by Thomas Perry
As he moved through the woods, he thought he heard something. It was a faint, steady rustling like the sound of a wind blowing through the wet leaves on the ground, but he could feel no breeze on his face. He stopped, stood beside a tree trunk and waited for the sound to resolve itself into something he could identify. He stared through the trees in the direction of the sound. Beyond them he could see the silvery gleam of the tiny lake, the white front of the museum on the other side and then a car’s headlights on the distant road. It was moving along at about thirty, and as it made a turn its headlights swept across the little woods. Then he saw the men. There were three of them about twenty feet apart, shuffling along slowly through the trees. The car turned again and the light disappeared just as the one in the middle fired. The bullet thumped into the tree above his head, and stung his cheek with a spatter of bark and dirt.
He knew that ducking or diving to the ground wouldn’t save him. He had to run, and hope that the trees and the darkness, distance and difficulty they would have in planting their feet for a steady shot would give him a chance. Of course a man like Angelo Fratelli wouldn’t be out here in the dark with one man and a corpse. It was ridiculous.
He considered going back to look in the bushes for the shotgun, but he knew he would never make it. The gun was hidden badly enough so that the police would have no difficulty finding it in the morning, but they wouldn’t have people shooting at them, and this wasn’t morning. He concentrated on his immediate problem, which was that in a moment he was going to run out of trees. He would have to dash across what looked like a picnic area under a few stately old maples, and when he did it he was going to be a hard target to miss.
He kept running. He could tell from the sounds that he was putting some ground between himself and two of his pursuers, but the one directly behind him was having an easier time of it because he could run exactly where his quarry did without stepping into a hole or crashing into a tree trunk. Wolf broke into a sprint to give the man a chance to get ahead of the others. At the edge of the grove he saw something that gave him hope. To his right was the old brick wall of the zoo, covered with ivy and skirted by uncut brush. The top of the wall was protected by old-fashioned foot-long steel claws that curved inward, looking as though they had been put there to keep a lion from jumping out, but probably designed to keep morons from climbing in.
Wolf stopped; made a quick pivot to the right and reached into his pocket. The only heavy objects he had were the extra shotgun shells. He listened for the approach of the pursuer, then threw four of the shells as high into the air as he could. Their trajectory carried them up and over the wall before they began to fall. They came down to the right of the first man, and on the other side of the wall.
Wolf waited behind a tree for the sound of the shells hitting. When it came, he was pleased. The first one hit with a heavy thump on a surface that sounded like concrete. Then the others came down in a group, and there was a dull, grating noise as they rolled down some kind of incline. It was as though he had set off a weird perpetual-motion machine.
When the first man appeared, Wolf could see he had heard the sounds. He was small and wiry, and from his silhouette and speed, Wolf judged that he was young. The man stuck his pistol into his coat pocket, jumped up and grabbed the curving bars at the top of the wall. But just as he pulled himself up to peer over the wall, something big on the other side made a decision. The something big was a male polar bear named Caesar. He had been born in the zoo, so he had no idea that the reason he was half crazy was that polar bears hadn’t evolved to occupy small concrete pens with tepid swimming pools painted aquamarine. First there had been the two loud blasts, then a smaller one. When the pieces of metal and plastic had fallen from the sky into his enclosure, he had stopped cowering in the dank concrete pillbox he used for a den and come out looking for something to maul. When he reached the edge of his pool, he saw that the intruder was only a bunch of cylindrical shiny objects rolling off his patio into the deep moat that kept him at home.
When Caesar saw the ridiculous sight of a man hoisting himself up on the bars above the wall, it made him angry. He stood up on his hind legs, spread his forelegs and, with a tottering, staggering gait, trotted quickly toward him, baring his fangs and uttering a loud, deep, groaning noise from somewhere inside him. The sound was part joy at finding something close enough to take a swipe at with his powerful forepaws, part anger because he knew that usually when he did this they raised a little black one-eyed box and flashed something bright in his eyes and part frustration because even if he killed it, he would probably never get to eat it. Caesar was just going through the motions; still, as his huge form waddled forward out of the darkness, it was nearly nine feet tall, glowing white in the moonlight, and appeared to be composed mainly of claws and teeth.
The man on the wall bared his teeth too, but it was only because he needed to open his mouth wide to let out a scream. Instead of simply letting go of the curved steel rods, his arms gave a reflexive push to get him as far away as possible from the charging apparition, and his legs pushed off the wall too. He took the weight of the fall on his shoulder blades and lay there for a second with the wind knocked out of him, unable to move. He had forgotten about Wolf for the moment, but when he remembered and drew the conclusion that lying on his back across the protruding roots of a maple tree was a good way to commit suicide, Wolf was already looming at the edge of his vision. The kick in the head didn’t kill him, but it brought the same sudden explosion of pain and an approximation of the same darkness to shut down his brain.
Wolf reached into the man’s coat pocket and extracted the pistol, then stepped back behind the tree to scan the woods for the next pursuer as the bear let out an anguished cry of disappointment behind his protective wall. Wolf had no idea what kind of animal made that kind of noise, but it had to be huge and it wasn’t happy. The sound brought the other two men closer. He could see them slipping from tree to tree, waving and nodding at each other in turn to provide cover for each movement.
Wolf waited for a clear view to present itself. He ran his hand over the fallen man’s revolver to identify it, but could tell only that it was probably a .38. He tried to remember how many shots its owner had taken at him, but he wasn’t sure. Then the man on the ground began to come to life. First there was a gasp, then a groan, just his body making a sound to celebrate having some air it could take in and let out again. Then the man’s brain began to struggle to reassert itself. He said loudly, “Ooooooh,” then, “Oh, boy.” Wolf glanced at the man. There still was no movement, but he wouldn’t shut up because he still hadn’t regained enough of his consciousness to remember where he was.
“Oh, damn,” the man muttered.
Lurking in disappointment behind his brick wall, Caesar the bear heard the voice. When the sound of his fallen enemy groaning helplessly reached his keen ears, he began to salivate and stagger toward the wall again. He couldn’t get over the inward-curving steel rods, so he placed his paws on top of the wall and bounced up and down on his hind legs, trying to see. When this didn’t work, he let out a cry of rage. This noise set off a reaction deep in the half-conscious man’s brain. A tiny pulse of electrochemical energy crackled across a recently altered synapse and indicated to the brain that it was now or never. Wolf saw the man’s head jerk up off the ground and keep rising. As though the motion of his head had begun an involuntary reflex, the rest of his body moved after it. When the impulse reached the man’s legs, he stood up so fast that his feet actually left the ground, and when they came down again he was already running. He sprinted back the way he had come, into the trees where his partners were hiding.
Wolf listened, hoping for a pistol shot, but instead he heard the sound of a struggle. One of the runner’s companions had the presence of mind to grab him, but the frightened man wasn’t ready to be grabbed. “It’s me,” said someone in an urgent, hushed voice. “Hey, it’s only me.”
Wolf judged that his moment had come. He pu
shed off the tree with his foot as though it were a starting block, and then he was out in the open park, running hard. But immediately he heard other footsteps and realized that the two remaining pursuers had not been as distracted by their partner’s plight as he had hoped. He knew that he probably wasn’t going to make it across the open-grass picnic area in time. He was going to die. It made him angry. He felt a wave of contempt building in his chest. Who the hell were these three anyway—the Greater Buffalo Pistol Team? They were three losers who spent their lives walking stiff-legged into little bars and scaring the shit out of people with their bent noses and scars. Probably none of them had ever fired a gun at anybody before, and if he did he pushed it down the guy’s throat and pulled the trigger. Only two of them even had guns now, but if they could hit anything, it would be the back of a running man.
Wolf didn’t stop running. He just let his feet outrun his torso, and went into a kind of baseball slide. When his side hit the ground, he rolled over onto his belly and aimed the pistol at the path out of the grove he had just left.
The first man out of the grove didn’t see Wolf at once. He took three steps onto the grass, then stopped, lifted his weapon and stared at Wolf’s prone form as though he were trying to decide whether it was a man or not. Wolf fired twice, and he could tell within a second that both shots had caught the man in the chest. The man went to his knees, then toppled over and gave a loud grunt and then Wolf was up again and running. Over the sound of his own breathing, he heard the second man say, idiotically; “Are you all right?”
Wolf kept running. He probably had one round left in the cylinder of the revolver, but he knew that his best chance lay in what the one remaining man was thinking; by now he would have noticed that for all practical purposes he was alone. He would also be aware that he had an acceptable excuse for not continuing to chase an armed man into a series of dark places; he had a colleague who was seriously wounded, and was lying there bleeding to death. There was only one thing left that the man needed to do before he officially gave up the pursuit.
Wolf made it to the first tree on the other side of the open space and ducked down while the survivor fulfilled that need, firing his weapon six or seven times into the darkness in Wolf’s general direction. Now he could show the underboss who was in charge of punishing the weak that he had been in the battle with the rest of the soldiers.
Gripping the telephone receiver, Richardson tried to calculate how much of his life was spent pressing one of these damned things against his ear. “What the hell is Jack Hamp doing?” he asked.
“Jack is still in Santa Fe,” said Elizabeth. “He’s trying to find out how our friend is getting around. Santa Fe is a small place, so he has a hope of getting a credit-card number, a rental-car license or the Butcher’s Boy’s latest alias. He’s also at least eight hours from Buffalo, because he’ll have to change planes at least once.”
“What are you going to do with the kids?”
“Please don’t make this harder. I’m paying Maria a sum I can’t afford to stay all night, and probably let them watch old horror movies in Spanish and teach them to love potato chips. But I can’t pull Jack away from the only place this man has been where he might not have been hidden in the crowd because there is no crowd. I’ve got to go myself, and my plane is getting ready to leave.”
Richardson shrugged and stared at the telephone. She hadn’t changed much in ten years; this was how it had started the last time.
Lieutenant Delamo of the Buffalo Police Department stood beside his plain-wrap Dodge and watched the long line of uniforms make their sweep of the park. He could see their flashlights moving back and forth on the grass in little circles. This was the sort of case that had lots of cracks and potholes to fall into. There were three bodies in a row in the middle of the park, and they hadn’t even died in the same way. One of them looked like he had been hanged, and the other two were shot with something, most likely double-ought buckshot at close range, judging from the mess it had made of them. One of them had about two thirds of a head left, and that was the one that occupied Delamo’s thoughts now. It had been a disgusting sight, and he could close his eyes and still see it. That was the test for him; it meant that at some point, maybe not tonight, but soon, it would come back to him in his dreams. It wouldn’t be accompanied by the sympathy and sadness that he usually felt when he had to look at human bodies that had run into something made of metal. This time he felt something different, and he would probably pay the price for it in guilt. The partial head that remained was perfectly recognizable as the property of Angelo Fratelli.
There had been several times in his career when Delamo had caught himself wishing that somebody would blow Angelo Fratelli’s head off, but he had always pushed the thought aside into a compartment of his mind that he never visited. Now somebody had done it, and Delamo had learned enough to realize that it wasn’t time to celebrate. It had already occurred to him that this midnight outing in Delaware Park might be only the first of many trips to look at bodies in the more deserted parts of Erie County. There had been no warning of any kind from any of the agencies that kept an eye on these people, which didn’t surprise him; it simply showed that things hadn’t changed as much as a lot of people had thought.
Delamo didn’t pride himself on his knowledge or expertise. The only claim he made for himself was that he was not a fool. In keeping with this modesty, he had not ignored the old-timers who had been around the last time this had happened, in the fifties. If he listened carefully, the frustration and anger were still evident in their voices. In those days, police intelligence on organized crime had been so sparse and unreliable that they’d had no idea of who was at war with whom, or for what stakes. All they had known at first was that kids started to find mutilated bodies lying in empty lots.
It had gone on for years, and the cops had been able to do little beyond carting away the corpses and writing down their names. Eventually it had turned out to have no local cause at all, having been started by a bungled murder attempt at a restaurant in New York City, and it had ended at a small meeting a year or so after the famous interrupted conference about two hundred miles from here in Apalachin. But nobody had even known that much until the late sixties, ten years afterward.
“Lieutenant,” said a voice behind him. Delamo turned and saw a young patrolman named McElroy coming toward him with a woman. He had sent McElroy around the neighborhood to knock on doors and ask the neighbors the usual “Was it two shots or ten shots?” questions, but he had done so principally to give the kid a chance to pick up his second wind. McElroy had been held over for this mess after working a twelve-hour shift which had, according to his sergeant, included a twenty-minute wrestling match with a particularly nasty pair of drunks, followed by a gruesome car accident on the Father Baker Bridge in which a family of four had been roasted in their station wagon, and he was beginning to get that peculiar look where he was forgetting to blink his eyes regularly.
“Lieutenant? There’s someone here,” said McElroy. “This is Miss Elizabeth Waring of the Justice Department.”
“Thank you, McElroy,” Delamo said. He looked at the woman. She was very young, he decided, then changed his mind and revised his estimate to the middle thirties. “We haven’t met, have we?”
The question took Elizabeth by surprise. Then she realized he must be assuming she had come from the Buffalo office. “No,” she said. “I don’t think so. I just flew in from Washington.”
Now Delamo was surprised. “How did you get here? How did you know?”
“I was expecting something like this, so I was waiting for the right sort of report to come over the wire.” She couldn’t wait any longer. She tried to keep the eagerness out of her voice, but she had to know. “Have you confirmed that it’s Angelo Fratelli?”
“I don’t have to confirm it. I’ve seen him before.”
She could hear the annoyance in his voice, but she couldn’t allow herself to think about him yet. “Then it�
�s the third.”
“The third?” Delamo asked. His face was flattening into an exaggerated expression of incredulity, so there could be no question that she would interpret it correctly.
Of course, she thought. How could he know? “A week ago a man named Antonio Talarese was killed in New York. He was an underboss watching things there for Carlo Balacontano while he’s in jail in California. Two nights later, Peter Mantino was killed in Santa Fe. He was the family’s western regional boss. I haven’t had time to find out what he was doing in Santa Fe. And now Fratelli.”
“Miss uh—Waring. I’m a simple honest-to-God policeman. I’ve got to confess that I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I assume you do. I know who Carl Bala was—or is—but that’s about it. If you people knew that there was a war on, why the hell didn’t you say something?”
It was starting to feel to Elizabeth like one of those moments when cops made suspects admit things they hadn’t known they were accused of. “I still don’t know anything about a war. I think this is somebody we heard about from an informant ten years ago, and I think he’s alone. He’s a killer for hire that people call the Butcher’s Boy—no real name, no record, not even a description. One of the witnesses says that’s who killed Tony Talarese in New York. We know he was somewhere in the West when Mantino was killed.”
“So who hired him?”
“I don’t know if anybody hired him, and I don’t know what it’s about. The others were from the Balacontano family, and Fratelli wasn’t.”
“So what am I supposed to expect—a couple of hundred new faces from Chicago or New York moving in and carving up Fratelli’s estate?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think that’s what it’s about.”
Delamo took a deep breath, let it out slowly and then said it anyway. “You people don’t have a whole lot of useful information, do you?”