The Butcher's Boy bb-1

by Thomas Perry

  Elizabeth sat motionless for a moment, then remembered she was still holding the telephone, and set it back on the cradle. She thought it through again. No, it wasn’t like Brayer to take someone off a case and say nothing. He wouldn’t leave her in a quiet office with a pile of out-of-date reports to keep her out of the way while the others handled everything sensitive, would he? But then why hadn’t he explained what was going on? Then it hit her. There was another possibility. That was if the killings were local. The field agents would be reporting directly to the local controller. And the controller right now happened also to be the unit head. John Brayer.

  There was one way to find out, she thought. If the agents were in the field the controller would call in the report to the FBI office, even if the controller was John Brayer himself. And if Brayer had called in and the report had been withheld from her, she decided, she was damned well going to know why.

  25

  The car’s headlights threw a bright wedge of light into the dark Illinois fields and the car rushed forward to occupy it, never quite fast enough to catch up. He drove in the silence of intense concentration. He knew he had to figure it out, but no matter how he arranged the facts, there was something he didn’t know how to account for. It was the thing that was most dangerous.

  Maureen spoke. “I didn’t sell you.”

  “Huh?” he said.

  “I said I didn’t tell them where you were.” Her voice, coming from the darkness, sounded frightened. Of course.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “No, do worry, but not about that. I know you didn’t. You might be stupid enough to sell me to them and then panic when you realized they would take you out too. They’re not stupid enough to send a face I knew. Not unless they didn’t know where I’d be. You did fine. Your fee just doubled.”

  He sensed in the darkness that her body relaxed from a rigidity that must have gripped it for some time. Stupid, he thought, both of us—her for being afraid and me for letting her sit there like that and not noticing. And the gun she must have near her hand will disappear now. She won’t let me see it, and she’d deny it if I said it, but I know it’s there. Probably under her skirt, between her legs.

  “What now?” she said.

  “Now we’ve got trouble,” he said. “Did the old man know the cover?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But he didn’t blow it. He wouldn’t and anyway he couldn’t be sure they’d get us both.”

  “I suppose,” he said. “But the cover is blown. We’ll get rid of the car in a bit.”

  She was silent, so he went back to his concentration. Something was going on. He thought about the comical surprise on Crawley’s face when the slugs had ripped into him in the motel room. But that was just a distraction. Crawley was Bala’s creature. What was he doing in Chicago? Chicago belonged to Toscanzio. It was Toscanzio’s responsibility to get the man who’d killed Castiglione if he was in Illinois. It shouldn’t have been Crawley; they’d never hire an outsider for the one who’d gotten Castiglione. It should have been Toscanzio’s soldiers, maybe half a dozen. And they wouldn’t have sneaked in to do it quietly. They’d have smashed in and demolished him, torn the whole motel down if they had to. It didn’t make sense unless killing Castiglione had worked. He smiled to himself. There was no question about it. The bastards were at each other’s throats.

  “HE LOOKED JUST LIKE THAT when we found him, Miss Waring. We haven’t moved him yet because of the—the way it was done.”

  “I see,” said Elizabeth. She walked back toward the front of the gift shop where the other one had been, the girl. She stepped behind the counter and stood at the cash register, then scanned the room. You couldn’t see the dressing cubicles from the counter. The tall racks of china objects in the center of the room were too thickly crammed for that—coffee cups that had Las Vegas and a pair of dice on them, ash trays that looked like roulette wheels. The killers had probably stood behind the rack of coats in the back. The front of the gift shop was where all the likely objects were placed: the jewelry, small carved figurines, and even the junk that wasn’t worth stealing. In the back were the bigger things, the clothes and the imported coffee tables. They were too big for a shoplifter. There was a round convex mirror on the wall, but the girl at the cash register couldn’t have seen behind the rack of coats. God, what a place. A rack of coats—sable and mink and silver fox, none of them to be had for less than seven thousand, and next to it a rack of T-shirts. Something for everybody.

  The girl’s body was gone, but the usual chalked outline was on the rug where she fell. Not that anybody needed it. It was amazing how much blood you had in you.

  “Miss Waring, we’re getting ready to move him now.”

  Okay. One last chance. It wouldn’t accomplish anything, probably, except to give her one more image for a nightmare. But you had to look. You always had to look, because they might have made a mistake, gotten too confident, let their flair for the dramatic get them into trouble. She left the counter and made her way back around the racks of souvenirs to the dressing rooms.

  The police lieutenant was waiting for her. He pulled open the curtain and stood back. A gentleman, she thought. Absurd. She stared in at the body. It was sitting on the bench, leaning in the corner of the little cubicle, the head lolling sideways as though he were trying to look over his own right shoulder. She could see the face in the mirror, the open eyes bulging, and a T-shirt stuffed in the mouth. It was hard to tell what he would have looked like when he was alive. He was big: fifty-three years old, they’d said, but he was broad shouldered and with a barrel chest. She looked down at his waist. Not much of a paunch—he had stayed in shape. A hard man to take into a busy gift shop and do this to. He’d been strangled and they’d broken his neck. She looked down to examine the shoes, but she couldn’t get past the abdomen without stopping. For some reason that was the most horrible part of it. The joke.

  The china figurine of a baby rabbit had been stuffed into the fly of his pants, so only the head and shoulders stuck out, the little face smiling shyly at nothing. She looked down at the shoes. They were beautifully polished, with no scuff marks. What was the leather? Lizard. At least two or three hundred dollars, she thought. A good match for the suit. She’d lost track of what men’s clothes cost, but this one was expensive.

  “Do you know what he did?” she asked.

  “Did?” said the police lieutenant.

  “Yes,” she said. “What he did for a living. You know.”

  The lieutenant shrugged and let the curtain swing across the body. “Not really. Ferraro was from New York, and the response from NYPD didn’t tell us much. The first round just said he was a probable. When they sent the rap sheet to us the last they had was 1958, assault, three counts. Nothing recent, but he’s obviously come up in the world.” He nodded, and the ambulance men shouldered their way into the cubicle to begin maneuvering the body to their cart.

  “What do you think happened to the girl?” said Elizabeth.

  “Hard to tell,” he said. “At the moment I think she probably saw something or heard something, and started toward the dressing room. But it’s possible they wanted her too. She was shot four times. There must have been a silencer because nobody heard anything, and this is a big, busy hotel.”

  It didn’t matter, Elizabeth knew, because Brayer had been right all along. They had probably killed the girl because she’d seen their faces. There must have been two of them. It was Ferraro they wanted. But why in a gift shop in a bottom-level corridor of the MGM Grand Hotel? She looked out through the glass display window at the crowds moving past. It was easy to see how they’d done it, slipped in and done their work, maybe one of them at the door to pull the curtain and put up the CLOSED sign. Then in a few minutes they’d just come out and dissolved into the flowing current of people. And it might have been an hour before anyone had checked the door or wondered aloud why a hotel gift shop was closed at ten thirty on a Wednesday. But why? The only possibility was that Brayer w
as right. It was a struggle for primacy, and the opening gambit would have to be like this, terror tactics, each side telling the other that it would be best to submit. They were saying we can get you whenever and wherever we want to.

  HE RETURNED TO THE CAR and carefully wrapped the money in the newspaper so that it made a neat, tight bundle. He wrapped the masking tape around it and slipped it into the padded book mailer, then sealed the mailer. Maureen watched, but said nothing, just stared out across the broad expanse of the parking lot while he worked. He left the car and returned to the post office, then printed boldly across the package, P.O. Box 937, Tonawanda, New York 14150, and dropped it into the mail slot.

  When he was back in the car Maureen said, “Is that what this is all about?”

  He started the car and drove out of the lot. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “You’re collecting your nest eggs, aren’t you?”

  He nodded. “That’s part of it.”

  “And you’re mailing them somewhere.”

  “It would be hard to deny that, wouldn’t it?” he said. “So what? I’ve got to travel light.”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I just hope you’re not one of those guys who has a wife or a girlfriend somewhere waiting to pick it up.”

  He chuckled then said, “Maureen, are you jealous? I mean, you’re a lovely lady and an outstanding fuck, but come on.”

  “That isn’t what I mean and you know it,” she snapped. “I mean if wherever you mailed that isn’t secure I want to know about it, and I want my money now, because I’m getting out of this. If there’s somebody at that address they’ll have the money and they’ll have the place it was mailed from.”

  He looked at her. She was staring at him and her jaw was tight. He said, “Relax. It’s a post office box. I’ve had it for some time. I’ve got several of them, all over the place. Some I’ve used for people to get in touch with me when they had a job to offer. Some I use as addresses for the covers I need: a place to send bills for credit cards, license renewals, and so on. There’s somebody behind all those boxes—me. This address is a money drop for me. I’ve only used it three times since I’ve had it, which is about that many years. I’ve never given the address to anyone, and nobody knows I’ve been there. Is that secure enough?”

  Maureen didn’t answer at first, just stared ahead at the road. Then she brightened and said, “You’re not such a terrible fuck either. Nothing special, but adequate, I suppose.”

  He said, “Then it’s settled.”

  She looked puzzled. “What’s settled?”

  “That we get rid of this car, scrap Mr. and Mrs. William Prentiss, and disappear into the sunset. We’re going to make a jump and then go under for a bit.”

  They made Peoria at almost two o’clock. This time Maureen drove the car around the block and waited while he went into the bank. The money didn’t fit in the briefcase, so he put the rest of it in his pockets. This, he decided, would be enough. There were savings accounts in seven banks in different parts of the country, but they could wait. None of them was large enough to be vulnerable, and the money would keep until it was safe to transfer it in small payments to the account of his next identity. In the meantime it would even draw interest. If he left it for a few years it would double.

  The proportion was about right. He had at least eight hundred thousand dollars in those accounts, three hundred thousand in the post office box, and two hundred thousand with him when he returned to the street. He could wait. He could wait until Toscanzio and Balacontano and the others died or went off to retire in Italy, until Little Norman and everyone else who’d ever known him had died and been forgotten. Because he didn’t have to work again. He was a rich man. He could take it day by day, living comfortably but not comfortably enough to draw anyone’s attention. And each day he bought himself would make it less likely that the Italians would ever find him. Each day he would seem less dangerous to them, and each day would bring them something new that they’d rather think about because there was a profit in it. Someday they’d have forgotten all about him. In five years he’d be one of those problems that had solved itself. In ten, it would be hard to find anyone who could remember whether or not he’d been found and killed. Crawley had played a hunch and waited for him in Detroit and followed him. He’d have done the same himself. A sucker who had to disappear would try to get on a plane for someplace far away that he’d never been to, but you had to figure a pro would go to ground in a familiar place. But Crawley was dead. The only thing that still worried him a little was that Crawley had seen the car, and managed to find it again in the motel parking lot outside Chicago. Crawley had never been that lucky. Had he managed to do that alone?

  He stood in front of the bank looking for the car. Maureen would keep circling the block until she saw him. The traffic downtown was heavy, he thought. It might take a few more seconds before she came around again, so he watched the people on the street. It wasn’t a bad way to do things, he thought. There were other people standing in front of buildings across the street waiting for buses or the arrival of friends. He knew he didn’t look appreciably different from the others, if you took them as a group. He was wearing a sport coat and carrying a briefcase. The only difference was that his was full of money.

  He even counted two who looked a hell of a lot more suspicious than he did. One of them was a short, dark man with curly hair who was just standing on the corner across from him. He was wearing a gray three-piece suit and carrying a briefcase. He wasn’t waiting for a bus, because he was right at the corner. Whenever the light changed, a herd of people would scurry across the street, but he’d still be there. Whatever he was waiting for, he didn’t look impatient about it: he never looked at his watch and he never looked up and down the street to see if it was on the way. Maybe he was early. The other man was about a hundred feet from the corner, in front of the display window of a travel agency. He was waiting for someone too, but he was getting impatient. You could tell because he had been staring into the window for a long time, the way people did when they had been standing in one place long enough to wonder if they were attracting attention. It made them feel as though they had to be absorbed in doing something, or people would notice them. People would think, look at that schmuck standing there. He’s been there for twenty minutes. She stood him up, and he’s too stupid to know it, the poor bastard.

  Where the hell was Maureen? His sense of time must be off, because it seemed he’d been here long enough for her to go around the block at least twice. There couldn’t be trouble, not real trouble. He hadn’t been in Peoria in a year, at least. There was no way anybody could anticipate that he’d be coming to pick up an old contingency fund. The one thing they would believe was that he wasn’t worried about money. They’d given him two hundred thousand less than a week ago. But what was keeping Maureen? Unless she’d decided to sell him after all, now that they were separated and he could be had alone. No, that didn’t fit. She would wait for the forty thousand he’d promised her, because she could never suspect that he was worth more than that to them, not on what he’d told her. So where was she?

  He began to feel a prickling sensation at the back of his scalp. He was vulnerable. He had to stand here in the open as long as it took. There was no plan to cover the possibility that one of them would get into trouble. He’d only been in the bank for ten minutes—what trouble would there be? But there must be a problem. And here he was. He didn’t even have a gun. You didn’t walk into a bank with a gun on you because it wasn’t worth the risk.

  Suddenly he saw the car swing around the corner. He felt the muscles in his neck and shoulders relax. He could see Maureen behind the wheel now, coming toward him. It was all right. Then he thought, if she stopped somewhere and went into a store to buy a new pair of panties or something I’ll make her wish she hadn’t. As the car approached he took a step forward toward the curb to meet it.

  The car didn’t stop. Maureen didn’t even look in his direction, jus
t drove on past him and kept going. His practiced reflexes took over and he completed his stride and made another step forward. He looked down the street into the distance as though he hadn’t recognized Maureen. His mind worked at the problem. She had seen something and come here to warn him.

  She was being followed. It had to be that, because nothing else would make leaving him here less dangerous than picking him up. Somebody was following her, and she thought they wouldn’t make their move until the two of them were together in the car. So it had to be the car. Crawley hadn’t been alone after all, and someone had spotted the car a second time. And now she would have to keep driving, leading them somewhere else until either she shook them off or they realized she’d seen them. That meant they’d backtrack until they found him, or they’d take her and ask her questions. He didn’t bother to think about that. She’d tell. His forty thousand wasn’t worth what they’d do to her. Nothing was.

  So he had—what? Five minutes? Fifteen if she bought it for him. He looked at his watch, and then started walking down the sidewalk. The important thing would be to get off these streets as quickly as possible. He wished Peoria had subways. A taxi might do it, he thought, but he didn’t see any. A bus? No, a city bus was too dangerous. If anybody saw you get on, he’d see the route number and he had your schedule for the next hour. He walked briskly, varying his pace to the hurried strides of the people around him. He was getting cold. He hoped it didn’t show. A businessman wouldn’t hang around on the street long enough to get as cold as he felt.

  Across the street and ahead of him was a Sears store. That looked like the most promising place. He stopped at the corner to wait for the light to change. Then he saw the man. It was the short man in the gray suit. He had moved down the block across the street, and now he was standing at the corner. He looked to see if there were a second man. Maybe the one who’d been staring in the travel agent’s window? He couldn’t see anyone who looked familiar. But the man in the gray suit was looking at him.