Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

The Jaguar spun around the corner and its arc carried it into the next one, heading south again. Ackerman turned to the salesman. “Do you know where you’re going?”

The salesman shrugged. “Can’t stay out alone. Got to get with my friends. The Jamaicans will be hunting me.”

“Let me out at the corner.”

The salesman’s eyes narrowed and he glanced at him quickly. “We still need to talk.”

“What about?”

“I need the gun back. They’re looking for me.” He had obviously been thinking about the predicament he was in. He had emptied the clip in the Uzi and sold his pistol, and now he still had to make it across the city to whatever stronghold his friends maintained. He wasn’t sure he would be able to do that unarmed, and even he knew he couldn’t stay out in a car as memorable as a Jaguar and not be caught by the police.

Ackerman was surprised to detect in himself a certain sympathy for the salesman. “All right. Pull over up there.”

The salesman steered his car to the side of the street and let a taxi go by. Then he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the five hundred-dollar bills. Ackerman accepted them, then got out and leaned back into the car to look at the salesman.

The salesman was agitated. “Where is it? Where’s my gun?”

Ackerman pulled the big nickel-plated pistol out of his coat and laid it on the floor behind the passenger seat, out of the salesman’s reach. “If I were you I’d drive around the corner to a dark spot before I tried to pick that up.”

The salesman looked hurt at the lack of trust, or perhaps disappointed that he wasn’t going to get the five hundred dollars back. “You have another one, don’t you? You took one off B-Man.”

Ackerman answered, “I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you have. Don’t try to follow me. I can still kill you any time I want to.” He closed the door and watched the Jaguar move off into the night.

He walked quickly down the street past a hotel, a bar and two closed stores before he ducked into the next doorway. He looked out at the street for the Jaguar, his right wrist beside his coat pocket, feeling the weight and square corners of the small automatic inside without letting his hand pat it or touch it. The Jaguar didn’t reappear, even after he had watched the traffic signal change three times. The salesman had decided to forget about the money, and had gone to find whatever form of safety and shelter home could offer him.

Ackerman grasped the big wrought-iron handle, pulled the heavy plank door open and entered. There was a podium with a book of reservations on it, but the kitchen had been closed for hours and the hostess had been replaced by a bouncer who sat in an alcove with a pilsener glass half full of flat beer. He was a melancholy weight lifter recruited from a local gym, a thirtyish man with a cap of black, curly hair and a management-owned blue suit that had been let out to accommodate his squat, thick upper torso. He let his dark eyes stray upward to determine that the man coming through the doorway was alone, and therefore probably quiet; wearing a clean shirt and sport coat, and therefore probably not insane; and of average height and weight, and therefore manageable for the bouncer if he had been overly optimistic about either of the first two.

The bouncer took a birdlike sip of his beer and returned his eyes to a sad survey of the rest of the patrons sitting at tables ranged around the dark interior of the bar. Behind the eyes he was a small, shy little introvert who had inherited the body of generations of brawlers and laborers, then with introspective concentration had built it into a comic-book picture of a man, with muscles that he compared each day, one by one, with a series of photographs in a glossy magazine. He saw himself as a kind of lifeguard who was always in attendance at a scene of continuous and foolhardy revelry that he was never moved to join.

Ackerman walked past the bouncer to the bar, edged onto a stool and found that he had immediately intersected with the bartender’s orbit. “Perrier,” he said. The bartender’s answer was a warning and a challenge: “That’ll be three-fifty.” He reached for his wallet to signal that he was aware he was going to pay that much for a glass of water, and the man moved to the cooler.

Ackerman placed a five-dollar bill on the bar, then moved toward the sign that said RESTROOMS. There was a dark little hallway, and two doors with the international symbols for the sexes, two gingerbread people so nearly alike that they signified nothing until compared for differences. He had been glad to see the bouncer because it meant that the pay telephone would still be firmly attached to the wall, and the book would be intact. The bouncer was the sort who would have considered the destruction of a telephone book an infraction that required his regretful attention.

He had no difficulty finding the home address. There were only four Talarese numbers, and only one Antonio. But then he noticed the business numbers. The first was Talarese’s Bella Italia, then a number for catering, and one for reservations. The address was on Mott Street in Little Italy. It had to be the same place, the little catering store where he had met Tony T years ago. He walked back to the bar and sipped his bubbly water. The antique clock on the wall over the bar, a plain black face with glowing green numbers and a green neon ring around it, said that it was ten minutes to one.

He sat in the subway car looking at the spray-painted graffiti on the walls. The colors had gotten better, the viridian greens and new shades of orange, and the gold and silver metal-flake, but the script was now so ornate that he couldn’t read any of it. When it occurred to him that it might be a different language, he decided it should still be organized into words. It looked more like the samples of Sumerian and Phoenician in the books he had found in his house in England than like any modern language. The British were always complaining that London was no longer an English city. They should see New York. It had always been a few steps closer to chaos than London was, but now no European would recognize it as having any historical relationship with anything he knew or understood. It was as though the Indians had returned to claim it after a three-hundred-year sojourn in the woods.

The train clattered to a stop, the doors opened and he stood and followed two anorectic heroin addicts onto the platform. They were probably younger than they looked, and they looked about twenty, two pockmarked young men in tight black pants that betrayed the fact that they had sat on the ground at some point, and thin almost-antique jackets of early synthetic materials—one in a silky blue-gray that he remembered seeing on someone when he was a teenager, and the other in a dirty bile-green with a texture almost like foam rubber. He could tell that they were holding, because the shorter of the two kept patting his pocket to reassure himself that he hadn’t dropped the bag or his works. In England they made an effort to keep the poor bastards supplied and off the streets, so he had forgotten about them. But at least these two were holding, so he wouldn’t have to watch his back when he moved out into the darkness. They would be on their way to a peaceful place where they could bring up a vein.

He ascended a set of concrete steps that smelled like a urinal, past old paint that was beginning to peel, taking with it the most recent graffiti and revealing more beneath it. When he reached the street he came around the railing and moved toward the catering shop he remembered.

He had no trouble seeing the store from a distance. It was after one on a Saturday night, and two men in suits were standing on the street like parking attendants. A big gray car pulled up in front, and one of them went to the window to talk to the driver. When the car pulled around the building, Ackerman remembered the loading dock in the back. Even in the old days, the little square of tar had been an unusual extravagance in this part of town, where trucks usually stopped on the street in front of businesses and unloaded onto the sidewalk. By now the Talareses could probably have lived off the rent on that much land. It was a place invisible from the street, where they could park a truck and bring anything in or out of the building. If the police had been both smart and honest for any extended period, they would have given themselves an education by watching that lot.