Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

“Shhh. You’ll give yourself agita. ” The woman was standing up, farther away.

“Nobody said it was your fault.” This one was standing too; another man, and he was moving, probably pacing. “Please, Tony. Eat something. You’ve got to eat.”

Ackerman used the aimless ritual of the conversation to crawl to the door. This was the entrance he had used when he had met Tony T. He pulled on the steel door, but it had an unbudging solidity that told him it was locked and staked down with a dead bolt in the floor. He would have to get in another way. As he moved closer to the kitchen door he could smell something cooking. It was the burning fat of meat mixed with something spicy that burned his nose and made him hungry. He didn’t allow himself to smell it for long because it belonged in the category of irrelevant sensory distractions. It was other people’s food, just part of what pertained to them, like their talk and clothes and names.

He stood in the darkness for a moment and tensed the muscles in his legs, feet, toes and then arms. He took a couple of deep breaths and let his heart rate speed up and the moment of dizziness turn into tension. He took the little pistol out of his coat pocket and flipped off the safety, then opened the door and slipped inside the kitchen, looking around him.

He stared into the eyes of a thin, dark woman in a black dress with a string of pearls around her neck, incongruously wearing a pair of huge, quilted oven mitts that looked like flippers. The woman froze, speechless, as he crouched and moved sideways behind the man seated at the stainless-steel table.

The man at the table saw her, twisted in his chair to see what she was looking at and scowled. In the last decade the face had gotten coarser and thicker, and the wavy black hair now had a few wiry gray strands, but it was unquestionably Tony Talarese. “What?” The mouth was thin and wide, and the pointed chin stuck out in annoyance until the eyes focused on the face that was too close. “You? Why you?”

It seemed an odd question, but Ackerman had no time now to wonder about it. He thought of Eddie’s egg in the frying pan as he placed the gun against Talarese’s temple and fired, then moved, not back toward the door but forward, sidestepping the woman in black, who was running to the body slumped forward on the table, flapping her arms to get rid of the oven mitts like a startled bird trying to take flight.

Nobody else in the kitchen moved as the woman flung herself on the dead man’s back. Their eyes fluttered in their heads, not knowing where to look as he stepped past them: a middle-aged man in a dark suit and an apron, two girls in their twenties, one black-haired and the other blond, but like sisters, wearing short tight black dresses with a lot of stiff lace and explosions of chiffon at the hems as though they had just come from a nightclub. As he reached the swinging door to the dining room, two other young women who had the flat shoes and big forearms of waitresses rushed in past him, one carrying a fire extinguisher upside down. He was prepared for the screams, but the screams didn’t come from them. They came from the woman clutching the dead man to her. He slipped out the door to the dining room.

Inside the kitchen, the woman cried, “Tony!” There was a short pause, and then, “What’s this?” The others flocked to her, trying to pull her away, but she didn’t budge. She tapped on the dead man’s back, and mere was an audible electronic click. “A wire! The son of a bitch is wearing a wire!”

The woman tore at Antonio Talarese’s back. The kitchen had turned into this small dark woman’s personal madhouse, and confronted by the spectacle, the others all seemed to forget about the killer. The woman clawed Talarese’s shirt up out of his belt to his shoulders, so that everyone could see that Tony T did have something taped to the small of his back. The woman squawked again, “See? I never would have believed my husband—” The grieving widow turned to the man in the apron. “Are these things always turned on?”

“What?” The stunned man in the apron looked as though he had been shot too. “What?”

“You know. Can they hear … at night? I’m his wife. You know what I’m asking.”

The man seemed to decipher the words with great difficulty, groping toward the idea but not quite believing that anybody could be asking what he thought she was. When he arrived at it, he reacted with contempt. “For Christ’s sake, Lucille! Who fucks with his coat on?”

That seemed to satisfy the wife for a moment, and her bony shoulders drooped. But what he’d said had brought understanding to one of the waitresses, a plump, fair woman about thirty-five. She seemed to remember something. “Oh, my God,” she wailed, and the widow’s eyes flicked toward her and narrowed. The widow’s lips curled back to bare her teeth. “Whore!” she shrieked. As she hurled herself at the buxom, peach-faced waitress, she didn’t notice that both of the young girls in the black dresses and the other waitress were backing toward the loading dock with identical stunned expressions on their faces. One of the young girls was compulsively jerking at the chain of a diamond pendant, trying to snap it off her neck. The widow was so alert she could see into their souls. “You too? You all let him do it wired up like a radio station?” Her voice shattered into a cackle.

Ackerman moved across the dim, empty restaurant, staying low and keeping his eyes on the door. He heard the hysterical woman exploring new octaves beyond soprano, but her screeches didn’t resolve themselves into words.

Behind him in the kitchen there was a series of screams as pots and pans and then a table were knocked over. He watched the front door of the restaurant, crouching in the deep shadows below the bar. He heard the door rattle as one of the men on the street tried to open it, and then saw their shadows moving rapidly back and forth at the windows. Their voices didn’t reach him over the noise in the kitchen, but he knew that eventually one would make a dash around the building to the loading dock while the other came through the front door into the dining room.

He relaxed his muscles and controlled his breathing while the minds of the two men outside lumbered toward the only possible strategy. He saw a shadow float along the front window toward the alley, and then watched the other shadow loom suddenly at the door. A moment later the glass was hammered inward, and a big arm reached through the hole and tugged at the crash bar. The door swung open and a big man pivoted around it into the restaurant, visible for only a second as his silhouette slid across the broken door into the safety of the darkness.

This man’s movements were an unpleasant surprise. He was big, but he used his strength to move himself gracefully into a corner and hold himself low, silently waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness while he listened for the sound of an intruder. He was crouching in a spot where nobody could get behind him, and he could control both doors. With every heartbeat it became more likely that the man was cunning enough to stay where he was until his partner came in through the loading dock and flushed any intruder out the kitchen door.

In the kitchen, the widow had somehow freed herself from the man with the apron and resumed her tirade right beside the dining-room door, where the words were audible. “Whores!” she shrieked. Then there was the quavering voice of another woman, younger, frightened but steeling herself to defiance. “He was the one who wanted to.” This seemed to enrage the widow even more. “Of course he was the one who wanted to. He wanted everything, like a little boy. I hope they play this on the six o’clock news, so your grandmothers hear it and drop dead. And you with your bleached hair, twitching your ass in his face every day—”