Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

Being isolated in Amarillo, Mascone had an idealistic view of how the world worked. He thought he should call Vico and tell him what was going on because it was a courtesy. Vico was true to his reputation. He sent three men to the Butcher’s Boy’s hotel to demand a third of the price for McPray. It was, they said, the overhead for doing that kind of business in Vico’s territory. The Butcher’s Boy had said he understood, and started to pack his suitcase in front of them. When they asked what he was doing, he said, “I’m not going to do that kind of business in Vico’s territory.” Then he had called Mascone in front of them and told him that calling Vico had cost him twenty-five thousand dollars.

This had created a problem for Vico’s men, who had been told to pick up eighty-three hundred dollars. The Butcher’s Boy was in the airport when he saw them again, only this time Vico was with them. He had been about sixty then and fat. He had sat waiting in the airport coffee shop while his men pointed him out to the Butcher’s Boy, who went in to listen to what Vico had to say. He had said that eight thousand dollars wasn’t the point. It had to do with the way things had always been done. The local capo got a cut of everything that went on, and this covered the aggravation, bad publicity and protection if it was necessary. It was simply overhead. The Butcher’s Boy had answered that he understood, but said that he was keeping Mascone’s money because he too charged for overhead, aggravation and bad publicity. Then he excused himself, stood up from the table and got on his plane. A month later he read that McPray had been found in the Potomac suitably mutilated, and without thinking about it very hard he knew who had done it. He also knew that Vico would have seen it as an opportunity to charge at least fifty thousand.

If Vico thought he had a chance to collect on the contract for the Butcher’s Boy, he would probably come out and walk the streets himself, even though he must have been over seventy by now and had more money than some state treasuries. The fact that it was unseemly for a man in his position to expect money for what the other old men would have considered a favor would not bother him; he would demand it. If Wolf got hit by lightning in the next ten minutes, Vico would send a man to see Carl Bala in prison on the grounds that it was his lightning.

When Wolf was finally inside the garage, he had to control an impulse to run. There was something about getting out of the open that made him feel light and optimistic. He walked quickly toward the stairway, climbed to the first landing and then up to the second level. He moved cautiously. There was no telling where he had been when Pauly the Bag Man had first seen him. If he had been in the car, then he could be walking into something now. He stopped at the doorway onto the second level and waited. He listened to the distant sound of cars on the ramps above, then walked back to the head of the steps and held his breath.

Paul Martillo was dizzy and gasping for breath. The coat of his suit had big sweat spots under the armpits, and his new shoes were scuffed from trying to catch himself when he slipped on the sidewalk, but what was most annoying was that his ears felt like they were plugged up. He had a vague suspicion that having your ears feel pressure must be a sign of heart trouble, but he couldn’t remember ever hearing anybody say it. He still couldn’t believe he wasn’t running anymore. He had gone all the way to Constitution Avenue and was making the turn up Louisiana before he realized he had outrun the son of a bitch. Then Vico’s men had come along in a car, made a U-turn in the middle of Louisiana and picked him up. As he thought about it now, getting into the car probably had been a mistake. In the first place, his leg muscles were certainly going to stiffen up because you were supposed to walk around for a while and stretch your muscles after a dash like that. In the second place, just in case there was one person inside the Beltway who had not seen him running like a madman across the damned Capitol lawn chased by a hit man, he had given them a good chance to see him getting into a brand-new Cadillac with four of the most obvious-looking hoods that he had ever seen. Two of them had even had guns in their hands when they had picked him up.

Now that he had his wind back, he began to think about the fact that this was going to be over in a few minutes, and Paul Martillo still had to live here. In fact, until this interruption, he had been on his way to see a senator. It was hard enough around here. At least the bastards had a phone in their Cadillac so that he could call Bart, his driver, and tell him where to meet him. When he hung up he even made a little joke to hide the way he felt. “I was afraid I was going to have to call the cops and get them to activate the Thiefbuster on the Lincoln.”

Sitting in the back seat of the Cadillac, he had tolerated the questions from Carmine, the leader of the crew. “So what’s he got on?”

Martillo thought. “I don’t know. A sport coat, a pair of pants. He doesn’t look like anything. Doesn’t Vico have anybody out here who met him?”

“Sure,” said Carmine, “but that was a long time ago.”

“Not long enough,” said Martillo.

There was a little snort that stood for laughter from one of the others. Sure, these jerk-offs thought they were better than Paul Martillo. It was like the guy who came to fix your toilet thinking he was smarter than you because you had to hire him to do it.

At last the car pulled over beside the parking garage. Martillo opened the door and nearly fell out, straightened his tie, pulled his cuffs so that they showed a little beyond the coat and walked into the dark concrete structure. He was a little more upset than he had let Vico’s men see. As he thought about it, he realized it was just possible that Vincent Toscanzio was only doing what the old men had told him to do. They probably figured that if they got Balacontano out, from then on the Butcher’s Boy would be his problem. Carl Bala was a nasty, arrogant maniac in his own right, and he would be capable of getting this one little guy. The old men were smart that way. They thought ahead, which was why they were the old men, and the ones who had come up with them were all buried. On the other hand, this development was good luck for Carl Bala. If somebody didn’t pull some strings in Washington, he was going to sit in jail for a hell of a long time. He would be like the Birdman of Alcatraz, one of those ancient, clean old guys who took up needlepoint or something.

As he walked to the staircase to meet Bart in the Town Car, Martillo noted that the Cadillac was driving up and down the aisles looking for a parking space. This was why those guys were still being sent around town in threes and fours, carrying guns. Given Washington on a day like this at one o’clock, anybody with a brain knew that the lower levels would be filled. It was the only public lot for about ten blocks, for Christ’s sake, and anybody who was ever going to make something of himself would take the ramp to at least the third floor to save some time. That was the real difference between the schmucks and the winners: the winners could think ahead, while the schmucks went around and around the track like donkeys.

Paul Martillo leaned hard on the railing as he started to climb the steps. He knew his shoes must be making a loud noise on the metal steps, but the clanks sounded distant and hollow. He was going to have his ears looked at.

Wolf heard the footsteps, then moved ahead again and looked onto the floor of the garage. The black Lincoln with the driver still in it pretending to read a newspaper wasn’t more than fifty feet from Wolf’s Dodge. He took three deep breaths as he pulled Little Norman’s pistol out of his coat, held it down beside his thigh and turned back to the stairwell. There just wasn’t anywhere to go.