Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

Wolf was at the curb, then a second later he was in the traffic, slipping into the backstream of one car and out of the lane before the next one arrived. He made it to the double white line in the middle before something about the sound of the cars changed enough to make Pauly turn his head. When he did, Wolf could see his eyes widen. His hands came up and a nervous tremor started to grip him. His head shook so hard that he seemed to be nodding. He was already backing away, and he almost fell as he turned to break into a run.

Pauly the Bag Man was over fifty years old and hadn’t needed to run from anyone since the February night in 1972 when the brain of a man named Fritz Hinckel short-circuited in Pastorelli’s Family Restaurant, and that time it hadn’t been personal. Pauly had been just one of fifty or sixty people whom Hinckel was trying to stick with a steak knife, and he had only needed to run five or six steps before an anonymous diner dropped Hinckel with five shots from a Colt Cobra that happened to be part of his evening wear. Pauly was long-legged, but his muscles were slack and slow from riding in the Town Car, and the leather soles of the new three-hundred-dollar shoes he was wearing hadn’t been scraped against anything but floor wax and carpeting until a few minutes ago. He was still striving to attain what he hoped was sufficient speed when he began to hear the Butcher’s Boy’s footsteps.

Pauly kept his head up and elongated his strides, pumping his arms and hitting the pavement with the balls of his feet like a quarter-miler. He had a terrible sense that the Butcher’s Boy was about to put a bullet into his spine, and that he wasn’t going to hear it first. There would be a horrible, wrenching pain, and then he would be down, but the lower part of his body would already be limp and dead. Or maybe the top part. Why not the top part? Just because you never heard about—

Wolf watched Pauly offering a credible imitation of a sprint as he abandoned the concrete and headed out across the wide green lawn. He could see that Pauly wasn’t running toward anything or anybody, which meant that nobody had arrived yet. He was simply a one-man stampede, like a man running from a hornet’s nest. There was no point in going after him. Wolf didn’t slow down; he merely changed directions. Where Pauly had veered to the right onto the lawn, he turned to the left, darted across the street again and sidestepped into the crowd. In a second he was walking in the other direction.

He joined a group of men and women who were walking up the steps of the first big building he came to. He put on the same bored, resigned expression they all wore. The sign said HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, SO he stayed with them. He was reasonably confident that he wasn’t about to stroll into the beam of a metal detector. As soon as he was inside the doorway, he looked back out the glass door at Independence Avenue and saw a car pull up near the spot where the tourists had assembled in front of the Rayburn Building. Three doors opened, three men got out and the car pulled away. As the three men stood on the sidewalk, each of them made a slow 360-degree turn, then picked a favorite point on the horizon and stared at it.

Wolf turned and moved deeper into the hallway. He walked until he came to a corridor that turned off toward Fourth Street, and stayed on it until he could see another, smaller entrance. He ignored the people to the right and left of him, and never paused to look inside an open door. But then without warning a woman coming toward him looked up from a file she was carrying and gave him a perfunctory smile. It was only then that he realized he had been smiling too.

He paused and looked out at the street before going through the door, but there seemed to be nobody out there whom Pauly the Bag Man would ask for if he needed help, so he set off down Fourth Street with his head down and his legs matching the pace of the busy civil servants around him. He was going to have to make it to the car after all. There was no telling what Pauly the Bag Man was doing in Washington, but the three men on Independence Avenue must belong to Vico. If Vico thought he had a reason to send three men to stand around in sight of the Capitol scanning the crowd for somebody to kill, he wouldn’t be shy about sending twenty more. Wolf had to get out of here.

The car was in the garage at the Gateway Tour Center on Fourth and E streets. It was only a couple of blocks, but there was no way to get there except by the sidewalk, and nothing to hide him but the bodies of the other people walking the street. They were a mixed group. The ones who looked like college students or lawyers were in a hurry, moving along in both directions without letting their eyes rest on the ones that looked like derelicts, even when they had to weave a course among them. The ones who complicated the mixture most were in pairs, most of them elderly and from East Jesus, Kentucky, or Marrowbone, Texas, stopping without warning to give the Capitol a proprietary survey or to study the grass on the lawn to see if their employees had given it the proper dose of fertilizer. Each time they did so, one of the quick ones had to do a strange little dance to get around them without stepping on their heels. Wolf did his best to imitate the quick ones.

He was in trouble now. Vico was a scavenger. He had come up in the forties with the Castigliones, and been sent off to Washington to see what he could do about cashing in on the war-surplus business. A lot of Castiglione people had been in the army and seen the unimaginably huge hoards of every known commodity that had been built up in four years, and somebody had been curious enough to wonder what was going to happen to all of it later. The idea had been that a man with a supply of cash could probably pick up some useful stuff cheap. Vico had been the man with the cash, and he had found that it went a long way. He had bought up gigantic lots consisting of everything from unassembled motorcycles packed in oil to leather bridles for a cavalry that didn’t exist anymore to tinned K rations so cheap that he could make money opening them up just to salvage the cigarettes inside. From then on, the story went, he had been the organization’s man in Washington.

Wolf hadn’t even been born then, and by the time he ran into Vico, Washington had been sewn up. The capital was a huge place that had hundreds of thousands of people getting paid for producing nothing. All day and night trucks, trains and planes brought in everything they used, and Vico took whatever was spilled in the process: appliances taken off freight cars, percentages of the food brought in for the markets, even the gasoline left in the hulls of tanker trucks after they had shorted the stations to which they had made deliveries. He would take the money and multiply it by supplying the drugs, whores and gambling the residents needed, and by lending them money to pay for these necessities at fifty percent interest. Vico had an army of vultures working the streets all the time, looking for ways to make money that he hadn’t thought of yet.

Wolf had met Vico only for a moment in the year before he’d had to leave the country. He had been hired to kill a man named McPray, who had recently moved to Washington. He had been a Texas businessman who acted like an oil man. It was said that he had some connection with people in oil, but in those days everybody in that part of the world knew somebody who was in oil. Somehow he had been involved in the buying of supplies for the public schools in a large area of the state. It was never explained to Wolf exactly how he had gained a say in the matter, but he had one. For several years he had steered the contract for paper to a company owned by Mike Mascone, but one year, without warning, when Mascone had a huge inventory he had collected in an Amarillo warehouse in anticipation, McPray had simply changed vendors: some relative of his had gone into business. This put Mascone into a bind, and he had made some semipublic threats about having relatives of his own. The truth was that Mascone was a genuine made guy, but he was also of no importance. He wasn’t even very rich. After some stewing, he decided that the only way he was ever going to be rich was to have McPray killed. By now McPray had moved to Washington on some other scheme, and Mascone wanted him killed in a way that would make certain people in Texas believe that Mascone was some kind of serious Mafioso with connections everywhere. After a number of inquiries, he had found out whom to call, and the Butcher’s Boy had collected his money in advance and gone to Washington.