by Thomas Perry
Andalusia was one of the narrow, cramped streets that ran parallel to Canyon Road, where he remembered that the galleries were. He had never felt an impulse to own paintings, and in the days when he had lived in the United States it would have been foolish, but he had walked down Canyon Road once, years ago, to pass the time, and he remembered the neighborhood. He judged from the map that he would have to leave the car blocks away and find Peter Mantino on foot.
When the waitress came to stand beside him and said, “Ready?” he answered, “Huevos rancheros,” because he hadn’t had time to read the menu, and it was the only thing he remembered that places like this would have. When she left, he studied the map again, letting it suggest the way things would happen. If things were as they should have been, a man like Peter Mantino would put some obstacles between himself and the world. But six or seven years ago, Mantino had been convicted of a bunch of charges that Wolf couldn’t even remember now, all of the bribery-and-suborning variety. Now he was on parole, supposedly living in voluntary seclusion hundreds of miles from the centers of power in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. All of this had been in the newspapers years ago, and even the reporters clearly hadn’t believed a word of it. But the important part was true: if he was on parole, he couldn’t have the sort of protection he was about to begin needing.
Wolf still had not gotten over the shock of seeing the shooter at the airport, but he had never for a second doubted what had happened. The truth was, there was no way even Carl Bala could send a specialist to kill somebody in the Los Angeles airport. The airport lay unambiguously in the center of Peter Mantino’s empire, and any consequences would fall exclusively on his head: the text of every letter to the editor would mention his name, the resulting crackdown would cut into his profits and the token arrests would make his people cautious and unproductive. He had to have been the one who made the decision, and the man must belong to him.
Mantino had started out running a crew for Balacontano in New York in the sixties, and then gotten to run the family’s interests in the West, supposedly as a reward for faithful service. At the time, people had said there was more to it than that. They said Mantino had begun to attract a lot of loyalty in the family, and Balacontano had just wanted him out there and away from the soldiers. The world was full of little men who knew what big men were really thinking.
It didn’t matter why Mantino had reacted so quickly. Maybe he was still loyal to the Balacontano family, and maybe he was making a safe, easy bid for respect while the old man was in prison and Talarese was out of the way. The only thing that was certain was that Mantino was taking enough of an interest to send shooters into public places. That changed Wolf’s problem into figuring out how Wolf was going to stay alive.
He needed to get out of the country, but nobody was going to let him step onto a plane to London without a passport. He knew of only one place where he might be able to get one after all these years, and that was in Buffalo, over fifteen hundred miles away. It would take time to get there, and time to make the contact, and time for the passport. And every second that passed, he was heating up. He needed to buy some time.
The only thing that gave him hope was that word of his return couldn’t have traveled faster than an airplane unless it was passed by telephone from somebody in New York to Mantino. And Mantino wouldn’t have told a lot of people in his organization that he was going to have somebody killed. That was the sort of thing nobody talked about until after it was accomplished. And it hadn’t been accomplished. The shooter had gotten himself busted in the airport. Wolf had to take advantage of that mistake. The only way was to do the unexpected: Mantino takes a swat at a fly, and the fly goes right up his nose.
Twice in his life he had seen what happened when a capo unexpectedly died. People reacted in different ways. A few would check in at out-of-town hotels and start making phone calls. But a lot of them would stay home and wait for somebody to get in touch with them. Usually it would be some acquaintance—a guy they had been introduced to at the races, or somebody’s cousin they had met at a wedding. The guy would say, “Peter’s dead. You have a problem with that?” or just, “What are you going to do now? If you want to go with us, I can talk to some people.” But until they heard from somebody, they were going to be watching a lot of television with the blinds drawn. Sometimes nobody got in touch, and the trouble just got worse. There had even been one famous time when a boss died, and forty of his friends across the country died the same day. That was what they would be afraid of—not that somebody Carlo Balacontano had put a contract on ten years ago had come for Peter Mantino.
The low brown stucco wall around the yard would present no problem unless it had some electronic component that Wolf couldn’t see from the street. He couldn’t see or hear a dog, and the sign on the gate that said NORTH AMERICAN WATCH—ARMED RESPONSE was comforting. It made it unlikely that Mantino had anything more sophisticated than a conventional alarm system that would summon untrained night watchmen. The house was a single-story adobe-colored building. Like all the others in this part of town, it was required by the building code to look as though the Spaniards had never left, although he suspected that any Spaniards that had made it this far north and east must have been a forlorn, raggedy-assed bunch.
He maintained an even, leisurely tourist’s pace, and studied all the houses on the street with equal attention. At the corner he turned, walked to the street behind Andalusia and examined the houses there. There appeared to be nothing of any consequence to protect any of them, but the situation was still troublesome. There were no cars parked on the narrow one-way street, and he had passed only a few pedestrians during his walk, none of them within blocks of Andalusia. Even if he could get in, getting out would be difficult.
It was dark now, and the cold air was still and crisp. The patches of dirty snow that had melted in the sunlight were now furrows and tumuli of iron-hard ice, and Wolf watched for them so that he could step around them on the sidewalk. In his left hand he carried a paper sack from the store where he had bought the gloves and channel-lock pliers a few hours ago, but now it also contained the Ruger .38 and its silencer. If necessary, he could drop the bag surreptitiously, but for anyone who might see him, the bag was an indicator that he had gone out on foot for a purpose and was on his way home.
He moved along the storefronts on Galisteo Street, keeping under the roof and away from the thick pillars, where he could remain only a shadow. Santa Fe was still a sunlit town for most of the year, even now. The inhabitants were out and in evidence when the bright sunlight warmed the ground, reaching it unimpeded by the extra mile of clouds, smog and dust that covered other cities, and without being blocked anywhere by tall buildings. But when the sun set, they disappeared behind the stone and clay walls, the oldest ones a yard thick. Even the restaurants that catered to the small, quiet night trade were hidden in mazes of courtyards and passageways.
The office of North American Watch was even more difficult to find. It had an entrance to the street, but that had been closed for hours. Behind the dusty Venetian blinds he could see a thin slice of the light from the dispatcher’s desk. He walked around the building to look for the cars. These people were in the peace-of-mind business. They provided louts to drive by every four hours with flashlights, and since this was a state where anyone could wear a gun in a holster unless the weight of it pulled down his pants, they were armed louts. He didn’t know the current procedures, but if they hadn’t changed radically, on a cold night when there were few people on the streets, the management would save a few dollars by keeping some cars in the lot. If a call came in or an alarm lit up the board, they would call the police and then send one of the men in the office on a slow stroll to a car so that he would arrive about the time the cops were composing their theft reports.
It was better than he had imagined. There were three blue-and-white imitation police cruisers parked behind the building, and a fourth at the curb. Wolf walked to it and put his hand on the hood. It
wasn’t even warm. He ducked down beside it, opened the door and slipped into the driver’s seat. He felt the ignition for the key, but he wasn’t that lucky. They must have a hook inside the office with the keys hanging on it. He took the heavy pliers out of his bag, pried the bar away from the steering column, wrenched the ignition switch out of its hole and tugged the wires out of the back of it. He pumped the gas pedal to the floor once, touched the two wires together and started the car. He let the engine idle for a moment while he watched the back door of North American. There was no sign that anyone had heard, so he pulled away from the curb. Just as he was passing the building, another set of headlights came up the street behind him. As he turned the corner, he saw the car pull into the space he had vacated. It pleased him. If one of the louts happened to glance out the window, he would see a car where he was looking for it.
Wolf kept the car at a crawl as he moved down the quiet, empty street toward Andalusia. He knew that when he had hot-wired the engine, he had started an invisible timer, but the danger would increase if he deviated from the pace people expected of this car. He made the turn onto Andalusia and allowed himself a little more speed. At 1500 Andalusia he applied the brakes and let the rear end of the car swing out a little, so that he could stop at an urgent-looking angle to the wall. He glanced up at the house to be sure the car was visible through the iron gate, left the motor running and ran up the walk to the door, his pistol in his hand.
He rapped on the thick wooden door, then rang the bell. Inside, he could hear feet pounding down a hallway. He turned to the side so that whoever was looking out through the fish-eye lens of the peephole could see the car. As he forced his eyes to scan the yard like a man looking for something, he felt his heartbeat quicken. It was these few seconds that would decide everything. Then he heard the dead bolt slip out of its receptacle and watched the big door open a couple of inches.
A voice said, “What is it?” and Wolf turned to look into the man’s eyes. He was in his thirties and wore his wavy hair long, cut in a style that seemed out of date until Wolf remembered that it might have come back.
He forced his voice into a tone that would carry it. There had to be enough urgency to make the man forget his natural suspicion and want to find out what was going on, but enough confidence to assure him that Wolf was going to take care of it. “North American Watch,” he said. “You Mr. Mantino?”
The man moved away from the door, and Wolf stepped beside him into the warm chiaroscuro of a dimly lit space. There was a fire burning in the big whitewashed adobe fireplace at the other end of the room. He was startled when he saw a man in his fifties, lean and limber in the way that men were who spent a lot of time playing tennis, moving to a big cabinet on the far wall. “What is it? I’m Mr. Mantino.”
“You got an intrusion,” Wolf said. Almost instantly he regretted it. He had expected to have time to attach the silencer before he fired. But now there were two of them, and they moved in different directions with surprising decisiveness. Mantino turned a key in the lock on the cabinet and reached inside. His hand came back holding a short-barreled shotgun, and he didn’t swing it around like a man gripped by panic, but held it pointed upward. He pumped it and moved into the hallway. “Where is he? Have you seen him?”
Wolf had no time to answer, because now the younger man was beside him, and cradled in his arms was a thirty-ought-six hunting rifle with a large clip in it. “Holy shit,” said Wolf, trying to infuse some incredulity into his voice. “He’s probably just trying to boost your hubcaps or something.”
The young man snapped, “Then he made a mistake,” and stepped toward the rear of the house.
Wolf reminded himself that speed was really a matter of deliberate, economical movement. He fell into step with the younger man, pulling Mantino with him. He took two steps, raised the pistol, shot the younger man in the back of the head, stepped back and swung an elbow into Mantino’s face. He was surprised at how fast Mantino’s movements were—he was already moving away, trying to swing the shotgun around in time. The elbow struck Mantino on the shoulder, and Wolf barely had time to jab the pistol against the man’s chest and fire.
Mantino toppled backward, and Wolf fired three more times as he fell. Each time he fired, there was an instant when he wasn’t sure the shotgun wasn’t coming the rest of the way around. The man’s body made a spasmodic jerk backward each time he was hit, and Wolf had the sense that he was pushing a man toward a cliff by jabbing him with his finger. When Mantino finally hit the floor, Wolf kicked the shotgun away and fired the last round into his forehead.
Wolf stood still for a moment and listened. He’d made a mess of it, and he still had to get out. The security-service car might buy him the most time left where it was, parked in front and still running. The neighbors would assume that someone whose job it was to respond to gunshots had arrived to take charge, and the police, who knew better, would be cautious about barging in without warning the armed and frightened rent-a-cop they would expect to find inside. He began to wipe his prints from the pistol.
He went to the gun cabinet and opened it. There were five rifles of varying makes and calibers, and a whole section devoted to handguns, all fastened to a blue velvet display board. He spotted a Ruger .38 police special, pulled it off the board and replaced it with the gun he had used to kill the two men, then hurried to the back door of the house.
He stepped out the back door, climbed over the fence into the neighbors’ back yard and kept walking toward the next street. As he moved along beside the house, he heard the first of the sirens. Things were happening too quickly, coming now like punches from an opponent he had underestimated. He listened for the route of the police cars. The electronic blips went on long enough for him to hear them on both sides of him before they stopped. He moved to the wall beside the house, knelt among the garbage cans, swung out the cylinder of the pistol he had stolen and pushed in six rounds. Then he remembered the silencer he had brought with him. It had been machined to fit a weapon of the same make and model. Even if it didn’t silence the report of the new pistol, it would suppress the flash a little. In the darkness this edge might keep him alive.
Carefully he raised himself above the level of the garbage cans and sighted between the houses. He saw the police car on Andalusia pull up behind the North American Watch car, and two uniformed policemen get out. After a moment one of them returned to pull the shotgun out of its mount in his squad car. Wolf turned to look at the street behind him and saw two more police cars glide silently to a stop. They seemed to have practiced a drill to cut off the escape of an intruder in these quiet streets.
He ducked down and concentrated on what he had seen of the neighborhood as he fitted the silencer to the revolver. There were no crowds of pedestrians to lose himself in, and not even a passing car to distract the police. He had to break their choreographed plan, and the only way to do it was to add some element that they hadn’t imagined. He considered starting a fire, but he would have to be nearby when the first flames flickered to life, and would be caught in the light. Then another squad car passed slowly up Andalusia. A spotlight mounted on its window strut swept along the thin trunks of the trim shrubbery, sliced down the spaces between the houses, then shot upward to the roofs. Just before it came abreast of his hiding place, Wolf crouched to let it pass, but as he disappeared into the darkness, he retained an image: the spotlight moving along the fronts of the houses illuminated, one after another, bright reflecting signs that read NORTH AMERICAN WATCH—ARMED RESPONSE.
As soon as the car passed, he came up again. He aimed his pistol at the front window of the house across the street and squeezed off a round. There was a faint spitting noise, and he could see that a spiderweb network of cracks had appeared. Pivoting, he shot the back windows of the next four houses, then ducked down to reload. He was satisfied for the moment. No matter how crude an alarm system was, if it was triggered by sound, motion or simply the dislocation of a conductive tape, it would go off when a
window broke.
He resisted the impulse to move his wristwatch up to his face in the darkness to time the “armed response.” Now was his time of greatest danger, while the police were still free to run their prearranged tactic unimpeded. He had to hope it would take them a few minutes to analyze the scene at Peter Mantino’s house before they started to sweep the neighborhood on foot. He listened for footsteps or radio voices to reach him, and then heard more engines. There was the squeal of tires at the end of the street in front of him as the North American Watch cars started to arrive.
A voice on a police bullhorn said, “Pull back out of here. This is a crime scene.” But there was no diminution of the sound of engines or dimming of the glare of headlights. “Yeah, you. Get out of here.”
Wolf decided it was essential to see how the competition was faring, so he moved to the gate that led to the front lawn and looked through the crack by the hinges. There were two cars like the one he had stolen, and they had pulled into the driveways of two of the houses whose windows he had shot out. Men in jeans, flannel shirts and sweatshirts were outside the cars now, carrying an odd assortment of handguns and flashlights.
Two of them stood on the lawn across the street, looking skeptically at a policeman who was walking toward them; a third was already at the side of the house, looking over the fence and aiming his flashlight into the back yard.
As Wolf waited for the mix to get as volatile as it needed to be, he glanced behind him toward the Mantino house. In front of it, he could see another North American Watch car pull up in the middle of Andalusia. A large man got out of it, leaving the door open. He already held a heavy, long-barreled revolver in his hand, as though he had driven with it lying on the seat beside him.
Wolf took three deep breaths to ensure that he had expelled all the carbon dioxide he could. It was carbon dioxide in the blood that made the hands shake. He eased his body upward, rested his arm on the top of the fence and fired a single shot.