Thomas Perry: Sleeping Dogs

Vico sat back in his favorite chair and stared at the fire. He had always liked a fire. He had a vague sense that there were things he should be doing, but he wasn’t going to move. He was waiting for a call. He had at least two hundred people out there right now actively looking for the Butcher’s Boy, and that was part of his agitation. He had always believed that he had inherited a little bit of his mother’s witch quality. In her youth she had been one of those young girls who dreamed of train crashes and ships going down, and then when she was older she had been the one all the pregnant women in the neighborhood had gone to and asked if their children would be boys or girls. What he was feeling was probably the eagerness of all his people out there—a little bit scared, a little bit excited—as they turned the city into a tiger hunt.

The telephone at his elbow beeped patiently, and he picked it up. “Yeah?”

It was Toscanzio, of course. “You know who this is?” Of course he did; he had been waiting.

“Yes. I was sorry to hear about it. Is your family well?”

“I’ll tell them you asked. We have a little problem, eh?”

“I want you to know I’ve made arrangements for Paul’s … remains to be sent to his family out there. It’s all in their name, just as though they had picked the undertaker out of a phone book, but the bill … where do you want it sent?”

There was a long silence on the other end.

“Well, I’ll have it sent to you, and you can decide how you want to handle it.” That ought to give him the hint. Martillo never should have been operating in Vico’s town and not reporting to Vico.

“There’s going to be fallout from this.”

“What do you mean?”

“Our friend in California. Pauly was talking to important people to see if he could work out something in the way of clemency. But the way he went … I don’t see how we can send somebody else to walk into some senator’s office and start all over again. They get skittish when the last guy got a bullet in the head.”

“Have you talked to anybody else?”

“Some people in Chicago.”

“You know what I mean. Did you call anybody in New York?”

“I didn’t think that was a good idea. Look, he’s going to get out sooner or later. When he does, I don’t want to be the one who said we gave up on his problem. Do you?”

Vico’s smile was audible. “I didn’t. I’m working on it right now. By morning I should have something to ship to his people in New York.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Vico could tell that Toscanzio was already trying to figure out if he should call the Balacontano family in New York, or whether there was some way of talking directly to Carl Bala in prison. Let him. If Vico did get the body, he would make sure Bala knew where it came from. If he didn’t, Toscanzio would be the one Bala hated for getting his hopes up.

“That’s good news.”

“I’ll let you know when it’s done.”

“Thank you. My best to your family.”

“Good-bye.”

Vico hung up the telephone and went back to staring at the fire. It was a good feeling. It was as though the whole world—not just the people, but the natural forces, the wind and the stars—were working for him.

Wolf switched off the headlights before he turned the car into the driveway, and stopped it before it could trigger the electric eye that would buzz the intercom inside. He turned off the engine, popped the hood and went around to the front of the car. In the last few days he had found that he wasn’t as good with cars as he used to be. They had changed a lot while he was gone, without changing at all. But he still knew how to yank out wires and hoses.

When he was satisfied, he closed the hood quietly and turned his attention to the electric eye. There was a little light and a receptor on each side of the driveway. If he didn’t disconnect both sides of it at once, a light was going to stop hitting a receptor and it would buzz. The way to handle this kind of system was to put a mirror at exactly the right angle in front of each box so that it detected its own light, but he wasn’t prepared to screw around with that. He studied the system carefully. The wiring would be steel-jacketed and buried inside a pipe, and some of it must run under the driveway. But the vulnerability of a system that had lights was that there must be a way to change a bulb without setting it off.

He stepped over the beam of light and knelt beside the gate. There was a lever that was designed to permit the electric motor that moved the gate to be disengaged in case it jammed, so he pressed the lever and pushed the gate open on its rails. It wasn’t hard to find the circuit box. It was mounted on the brick wall just inside the yard, with a holly bush planted in front of it. He opened the box and watched the electric eyes go out as he flipped the circuit breaker.

He went back to the car, released the brake, shifted into neutral and then hurried to the back to push. In the old days a Lincoln had been a hell of a lot of metal, and he had been wondering if he would be able to move this one up the incline by himself. At first it was hard to get it to budge, but finally it rolled through the gate and ten feet inside before the front wheels turned a little and it headed onto the lawn. He stopped pushing it near a birdbath with a naked nymph pirouetting in the center. Then he went around, reached inside the window, yanked out the keys and put them in his coat pocket with the wires he had taken out of the engine. He took out one of the pistols with a silencer and waited. After a minute or two, the light changed on a street somewhere nearby, and the driver of a big truck began to goad his diesel engine up through its gears. It was the only sound as Wolf walked toward the driveway.

He stopped at the gate. It was big and heavy and made of wrought iron, but it would be hard to keep somebody from moving it the way he had. He decided such a fine gate was worth a few more minutes. Following the dead line from the circuit box to the electric eye, he pulled a few feet of it out of the ground, cut it and stripped the insulation away for two inches. He wrapped the two bare wires around the bottom rung of the gate, then returned to the box and switched the circuit breaker back on. As he climbed over the wall to get back onto the street, he wasn’t sure how the sequence would work, but somebody was going to realize that it was important not to leave Martillo’s car in Vico’s yard, and that the only way to get it out was through the gate. When the button inside didn’t open it, somebody was going to touch the gate.

Wolf had walked half a mile before he found the right place to call for a taxi. On another night he might have stopped in one of the bars he had passed, but tonight Vico would have his army of collectors and parasites out looking for him, and it was always possible that he would run into someone who had seen his face in the old days. He had never had much to do with Vico’s people, but he was through with letting himself be surprised.

The safest sort of place was a telephone booth beside a closed gas station, and he waited until he found one. There were six or seven diseased cars parked beside the building, and he decided that his was one of them. It was the new Chevy on the end, and he had pulled it in there and left it, in case the cab driver was curious. But when the driver arrived, he wasn’t curious. He was young and a little bit frightened because this was the way cab drivers got robbed. Somebody called them from a public address where there weren’t any other people and there wasn’t much light. Then there would be a gun against the driver’s neck, a whole night’s receipts went up some guy’s arm and the driver probably got killed. But this one was okay. He was old—at least thirty-five—and he wanted to go to Alexandria, and he only seemed tired, and looked as though he had some money.