Thomas Perry - The Butcher's Boy

“Yes,” he said.

“Good. Then we can talk while you’re driving. You don’t have to tell me anything. That isn’t part of our deal. But if there’s anything that will help I’d like to hear it.”

He thought for a moment, then made his decision. She was in all the way already. Even if she had an inclination to betray him she would know they probably wouldn’t be able to get him without taking her out too. He decided to clinch it. “I had a deal with a man who was working for somebody else. After I delivered, they killed him but made me think I was going to get my money anyway. I got out. That was two days ago. It could have been anybody, but Carlo Balacontano was there when I was.”

“Carl Bala,” she said. “Shit.” She was lost in thought for a moment. Then she said, “I just have to know one more thing, and I won’t ask any more. How bad do they want you? Is it just the money or do they have some reason to be afraid of you? The old man said you were a pro.”

He looked over at her, but her face was obscured by the shadows. He drove on through the night. After a few minutes he found the entrance to the expressway and swung the car up the ramp into the rushing stream of southbound vehicles. It was over an hour before either of them spoke again. She asked if it was all right if she smoked, and he said it was.

23

Elizabeth studied the report. It could hardly be called a report, because it told her nothing she hadn’t known for a week; in fact, there were two paragraphs that she had handed in as field notes for the Ventura police. Veasy, A. E. Death by detonation of explosives carried in vehicle. Probable murder. No suspects, no motive, no identification of the source of the explosives, no witnesses to the wiring of the truck, no similarities to other cases. Projected course of investigation: none. They were cutting it loose. No case with a report that said Murder by Persons Unknown could ever be closed, but the report had the neat and polished appearance of a document done for the archives. They knew this was a sheaf of paper they were going to have to live with. Damn.

She turned to the Senator’s file. It was already five or six hundred pages of field reports, chemical analyses, interviews, and transcripts from consulting agencies. It wasn’t really different from Veasy’s file. It would just take longer before they could give up. But already the additions were beginning to take on that peculiar archival quality. Here and there she could see notations that said substance not traceable or checked without result instead of investigation in progress . It was just time, that was all. A week for a machinist, and how long for a senator? A month? A year? It didn’t matter, because in another week or two the real investigation would have ended—maybe it had already. If there was evidence about the murders it had to be at Fieldston Growth Enterprises. And that meant it was gone. Because of Elizabeth Waring.

When Elizabeth looked up, Brayer was back. She returned to her work without speaking to him. Since Connors had left, the sight of John Brayer had been an irritant. She had placed him in a vulnerable position by her mistake, and he had accepted it and supported her. Now he was an irresistible temptation, the only possible source of approval that could assuage the guilt and humiliation of the last twenty-four hours, and she couldn’t ask for it or even take it if it were offered. It wouldn’t be offered because then he wouldn’t be John Brayer, who approved what was efficient and productive, and disapproved of everything else.

The file had been kept up. After she’d left Denver the FBI had even followed up on Elizabeth’s theory that the killer would have multiple sets of reservations. If he had, he’d been clever. He’d used more than one name, and possibly even used other blinds nobody had thought of. He was home free, she thought. He could run for senator himself, now that there was a vacancy.

“Elizabeth,” said Brayer. His voice sounded normal—happy, almost. She closed the file.

It couldn’t be, she thought. They hadn’t caught Tollar and Hoskins.

“We’ve got some action. I just got a call from the Flamingo. They’ve asked for a bellhop in Toscanzio’s suite. It looks like he’s headed for home.”

HE WOKE UP and looked at Maureen. She was still moving the car down the highway, her eyes peering through a pair of saucer-shaped sunglasses at the traffic. She’ll do, he thought. Even if all she knows is driving a car and staying awake when I can’t. I’m a respectable businessman on a trip with his wife.

The first stop would be the one that would tell him how to handle the rest. He’d worked in Detroit. There were people who knew him by sight. It had to be first, it had to be the test. He looked out at the bleak, rolling hills, a few trees between patches of old gray snow. Even like this it was familiar—especially like this. It reminded him of the man standing alone on the hillside, a man so alone he could have been lost on the surface of Jupiter or drifting in the darkness and silence at the bottom of the ocean. And as soon as the man had seen his face he’d known. The man had been a numbers runner, or was it a bookie? But the man had come up short. He’d been given chances, but he hadn’t used them. But as soon as they’d gotten close enough for their eyes to meet, the man had known that this wasn’t a warning. That was when the rest of the world had dissolved and he’d become the man alone on a hillside, a dark, motionless vertical object standing on the gray, empty snow. He hadn’t bothered to say, “Wait, I can pay.” He hadn’t bothered to say anything, because when he saw who they’d sent to meet him he’d known that restitution and repentance and even money were things that pertained to people on a world a million miles away from him, a world that he was no longer a part of. He had stood there and then the bullet had smacked into him and toppled him over. The man lay there against the empty hillside, already dead with his blood leaking out into the snow, and he’d stood over the body and pumped the trigger until the clip of the big .45 automatic was empty. Later he’d dropped the gun in the river, a heavy military-model .45, inaccurate beyond a few feet, all square edges and with a kick that jerked his forearm when he fired it.

In Detroit he had let them use his face. He’d been young in those days and hadn’t known any better. It hadn’t occurred to him that this day might come and there might still be people around who had thought about that face during the long winter nights, wondering if it would be the last thing they ever saw.

They were nearing the city. He said, “I’ll drive now. Find a place to pull over.”

Maureen nodded and turned off at the next exit. It was a rest stop that consisted of a parking lot and gas station and a Howard Johnson’s with a tiny souvenir shop attached to it. They got out and separated to the rest rooms, then bought gasoline before he swung back onto the highway.

He drove for another half hour, the traffic heavier now, as more and more cars poured onto the highway from the roads that converged on the city. At the Woodward Avenue exit he slipped from the current and guided the car down the ramp to the stoplight.

“What do you want me to do here?” said Maureen.

“Nothing,” he said. “We make one stop and move on. In and out as fast as possible. I’m going inside and you stay with the car so we don’t get a ticket,”

He inched the car down the familiar street from stoplight to stoplight, past large department stores and office buildings and banks. It hadn’t changed much. He searched for a place to leave the car. Anyplace would do now. He passed the Midwestern Bank and turned right.