Thomas Perry - The Informant

While he held the cord tight and waited, he watched and listened. There was no sound up here except the whisper of wind in the tall trees. He studied the view up the hill from here so he would be sure to come back past the dead sentry instead of some live one. He looked down at the sentry. He was about thirty years old, wearing new blue jeans and a black shirt cut like a cowboy's, with snaps instead of buttons. He was beginning to lose his hair prematurely, with a receding hairline and a bare spot at the back of his head about the size of a silver dollar. On his feet were a pair of clean, new hiking boots.

Schaeffer held both handles in his left hand, touched the man's wrist, and felt for a pulse: nothing. He unwrapped the rope, found the man's wallet, and looked inside. His driver's license was from New York and said he was Raymond Agnetti. There was a thick layer of hundred-dollar bills, so Schaeffer took them. Agnetti's jacket was lying on the log beside him. When he lifted it, he felt the weight of a gun. He took it out and looked at it in the moonlight. The etching on the slide said it was a Springfield Armory XD. He'd never seen this model before, and so he knew it must be new. He released the magazine and saw it held about sixteen nine-millimeter rounds in a double stack. He pushed it back in and put the pistol in his belt and its spare magazine in his pocket.

He found Agnetti's cell phone in the coat, but he had no radio for talking to all the other guards at once. Schaeffer turned the phone off, put it back in the coat, dragged the body into the low brush at the edge of the pine woods, and covered it with branches from a broken sapling. He retrieved his gear and went on.

Moving slowly and carefully, he made his way down the hill toward the ranch. There were clearly marked hiking trails now, and he stayed in the woods that bordered them. After a quarter mile he saw the complex and realized why the families had posted guards up the hill. The hill offered a good view of the whole re-sort. He kept moving downward looking below for ways to accomplish what he wanted to do.

When he was only a few hundred feet from the populated area, he stopped and surveyed it. From the website he recognized the Lodge, a big, barnlike building with a high roof and big windows. He could see there were many men inside it right now. Parked beside it on the side away from the main entrance were three big white Fibbiani trucks marked GOLD SEAM CATERING, with white-coated hotel staff walking back and forth unloading supplies.

There were cabins along a network of paved roads surrounding the lodge. Many cabins had cars parked in front of them, and quite a few had lights glowing in their windows. There were small knots of men who had gathered to talk at various places along the paths to the lodge or on the wooden porches of the cabins. The thing that struck him as he looked down on the scene was that every human being he saw was male. This was not the sort of conference where they brought wives and girlfriends. It looked like a military encampment.

He found a small level space on the hillside that served as a foothold for some spiky plants, sat down, and spread his poncho on the plants so his body was under it, and its shape merged into the brush. He trained the rifle scope on a group of men standing near the lodge and studied them, then moved the rifle to other groups, searching for familiar faces. It took him several more minutes before he found one he knew. It was Gino Castelletti, an old caporegima from Brooklyn. He was fat and stooped now, and Schaeffer judged he must be around seventy. His hair was so thin that it looked like lines drawn on his bald head.

The five men standing around him listening to him talk were all about twenty-five to thirty-five years old, and Schaeffer didn't know any of them. At one time he had known a great many made men across the country and a fair proportion of the bosses. But nearly all the faces he saw tonight were new. It had been twenty years ago when he had last been around people in the families. Even the oldest of these soldiers had been children then, ten or fifteen years old. None of them had ever seen him.

There were few of the older men in evidence outside the lodge. A lot of the men who had known him were probably dead by now, and others had been convicted of something and been given those comical sentences of four or five hundred years, as Carl Bala had. There were probably two hundred men gathered at the resort tonight for the conference where one of the topics was his death, but he guessed there were fewer than forty present who had ever seen him.

He carefully made his way down the hill after stowing the rifle, the scope, and the poncho underneath a ledge. He picked his way between thick bushes and rocks, trying to stay as invisible as possible. At the edge of the resort and up a short drive by itself was a cabin with a dim light glowing in a window and a rental car parked beside it. He went to the back of the building and looked in the window. There was a bedroom, and he could see a suitcase open on a folding stand and some clothes hanging in an open closet. He went to the woodpile, picked up a piece of firewood, wrapped his hat around the end to muffle the sound, broke the upper pane of glass, reached in, and unlocked the latch, then climbed in.

He went to the closet and picked out the sort of outfit that the men outside were wearing-a pair of blue jeans and a shirt, with a nylon windbreaker intended to keep off the night chill of the mountains and conceal a weapon.

He changed into the clothes, searched the suitcase, and found a brand-new Springfield Armory. 45 pistol, still in the box, and a full box of. 45 ACP ammunition. These people must have flown into southwestern cities, then driven straight to gun stores operated by friendly owners to pick something out so they wouldn't feel powerless. Probably when they went back to catch their flights home, they would drop the guns off where they had picked them up. He already had the sentry's gun, and it was more concealable than the. 45, so he left this one alone.

Through the front window he watched a group of younger men coming along the lighted drive toward the lodge. He had never seen any of them before. He waited until they were just past him, then opened the door and hurried to the road to follow them. If someone looked at him from a distance, he would seem to be a straggler from the main group.

He was very watchful, trying to avoid coming face-to-face with any older men because they were the ones who might have seen his face years ago. When he was young, not long after Eddie Mastrewski had died, he had worked for the Albanese family in Detroit for a time. By then he had a reputation, and so a few times the Albanese capo, Johnny Sotto, had used Schaeffer's face. He had gone along with an Albanese soldier to collect debts. People might stall the soldier, but as soon as he walked in the door, the money would appear very efficiently and without any discussion. After a few months he left and never did that kind of work again because he didn't like having so many people see his face.

He had also resisted the camaraderie that some of the capos who had hired him tried to foster. He had kept his distance, done his job, collected his pay, and left town before buyer's remorse set in. He made it clear that he was a free agent and that he was nobody's friend.

The group of men kept moving down the drive leading to the lodge. There were already many men gathering there. He knew that he couldn't take the chance of going inside, where the men who had seen him would be. He preferred to stay outside with the young men who had no idea who he was. The young ones would find out what was going on inside as soon as it happened anyway. They absorbed every word the old men said, analyzed it, and repeated it.