by Thomas Perry
Carmine was sweating. When he had called, Mr. Vico had yelled at him. Mr. Vico was a fat old man with a heart condition, and he probably hadn’t yelled at anyone since the Eisenhower administration, but what he had said had been worse than the yelling. At least yelling got rid of some of the anger before he did anything about it. Carmine might survive the yelling, but the other thing was trouble. He’d said that the way car telephones worked was that they billed you for each call, put the number and time you had called on the bill, just like long distance, and that the guy who owned the car had been dead for hours; the police had already scraped his body up off the parking lot for an autopsy.
This had started Carmine sweating. Then, when he had tried to get out of the garage to tell Petri, whose fault it all was, he had found he couldn’t open the damned door. He had practically gotten a hernia tugging on the thing, and still it wouldn’t go up. Now he was getting scared. The first thing he had thought of was to call Castelli and Petri to tell them to come open the door, but the reason he was stuck in here was that there wasn’t any phone in the house for them to answer. Then he had thought of calling Mr. Vico back and asking him to send somebody to tell Castelli and Petri to get him out, but he knew that wasn’t a good idea. Then he had tried to think of who else he could call, but remembered what Mr. Vico had said about the phone numbers being recorded. Anybody he called might know what Mr. Vico knew about phone bills; anyway, at some point they were going to hear, and then they would know he had put their phone numbers on a short list that had been called after Martillo was dead. Also, he had ordered his brother-in-law Gilbert not to drive that big-assed Caddy back to this street. Gilbert would be sitting in the car now, playing the radio and waiting for Carmine to get this over with and walk with the others to the liquor-store parking lot on foot. Except that Carmine wasn’t about to walk anywhere.
Carmine was gradually getting around to admitting to himself that there was only one way out: he was going to have to hotwire Martillo’s car, start the engine and ram his way out the door. He had no idea how long it took to fill up a tiny garage like this with enough carbon monoxide to smother him if he failed. He also worried about what would happen later. Crashing through the door would make a hell of a lot of noise, so he would have no choice but to keep on going, because Petri and Castelli would assume that any big-time disturbance had to be caused by somebody other than Carmine and would open fire. But if he did take off, it would leave Castelli and Petri inside the Butcher’s Boy’s house with the cops on the way and no car in sight. It would be hard to explain, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to get protection from Mr. Vico.
He opened the car door and turned on the headlights, then looked around. There had to be a crowbar or something, but all he could see was a network of studs over bare tar paper. It was weird; what kind of man had a garage with nothing in it but his car? He turned off the lights and went to the door again; he had to get the damned thing open or he was going to regret it. He bent his knees and got down as far as he could. You had to get your legs into it.
Wolf heard the garage door roll up into the roof with incredible violence. It sounded as though it were going to jump the track. Then he heard the hiss of the man’s breathing. It sounded as though his chest were heaving. He let the man walk out of the garage and stagger to the kitchen door. Then the man stopped and wondered why the lights were on inside. Wolf raised the pistol with the silencer on it and put Carmine’s mind at rest.
Wolf dragged the last one into the garage. He was the one lying in the dining room, and he had been at least six feet three and heavy. Wolf closed the garage door, lifted the body into the back seat and propped it up with the other one, then looked at his little display. The three men sat in the car in three different postures of leisured comfort. He moved the last one’s right arm to the back of the seat so it looked as though he were resting it behind the other one’s head, and that helped to hide the hole and the blood.
Wolf opened the garage door again, got into the car, started it and pulled out into the driveway before closing the door again. He backed out as quietly as he could, letting the big car coast down the driveway to the street, then slowly accelerated away. As he drove, he made an inventory. He had cleaned the floors thoroughly, put the towels onto the car seats to soak up some of the blood and then prepared his companions for the ride. He still had two pistols with full loads and silencers, one under his coat and another at his feet under the driver’s seat. He had stuck Little Norman’s in the coat of the corpse in the passenger seat beside him. If he didn’t make any sudden stops or reckless turns, his companions would remain sitting in fairly natural positions. It had been at least three hours since the last of them died, and by now the beginnings of rigor mortis would help. It always started in the jaws and neck, then spread to the torso and legs.
It had taken a long time, but he had probably done as well as he needed to. If the police really went through the place they would undoubtedly find blood, hair and threads from these three, and from him and from the family that owned the house, and their dogs and cats. But they wouldn’t look.
After all these years Wolf wasn’t squeamish about handling bodies, but he didn’t want these three toppling over while he was on the highway. He had taken the precaution of searching their wallets to be sure they weren’t some kind of police, but all he had found was money and credit cards. Their names were Castelli, Petri and Fusco, but by now he didn’t remember which was which. They had all lived in Washington, and none of them had any kind of card that entitled them to medical or dental care. Vico obviously didn’t pay the employer’s share.
He had checked when he had come to town to see whether any of Vico’s businesses still had the same names, and some of them did. They were all called Acme or Apex or AAA or ABC, so that his contacts didn’t have to learn the whole alphabet to figure out where to drop things. Wolf had gone to a lot of trouble to be sure he didn’t run into Vico’s people by accident, but it hadn’t done him much good. He had even driven by the big house Vico lived in just so he would know where it was.
Vico had just finished making a formal complaint to the telephone company’s business representative. He had received a crank telephone call this evening, and had demanded a new unlisted number. While he was talking he could hear the woman clicking away on the keyboard, duly noting his request in the company’s computers in case his lawyer needed it later. He hadn’t decided what to do about Fusco yet. Carmine was the loyal-dog type, and once in a while he needed a rap on the nose with a newspaper, but you couldn’t expect a dog to climb trees for you. He was good enough at what he was expected to do, and right now he was making Vico a hero.
Vico sat back in his favorite chair and stared at the fire. He had always liked a fire. He had a vague sense that there were things he should be doing, but he wasn’t going to move. He was waiting for a call. He had at least two hundred people out there right now actively looking for the Butcher’s Boy, and that was part of his agitation. He had always believed that he had inherited a little bit of his mother’s witch quality. In her youth she had been one of those young girls who dreamed of train crashes and ships going down, and then when she was older she had been the one all the pregnant women in the neighborhood had gone to and asked if their children would be boys or girls. What he was feeling was probably the eagerness of all his people out there—a little bit scared, a little bit excited—as they turned the city into a tiger hunt.
The telephone at his elbow beeped patiently, and he picked it up. “Yeah?”
It was Toscanzio, of course. “You know who this is?” Of course he did; he had been waiting.
“Yes. I was sorry to hear about it. Is your family well?”
“I’ll tell them you asked. We have a little problem, eh?”
“I want you to know I’ve made arrangements for Paul’s … remains to be sent to his family out there. It’s all in their name, just as though they had picked the undertaker out of a phone book, but the bill … where
do you want it sent?”
There was a long silence on the other end.
“Well, I’ll have it sent to you, and you can decide how you want to handle it.” That ought to give him the hint. Martillo never should have been operating in Vico’s town and not reporting to Vico.
“There’s going to be fallout from this.”
“What do you mean?”
“Our friend in California. Pauly was talking to important people to see if he could work out something in the way of clemency. But the way he went … I don’t see how we can send somebody else to walk into some senator’s office and start all over again. They get skittish when the last guy got a bullet in the head.”
“Have you talked to anybody else?”
“Some people in Chicago.”
“You know what I mean. Did you call anybody in New York?”
“I didn’t think that was a good idea. Look, he’s going to get out sooner or later. When he does, I don’t want to be the one who said we gave up on his problem. Do you?”
Vico’s smile was audible. “I didn’t. I’m working on it right now. By morning I should have something to ship to his people in New York.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Vico could tell that Toscanzio was already trying to figure out if he should call the Balacontano family in New York, or whether there was some way of talking directly to Carl Bala in prison. Let him. If Vico did get the body, he would make sure Bala knew where it came from. If he didn’t, Toscanzio would be the one Bala hated for getting his hopes up.
“That’s good news.”
“I’ll let you know when it’s done.”
“Thank you. My best to your family.”
“Good-bye.”
Vico hung up the telephone and went back to staring at the fire. It was a good feeling. It was as though the whole world—not just the people, but the natural forces, the wind and the stars—were working for him.
Wolf switched off the headlights before he turned the car into the driveway, and stopped it before it could trigger the electric eye that would buzz the intercom inside. He turned off the engine, popped the hood and went around to the front of the car. In the last few days he had found that he wasn’t as good with cars as he used to be. They had changed a lot while he was gone, without changing at all. But he still knew how to yank out wires and hoses.
When he was satisfied, he closed the hood quietly and turned his attention to the electric eye. There was a little light and a receptor on each side of the driveway. If he didn’t disconnect both sides of it at once, a light was going to stop hitting a receptor and it would buzz. The way to handle this kind of system was to put a mirror at exactly the right angle in front of each box so that it detected its own light, but he wasn’t prepared to screw around with that. He studied the system carefully. The wiring would be steel-jacketed and buried inside a pipe, and some of it must run under the driveway. But the vulnerability of a system that had lights was that there must be a way to change a bulb without setting it off.
He stepped over the beam of light and knelt beside the gate. There was a lever that was designed to permit the electric motor that moved the gate to be disengaged in case it jammed, so he pressed the lever and pushed the gate open on its rails. It wasn’t hard to find the circuit box. It was mounted on the brick wall just inside the yard, with a holly bush planted in front of it. He opened the box and watched the electric eyes go out as he flipped the circuit breaker.
He went back to the car, released the brake, shifted into neutral and then hurried to the back to push. In the old days a Lincoln had been a hell of a lot of metal, and he had been wondering if he would be able to move this one up the incline by himself. At first it was hard to get it to budge, but finally it rolled through the gate and ten feet inside before the front wheels turned a little and it headed onto the lawn. He stopped pushing it near a birdbath with a naked nymph pirouetting in the center. Then he went around, reached inside the window, yanked out the keys and put them in his coat pocket with the wires he had taken out of the engine. He took out one of the pistols with a silencer and waited. After a minute or two, the light changed on a street somewhere nearby, and the driver of a big truck began to goad his diesel engine up through its gears. It was the only sound as Wolf walked toward the driveway.
He stopped at the gate. It was big and heavy and made of wrought iron, but it would be hard to keep somebody from moving it the way he had. He decided such a fine gate was worth a few more minutes. Following the dead line from the circuit box to the electric eye, he pulled a few feet of it out of the ground, cut it and stripped the insulation away for two inches. He wrapped the two bare wires around the bottom rung of the gate, then returned to the box and switched the circuit breaker back on. As he climbed over the wall to get back onto the street, he wasn’t sure how the sequence would work, but somebody was going to realize that it was important not to leave Martillo’s car in Vico’s yard, and that the only way to get it out was through the gate. When the button inside didn’t open it, somebody was going to touch the gate.
Wolf had walked half a mile before he found the right place to call for a taxi. On another night he might have stopped in one of the bars he had passed, but tonight Vico would have his army of collectors and parasites out looking for him, and it was always possible that he would run into someone who had seen his face in the old days. He had never had much to do with Vico’s people, but he was through with letting himself be surprised.
The safest sort of place was a telephone booth beside a closed gas station, and he waited until he found one. There were six or seven diseased cars parked beside the building, and he decided that his was one of them. It was the new Chevy on the end, and he had pulled it in there and left it, in case the cab driver was curious. But when the driver arrived, he wasn’t curious. He was young and a little bit frightened because this was the way cab drivers got robbed. Somebody called them from a public address where there weren’t any other people and there wasn’t much light. Then there would be a gun against the driver’s neck, a whole night’s receipts went up some guy’s arm and the driver probably got killed. But this one was okay. He was old—at least thirty-five—and he wanted to go to Alexandria, and he only seemed tired, and looked as though he had some money.
* * *
Jack Hamp’s flight from Chicago was within inches of touching down at Washington National just as a freak tail wind blew in from nowhere, and in order to keep the wing from dipping, the pilot had to give the engines another punch. There was no doubt in Hamp’s mind what was happening because when the wheels touched the ground the tires gave a screech like a buzz saw, and the plane rattled along the runway taking the regularly spaced bumps at about twice the normal speed. He barely had time to brace himself for the drag of the brakes before he felt his head go forward in a bow so that he was looking at his knees. He wasn’t particularly concerned, because a hot-wheels landing wasn’t unusual, but he was impatient because now the plane would have to sit on the runway until the brakes cooled. To pass the time he read over the preliminary report from the Washington office again, occasionally glancing out the window beside him at the men in coveralls down on the tarmac playing flashlight beams over the tires and undercarriage.
He’d seen the whole procedure a few times in his days as a birdwatcher at LAX. The ground crew always stood fore or aft of the wheels because on the rare occasions when they did pop, the hot debris and metal would tear straight out along the wings. There wasn’t a hell of a lot anyone could do until the night air cooled the wheels down to a temperature that would at least let the ground crew move a portable gangway up to get the passengers out.
As he read, he thought about Elizabeth Waring. She might not know who these victims were any more than he did. That was what bothered him most about this case. You had to be an organized criminal yourself to know who these guys Bartolomeo and Martillo were—and a well-organized criminal at that. It didn’t make any sense as an offens
ive move. The only thing that might help the Butcher’s Boy right now was noise; the victim had to be big enough to cause a stir. If he was in Washington, it would have to be Jerry Vico, or at least somebody who had made his bones with Vico.
The Butcher’s Boy was in a special sort of fix right now. He had to do things which weren’t predictable, but which made some kind of sense in retrospect. If they were predictable, there would be people waiting for him, but if they didn’t make sense when you thought about them later, then they wouldn’t help him get out. The organization would assume that he was completely round the bend, like a rabid animal. If this happened, he was dead, because you couldn’t see something like that and figure you would just wait until it wandered away. You wanted to know exactly where it was during every second until you killed it. If the report said he was popping unknowns who hadn’t done anything to him, then something was missing.
Elizabeth could probably help him out on this one. As he thought about her he felt a shudder of regret and embarrassment. He never should have made that joke about her being ugly; what if she really was ugly? No, it was worse than that. Just about every woman he had met who was worth anything thought that she was ugly. It was some kind of mass delusion. What on earth had led him to trigger a reaction he would have known was likely if he had stopped to think? But there was something about the anonymous present that bothered him. At first it had surprised him and made him feel panicky because maybe he was supposed to have sent her a present and hadn’t known it, so he had pushed it away with the first smart-ass remark that came to mind. He had even said something about its being a bomb, as though nobody would send her anything unless he wanted to …