Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

Hamp looked around. There were lots of long, straight firing lines he could use: adobe walls around the houses to hide his movements, tall trees and thick hedges to complicate their view but not his. In the dark the police had to distinguish which, among the twenty or thirty silhouettes they could discern, belonged to their comrades and which to another man they didn’t even have a description of. By the time there were fifty policemen and armed civilians on the scene, any shot fired had a two percent chance of hitting a murderer and a ninety-eight percent chance of creating one.

This was what the old gangster in the California prison had been trying to describe to Elizabeth Waring. The tape-recorder team in New York had managed to stumble on a man who had never done anything for a living except kill people. He had been doing it for, say, twenty years, and he had gotten pretty good at it.

There was only one stop left to make, and that would have to wait a few hours. Evening was the time for visiting policemen, when you could talk to them in their homes.

Hamp walked to the door of the freshly painted one-story gray house and rang the bell. He could hear a dog barking somewhere in the back, then the loud scratching noise of its toenails as it ran across an uncarpeted floor to sniff under the door. He sensed that it was big, probably a shepherd or a Doberman, and he felt better when he heard a deep male voice cajole it away from the door. “Go on,” it said. “Into the kitchen.” Then, “Kitchen. Stay.” The toenail sound receded into the distance.

A dead bolt gave a metallic clank as the man slipped it. Hamp conceded that the precautions were understandable. Lorenz was an ordinary policeman. He’d have spent enough of his career looking at the work of intruders to develop a desire and talent for home security. His house wasn’t impregnable, by any means, but a burglar would find it discouraging enough to make him move on to the next one. The door opened, and Hamp looked the man in the eye and held out his hand. “Jack Hamp,” he said. “FBI.” Now he rapidly revised his expectations. Lorenz was in his early thirties, over six feet tall and athletic, his black hair cut by a good barber.

The voice was quiet and the eyes were intelligent. “Fernando Lorenz. Pleased to meet you.”

Hamp regretted the lie, but Elizabeth Waring had spent an hour telling him what she knew and what she wanted, and the quickest way to get it was to lie. She hadn’t told him to; he had figured it out on his own. He had been a cop for a long time, and he knew how it felt to wear the uniform. When a cop heard “FBI,” he had a pretty clear idea of what to expect, and of who he was talking to. He might like it or he might not, but he was going to answer questions because he didn’t think he needed to ask them. If you said you were a special investigator for the Justice Department, he was going to spend a lot of time looking at your ID and asking you what you did for a living, and maybe after you left he would make a couple of calls, and maybe find out through his own connections that you had spent the last two years sitting in an airport, or even that you were just doing legwork for a woman lawyer you had never met and he didn’t need to care about. The image that would come to mind was that of a young female assistant DA, and the fact that the office where she did her nails was in Washington instead of at the county courthouse didn’t make any difference. She wasn’t the one whose hands shook while she was strapping on the bullet-proof vest to go in after the barricaded suspect; she was the one who let the suspect go the next day because the paperwork didn’t look to her like it was going to add to her won-lost record—or else on the second day, after the charges didn’t get filed in time because she was at lunch with the councilman from the seventy-fifth district. It was simpler not to have to get past all that.

He followed Lorenz into a small living room furnished with a few large leather chairs and a long couch that had a half-folded army blanket on it. On the wall hung a dark-red Indian weaving that Hamp recognized as a good nineteenth-century pattern.

“Sorry to bother you at home, Lieutenant,” said Hamp, “but I’m sure you understand that we’d like to handle this as quietly as possible. The press seems to take a particular joy in letting the public know when we’re on a case, and this time it might lead to some wrong conclusions.” He had brushed across the sensitive spot without poking it. The police here would be smarting now, defensive because they sensed people were wondering how fifty men had lost a gunfight with one, and disoriented because they didn’t know the answer either. The press would imply that the FBI was wondering too.

Lorenz said only, “Sure. You mind dogs?”

Hamp hesitated, relinquishing the relief that he had felt at having this behind him. “No,” he said. “I used to have one.” If it was a working police dog, he knew from experience that when Lorenz told it to leave him alone he would have to say it in German. Every department in the country figured that the average fleeing suspect didn’t remember enough of what he had learned in high school to get a job, let alone call off a dog.

Lorenz said, “Martha,” in a normal voice, and Hamp heard the toenails again, tapping lightly toward him from the back of the house. He turned and saw a gray-brown standard German shepherd, at least three feet tall, with a chest like a barrel and a huge gaping mouth, emerge from a hallway. She walked past Hamp, gave him a look and then sat down in front of Lorenz’s chair. When he pointed at the couch, the dog leaped up and lay down on the army blanket. “She gets lonely,” said Lorenz. “She and I were Air Police.”

Hamp nodded. “How old is she?”

“Nine.”

“You made lieutenant fast.” Hamp stopped trying to remember his German. It wouldn’t do any good. Lorenz had been one of the men Hamp had seen when he was in the marines guarding the most sensitive installations: Strategic Air Command bases, air force communication centers and listening posts, walking the perimeters with guard dogs. The sight of them had always struck him as vaguely poignant. The dogs were given to the men as soon as they were weaned, and man and dog trained together, sleeping together in the same barracks, never more than a hundred feet apart for at least the length of an enlistment, and more often for the life of the dog. If the man was married and lived off the base with his wife, the dog lived with them, and the two would report for duty together. The attachment between them grew so strong that they were like two men, or sometimes two dogs, the one who walked upright representing to the other one mother, father and head of the wolf pack. The loyalty was so blind and unbreakable that when the AP’s enlistment ended, the dog had to be discharged with him because it couldn’t live without him. Hamp had seen them in Thailand, Vietnam and other places, the strange solitary pairs the embodiment of a primal nightmare, the big vulpine creature perfectly capable and even eager to hurl its ninety pounds of muscle and fang into a man’s throat if it would bring a whispered word and a gentle pat from its master, who had trained it to attack even more efficiently than its ferocious instincts would have prompted.

Hamp stared at Martha. The dog lay quietly on the old army blanket and stared unblinking into his eyes, her head resting on her paws. He turned back to Lorenz, who seemed to be looking at him with the same expression. “In your investigation of the break-in at Mr. Mantino’s house …”

There was something about the term break-in that jarred Hamp’s mind. Whatever had happened, the entry was the least of it. But Lorenz’s eyes moved to the dog, and Hamp’s followed. The dog’s ears were up, and its head was turned toward him attentively. Hamp felt a sudden alarm. The dog had sensed that he was feeling uncomfortable, maybe by smell, or by a sound in his voice, and it was already beginning to show little signs of agitation. He had to do something before the animal began to suspect that he wished Lorenz harm. He had to stay on solid, neutral ground and get the master to talk. “Tell me anything you found that the FBI might need to know.” He knew better than to try to talk to the dog or make a friend of her. She had been brought up to feel no interest whatever in any human being but Lorenz. He tried to formulate something that he could say for the dog’s benefit, something scrupulously true and sincere. “I know that’s a tall order. I’m asking you for information without being able to reciprocate.” The dog set her head down again. “Anytime someone like Mantino dies violently, there are possible consequences and implications, and I don’t know yet what they might be. The report says it appeared to be a simple B and E for purposes of robbery.” The dog seemed to be satisfied, so he sat back in his chair.