Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

“I’d have to know what he was thinking to answer that.” Oh, God, she thought. I’m only a few hours behind him, and this man is sending the police to look for a gang while he wastes time convincing me.

“How do you think one man could do all that?”

“I’m not sure how,” said Elizabeth, “but I know that ten years ago a man in Las Vegas who had never laid eyes on him came to me for protection because he was afraid to go to sleep. I couldn’t blame him, because that morning we’d found nine bodies around town. The man who killed them is the one I’m looking for now.”

It wasn’t long after Ms. Waring left that McElroy appeared at Delamo’s elbow again. “We just got a radio call from downtown, Lieutenant. They said another fed will be here in a few minutes. We’re supposed to extend him every courtesy.”

Delamo turned to look at him. “What the hell is that about? Why wouldn’t we?”

“I’m just repeating what they said. The guy wants to examine the body. Fingerprints, pictures, the whole thing.”

“Didn’t you tell them we already did that? We’ve got a positive ID. It’s Fratelli.”

“Not that body. The other one—the one with the broken neck.”

Eddie Mastrewski had shown him what to do in a variety of situations that arose in their business. He remembered Eddie waking him up in the middle of the night in a hotel in Milwaukee. At first the boy had been terrified because he thought the only reason to get up in the dark was that the police had somehow found out about the man Eddie had killed by the lake. His name had been “Good Eye” Fraser. Eddie had told him it was because Fraser had lost an eye in a fight years before, and it had been replaced by a very expensive and well-crafted glass sphere. That was the good eye. The other was small, red and piercing, and Fraser moved his head like an enraged turkey to bring it to bear on his enemies, a group that seemed to include everyone it looked at. The boy had assumed the police were now moving up the two stairways quietly because only a few hours before the satisfied customers had paid Eddie in a room behind an old pool hall a mile from there. They had scarcely been able to contain their joy at Good Eye’s demise. There could be no question of Good Eye’s friends seeking vengeance, because his friends had been the customers. They had literally stopped a game of rotation on the back pool table and passed a hat around to collect the money.

The boy had leaped out of the bed, snatched his revolver out of the drawer of the nightstand and groped for his pants. At this point he had seen Eddie’s grin. “Don’t get excited. Everything’s fine,” he had said. “It’s just time to go home.” The boy had been puzzled, but Eddie was busy packing his suitcase. “We did the job and we got paid for it, but if we’re still around after a day, those guys in the pool hall are going to start wondering why. We’re dangerous now. The police might find us, and that’s bad enough, but we also showed them we could take out a man they were afraid of, and that’s even worse. They might get scared that we’ll take over and bully them the way Good Eye did, and then they’d be even worse off. Or they might get to feeling ashamed that they had to hire us, and that we did it so easy. They’ll think, If it was that easy, we should have done it ourselves, so we wasted our money. No matter what they think, it’s bad for us, so we won’t give them time to think. Anyway, it’s part of the contract. If you hang around after a job and get the customers into an uproar, you’re denying them the peace of mind they paid for, and you deserve to die. It’s only fair.”

“Fair?” The boy was still groggy from sleep, and Eddie’s reasoning was hard to follow even in broad daylight. “To kill us for that?”

“Sure,” Eddie had answered. “In this life you always get a little bit worse than you deserve, so you have to take that into account.”

He had been a child then, and some of it was vague in his memory, but as he thought about it now, the rest of it began to come to him. It had been easy, as Eddie had said, and he realized that Eddie had probably just approached Fraser from his glass-eye side. But the part that seemed different now was the payoff in the pool hall. It hadn’t taken place in the back room, really. That was where they had made him wait while Eddie had accepted the money. His memory of it was the loud laughter and hooting coming from the men around the pool table in the front. For the first time, he remembered it as though he had seen it. Eddie sends the boy into the back room and closes the door, then walks up to the pool table and reaches into his pocket. When his hand comes out, the glass eye rolls the length of the table, looking as though it’s winking at the men gathered there. What other proof would they have asked for?

He knew what Eddie would have said about his situation at this moment: it was his own fault, so he deserved it. It was the result of what Eddie would have called a lapse of professionalism, and he would have said that it had started with The Honourable Meg. Eddie had been the ultimate pragmatist, with little time for sentiment. He had never married because it would have been foolish to imagine he could keep his second profession a secret from anyone who lived with him. He had had a series of liaisons with married women in the neighborhood whom he referred to as his “home-delivery customers.” He would go to their houses on slow afternoons, bringing some lamb chops or a roast for their husbands’ dinners, then return in a couple of hours and go back to work behind the counter. He would not have approved of The Honourable Meg.

But as Wolf searched through his memories of Eddie, he could recall nothing that would help him out of this mess. Eddie had never worked in the league where the customers were more dangerous than the jobs; he had known his limits.

Wolf realized that everything he did now would take on huge proportions in the future. There could be no more mistakes. It was time to lose the rented car. If he turned it in, he faced the risk that somebody would have had it traced through the credit card.

Just outside Cleveland, in the fringes where car lots, carpet stores and furniture warehouses marked the farthest reaches of the city, he found a huge new apartment complex. He parked the car on the street in front of it, then walked two miles down the road to a big motel and called a taxi to take him to the airport. Eventually, the people in the complex would realize that the car did not belong to somebody visiting their neighbors, or the cops would notice that it hadn’t been moved and would tow it. But that process would probably take a week. If he wasn’t out of the country by then, he would probably be dead. It was time to go see Little Norman.

Little Norman was the longest-running lounge act in Las Vegas. Each day at four o’clock in the afternoon for eighteen years, he would eat his breakfast in the back bar at the Sands, then place a two hundred percent tip on the table, stand up to his full six feet six and stroll out in a pair of cowboy boots that added two inches to his height. Today’s boots were hand-sewn iguana with carved silver toe caps and little silver imitation spurs at the heels, selected because the iguana hide went well with the Armani suit he was wearing.

As Little Norman stepped out of the bar and across the casino toward the door, the throngs of gamblers looked only at the clicking, buzzing, jingling displays on slot machines, or the brightly colored playthings on green felt tables. The only people who really watched Little Norman were some men on the walkways above the mirrors in the ceiling because they were paid to see everything, and a couple of women in the cashier’s window because they were bored. Their eyes settled on him for only a second and moved on. Little Norman was a regular, part of the garish sameness that they looked at every day.