by Thomas Perry
Schaeffer stepped in the doorway of his old bedroom and pivoted with the rifle at his shoulder, but nobody was there. He moved into the room and made sure nobody was hiding in the closet, under the bed, or in the bathroom. He checked the other room too. The lights were on in both, and the bed was unmade, so there must be a third man. Why wasn’t the third man coming for him?
He heard a cell phone ring, and instantly the sound changed his view of what was going on. The third man wasn’t in the house. He was somewhere else, calling in.
Schaeffer ran up the hall to the front room where the two bodies lay, and as he pushed the door open, he heard the ringing coming from the pocket of the man he had killed first. He reached into the man’s pants pocket, took the phone out, pressed “Accept” and said, “Yeah?”
“What the fuck?” said the voice on the phone. “You said you’d call me when the food came. Did it come, or do I have to go get it?”
“No. Get it.”
“Who is this?”
Schaeffer turned off the phone and pocketed it. He took the two men’s wallets and keys, then went through the second floor turning off lights. He hurried down the stairs and out the back door, set the lock, and closed the door firmly so the plunger would be well seated in the jamb. He hoped the locks and darkness would delay the third man’s attempts to figure out what had happened.
Schaeffer went down the street at a fast walk to keep from attracting attention, but he wanted to get to his car before the third man arrived. He had no way to know if the third man had been calling from ten minutes away or a hundred yards. He turned the first corner and walked faster.
He heard a squeal of tires—the sound of someone taking a corner too fast. Then he heard engines. He stepped into the dark passageway between the house where Bobby Moran had lived and the old Czimanski house. It sounded as though three cars were arriving at Eddie’s from different directions. He began to run.
21
He moved his two stolen wallets to the pockets of his jacket so that they wouldn’t fall out while he was running. He knew that he would probably be the only man running across the Flats at the moment. He had been prowling around at night for over a week, and he had seen few men out this late. There had been a couple of them leaving their houses or their girlfriends’ houses and driving off, but no walkers. He tossed the men’s keys into a storm drain and kept going.
He stayed off the sidewalks and instead moved along between the buildings. He emerged from the yards and driveways near Diane Whittaker’s house and kept running toward the apartment building where he had parked his car. It had seemed safest to leave it parked at the curb in front of an apartment building, where there would be several other cars parked every night, so people wouldn’t notice it.
He turned right at the next corner and saw a car turn onto the same street from the far end and come toward him. He took the few brisk steps necessary to get to the end of the next house and disappear up the driveway between it and the house beyond. As soon as he was out of sight in the shadowy backyards of the houses, he ran again, this time hoping to be past this block before the car on the street reached the driveway he had taken.
He ran along behind the next house and the next, making his way down the block in the direction he’d come the day he’d had tea at Diane’s house. He had parked only about two hundred yards from her door. As he went, he heard the sound of an engine idling. He sped up, trotted to the next wooden fence, and leapt over it.
Then he heard voices. A man called out, “You go around and watch the other end of the block.”
Schaeffer was as aware of where each man was from the sounds as he would have been if he could see them. He had ranged these blocks from the time when he was a kid playing hide-and-seek until the days when he was making deliveries to Diane Whittaker.
He knew that he was running toward the place where the men in one car would be waiting for him and another was moving up behind him. He might be able to slip out from between them onto the parallel street to his right if he moved fast. As he ran, he saw Diane in her kitchen window, pulling aside the curtain and craning her neck to see what was going on. She must have heard the men outside shouting directions to each other.
He ran toward her window. She saw him and opened the kitchen door, and he dashed forward, reaching the top of the concrete steps in two strides. He put his left arm around her waist and pulled her with him into the kitchen, then shut the door and turned off the light.
Her face was right beside his ear. “What’s happening? Are they chasing you?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Why? Who are they?”
“I think they’re members of the local Mafia, or working for them. I seem to have convinced somebody they’d be safer with me dead. I don’t want to put you in danger. If I can make it to where my car is parked, I’ll just drive away and this will be over.”
“How do they even know you?”
“It’s complicated. I asked around about buying Eddie’s old house and shop back after all these years. The property was registered in the name of a company, and when I went to the state department of corporations to find out who owned the company, that set them off. They wanted to meet at the house to negotiate. That’s where I was going when I left here. But when I got there, they made it pretty clear that they weren’t interested in selling. They put me in the room that used to be Eddie’s office with two men. They each had a pistol. They wouldn’t let me leave. They were making jokes about how I was going to disappear and never be found—that kind of thing. One of them got a phone call, and the other went to listen in, so I ran.”
“Oh my God,” Diane said. “I thought the whole Mafia was dead or in prison years and years ago.”
“The police seem to have missed a few of them.”
She moved toward the telephone on the kitchen counter. “I’ll call the police and tell them if they surround the block, they can arrest them.”
“Hold on,” he said. “Let’s not do anything we’re going to regret. I don’t want to set up a firefight where some young cop loses his life just because I remembered the old shop and thought I could make a quick profit on a turnover.”
“That’s crazy, Michael. They threatened your life. They’re criminals.”
“Real estate is a crazy business, and it draws money from surprising sources. Once you start looking into deeds and tax rolls, sometimes you turn up people you don’t expect. And there’s no question these guys would find out who called the cops. You would be in danger, and have no way to get out of it.”
“What can we do then?”
“Wait them out.”
“How?”
“Let’s go upstairs so I can see what they’re doing and when it’s safe to leave.”
They climbed the stairs and stepped into the guest room at the top, where they used to go on the afternoons of the home deliveries. For Schaeffer it was like revisiting a place from a dream.
When they were young and he would follow Diane up these stairs, she would often have her left hand on the railing and her right hand at the neck of her dress or blouse, already getting a start on the unzipping or unbuttoning. When they were at the upper landing, she would guide him into the guest room and close the door, then shrug off that garment, continue the process until she was naked, and then start on the boy’s buttons and zipper.
They reached the upper landing, and she stopped and stepped aside. “I guess you know your way from here.” She leaned against the wall.
“Yes,” he said. “Thanks.” He moved past her into the room and went to the front window, but remained at its side, where the curtains hid him, and looked down.
Three cars were in the street with their lights out. He could see the drivers waiting with their motors running. If he ran, they would catch up with him in seconds. If the others caught and killed him, they would pick them up for the getaway.
> The men he was most concerned about were the ones on foot—at least three men who would be walking slowly and quietly around the houses trying to find him. Judging from the yelling he’d heard tonight, they weren’t too concerned about making noise. They were here looking for which window to fire through or which door to kick down.
Schaeffer walked from the guest room toward the rooms at the back of the second floor. He passed a bathroom with smoked-glass windows. He kept going to the room in the left corner and stepped in to look out the window.
The men were walking through the yards in a line. There were four of them, all carrying pistols pointed down at the ground, each trying to stay abreast of the others as they stared into the darkness.
Diane moved beside him and whispered, “What are they going to do?”
“I’m hoping they’ll move through here, find nothing, and move on to search somewhere else. Then I’ll get in my car and go.”
She said, “You can stay as long as you want, you know.”
“Thanks,” he said. “But it would be best if I disappear as soon as they do. I don’t want to give them a chance to figure out that there was a right house and come back to find it.”
He watched them move along the row of backyards. They were using their only advantage, numbers. If one of them saw him or was fired upon, all four guns would answer. He kept his eyes on them until the four reached the end of the block, then turned to the left and walked single file beside the last house to return to the street where their companions in the cars were waiting.
Schaeffer moved back up the hall to the spare room, where he stepped to the window and watched the men get into the cars and buckle up. Then the three cars drove off.
“That was sudden,” Diane said.
“They probably got a call from someone who thought he’d spotted me somewhere else. I’d better go while I can,” he said. “When they find out it was mistaken identity, they might come back. Thank you for taking me in tonight. You may have saved my life.”
“Maybe I’ll choose to believe that, because it will make me feel better. Goodbye, Michael,” she said. “Be safe.” She kissed his cheek, and he went down the stairs and out.
22
Schaeffer hurried to the spot where he had parked his car in front of the apartment building. But it was now between two others, one nosed up nearly to its trunk and the other just ahead of its headlights. He knelt and used the flashlight app on his phone to look at the wiring and the underside to be sure there was nothing attached to the car that would explode or transmit a locator signal.
He got in, started the engine, and listened to it. The engine sounded fine—still smooth and quiet. He looked up and down the street to verify that the hunting party had really moved on. Then he inched his car forward and back, until he was able to pull out of the parking spot.
He drove the twenty miles to his hotel, checked out, drove another hundred miles, and checked into another hotel. He went into his new room, bringing with him the bag containing the wallets and handguns of the men he had killed.
Schaeffer sat at the small table in the corner of the room and opened the bag. He took out the first of the wallets. The driver’s license had the name James Joseph Pastore, age thirty. The second one was John Vincent Sarcone, age forty-one. Their license addresses should have been in or near Pittsburgh, but they weren’t. They didn’t even live in Pennsylvania. They had both lived in towns on Long Island and had New York licenses.
The two men had quite a bit of cash in their wallets, all of it in hundred-dollar bills. He supposed that they hadn’t wanted to make any credit card purchases or other transactions that might place them in Pittsburgh. If they had managed to kill Schaeffer, it could have gotten them convicted. He set the cash aside. It would help keep him from being traced too.
He needed to know who was really behind the attempts to kill him. The men who had attacked him in York and Manchester didn’t have names he could connect to an American crime family. The names in York were Morgan, Kaiser, Olanski, and Holmes. Probably they were just shooters who had been hired in America and sent off to do the work. The ones in Manchester had been English, and the ones in Sydney were certainly Australian. The two men he had killed tonight were the first he’d seen who might belong to La Cosa Nostra.
He couldn’t call Elizabeth Waring from this far north. It practically placed him at the scene of the murders he’d just committed. And it would give her the number of the cell phone he had been carrying around for several days with its battery in it. The FBI would be able to tell her every cell tower it had pinged off for all that time.
He used this moment to take apart his phone, break the small parts of it, and cut up the SIM card. Then he showered and slept. In the morning, he packed and checked out, then drove south toward Washington, DC. He didn’t assemble and activate his remaining cell phone until he was in Virginia.
He sat in his car in the shade at the curb and called the cell number she had given him the night of his visit to her house. He heard her phone ringing. It rang eight times and then went to voicemail—a recorded male voice that said the customer could not answer now, but if he wanted to leave a message, he should wait for the tone. He didn’t. He took the battery out of the phone.
She knew that he would use a cell phone to call, and that her phone would record the number of his phone even though the call went answered. Her people at the Justice Department could have the phone company locate the cell phone that had just called her if he hadn’t disabled it. He started the car and drove.
He wondered whether she hadn’t been able to answer the phone or whether this was an intentional attempt to trap him. If trapping him like a wild animal had been her plan, then he had better know it now. The idea of trapping animals made him think of the zoo, so he drove into the city, got on Connecticut, turned on 14th, and found a place where he could park near the Columbia Heights metro station. He paid the charge at the station entrance and took the train to the station near the zoo.
He walked to the zoo, bought a ticket, picked up a map at the entrance, and then followed it to a place called Lion and Tiger Hill. He found a men’s room, reassembled the cell phone, and turned it on. If she was having his GPS signal tracked, her people would be able to do it now. He left it in a trash can full of crumpled paper towels near the men’s room exit.
He didn’t know how much time he would have, but he was going to need to cover the distance back to the zoo entrance quickly. By now the FBI could have identified his number as the one that had called Elizabeth Waring and located his phone, and they would be on their way.
He took a shortcut directly across the zoo. When he made it back to the entrance, he went out with a large group of tourists who were filing onto buses outside the gate. He knew he wouldn’t have time to get out of the zoo if he waited his turn, so he slipped away from them and walked faster. If the FBI arrived and thought he was inside the zoo, they would shut the gates and begin hunting for him. They would take over the entrance and keep sending more and more cops until they had him.
He took quick strides away from the gate and managed to travel a few hundred yards on the sidewalk before he saw the first pack of black SUVs roar past him. He saw them turn into the entrance gate without coming to a full stop, and stream past it and onto the zoo’s interior roads. After they had entered, the exit side of the gate closed and a vehicle moved in front of it.
Schaeffer walked to the subway entrance, descended to the platforms, and took the next train to the 14th Street station. When he got there, he retrieved his car from the nearby parking lot, drove to a hotel in Bethesda, and checked in. He went up to his room, turned on the television set, and watched the afternoon news. The first thing he saw was a helicopter shot of a green hillside inside the zoo with winding driveways around it, most of them still crowded with tourists, groups of schoolchildren, and families.
The screen changed to sho
w an anchorwoman in the studio looking mildly concerned and disapproving. “We’re going live now to Caitlyn Franklin on the scene at the National Zoo.”
The shot changed again, this time to a spot he recognized outside the zoo entrance. “Yes, Tara,” said a young woman in a windbreaker holding a microphone. “The police here say there was a phone call to the FBI warning that a bomb had been placed inside a building on Lion and Tiger Hill at the National Zoo. DC police and a contingent of FBI agents responded and are in the process of making sure that the men, women, and children already in the park get evacuated safely before the authorities enter the building to discover whether there is indeed an explosive device of some kind.”
“Is there any indication whether we’re dealing with a real bomb or a hoax?”
“Minutes ago I spoke to Lieutenant Jerry Xavier of the DC PD.” In a second she was shown holding the microphone in front of a man about a foot taller than she was. He said, “We always hope that every threat is an empty threat. But it’s our job to find out. We’re checking the cars, buses, and shuttle vans that leave the zoo to see if we spot any suspects, and keeping the entrances closed to keep more visitors from entering.”
The young woman turned to the camera and said, “All we can report at the moment is that the police have not yet found anything dangerous, but they’re going to systematically and thoroughly make sure things stay that way. Back to you, Tara.”
Schaeffer had to admit the imaginary bomb call was a pretty good cover story. It even ensured that if civilians overheard them talking about a cell phone, it wouldn’t sound like a lie. A bomb story added just the right level of fear, enough so that the people in the zoo would do what they were told to do. If the FBI arrested a lone man—Schaeffer—during the operation, or even shot him, their actions were explained and justified in advance. And if nothing at all happened, that was half expected too, and would be welcome news.