Thomas Perry: Sleeping Dogs

“Trouble?”

“You were late, weren’t you?”

“Not at all. I was making cold calls.”

“Cold calls?”

“No appointment, no warning. You just drop in on them and see if they’re interested in what you’re selling.”

“What are you selling?” she asked brightly.

“At the moment, advertising space. Want some?”

“I don’t think so.” No wonder he didn’t talk about it. Even he wasn’t interested. “Would you like some more of this torte?”

Wolf looked at the pastry and shook his head. “Save some for your kids. Where are they, anyway?”

“They had dinner at six tonight. If you can call it dinner. Amanda throws it, mostly, and Jimmy evades it. Amanda goes to bed around seven-thirty, and tonight Jimmy fell asleep at eight—a big day at preschool, I guess.” She pointed to the little box on the sideboard that looked like a transistor radio. “If you listen carefully, you can hear Amanda snoring. I’m afraid you won’t get to meet them.”

“Oh. Too bad.” He began to search his mind for a way of killing her so that they wouldn’t see it happen, or walk out here in the morning and find the body. He didn’t want to kill them, and he wanted the maid to find the body.

“Do you like children?” Elizabeth asked. She regretted it instantly, and a wave of something that felt like heat swept over her. It was the sort of question that somebody—somebody very crude and desperate—might ask a single man if she wanted to determine whether he was a suitable prospect. Now he would think that she was pathetic. Then it occurred to her that there was a worse possibility. What if he misinterpreted the whole invitation? She had dragged him over here alone in the evening—well, not alone, because the kids were here, but without any other adults—and he could easily think it was because she wanted to seduce him. Of course he would, when in reality the impulse had been exactly the opposite. She had wanted to assert the fact that she was an independent person who repaid a kindness with an appropriate gesture of thanks. But he could understand this and still imagine that she thought the appropriate gesture of thanks was …

It took him a moment to come back to the conversation. “Uh … I guess so. I mean, I don’t really know much about them, except for remembering being one. But it would be sort of odd not to like them, wouldn’t it? It would put me in a strange position: not liking the members of my species until they were fully grown. So I guess I do.”

She smiled again. She had been imagining it all. He had managed to block another avenue of conversation in the process of reassuring her, but that was no loss; she had been known to drone on about the kids.

Wolf said, “It must be kind of hard taking care of them by yourself. I see you going off to work every day.” At last he had found a way to bring up the husband. Was he at a military base on Guam, or was he going to come through the door in ten minutes to pick up his mail or pay his alimony?

“I have a baby-sitter. She’s a nice woman and the kids like her. But it is hard. You feel guilty for leaving them, and you feel guilty at work because you sometimes have to miss a day or go home early because they’re sick, or whatever. What it is, really, is that when you have kids you need to work more than you ever did, but even when you’re at work, you’re not always thinking about your job, and if it comes down to a choice, the job always comes second.”

If the job came second, she must be a hell of a mother. He had been in the trade for more than fifteen years before he had left, and he had never had to think about the federal government. But now he did. “What do you do at the Justice Department?”

“I’m sort of a bureaucrat, I guess.”

“You mean you’re a lawyer, or an FBI agent?”

“Lawyer,” she said. “My husband was the FBI agent. He got to do the glamorous stuff, and I sit in an office.”

“Was. You’re divorced.” He tried again.

“No such luck,” she said. “Jim died of cancer about a year ago.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” He noted the way she said it. It would be better if he could be alive. She loved him, or had reached the stage where he had a rosy glow around him and she was telling herself that she did. But she was in luck; she was going to be one of those widows who didn’t last long after her husband died.

“Don’t be,” she said. “Everybody loses somebody; if it’s not a husband it’s parents, grandparents. And we had the kids. I’m lucky.”

He nodded. “That’s a nice way to think about it.”

“You sound like you think I’m deluding myself.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Wolf said. “I meant it. We don’t have a whole lot of choice about certain things, and death is one of them. But you do have a choice about how you think about it.”

“That’s true. But I’ve thought about it in a lot of different ways, and I think this is the right one—not because it’s the most useful, but because it’s the most accurate. Most of the time I don’t feel sad. I just miss him.”

Wolf wasn’t really listening now. Something strange was happening. From his seat at the end of the table he could see a red glow through the curtains. It was the brake lights of a car pulling up in front of his house across the street. After a second or two the lights went out. He hadn’t seen any headlights. He listened for the thumps of doors slamming so he could count them, but he couldn’t pick up a sound. “Tell me about him,” he said. “I mean, if it doesn’t bother you.”

It was strange the way he focused his eyes on some point beyond the wall, almost like a blind person. Maybe he was remembering something of his own. There was more to him than she had thought. “Well, we had fun together.…”

“You mean he had a sense of humor.”

“Not exactly. I mean, he did, but it was sort of an FBI agent’s sense of humor. I know it’s not fair, but they’re in a mostly male sort of world, so most of the jokes are inside jokes, and the ones that aren’t are kind of simple. Somebody famous once said that the difference between men and women is that women don’t like Falstaff.”

What the hell was she talking about? He still hadn’t heard the doors. He tried to concentrate. “I thought it was The Three Stooges.”

She grinned. “That was a different famous person.”

He hadn’t heard the doors, but a car went by on the street, and he saw that for just a second the brake lights went on as it passed his house. “Maybe so.”

“I guess what I mean about Jim was that he had a capacity for fun. The way we got together was that ten years ago we were each assigned to the same case. It was a bad case, and the outcome was awful. Afterward I took six months in Europe. One morning, really early, I was asleep in my hotel when the concierge woke me up to tell me I had a visitor. It was Jim. We hadn’t been dating or anything; he simply showed up.”

It must be the police. How could they have followed him here from the parking structure without him seeing? Why hadn’t they just grabbed him as he had pulled into his driveway? He realized that some reaction was expected, but he hadn’t heard any of it, so he smiled.

“Then later, about two years ago, he came home one day with three tickets for a flight to London.”

“A flight to London?”

“That’s right. He did it because it had been eight years since the first time.”

“Very nice,” he said. “That is fun.”

“He was always doing unexpected things like that. When I say he was an FBI agent, you probably picture a fullback with a big neck. He wasn’t. In fact, he looked enough like you to be a relative. He was perfectly normal, about your size, and had an intelligent look in his eyes. He had a perfectly good law degree, and we always talked about going into practice together someday.”