Thomas Perry - The Informant

He walked toward the gray building, his eyes constantly scanning, his mind evaluating and contemplating the thousand details they passed over. He looked at traffic patterns in the neighborhood to be sure there wouldn't be a jam that kept him from getting out, searched for security cameras high on the sides of the building or in the ceiling of the garage, watched for police cars to determine the frequency of routine police patrols. He looked at the people walking along the street, and even more closely at anyone who was not walking, just standing by a building or a bus stop. He looked at upper windows for any sign of a police surveillance team or the dark silhouette of a sniper a few feet back from an open window. He studied faces, watching for eyes that stared back at him with too much interest, ones that looked away quickly, or any he had seen before. Always he had a hand close to one of the guns. As he walked he could feel the hard handgrip of the gun beneath the fabric of his coat brush the inside of his wrist.

Darkness had reclaimed the city as he approached the gray stone building. The lights were on in the travel agency and the credit union, but all the desks were empty, the surfaces cleared except for computer monitors, keyboards, and mice. The magenta neon at Mimi's Ristorante was brighter now, and the coffee shop had taken on the forlorn look they all had in the evening, empty except for a few solitary people.

Then, unexpectedly, Vincent Pugliese came out of the building, flanked by two men in dark suits. He looked almost the same as he had twenty years ago. The slicked-back hair was more gray than brown now, and his frame looked a bit broader. The expression on his face was a pinch at the eyebrows, slack skin in the cheeks. He looked as though he hadn't had much sleep. He and his two men went to the curb and looked up the street in the direction of the garage.

A gleaming black Mercedes sedan that had to be Pugliese's came out of the driveway behind the building, turned to the right, and glided toward the curb where Pugliese and his two men waited. Schaeffer kept moving along the street toward them. He stepped into the space behind an accidental grouping of five men who had just come out of a big building up the street, probably all leaving at quitting time. He kept them ahead of him like blockers as they walked toward Pugliese.

"I need to talk to you."

He turned only his eyes. It was Elizabeth Waring. She had separated herself from the stream of pedestrians beside him, appeared at his shoulder, and spoken close to his ear. He spun on his heel, put his arm around her waist, and walked her back in the direction he had come from. They walked a hundred feet or more before he said, with barely contained anger, "What do you want to talk about?"

She was aware that their body language, him embracing her that way and leaning close to her to speak, was intended to make them look like a couple. She said, "The way we start is that I tell you not to kill Vincent Pugliese."

"You've already made that impossible. Now go tell him not to kill me."

"What you did last night has made a lot of people come to this part of town who weren't here yesterday. Besides the regular contingent of FBI from the Chicago office, there are planeloads on their way from Washington and from all over the Midwest. How much more the wiseguys are doing, I can only imagine. But I'll know in another day because it's my job."

"Go do your job. You don't belong out here."

He released her and took a step that separated them by a few inches. Suddenly a shot tore the air, then four more at once, all incredibly loud, and beside him a wall of glass at the front of a closed women's clothing store had a constellation of holes. Cracks appeared to connect them, and the glass came down like a curtain at his feet.

He grasped Elizabeth's arm so hard it hurt and yanked her up into the windowless display, dragging her with him between headless manikins wearing cotton jackets and shorts. There were more shots, some blasting chips from the plaster manikins and pounding one of them backward onto the display. Elizabeth could see there were men firing from the windows of a big black car that was pulling up to the curb near where they had stood.

He pulled Elizabeth through the display of manikins, artificial grass, and colored leaves and down into the center aisle of the store. They ran toward the back of the dimly lighted building. At the end of the sales floor, there were two doors. The one he chose took them into a room full of more racks of dresses and coats, stacks of boxes, a table set up for wrapping. He saw a door to the side of the room and pulled Elizabeth through it.

They were out the side door into the alley, and they both ran hard without speaking. They knew that in a moment the black car could drive around the building and into the alley in front of them. They had to be out of sight before that happened or they would be trapped. They turned into the narrow space between two buildings and ran toward the next street. When they approached the end of the dark passageway, he held up his hand for her to stop, and she managed to do it without running into him. She turned to look behind her down the long, narrow space and put her hand in her pocket to wrap her fingers around the grips of the gun.

He grasped her arm again and tugged her out onto the sidewalk and to the right. He walked purposefully down the street with his arm around her, squeezing her affectionately. Now and then he would look around, not in a panicky, harried way, but calmly, as though he were just checking the crowds of people to see if any of their friends were among them. Elizabeth was surprised for a second at how good a physical actor he was, but then reminded herself that he'd have to be to get close to his victims and walk away after he'd killed them.

"We've got to get out of the street," he said. "Vince is probably calling everybody he knows to get them here."

There was the scream of a siren. "My side seems to be getting here quicker," she said. "They'll protect us."

"If they know who you are, they might try. But they'd fail because too many of the other side are already here. What are you doing out here alone with a gun?"

"What gun?"

"You didn't let go fast enough when I pulled your arm to get you to come along, so I saw it."

"I'm not giving it to you."

"I didn't ask. If you can hit anything smaller than a building with it, I'd rather you keep it."

"I'm competent." She pointed across the street. "Can't we just go into a restaurant like that one and wait?"

"Not that one. It's the Bella Napoli. Somebody in the Castiglione family owns it. Today they're probably using it as a command post for twenty or thirty soldiers. Keep walking, but not too fast. We're a nice, middle-aged couple going somewhere. We heard some noise a few minutes ago, probably, but we don't think it can be any big deal. We think it's a construction crew."

"At night?"

"A road crew, then. The point is, we're not the sort of people who believe we need to run from anything."

"Innocent as babes."

"This isn't funny. The family is stirred up. They aren't going to give up on us."

"Us?"

"They need more revenge than they can get with one person."

"How about that massage place?" It was a white storefront, with four Asian women in white shorts and T-shirts looking out the front window through gauzy curtains to see what the commotion was. "Who owns that?"

"Can't risk it. This close to Vince's place, they might be hookers, and that takes protection." He saw something up the street ahead of them that didn't make him happy. He took her hand and walked with her in a diagonal across the street, around a corner, and then took another diagonal onto State Street, and then up the front steps of an enormous church.