Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

“What have they got to do with this?”

Salateri’s eyes narrowed. “You think we can go into their front yard and set up a business they’ve been in for a hundred years and expect them not to notice? They needed to be consulted, mollified.”

Seaver was beginning to sense the gravity of the partners’ predicament. “Did Hatcher pay them too?”

“He doesn’t know that either,” said Foley. “The Justice Department would take about thirty seconds to figure it out. And what Hatcher paid them wasn’t to buy them out. It was to buy them in. Without their help we wouldn’t have known which politicians could be paid off, how to approach them, where to put the money.”

Seaver frowned and considered. “I know I’m being slow, but let me be sure I understand where we are—”

“For Christ’s sake!” Salateri shouted. “Hatcher doesn’t know he knows anything! But if the F.B.I., the New York State Police, the Nevada Gaming Commission, or the fucking dog-catcher hear a word of it, they’ll know everything!”

“It seems to me that if we could somehow separate the issues—”

Salateri was white with rage. “What did they teach you in the police academy—how to shake down doughnut shops? We have one deal that connects a Las Vegas casino, half the politicians in New York, and the Mafia. In one deal! That blows the politicians, who might have to go get a job. And that blows seven or eight fat old grandpas, who have to spend their last few years locked up with friends and relatives. But not us. We’re not going to jail with them. They’re not going to let us make it up the courthouse steps to hear the charges.”

Buckley looked at Seaver with gentle regret. “It seems to us that we can’t pull out of this and tell them we managed our business badly. We can’t let them get an inkling that anything is wrong. We’re staying alive one day at a time by convincing them that we move slowly, cautiously, prudently.”

“This is something they respect,” said Salateri. “For five generations they’ve been nibbling away at the world like termites, until now you can’t pull a board off a toolshed without finding them behind it. The problem is, the longer we bullshit them, the harder they’re going to take it.”

Seaver squinted down at the carpet.

Peter Buckley said, “You’re thinking we should tell them the truth and ask them to find Hatcher for us.”

“Well,” said Seaver, “I was considering it.”

“Very alert of you,” said Buckley. “They could certainly do it.”

“Sure,” said Salateri. “They have people in every city in the country. He couldn’t run to Europe, because they had that sewn up before Great-Grandpa got on the boat to come here. In South America, Southeast Asia, North Africa they have drug suppliers with armies to protect the crop. I never heard of them having anybody at the South Pole, but I wouldn’t rule it out. They’d find him. But he doesn’t know much, and we know a lot. Who’s the biggest threat? And they don’t have to hunt around and find us to end it.”

There was a moment of silence to give Seaver’s mind a chance to catch up, to understand. “What would you like me to do?”

Foley said, “We’re thinking of hiring a second team. Maybe a third. Pay all of them. Whoever succeeds gets a bonus. How does that strike you?”

“It makes me nervous,” said Seaver. “Earl and Linda are good. Most likely, by now they know where he is, or at least what region. If they find him and there are other people nosing around, they’ll notice them. They’ll have to assume those people can only be bodyguards for Hatcher, or police of some kind. They’ll kill them. Or try to.”

“So what?” asked Foley.

“Then it’s not a clean hit where an anonymous newcomer came quietly and went quietly and nobody notices. It’s a fight between professionals with lots of gunfire and unburied bodies and blood.”

“And?”

“And, as Bobby pointed out, no matter where this happens, it’s in the middle of some Mafia family’s territory. They’re going to want to know who these shooters were, who they worked for, who they were after. It would be hard to imagine them not turning up Hatcher. If he’s killed or wounded, he’ll be identified. If he gets very lucky and escapes while our own shooters massacre each other, somebody will survive, and the local family will hear Hatcher’s name.”

Buckley stared at Seaver with interest. “Any ideas that would get around those problems?”

“Not offhand. I’ll think about it.”

“How about if we had somebody at least as good as Earl and Linda, somebody they know by sight, whose interest in Pete Hatcher won’t require any explanation? Somebody they’ll see as an ally?”

Seaver’s collar tightened and he began to sweat. “I don’t think they’d see it that way. I don’t know where they are. There’s no way to call them off, or warn them.”

“But they wouldn’t shoot you, would they? How could they expect to get paid the three hundred thousand if they killed their employer?”

“They couldn’t, but—”

“Good,” said Foley.

Seaver flailed hopelessly. “But what would happen here? Who would run security for the hotel? The casino?”

Salateri blew out a breath in a mirthless chuckle. “Your errand boy, Bennis, or somebody. Who cares? If you don’t get Hatcher before he talks, we won’t have a hotel and casino,” he snapped. “There’ll be a bunch of U.S. marshals in here running the place for the government, or a bunch of paisans running it for the ones we screwed in New York.”

Buckley’s voice became avuncular. “I think it’s rightly your responsibility now, don’t you?”

Seaver sat in the chair, helpless.

Foley scribbled on the pad at his elbow. “Give this to Eddie downstairs.” He tore off the sheet and held it out.

Seaver glanced at the small note. “Give Seaver whatever he wants. M.F.” Seaver stood up. He took a step, then paused and looked at the three men. He knew that there must be an answer, but he could not bring his mind to stop racing long enough to concentrate and find it.

“Good luck,” said Buckley. His cheeks constricted to bring up the corners of his lips in a false smile, then went slack again.

“Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on your way out,” Salateri muttered.

11

Tonight was a sort of birthday, because David Keller was three months old. He had spent the time cautiously, patiently finding out who that was. He had spent the previous thirty-three years acquiring a working knowledge of Pete Hatcher, and now most of that work had been wasted. Any quality that David Keller shared with Pete Hatcher would probably get him killed. That was the most distinctive characteristic that David Keller had been able to establish about himself, and it determined all of the others. David Keller was a suspicious, fearful person. He lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of an old brick building in downtown Denver that had no elevator and overlooked a triangle of grass that wasn’t big enough to be called a park. It looked like a spot where the surveyors had not been able to make three roads intersect and had to leave a scrap.

In the evening, when David Keller cooked his simple dinner and washed the dishes at the small, scratched porcelain sink, he could look out the window, across the tops of trees, and see the side of a topless bar with a turntable contraption over the door that had a female mannequin dressed in a sequined outfit revolving around and around like a mechanical dervish. The apartment was small and dark, built at a time when lumber must have been cheap, because everything was old, varnished wood—a built-in sideboard in the dining room and cabinets in the living room and, everywhere, ten-inch baseboards.