by Thomas Perry
"Hold it," he said. "Let's read that."
She stopped and scrolled upward again. He was a slow reader. He was suspicious and irritated when she moved ahead too quickly, as though she were hiding some message she didn't want him to read.
Holman's e-mail described the men the Butcher's Boy had killed in Los Angeles. She heard the man mutter, "Damn," as he read it. Then he seemed to catch himself. "He's had quite a workout."
"It's been that way wherever he's been since Frank Tosca tried to get him killed. Is Tony Lazaretti the one who hired you?"
"What are you thinking—that we'll never get paid?"
"It had crossed my mind."
He was standing just behind her and to the side when he hit her. It was a short, quick backhand to her cheek and jaw that spun her head to the side.
"Oh!" she said, and her hand went to her cheek.
He hit her on the other side with his left hand, then pushed her back and kicked the chair forward so her back hit the floor hard. He hit her again, on the head with his gun, so hard that she saw the ceiling as a red tunnel with him coming at her down the middle of it. She went limp to keep from inciting him to hurt her more, but he hit her with his fist three times. She could tell that she wasn't just feeling the sting from slaps. He was doing damage to the bones in her face.
A red haze grew across her field of vision, and everything seemed to go quiet and dark for a second, but then she could see his face right above hers again with his teeth bared.
"You're not my equal," he rasped. "Don't tell me what's going to happen. I'll tell you what's going to happen if I feel like it."
She managed to croak, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." Her tongue tasted like copper, and she couldn't talk right because her mouth was pooling with blood that dribbled and bubbled out when she tried. "I'm sorry. Please. I didn't mean anything."
He glared at her, moving his head to keep his face in front of her eyes, so he looked like a snake maneuvering to strike. "You're nothing. You understand? They give women like you some fancy title like you were hot shit, but you're nothing. The best you can hope for is to be a hostage, just a piece of meat for bait. Don't imagine you're some kind of player in this. It's between us and him. You're already dead, and I'm keeping you on life support for my own convenience until I decide to pull the plug."
She lay still on the floor with the chair back under her, trying to avoid his eyes by closing hers, until he hit her again. "Look at me!"
She opened her eyes and kept them open, hoping he wouldn't see that they were unfocused because looking at him terrified her. She was weak with fear. She felt that a horrible, sudden, and unexpected change had happened to her, and it made her ashamed and disgusted with herself. She had never imagined what this kind of fear was like, never had any way of picturing herself being so totally defeated. "I understand," she said. "You're the boss. Whatever you say."
His face compressed itself into a smirk. "That's more like it." He stood. "Get up."
With difficulty, she rolled to her side and pushed herself up. She saw a shiny six-inch pool of blood where her head had been and realized her hair was wet. She resisted reaching up to touch it because he might see that as a delay in her compliance with his order, or even a complaint, and he would punish her. The pain in her scalp was no worse than the pain in her jaw or her nose. She got to her knees and then picked up her chair and sat in it.
She brushed the tears out of her eyes and went back to clicking on each of the e-mail updates about the Butcher's Boy, reading through each one slowly, giving him time to satisfy himself that she wasn't tricking him. She didn't dare try a trick. She was afraid of tricks. She only wanted to be alive and keep her children alive. This man was a brute. If she didn't find what he wanted soon, he would kill them all. She felt his impatience, his anger, the growing dread behind it that he might be failing. She slowly came to feel that she understood him and that she could almost read his thoughts. He was nearly out of patience. He needed a clue. If he didn't have a clue soon, she would begin to hear the shouts of her children.
"I've got it," she said. "He's been seen in Philadelphia. I know where he's going. He'll be there tomorrow or the next day."
33
SCHAEFFER'S FLIGHT INTO Baltimore was six hours of sleep. He dreamed that, according to some new set of government rules that made sense in his dream, if he agreed to die voluntarily, he would be permitted to be alive again at a later, prearranged time. The problem was that to his dream self the offer sounded like a con. He was tempted to try it because if what the government said was true, it was the only way he could ever hope to see Meg again. He was trying to construct some test of the government's sincerity when the plane descended a few hundred feet and the change in pressure woke him.
He looked out the window at the grid of lights, the yellow street lamps and blue-white headlights stretching off into the distance and then stopping at the bright edge before the black ocean. The plane swung slowly around to face the west wind and then began its approach.
It occurred to him that he had passed into a new phase of his life now. A year or two ago, Meg had forced him to go to a church for one of the occasions that the local aristocrats were expected to attend. Since the church was the Church of England, it seemed perfectly safe to him. There were no Anglican Mafiosi. The church was in a village outside Bath, where it was unlikely an American visitor would show up. The priest gave a sermon about the "end times" and what each Christian should expect. The term had stuck with him. These were his end times, the phase after the end of his world had begun but before his death. It was highly unlikely, for instance, that he would be alive in a week and almost impossible that he would last a month.
The bosses of the families had clearly figured out that he was going after all of them, and they had hired specialists to find and kill him. He had seen three specialists. It was possible that there were thirty more ranging the country and waiting for him in likely places, and when the news from Los Angeles spread, there could be sixty or seventy professional killers and hundreds of Mafia soldiers, all hunting for him.
Elizabeth Waring at the Justice Department would soon realize that while she was trying to interest him in being a stool pigeon, he had managed to keep his own schedule of kills going. When she did, her next move would probably be to have the FBI capture or kill him.
He would make the most of his final days. He would still follow the same strategy he'd devised in the beginning of this—kill the shooters and then go up the hierarchy like a ladder, killing the middlemen on the way up until he reached the boss who had sent the shooters.
The advantage he'd had on this visit to America was Elizabeth Waring. They had been using each other. He had given her a chance to solve two or three old gang murders. She had brought his knowledge of the Mafia up-to-date. It was as though without her, he was stuck in the distant past, knowing the enemies only as they'd been twenty years ago. Without him, she had to face bosses who exerted immense power, but did nothing illegal themselves. He had given her the crimes they'd committed before they got powerful.
He would use her again tonight. He couldn't avoid it. The two shooters in Los Angeles had seen him with her at her hotel. There was almost no chance that they hadn't found out which room was hers and what her name was. There were also soldiers from the Castiglione family who had seen her with him in Chicago. Now that he had dropped out of sight again, where were the shooters supposed to go to pick up his trail? They'd go to the place where she was. He was hunting them, so that's where he was going too. If he could make a few kills in Washington to get some of the pros out of the way, it might buy him more time to bag the boss in the next city. If he could get to Boston in the morning, he might be able to hit Providence the same night.
He waited at the baggage claim for his suitcase to come down the chute to the stainless steel carousel. Out of his customary caution he watched for people who looked familiar or who seemed to look past him at something else or watched him in the reflectio
n on the big front windows. He hadn't spotted anyone who worried him before his suitcase slid down onto the carousel. He pulled the suitcase off, swung it to the floor, and extended the handle, then walked off with a purposeful stride. He boarded the shuttle to the car-rental center and settled into a seat facing the terminals.
He looked for the sort of man who might be trouble—a man watching for something to happen, waiting for someone to appear. It was the middle of the night, and the watchers stood out more than they did in the daytime. He saw three as the shuttle moved from one airline's area to another, but he couldn't tell who any of them were. They could have been working for the drug smuggling cartels, the police, federal agencies, foreign governments. It didn't matter, because they weren't interested in him tonight.
The bus left the airport, but he never relaxed his vigilance. After being away from the country for so long, and having returned during a prolonged national security crisis, he knew he no longer had an accurate idea of what sort of surveillance might be focused on people who arrived in the airports around Washington, D.C.
His shuttle reached the lot and he entered the rental center to find it almost deserted. He picked the counter where the night man looked the least exhausted, rented a car with his Charles Ackerman identification and credit card, then drove toward McLean, Virginia. There were a lot of big hotels at Tysons Corners—Westin, Hilton, Marriott, Sheraton—and it was just a couple of miles along Dolley Madison Boulevard to McLean. He pulled into the driveway at the Hilton, left his car with a parking attendant, and said he'd be out in a few minutes.
He went inside and checked in, then took his small suitcase up to his room. He intended to go out tonight to take a quick look around Elizabeth Waring's neighborhood for signs that shooters might have already arrived. He knew that precautions might not be necessary, but he took them anyway. He unpacked his suitcase, took out the external computer drive that held the parts of his gun, and used the small screwdriver he'd packed with it to take off the black housing. He retrieved the parts of his Kel-Tec PF-9 pistol and reassembled them. He loaded the magazine with seven nine-millimeter rounds, inserted it, and put the small, flat gun in his right coat pocket, then shrugged his shoulders to make the coat hang right. He could feel the pistol against his right wrist, where he could reach it in a second. He put his lock-blade knife in his pocket.
He went out to the valet parking attendant to claim his car and drove out to the boulevard toward McLean. He had studied the neighborhood twice before. The first time had been ten years ago, when he had first become aware of Elizabeth Waring. He had rented a house on her block so he could watch her and decide whether or not to kill her. The second time had been a couple of weeks ago, when he had come back to the country and could think of nobody else he still knew who would be intimately familiar with the current hierarchy of the Balacontano family. Before he had gone in, he had studied every house and parked car, every spot where a shadow might be hiding an enemy.
He turned into her neighborhood four blocks from the house and approached it by driving in narrowing circles. The place looked about the same as it had weeks ago, but the hour was much later now. It was after two A.M., and all of the neighborhood windows were dark. The garages were closed and the only cars that were out on the street were the ones that didn't fit in the two-car garages.
He prepared to park and walk a bit, but he noticed something that didn't feel right to him. It was a big SUV with tinted windows. It was parked at the curb on the street behind Elizabeth Waring's house. It was exactly the spot he'd chosen when he'd come to talk to her weeks ago. It had given him a straight, sheltered path from here to there, over a stone wall that was easy to climb, then a stroll along the outer edge of her neighbor's lawn to a low fence into Elizabeth Waring's back yard, and then to the house.
He drove one more block and parked his rental car, then walked back to take a closer look. There had not been a vehicle like this when he'd been here the last time. It was almost certainly the car of a stranger to the neighborhood. He knelt to look at the license plate. It had some deep gouges in its paint, the worst of them around the brand-new set of bolts and nuts that held the plate. The plate was definitely stolen from another vehicle. He looked at the rear door. The lock was held in place by something on the inside, probably tape. It had been hammered out so the door could be opened.
He knew the safest thing to do would be to walk back to his rental car and leave. But he had come to Washington to hunt them, and here they were. He might be able to kill them before they had a chance to kill him. He walked around the SUV trying to see in the tinted windows, looking for anything left inside that might help him.
He supposed they would be set up in an ambush around the outside of Elizabeth Waring's house, like the man who had tried to kill him in Pasadena outside Lazaretti's house. He went to the low fence, looked and listened, then rolled over the fence, squatted in the deep shadow, and listened while he looked for the shape of a person.
There was nobody in this yard, so he began to move. He lingered in shadows and moved slowly, then stopped, staying still, keeping his body low. When he stopped, he kept his body in a crouch that might suggest to the eye "shrub," but never in a shape that suggested "man."
He stretched and compressed time, giving himself several minutes to sense movement, then quickly melting into a deeper darkness when he found it. When he was across the neighbor's yard, he entered Elizabeth's by going over the fence. There were lights on in the back of the house on both floors.
His heart began to beat more strongly, but he held back his eagerness. They weren't waiting for him outside. They were inside, hoping to get him when he came to the door. It was a solid, cautious way to take him. He would knock or ring a bell, they assumed, and they could open the door or shoot him through a window.
They had made a mistake and assumed that he had some kind of personal relationship with Elizabeth Waring. Maybe they had even gone into the house in the middle of the night, believing that they might surprise him in her room. He supposed that when the others had seen him at her hotel, it had given them a distorted idea of their history.
Why they had made the mistake was probably not important. The thing for him to think about was making sure it was a fatal mistake. He had a perfect chance tonight to get these people.
As he made his way to the back wall of the house, he could feel the tension of the moment. The muscles of his legs, arms, back, and stomach tightened, his breathing grew deeper to load his blood with oxygen. It was the old, welcome feeling again, the one he'd first experienced when he was a boy going out to kill with Eddie. On the first few jobs, there had been such fear and elation that it was almost impossible to separate one from the other. His mind had been activated the same way as his body—more blood pumping through his brain so he thought faster and could see things in sharper, brighter relief. It had seemed to him that he could feel the surfaces he looked at long before he touched them.
After those nights, the feeling had returned to him often. Tonight he felt it again, and it made him feel strong and quick and eager. He stood at the side of the sliding door at the back of the living room and looked in. He couldn't see anybody inside. The alarm system keypad was beside the front door, and he could just see it from here. The little lights on the keypad were off. The shooters must have shut it off somehow to get in. He could see into the dining room from here. One of the chairs at the dining room table had been moved out of line. Behind it there was a pool of blood on the light hardwood floor. Had they killed her already? No. There wasn't enough blood for a bullet wound or stabbing, and far too little for anything fatal.
They must have hit her or knocked her to the floor. It was that kind of blood. They hadn't killed her yet. They were probably trying to get her to say where he was going to be next or force her to get him to come here. He hoped she'd had the presence of mind to lie and buy herself some time. If she did, he still might be able to keep her alive if he moved efficiently and made no mistake
s.
He reached into his pocket for his knife, opened it, and slid the four-inch blade between the latch and its receptacle to open the latch, then put away the knife and reached into his coat pocket for the small, flat pistol. He'd had the intention of buying a couple of spare magazines for the gun before he tried to use it, but things had happened too quickly. He slid open the door, stepped inside into the living room, and closed it again. He stood with his back against the wall, his body partially concealed by a baby grand piano.
He stood still. The gun was in his right hand, but not aimed. He simply held it pointed to his right because moving his right hand to his left was milliseconds faster than moving it to the right, and his aim would be surer. His left hand touched the wall so he could feel vibrations, and he let his eyes stare into space so anything that entered any part of his vision would be visible to him. He yawned silently so his ears were clear and listened.
Time passed, but he kept no count of the minutes, only tried to hear and feel where people were in the house. He heard and felt the sound of someone heavy walking above him near the back of the house, and a second later, someone else a few feet to the left. Waring's daughter had to be under a hundred pounds and the son was tall, but thin. And kids didn't wear hard-soled shoes like that at this hour. Waring was maybe a hundred and twenty, so it wasn't her either.
It was two men, both upstairs but at least ten or fifteen feet apart, maybe in different rooms at the moment. Were they searching the place? For what? Maybe Waring and her kids weren't even home. The thought made him feel a tentative optimism, but then he heard Elizabeth Waring's voice.
It was a low "Uh, unh. No. Stop." It came from a nearby room. "Stop, please! I already told you what I know!"
Schaeffer was already moving toward her voice. It seemed to be coming from the direction of the little office off the kitchen. He kept the gun ready. There were three of them, two upstairs, probably guarding the kids. This one was downstairs with Waring.