by Thomas Perry
At the end of the attic, Wolf lifted the plywood square just enough to fit the muzzle of Little Norman’s pistol. The roar of the automatic weapon a minute ago was a sure sign that somebody down there was getting jumpy. It also seemed like a reliable indication that the people down there were not from the FBI. As he looked down through the crack, he saw something he had not expected. There were a man and a woman, both about fifty, lying on the floor in the motel office. They were both on their backs, so he could recognize them as the owners, but they’d both had their throats cut. He could see that the counter drawers and cash register had been rifled.
Wolf lifted the hatch a few more inches. It was stupid. All they’d had to do was flash a badge they could have bought in any toy store and tell everybody there was a gas leak. For a moment he considered staying in the attic and waiting for his pursuers to leave, but something about the scene below made it seem foolish. They weren’t going to leave. He ran a mental inventory of the contents of his small suitcase and decided there was nothing in it that would tell anyone anything about him, so he left it in the attic, then lowered himself to the top of a filing cabinet, went to the counter and began to look in the drawers.
There was no sign that the couple lived here, so there had to be a car. Finally he found the woman’s purse, a large bag made out of something that looked like carpet, with wooden handles. Her key chain had a little flashlight and a whistle on it. It was sad that she would have imagined that those things would keep somebody from hurting her.
He moved toward the back door of the office. The car had to be in the back, because the lot was empty. There were only a couple of things in his favor now. One was that the only men he knew about for sure were still somewhere behind him firing automatic weapons into empty rooms, so nobody would expect him to emerge from the office. Another was that there couldn’t be many people still around who knew him by sight after all these years. He glanced back at the two bodies, already half drained of blood. Of course, those people outside didn’t seem much worried about killing the odd bystander. If any one of them had a functioning brain, at least some soldiers would be positioned around the motel waiting for him to break cover. He had to get them to show themselves.
He searched the other counter cabinets. What he was looking for wasn’t hard to find. It was a big cardboard carton full of boxes of matchbooks printed with an idealized drawing of the motel with imaginary trees around it and the words “Hanniver House Motel.” He had seen the matches in all the ashtrays in his room, and the supply had to come from somewhere. He opened a box and took a couple of books out of it, then tossed half the boxes up the access hatch to the attic and poured the rest against the wall of the office that joined it to the rest of the motel. He lit the pile of boxes in the attic first, then climbed down and waited a minute until he heard a crackling noise that told him the old, dry two-by-fours were beginning to burn. Now he tossed a burning match on the pile of boxes against the wall. After a few seconds the first matchbooks ignited with a bright, sputtering, sulfurous flare. Then the whole pile seemed to go up at once in a big flame, like the afterburner on a jet, licking up the wall, peeling the paint off it and covering the upper parts with a poisonous black smoke. He backed away, keeping himself within arm’s reach of the door because he wasn’t sure just how fast this place was going to burn.
Cabell was preparing to kick in the door of the fifth room when a familiar sound reached his ears from a distance. It sounded like an electric smoke detector. At first he felt the special sort of anger that he reserved for people like Sota. It would be right out of Sota’s repertoire to toss a burning cigarette somewhere just because there was nobody to make him pay for the damage to the carpet, and therefore no reason not to. Right now he hoped Sota was listening to the reason not to, but then a second thought occurred to him. What if the ten or twelve impatient geniuses stationed around the place had heard the gunfire a while ago, and then expected Sota and Cabell to come out? They hadn’t, so those guys might have assumed that it meant they couldn’t, that what they had heard was the sound of the Butcher’s Boy shooting him and Sota. He thought about the ones he had known before this excursion. Some of them were thieves like him, a couple had something to do with the gambling business and three were apparently pimps. The only ones he was sure had any experience at all with this sort of thing were Puccio’s own men, and where the hell they were right now was anybody’s guess. The others would react to the sound of an automatic weapon the way he would—with a resolution not to enter the building hastily. But whose idea was it to burn the guy out? Well, if that was the plan, it was time he got with the program. He went to the door of the room, opened it and peered into the hallway. Sota whirled and aimed the little submachine gun in his direction, but he didn’t fire.
“Jesus,” said Sota. “You scared me.”
“It’s about time,” said Cabell. “Let’s get out of here.”
As he glanced down the hallway to look for the most likely exit, he saw two things he didn’t like. One was that black smoke started to pour out of the crack under the door of one of the rooms down the hall. It wasn’t seeping out; it looked as though it were being blown out with a fan. The second thing he saw didn’t look as ominous at first. On the ceiling of the hallway thirty feet from Cabell’s head, a little red disk popped and fell to the carpet. Then the little brass pinwheel it had held in place started to spin. It gave a hissing, gurgling noise, and then began to spew a thick spray of muddy, rust-colored water onto the carpet. A second later the next spigot did the same. Cabell started to run, but it was too late. All along the pipeline, the spigots of the sprinkler system popped and vomited red-brown, icy water down on the hallway. The first eruption was so cold that Cabell’s heart stopped and he gasped, but in an instant he and Sota were drenched. As he sloshed toward the exit, he could taste the metallic, gritty stuff, and he kept waiting for the pipe to clear itself and maybe blow the sediment off his head and out of his eyes. But he made the exit without knowing if it ever got any clearer.
As they dashed out of the main entrance and slopped onto the pavement, Cabell could see two or three other men moving away. He looked to see if any of them were running, but they all moved with the same chagrined strides that he was taking. The son of a bitch they were supposed to kill must be long gone. If he had still been here, they would have heard him laughing.
Wolf finished ripping the woman’s dress off her bloody, lifeless body. He slipped the wet rag over his clothes and cinched it together with her dead companion’s belt, rolled his pant legs up over his knees, then pulled a little tablecloth that had “Chicago” embroidered on it off the counter, folded it, threw it over his head and tied it under his chin like a scarf. The torn, bloodstained dress covered his clothes, and if nobody got too close, he might make it the five yards to the car.
The only one out there who would be positive the woman couldn’t be dragging herself out of the burning building to drive herself to the emergency room was the one who had brought the knife across her throat. If any of the others were still around the motel, with all the noise and smoke attracting police and firemen and gawkers, they weren’t likely to open up on anything wearing a bloody dress. He just had to hope the one with the knife was gone.
As he slipped the bolt on the back door of the office, he had a brief attack of irrational reluctance. There was something horrible about the possibility of dying in this bizarre costume. But he reminded himself that he didn’t know any way of dying that wasn’t horrible, and if they got him, it wouldn’t much matter what he looked like. He swung the door open and bent over to cross the open space as quickly as possible.
Wolf slipped into the old Ford station wagon, started it and pulled away from the back of the motel slowly. There was a car parked across the drive, but nobody seemed to be in it, so he pulled around it and bumped across the lawn and onto the highway. When he saw the fire engines coming toward him, he pulled over to let them pass, but after that, he felt it was probably safe t
o get into the left lane and give the car its last hard ride. It was probably only good for about a half-hour drive, and after he abandoned it, the heirs would undoubtedly junk it.
“I love you,” said Elizabeth.
“I know,” said Jimmy. He was cheerful about it, and he seemed to mean it, but she wanted him to say, “I love you too,” and he didn’t seem to think this response was appropriate from somebody who was already four and on his way out the door to catch his ride.
“Be good.”
“Okay,” he said, then stepped out the door and ran down the steps toward the van. She watched him climb up the big step and pivot to sit down hard on the bench seat in the back. They grew up so fast. No, it wasn’t growing up; it was growing away–becoming a separate person.
Elizabeth spotted Amanda crawling across the floor toward the pole lamp. As she approached it, she was like a soldier in a movie scrambling up the last few yards of a beach under fire. Her little legs pumped so fast that her knees slipped out from under her and she made a premature grab for the pole. Elizabeth closed the front door and got there in time to hold the lamp upright as Amanda lifted her body, hand over hand, up to a standing position. She looked pleased and proud as she stared up at the bulb, her little face containing a hint of the explorer planting a flag on a peak, as well as a hint of the escaped felon. She had made it in time to keep her mother from stopping her. “Up, up, up so tall,” said Elizabeth helplessly.
It was a simple matter to hold the pole firmly while Amanda bent her knees and bobbed up and down in an attempt to dislodge it and topple it over. “Careful, baby girl. That’s not a good game.” Elizabeth acknowledged that she should have stored it in the garage with the glass coffee table months ago. Maybe tonight, when she had gotten into her jeans and sweatshirt, she could face that corner of the garage. Jim used to do that sort of thing. A lot of the stuff in there was just where he had put it a year ago, and it would probably stay there forever. She wasn’t very good at getting rid of things.
Elizabeth heard Maria open the door behind her and then hang her purse on the doorknob. “Hello, Maria,” she said. “Say hello to Maria, Amanda. Say, ‘Hi, Maria! How’s it going?’ ”
Maria moved into the living room. “I’m here, little Amanda,” she said. “I missed you so much. I wanted to come back just as soon as the sun came up. I said, ‘Where’s my little Amanda? I better get dressed quick and run to the car.’ ” This was to tell Elizabeth that she knew she was late, and that nothing was wrong. “Now we better say bye-bye to Mama.” This was to tell Elizabeth that she was dismissed.
Maria snatched up Amanda and carried her to the door for the ceremony. Elizabeth kissed the baby’s incredibly smooth little cheek, and Amanda’s fat little chin started to quiver, her eyes filled with tears and she began to cry the lament of the forsaken. Elizabeth said, “I’ll be back before you know it. I love you,” and the tiny, uncomprehending victim held her arms out in a final plea as her mother slipped out the door. For some stupid reason, this morning she could feel tears forming in her own eyes as she hurried down the steps toward the garage. She knew that the stupid reason was that her period was going to start, and that a lot of unnecessary hormones were coursing through her and making her feel weepy. But at the same time she also didn’t know it, because even though it always happened, and had since she was thirteen, each time it was as though such a reaction had never occurred before. Because what she was feeling was as real as any other feeling at any other time, and maybe it was, after all, the true reaction. Maybe the difference was that at other times she had the strength to keep herself from seeing things clearly.
As she started the car, she thought again that it was probably going to begin giving her trouble unless she found time to get it into the shop for maintenance this week. Maybe Thursday, so it would be okay again by Friday and they wouldn’t have any excuse to keep it over the weekend. This morning everything seemed to be overdue and about to fall apart.
As Elizabeth drove into the city, she made a point of looking at the trees. She had read in a doctor’s column in a magazine that looking at trees was a cure for stress. It had something to do with focusing one’s eyes on faraway objects, and something to do with the color of the leaves. But the same column had said that a cure for depression was looking at the light in the sky just before the sun came up. She hadn’t missed a day at that in one year and two weeks.
Elizabeth found herself in the Organized Crime office earlier than expected. Maybe looking at trees was a cure for slow driving. She sat down at her desk and saw with sadness that someone had taken the time to provide her with an “In” box. She didn’t want an “In” box, so now she would have to spend some time trying to find out who had done such a thoughtful thing and then try to keep from hurting her feelings.
Elizabeth had learned years ago that analysis had to do with taking the flow of information that moved through the bureaucracy and preventing it from moving in its normal way through the old channels. Sometimes she collected tidbits and left them lying around for weeks until they made sense, and sometimes she merely scanned the printouts and knew that there was nothing in them but distractions. If you had an “In” box and an “Out” box, you were treating information the way it was meant to be treated, which was the wrong way. The system put you here to process paper, but you had to resist the system in order to make it work.
She put her purse in the “In” box so that nobody would deliver anything there, and walked to the communication room to look at the night’s reports. As she entered, she saw a copy of the NCIC entry lying on the desk. Something had been added to the bottom of it: “Information concerning the suspect: Attention E. V. Waring, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., as Agent in Charge.”
Wolf sat by himself in the back of the diner in the Chicago railroad station and looked at the pile of folded papers. If they had not been about him, he wouldn’t have had any idea what they said. As he had thought, Charles Ackerman had been burned for all time: the paper referred to him as “AKA Charles Ackerman, AKA the Butcher’s Boy, real name UNK.” They had tagged him with Tony Talarese for sure, but said they also wanted him for questioning about Peter Mantino and Angelo Fratelli. So Little Norman had been right about the wire on Talarese. That had brought the FBI in right away, and then somebody there had told them who he was.
Still, the physical-description part didn’t seem to fit this theory. Hair color, eye color, height, weight: all UNK. If somebody had recognized him, what the hell had they used—smell? What it sounded like was that they had heard about his identity from somebody who didn’t know he was telling them. They must have picked it up from the wiretap. If they had put a wire on Talarese, they would have tapped his phones too.
In one way it was reassuring; they didn’t seem to know anything about him at all—where he was, what he looked like, what he was doing. In about four other ways, it was starting to scare the hell out of him. The reason he was stuck in the United States in the first place was that somehow they had managed to figure out he was using the Charles Ackerman passport, then had shut down an airport three thousand miles away in time to keep him from using it again. Maybe they had shut down every airport in the country with one phone call. He had no way of knowing how they did things, or whether there was any practical limit to what they could do.
In the old days he hadn’t spent much time worrying about the police. He had thought about them only when he was actually doing a job. If he managed to get through it without making too much noise, leaving fingerprints or getting himself hurt, he stopped thinking about them at all. It didn’t take much thought to stay out of their way; once you got out of the water, you could probably stop worrying about getting bitten by a fish.
He wanted to stop worrying about the FBI. He thought about going to Mexico. He could certainly get across the border, but what then? He didn’t know anybody in Mexico, and the Mafia must have lots of people there to keep an eye on its drug interests. It was a fairly obvious place f
or him to go into hiding, so they would be looking for him, with fewer chances of missing him. Even if he could buy a passport there that would get him into England, it wouldn’t do him much good. The British customs man would ask him a question in Spanish, and he wouldn’t understand it.
He could get into Canada with even less strain. A Canadian passport would be perfect, but the setup there had always been worse than in Mexico. The Mafia had established footholds all along the border during Prohibition in order to bring in liquor. Even before that, a lot of the old Mustache Petes had gotten into the United States by signing up for a wheat harvest in Manitoba or someplace and walking across the invisible line. It was hard to know what the Mob controlled there, but one thing they were sure to have a corner on was forged passports. He kept remembering the computer scanner that Immigration had used on his passport at Kennedy. He needed a real passport or he was going to be stopped. And unless he got out of the country soon, there was no question that he was going to die. The way he had survived in the past was by quick retaliation. The hand would move in his direction, and he’d sting it, and it would hesitate long enough to let him disappear. It still worked, too, except for the part about disappearing.
It wasn’t the Mafia that was keeping him in the fire; it was the damned FBI. But he was overlooking something. Organizations didn’t do anything; it was some person in charge, some human intelligence that was working on him. He looked at the sheets of paper again. On the last one was “Attention E. V. Waring, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., as Agent in Charge.”
Wolf finished his coffee and walked out into the cavernous train station. The place was not just wide but vertically immense, in a way that buildings constructed now could never be unless they were designed to shield some sport from the weather. The ceiling must have been seventy or eighty feet above him, and they could have held a cattle drive through the waiting area without taking up more than a third of the marble floor. These places had seemed archaic to him when he was a child, remnants of some richer time when there was more stone and wood and leather in the world, and more time to think about what things looked like. In the old days these places were always noisy with the echoes of feet, luggage carts, yelling and amplified announcements, but for some reason he couldn’t remember ever hearing a train. Now the station still echoed, but the sound of his shoes on the marble was all he heard as he walked to the one ticket window that wasn’t boarded up and bought a ticket to Washington, D.C.
