Thomas Perry - The Informant

He put strips of duct tape on the glass of the small, low window, then crossed the strips with vertical ones. He opened his messenger bag, took out the butt end of the shotgun, and rammed the glass once. The glass gave a pop, but the pieces all stayed together. He pulled the glass out and lay it on the ground. He heard no alarm.

Turning to put his feet first, he lowered himself into the room with the furnace. He looked carefully for the small red and green lights that would indicate an electric beam that would set off the alarm if he broke it, but the basement seemed to be clear. He moved into the room that looked like a study, sat on a leather couch, and fitted the two halves of his shotgun together. He reached into the messenger bag, extracted five shells, and loaded the shotgun. He pumped the slide once. The "snick-chuck" sound reminded him again of the night in Providence. The rest of Eddie's instructions came back as he walked to the stairs. "Hold the butt of it tight to your shoulder so the kick doesn't punch you in the face or some damned thing. Never fire a twelve-gauge from your hip. You're a hell of a lot scarier staring down that long barrel so you can hit what you shoot at. And keep both eyes open. In a gunfight everything that's alive is moving, and that's what you've got to see." As an afterthought, he added, "And click that safety off. Once you're in somebody else's building, anybody you kill by accident is just one you won't have to kill on purpose."

He climbed the stairs quietly, switched off the night-light so there would be no glow behind him, opened the door, and raised the shotgun to his right shoulder. He looked down the barrel at the room. It was the kitchen. Big windows let in moonlight, and he could see it was empty. It was a huge room, equipped like an old-fashioned restaurant, with appliances that were heavy, not pretty, and big iron pots and pans.

Beyond the kitchen there was a hallway that led forward toward the front of the house, and he could tell the wall to the right side was the storage space under the staircase. He moved ahead. The closer he got to the heart of the house before the occupants woke, the more damage he could do.

He reached the foyer, an octagonal shape with windows up high that let moonlight in to throw a shine on the black-and-white tile. The stairway to his right was wide and had a curve that reminded him of the stairways to the loge in the movie theater he used to go to when he was about eleven or twelve. It had thick patterned carpet like that and brass rods at the corners to keep it from sliding. He sensed it was a trap. He didn't know how it was managed-an interior alarm system, a motion detector, an electric eye like the ones at the doors of stores, a trip wire, a pressure strip under the carpet-and it didn't matter. If they had an alarm system, what they'd want to protect most was the bedrooms at the top of those stairs. He backtracked toward the kitchen.

He found the other staircase between the pantry and the cellar door where he'd come in. He tested the back stairs to see if they creaked. They were old, part of the original design of the house, probably so the maids could get up and down without disturbing the owners. But they weren't creaking, and they were plain, bare hardwood with no carpet to hide anything. In a moment he was on the second floor, which consisted of a long hallway with bedrooms on either side. He went from doorway to doorway, staring in each room. All eight were furnished, but none of them was occupied tonight.

Joe's children had apparently all grown up and moved out. But it was odd that there weren't any bodyguards asleep on the second floor. He had seen cars in the space in front of the garage. It occurred to him that it was possible Castiglione wasn't at home. He might have been held for some infraction at the ranch in Arizona or decided not to be available to reporters.

Schaeffer returned to the servants' staircase and climbed to the third floor. As soon as he opened the door into the hallway, he knew this floor was inhabited. He heard snoring. There were two bedrooms at his end of the hall, and a single door at the opposite end, which he guessed was a master suite that took up one wing.

Between the ends of the hall there was one huge room with big windows facing the lake, and a wide-open portal. The room must once have been an upstairs sitting room because it offered a spectacular view. In the morning, it would be filled with sunlight. In the afternoon, when the sun was on the other side of the house, it would be a good place to look out at the boats on the lake. Probably parties had been held up here.

But this end of it had been transformed into what looked like a barrack. There were eight sets of bunk beds set up in two rows. The bunks didn't look like a recent development, something someone would do just for a couple of days. It would be too much trouble. A number of times over the years the Castigliones had been involved in rivalries and struggles for dominance. There must have been times when they gathered a group of their soldiers into the Castle to defend it and themselves. He heard more sounds of snoring and deep, unconscious breathing and stepped closer, studying the bunk beds from different angles. There was a man asleep in the big room.

Before he did anything else, he needed to clear the rooms by the back stairs to be sure his escape wouldn't be blocked. He opened the first, and it looked like a hotel storeroom with shelves full of linens and blankets and paper goods. The second was a large bathroom remodeled for multiple people, with toilet stalls and a shower room with three stations. He moved quietly back into the big room.

He looked down at the sleeping man in the bunk. The moment that he started the killing, all of this silence and stillness was going to shatter, and he would have to be in motion. He prepared himself.

He aimed the shotgun at the head of the man in the bunk and fired. The roar was deafening, and the man's body jumped on the springs, but there wasn't much left of his head.

Schaeffer's left hand was pumping his shotgun as he ran for the single door at the end of the short hall. He knew that the less time he took, the better his chances were, so he lifted his right foot and stomp-kicked the door. The door swung inward, splinters flying, and he dashed in after it, his shotgun aimed at the bed. He flicked on the overhead light.

There were two people in it, a man and a woman. The man was Joe Castiglione, but the woman was much younger, probably her mid twenties, with long bleach-blond hair. Castiglione was in the middle of a half roll, reaching into a drawer in his nightstand.

As Castiglione fumbled to get the gun in his hand, Schaeffer shot him in the back of the head. The woman screamed, her hands clawing at the sides of her head like talons.

"Shut up," he said.

She took a deep breath to scream again so he shot her, and she sprawled backward on the bed, her arms spread like wings.

He picked up the ejected shotgun shells in the bedroom and then the one he'd fired in the big room, and then went down the back stairs. He climbed out the basement window and pushed it shut behind him, and then took his shotgun apart and put it in his messenger bag. He walked quickly away from the house along Lake Shore Drive toward the parking lot where he had left his car, put the bag in the trunk, and drove off toward the next house.

The point would not be made without the other two brothers. The second one was Paul, and the youngest Sal. He knew he had no more than an hour or two to do the rest of the job and get out of town.

When he arrived in Paul's neighborhood, it was three A.M. The night air was cool and fresh, just a stealthy breeze flowing onto the land off Lake Michigan. In the evening it had seemed hot, but as he walked along the street, the air felt alive to him. It filled his lungs and gave him new energy.