Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

“Here’s what I want,” said the Butcher’s Boy. “I want a copy of whatever the FBI is sending out to the police computers about me.”

“The NCIC file? How am I supposed to do that?”

“Maybe somebody will fax it here from the station, or Washington, or whatever. Maybe you can get one of these computers onto a phone line and call it up. Anyway, do it.”

“Give me a minute to think.”

“If you do it, I’ll pay you. If there’s some trick or something, I”—and then he paused for what seemed like a long time—“won’t.”

Lempert went to the kid at the counter. “I want to use a phone.”

The kid recognized him. He hesitated, and Lempert had the impression that he was scared, but it gave him no pleasure. “Here’s the phone.”

Lempert only briefly considered saying something on the phone that made no sense. Who could say what this man knew? He dialed the squad room and heard McNulty’s voice say, “Police Department Metro Division.” Of course it had to be McNulty working tonight, somebody who not only didn’t like Lempert but was also so stupid that his partners wouldn’t ride in a car with him unless they had personally checked the shotgun to be sure there wasn’t a shell in the chamber when he stuck it in the rack.

“It’s me, McNulty. Lempert,” he said. “I need a favor.”

“Don’t we all,” said McNulty.

Lempert thought for a moment. What was in his desk? Nothing that would get him into this much trouble. “I want you to look in the lower left-hand drawer of my desk, and fax the stuff in the file folder on top to me.”

“So where are you, Paris?”

“This is serious.”

“Where you at?”

Lempert turned to the kid, who was pretending to be dusting a shelf with a cloth. “Give me the fax number here.”

As the sheets rolled out of the machine, the Butcher’s Boy barely looked at them. He just took them out of the tray, glanced at them, folded them with one hand and stuffed them into his coat pocket. Most of the time he watched Lempert. What kept driving Lempert crazy was that the kid at the counter knew him. He was watching the proceedings out of the corner of his eye, and unless he was retarded, all this must have struck him as strange. He could probably see the lump in the Butcher’s Boy’s coat where he held Lempert’s service revolver. But he also knew that Lempert was a cop, and naturally would assume that the Butcher’s Boy was a cop too, and since cops carry guns, there was nothing strange going on at all. Anybody else would slip out the back door and dial 911. Even this kid would if it was anybody else but Lempert. Now the bastard was probably going to kill them both, walk out of here and drive away in the van. The keys were on the floor.

Finally the machine stopped grinding out pages. The Butcher’s Boy said, “That’s good enough. How do you usually get your money?”

Lempert knew he didn’t mean his police pay. “A post-office box.”

“Write it down and give it to me.”

Lempert couldn’t believe it. “You’re really going to pay me?”

As the Butcher’s Boy looked at him, Lempert could tell that he was being evaluated, and that somehow the assessment wasn’t good. “I said it.”

Lempert smirked. “Yeah. I heard you.”

“People lie to you a lot?”

“About money? Just about everybody.”

The Butcher’s Boy looked at him with a mixture of pity and distaste. “Then it’s your fault. You should have killed the first one.”

The man was absolutely serious: he had killed the first one. Lempert could tell, and it had a strange effect on him. For a few minutes he had been gaining strength. He had begun to look at the hand that gripped his revolver and feel a certainty that his hand was bigger and more powerful, and just a minute ago he had begun to wonder if maybe it wasn’t faster too. He had begun to visualize how he would grab it while it was still in the pocket and break it at the elbow, and his blood had started to warm in preparation for the moment. But now the other feeling had returned, the one he had felt when he had first met this man years ago. Not this time, not this man. He simply was not somebody you could do that to and have any real expectation of succeeding, because you couldn’t surprise him. A dozen people must have already tried whatever he had just thought of, and all of them were dead.

Lempert wrote the post-office-box number on a piece of paper that was meant to refill the fax machine and watched the free hand pick it up and put it in the pocket with the other sheets. But then Lempert was distracted. The back door of the copying store, the one that opened onto the parking lot of the plaza, sent a glint of light in his direction. It had moved, and the reflection of the overhead fluorescents had flashed too. As he watched, he could see the reflection swinging a little, back and forth. Somebody he couldn’t see had touched it. A sick feeling came over him; it was somebody testing to see if the back door was locked.

Apparently the Butcher’s Boy hadn’t seen it. He said, “You’ll get some money in the mail in a couple of weeks. Let’s go.” He tossed a twenty-dollar bill on the counter where the kid could see it and moved toward the front door. Then he stopped. “Coming?”

Lempert was sweating again. Whatever happened next, he was going to be in the middle of it, standing here without a weapon or a place to hide. If it was cops, he could give a yell and dive to the floor, and they would know enough to fire. He hoped it was cops. But how the hell could it be? It must be either the wind or Puccio’s men. God, he hoped it was Puccio’s men. Even if they were the ones who actually got him, Lempert would share in the credit. It was only fair.

* * *

As Albert Salcone stood outside the back door, he saw Ficcio across the door from him, reaching out his hand. Salcone gasped, then realized there was no way to keep Ficcio from touching the door. He pressed himself against the back wall of the building, blew the air out of his lungs and waited. As he watched the door swing back and forth a little, he forced the hatred he felt for Ficcio to drain out of his mind. Ficcio was a kid by today’s standards. In Salcone’s day, by the time you were nineteen, either you were in some jungle wearing camouflage fatigues or you were in jail. Now a kid that was nineteen might not have been in a real fight in his life.

Salcone turned to Ficcio and shook his head disapprovingly. Maybe Ficcio understood. At least he looked crestfallen. Salcone hoped he was devastated, but there was no way to explain to him now why he should be. Either the door was unlocked, in which case it would offer no resistance when they moved in, or it was locked. If it was locked, then when one of them tried to get in for real, it wouldn’t budge and he would have to fire through it. Either way, there was nothing lost. The one thing you didn’t want to do was test it and let the occupants know you were coming.

Salcone had been planning to have Ficcio go in through the back door alone while he waited in the street at the front of the store. But that wasn’t going to happen now. So much for all the cunning that had gotten them this far—Puccio’s and his own.

Puccio had come up to him in the theater and told him to find out what he could about the van that had been parked in the street across from the building. He had said there was something peculiar about it, and Salcone had known Puccio long enough to forget about asking questions and get out there. When he had sneaked to the rear corner of the van a while ago, he had peered inside and seen something every bit as peculiar as Puccio had suspected, but not as ominous. It was Bob Lempert, sitting in a swivel chair like the ones bass fishermen installed in their boats so that their butts wouldn’t get sore.