Thomas Perry - The Informant

Paul Castiglione lived only a couple of minutes from his older brother. His house was an old redbrick two-story cubical building that had a white wooden porch in front with Doric columns. It wasn't quite a mansion, but the sort of house that had probably been built just after the Great Chicago Fire and painstakingly restored by whomever Paul had bought it from.

Schaeffer drove past and scanned to be sure there were no clusters of cars and that the street behind looked about the same as the last time he'd been here. He parked just around the corner, where he could reach his car quickly, but where it couldn't be seen from the house. He opened the trunk, took the two Beretta pistols, and put them in his jacket. He closed the trunk, walked up to the house, and looked into the window of the garage. There were three cars inside, a black Cadillac, a black Corvette, and a black SUV that seemed to be about seven feet tall. Even though he'd been in the United States ten years ago, the sight of those big SUVs still startled him with their ugliness and impracticality. But he was pleased. The three cars looked as though they represented three moods of Paul Castiglione-pretentious, childish, and stupid.

He walked around the building, examining window latches through the glass, testing doorknobs. Through the window near the front door he saw that there was an alarm system. It probably wasn't the kind that rang in the office of a security service or a police station because Paul Castiglione wouldn't want to give the cops a legal excuse for bursting into his house, but he was sure it would make noise. He could see the keypad lights glowing on the wall. He thought it probably wasn't necessary, but in case he made a mistake, he went to the rear of the house, opened the phone junction box, and disconnected the telephone wires.

There had to be a way around the alarm system because there always was. As he continued around the house, he found it. Set in the wall beside the kitchen door was an old-fashioned milk delivery box. There was a small wooden cabinet door with a weathered brass latch on the outside so the milkman could put the bottles of milk in it. Inside there would be another door that opened inward so the cook could bring the milk bottles into the kitchen.

It was a long-obsolete feature. Nobody now would have a little door set into the brick facing like that. The renovators must have left it there because antique details reminded people that this house was the real thing and not a copy. He reached up and turned the little knob and the milk door opened. He pushed on the inner door, but it was locked. He looked in and he could see four small brass screw heads flush with the surface of the door. He looked at the inner side of the outer door to compare, then used his lock-blade knife to unscrew the four screws. When he pushed the door inward, it moved. He jiggled it a bit, moving it inward until he could get his hand in and pull the latch free.

He studied the dimensions of the milk door. In the years since he had left the trade, he had aged, but he was still relatively flexible, and he judged that he could fit his middle through the two-foot square. He took off his jacket, heavy with his two pistols, and hung it on the brass handle on the door. He ducked to get his head and arms into the opening, turned sideways to get his shoulders in, and then pushed against the inner wall to slide in to his hips. He could reach a counter to his right now so he used it to pull himself the rest of the way in and get his left foot on the floor and then the right.

Turning to reach outside, he grasped his jacket and brought it in with him. He put it on, closed the milk door, stood with his back against the wall with the two pistols in his hands, and listened. There were only the tiny, barely audible sounds of a house-the refrigerator compressor, the air-conditioning system.

He moved forward into the kitchen. He had always preferred to take a great deal of time so a listener would not connect one of his moves or sounds with another. Tonight he had to bend time in the opposite direction, moving from place to place more quickly than anyone would expect. He had to find and kill Paul Castiglione, and then get inside Sal's defenses before he knew his brothers were dead.

He was halfway across the kitchen when Paul Castiglione materialized in the doorway in a big, loose-fitting bathrobe and bare feet. Castiglione took a couple of steps and opened the refrigerator door. The light spilled out of it onto the floor and splashed the walls.

Castiglione leaned over and squinted into the refrigerator, and then the sight he'd seen in his peripheral vision as he'd turned registered in his brain, and he jerked his head and looked. "Holy shit."

"Hello, Paul." The two pistols came up in Schaeffer's hands, so that Castiglione saw not only the shape of a man in his kitchen, but also a vaguely familiar face staring at him above the dark, gleaming muzzles of the two Berettas.

"It's you. What would you come to me for? I can't save you."

"I never asked." He shot Castiglione. In the light of the open refrigerator, he could see that the single shot had passed through his forehead. Schaeffer heard a woman's voice call from upstairs, "Paul? What was that? Did you knock something over?"

Schaeffer had to make a decision. Going through the house, first killing the woman and then maybe Castiglione's kids, would take time and do nothing for him. It was too late to preserve the quiet. He had to get to the third brother as quickly as he could. He turned, stepped out the kitchen door, and closed it again. Beyond the door he could hear the alarm, an electronic imitation of a bell ringing. He ran hard toward the car, got in, and drove off. The first time he had to stop at a traffic signal, he retrieved the shotgun from the trunk and reloaded it, then propped it on the passenger seat beside him.

It took him fifteen minutes to reach Salvatore Castiglione's house, and he could see he had not made it in time. Paul Castiglione's wife must have come downstairs, seen her husband's body, and started dialing the phone. The house was a suburban one-story ranch-style house set on a large lawn with a pine grove behind it and along the sides to form a narrow privacy barrier at the edges of the property. As he drove past, he could see that in spite of the fact that it was nearly four A.M., there were already lights on in the house and the shapes of men moving across the front windows. A big black car with tinted windows sat in the driveway with its motor idling. It had to be Pugliese's men, here to get Sal out of danger. Schaeffer kept going, heading his car to the north toward Milwaukee.

Elizabeth's flight landed at Midway at four P.M. She was traveling with the two Justice Department investigators Morris had temporarily assigned to her. Morris had chosen Manoletti and Irwin, both of them men about forty years old, with at least a dozen years of field experience. They inspired confidence, but they weren't very good companions for her. They were businesslike and distant. They considered themselves "sworn" peace officers, like cops and FBI agents. The fact that everyone in the Justice Department took the same oath to preserve and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign or domestic, meant nothing. The gun she was carrying at this moment didn't make her one of them either. It only made them more nervous about her. She wasn't entirely satisfied with them. In spite of the fact that Morris knew she wanted to do some undercover surveillance, he'd picked men who looked like cops. They both had that triangular torso that men who lifted weights often achieved, so the seams of their sport coats looked strained. They looked as though they'd gotten their hair cut on a military base.

There was never a way for them to forget she was on the other side of the department, the side with lawyers and administrators and analysts-she had become all three-and she was several levels above them on a parallel branch of the hierarchy. Worse, she was a woman. In the twenty years she'd been in Justice, women had become common, but there were still men who seemed determined to maintain a distance. Sometimes she had suspected that their aloofness was a strain of puritanical discipline left over from an earlier time. A woman, if she looked like a woman, was a temptation and a threat to their integrity. They probably knew that Elizabeth posed no threat to their chastity, but her presence still made them vulnerable to rumors and suspicions.