Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

The problem was that the Butcher’s Boy had also seen Lempert. At the time Lempert had believed that it was likely to be useful in the future to get to know all the important people he could. Important people knew other important people, and opportunities could come from anywhere. He even had the odd notion that they might get to be friends. Lempert was an ordinary guy, after all, and he had never heard anything about the man that said he wasn’t one too. When he said it to himself, he had a picture in his mind. He didn’t analyze it, but the essential elements were that the guy would be somebody you might drink a beer with in a neighborhood bar, and that he should have some passing interest in sports, maybe enough interest to place a small bet now and then. There was a subtle bond between men whose lives were contested, who could keep living only as long as they won. That wasn’t exactly Lempert, but he had been in some tight spots.

So he had contrived to meet the bastard. Puccio had told Lempert he was going to see the guy the day before and give him the money. It was supposed to be in a restaurant called The Golden Cock, and Puccio had wanted to be sure there wasn’t some plan to raid the place that day because the cops knew there were slot machines in the room upstairs. Puccio didn’t want to be sitting in the place holding a hundred thousand in cash when some idiot rookie with a fire ax in his hand burst in through the back door to arrest illegal gamblers. But even more fervently, he didn’t want to be sitting across the table from that particular man when the cops came in. Lempert assured him that the place was not due to come up on the list until August, and maybe not even then, but it gave Lempert an excuse to show up and meet the Butcher’s Boy.

It was a mistake. He wasn’t an ordinary guy. Lempert walked up to the booth in the corner just as Puccio was saying something in a low voice about whacking Ugolino. The man was a disappointment at first glance. He didn’t look like much—no big shoulders or bull neck, and he was wearing a herringbone tweed sport coat with no tie. He had thin, sandy brown hair and brown eyes, and his fingers were long and thin, like a musician’s. One hand was sort of playing with his napkin on the table as though he were preoccupied, and his eyes seemed almost dull as they passed across Lempert. Then he looked up. “Sit down.”

Lempert had grinned and pulled out a chair, but then he noticed that Puccio was scared shitless. “What the fuck?” he whispered. “Get out of here.”

Lempert’s grin lingered on his face because he didn’t know what to do with it. The man repeated, “Sit down.” This time he let the napkin slip a little, and Lempert’s grin disappeared. Under the hem of the napkin he could see the black muzzle of a silencer aimed at his belly, and the hand was preparing to pull the trigger of the pistol through the napkin. He sat down.

The man turned his expressionless face on Puccio. “Keep your money.”

“But he’s—”

“I know who he is. He’s your cop.”

“Look,” said Puccio. “He just made a mistake. Please. Don’t kill him.”

Lempert had never heard these terms applied to himself before. Even after he had seen the gun, it had not occurred to him that he had done anything that could conceivably raise the stakes to that level. On reflection, he realized that he should have known before the gun, as soon as he had seen the eyes. They were not the eyes of a man who was afraid or angry. They weren’t even eager, like the eyes of a cat or a dog about to tear something up; those eyes had a kind of excitement or anticipation. This was not an ordinary guy. Lempert had been a cop for a long time by then, and he had seen something like this before. He didn’t know a lot about what he was looking at, but he knew that if this man started to smile, Lempert was going to dive for the floor and try to get his gun out in time.

The Butcher’s Boy said, “I won’t. I’m going to get up in a minute. You’re both going to sit where you are until I’m gone. Don’t send for me again.”

Puccio looked at Lempert, a quick glance that was intended to communicate a lot of things at once. It said something like, “See what you did?” But it also said, “If you speak or move or even change your expression, we’re going to die. And if I die here like this, I’ll hound you through hell for all eternity.” Puccio was like that. He never forgot or forgave or made allowances. He was a brilliant man, and it was his tragedy that the Cambria businesses had grown so large that he couldn’t handle all the details himself. Lempert let all the life go out of him and sat there, barely breathing. “Look, kid …” said Puccio. “I apologize. I’m embarrassed. The money just doubled. I’ll throw in another hundred thousand out of my own pocket.”

“The job’s not worth that.” It was a strange thing for a man to say. “The price isn’t the issue.”

Puccio nodded, but slowly, and he didn’t talk with his hands the way he usually did. “I know. I’m sincere. I’m trying to make up for this and show you I’m a serious man.”

The Butcher’s Boy looked at Puccio for a minute, then said, “All right.”

Lempert wasn’t sure he had heard correctly at first because he was busy remembering the sight of the Goschia brothers. Puccio had actually had them hung on meat hooks in the freezer of the Ritzmar Quality Packing Company, like some don in a movie. Only he had taped the button on the electrical track so that they were still going around and around when the rest of the employees came to work on Monday morning. Lempert had arrived just after the Homicide guys, and they were still up there. The rumor was that they had run their own football pool in the plant and had cost Puccio about ten thousand dollars in receipts.

Puccio was already saying, “I know you’ll get out, but just in case …”

The Butcher’s Boy let his eyes settle on Lempert and said, “I want him. No sense having everybody in town see my face.”

Afterward, Puccio didn’t kill Lempert, but he did everything he could to make him think he was going to. As soon as the Butcher’s Boy had gone, he shrugged his shoulders, chuckled and patted Lempert on the back. “We dodged it that time,” he said. The only reason Lempert could think of why Puccio would behave that way was if he didn’t expect to see Lempert again.

When Lempert had tried to stammer out, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Puccio had said, “It’s forgotten. Just don’t do it again.”

It was only after Ugolino was dead and Lempert was still alive that he started to take breaths that actually kept enough oxygen going to his brain. At that point he understood what was going on. By the time he had arrived in his squad car to watch the Butcher’s Boy come out of the social club, Ugolino had been dead almost an hour. That was what the coroner’s report had said. Lempert read it three times to be sure. But what gave him such chills that the skin on his jowls tightened and made his whiskers actually rise to the touch was that the death was listed “natural causes.” The best he could figure it was that the bastard had somehow gotten to Ugolino in the crowd and injected him with something that made his heart stop, and then let him slip down under the table at the booth in the back before anybody saw him. Who the hell would try to kill somebody like Ugolino that way? But whatever he had done, he had hung around for an hour inside the building before leaving.

Paul Cambria had gone to Ugolino’s funeral, with his foreman, Puccio, in attendance. In the surveillance photographs, the two of them had looked dignified and mournful as they accepted the homage of Ugolino’s family and friends. Two hundred thousand was a bargain. They didn’t just get to see Ugolino dead, they got to eat him afterward, like cannibals.