Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

Suddenly the big man in the corner leaped up and knocked over a table on the way to the kitchen, bellowing, “Gloria? What’s she saying?”

He waited for the man to burst through the swinging door, then glided to the front of the restaurant. He pushed gently on the crash bar and opened the door only wide enough to step through it to the street. He put the gun into his pocket as he walked. In a moment he was around the corner, out of sight of the restaurant, a fortyish man in good clothes making his way toward the subway entrance two blocks down the street. As he walked, he had no concern that the two soldiers would be able to sort out what had happened in the two minutes in which they might still catch him. If they did, they would be in their cars looking for a man in a car.

As he approached the subway entrance, he reached into his pocket and felt the pistol. He was reluctant to relinquish it after all the trouble he had gone through to get it from the salesman’s wounded friend, but he reminded himself that it was more dangerous to him than to anybody else now that he had used it. He moved down the steps to the shelter of the underground and used the change machine to buy a token to get him through the turnstile. It was all a sequence of simple, mechanical, logical steps.

He saw that he was alone in the big, echoing tunnel. In the silence he could hear the rails clicking somewhere, but the sound was still far off. He wondered how things had changed so much that he would be alone at a subway stop, even at two in the morning.

He jumped off the platform, ran down the track to the tunnel mouth and looked around again. There was no other human being in sight, and no sound except a train somewhere in a parallel tunnel, not even audible now, just a vibration through the bedrock. It had to be now. He took the little pistol out of his pocket, wiped it clean with his sleeve, laid it carefully across the gleaming steel rail, then turned, ran back to the platform, hauled himself up and waited. In a few minutes, even a few seconds, the New York transit system would effectively dispose of his weapon for him, turning it into something that looked more like a torn orange peel than a firearm. If the serial number miraculously survived, the nearest it would lead the most astute police force to him would be a delirious teenager lying in a hospital bed miles away.

Ackerman heard the reassuring sound of the train long before it arrived. It was rattling through the tunnel as though it had no intention of stopping. He watched the rail where he had placed his pistol. Suddenly there was a flash of light as the nose of the train swept past, and then it was just a strip of windows, most of them empty or nearly so, a few somnolent, dull-eyed faces looking out past him at the walls.

The train came to a stop beyond the boarding zone, and he had to walk quickly to reach the door of the last car as it opened automatically to receive him. He stepped through it just before it slid shut. As he moved to a seat, he took a census. Most of the cars he had seen were nearly empty, and a man alone sitting in the bright light would stand out like a stuffed animal in a diorama in a museum. In this car a dozen people sat in the sleepy boredom of the late shift, or the mildly disappointed memory of an evening out. Four big men sat in the two seats across from him, thick-necked beer swillers with pudgy fingers and bowling bags at their feet. There were two tall, studious-looking black men sitting in the seat in front of him. One of them wore wire-rimmed glasses with small, flat, round lenses that looked as though they had been issued by a Soviet medical mission to Zimbabwe. They caught the overhead lights and glinted whenever he glanced at the four white men across the aisle. His companion seemed to be a little more used to New York subways, and kept his gaze ahead to avoid meeting the eyes of any possible lunatic who might be staring at him in incomprehensible hatred.

The rest of the passengers were like him: solitary men who didn’t want to be either memorable or visible in this place at this time. There were no sales to be made, contracts to be negotiated or friendships to be started on a subway after midnight, and any contact with the people surrounding them was risky. He adopted the same pose; he slouched a little, but only enough to suggest ease, not physical weakness. Like them, he cleared his mind and set his face in an ambiguous, empty expression.

He waited until the subway had stopped at Thirty-fourth and Sixth, then watched until a train decorated with a white airplane on a blue background arrived. The gradual replacement of words with colors and pictures had accelerated during his time away, and it made moving around a kind of puzzle. What could it be but an airport express? Maybe an ad for air travel? But it took him to the Howard Beach-JFK Airport station, and a bus came to shuttle him to the terminal.

Ackerman didn’t see people on his route. He saw the backs of heads, collars raised and bodies bundled against the predawn chill, eyes half-closed because there could be nothing to look at until the train stopped moving. When he entered the terminal he took the precaution of finding a door with a little picture of a man on it so that he could wash any invisible traces of burned powder off his hands and forearms to fool a paraffin test. Then he went to his locker, retrieved his suitcase and returned to change his clothes in a stall.

He knew he was acting like a shopkeeper who had just killed his wife for the life insurance, but something unexpected had happened at Talarese’s. He wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but he knew it couldn’t be good.

Elizabeth Waring Hart poured boiling water through the coffee filter, then set the kettle back on the burner without making any noise. She stopped and listened to the baby monitor for a second, poured the coffee into her cup and then sat in the cold predawn darkness. As soon as she raised the cup and touched it tentatively to her lips, she heard Amanda’s first stirrings. There was a faint little gasp that the monitor amplified into a rattling snore, and then came the roll. The crinkle of the biodegradable diaper sounded like the crumpling of a newspaper over the thin layer of static. Then Amanda began to coo to herself in her crib, and Elizabeth listened intently. In a few minutes, she would be crying for rescue, but as long as she was experimenting happily with sounds and running the morning inventory of toys in her crib, it was better to leave her in peace.

Elizabeth took another sip of her coffee. When Jimmy was this age, Jim had been the one to do this. He had been a morning person. Sometimes, soon after he had died, Elizabeth had felt strange when she sat here, taking his place. Sometimes she had even tried to talk to him, because it seemed as though he were nearby. She would say, “You bastard. You stupid bastard. You should be doing this.” The counselor from the hospital had said that anger was a normal reaction, but counselors were in the business of telling people things were normal that weren’t.

When the telephone rang she snatched it off its cradle before it had finished its first jangle. “Hello?” she said, just above a whisper.

“Elizabeth.” It was a statement, uninflected, and not enough to tell her who would call at this hour.

“Yes.” She matched the emptiness of the tone.

“I think we’ve finally found something that will make you come back to Organized Crime.” So it was Richardson. When she had transferred out of the section ten years ago, Richardson had been at her level, just a data analyst with a law degree. Now he was in charge.

“What’s that?” she asked without curiosity. She had been in two other sections of the Justice Department since then and taken two maternity leaves, and nobody had ever asked her to come back.