Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

Wolf dried himself with two of the big rough white towels and walked into the bedroom. There were really two problems now, and the way to get through this was to look at them separately. The old men were the big problem. He had done the right thing by going to Las Vegas. Little Norman might be able to convince them that the best thing they could do was to let Carl Bala stay in his cage and forget about helping him with his revenge.

The other problem was new to him. He knew that Little Norman must have been telling the truth. Tony Talarese had been wearing a wire. It was the only thing that explained the commotion in the kitchen when he had popped the bastard. It had been so obvious; why hadn’t he figured it out? Because it was such an outrageous idea that his mind had somehow blocked it. But now the New York police knew something about him. Hell, they must know a lot about him if they could have five cops waiting for him in the Los Angeles airport a few hours later. Because that’s what it had been; he had seen the whole thing wrong. It wasn’t four cops looking for a shooter; it was five cops looking for him.

He sat down on the bed and thought about this, and it was still wrong. The New York police couldn’t have gotten on a plane and caught up with him like that. They would have needed to take practically the next flight out of New York, and what could they expect to do in Los Angeles? They wouldn’t have jurisdiction. Now it fell into place inevitably. It wasn’t the New York police; it was federal cops—the FBI. It fit better anyway. They were the ones who were always bugging telephones and taping microphones to people, and they wouldn’t have to put anybody on a plane; they would simply make a phone call to the Los Angeles office to have their agent bring four bozos across town to scoop him up.

Wolf dressed quickly and walked across the street to the pay phone outside a small diner. He had twenty dollars in quarters, two ten-dollar rolls that he had bought from the sleepy change girl posted near the slot machines in the lobby of his motel in Las Vegas. He had picked up the habit from Little Norman in the old days, and it had come back to him. Little Norman had always told him that his hands were too small to use by themselves. A fist wrapped around a roll of quarters might lose a few hundredths of a second getting there, but when it did it would make an impression.

He put a quarter into the telephone and dialed the number. The operator came on the line and said, “Please deposit three thirty-five.” He laboriously pumped fourteen quarters into the slot, and after the fourteenth, the operator wouldn’t go away until she had said, “You have fifteen cents’ credit.” Then it sounded as though she were climbing into a jar and then screwing the lid on after her. And finally he heard the ring. It sounded different from the ones here, sort of bubbly and quick, and it made him feel as though he were home. It was maddening. He was listening to her phone, and he could see the room in his memory.

“Hello?”

“Hi,” he said. “I’m going to have to talk fast.”

“After leaving me alone this long, I should say you are.” He tried to remember how long it had been since he had heard anyone talk with a smile in her voice.

“Not to make excuses. It’s the connection. Wiring problems, I think.” She would understand that. It was from one of those silly books she had made him read. The British spy had detected a couple of ohms of extra resistance on the line to his reading lamp, and concluded it must be a bug. An American would have gone through the place with a bug detector. You could buy one for twenty-five bucks.

“Oh,” she said. Then, “ Oh .”

It was the FBI that worried him. In another book she had forced on him he had read that the National Security Agency had the capability of recording every transatlantic telephone call. The book hadn’t said whether they did it, or what use they made of all those tapes, but if they didn’t share them with the FBI, they were stupid. He had heard a lot about American intelligence services, but he hadn’t heard that they weren’t devious enough.

“I’m going to have to stay longer than I thought,” he said.

“Why? Can you-”

“It’s because I made a mistake. I’d like to say it was something else, but it wasn’t.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

This was the hard part. If they were listening, it had to be plausible nonsense. “Yeah. It’s funny I should be thinking about this right now, but I can’t get it out of my mind. The best thing you could do is spend today rearranging things. Maybe move your clothes and stuff. A good place might be at the north end, where the bed used to be.” He spent a second hoping she had gotten it, and knowing she couldn’t have. He thought of Yorkshire pudding, and there was an archbishop, but if he got that crude, they would have it before she did.

But she said, “Oh. The present arrangement isn’t good?”

Her voice had the sort of concern he was listening for, but he needed to be sure. “I’ve done a lot of this kind of decorating,” he said. “If you take my advice, I think it will brighten things up a lot.”

“Is it … that dark now?”

He was satisfied. She knew. “It just struck me as a good idea. I’d love to look the place over myself, but I just can’t get away right now. I’m hoping I’ll be able to soon.”

“I’d be very sad if you couldn’t.”

“I would too.”

There was a long silence on the other end, and he thought he could hear her breathing. It began to bring her back as a physical presence: the barely detectable scent on her hair, the incredibly soft skin just in front of her ear, and then, “I wanted to say,” Margaret said, “just in case we don’t get to speak again soon, that I …” She paused and then said the next two words softly: “love you.” He drew in his breath to answer, but she went on rapidly. “Please don’t answer, because it wouldn’t mean anything if you did right now. I wouldn’t have said it today either, but I thought I’d better, given the circumstances. These things often don’t get said, and then you regret it and all that. I know this is being unfair to you in case you wanted to say it for the same reasons, but that’s the way it is.”

“I love you.”

“After all that? It makes me feel worse than I thought, because it’s so typical of you.”

“I’ve got to go now. Don’t forget what I said.”

“Michael, wait!”

“What?”

“That was stupid of me. I’m sorry. I just—you know. I hope it’s not long. But if it is, I’ll—”

“Don’t.”

He hung up the telephone and heard a loud jangle as the machine dumped the load of quarters into its collection box. As he watched for a break in the traffic so that he could get back across the street to his motel, he felt worse. He hadn’t made her understand. He should have told her something closer to the truth. He wasn’t delayed; he was probably dead. The dons might sit back and wait while he disappeared and then tell Carl Bala in his prison cell that it was just one of those things, but if he didn’t disappear, then he was in trouble. After allowing him a decent interval, they would change their minds. And already the people who worked for Carl Bala would be out in force, hanging in all the places where he had ever been seen, watching for him. He might be able to avoid them for a time, but not forever.

He had never worried much about the authorities before. He still didn’t think they could catch him, except by some gigantic stroke of blundering good luck, but what if they could actually keep him from leaving the country? He had just used up the only passport he had that would get him past the computerized scanners they had installed in the airports since he had left, and there was no way he could try again to buy one. What had happened in Buffalo had closed that down for all time.