The Butcher's Boy

by Thomas Perry

  The boy shrugged. “Okay.” She followed him to the rest-rooms, and waited while he unlocked the door and sidestepped in, as though it were a tenet of his faith to protect the privacy of all men from the intruding gaze of the insistent woman.

  From inside she heard the sound of his voice, “Agh!” In a second he was back out, gaping at her in horror. He said to her, “We’ve got to call a doctor,” and ran around the building toward the office.

  Elizabeth rushed into the men’s room. She could see Palermo’s feet under the door of the stall, placed as though he were sitting on the toilet. But on the floor around them was a pool of blood. She slowly pushed the door open and looked at him. He was sitting there fully dressed, with his head hanging down on his chest as though he were engaged in some profound meditation. She didn’t touch him, and didn’t look more closely. She let go of the door and walked outside into the air. Then she remembered the boy. She knew she should go tell him to change the call. Anybody could see from Palermo’s shirt what they’d done to his throat. The shirt had once been white. But there wasn’t any hurry, really. She couldn’t foresee any reason to hurry again. And out here the doctor probably doubled as the coroner anyway. The police would know. 47507Y. A blue license plate. Nevada.

  29It was just midnight when the sky above the black horizon began to glow pink, as though somewhere beyond this dark emptiness a city were burning. He was still twenty miles out when beneath the glow the impossible lights surfaced in a shimmering smear of white and blue and yellow and red.

  His instincts resisted as the jumping, wavering apparition rose over the lip of the earth and began to resolve itself into the straight lines of bright streets and monolithic buildings bathed in color. He felt a strong urge to stay out here in the dark, empty desert, but he had to penetrate that eye of light. He had to have the name. Without it he could never be safe, because that man wanted him dead. The man wasn’t to be distracted or fooled or misled by feints and sudden shifts because he wasn’t even paying attention. He had signified the wish, and he was someone the others knew had the power to reward and punish at will, so it would remain a standing priority in a thousand minds until it was accomplished. That meant the name had to belong to one of fifteen or twenty men. That wasn’t many, but each of them was like a celebrity or a petty monarch surrounded by retainers and sycophants and guards. There was no way to reach all of them, and each wrong guess would strengthen the one who wanted him dead. He had to have the name.

  He avoided the exit ramp that led onto the Strip and its nearest neighbor. He took the third exit and moved up Flamingo Road across the Strip toward the complex of lesser streets beyond the lights. He had few choices. Little Norman knew, but there was no way to make him reveal the name. He had existed far too long by working for everyone and appearing to know nothing about anyone. If he caught Little Norman alone the best he could hope for was to kill him. Little Norman was a professional. Orloff had known the name. Orloff was dead, but there was still Orloff’s office, the place where they’d killed him. Fieldston Growth Enterprises.

  He drove around the neighborhood, carefully covering the streets for three blocks on each side. If there were a competent team of watchers in the vicinity, they would have cars at the most likely points of access to the major highways, out of sight of the building itself. There might even be a building nearby with a dim light in an upper window that faced away from FGE.

  When he had satisfied himself that there were no watchers he drove up the street toward FGE. The street was quiet. All of the buildings in the area were closed, their darkened windows reflecting only the lights of his car as he passed. He parked on the street behind, and set off on foot toward FGE. He carried Maureen’s pistol with the silencer in his coat pocket. He hoped that a small building like FGE that consisted only of offices would just have a burglar alarm. If the place contained the kind of information he needed, there would be no night watchman—they wouldn’t want to seem excessively worried about security.

  He approached the building from the rear, prepared to look for the most likely window. But there were lights on inside. Damn, he thought. A watchman. He’d have to find the watchman first. And it would be nothing like he wanted, a quiet visit that nobody knew had ever taken place. Whatever Orloff had that would give him the name would be hidden in a place where only Orloff could find it. Nobody would have missed it. But now there would be a dead watchman.

  He started to make a circuit of the building, looking for the window that would give him the best view of the watchman. At the parking lot he stopped. There were two cars there, parked side by side. He approached the cars, and looked inside the first one. It had to belong to the security guard service, he thought. It had a radio under the dashboard, just like the ones the police used. He moved to the other car. Small letters of a decal on the trunk said, “This car carries only bookkeeping material.” He thought for a moment. The first car had to be the watchman. What was the other? He moved to the building and looked in the window.

  Inside, there were three men in shirtsleeves, working at desks. One seemed to be scanning files and putting folders in a cardboard box and the others were going through the drawers of the desks. All three were wearing guns in shoulder holsters. He moved away from the lighted window and returned to the cars. This time he looked at the license plates. They were both white and said U.S. Government. He kept walking.

  He kept himself in the shadows as he moved toward his car. He needed time to think. They had to be the FBI. Of course. Whenever there was a pretext, some possibility that one of these killings involved the crossing of state lines, the FBI moved in. But whatever they’d been doing in that office, it wasn’t investigating Orloff’s shooting. And the decal on the car had said something about bookkeeping. They were going through the files. What did they know?

  He felt a sudden wave of panic, a surge of adrenaline. But the fear cleared his mind and subsided. No, it was all right. What Orloff had known about him was a post office box number. There would be a reference to him somewhere, but it would do him no harm. But the rest of it was disturbing. They knew that FGE was a blind. He hadn’t counted on that. So now they were as likely to find the name as he was. But they were still looking, working through the night. And they were reading business files. Bookkeeping material, the car had said.

  He smiled. There was hope. They were looking for the name, but they didn’t know Orloff. They might figure out that Orloff was moving money, and they might find out where some of it went. Unless they found Orloff’s private ledger they wouldn’t find out where it came from. Not the name. They were looking at whatever Orloff had prepared to throw off the auditors and the tax men, not what he’d prepared to keep track of the real transactions. Because there had to be a ledger: Orloff wouldn’t have taken the chance that he’d make a mistake. They were looking in desk drawers and filing cabinets, not tapping floors and walls for hollow places. They’d walk out with their files and maybe they’d figure it out eventually. But by then he might have the name, and they’d be wasting their time.

  He was concentrating now. FBI men in Orloff’s office. They didn’t know what they were looking for. Maybe they didn’t even know yet what Orloff was. If they didn’t, would they have searched his house? He’d never been to Orloff’s house although he assumed there must be one. It had never occurred to him to wonder where Orloff lived until he’d hired the Cruiser to watch him. He had little interest in the brokers and middlemen. He knew and accepted the fact that he wasn’t the sort of man they’d want to spend time with, even if it hadn’t been dangerous. And if Orloff had invited him there he would have been insulted. He did the work and took the money, but he would have resented any presumption that he cared who gave it to him, or took any interest in the problems and personalities that provided him with a market for his services. Orloff had been a pig. He had noted it, as he noted whatever came within the range of his consciousness, because it might present a problem or a solution, but it evoked no emotional response.
But now Orloff was important to him because Orloff had known the name.

  He contemplated Orloff as he searched for the address in the telephone book. Orloff had been greedy. So the house would be large and opulent. He memorized the address and returned to the car. But Orloff had been nervous and frightened most of the time, his greed conflicting with his natural cowardice to keep his fat body sweating beneath the custom-made silk shirts in fits of excitement and terror. So the house would be difficult to break into, no doubt protected electronically from whatever phantoms Orloff’s brain conjured up when it contemplated the possibilities of the night outside the windows. That part presented no problem, because Orloff was dead, and unless he had a family still living there, there would be no one to turn on the equipment.

  When he neared Orloff’s house, he followed the same procedure he’d used at FGE. He circled the block searching for signs that the house might be under surveillance. He saw nothing that was questionable, so he drove past the house. There were no cars at all in the driveway. Orloff’s car had probably been impounded by the police in the investigation, he thought. Maybe because it caught some of the slugs from the shotgun, although there must have been more than enough in Orloff’s body for any practical purpose.

  He saw no lights in the windows. It was the sort of house he’d imagined. The low, T-shaped structure gave an impression of careless, sprawling expanse, the two wings sheltering gardens of close-cropped yew and juniper, and yucca. Another eye would not have noticed that anyone approaching either of the two doors in the wings could be observed from behind through opposite windows in what must be the same room.

  He parked the car around the corner and walked to the house. The windows were all tightly latched and bolted, so he contented himself for the moment with examining them to see if he could discern the contact wires or the glow of an electric eye that would show him how to disengage the burglar alarms. He peered through each of the windows, seeing only the dark shapes of the furniture. It took some searching, but at the rear of the house behind a fan-shaped shrub he found the electric meter. He read the meter and sat down and waited patiently for fifteen minutes, then read it again. It was as he’d hoped. The police had either notified the electric company to turn off the power or simply gone through the house in their methodical, unthinking way and turned everything off. In any case, nothing was drawing electricity. Whatever alarm systems Orloff had installed were so much dead metal.

  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?”