by Thomas Perry
When Michael was close behind him, the driver jumped and spun halfway around in his seat. He appeared to recognize the rain jacket Michael had taken. “You think that’s funny?” An English accent, but not from Yorkshire. “I ought to leave you here.”
Michael held one of the pistols to the man’s head. The driver was frozen looking up at him, and Michael could tell he was thinking he would have been better off if he had backed into the woods and were still facing the windscreen. He might have stomped on the pedal and sped off.
Michael answered his thought. “You wouldn’t have made it. I’ve killed a lot of men when they tried to drive away. But if you can tell me who sent the four of you after me and why, I’ll let you go.”
The driver seemed to feel cheated of his expectations. He obviously hadn’t been paid yet. “Where are the others? Them three? This was their job, not mine. I was just hired to drive the car.”
“I could tell. That’s why I couldn’t offer them the same deal.”
“I heard shots. Are they dead?”
Michael nodded. “They weren’t as good at this as they needed to be. Did they even know who I am?”
“Maybe they did,” the driver said. His brain seemed to be working frantically. “I don’t.”
“Who do you work for?”
“Nobody. I drive customers on long-distance rides. They found me online.”
Michael flung open the door, dragged him out onto the ground, and held the gun on him. “Somebody owns the Bentley, or owns you, and sent you to do a dangerous job. You wouldn’t have sat waiting for them to finish a murder if they were strangers who hired you online. You shouldn’t have lied. One more chance.”
“I told you the truth.”
Michael fired into his forehead and stepped back from the car and into the trees. He waited for any other man he hadn’t seen to come toward the car, but after a few minutes, none had. He took the driver’s wallet, got into the driver’s seat, and backed the car onto the pressed-gravel drive to the manor house. Then he went inside and turned on the lights in the great hall to look at the bodies.
The first man, who had the shotgun lying across his chest, was dead. The third man, who’d shot from outside, had been fooled by the shotgun and put a bullet through his head. Michael had shot the third man from the floor as he leaned in the window; a bullet under his jaw had come out the top of his head. Michael had some hope for the remaining man. His only wound was the shotgun blast from the other side of the big room. In the dark Michael had guessed that the shells were probably number 7, because the only game anyone had shot here in modern times as far as he knew was pheasant.
He looked closely at the man and felt for the pulse in his neck, but found he had been optimistic. He opened the breach of the shotgun and saw that the shells were number 4, intended for deer and men. He closed the shotgun, set it carefully on the table beside him, and looked up. His eye caught movement at the top of the big staircase.
Standing there in an ankle-length white satin nightgown and a long, lightweight robe was his wife. Meg stood with perfect, erect posture looking down at him.
“Oh, hello,” he said. “I’m sorry for all the noise and commotion.”
“I assumed it must have happened again,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“It looks as though you’ve got it under control.”
“Yes, it’s pretty much over.”
“What sort of time have we got?” she said. “Should I be throwing on some clothes and running for the car, or do we have time to talk?”
“We’ll make the time,” he said. “I have these two men under the windows, one outside, and another in the wood on the way to the gate. I’ll join you after I’ve cleaned up.”
“You know, Michael, you’re not thirty anymore. Maybe we could ask some men we trust to help out.”
He shook his head. “I’d rather not. Even helping at this stage would make them guilty of serious crimes. That wouldn’t be much reward for being worth trusting.”
“I suppose not.” She turned and walked away from the top of the stairs toward their bedroom.
Michael took a deep breath and knelt beside the two bodies. He searched for wallets, weapons, and other belongings and discovered they both had US passports. He got up, closed and latched the window, and set the broken piece of glass on the table with the shotgun.
He took off the first man’s rain jacket, spread it on the floor, rolled its owner onto it, and dragged him to the door and out to the rear of the Bentley. Then he took the jacket back and used it to drag the second body out, and then used it a third time on the grass for the man he’d shot through the open window.
He had too many bodies to transport in a car trunk. They would have to be in the seats. He hoisted one of them to the rear seat and fastened the seat belt around him, and then another. He opened the trunk and managed to get the head, arms, and torso of the third man’s body up over the edge of the trunk, and then one leg at a time, bending one knee and then the other. The final man was the most difficult. The whole process of loading the car had taken no more than ten minutes, but Michael’s arms, back, and legs felt as strained as if it had taken several hours. He sat on the stone steps until his breathing returned to normal.
He heard Meg’s voice. “I hope you didn’t hurt yourself.”
He glanced over his shoulder. “I’m fine. Do you remember what we did with that blue tarp we bought for the painting last summer but didn’t use?”
“It’s in the carriage house. They used it to shade the coolers for the cold drinks during the day and then put it in there.”
“Thanks.” He got up and walked to the carriage house to retrieve the tarp. When he came back, Meg was looking in the car window at the three killers he had propped up.
“It’s not like you to look.”
She shrugged. “This reminds me that you only get a certain number of days. If you spend any of them without paying attention, it’s as though you weren’t alive at all. Not just the pleasant parts either.”
He opened the passports of the three Americans and was puzzled. They appeared to be genuine, but they said the men’s names were Koslowski, O’Rourke, and Benson. The names of the people who had reasons to kill him were all Italian. These men must all have been hired shooters. He opened the glove box of the Bentley. The registration papers said the owner was a place called Luxury Rentals, with an address in London, but no name of a human being. Time was passing, and he had to move. He looked up at Meg. “Let’s go talk.”
2
They went upstairs to the master bedroom. Michael took some of the clothes he had brought to Yorkshire off the hangers and out of the drawers and laid them on the bed, then folded them quickly in neat stacks.
“What are you doing?”
He said, “I’ve got to drive their car away from here as soon as possible. We can’t have four bodies lying around.”
“I’ll follow you in the Jaguar so you can park them somewhere, and then we’ll go away.”
He looked at her, her bright green eyes still astonishing to him after all the years. Her hair, a dark reddish brown when he met her, was still that color, kept that way by a visit to a salon once a month for years. She had begun noting the arrival of each wrinkle on her face when she was thirty, but had stopped talking about them because she believed the worst kind of narcissism was a person whining about time and her body’s offenses against her.
He still loved to look at her, and he had every day. She’d told him she didn’t mind. “You saw me when I was in my twenties, gorgeous and athletic, and partly for that reason I can bear to have you see me now. I know that who you see includes both then and now.” It was true, like thousands of surprising things she’d said over the years.
He said, “We can’t just go away together and hope this is over.”
“This i
sn’t the first time they’ve found you.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“The first time it happened we were still young. You lied to me about it.”
“Well.”
“When you came home I didn’t know any of the details, but I knew the gist of it. You made up a story that you thought would make me feel better, and I loved you even more for it. I still don’t know what you actually did to make it stop.”
“The truth wouldn’t have made you like me any better.”
“Don’t be too sure.” She paused. “And then we were happy for years and years, until the night when they came for you again. And that time the men were dead in fifteen minutes, and in twenty you had left me alone again.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve never been somebody who was worth your attention, or your company, much less your love. The attempts to kill me were things I brought on myself that I earned before we met. You never had a reason to stay once the first time happened.”
“The point being not to elicit a tardy apology but to note that tonight it happened—is happening—a third time. Twice in our lives you left me at home and went off to find enemies you had not anticipated would be coming for you. I will only remind you that I have lived with you and loved you for thirty years, thinking of you as Michael Schaeffer, even though I’ve known for at least that long that it was never your name. Now I want you to do me the favor of considering a suggestion.”
“What?”
“I know that right now part of your mind is ranging ahead, thinking about how you get to America and leave me in some kind of storage so I’ll be safe while you go off down some hole to kill whoever is after you. I’m begging you not to.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to take me on a trip, but not to America.”
“Where, then?”
“I don’t know or care. Not to kill somebody. Maybe Australia, where nobody knows you or the people who hate you.”
He took his watch from the nightstand, slipped it on, and looked at it. Time was passing, and he needed to be on the road. He said, “I can’t take you with me. I know that seems debatable, but it isn’t. You have a million friends in England who will be delighted if you would visit them for a month or so. You’ll be as safe as a person can be. I want you to pack up, put a suitcase in the Jaguar, drive yourself to one of their homes, and later, if necessary, another, and another. Stay out of sight for as long as this takes.”
“Then please, just make me a deal. If we can’t go to Australia together, you can go alone. It will buy you time, at least. You can use computers and phones to learn what you can from there. Just don’t rush off to America. Since their first try failed, they’ll be waiting for you there, expecting you.” She hugged him. “Please, Michael. Just give me that much. I’ll know you’re safe for a while. If Australia is safe, I could even join you there.”
He looked at her, then said reluctantly, “I’ll try it.”
She hugged him harder. “Thank you, Michael. I know you’ve got to get going now. Do it. I’ll be packed and off in the Jaguar in ten minutes or so.”
3
He put his leather carry-on bag in the trunk of the car on top of the blue tarp that was spread over the body of the driver, got into the Bentley, and began to drive. He drifted slowly as far as the front gate, watching for a glow of headlights, and then turned south onto the high road and accelerated. He looked at his phone and saw that the distance from York to Manchester Airport was 144 kilometers. He opened the case of the phone, took out the battery, and put the phone in his sport coat.
He could drive now with the three corpses strapped into the seats of the Bentley, but he knew he would have to get rid of the car before there was enough light to see that his passengers were dead. He had to put as much distance as he could behind him each minute of the next hour and a half.
As he drove south, he couldn’t help thinking about how his life had narrowed down to this. He and Meg hadn’t said it, but they both knew that it was unlikely he’d live to return home one more time. He’d had a long life for a man in his line of work. He had begun working at age fifteen and quit at age thirty-one, the week he had met Meg Holroyd. Yes, as she’d reminded him, a few years later he’d had to go back to the United States to kill some people, but not for money. Years after that, Frank Tosca’s men had found him. He had survived his trip to solve that problem too. It had been a long haul. As of tonight, when he’d made the four corpses he had strapped in the seats and placed in the trunk, he had been killing people as needed for about forty-five years, the last thirty just to keep breathing.
Everything he knew about his early life he had heard from Eddie Mastrewski. He could practically hear him talking now as he drove through the night fifty years later. “Your parents just showed up in Pittsburgh, nobody knew from where. They were new and nobody knew much about them. They were in their mid-twenties, maybe twenty-three and twenty-four. This neighborhood—the Flats—was the way it is now, a nice place to live but not fancy. The only place anybody wore a necktie was to church or their funeral. Things looked the same as now—one-family to four-family houses. Your parents rented an upstairs apartment in a big house. They already had you, so they showed up with a lot of toys and books and kid-size furniture and stuff. They also had a bunch of books for grown-ups, but I don’t know what kind.
“Most of the businesses were already here. The two grocery stores, the three barber shops—Mel’s, the Barbery Coast, and the Hair House—and the four or five women’s salons. There were already the two regular pharmacies, but the chain drugstore hadn’t come in yet. Vincent the tailor has been there since the last ice age, and the same with the Heaven-Scent cleaners and Lana’s Sewing Shop. The liquor stores, the pool hall, Dan’s Shoe Repair, and the pawnshop were left over from when I was a kid. The churches were all around since the 1820s, I think—Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and a few Protestant denominations. I started my butcher shop the year after I got out of the army.
“Your parents never told anybody much, not because they were the kind of people who kept secrets. They just hadn’t been in town long enough to have many conversations before they were killed in the car wreck. In those days I was always in the shop working during the day, and they weren’t customers, so I never actually saw them.”
Other short conversations had taken place at other times. He remembered Eddie saying, “Even the landlady didn’t know much. She didn’t have much to say, except that she thought they might be students because of the books and the fact that they lived a quiet life—no late nights, no boozing—but you could have said that about a lot of people.”
Another time Eddie said, “You were kind of a challenge for the neighborhood. You were about three years old, or a little younger. The cops who came to investigate told somebody that you would probably have to be turned over to the county since they hadn’t located any relatives.”
“The county?” He remembered that he couldn’t imagine what a county would do with him, or with anybody.
“It probably wouldn’t have been so bad,” Eddie said. “What they usually did was place a kid with a foster family, who would take care of him until some other family adopted him.”
“How come they didn’t do it to me?”
“We kind of headed it off. They called a neighborhood meeting one night at Sidderly’s restaurant. We—the grown-ups who sort of owned and operated the neighborhood—talked about it.”
“Who was that?”
“There were three hairdressers, and Mr. and Mrs. Sidderly, since they were there anyway, and the owners of the two pharmacies, the managers who ran the grocery stores, a couple of teachers, some PTA mothers, a couple of ministers, a doctor named Birken who’s since died, and I don’t remember who else. None of us felt we wanted to just hand you to the cops, so we decided to find a way to handle your situation ourselves. After a lot of talk, one of the
others said, ‘Does anybody have a suggestion?’
“I’ve always hated long meetings, so I got up and said, ‘You all know me, Eddie the Butcher. I haven’t raised any kids, but I have a good business, a big house, and I can give him a good room, clean clothes, healthy food, and reasonable encouragement. I can also teach him a trade, if he turns out to be up to learning it.’ People talked about it among themselves, and they decided to take me up on it.” He added, “I want you to know I’ve never regretted it. Not for a second.”
Now, looking back on it, Michael Schaeffer had to admit that Eddie had more than lived up to his promise. He had taught him how to cut meat; weigh and wrap the cuts; make change for customers; run a spotlessly clean, sterile shop; pay suppliers, bills, and taxes; and keep up appearances. Eddie had also taught the boy his other profession, the one that the other shopkeepers and businessmen and their families never knew about.
He remembered being about ten when Eddie had begun teaching him that other profession—how to see the best way into a house, how to follow people. They would walk along, and Eddie would deliver muttered observations: “That guy up there? He’s following that woman a hundred feet ahead of him. He’s going too fast. She’s about to go by a bunch of women’s stores, and she’ll slow down to look. Even if she doesn’t go in, she’ll pretend to look at the clothes, but really check her own reflection to see if she looks good. Since she does, she’ll look longer. He should be able to see what’s ahead as well as you and I can, but his brain is in neutral. He’ll come right up on her, close enough for her to feel him. Then he won’t want to pass, so he’ll stop and light a cigarette or something. That will make him stand out even more and spook her.”
“Why is he following her?”