Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

What Carl Bala said was, “I’m trying to be reasonable about this. I’ve been in here for eight years because of this man. I asked before the trial that my friends and associates do their best to help me. I got no help. I asked that they make this man pay for what he did to me. I was told that nobody could find him. Now he’s back, and he’s killed Mantino and Talarese because they were mine, and Fratelli because he helped me. What am I supposed to say—that it’s all right?”

Little Norman towered silently above Balacontano as he walked along, a half-step behind and to his left.

“Tell them I repeat my respectful request that this man be found and his body turned over to my people in New York.”

“Yes, sir,” said Little Norman. “I’ll tell them that. Anything else I should say?” It was common knowledge that somewhere in New York there was a safe-deposit box full of things that Balacontano’s men had lifted from the house of the man he was convicted of killing. The key was going to be planted on the body of the Butcher’s Boy.

Balacontano wasn’t really listening. He was thinking about how soft and weak the old men must have gotten. It would be easy. With a little probing he could find two or three at the beginning who would probably let him take over just for leaving them alive. Then he would be that much stronger when he was ready to face the ones who still had a little blood in their veins.

He realized that Little Norman was waiting for him to say something. “You can go now. I’m in the middle of a gin game.”

Wolf watched the small green Mazda back out of the driveway across the street, and then walked out his front door in time to be seen. He didn’t want to let her see his face too often, just to be somewhere near the edges of her peripheral vision and consciousness as the man who lived across the street.

He would have preferred to rent a car, but he didn’t have the kind of identification that companies felt comfortable with, and so he had bought this one for cash at a used-car lot in Virginia Beach. It was about as far from Washington as he could conveniently get and still have Virginia plates. These transactions were always delicate. If you walked into a Mercedes showroom and handed them eighty thousand in cash, you had better be able to convince somebody that you were a lovable millionaire. The car had to be a beater, so the amount wasn’t huge. The best way to do it was to find a place small enough so that you could talk to the owner. If the man had just taken something as a trade-in that he wasn’t particularly fond of, cash could be attractive. He wouldn’t have a price he had to get back, and once the car was off the lot, he could put any figure he wanted down in his books. But for Wolfs purposes, the car had to be right. He ended up with an ‘83 Dodge Colt that hadn’t even been put out on the line with the others yet, because they hadn’t had time to spot-paint the nicks on the doors and roll back the odometer. It was plain, unassuming and unmemorable, and it ran well enough. It was a little below the scale for his new neighborhood, but not so much that it attracted attention. He started it, backed out of his driveway and had shifted into first before he caught something in his rearview mirror: Elizabeth Waring’s Mazda wasn’t moving.

As Wolf let the car drift forward, he steered it so that his rearview mirror would show him what was going on. The Mazda was stalled, and she was walking quickly toward the back of his car, waving her arms. It was too late, and the appeal was too blatant, to drive off and pretend that he didn’t see her. In the mirror she seemed to be staring right into his eyes, which meant she must have seen him move his head to spot her. He had to pretend he had seen her all along.

Wolf stopped, backed up until his car was in front of hers, then got out and talked to her over the roof of his Colt. “Hi. I see you’ve got troubles. Anything I can do to help?”

Elizabeth Waring threw up her arms, her brows knitted in despair. “Anything. It just died.”

Wolf turned off his engine and walked to her car. It was unbelievable that he had let this happen to him. He went over it in his mind. He had seen her come out of her house, turn to wave to the Spanish maid and the baby and walk to the garage. Then he had put on his coat and checked the doors of his rented house. If she’d had any trouble starting the Mazda, that’s when it must have happened, because when he had returned to look out the window again, she was already backing out of her driveway. Then he had stopped looking.

He reached under her dashboard and popped the hood, then went around, lifted it and looked at the engine for any obvious sign of trouble. If he could just get the damned thing going before she had time to get bored with her trouble and start looking at his face, he might be able to get through this. Nothing under the hood was disconnected or leaking, but everything looked a little grimy for a car this age. He walked back to the driver’s side, slid in and tried to start the car. He heard the ignition click, but the starter motor didn’t engage, and he smelled gas.

He got out again. “Your carburetor got flooded and your battery gave out—not necessarily in that order. Do you have jumper cables?”

Elizabeth seemed to be thinking about something else. “Look,” she said. “I know you’ve got to get to work. Thanks for trying, but I’ll just call a gas station.”

Wolf decided he had better look at his watch before answering, and he did so. “It’s no problem. Honestly, I don’t have to be there for another hour.”

But she persisted. “No, it’s not right. I’m not one of those women who just assume that any man who happens to be within screaming distance is there to be used. Or at least I don’t want to be.”

“It just takes a minute,” he said. “It’s not hard or dirty or anything. We’ll just see if we can get it started. Have you got cables?”

“Yes,” she said. “They’re in the trunk.”

He pulled her keys from the ignition, opened her trunk and surveyed the mess. There were toys, a child’s car seat, a whole package of diapers that looked about the size of a bale of hay, a couple of umbrellas and, at the bottom, a pair of jumper cables whose plastic wrapping was still intact. He unraveled them, hooked the alligator clips to her battery terminals and then turned his car around. When the two cars were nose-to-nose, he unlatched his own hood, connected the cables to his own battery terminals and restarted his car. “Okay,” he said, handing her the keys. “Try it.”

The car started immediately, but as he disconnected the cables, he could hear that the Mazda wasn’t running evenly. It sounded as though the cylinders weren’t all firing. He closed the hood and said, “You got a garage you can take it to?”

“Yes,” she answered. “I take it this means it isn’t healed.”

“That’s right. I can get the heart to beat, but it takes a mechanic to get it off life support. Tell me where it is and I’ll follow you in case it stalls.”

“That’s all right,” she said, and this time she looked worried. “The only reason this happened is that I kept putting off taking it in. I’m guilty.”

“So buy it a new wax job and apologize. If you stall out in a major intersection you’re liable to get hammered.”

“I’d have to be pretty unlucky to have it happen at an intersection.”

Wolf shook his head. “They only stall when you slow down, and you only do that when you’re coming to a corner.”

She seemed to see a vision of it, like a premonition. “It’s on Millwood. The corner of Millwood and Fanshawe.”