Thomas Perry: Sleeping Dogs

“Anyway,” Elizabeth was saying, “the whole point of this was to thank you for helping me this morning. You’re not doing any dishes in my house.”

Wolf stood, and the moment came and went. “All right, then,” he said. “But I’ll take the garbage out for you on my way home.”

“A deal,” she said. “Going out there at night gives me the creeps.”

Wolf carried the garbage bag out to the side of Elizabeth’s garage, where there were four big cans. He set the bag in a can carefully so that it didn’t make any noise, then fit the lid back on. He looked at the kitchen door, and then at the window. At least she wasn’t standing there to watch him walk down the driveway and across the street to whatever was waiting for him. He could go through the back yard to the next street and then circle around.

Carmine stood up again and walked through the house to the back door, where Petri was waiting. “See anything move out there?”

Petri grunted.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I was shaking my head. The answer is no.”

“What time is it?” He hated asking Petri for the time, but it was so dark in here that he couldn’t read his watch, and so he had to keep making up excuses to ask the others. He would have to start eating carrots, or else get a watch that glowed in the dark.

“About a quarter after eleven.”

Carmine thought about it. “I don’t like it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what if he’s not coming? I mean I don’t want to sit around in here until dawn with a car in the garage that doesn’t belong to him, and sure as hell won’t have his fingerprints on it, and has blood splashed all over the inside of it. If he knew we were here, all he’d have to do is call the cops and say somebody had broken into his house, and I’m not sure I want to bet my life he can’t figure that out.”

“He doesn’t know we’re here, Carmine.”

“I’m not sure I want to bet my life on that either. Where’s the phone?”

“What phone?”

“His phone.”

“There is no phone.”

“No phone at all?”

“No. We went through the place. If there’d been one, I’d have seen it.”

Carmine’s heart began to pound, and then the pressure seemed to move upward to his head. “You went through this whole fucking place, there was no fucking telephone and you didn’t tell me?”

Petri said defensively, “So what?”

“I guarantee you this man had a telephone this morning. You can’t live without a telephone. That means he took it out.”

“Not necessarily. My grandmother didn’t have a phone.”

“This guy isn’t your grandmother, you dumb shit. That’s the first thing you do in a war; you cut the enemy off and isolate him. He’s severed our communications. He knows we’re here, and he’s going to do something about it.”

“So use the car phone.”

“Huh?”

“The car phone. Martillo had a phone in his car. That’s how he called Mr. Vico when he saw the guy in the first place.”

Fusco’s mind scurried back and forth, looking for something that would negate Petri’s suggestion, but he kept coming up with nothing. Finally he muttered, “I didn’t want to have to do that. But now I haven’t got any choice.” He pulled out his pistol, stepped to the back door and whispered, “Keep your eyes open. This is where he’ll make his move if he’s out there.”

Wolf walked through the yard of the house beside his, staying in the shadows and moving slowly, then stopping to listen. He scanned the back of his house. There were no lights on inside, and he couldn’t detect any broken windows. Suddenly he saw his back door open. He froze, then slowly brought Little Norman’s pistol up in line with the doorknob. He couldn’t quite discern the shape of what was pushing it open, but when the door began to close again, the silhouette of a man materialized against the white clapboards.

Wolf moved his eyes away from the man; maybe they were trying to see if he was out here. He watched the windows and the door itself, but could discern no shape or motion. Then the man began to walk, and since the man wasn’t coming toward him, Wolf watched. The man went to the garage door, opened it, then ducked inside. What he did then was mystifying: he closed the garage door behind him.

That was no cop. At this stage there was no such thing as one cop. There would have been about five of them around Pauly the Bag Man’s car trying to get prints, samples of blood and hair and whatever else they collected these days. But if it wasn’t a cop, it must be Vico’s people, and if this man wasn’t doing what cops did, what was he doing?

Wolf stood still and watched the house. Vico’s crews still seemed to consist of three soldiers and a driver. In the old days he had sent three men to try to hold Wolf up for money. This afternoon Wolf had seen three men get out of a car on Independence Avenue, and then he had seen three men on the parking ramp. Most likely there were two more men inside his house, and one in a car somewhere nearby.

He stood still for another moment. There was still a chance he could simply turn around and walk away. He had enough money on him even now. He could go back the way he had come, walk a mile or so to a liquor store away from the neighborhood and call for a cab. The chances were pretty good that the driver who would come for him would have nothing to do with Vico, and even if he was wrong, the man wouldn’t know who he was. There was no reason for him to go back into that house. He had rented it with the expectation that he was going to kill the woman who lived across the street, then disappear, so he hadn’t touched anything with his bare hands, or left anything that could be traced to him. He had even cut the labels out of his clothes.

But he was angry. What Vico was doing was pure opportunism. Wolf had done nothing to him, and before that, Michael Schaeffer had done nothing to anybody for ten years except sit in his house in Bath and go to an occasional concert with his girlfriend. These guys were waiting inside the house to collect on the Butcher’s Boy. He wondered if they were really prepared to see him face-to-face.

If there were two men inside, one of them would be watching the street. That left the other, and he would be at the kitchen door to cover his companion’s path to the garage. Wolf moved to the side of his house, staying within six inches of the clapboards as he sidestepped to the back door. He crawled across the steps, then sidestepped again to get to the garage door. He quietly slipped the bolt on the garage door to lock the man inside, then stepped to the back door, knocked quietly on it and whispered, “Let me in. It’s me.”

The door opened inward an inch and he threw his weight against it so that it hit the man hard in the face. The man’s hands went up to cover his bleeding nose and mouth, and he staggered backward. Before he could lower them, Wolf was inside and pushing Little Norman’s pistol against his head. Wolf whispered in his ear, “Lie down on your face. If you make a noise, you’re dead.”

The man sank to the floor. Wolf looked around for the man’s gun and saw it on the floor at his feet. It was a Browning 9 millimeter, with a silencer screwed onto the end of it. He knelt down on the floor and picked it up, but as he did, the kitchen doorway seemed to fill with darkness. It was the shape of a big man looking down at them. “What are you doing on the floor?” Wolf raised his arm and pulled the trigger three times as quickly as he could. There were three hoarse spitting sounds, and the man took a step backward and toppled over into the dining room.

The one on the floor pushed himself upward with his arms and kicked out at Wolf with his feet. Wolf danced to the side to avoid the swinging legs, then fired down into the man’s back. He took his time aiming the second shot, and it went into the top of the man’s head. He walked cautiously into the dining room and shot the other one in the temple.