Thomas Perry - The Informant

The lock-blade knife he'd bought was in his pocket. He opened it, then chose the spot on the wall carefully. It had to be the space behind the small dresser. He quietly moved the dresser aside, then stabbed the knife into the wallboard. It punched through. The consistency was like thick cardboard. He punched through again and again, until he had cut an eighteen-inch square, pulled it out, and confirmed his theory. There was a frame holding up two sheets of wallboard. He punched through the next one with less hesitation. When he had cut the second hole, he pushed the piece through into the next room, then the other.

As he worked, he thought about the men outside. What took the longest on jobs like this was getting the men into proper positions, two on either side of the door. Two would hit the door near the knob with all their weight so it would fly open. The first two would run in low and fast, trying to get a shot in. The other two would come in a bit higher, aiming their guns over the shoulders of the first pair.

His hole was finished. He slithered through it into the next room, and then reached back through and strained to pull the empty dresser back up to the wall after him. He tugged on one side, then the other, to walk it to the hole in the wall, then lay still and listened.

There was no bang, no sound of a foot kicking the door in. Instead, there was a jingle of keys and a scrape as the deadbolt slid out. The door to his old room opened a crack, then hit the desk he'd pushed in front of it. There was a labored scrape as they pushed the desk aside, and then quick footsteps that he could feel vibrating up from the floor to his belly.

"What the fuck?"

"Where is he?"

Footsteps shook the floor again as two of them burst into the bathroom. "He's not in here."

Schaeffer aimed one of his pistols under the dresser through the hole he had cut. A man lay on the floor in his room to look under the bed. Schaeffer waited. If the man rolled and looked in his direction, he would have to kill him. The man stood up. "What if we got the wrong room?"

"Does that bathroom window open?"

More footsteps. "I don't think so. And how would he get up there?"

"The son of a bitch is famous for doing stuff like that. Jerry said he killed a guy once who locked himself in a bank vault. They opened it up the next morning and there he was."

Whoever Jerry was, he had gotten the story wrong. The bank vault was just a safe room in Angelo Turcio's house in New Jersey. Schaeffer had boiled some bleach beside the air intake, and the chlorine had made Turcio sick. He had opened the door himself and tried to shoot his way out.

"Bobby, go to the desk to be sure we got the right room number and ask if he checked out already."

Somebody said, "We don't even know if he was the right guy."

"Some traveling salesman didn't figure this out and get away before we could slip a key in the door."

He took a couple of seconds to prepare himself for what was going to happen. In a minute they would suspect he'd made a hole and look for it. He saw the two sets of shoes approaching. The dresser was lifted suddenly, one man on each side.

He fired upward into the one on his right, the bullet going toward the groin. The other dropped the dresser as though it were hot, leaving himself open for a moment while Schaeffer fired into his side.

Schaeffer rolled away from the hole and dashed in the direction of the door. As he ran, the other two men fired at the hole, then moved their aim along the wall, punching small blooming holes in the wallboard behind him. He beat them to the door and stopped with both his pistols aimed at the door beside him, the only exit from his room.

The two men spilled out the door of his room, fully expecting to head him off before he got out, but they were terribly late. For a moment their faces showed identical expressions of unwelcome surprise, but he opened fire with both pistols, and left them lying in front of the door.

He sprinted to his car, got in, and drove. He was feeling alert and ready now. He swerved out of the lot onto the highway and quickly found the sign that said 57 NORTH-CHICAGO. It was time to go and see his old friend Vince Pugliese.

Elizabeth Waring was in her office early in the morning once again. Yesterday's meeting with the deputy assistant AG had been worse than she had anticipated. A few days ago, she had been worried that she had forfeited the chance for a good working relationship with her new boss. Today, she was worried that she was about to lose her job. She was uneasy, not only because he was now openly contemptuous of her performance, but also because, from a certain point of view, she was guilty. If he chose to call a personnel hearing right now, it would be difficult to defend herself. She tried to imagine what that would be like. At the end of it, did they say, "We'll get in touch to announce our decision," or did they ask for the Justice Department identification and the gun and the office key right away?

What would she do? She was nearly fifty. She had a law degree, but could she even find a job as a lawyer at her age? Even if she didn't admit to being fired, she couldn't hide that she'd left because of trouble. All this time she had been encouraging Jim-and in a year, Amanda-to apply to the famous private colleges that would give them advantages in life. If she lost her job, that was over.

As she sat at her desk, paralyzed, trying to get herself to start on her work, she thought about Dale Hunsecker. Without ever wanting to, she had become his enemy, and he was going to try to crush her. What frightened her was that he was the champion idiot in a succession of amateurs appointed to hold that position. There was no way for her to work her way into his good graces. He combined strong, inflexible opinions with a complete innocence of facts. He had no instinct for law enforcement and a temperamental distaste for what it actually involved. He didn't want to learn anything about organized crime, but he wanted to know everything that anyone in the organized crime division was doing before they did it so he could arbitrarily veto about half of it. Each time she saw him, she was more deeply convinced that she must keep him from knowing about anything important and try to survive until he moved on. And right now, there was one thing that was more important than anything else.

Three days had passed, and the Butcher's Boy had made no new attempt to get in touch with her. She was almost certain that he had seen her ad by now. He would have wanted to see every single bit of information about the Arizona meeting and the resulting charges. The simplest places to look were the Arizona papers and the big metropolitan papers that covered organized crime. He must also be watching for any attempt by individual bosses to talk to him. No matter what the old men had promised Frank Tosca, he was dead now, and there was no benefit to be had by keeping their word to him. The Butcher's Boy, on the other hand, was alive, and there wasn't much sense in hunting him if it might get them killed.

She had made her own bid, but had she used the wrong way to get his attention? No. The personal ad from VP that she had seen in the same papers was a confirmation that this was a likely way to reach him. It had also diminished her hope. She could only succeed if he was alone and in trouble. If he had other invitations to talk, then he might think he had other options.

She had very complicated feelings this morning. She was frustrated that VP had reached out to him the same day she had, and she was sure that VP's ad would interest him more than hers. It seemed to be a chance for rapprochement and reconciliation with at least some small faction of the Mafia. Her offer could only amount to protection in some kind of confinement. If he could trust both offers, he would pick the offer from VP.