Thomas Perry: The Informant

Eddie Mastrewski did exactly as he had promised-provided a safe, happy home and taught the boy his trade. The part that the neighbors didn't know was that Eddie the Butcher wasn't just a butcher. He was a professional killer.

The boy had been a good learner. As a teenager he had a photograph on his wall taken by a news photographer in Vietnam. In the foreground there was a procession of people at some sort of religious festival. They were walking along, some beating drums, some with their mouths open wide singing, some with their heads bent in prayer. But behind them was a glaring bright-orange-and-crimson explosion spreading into the air like a monstrous flower blooming.

He knew from Eddie that the photograph must have been taken during the two-tenths of a second after the bomb's initiator had ignited the explosive, but before the minds of any of the paraders could apprehend the change. The bomb had already gone off, but none of these people had yet heard, felt, or seen anything happen. That was still in their future.

The boy had spent a great deal of time over the next few years thinking about those two-tenths of a second. If he could deliver a disabling blow in those two-tenths of a second, the adversary would literally never see it coming, never know what happened to him until he was down.

Eddie made sure the boy was proficient with knives, shotguns, rifles, and pistols of the common brands and calibers. When the boy was fifteen, Eddie began to take him out on weekend jobs. When he turned sixteen, he quit school and worked with Eddie full-time. That was when he had advanced from apprentice to journeyman.

Killing was mostly a mental business. It required thinking clearly, not quickly. Picking the time and place long before he went out to do a job gave him the chance to study the way it should be done, to find the best shooting angle, and become familiar with all of the entrances and exits. Before the time came, a professional killer could arrange almost everything in his favor. He could come through like a gust of wind-there unexpectedly, then gone-and after he disappeared, leave an impression rather than a memory.

Eddie had taught him that "It's the passion that's missing, and that protects you. You kill somebody because someone else hates him. The only time you have to feel anything is if you make a mistake and he gets the chance to fight back. Then he's your enemy and your adrenaline flows until he's dead."

Amateurs were all passion. Amateurs would plan the killing up to the moment when their enemies died and then turn stupid. They thought it would end then, that they'll toss the knife or gun away, go back to their houses, take a shower, and stuff their clothes in the washing machine.

Amateurs didn't think about the fact that as soon as the body was found, they had potent new enemies, the cops. And cops looked for connections between victims and their killers. Nine out of ten murders were done by somebody the victim knew. How many people could the average person know? The average person could only hold five hundred faces in his memory. So at the moment when the victim hit the ground, the world's six billion people narrowed down to only five hundred suspects. The police would look at how the killing was done. If it required a lot of strength, the killer was a man; about two hundred and fifty of the five hundred were eliminated. Two-thirds of the remaining two hundred and fifty would have good alibis. Make that eighty suspects. A quarter of them were too young or too old. Make that sixty suspects. By now the amateur was beginning to feel a little sick. The pro would already have counted his money and be on the way to his next job. He was one of the six billion who had already been eliminated.

He turned into the car-rental return outside La Guardia, returned his car, and rode the shuttle bus to the terminal. The people who saw him noticed only another middle-aged man with brown hair graying a bit at the temples, who wore the nearly universal travel uniform of such men-a dark-colored sport coat with gray or beige pants, a blue shirt without a tie, and rubber-soled shoes. There was no reason to look at him closely, nor did he look at them. Everyone on a shuttle bus to an airport was on the way to somewhere else, and thinking well ahead into a different time and place.

He came onto the property over the neighbor's back fence and then crouched for a few minutes beside a brick barbecue, getting his eyes used to the darkness and bringing the house back from his memory. It was a warm, pleasant Monday night in September, and he took his time. He had broken into this same house about ten years ago. That night he'd had a tentative plan to kill her if she woke, but he hadn't needed to cause her or her children harm. He had only needed to steal her dead husband's identification.

When he had listened intently for a few minutes and retrieved the memory of the interior of the house, he moved slowly and steadily, still part of the shadows, to the tall windows along the side of the dining room. He knew there was an alarm system.

The way home alarm systems worked was that a contact in the windowsill had to be touching a magnetic contact in the window frame or the alarm would go off. But these tall windows had two big panes, each in its own frame, one at the bottom and one at the top. The alarm contact was in the bottom frame, so if he could get the window unlatched, he could lower the top half and leave the lower half, with its electrical contact, in place.

He had a coil of thin steel wire in his pocket. He took it out and uncoiled it, then took out the lock-blade knife that he'd brought and opened it. He inserted the blade upward between the two frames and pried them apart a bit by wedging the blade in as far as possible. He bent his wire into a loop about an inch in diameter, and then slid the wire up into the space the blade had made. He twirled the wire so the loop went around the latch, then tugged it tight and pulled the latch into the open position. He pulled his knife out, closed it, and pocketed it.

Again he took some time to remain still in the dark shadow of the roof overhang, listen, and study what he could see of the house's interior. No interior lights had been on when he'd arrived. He stepped back to look up at the second-floor windows to be sure nothing had changed, then hooked the fingers of his left hand under a clapboard to steady himself, stepped onto the windowsill, pulled down the upper window, stepped over it with one leg, then the other, and then lowered himself silently from the inner sill to the floor. He carefully closed the upper window and reset the latch. He remembered where the stairs were.

He was standing in Elizabeth Waring's bedroom when she woke. He watched her stir and become aware of him and stifle the quick reflex movement of her right arm to reach for the gun, forcing herself to go limp again to make him believe she had just stirred in a dream. She was extraordinarily disciplined to calculate that she would not have time to grasp the gun and then abandon the attempt and try to make him think she was still asleep.

"I already have the gun," he said aloud. "I don't intend to harm you. I just want to talk for two minutes."

She opened her left eye a little, then sat up slowly and reached toward the lamp by her bed.

"Don't turn it on," he said. "There's no reason for you to see me, and it will be safer for you if you don't."

"I know you," she said. "I know who you are." She paused, seeming to use her fear to make herself more alert, but forcing herself to seem calm. "You've been away a long time. Were you in prison?"

He spoke quietly, without anger. "I know you're good at your job. That's why I became aware of you years ago. You try to surprise me, push me off balance by saying you know me. Then you ask a question that will give you information to help you find me. It's what you're supposed to do, but stop. I have questions. Who does Michael Delamina work for these days?"