sticky with barbecue. “If that’s not for me, I’m gonna cry.”

  She licked her fingers clean, reached up and gathered her hair away from her neck so he could put it on her. As he fastened the clasp at her nape, he said, “This stone, incidentally, has a story to it.”

  She could tell from his voice there was nothing “incidental” about it, but before she could call him on it, he continued.

  “The maiden Amethyst was wandering through the forest one day, when she stumbled on the tigers of Bacchus, sleeping in the sun. Before she could sneak away, the tigers woke up. She panicked.”

  “Bad idea with tigers,” Shel guessed.

  “You know this story.”

  “Every girl knows this story,” she said. “More or less. Go on.”

  “Amethyst ran. The tigers chased her down. They almost had her when she was spotted by the goddess Diana. Taking pity, and to save Amethyst from being torn to shreds, Diana turned the girl into stone.”

  Shel turned to face him, squinting in the sunlight. “What, this goddess, she couldn’t just wave some kinda magic thingy?”

  Abatangelo sat there a moment, considering it. “There’s no magic thingy in this story. Sorry.”

  There it was again, she thought. That catch in his voice. The necklace wasn’t just a gift. It was a warning.

  “This story,” she said, “you’re gonna get to the ending before you break my heart, right?”

  He clicked the felt box open and shut, nervous. “Bacchus,” he said finally, “in remorse for what his tigers had done, poured wine over Amethyst. It didn’t bring her back to life, but it did turn the stone the color you see there.”

  Shel nodded, then held the stone up to the sunlight to watch it flare. “Great story,” she said finally. “Spooky, but great. And I love my present. Thank you.”

  “You are,” he said, “most definitely welcome.”

  “That’s not the only story goes along with this present, is it.”

  He looked out at the wide blue bay, dotted with sails, taking a moment to frame his thought. “I want to give you the chance to walk away,” he said, “before things get sticky.”

  And that was how the truth came out. He’d been smuggling since college, he told her, turning serious right about the time he lost his scholarship in water polo, the result of blowing out a knee in a motorcycle accident. He’d earned a nickname from his former teammates, some of whom remained customers. He was Bad Dan, The Man Who Can.

  He ran the stateside crews, hiring the boys on the beach and managing distribution, while his partner, Steve Cadaret, worked up the loads in Bangkok. Over the preceding three years, the Cadaret Company had brought in two hundred tons of premium Thai pot. They landed it on remote beaches, in abandoned quarries, along heavily forested riversheds. For transport, they used anything that would float, from garbage scows to an old fruit freighter they’d salvaged from a shipyard in Panama. They’d formed a nexus of dummy companies to hide the money and mastered the ancient art of bribery.

  For all that, he assured her, he and his buddies did their best to avoid the gaudier macho baggage. From the time he and Cadaret had started out, they’d lived by the credo: No guns, no gangsters. It’s only money. Because of that, and a number of other factors—philosophical, socio-legal, what have you—he resisted conceding that what he did made him a criminal. A character, sure, deviant probably, maybe even an outlaw (“Got a nice, old-timey ring, that one,” he said). But criminal, no. He knew criminals. At the age of nine he’d watched his father disappear with three enforcers from a local loan shark. He’d grown up with guys who’d later be in and out of prison like it was a combination trade school and fraternal lodge. And, of course, he dealt with criminals in the business—the worst could be avoided if you used good sense. Regardless, he felt no kinship with such men.

  In truth, he said, he was nothing more than one more aimless brat, born into a generation that dismissed the two core tenets of the American creed: Family and Honest Work. To his mind, families meant guilt, scheming, envy. That was his experience, at any rate. As for work, it amounted to little more than a lifelong resentment stoked by spineless greed. Friends alone legitimize duty. Only a dream makes work bearable, and nothing makes it honest. He held himself accountable only to the bond he felt for those he loved and the thrill of peering over the edge.

  Shel heard him out, swishing her feet in the salt water as, every now and then, a crab crawled up onto the sun-bleached dock, or a spate of laughter erupted from the hotel bar.

  “And that,” she said, “in the immortal words of Paul Harvey, is the rest of the story.” She looked up at him, trying to subdue the despair and panic and fury inside her. Too good to be true, she thought, should’ve known. Another handsome, sad-eyed liar. “So all that about being an artiste whatchamacallit, the gallery shows, it’s just a crock.”

  “No,” Abatangelo told her. “All that was true. It’s just not how I make my money.” He gestured to include the surroundings. “If it were, I could hardly afford this, believe me.”

  True enough, she realized. He wasn’t really lying. And
regardless what word got used to describe him, he wasn’t evil. Well then, she asked herself, what’s the problem? What did you expect, who are you to judge—more to the point, what is there to go back to that beats this? Dealing cards to drunks? You love him. Deny that, you’re the liar.

  “Overall,” she said quietly, “it’s a lot less twisted than I’ve got a right to expect. Not like I’m some virgin bride.” She turned to face him, squinting in the late-day sunlight. “I like the part about no gangsters. No guns.”

  “Me too,” he admitted.

  “I see guns, I’m gone.”

  PART I

  CHAPTER

  1

  1982

  Abatangelo stood on the porch of a safe house in western Oregon, watching with foreboding as an old Harley-Davidson shovelhead thundered up the winding timber road. The motorcycle turned into the long, steep drive to the house, spewing gravel and dust as it charged uphill beneath the pine shade.

  Behind him, footsteps approached from inside. Glancing over his shoulder, he watched as Shel materialized through shadow at the porch door screen.

  “Kinda early,” she said, nodding down the hill.

  “Isn’t it,” he replied.

  Abatangelo recognized the bike. It belonged to a man named Chaney, one of the local throwbacks he’d hired for the beach crew. Not the brightest bulb, but he wasn’t alone in that. This was probably the sorriest bunch Abatangelo had put together in years, comprised of Chaney and his wanna-be biker pals, plus an unruly and utterly toasted squad of pillheads from Beaverton and a few swacked Chinooks who at least knew the area. It underscored how right it was that this should be the last catch ever, a final nest egg against the looming unknown.

  Chaney took the final crest of the hill at full throttle. The dogs, three spirited black Labs, barked from inside the fenced-in backyard as the bike left behind the thick shade of the drive and entered the hardpan firebreak surrounding the house. Chaney came garbed in denims and cowboy boots and aviator shades, with a black watch cap pulled down low on his head. Maybe all of twenty years old. Give him three years, Abatangelo thought, he’ll be punching a clock for the timber companies, or whining because he isn’t, same as everybody else up here.