The Butcher's Boy bb-1

by Thomas Perry

  “John,” said Elizabeth, letting just a hint of the exasperation she felt seep into her voice, “this company has turned up at least twice now in murders that might be professional within a week. It’s a match as it is, and I think there’s a third.” She waited until she knew he had to speak.

  “All right,” said Brayer. “It’s slim, but I’m willing to pursue it, to a point. The third, if I remember, was that the initials turned up in something of Senator Claremont’s, right?”

  “You know it is,” she said.

  “What’s the name of the staff counsel on Claremont’s tax committee again?” He matched her impatience with a fair imitation of sluggish complacence, but she saw that he already had the telephone receiver in his hand.

  “Justin Garfield,” she said in a sweet alert voice he would probably have believed in another conversation.

  “You might as well go wait for me at your desk,” said Brayer. “If this guy says FGE is Fieldston Growth Enterprises, I’ll want a report I can use to get a subpoena for their records before you get on the plane.” He started to dial the telephone.

  “What plane?”

  “To wherever this company is—oh, yeah,” he said, staring at the computer copy she’d laid on his desk. “Las Vegas.”

  HE KNEW WHAT HE HAD to do without stopping to think about it. When he drove past the Frontier he spotted two watchers without even turning his head. One was in a Mark VI parked in perfect position to block the front exit of the parking lot if he slipped the hand brake and let it roll forward five yards. The other was just inside the lighted front lobby, waiting for a taxi within a few feet of a half dozen of them. He drove eastward toward the other end of the city.

  There was no simple way to do it without making a lot of noise. He wouldn’t have the kind of time it took to be clever, and there were sure to be a lot of people around who were ready to avert just this kind of thing. Castiglione was old, but he was old the way a retired president was old, living behind a high fence in a house that was built like a fort and cost somebody plenty. If you had a reason to see him it was hard enough to get in, but if you didn’t have a reason it was worth your life to try. Still, it had to be Castiglione. He was the only one. He was the elder statesman, the one who had always had the juice to keep Balacontano and Toscanzio and some of the others in check. If he was out of the picture there would be confusion. None of the capos would ever believe that one of them hadn’t done it, and the only reason to do it was to make a bid for ascendancy.

  Eventually one of the others would come out on top, but it would take time for them to devour the losers. If he couldn’t be sure of getting the one he wanted, this was the next best thing. He drove up Grayson Street slowly, a good citizen of Las Vegas trying not to wake up the neighbors after he got off the eight-to-two shift at the Thunderbird or somewhere. Grayson Street was a ruler-straight parkway with a hairpin turn at the end of it dominated by the imposing adobe facade of Castiglione’s house. As he swung past the house he studied it carefully. There was nobody outside patrolling the grounds. It had probably seemed unnecessary to have somebody freezing in the cold desert wind to protect a man whose personal enemies had been dead for decades. The adobe wall around the yard didn’t obscure the view of the house, which sat on a little rise in the center of a vast lawn. No shrubs had been allowed to grow within a hundred feet of the house, so anyone who approached it would be in the open all the way back to the street. And there would be lights, although at a glance he couldn’t see them, big floodlights that would change night into day in the first seconds of danger. The windows of the place were negligible squares cut into the adobe of the house’s Spanish-style facade, more because a blank wall that size without some variation would offend the eye than because old Castiglione would want to look outside at the shimmering heat waves of the desert floor.

  It wasn’t promising, he thought. Castiglione had been in too much danger for too many years before he’d come West. Besides the front entrance, there was a side door that opened on a stone walkway to the swimming pool. He parked the car in the driveway of a neighbor, facing the street. He took the rifle and began to walk the circuit of Castiglione’s wall. Now that he could see the place clearly, it was even more forbidding. There were only the two doors he’d seen from the street, and at the back of the house even the small windows had been eliminated. He began to wish he had some dynamite. He couldn’t see any lights burning in the house, but he knew that the old man who lived here would have someone awake, if only to be sure the telephone didn’t disturb his sleep.

  He felt frustrated and disappointed. It was going to be a pain in the ass. He carefully climbed the fence and approached the house, watching where he placed his feet. It wouldn’t be out of the question for the old bastard to have the lawn booby-trapped. He cautiously walked around the house looking for points of vulnerability until he found what he needed. There was a barbecue pit big enough to roast a side of beef, and near the swimming pool were two cabinet doors built into the wall. When he saw them his heart began to beat faster. It could be done. He took his pocket knife and quietly jimmied the first of the doors. Inside was the hot-water heater for the house. Behind the second door was a collection of miscellaneous objects: garden tools, charcoal and a can of fire-starter for the barbeque pit, bottles of chlorine for the swimming pool, a long hose already attached to a faucet. He leaned his rifle against the house.

  In the darkness it was difficult to work silently, but he moved with care and deliberation. First he took the charcoal and the can of fire-starter and moved around to the front door of the house. He banked the charcoal against the gigantic wooden door and soaked it with the odorous liquid, getting as much as he could on the door itself. Then he left it to sink in and moved back to the patio. He took all of the garden tools and spread them on the pavement in front of the door. The hose he propped between two gallon jugs of chlorine so that it aimed from the side into the doorway. He checked the loads of his rifle and pistol and set the rifle on the deck next to the swimming pool. He looked around to see that everything was ready. The hot-water heater was the key to all of it, so it would have to be first. He turned off the gas valve and then disconnected the heater from the gas pipe. He went around to the front door and started the charcoal fire.

  He trotted back to the patio, turned on the gas and lit the jet, then turned it up so the flame was high enough to lick the top of the cabinet. Then he turned on the faucet and adjusted the pressure so that a steady, hard stream of water rushed across the doorway. Finally he retreated to the swimming pool. He lowered himself into the water at the shallow end of the pool and gasped. It was colder than he’d imagined. He ducked down to wait, holding the rifle above the surface and shielding himself from the growing glare by clinging to the gutter of the pool nearest the house.

  It seemed to be taking a long time. He peered over the edge of the pool at the house. There were still no lights on, but he could see the glow of the fire in the front of the house, and the gas jet was flaming steadily. The eaves had caught, and part of the roof. Already the facade of adobe was crumbling, and the plywood siding beneath it crackled into flames almost instantly. He began to shiver, whether from the cold of the water or the cruelty of the night wind he couldn’t tell. It suddenly occurred to him that Castiglione might not be home. What if he wasn’t even home?

  But then the lights went on, one after another, each window now glowing. The fire from the hot-water heater must have eaten its way into the back of the house. He ducked down again. When they were ready to leave, the outside lights would blaze on. He listened to the muffled shouts inside the house, trying to gauge how many voices there were. There were doors slamming and the sound of running feet. He knew when someone reached the front door, because he heard a yelp that escaped into the night air, then footsteps back toward the rear of the house. The pool, he judged, was about seventy feet from the side door. He steadied the rifle on the cement deck and lined up his sights.

  At last the s
ide door burst open and a man ran out onto the patio. When he was sprayed by the hose he turned and shot at it, then swore when he stepped on a rake. He ran toward the hose, since it seemed to his dim, confused, frightened brain to be somehow the source of the trouble. He was easy to hit because when he got near enough to see that there was no one holding the hose he stopped short, silhouetted in the growing light of the fire behind him. Another man made it far enough to kneel over his fallen comrade, then looked around him for someone to kill, before the rifle’s sights leveled on him too.

  Inside the house they couldn’t tell what was happening. There had been shooting outside, and water coming from somewhere, but there was no way to put it together into a coherent idea that would tell them what to do. Somebody must be trying to put the fire out with the hose: he could tell that was what made sense to the two who rushed to the door next, because they weren’t armed. He let one of them get almost to the gas jet before he cut him down. The other stood inside the doorway, unaware that his companion was dead.

  From his spot in the dark swimming pool, he decided to take a chance. He shouted, “Get the old man out!” then ducked down into the shadows and waited. There was the sound of movement inside the house and then he saw what he had been waiting for. A man in pajamas carefully eased a wheelchair into the doorway, and moved it out onto the patio. He aimed the rifle at the center of the chair’s back and prepared to squeeze a round into it. Then he sensed something was wrong. When the attendant got the chair to the patio he moved away from it toward the front of the house, his gun drawn. It wasn’t right. They wouldn’t leave the old man alone, no matter what happened. He studied the chair through his telescopic sights. There was something in it, but now he was sure it wasn’t the old man. Some hero? No, there were shoes on the footboard, but the leather back of the chair didn’t bulge in the right places. He thought quickly. It couldn’t be the front door. He could see that the front of the house was blazing now. There must be another way out. But where was it?

  It had to be the garage. They’d want to get him away. The garage was behind him, too far to walk an invalid in an emergency. Suddenly it made sense. The place was built like a fortress, and yet the garage was a hundred yards away from the house. There had to be a tunnel under the yard. Then he realized that as soon as the ones who were left had made it to the garage, the old man would be driven away and then the floodlights would come on. He had to get out of the pool before they reached the safety of the garage.

  He calmed himself and aimed at the only man he could see, the one in the doorway. He watched him fall backward. He dropped the rifle into the water and heaved himself out of the pool and began to sprint for the garage. He made it just as the electric door began to whir. He heard the car’s ignition, and then the dark shape of the car, its lights out, slid forward beside him, inching ahead behind the rising door. He froze and waited until the driver was abreast of him, then fired the pistol into his face. The car kept sliding slowly forward of its own volition, no living foot on its brake to halt it. When the back seat slid into view beside him he saw the old man’s face, held for an instant in a mask of surprise and terror like a photograph. When he squeezed the trigger the head jerked sideways as though it had been kicked. He walked along beside the drifting car and shot the old man twice more before he relinquished his place beside it.

  He knew there would be only seconds now before someone turned on the lights. He sprinted for the nearest place the driveway ran along the wall and clambered over it. He didn’t look back, just kept running, turning the seconds of remaining darkness into whatever distance he could purchase. As he came to the end of the wall he saw a crouching shape waiting for him, both hands extended in front of it as though to steady a pistol. He heard the man shout something just before he fired into the crouching shape. The man’s gun went off in a last spasm of the fingers and he ran over the body before he realized that the man had said, “Hold it.” Hold it? Why would he say that? He kept running, but glanced back for an instant and realized the body was wearing a white shirt and tie under its coat. Strange, he thought. At three o’clock in the morning? But he didn’t have time to think about that. He was running hard along the house fronts. Behind him the floodlights went on and he heard the driverless car crash into something. When he reached the driveway where his car was parked, he jumped in, started it, and gave it as much gas as he dared without turning on the lights. In the rearview mirror he could see half the sky was lit up, a chaos of white floodlights and orange fire, and he could hear the first barking of guns back and forth across the deserted lawns and into the empty night. As he turned the corner and urged the car to fifty-five, he smiled to himself. He didn’t feel so angry now.

  19

  There was the climate-controlled humming tube of the airplane’s interior; and then the two stewardesses standing at their station next to the Formica kitchenette like a pair of dancers from the chorus line brought out for a last bow in front of the curtain; and then the white, searing sunshine of the Las Vegas Saturday morning. Elizabeth squinted as she stepped down the portable stairway, staring down at her feet to avoid a glaring sun that seemed to explode at her from every direction at once.

  There were no knots of happy relatives waiting at the terminal entrance for the passengers to arrive—everyone was a stranger here—only sober-faced preoccupied porters. As she looked about her for some sign that would tell her where to find her suitcase, a man’s voice came over a loudspeaker.

  “Elizabeth Waring, please come to the United Airlines Courtesy Desk, Elizabeth Waring. Elizabeth Waring, please come to the United Airlines Courtesy Desk, Elizabeth Waring.”

  Brayer. No question about it, she thought. No doubt he’d forgotten to tell her something, and it wouldn’t occur to him to wait until she got to the hotel. She approached the desk, and said, “Elizabeth Waring.”

  The man handed her a note, which said, “Please telephone John Brayer as soon as possible.” The please had to have been the airline’s amendment. She went to the bank of pay telephones on the wall across the lobby and dialed. He answered on the first ring.

  “Something’s going on there, Elizabeth,” said Brayer. “I’m not sure yet what it is, but we’ve got an agent down.”

  “Oh God,” said Elizabeth. “Are you sure? Who is it?”

  “The Las Vegas police phoned a half hour ago. They found DiGiorgio this morning when they were going over a burned-out house. He’s alive, but there were five dead men in the yard, and they’re not sure if there were others inside.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Sit tight for a few minutes. There’ll be a police officer at the United desk to take you to the hospital. If they’ll let you talk to DiGiorgio find out what you can. If they won’t, get everything the police have and get back to me. When you’ve done that I should have a better idea. For the moment work through me. Don’t try to get in touch with any of the field agents. I don’t know what the hell is going on and I don’t want anybody spotted until I do.”

  “John,” said Elizabeth, “I see the policeman at the desk now. I’d better get going.”

  “Fine. Get back to me when you can. We’ve got people all over Las Vegas and if they’re in danger we’ve got to know it.”

  Elizabeth hung up and moved toward the desk just as the policeman turned to approach her. “I’m Waring,” she said. The policeman nodded and touched the polished brim of his hat as they set off toward the door. He was tall and his first two strides left her a yard behind.

  “My luggage,” she said apologetically. “I haven’t picked it up.”

  “Where are you staying?” he asked.

  “The Sands.”

  He looked a little surprised, but said, “If you’ll give me your stub I’ll have it sent on.” He returned to the desk and gave the stub to the United man. He joined her at the curb outside, where his patrol car sat idling, its front door open and the radio squawking and sizzling.

  She got in beside him and h
e swung out into the drive. “How’s DiGiorgio?” she asked.

  “Critical,” said the policeman, his face stony. She decided that he didn’t like women, but that it didn’t matter whether he did or not, so she forgot about it. “He lost a lot of blood before they found him. Upper chest. One shot from close up, small caliber.”

  Elizabeth thought about it for a moment, but it didn’t mean much. “Does anybody know what happened?”

  The policeman’s eyes shifted to her face for an instant, then flickered back to the road. “We’d hoped you might help us there, ma’am.” There it was again, she thought. The exaggerated politeness reserved for outsiders. Outsiders and women. “He’s your man.” It sounded like a reproof.

  “He was assigned to surveillance,” she said. “But it was supposed to be remote. He wouldn’t have initiated any contact.”

  The policeman nodded. “That’s what we thought.” Then he added, “Of course, we didn’t know he was here. We were pretty surprised when we found his identification.” So that was it, she thought. A federal agent turns up and the local police didn’t know he was there—the implicit assumption that somebody is probably on the pad. She let the thought lie there between them, because there wasn’t anything she could do with it. It was just the way things were done and they both knew it and neither one was responsible for it, though it carried with it an insult to what he was and what he did.

  He seemed to have thought through it before she arrived, and so he recovered first and determined to do his job. He went into his recitation. “The house belonged to Salvatore Castiglione, so we’re assuming that was who Agent DiGiorgio was observing.”

  “Belonged?” she said. “Is the house destroyed?”

  “No,” he said. “Castiglione is dead. So are five other men who were apparently staying there. Four of them were shot with a high-powered rifle. We found the rifle in the swimming pool. Agent DiGiorgio and Castiglione and one other man were shot with something smaller. Maybe by each other. We won’t know until they finish with the ballistics reports and the autopsies.”