Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

Inside the third room, he decided it was time to try another way. He picked up a chair, tied the lamp cord around the back of it and carried it into the bathroom. Setting it in the center of the floor, he stood on it, then reached up to push the plywood hatch off the access hole to the attic. After shoving his little suitcase into the crawlspace, he reached up, grasped both sides of the cubbyhole and pulled himself up. Inside the crawlspace it was dark and dusty, and the sloping roof was only a yard above the floor of bare two-by-fours with layers of insulation between them. Here and there were wires for the light fixtures below. As soon as he had turned around on his hands and knees to face the hole again, he pulled the chair up with the lamp cord, set it aside and put the cover back on the access hole.

Wolf crawled carefully from one two-by-four to the next, at each advance setting his suitcase down ahead of him, quietly making his way down the long empty space. He could see the small louvered vent at the end of the building, and he used it as a goal.

In the hallway Cabell whispered to Sota, “Remember, anything that’s alive in there is no friend of yours.”

Sota grinned at the door and clicked the slide on his new MAC-10. “Lock and load,” he whispered. Sota’s dumb cheerfulness was beginning to wear on Cabell. The fact that the last time he’d had a weapon in his hand he had fired point-blank into a pane of bulletproof glass at a man selling lottery tickets didn’t inspire confidence.

Cabell and Sota were thieves. The difference was that Cabell knew it, and had been nervous about going along on something like this to begin with. But Sota seemed to think he was a badass. Puccio had decided it was some kind of weird Mafia justice that somebody should shoot this guy with the gun that Salcone had carried when he got killed. To Cabell it was just asking for trouble, so he had given the gun to Sota, who hadn’t figured out that if you found blood on a gun, it wasn’t from the guy it was fired at.

Puccio was calling in lots of markers today. Landsberg was only another thief like Cabell, but he had his own crew working out of a travel agency Puccio owned. Once in a while, when a whole family sailed for Fiji or someplace, Landsberg’s crew would come in with a moving van and take out everything but the plumbing. Everybody owed Paul Cambria the right to work in town, but Puccio was the guy who kept track. There were at least ten or fifteen guys around the motel right now, all of them called in the middle of the night.

Cabell kicked in the door, and when he brought his foot back to the floor he let his momentum carry him to his right and into the room, as Sota slipped in low and to the left. For a second, Sota’s mind didn’t allow the possibility that the room was empty. He fired a short burst into the couch, which seemed to be the only thing that wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Then he rushed into the bathroom, where there was nothing to point his weapon at but a couple of wet towels draped over the shower curtain. Cabell said, “You didn’t happen to slip out for a smoke while you were supposed to be watching the hall?”

“No way,” Sota protested, but Cabell hadn’t said it seriously. He was already checking to see if the window had been opened. He did it cautiously, without moving the curtain, so that Landsberg wouldn’t get a glimpse of him from outside and put a hole in him. He looked around the room, and then saw it. “You said there wasn’t but one door.” He walked to the sliding door that led to the next room and studied it. There was a deep indentation beside the lock, and the wood around it had been compressed and cracked. He silently pointed to it, stepped to the side, and abruptly slid it open to allow Sota a clear shot, but Sota just stood and stared.

Cabell cautiously craned his neck to peer into the next room. It was identical to this one, and he could already see that some damage had been done to the lock on the sliding door that connected it to the third. He turned to Sota. “You go out in the hall. When I flush him, that’s the way he’ll go.”

At the end of the attic, Wolf lifted the plywood square just enough to fit the muzzle of Little Norman’s pistol. The roar of the automatic weapon a minute ago was a sure sign that somebody down there was getting jumpy. It also seemed like a reliable indication that the people down there were not from the FBI. As he looked down through the crack, he saw something he had not expected. There were a man and a woman, both about fifty, lying on the floor in the motel office. They were both on their backs, so he could recognize them as the owners, but they’d both had their throats cut. He could see that the counter drawers and cash register had been rifled.

Wolf lifted the hatch a few more inches. It was stupid. All they’d had to do was flash a badge they could have bought in any toy store and tell everybody there was a gas leak. For a moment he considered staying in the attic and waiting for his pursuers to leave, but something about the scene below made it seem foolish. They weren’t going to leave. He ran a mental inventory of the contents of his small suitcase and decided there was nothing in it that would tell anyone anything about him, so he left it in the attic, then lowered himself to the top of a filing cabinet, went to the counter and began to look in the drawers.

There was no sign that the couple lived here, so there had to be a car. Finally he found the woman’s purse, a large bag made out of something that looked like carpet, with wooden handles. Her key chain had a little flashlight and a whistle on it. It was sad that she would have imagined that those things would keep somebody from hurting her.

He moved toward the back door of the office. The car had to be in the back, because the lot was empty. There were only a couple of things in his favor now. One was that the only men he knew about for sure were still somewhere behind him firing automatic weapons into empty rooms, so nobody would expect him to emerge from the office. Another was that there couldn’t be many people still around who knew him by sight after all these years. He glanced back at the two bodies, already half drained of blood. Of course, those people outside didn’t seem much worried about killing the odd bystander. If any one of them had a functioning brain, at least some soldiers would be positioned around the motel waiting for him to break cover. He had to get them to show themselves.

He searched the other counter cabinets. What he was looking for wasn’t hard to find. It was a big cardboard carton full of boxes of matchbooks printed with an idealized drawing of the motel with imaginary trees around it and the words “Hanniver House Motel.” He had seen the matches in all the ashtrays in his room, and the supply had to come from somewhere. He opened a box and took a couple of books out of it, then tossed half the boxes up the access hatch to the attic and poured the rest against the wall of the office that joined it to the rest of the motel. He lit the pile of boxes in the attic first, then climbed down and waited a minute until he heard a crackling noise that told him the old, dry two-by-fours were beginning to burn. Now he tossed a burning match on the pile of boxes against the wall. After a few seconds the first matchbooks ignited with a bright, sputtering, sulfurous flare. Then the whole pile seemed to go up at once in a big flame, like the afterburner on a jet, licking up the wall, peeling the paint off it and covering the upper parts with a poisonous black smoke. He backed away, keeping himself within arm’s reach of the door because he wasn’t sure just how fast this place was going to burn.

Cabell was preparing to kick in the door of the fifth room when a familiar sound reached his ears from a distance. It sounded like an electric smoke detector. At first he felt the special sort of anger that he reserved for people like Sota. It would be right out of Sota’s repertoire to toss a burning cigarette somewhere just because there was nobody to make him pay for the damage to the carpet, and therefore no reason not to. Right now he hoped Sota was listening to the reason not to, but then a second thought occurred to him. What if the ten or twelve impatient geniuses stationed around the place had heard the gunfire a while ago, and then expected Sota and Cabell to come out? They hadn’t, so those guys might have assumed that it meant they couldn’t, that what they had heard was the sound of the Butcher’s Boy shooting him and Sota. He thought about the ones he had known before this excursion. Some of them were thieves like him, a couple had something to do with the gambling business and three were apparently pimps. The only ones he was sure had any experience at all with this sort of thing were Puccio’s own men, and where the hell they were right now was anybody’s guess. The others would react to the sound of an automatic weapon the way he would—with a resolution not to enter the building hastily. But whose idea was it to burn the guy out? Well, if that was the plan, it was time he got with the program. He went to the door of the room, opened it and peered into the hallway. Sota whirled and aimed the little submachine gun in his direction, but he didn’t fire.