Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

The man’s wife had reported his absence that night, but even she never came forward with a theory about what had happened to him. Either she hadn’t known about Santorini or she had decided her husband would have wanted her to live to collect his insurance.

Ackerman thought about Antonio Talarese. He was probably a little more substantial than he had been twelve years ago, but he would probably still be in the same part of town. With all the trials that had made the London newspapers in the past couple of years, plenty of vacancies would have opened up above him in the hierarchy. By now Tony T might even be what Santorini had been in the old days, which would mean that he would have some underlings of his own.

In the old days it would have been easier in another way too. There would have been somebody he knew who could supply him with a weapon at eleven o’clock on a Saturday night in New York. This time he couldn’t talk to anybody, and he couldn’t wait. If Mario Talarese was a relative of Tony T, a telephone call from England announcing his death would be coming soon.

As the cab crossed the Triborough Bridge, he spoke. “Don’t go down East River Drive. Take One-twenty-fifth.”

The driver said, “Are you sure? It’s not … real safe.…”

“I’ll give you an extra twenty.”

The cab coasted down the incline onto East 125th, and now he could see the distant glow of the tall buildings below Central Park. As the cab turned off the busy street to head south, he saw four young men standing under the shadow of a billboard high above them on a brick building. The building had boards nailed where windows used to be under the wrought-iron bars. He noticed that while three of them were talking to each other, the fourth never took his eyes off the cars that stopped for the red light on the corner.

There was no question what they were doing here. They were waiting for easy prey, the car that would come off the bridge with its radiator steaming or a tire flapping, or the woman alone who would stop for the light with her window open, her purse on the seat beside her and the radio turned up loud enough to cover the sound of the footsteps coming up behind her car. “I’ll get out here.”

The cab driver’s eyes appeared in the rearview mirror. “You from around here?”

“No.”

“Then let me take you a little farther down. This is Harlem. In the Fifties there are a lot of good hotels. You don’t want to get out here.”

“No, thanks.” He handed the driver sixty dollars and climbed out. “Keep the change.” The driver didn’t speak. The buttons on the doors all came down automatically and the cab was already moving to catch the green light. The man had decided not to sit through another red and watch what he was sure would happen.

Ackerman glanced at the four young men beside the building. The watcher was moving his head from side to side rapidly, as he had seen one of the horses do at the post this morning at the racetrack. The life of a petty thief was mostly watching and loitering, and the thought that the waiting was over always seemed to make them twitch and flex and make unnecessary moves just to wake up their limbs.

The guns wouldn’t be in their clothes. If the police surprised them on a sweep, they wouldn’t want the ten-year sentence for carrying a firearm—or worse, to give a cop the excuse to open fire. The weapons would be in a trash can or behind a loose board over a window. He held the thieves in his peripheral vision as he moved up the street. It was a delicate matter to pique their interest enough to get them to reveal their hiding place, and then to induce them to reject him as prey. He knew the critical moment would be the instant when they thought he had stopped looking. Then at least one would make a move, if only to check the place where the weapons were.

He walked past their building and they held their places, but he could feel their eyes moving up and down his body. They would be looking for some sign that he was a cop acting as bait. If he was dangerous, it wasn’t because he could chase down four men half his age and handcuff them; it was because attacking him might bring five or six carloads of cops screeching in from all directions with riot guns and body armor. He sensed that they were making their decision. In a moment one of them would betray the hiding place.

“Hey, man!” came a voice. It disconcerted him. That wasn’t how it was done. The voice came again. “Want some crack? A little blow? Crank?”

He stopped and turned to look at them. What the hell were they doing? Of course it would be drugs these days. The watcher was the salesman. The salesman strutted out to the sidewalk, his head at a slight angle from his shoulder. He was skinny and black, with long legs in fitted jeans that ended in a pair of white high-topped sneakers with big tongues half-laced with red laces. On his left wrist he wore a Piaget watch with a band that looked as though it had been chiseled out of a two-pound gold nugget. He had misread the signs. These weren’t hit-and-run thieves; they were pharmacists.

He stood thinking as the salesman approached. He had been out of the country too long. What else didn’t he know? He glanced over the young man’s shoulder at his three companions. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the darkness of their shadowy stand, he could discern that they were all black too. They all wore high-topped sneakers that looked as though they had been designed for players in the NBA, laced haphazardly with red laces. What was that all about—a sign to customers? A uniform? The cops would love that.

The young man smiled. “You be here buying, or looking? Don’t have all night, I got shit to move. Won’t do better anywhere around here.” His smile was vacant, unfeeling and confident. He didn’t speak quietly or look over his shoulder for the patrol car the way street dealers used to.

A line of five cars cruised up to the light, and the other three stood up, walked out into the street and leaned down to speak into the drivers’ windows. Two of them made quick deals, taking money and handing the drivers tiny plastic bags from inside their jackets, then moved on to the next two cars. When one driver didn’t roll down his window, the young man’s expression didn’t change. He just gave the door a lazy, half-hearted pat, already looking ahead at the next potential customer.

Ackerman pushed his amazement to the back of his mind. This was a distraction, and he had to work with the new circumstances, regardless of how they had come about. “I want to buy a gun.”

The salesman cocked his head again and leaned closer. “Say what?” From the exaggeration he could tell that the salesman was already savoring the irony of the situation enough to want to hear it again.

“I don’t want any drugs tonight, but I do want a gun. Can you help me out?”

The grin broadened. “If I have a gun, and you have money but no gun, what’s to stop me from having both of them?”

“You’re making too much here to fuck it up robbing people.”

“Come back tomorrow. I’ll see what I can do.” The young man turned and sidestepped back toward his building’s shadow like a base runner shortening his lead.

He followed the salesman back toward the shadow. “It’s got to be now.”

“Can’t do that. How’m I supposed to hold my corner with no gun?”

So that was it. They weren’t afraid of the police or a tapped-out, desperate customer ready to kill to get the whole hoard. There were so many dealers now that they were fighting over prime locations. “I don’t want all of them. Just a pistol.”

“Pistol? Shit.” The salesman’s professional grin returned. Behind him the light turned green and the traffic moved past again. The three vendors looked up the street, then began to drift toward the shadow of the building, so the salesman felt comfortable enough to turn his back. He removed the board from the window and reached inside with both hands. When he turned, he held a nickel-plated .357 Magnum revolver with a four-inch barrel. A gun like that weighed at least two pounds empty and was fat and squat, like a little cannon with a thick round handgrip. Ackerman could see that the salesman and his friends weren’t in the concealment business. The only conceivable reason they would pick a gun like this was that it wasn’t as heavy to carry around as a .44. But then, with his other hand, the salesman reached deeper into the cache and produced something bigger, black and square and utilitarian, that didn’t resolve itself into a recognizable shape until he had it at chest level.