by Thomas Perry
Fusco gave Castelli a push toward the stairs, then looked at Petri and pointed to the left. Fusco walked up the ramp himself. It was good for his status to have the others think that he had all the guts, but the truth was that it was the safest place to be. This guy wasn’t going to shoot the man in the middle first. You might shoot the one on the right, or the one on the left, but you never shot the one in the middle. It was one of those odd things.
Fusco was a little suprised when he made it to the top of the ramp without hearing another shot. But then he saw Martillo’s driver, who was dead as a can of tuna. When he turned his head, he could see Castelli bending over another body in the stairwell. It was Martillo, which left only one likely candidate for the driver of the Lincoln.
“Carmine,” said Petri.
“Wait a minute,” Fusco said. “I’m thinking.”
“Didn’t that guy Martillo say his car had a Thiefbuster?”
Fusco smiled. It figured that Petri would have picked up on that. Ever since those things had gone on the market, Mr. Vico had been on Petri’s butt to think of a way to locate and disconnect them. They were making it dangerous and nerve-racking to boost a car.
Wolf finally found the button that rolled down the window and pushed it. It went only halfway down before the place where his bullet had punched through stuck in the slot and the electric motor hummed without moving it. When he rested his elbow and forearm on the window and leaned, it rolled all the way in. This didn’t help make him feel any more comfortable, but it did make the car look normal from the outside. On the inside it wasn’t normal at all. He had walked up to the driver and shot him through the window. The bullet had gone through his forehead and out the back of his skull, and he had fallen across the front seat. The problem with head wounds was that they produced a lot of blood. Even though he had pushed the body out the passenger side within a few seconds, there was blood all over the interior; the leather upholstery of the passenger seat had a pool of blood on it that sloshed onto the floor every time he applied the brake, and seeped backward when he stepped on the gas pedal.
The only thing on his mind now was getting onto 1-395 and back to Alexandria before somebody spotted him. He had to find a way to slow everything down. It was as though the pace of things had changed in his absence. Events happened too quickly now, which made it seem as though they didn’t have any relationship to each other. He needed an hour or two in a place where he didn’t have to look over his shoulder. He would have to duck under the surface again and come up someplace else where he could be the one who made things happen. He wished now that he had killed Little Norman instead of talking to him. He had considered it carefully, and thought he’d had nothing to lose. If everybody he had ever known was already eagerly looking for him so that they could get rich, then there was no way he could make things worse, so he had offered a rational, measured bargain: in effect, he would cease to exist, and all they had to do was to let him. But they hadn’t let him, and this was why things were happening so fast.
He reached Alexandria with a small feeling of surprise. He had managed to sedate himself with the simple mechanical task of keeping the car between the lines. He turned onto his street, then into the driveway, opened the garage door, drove the car in and shut the door with the briefest, most economical movements he could manage. As he walked to the front door, he glanced across the street at the house of E. V. Waring. Tonight was going to have to be the night. If he left her body inside the trunk of Pauly the Bag Man’s car and parked it in the right place, maybe he could cause some trouble for them.
As he opened his front door, he saw a piece of paper stuck in the mail slot. When he plucked it out, he could see the engraving that he had selected: “E. V. Waring.” It read, “Please stop by around eight for coffee and dessert. It’s the only way I can thank you for your help this morning, and my pride demands it. The least I can do is welcome you to the neighborhood. Sincerely, E.”
“You know, this wasn’t necessary,” said Wolf. “It’s wonderful, but you didn’t have to do it.” He gestured vaguely at the long dinner table. The dark, polished hardwood stretched for at least five feet past the zone covered with white linen, china, silverware and the remnants of a peach torte. She must have bought it in some other time, when she thought she was going to be cooking for her whole FBI squad, or whatever they called them.
Elizabeth smiled. At least somebody had taught him to compliment the hostess. He seemed to be nice enough, but he was boring—unbelievably, thunderously boring. He didn’t appear to have any interests or experiences that he could be induced to tell her about. Why did she always feel that she had to do this kind of thing? “It’s nothing. I just wanted to thank you for helping with the car and giving me a ride to work. I hope you didn’t get into trouble …”
“Trouble?”
“You were late, weren’t you?”
“Not at all. I was making cold calls.”
“Cold calls?”
“No appointment, no warning. You just drop in on them and see if they’re interested in what you’re selling.”
“What are you selling?” she asked brightly.
“At the moment, advertising space. Want some?”
“I don’t think so.” No wonder he didn’t talk about it. Even he wasn’t interested. “Would you like some more of this torte?”
Wolf looked at the pastry and shook his head. “Save some for your kids. Where are they, anyway?”
“They had dinner at six tonight. If you can call it dinner. Amanda throws it, mostly, and Jimmy evades it. Amanda goes to bed around seven-thirty, and tonight Jimmy fell asleep at eight—a big day at preschool, I guess.” She pointed to the little box on the sideboard that looked like a transistor radio. “If you listen carefully, you can hear Amanda snoring. I’m afraid you won’t get to meet them.”
“Oh. Too bad.” He began to search his mind for a way of killing her so that they wouldn’t see it happen, or walk out here in the morning and find the body. He didn’t want to kill them, and he wanted the maid to find the body.
“Do you like children?” Elizabeth asked. She regretted it instantly, and a wave of something that felt like heat swept over her. It was the sort of question that somebody—somebody very crude and desperate—might ask a single man if she wanted to determine whether he was a suitable prospect. Now he would think that she was pathetic. Then it occurred to her that there was a worse possibility. What if he misinterpreted the whole invitation? She had dragged him over here alone in the evening—well, not alone, because the kids were here, but without any other adults—and he could easily think it was because she wanted to seduce him. Of course he would, when in reality the impulse had been exactly the opposite. She had wanted to assert the fact that she was an independent person who repaid a kindness with an appropriate gesture of thanks. But he could understand this and still imagine that she thought the appropriate gesture of thanks was …
It took him a moment to come back to the conversation. “Uh … I guess so. I mean, I don’t really know much about them, except for remembering being one. But it would be sort of odd not to like them, wouldn’t it? It would put me in a strange position: not liking the members of my species until they were fully grown. So I guess I do.”
She smiled again. She had been imagining it all. He had managed to block another avenue of conversation in the process of reassuring her, but that was no loss; she had been known to drone on about the kids.
Wolf said, “It must be kind of hard taking care of them by yourself. I see you going off to work every day.” At last he had found a way to bring up the husband. Was he at a military base on Guam, or was he going to come through the door in ten minutes to pick up his mail or pay his alimony?
“I have a baby-sitter. She’s a nice woman and the kids like her. But it is hard. You feel guilty for leaving them, and you feel guilty at work because you sometimes have to miss a day or go home early because they’re sick, or whatever. What it is, really, is that when yo
u have kids you need to work more than you ever did, but even when you’re at work, you’re not always thinking about your job, and if it comes down to a choice, the job always comes second.”
If the job came second, she must be a hell of a mother. He had been in the trade for more than fifteen years before he had left, and he had never had to think about the federal government. But now he did. “What do you do at the Justice Department?”
“I’m sort of a bureaucrat, I guess.”
“You mean you’re a lawyer, or an FBI agent?”
“Lawyer,” she said. “My husband was the FBI agent. He got to do the glamorous stuff, and I sit in an office.”
“Was. You’re divorced.” He tried again.
“No such luck,” she said. “Jim died of cancer about a year ago.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” He noted the way she said it. It would be better if he could be alive. She loved him, or had reached the stage where he had a rosy glow around him and she was telling herself that she did. But she was in luck; she was going to be one of those widows who didn’t last long after her husband died.
“Don’t be,” she said. “Everybody loses somebody; if it’s not a husband it’s parents, grandparents. And we had the kids. I’m lucky.”
He nodded. “That’s a nice way to think about it.”
“You sound like you think I’m deluding myself.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Wolf said. “I meant it. We don’t have a whole lot of choice about certain things, and death is one of them. But you do have a choice about how you think about it.”
“That’s true. But I’ve thought about it in a lot of different ways, and I think this is the right one—not because it’s the most useful, but because it’s the most accurate. Most of the time I don’t feel sad. I just miss him.”
Wolf wasn’t really listening now. Something strange was happening. From his seat at the end of the table he could see a red glow through the curtains. It was the brake lights of a car pulling up in front of his house across the street. After a second or two the lights went out. He hadn’t seen any headlights. He listened for the thumps of doors slamming so he could count them, but he couldn’t pick up a sound. “Tell me about him,” he said. “I mean, if it doesn’t bother you.”
It was strange the way he focused his eyes on some point beyond the wall, almost like a blind person. Maybe he was remembering something of his own. There was more to him than she had thought. “Well, we had fun together.…”
“You mean he had a sense of humor.”
“Not exactly. I mean, he did, but it was sort of an FBI agent’s sense of humor. I know it’s not fair, but they’re in a mostly male sort of world, so most of the jokes are inside jokes, and the ones that aren’t are kind of simple. Somebody famous once said that the difference between men and women is that women don’t like Falstaff.”
What the hell was she talking about? He still hadn’t heard the doors. He tried to concentrate. “I thought it was The Three Stooges.”
She grinned. “That was a different famous person.”
He hadn’t heard the doors, but a car went by on the street, and he saw that for just a second the brake lights went on as it passed his house. “Maybe so.”
“I guess what I mean about Jim was that he had a capacity for fun. The way we got together was that ten years ago we were each assigned to the same case. It was a bad case, and the outcome was awful. Afterward I took six months in Europe. One morning, really early, I was asleep in my hotel when the concierge woke me up to tell me I had a visitor. It was Jim. We hadn’t been dating or anything; he simply showed up.”
It must be the police. How could they have followed him here from the parking structure without him seeing? Why hadn’t they just grabbed him as he had pulled into his driveway? He realized that some reaction was expected, but he hadn’t heard any of it, so he smiled.
“Then later, about two years ago, he came home one day with three tickets for a flight to London.”
“A flight to London?”
“That’s right. He did it because it had been eight years since the first time.”
“Very nice,” he said. “That is fun.”
“He was always doing unexpected things like that. When I say he was an FBI agent, you probably picture a fullback with a big neck. He wasn’t. In fact, he looked enough like you to be a relative. He was perfectly normal, about your size, and had an intelligent look in his eyes. He had a perfectly good law degree, and we always talked about going into practice together someday.”
Was it possible that she had somehow identified him? Maybe she was going on like this to give her people time to surround the place. She would go out to the kitchen again to get more coffee, then slip out the back while the SWAT team came bursting in through every door and window. No, she had actually made herself feel sad. He wanted to look out the window at the people across the street, but he couldn’t take the chance. “Here,” he said. “Let me help you take the plates and stuff.” He picked up a plate and the glass serving dish with the torte on it and stood up. He decided that if she was conning him he would crack the serving dish on the edge of the counter and bring it across her throat.
As they walked to the kitchen, he had to think of something to say. “It’s too bad the kids were so young. They didn’t get to see much of him.”
“I know,” said Elizabeth. “I think it’s going to be hardest on Jimmy. He’ll remember him a little bit. Then there’s all that stuff the psychologists put in their books to scare mothers.…”
“What stuff?”
“About little boys needing men to identify with.”
“I wouldn’t take that too seriously.”
“I don’t know. I find myself stuck being a combination of the strong, domineering mother and the cold, distant father.” She looked at him mischievously. “I run into the product a lot professionally.”
She couldn’t see that he had stepped sideways through the door because she was looking the other way. He surveyed the kitchen, but there was nothing. The place looked like the kitchens he remembered seeing on television when he was a kid, with curtains on the window over the sink and a lot of cookie jars and salt-and-pepper shakers that looked like fish and fruit and little people in rows on the shelf. It was also a mess. There were pots and pans and knives and spills on the counter, and even a couple of slippery spots on the floor where something had dripped while she was cooking the kids’ dinner. Eddie’s kitchen had looked like an operating room in a hospital, with a gleaming stainless-steel cutting table in the middle of the floor that he had bought from the same wholesaler he dealt with at the butcher shop. But Eddie had been a rotten cook, so they had eaten at diners whenever they could think of an excuse.
He followed her back to the dining room for another load of dishes. He had to get a look out that window. “Did you take any pictures of England?”
“Sure,” she said. “But you don’t want to see them.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Jim took almost all of them, so it’s Elizabeth and Jimmy in front of this and Elizabeth and Jimmy in front of that.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
She shrugged. “You have to promise that as soon as you’re bored you’ll stop looking. They’re what you might call priceless family treasures. That means we’re always in focus, but the monuments and cathedrals aren’t. I put them away in Jimmy’s closet because I knew that someday he and Amanda will want to look at them.”
“If it’s too much trouble, don’t bother. I just thought that sometime I might like to go there. I’ve never been out of this country.”
“I don’t mind showing them to you. It’s just that looking at pictures of somebody else’s vacation is sort of a yawn.”
“I promise not to.”
Carmine Fusco sat in the dark in the living room of the house where the Butcher’s Boy had parked Martillo’s car. He had been sitting in a comfortable chair to the side of the door and about fifteen feet away from it, bu
t now he was restless and he stood up. Imagine a man like that living in this kind of a house for all these years. It was going to be an embarrassment to Mr. Vico if anybody found out that the Butcher’s Boy had been living quietly in the Washington suburbs for ten years.
He walked across the room. There was something about the darkness that made you more quiet. He could hear every creak of the floor. “Castelli?” he whispered.
“Yeah?”
“See anything?”
“No. Maybe he’s got a date.”
“If he can get it up after what he’s been through today, I’d like to meet her.”
“Jesus, if I can get it up after what I’ve been through I’d like to meet her.”
Carmine moved to the window and held up his wrist beside the curtain, but he still couldn’t see his watch. He knew it should have been comforting, because it meant the rest of him wasn’t going to be easy to see either, but it was just frustrating. It was bad enough waiting to blow away somebody you were scared of, but losing track of time made it seem longer.
Wolf waited until she kicked off her shoes and slipped into the hallway. He noticed that she didn’t tiptoe, but placed her feet flat on the floor to keep her weight from making the floorboards creak. When she turned and opened a door on her left he quickly stepped to the window and moved the curtain aside half an inch. He could see that the cars that had stopped in front of his house had pulled away immediately. They must have expected to find him there, so they had all arrived at once to storm the place. When they had found that he wasn’t inside, they had made the cars disappear and sat down to wait. That didn’t seem to him to be the way cops usually operated. They would kick in the door, flip on all the lights and rush him. But if they found the house empty, they would spend the next five hours tearing it apart and taking pictures and fingerprints. It occurred to him that he was with somebody who knew what cops would do, but that there wasn’t any way to get her to tell him.
