Thomas Perry - The Butcher's Boy

He thought about the house. Probably one of the doors would be easiest, and it would be less likely to show signs of his entry than the windows. He took another look at the electric meter and froze. The meter wheel was moving. Something had been turned on. His mind raced—at two thirty in the morning what could it be? The alarm system would take steady continuous power. A light? No. At this hour the person would have to have been sleeping in the house and awakened. He’d been here over twenty minutes and they’d have to have sat in the dark at least that long. Then he remembered. Of course, the refrigerator. It was the only thing that turned itself on and off. He was safe.

He went to the side door and used a credit card to depress the door latch and let himself in. The door had deadbolts and chains, he noticed, but you had to be inside the house to use them. Orloff would have hated that, he thought, but the alarms would have consoled him. Now that he was inside he could see the two black boxes of the electric eyes, their sensors turned off.

He listened for the refrigerator. He tried to remember where the kitchen window was. He had a mental image of the house plan, and followed it to the kitchen. The refrigerator was unusually quiet—he couldn’t hear it at all. He felt for the handle, turning his head away in preparation for the glare of the light. He didn’t want to destroy his night vision. There was no light, and in the darkness he smelled the unmistakable odor of rotten food. He closed the door silently and thought. Someone was in this house.

He crouched low and remained motionless. Superiority in the darkness was largely a matter of concentration and patience. “Get yourself a cat, like this one, and watch it,” Eddie had said. “A cat will sit for an hour staring at whatever it’s after and listening to it. As soon as the thing forgets what a cat is, the cat is on him, so fast you can hardly believe it. Forget all that jungle warfare shit they taught you in the service. You already know how to look like a fucking palm tree. A cat’ll teach you how to look like a shadow, part of the house, a pile of garbage.”

He waited until his watch told him it had been five minutes. If he’d been heard by whoever was in the house, they’d either discounted the sound or forgotten it. It was a matter of shaping time to dimensions that didn’t fit the normal sense of pace. If they heard a sound they’d listen for a few seconds to hear another. If they didn’t, they’d stop listening.

He moved out into the living room, keeping low and close to the wall. When he reached the first chair he settled down again to wait, crouching beside it in the darkness, listening. Whoever was in the house had been confident enough to turn on a light. That meant he had the only advantage he would need. Now that his night vision was at its best he could see that the living room was large—fifty by twenty-five feet, he estimated. It wasn’t a room that Orloff would spend much time in. It was designed for receiving guests in a fashion that would appeal to Orloff’s vanity—small tables and lots of chairs, but mostly arranged around the walls, without a focal point. And the shapes of the furniture weren’t the sort of thing Orloff would feel comfortable in—too little padding. The furniture would be different in the room he was searching for: thick and leathery, and with seats that wouldn’t cramp Orloff’s fat ass. But there would be time for that after he’d found the man in the house. He had as much time as he needed.

He decided to move again. Past the living room was a hallway leading to what must be bedrooms and bathrooms. That was where he’d find the room he wanted. Patiently he began to move himself by inches toward his goal, keeping himself low and close to the wall. His mind was cleared now of all thought except thoughts of sight and sound.

Years ago he’d done all of his thinking about what his body was now doing. Eddie had been wrong about cats—he’d learned that from Eddie’s cat in the butcher shop. It wasn’t that they shaped their bodies to imitate something else. All they did was make sure they didn’t look like a cat. It was the eye of the prey that formulated the disguise. The instant that it would take the man he was stalking to decide that the shape in the hallway wasn’t a chair, wasn’t a shadow, was maybe a man, would be all the time he needed. That instant was the predator’s moment, the cat’s time.

At the first turning of the hallway he heard the man moving about in the darkness. He turned his head slowly from side to side to locate the exact point the sound was coming from. It was off to the left. It was then that the thin sheet of light shot out from under the closed door.

He stationed himself beside the door and listened. There was a sound of rustling papers, then a drawer opening, then a clicking noise. He listened, straining to sense the direction of movement, while someone walked from one end of the room to the other. There was another rustling, and then his ears detected the sound he was waiting for. The footsteps began to move away from the door. He snatched the door open and stepped into the room, his gun pointed at the sound.

A man whirled to face him, his expression the terrible mixture of animal and human that the instant of terror brought on him. A gurgling sound escaped from the taut muscles of his throat, and he dropped a briefcase on the floor. The instant passed, and the man said, “What?” Then the man said, as though correcting himself, “What are you?” His face betrayed the fact that he sensed that the question wasn’t right. He tried “What do you want?”

He studied the man. He was about fifty years old, wearing a charcoal gray suit. Not a burglar. Police? He said, “Throw me your wallet and turn around.”

The man seemed to be relieved. He reached into his coat and pulled out a long, thin black wallet, and tossed it toward him, then turned his face to the window.

He didn’t bother to catch it. That would only give the man a chance to do something he’d seen on television. He had only asked for it to see if the man had a shoulder holster on or handcuffs, and there were none. He kicked open the wallet. There was no badge.

Keeping his eyes on the man, he said, “What’s your name?”

The man said, “Please, take the wallet. There’s over a thousand dollars in it.”

He repeated, “What’s your name?”

The man said, “Edgar Fieldston.”

Fieldston. Of course. There would be a Fieldston. An Edgar or a Ronald or a Howard or a Marshall. He knelt down and opened the wallet. It was true. Edgar R. Fieldston. A driver’s license, credit cards, a Blue Cross-Blue Shield membership.

He said, “Fieldston Growth Enterprises.”

The man said, “Yes.”

“What are you doing in Orloff’s house?”

Fieldston’s voice changed. He assumed an air of authority. He said, “Mr. Orloff worked for me. I needed some papers, and I have every right to be here. Now take the wallet and leave me alone.”

He sensed the wrong note in the voice. It wasn’t the bravado of a man trying to scare the sort of perennial loser that held people up for their wallets. And he hadn’t said take the money and leave the wallet. He’d said take the wallet. And to a man like this, the inconvenience of losing the license, credit cards, and identification could be more important than the thousand or so dollars. He said, “No thanks, I’ve got a wallet.”

Fieldston’s hands were in the air. Whatever resource he had been using to keep them from shaking now left him. When he spoke, it was with a slight tremor. “What do you want?”

He said, “You.”

Fieldston turned toward him, as though unable to control himself. “No, wait a minute. You’ve got it wrong. I wasn’t leaving the country. I’m here now, aren’t I?”