Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

Eddie had found Basset in a small town north of Syracuse along Lake Ontario. It was winter, and most of the cottages near the lake were closed. Apparently there had been some plan in Basset’s mind to go to Canada, because Wolf remembered a big boat frozen in the ice along the shore where it had been tied up. But when Eddie and the boy surveyed the house, Eddie had a nasty surprise; he discovered that he and the boy were not the only ones who had found Basset.

A man named Cathead Maloney drove past in a two-tone Pontiac just as Eddie was peering at the target through binoculars. Eddie had dragged the boy to his car, and followed. Eddie had been so angry when he had caught up with the Pontiac on the lake road that he had rushed to its side and flung open the door. Then he calmed down rapidly; Cathead Maloney had three other men with him.

Eddie had proposed that they share the danger and rewards, and Cathead had agreed in theory to the proposal. Their arguments had come over the execution. Cathead had decided that the way to get Basset was to wait until dark and approach the house from the lake side, walking on the ice to surprise him. Eddie pointed out that if a light went on, there would be six of them standing in the middle of a featureless white backdrop that stretched behind them at least forty miles, too empty to hide on, too slippery to run on, and probably too thin to hold their weight since Lake Ontario was too deep to freeze with any solidity.

Cathead responded that if the ice was thick enough to strand a twenty-five-foot boat with a car engine in it, then it would hold five men and a boy, and implied that anyone who passed up six-to-one odds against a mere sneak thief, with the advantages of darkness and surprise, didn’t really want to work very much.

Eddie held his temper, although the last part had nettled him. He countered that Frank Basset never worked alone; he’d had three men in the restaurants and four working the houses, and if he were alone now, he wouldn’t need a twenty-five-foot boat in the first place. From this point the discussion deteriorated, until finally Eddie uttered his benediction. “I give up. It’s all yours, Cathead. Have a ball. It’s going to be the slaughter of the innocents.”

Eddie had been right. There had been at least six very tense, alert, heavily armed men in the cottage, and Cathead Maloney and his partners had received the full benefit of their ability to find a light switch in the dark and aim a rifle afterward.

Wolf drove along Route 90, across the state line into Chicago, then pulled off the interstate. He went past a gas station, and noticed a set of three pay phones near the men’s room. He glanced at his watch, then patiently wheeled around the block and pulled in beside them. He walked into the office, asked the tired young man sitting on the high stool for the key to the men’s room and opened the other roll of quarters he had bought in Las Vegas. It was four-thirty in the afternoon in Las Vegas, and unless things had changed for no reason in two days, Little Norman would be in the Sands having breakfast. The efficient machine voice told him to put in more money, and he did. He asked the hotel operator to page Norman.

Seventy-five cents later, he heard the voice. “Yeah.”

“Norman.”

“I thought I wasn’t going to hear your voice again.”

“I ran into trouble. Did you do what I asked?”

“You know what that is, kid. It takes time. I started.”

“How does it look?”

“How can it look? Carl Bala lives to eat your eyeballs. The Castigliones know that if they forget that you did the old man ten years ago, they lose respect. The New York families aren’t sure they can pretend that Tony T wasn’t right in their back yard when you came to see him.”

“Are you giving up?”

“No, but it’s a fantasy. The old men aren’t like that. You chose this life. You knew what it was.”

“Norman?”

“What?”

“Tonight some people came for me. I’m going to assume that the man they worked for didn’t get the message yet. It’s a gesture of good faith.”

“Oh, shit, kid. They don’t care about your good faith. Just run.”

“I’m running, Norman. Tell them.”

“Right. Just remember, I don’t work for you. I work for them.”

Wolf hung up the phone and walked back to the van. It was time to get out of the area. The simplest thing to do was to try to drive another twenty miles to O’Hare Airport and find a room in a small motel in the neighborhood, where there were miles of them. It was already beginning to feel like a long night.

At the cashier’s counter in the Sands coffee shop, Little Norman was preoccupied. He paused for a moment before placing the telephone back on its cradle. He was watching the liquid-crystal display on the little screen that stuck up over the back of the telephone. It still held the number: (312) 555-8521. Illinois. Chicago area.

Wolf awoke in the big, hard bed and stared in the direction of the window. He wondered what had awakened him. The thick, opaque curtains were still drawn over the glass, so the room was dark, but at the side there was the tiny muted glow of a ray of light bouncing off the white lining of the curtain and onto the wall. It was daytime. He reached to the bedside table and held his watch close to his eyes. It was only seven-thirty A.M. It couldn’t be a maid who hadn’t seen the Do NOT DISTURB sign. He listened, then swallowed to clear his ears and listened again. There was no sound at all. It was almost eerie. He resigned himself to the fact that he wasn’t going to sleep again. He threw off the heavy covers and felt a kind of relief at the sound of the starched sheets sliding over one another. At least he wasn’t deaf.

He walked across the thick carpet to the window, pushed his index finger to the edge of the curtain and squinted to see what Rosemont, Illinois, looked like in the daytime. He started to breathe deeply in order to wake up and stop the shock before it made him slow and stupid. He stepped to the other side of the window and slowly moved the curtain a quarter of an inch. But when he looked out at the parking lot from the new angle, it was still the same. There were no cars in the lot. Last night there had been at least twenty, all in a row outside his window; now all he could see was black macadam, with the spaces marked in faded white paint. Somehow they had come in and evacuated everybody from the little motel without waking him, and now they were getting, ready to move in.

Wolf dressed quickly and threw everything he had brought with him into the little suitcase. It must be the FBI. They had come in with pass keys or even called every room on the telephone to tell them to get out quietly, and in a minute they would be coming through the only door with shotguns. There would be something like a SWAT team watching the only window. He had been lucky they hadn’t seen the curtain move, or there would be holes in it already.

He looked around him. There was the closet door, but there was also a sliding door on the side wall. It had to be a door to the next room, put there in case somebody wanted to turn both of them into a suite. He put his ear to it and listened. There was no sound of movement in the next room. If they were planning to come in that way, they would have it unlocked. He exerted a soft pressure on the door to see if it would budge, but it didn’t.

Wolf concentrated on dismantling the standing lamp. He cut the plug and jerked the cord through the long steel pole, pocketed it, and unscrewed the bulb and receptacle. Then he forced the motel’s bottle opener between the door and the jamb. Now he fitted the hollow steel pipe over the opener to extend the handle by six feet. When he pried with the long lever, the door lock gave a little groan, then popped. He slid the door open and saw an identical door on the opposite wall. Closing the one he had just come through, he headed for it.