Thomas Perry - The Butcher's Boy

He saw them at once. Three cars lit up to reveal the shapes of men swinging out to their feet. He ducked down and listened for the sound of running, but the noise of the big diesel engines was now flooding the air to replace the sirens. He saw one of the men dash past his window, but the man’s eyes were fixed on the doorway of the casino. Now the fire trucks were all in place according to some prearranged contingency plan the fire department worked by. The watchers would be at the hotel entrances waiting for him to try to slip out with the frightened guests.

He had a moment of residual terror when he turned the ignition key, but he already knew there was no bomb. They would never have sat in the parking lot to watch it go off. He backed out of the parking space and drove onto the Strip. If any of them noticed him it was too late for them to be sure what they were looking at, because already there were four or five others driving away from the hotel as he’d known they would. The hotel guests would stay to clog the sidewalks and the parking lots and crowd the firemen, but the visiting gamblers would be heading for their cars to go someplace where there damn well wasn’t a fire to close down the tables just when their luck was about to return to them.

He was out now, in a clean untraceable car with a full tank, carrying about two hundred thousand dollars stuffed into his coat. But as far as they were concerned he was dead already. He had been from the moment some old man’s mind had settled on him and declared him a possible irritant. All that had remained was the mechanical, automatic translation of the thought to accomplishment, and the old man had probably lost interest in specifics of that sort years ago. Having given his frown or his nod or said, “Take him out too,” his mind would have moved to other matters.

So he was dead. Well fuck them. He wasn’t going to take that. They were damned well going to know he wasn’t dead.

18

She stood in front of John Brayer’s desk with the computer copy in her hand. “Fieldston Growth Enterprises,” Elizabeth said. When Brayer didn’t react, she set the sheet in front of him and touched her finger to the line. He could hear her pointed nail tapping the glass top of the desk. “Fieldston Growth Enterprises is the name of the building where this lawyer Orloff was murdered. It’s also the name of the company that turned up in the investigation of the Veasy murder in California.”

“Oh, yeah. You didn’t get anything much on that one, did you? Too bad we had to pull you out so fast. You’re keeping up with what the locals are doing, aren’t you?”

“John,” said Elizabeth, letting just a hint of the exasperation she felt seep into her voice, “this company has turned up at least twice now in murders that might be professional within a week. It’s a match as it is, and I think there’s a third.” She waited until she knew he had to speak.

“All right,” said Brayer. “It’s slim, but I’m willing to pursue it, to a point. The third, if I remember, was that the initials turned up in something of Senator Claremont’s, right?”

“You know it is,” she said.

“What’s the name of the staff counsel on Claremont’s tax committee again?” He matched her impatience with a fair imitation of sluggish complacence, but she saw that he already had the telephone receiver in his hand.

“Justin Garfield,” she said in a sweet alert voice he would probably have believed in another conversation.

“You might as well go wait for me at your desk,” said Brayer. “If this guy says FGE is Fieldston Growth Enterprises, I’ll want a report I can use to get a subpoena for their records before you get on the plane.” He started to dial the telephone.

“What plane?”

“To wherever this company is—oh, yeah,” he said, staring at the computer copy she’d laid on his desk. “Las Vegas.”

HE KNEW WHAT HE HAD to do without stopping to think about it. When he drove past the Frontier he spotted two watchers without even turning his head. One was in a Mark VI parked in perfect position to block the front exit of the parking lot if he slipped the hand brake and let it roll forward five yards. The other was just inside the lighted front lobby, waiting for a taxi within a few feet of a half dozen of them. He drove eastward toward the other end of the city.

There was no simple way to do it without making a lot of noise. He wouldn’t have the kind of time it took to be clever, and there were sure to be a lot of people around who were ready to avert just this kind of thing. Castiglione was old, but he was old the way a retired president was old, living behind a high fence in a house that was built like a fort and cost somebody plenty. If you had a reason to see him it was hard enough to get in, but if you didn’t have a reason it was worth your life to try. Still, it had to be Castiglione. He was the only one. He was the elder statesman, the one who had always had the juice to keep Balacontano and Toscanzio and some of the others in check. If he was out of the picture there would be confusion. None of the capos would ever believe that one of them hadn’t done it, and the only reason to do it was to make a bid for ascendancy.

Eventually one of the others would come out on top, but it would take time for them to devour the losers. If he couldn’t be sure of getting the one he wanted, this was the next best thing. He drove up Grayson Street slowly, a good citizen of Las Vegas trying not to wake up the neighbors after he got off the eight-to-two shift at the Thunderbird or somewhere. Grayson Street was a ruler-straight parkway with a hairpin turn at the end of it dominated by the imposing adobe facade of Castiglione’s house. As he swung past the house he studied it carefully. There was nobody outside patrolling the grounds. It had probably seemed unnecessary to have somebody freezing in the cold desert wind to protect a man whose personal enemies had been dead for decades. The adobe wall around the yard didn’t obscure the view of the house, which sat on a little rise in the center of a vast lawn. No shrubs had been allowed to grow within a hundred feet of the house, so anyone who approached it would be in the open all the way back to the street. And there would be lights, although at a glance he couldn’t see them, big floodlights that would change night into day in the first seconds of danger. The windows of the place were negligible squares cut into the adobe of the house’s Spanish-style facade, more because a blank wall that size without some variation would offend the eye than because old Castiglione would want to look outside at the shimmering heat waves of the desert floor.

It wasn’t promising, he thought. Castiglione had been in too much danger for too many years before he’d come West. Besides the front entrance, there was a side door that opened on a stone walkway to the swimming pool. He parked the car in the driveway of a neighbor, facing the street. He took the rifle and began to walk the circuit of Castiglione’s wall. Now that he could see the place clearly, it was even more forbidding. There were only the two doors he’d seen from the street, and at the back of the house even the small windows had been eliminated. He began to wish he had some dynamite. He couldn’t see any lights burning in the house, but he knew that the old man who lived here would have someone awake, if only to be sure the telephone didn’t disturb his sleep.

He felt frustrated and disappointed. It was going to be a pain in the ass. He carefully climbed the fence and approached the house, watching where he placed his feet. It wouldn’t be out of the question for the old bastard to have the lawn booby-trapped. He cautiously walked around the house looking for points of vulnerability until he found what he needed. There was a barbecue pit big enough to roast a side of beef, and near the swimming pool were two cabinet doors built into the wall. When he saw them his heart began to beat faster. It could be done. He took his pocket knife and quietly jimmied the first of the doors. Inside was the hot-water heater for the house. Behind the second door was a collection of miscellaneous objects: garden tools, charcoal and a can of fire-starter for the barbeque pit, bottles of chlorine for the swimming pool, a long hose already attached to a faucet. He leaned his rifle against the house.