by Thomas Perry
Salcone had led Ficcio out the back of the theater and up the alley to Salcone’s car. He had thought about the situation for a moment and then gone around to the trunk and pulled out the two MAC-10’s. He had shown the kid how to flip off the safety and put it on automatic, then handed him the gun and told him to keep it on the floor by his feet, where he wouldn’t make a mistake and take off the roof of the car with it.
Then they had driven around the block and come up the street looking for a vantage point from which they could see whatever it was that Lempert was watching for. But at that moment, the van was pulling out of its parking space and moving up the street. Salcone had followed it nearly a mile, to this store. It wasn’t until the van’s doors opened that he had seen that Lempert hadn’t been alone in the van. The truth was much more startling than anything Puccio had imagined. Lempert had hired himself out to the Butcher’s Boy. He was driving the getaway car.
Salcone had forced himself to take a moment to think about what he had seen. It made sense for the Butcher’s Boy to hire Lempert. Lempert knew enough about Paul Cambria to know where he would be tonight, and how to get close enough for a shot, and probably how to get past the police afterward. Salcone didn’t have time to send the Ficcio kid back in the car to the theater for help, and anyway, that would leave Salcone stranded here if Lempert and the Butcher’s Boy decided to leave. He would have to kill the two of them right here.
He had brought Ficcio up to the back door of the copying store and told him the plan. What he had neglected to tell the boy was that when Ficcio stepped through the back door and opened up with the MAC-10, it didn’t much matter what he hit. Salcone would be at the front of the building. By the time Salcone stepped in, either the Butcher’s Boy would be dead, or he would be busy killing Ficcio. But then, without warning, Ficcio reached out and pushed on the door. If they had seen it, they hadn’t opened fire. That meant that either they hadn’t seen it, or they were on their way out the front door. Either way, Salcone couldn’t afford the luxury of going around to the front. He had to move.
“All right, kid,” said Salcone. “Go through the door fast as you can, stop and open fire.”
“You mean now?”
“Now.”
To Lempert, everything seemed to happen at once. First, he was surprised to see that the Butcher’s Boy hadn’t waited and made him go ahead. He pushed the front door open, and then he seemed to disappear for a second. Lempert whirled to look over his shoulder just as the back door swung inward hard, so that it banged against the wall. He recognized the two guys. One was Salcone, the guy Puccio always talked to in Italian because they came up together in some shithole in Pittsburgh that didn’t even sound like it was in America; and the other was a kid they called something that sounded like Fish, who wasn’t much older than the one who must have ducked behind the counter. They both held little assault weapons that looked sort of like Ingrams, although he had never seen an Ingram from this angle. In fact, from here the angle looked a little off.
Lempert’s body jerked, partly in surprise because even the body feels noise somewhere in the diaphragm when two .45-caliber automatic weapons roar in an enclosed space, and partly because the .45-caliber bullets were punching through his chest, arms, neck and head.
Wolf crouched beside the door with his back to the bricks and covered his face while the machine guns blew the glass out of the front window beside his head. He knew they would be approaching the front of the building fast, to get a shot at him as he sprinted down the street.
The first one was the older man, who walked directly to the empty window frame and leaned out to see which way the prey had run. Wolf looked up at the underside of his chin and fired the revolver through it. When the man toppled forward, he still held his little MAC-10. As Wolf snatched it out of his grip, he realized he had seen the man somewhere in the old days. He leaned inside the ruined window and opened fire on the second man, who was approximately where anyone would be, squatting low beside the front door that he didn’t have the guts to open. Then Wolf dropped the MAC-10 on the body and looked at the face again. He remembered where he had seen the man; he was the one who used to keep the security people busy while Puccio stole suits off the loading docks of clothing stores in Pittsburgh. In the old days he’d had more meat on him, and looked like a longshoreman or a trucker. Now he had flecks of gray in his hair, and wore photogray glasses—sort of distinguished, like a professor. Seeing him here like this was not a pleasure. Little Norman must have failed.
As he walked to the van he kept his pace leisurely. He got into the driver’s seat, picked up the keys, started the van and, as he pulled away from the curb, glanced into the copying store. From this height he could see that the kid at the cash register still was not ready to peek up over the counter. It was hard to blame him.
Wolf could feel his heart beating faster than he liked it to. What the hell was wrong with these people? They must have seen Lempert and followed the van, and then the older one had seen Wolf. Coming through the back door together like that was the tactic of losers; it was the way addicts robbed grocery stores. Then somebody had panicked or made a mistake and opened up on Lempert. Or was it even a mistake? It was as if the whole world had lost all sense of the way things were done and the way men behaved, so you couldn’t even figure out what they thought they were trying to accomplish.
The words “the slaughter of the innocents” came into Wolfs mind. That had been Eddie’s term for it. Presumably it was something that had happened in the Bible, but he had never looked it up. He remembered Eddie arguing with a man who was trying to collect on the same contract. It was one of the few times Eddie had ever let the boy work with colleagues, because he considered them to be competitors by nature and acquaintances only through some regrettable coincidence of geography. But this time Eddie and the boy had found a major prize. A man named Frank Basset had run a small-time burglary ring based on restaurant reservations. He had placed confederates as waiters and busboys in the best establishments, and each night they would go over the lists to see who would be at the restaurants, leaving their houses empty. If it were particularly tempting, Basset would hit the house. If a woman came in wearing diamonds, for instance, they would know that her house was worth the trouble. Eddie had sniffed as soon as he had heard this. “Well, for Christ’s sake, if she’s wearing them, then they’re not going to be in the house, are they?” But that had not been the only flaw. Wolf couldn’t remember the details, except that there had been a child and a baby-sitter in one house, and that the owner had been a lawyer with friends who had connections. Eddie had heard about the large, open contract at a time when he had been feeling vulnerable.
Eddie had found Basset in a small town north of Syracuse along Lake Ontario. It was winter, and most of the cottages near the lake were closed. Apparently there had been some plan in Basset’s mind to go to Canada, because Wolf remembered a big boat frozen in the ice along the shore where it had been tied up. But when Eddie and the boy surveyed the house, Eddie had a nasty surprise; he discovered that he and the boy were not the only ones who had found Basset.
A man named Cathead Maloney drove past in a two-tone Pontiac just as Eddie was peering at the target through binoculars. Eddie had dragged the boy to his car, and followed. Eddie had been so angry when he had caught up with the Pontiac on the lake road that he had rushed to its side and flung open the door. Then he calmed down rapidly; Cathead Maloney had three other men with him.
Eddie had proposed that they share the danger and rewards, and Cathead had agreed in theory to the proposal. Their arguments had come over the execution. Cathead had decided that the way to get Basset was to wait until dark and approach the house from the lake side, walking on the ice to surprise him. Eddie pointed out that if a light went on, there would be six of them standing in the middle of a featureless white backdrop that stretched behind them at least forty miles, too empty to hide on, too slippery to run on, and probably too thin to hold their weight sinc
e Lake Ontario was too deep to freeze with any solidity.
Cathead responded that if the ice was thick enough to strand a twenty-five-foot boat with a car engine in it, then it would hold five men and a boy, and implied that anyone who passed up six-to-one odds against a mere sneak thief, with the advantages of darkness and surprise, didn’t really want to work very much.
Eddie held his temper, although the last part had nettled him. He countered that Frank Basset never worked alone; he’d had three men in the restaurants and four working the houses, and if he were alone now, he wouldn’t need a twenty-five-foot boat in the first place. From this point the discussion deteriorated, until finally Eddie uttered his benediction. “I give up. It’s all yours, Cathead. Have a ball. It’s going to be the slaughter of the innocents.”
Eddie had been right. There had been at least six very tense, alert, heavily armed men in the cottage, and Cathead Maloney and his partners had received the full benefit of their ability to find a light switch in the dark and aim a rifle afterward.
Wolf drove along Route 90, across the state line into Chicago, then pulled off the interstate. He went past a gas station, and noticed a set of three pay phones near the men’s room. He glanced at his watch, then patiently wheeled around the block and pulled in beside them. He walked into the office, asked the tired young man sitting on the high stool for the key to the men’s room and opened the other roll of quarters he had bought in Las Vegas. It was four-thirty in the afternoon in Las Vegas, and unless things had changed for no reason in two days, Little Norman would be in the Sands having breakfast. The efficient machine voice told him to put in more money, and he did. He asked the hotel operator to page Norman.
Seventy-five cents later, he heard the voice. “Yeah.”
“Norman.”
“I thought I wasn’t going to hear your voice again.”
“I ran into trouble. Did you do what I asked?”
“You know what that is, kid. It takes time. I started.”
“How does it look?”
“How can it look? Carl Bala lives to eat your eyeballs. The Castigliones know that if they forget that you did the old man ten years ago, they lose respect. The New York families aren’t sure they can pretend that Tony T wasn’t right in their back yard when you came to see him.”
“Are you giving up?”
“No, but it’s a fantasy. The old men aren’t like that. You chose this life. You knew what it was.”
“Norman?”
“What?”
“Tonight some people came for me. I’m going to assume that the man they worked for didn’t get the message yet. It’s a gesture of good faith.”
“Oh, shit, kid. They don’t care about your good faith. Just run.”
“I’m running, Norman. Tell them.”
“Right. Just remember, I don’t work for you. I work for them.”
Wolf hung up the phone and walked back to the van. It was time to get out of the area. The simplest thing to do was to try to drive another twenty miles to O’Hare Airport and find a room in a small motel in the neighborhood, where there were miles of them. It was already beginning to feel like a long night.
At the cashier’s counter in the Sands coffee shop, Little Norman was preoccupied. He paused for a moment before placing the telephone back on its cradle. He was watching the liquid-crystal display on the little screen that stuck up over the back of the telephone. It still held the number: (312) 555-8521. Illinois. Chicago area.
Wolf awoke in the big, hard bed and stared in the direction of the window. He wondered what had awakened him. The thick, opaque curtains were still drawn over the glass, so the room was dark, but at the side there was the tiny muted glow of a ray of light bouncing off the white lining of the curtain and onto the wall. It was daytime. He reached to the bedside table and held his watch close to his eyes. It was only seven-thirty A.M. It couldn’t be a maid who hadn’t seen the Do NOT DISTURB sign. He listened, then swallowed to clear his ears and listened again. There was no sound at all. It was almost eerie. He resigned himself to the fact that he wasn’t going to sleep again. He threw off the heavy covers and felt a kind of relief at the sound of the starched sheets sliding over one another. At least he wasn’t deaf.
He walked across the thick carpet to the window, pushed his index finger to the edge of the curtain and squinted to see what Rosemont, Illinois, looked like in the daytime. He started to breathe deeply in order to wake up and stop the shock before it made him slow and stupid. He stepped to the other side of the window and slowly moved the curtain a quarter of an inch. But when he looked out at the parking lot from the new angle, it was still the same. There were no cars in the lot. Last night there had been at least twenty, all in a row outside his window; now all he could see was black macadam, with the spaces marked in faded white paint. Somehow they had come in and evacuated everybody from the little motel without waking him, and now they were getting, ready to move in.
Wolf dressed quickly and threw everything he had brought with him into the little suitcase. It must be the FBI. They had come in with pass keys or even called every room on the telephone to tell them to get out quietly, and in a minute they would be coming through the only door with shotguns. There would be something like a SWAT team watching the only window. He had been lucky they hadn’t seen the curtain move, or there would be holes in it already.
He looked around him. There was the closet door, but there was also a sliding door on the side wall. It had to be a door to the next room, put there in case somebody wanted to turn both of them into a suite. He put his ear to it and listened. There was no sound of movement in the next room. If they were planning to come in that way, they would have it unlocked. He exerted a soft pressure on the door to see if it would budge, but it didn’t.
Wolf concentrated on dismantling the standing lamp. He cut the plug and jerked the cord through the long steel pole, pocketed it, and unscrewed the bulb and receptacle. Then he forced the motel’s bottle opener between the door and the jamb. Now he fitted the hollow steel pipe over the opener to extend the handle by six feet. When he pried with the long lever, the door lock gave a little groan, then popped. He slid the door open and saw an identical door on the opposite wall. Closing the one he had just come through, he headed for it.
Inside the third room, he decided it was time to try another way. He picked up a chair, tied the lamp cord around the back of it and carried it into the bathroom. Setting it in the center of the floor, he stood on it, then reached up to push the plywood hatch off the access hole to the attic. After shoving his little suitcase into the crawlspace, he reached up, grasped both sides of the cubbyhole and pulled himself up. Inside the crawlspace it was dark and dusty, and the sloping roof was only a yard above the floor of bare two-by-fours with layers of insulation between them. Here and there were wires for the light fixtures below. As soon as he had turned around on his hands and knees to face the hole again, he pulled the chair up with the lamp cord, set it aside and put the cover back on the access hole.
Wolf crawled carefully from one two-by-four to the next, at each advance setting his suitcase down ahead of him, quietly making his way down the long empty space. He could see the small louvered vent at the end of the building, and he used it as a goal.
In the hallway Cabell whispered to Sota, “Remember, anything that’s alive in there is no friend of yours.”
Sota grinned at the door and clicked the slide on his new MAC-10. “Lock and load,” he whispered. Sota’s dumb cheerfulness was beginning to wear on Cabell. The fact that the last time he’d had a weapon in his hand he had fired point-blank into a pane of bulletproof glass at a man selling lottery tickets didn’t inspire confidence.
Cabell and Sota were thieves. The difference was that Cabell knew it, and had been nervous about going along on something like this to begin with. But Sota seemed to think he was a badass. Puccio had decided it was some kind of weird Mafia justice that somebody should shoot this guy with the gun that Salcone had car
ried when he got killed. To Cabell it was just asking for trouble, so he had given the gun to Sota, who hadn’t figured out that if you found blood on a gun, it wasn’t from the guy it was fired at.
Puccio was calling in lots of markers today. Landsberg was only another thief like Cabell, but he had his own crew working out of a travel agency Puccio owned. Once in a while, when a whole family sailed for Fiji or someplace, Landsberg’s crew would come in with a moving van and take out everything but the plumbing. Everybody owed Paul Cambria the right to work in town, but Puccio was the guy who kept track. There were at least ten or fifteen guys around the motel right now, all of them called in the middle of the night.
Cabell kicked in the door, and when he brought his foot back to the floor he let his momentum carry him to his right and into the room, as Sota slipped in low and to the left. For a second, Sota’s mind didn’t allow the possibility that the room was empty. He fired a short burst into the couch, which seemed to be the only thing that wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Then he rushed into the bathroom, where there was nothing to point his weapon at but a couple of wet towels draped over the shower curtain. Cabell said, “You didn’t happen to slip out for a smoke while you were supposed to be watching the hall?”
“No way,” Sota protested, but Cabell hadn’t said it seriously. He was already checking to see if the window had been opened. He did it cautiously, without moving the curtain, so that Landsberg wouldn’t get a glimpse of him from outside and put a hole in him. He looked around the room, and then saw it. “You said there wasn’t but one door.” He walked to the sliding door that led to the next room and studied it. There was a deep indentation beside the lock, and the wood around it had been compressed and cracked. He silently pointed to it, stepped to the side, and abruptly slid it open to allow Sota a clear shot, but Sota just stood and stared.
Cabell cautiously craned his neck to peer into the next room. It was identical to this one, and he could already see that some damage had been done to the lock on the sliding door that connected it to the third. He turned to Sota. “You go out in the hall. When I flush him, that’s the way he’ll go.”