Thomas Perry: Sleeping Dogs

Was it possible that she had somehow identified him? Maybe she was going on like this to give her people time to surround the place. She would go out to the kitchen again to get more coffee, then slip out the back while the SWAT team came bursting in through every door and window. No, she had actually made herself feel sad. He wanted to look out the window at the people across the street, but he couldn’t take the chance. “Here,” he said. “Let me help you take the plates and stuff.” He picked up a plate and the glass serving dish with the torte on it and stood up. He decided that if she was conning him he would crack the serving dish on the edge of the counter and bring it across her throat.

As they walked to the kitchen, he had to think of something to say. “It’s too bad the kids were so young. They didn’t get to see much of him.”

“I know,” said Elizabeth. “I think it’s going to be hardest on Jimmy. He’ll remember him a little bit. Then there’s all that stuff the psychologists put in their books to scare mothers.…”

“What stuff?”

“About little boys needing men to identify with.”

“I wouldn’t take that too seriously.”

“I don’t know. I find myself stuck being a combination of the strong, domineering mother and the cold, distant father.” She looked at him mischievously. “I run into the product a lot professionally.”

She couldn’t see that he had stepped sideways through the door because she was looking the other way. He surveyed the kitchen, but there was nothing. The place looked like the kitchens he remembered seeing on television when he was a kid, with curtains on the window over the sink and a lot of cookie jars and salt-and-pepper shakers that looked like fish and fruit and little people in rows on the shelf. It was also a mess. There were pots and pans and knives and spills on the counter, and even a couple of slippery spots on the floor where something had dripped while she was cooking the kids’ dinner. Eddie’s kitchen had looked like an operating room in a hospital, with a gleaming stainless-steel cutting table in the middle of the floor that he had bought from the same wholesaler he dealt with at the butcher shop. But Eddie had been a rotten cook, so they had eaten at diners whenever they could think of an excuse.

He followed her back to the dining room for another load of dishes. He had to get a look out that window. “Did you take any pictures of England?”

“Sure,” she said. “But you don’t want to see them.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Jim took almost all of them, so it’s Elizabeth and Jimmy in front of this and Elizabeth and Jimmy in front of that.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

She shrugged. “You have to promise that as soon as you’re bored you’ll stop looking. They’re what you might call priceless family treasures. That means we’re always in focus, but the monuments and cathedrals aren’t. I put them away in Jimmy’s closet because I knew that someday he and Amanda will want to look at them.”

“If it’s too much trouble, don’t bother. I just thought that sometime I might like to go there. I’ve never been out of this country.”

“I don’t mind showing them to you. It’s just that looking at pictures of somebody else’s vacation is sort of a yawn.”

“I promise not to.”

Carmine Fusco sat in the dark in the living room of the house where the Butcher’s Boy had parked Martillo’s car. He had been sitting in a comfortable chair to the side of the door and about fifteen feet away from it, but now he was restless and he stood up. Imagine a man like that living in this kind of a house for all these years. It was going to be an embarrassment to Mr. Vico if anybody found out that the Butcher’s Boy had been living quietly in the Washington suburbs for ten years.

He walked across the room. There was something about the darkness that made you more quiet. He could hear every creak of the floor. “Castelli?” he whispered.

“Yeah?”

“See anything?”

“No. Maybe he’s got a date.”

“If he can get it up after what he’s been through today, I’d like to meet her.”

“Jesus, if I can get it up after what I’ve been through I’d like to meet her.”

Carmine moved to the window and held up his wrist beside the curtain, but he still couldn’t see his watch. He knew it should have been comforting, because it meant the rest of him wasn’t going to be easy to see either, but it was just frustrating. It was bad enough waiting to blow away somebody you were scared of, but losing track of time made it seem longer.

Wolf waited until she kicked off her shoes and slipped into the hallway. He noticed that she didn’t tiptoe, but placed her feet flat on the floor to keep her weight from making the floorboards creak. When she turned and opened a door on her left he quickly stepped to the window and moved the curtain aside half an inch. He could see that the cars that had stopped in front of his house had pulled away immediately. They must have expected to find him there, so they had all arrived at once to storm the place. When they had found that he wasn’t inside, they had made the cars disappear and sat down to wait. That didn’t seem to him to be the way cops usually operated. They would kick in the door, flip on all the lights and rush him. But if they found the house empty, they would spend the next five hours tearing it apart and taking pictures and fingerprints. It occurred to him that he was with somebody who knew what cops would do, but that there wasn’t any way to get her to tell him.

Elizabeth returned with a disturbingly large box, set it on the couch between them, untied a string around it, lifted the lid and handed him the first pile of photographs. She looked apologetic and shy and a little sad. “These are London.”

As Wolf glanced at the first few they made his head ache. He had stood on the Embankment right where a younger Elizabeth Waring was standing, only he had been with The Honourable Meg. He was hiding in this woman’s living room because across the street there were men waiting to kill him. He had no clear idea what he was going to do; all he wanted was somehow to be magically transported into those photographs and stand there in the soft British light.

Elizabeth glanced at the pictures as he shuffled through them. He really seemed to be studying them. What a peculiar man. At first he had seemed so empty and dull, but he was sensitive in an odd, quiet way. Maybe he was quiet because he was so intensely interested in other people. Suddenly, without warning, this train of thought reversed itself and she felt a chill move up her spine. Maybe the interest wasn’t healthy; maybe he was some kind of voyeur. It had been so long since anyone had been interested in anything about her life, her world, that maybe she was exposing herself to something awful that she couldn’t name. He had encouraged her to go on a lot longer and more openly than anyone else ever had about things that she had always kept private. It hadn’t started out that way, and it hadn’t seemed peculiar at the time, so how had it happened? Maybe she was becoming—had become—one of those widows who ended up signing over their life insurance to a con man because he had paid attention to her. Maybe even to somebody she just imagined was paying attention to her—say, a television preacher with a wig that looked like a monkey pelt. No, she told herself; I was just being polite. She pretended to go through the box, but kept him in the corner of her eye. He’s nothing out of the ordinary. If you look at him objectively, he’s already giving signs that he’s restless.

When the telephone rang, she sprang to her feet. “Got to grab that before it wakes the kids,” she explained. She managed to snatch it up before the second ring. “Hello?”