Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

Wolf could also see a table where four dark-suited businessmen held a serious discussion, looking as though their plane from New York had been hijacked and they had been released, unharmed and unchanged, in the center of this small western town and were now waiting for the answer to their inquiries about whom to buy it from. He glanced around the lobby, first at the registration desk, where a dark-haired woman in her forties made quick, proprietary movements, arranging registration cards and keys to prepare for the morning check-ins. He avoided that side of the room and walked past two ancient Pueblo Indians, a wrinkled, leathery little man and a woman who undoubtedly was his wife, both of them busy opening modern, black sample cases full of silver and turquoise jewelry for display on the bench by the wall.

He drifted past a wooden rack of free tourist pamphlets, selected a Santa Fe street map and walked out the front door of the building to the street. There were a few little patches of the early autumn’s first crisp, hard snow in the square, and the air was clear and thin. He would have been tempted to ask for a room in the hotel, but he knew that Santa Fe was too small. He looked up and down the streets that led into the square. There were the stores he remembered, their windows full of intricately painted Indian pots, handwoven blankets of wool dyed with bright vegetable colors and antique pounded-and-burnished silver bought, by tradition, so cheaply from the once-credulous Indians that it was still called “pawn.” But among the stores was a coffee shop with outdoor tables turned upside down as a concession to the first taste of cold weather. He found it by following a couple in their thirties who were tourists but looked purposeful in their gait, reasoning that nothing else could be open yet.

Inside the door there was a steamy warmth to the air, a comforting heaviness to the dark wooden tables and a glow of hanging antique copper implements that he doubted the employees could even identify, let alone use. Wolf sat at a table and studied his map, while the waitress, a plump blond girl of the type he could imagine leaving college to study astrology, poured him a cup of coffee and left a menu beside him.

Andalusia was one of the narrow, cramped streets that ran parallel to Canyon Road, where he remembered that the galleries were. He had never felt an impulse to own paintings, and in the days when he had lived in the United States it would have been foolish, but he had walked down Canyon Road once, years ago, to pass the time, and he remembered the neighborhood. He judged from the map that he would have to leave the car blocks away and find Peter Mantino on foot.

When the waitress came to stand beside him and said, “Ready?” he answered, “Huevos rancheros,” because he hadn’t had time to read the menu, and it was the only thing he remembered that places like this would have. When she left, he studied the map again, letting it suggest the way things would happen. If things were as they should have been, a man like Peter Mantino would put some obstacles between himself and the world. But six or seven years ago, Mantino had been convicted of a bunch of charges that Wolf couldn’t even remember now, all of the bribery-and-suborning variety. Now he was on parole, supposedly living in voluntary seclusion hundreds of miles from the centers of power in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. All of this had been in the newspapers years ago, and even the reporters clearly hadn’t believed a word of it. But the important part was true: if he was on parole, he couldn’t have the sort of protection he was about to begin needing.

Wolf still had not gotten over the shock of seeing the shooter at the airport, but he had never for a second doubted what had happened. The truth was, there was no way even Carl Bala could send a specialist to kill somebody in the Los Angeles airport. The airport lay unambiguously in the center of Peter Mantino’s empire, and any consequences would fall exclusively on his head: the text of every letter to the editor would mention his name, the resulting crackdown would cut into his profits and the token arrests would make his people cautious and unproductive. He had to have been the one who made the decision, and the man must belong to him.

Mantino had started out running a crew for Balacontano in New York in the sixties, and then gotten to run the family’s interests in the West, supposedly as a reward for faithful service. At the time, people had said there was more to it than that. They said Mantino had begun to attract a lot of loyalty in the family, and Balacontano had just wanted him out there and away from the soldiers. The world was full of little men who knew what big men were really thinking.

It didn’t matter why Mantino had reacted so quickly. Maybe he was still loyal to the Balacontano family, and maybe he was making a safe, easy bid for respect while the old man was in prison and Talarese was out of the way. The only thing that was certain was that Mantino was taking enough of an interest to send shooters into public places. That changed Wolf’s problem into figuring out how Wolf was going to stay alive.

He needed to get out of the country, but nobody was going to let him step onto a plane to London without a passport. He knew of only one place where he might be able to get one after all these years, and that was in Buffalo, over fifteen hundred miles away. It would take time to get there, and time to make the contact, and time for the passport. And every second that passed, he was heating up. He needed to buy some time.

The only thing that gave him hope was that word of his return couldn’t have traveled faster than an airplane unless it was passed by telephone from somebody in New York to Mantino. And Mantino wouldn’t have told a lot of people in his organization that he was going to have somebody killed. That was the sort of thing nobody talked about until after it was accomplished. And it hadn’t been accomplished. The shooter had gotten himself busted in the airport. Wolf had to take advantage of that mistake. The only way was to do the unexpected: Mantino takes a swat at a fly, and the fly goes right up his nose.

Twice in his life he had seen what happened when a capo unexpectedly died. People reacted in different ways. A few would check in at out-of-town hotels and start making phone calls. But a lot of them would stay home and wait for somebody to get in touch with them. Usually it would be some acquaintance—a guy they had been introduced to at the races, or somebody’s cousin they had met at a wedding. The guy would say, “Peter’s dead. You have a problem with that?” or just, “What are you going to do now? If you want to go with us, I can talk to some people.” But until they heard from somebody, they were going to be watching a lot of television with the blinds drawn. Sometimes nobody got in touch, and the trouble just got worse. There had even been one famous time when a boss died, and forty of his friends across the country died the same day. That was what they would be afraid of—not that somebody Carlo Balacontano had put a contract on ten years ago had come for Peter Mantino.

The low brown stucco wall around the yard would present no problem unless it had some electronic component that Wolf couldn’t see from the street. He couldn’t see or hear a dog, and the sign on the gate that said NORTH AMERICAN WATCH—ARMED RESPONSE was comforting. It made it unlikely that Mantino had anything more sophisticated than a conventional alarm system that would summon untrained night watchmen. The house was a single-story adobe-colored building. Like all the others in this part of town, it was required by the building code to look as though the Spaniards had never left, although he suspected that any Spaniards that had made it this far north and east must have been a forlorn, raggedy-assed bunch.