The Butcher's Boy

by Thomas Perry

  Whatever it was, he’d have to stay out of sight until it was time for the payoff. If they were going to kill him it would probably be before rather than after. He checked the lock on the door, chained it, then moved the dresser in front of it. Then he went to the closet and pulled the pistol off the wall and checked the clip. Then he turned on the television.

  17The air was cold now that the sun had been down for a couple of hours. The hot, steady current of the desert breeze had changed into something harsher and more petulant that whirled down the Strip in icy eddies, then pawed at him and buffeted him from above as he waited to cross the street. He hunched his shoulders and moved closer to the center of the crowd of people. It was as though the frigid emptiness of the mountains was rushing in to correct some imbalance that had been precariously asserted by all this light and noise and motion and color—as though some fragile barrier had been swept away. He pulled his coat tighter around him and felt the pull of the tape on his belly. The hard, sharp edge of the safety catch on the pistol irritated his skin a little, but there wasn’t anything to be done about it now. There would be watchers around him already. It was the only place for it anyway. It had to be near his center of gravity, where he could forget about it. There was no way to carry an extra pound of steel attached to your side or your leg without involuntarily carrying yourself differently. One of the first things he’d learned was to watch for the man who held one arm an inch farther out than the other, or the man who stepped a little stiff-legged.

  Before the light changed the first two lurched forward into the street, and the rest of the people scurried after them. He stayed among them, measuring his steps to keep himself surrounded by their bodies. He looked at his watch again. He was still on time. It was just the cold that had made the walk seem endless. Above him in the dark night sky the gargantuan lady’s high-heeled shoe beaded with white light bulbs spun absurdly.

  In a moment the pneumatic doors huffed closed behind him like an air lock, and he stepped forward into the warm brightness of the casino. He kept moving deeper into the place. There was no question they had picked him up by now. Somewhere out of sight a telephone would have lit up and a voice would be saying “He’s here,” and that would be all.

  He strolled along the line of blackjack tables, his eyes sweeping the green felt surfaces for a sign, then straying upward to the private, emotionless eyes of the white-shirted dealers. He spotted it without difficulty. A new brigade of dealers filed down the aisle from wherever their break room was, but this time one of them stationed himself behind an empty table, fanned the deck of cards across the felt, and stood with his arms folded on his chest in the customary pantomime of ostentatious idleness that announced the opening of another table. The placard at the dealer’s elbow said ten-dollar minimum bet. So it was not to be private—it would be duly witnessed and recorded. The minimum was low enough to ensure that the table would fill up quickly. He waited to take a seat until two other players had rushed in front of him. The dealer swept his hand across the felt and the fan of cards closed into a thick deck. While the hands expertly performed the ritual of shuffling, the rest of the seats at the table were claimed.

  The dealer’s empty eyes seemed to stare out over the heads of the gamblers at some distant focal point as his fingertips tapped the fat deck into the shoe. The dealer looked young, his carefully sculpted hair blond from the sun, but already he had the ageless look of detached competence they all seemed to have worn into them. He clapped his hands once, held the perfect fingers up, turned them to show his palms, and said, “Good luck, ladies and gentlemen.”

  The cards seemed to fly from the shoe and appear in perfect order before the gamblers. The gamblers paid little attention to each other as each played his hand in turn, assessing the threat implicit in the dealer’s up-card. He watched the dealer’s hands float above the felt, collecting cards and moving chips with relentless unhesitating efficiency. He looked at the cards in front of him, a queen and a ten. The dealer’s nineteen won the chips on four of the betting circles, and paid off one other bettor. The cards appeared on the felt again and the dealer busted; the hands moved in an arc along the semicircle, duplicating five of the stacks of chips. The cards appeared again and the dealer’s seventeen had to pay four of the gamblers. As the game went on, the trend became clear. He was winning three hands out of four at minimum bets. Three of the others were getting random pairs of cards, sometimes good, sometimes bad. The dealer was using the other two.

  One was a fat man in a blue plaid sport coat who was dealt an ace and a ten-point card every few hands. The other was a small, pinched-looking woman about forty-five years old who was playing a mysterious intuited system that seemed to be paying off. He wondered which one the dealer was going to bust first. He collected his steady income, letting the dealer deftly pay his winnings in larger denomination chips to keep the stack in front of him from looking too big, and watched the other two winners to see if he could sense it coming.

  When the fat man began to double his bets, he knew. Slowly the trend changed. When the man lost, he doubled again. In a few minutes the chubby pink fingers extracted another pair of hundred dollar bills from the plaid sport coat and bought more chips. The cards kept coming, each pair the fat man got costing him more. Then he got up and left. When he pushed his chair back another man left too. By now the little woman was winning so steadily that the others took an interest. Nobody noticed that the nondescript man beside her was winning almost as steadily, or that he was now betting twenty-five-dollar chips. Two of them shrugged in sympathy when her luck ran out. One of them said, “Good move,” when she climbed down from the stool while she was still ahead. One by one the rest of the players dropped out and were replaced by new faces, until he was the only one of the original players who remained. The new people won or lost and moved on, none of them allowed to remain long enough to notice that the quiet man in the gray tweed was on a big winning streak. And then the dealer paid him off for a hand just as a new dealer arrived to relieve him. The dealer clapped his hands once, held his fingers up and said, “Good luck, ladies and gentlemen,” and walked away.

  Instead of watching while the new dealer began to shuffle, he looked at the last stack of chips. The third one down was slightly smaller. He pretended to restack them and palmed the chip so he could look at it. In the center, where the others had the legend Silver Slipper, this one said Flamingo. He put it in his pocket, collected the rest of the chips, and moved away from the table. At the cashier’s window the teller gave him almost ten thousand dollars.

  IT SEEMED EVEN COLDER outside now. The Flamingo was several long blocks out on the Strip, but he didn’t take a taxi. As soon as he had made his way to the blackjack tables he spotted the invitation. This time it was a middle-aged woman who looked a little mannish in the dealer’s white shirt. The evening was approaching its peak now, and seats were scarce at the tables. The twenty-five-dollar minimum bet at her table didn’t discourage anyone when she laid out the fan of cards. The game proceeded as it had in the Silver Slipper. Time after time he got nineteen or twenty. The dealer’s seventeen or eighteen took most of the chips on the table; about a quarter of the time she went over twenty-one. He won steadily while the faces around him changed. After about an hour the dealer paid him with a chip from the Dunes. This time when he cashed in the teller gave him forty thousand dollars. As he walked to the Dunes he was beginning to wonder where he would carry the rest of it. But by the time he left the Dunes it was almost midnight, and the Friday evening gamblers were too busy to notice that the teller had counted out sixty thousand-dollar bills to the man in the gray tweed. At the Aladdin it was the same. By the time the dealer at the Tropicana gave him the chip from Caesar’s Palace he calculated that he must have the whole two hundred thousand. His pockets were full of money and they were sending him home. He had to admit it was sort of funny: they’d actually found a way to ring in their own dealers without the solid-citizen management types of all those big hot
els even suspecting it. Anything happens, the hotels get the heat.

  At the front entrance of the Tropicana the wind was now blowing in an unvarying, merciless rush up the street into the city. He checked his watch and saw that it was after one thirty. The fire he’d set up in his room would start at two if he didn’t stop it, and the pedestrian traffic had died down at the outer end of the Strip. He took the doorman’s offer of a taxi. “Caesar’s,” he said and the car roared down the driveway to the street, then stopped. The driver said, “Excuse me, sir,” and got out. He bent down as though to check the left front tire.

  It was a second before he realized what was happening, but when the two cars pulled up on either side of the cab he recognized the face of the man in the cowboy shirt. The man was out of his own car and reaching for the door handle of the cab already. The one on the other side was a pace or two slower. He chose that one.

  He didn’t feel the pain when he tore the pistol off his belly, just a sensation of cold where the tape had covered him and his shirt was open. The gun blast jerked the man backward a few feet, but he was out the door and had the pistol in the cab driver’s face before the body toppled on its back. The cab driver’s face had an expression of surprise when he squeezed the trigger. He knew the cowboy was on the ground somewhere behind the car, but there was no time. He jumped into the front seat past the steering wheel, threw the cab into gear and hit the gas pedal hard with his left foot. The cab jerked forward as he struggled to control it without showing his head above the seat. He heard shots as he wheeled out onto the Strip, but the sound of the cab’s engine accelerating drowned out whatever he could have heard of the bullets smacking into the side of the car. He took the first right turn off the Strip and waited to see if the other cars had followed. After a few seconds he knew they had stopped to pick up the bodies, so he drove the cab into a parking space behind a closed gas station and got out. “Jesus,” he said aloud. “So it was the taxis.” They had offered him one outside each casino. And that was why they’d picked the casinos so far apart.

  Damn them!

  There was nothing he could do now except get out quickly. He’d have to make his way to the car in Caesar’s parking lot and get out. But damn them! They hadn’t needed to do it in the first place. He wouldn’t have been a threat to Carl Bala, sitting up there in the Frontier surrounded by a dozen concentric circles of hotel security men and policemen and the syndicate faithful, all watching each other watching him. And he didn’t even know if Bala was the one who’d ordered it. He loped along behind the buildings, moving parallel with the sidewalk out on the Strip, looking out at each alley to see if there was anyone to walk with, but each time seeing only empty sidewalk and the flash of passing cars. God! The stupidity of it! They could have sat there and done nothing, and he wouldn’t even have known who owed him the money. He sure as hell wouldn’t have shown up with his hand out at Carl Bala’s door. If he had, he would have deserved this, for being a fool. They had wasted his life for nothing at all, as if he were some poor sucker who’d happened to be standing too close when a numbers runner came in for a handoff. It was a joke.

  He was now behind the MGM Grand. Caesar’s parking lot would be just a block up and a block over, but there didn’t seem to be any way to get there. It was just too much empty pavement to cross alone and on foot if they were cruising the Strip in cars.

  Behind the MGM Grand he had a thousand cars to choose from. He selected one he would feel comfortable with if he got stuck with it for the night, a dark blue Chevrolet. He hotwired it. He was out of the lot in a few seconds. At Caesar’s nothing looked peculiar. There were still gamblers wandering from aisle to aisle looking for their cars, and even a few late arrivals pulling into the lot. He knew that for the moment they would be searching for him on the freeway only. They would think he was still in the cab until they found it behind the gas station. In a little while if it didn’t turn up they might have the cab company report it stolen.

  He glided up the driveway and found a parking space near his rented car, sat there and waited. Something about the place made him hesitate to disentangle the ignition wires of his stolen Chevrolet. The rented car was only thirty feet from where he sat, but that thirty feet would be enough for them if they’d thought to wait for him. And if they’d managed to find out about the rented car sometime during the week, it was all over anyway. They’d be sitting somewhere out of sight waiting for him to turn the key and blow himself into a hundred thousand spoonfuls of hamburger. So he sat there with his lights off and his motor idling, staring into the darkness around him for any of the signs—a parked car with the silhouette of a head in the driver’s window, a man alone and on foot who didn’t find his car right away, a car that circled instead of swinging out into the driveway at the end of an aisle.

  He glanced at his watch. It was two ten already. By now the fire should have started in his room. The smoke sensor should have gone off. The fire engines should arrive in a few minutes. At this hour they’d roar down the Strip at fifty or sixty, their flashing lights visible for a mile or more, not downshifting once until they were abreast of the giant sign that said Diana Ross. He tried to spot the window of his room, scanning the fourth strip of glass up from the parking lot for a flicker of light. Damn them! They weren’t thorough, they weren’t smart, but there was no way to make yourself a break with them because there were so damned many of them, lumbering around like so many baboons. It didn’t matter what you did, the weight of their stupid single-minded brutish persistence would advance behind you—either slowly like a glacier or fast like an avalanche and obliterate all your tricks and contrivances and you with them. It was too late to be cautious, too late even to be afraid. Somebody powerful, maybe Carlo Balacontano sitting in his suite in the Frontier, had become annoyed with Orloff, so Orloff and everybody in his vicinity must cease to exist. It was a miracle they hadn’t torn Orloff’s building apart the same day to eradicate every sign that such a person had ever walked the earth.

  It was time to move. If he didn’t do something soon there wouldn’t be time to get out. He felt in the lining of his sleeve for the keys to the rented car, and clutched them in his left hand. He killed the engine, reached under the dashboard until he felt the line of fuses, and plucked them out of their clips one by one. There was no time to figure out which circuit controlled the dome lamps. When he opened the door he didn’t want to be bathed in light.

  He was out the door and moving quickly now. He heard no engine start, no sign of life as he accomplished the thirty feet to the car. If they were about, they hadn’t moved. He bent down as though to tie his shoe or check a tire or pick something up, and scanned the surface of the asphalt around him for feet. While he was down he unlocked the door and waited.

  Suddenly he could hear the thin, whining sound of the sirens somewhere down the Strip, screaming into the vast night sky that practically swallowed their shriek into its emptiness. But there was no question what it was. “The cavalry,” he chuckled to himself. “The fucking cavalry.” From here on it would be timing.

  The sound of the sirens swelled as the trucks approached. He crouched, straining to prepare. At the moment when the first of the trucks flashed into view he slipped into the car, the interior flickering with light for only a second. If there were watchers they would be staring at the trucks, if only for that second; there was no way they could stop themselves. The first truck, a long hook-and-ladder rig, bounced up the driveway doing at least thirty, its siren wailing to a stop as though out of breath as the truck pulled up in front of the covered portico. Another like it burst into the parking lot by the side entrance and pulled around the building out of sight. Smaller trucks were materializing now, but he didn’t watch them. Instead he scanned the parking lot.

  He saw them at once. Three cars lit up to reveal the shapes of men swinging out to their feet. He ducked down and listened for the sound of running, but the noise of the big diesel engines was now flooding the air to replace the sirens. He s
aw one of the men dash past his window, but the man’s eyes were fixed on the doorway of the casino. Now the fire trucks were all in place according to some prearranged contingency plan the fire department worked by. The watchers would be at the hotel entrances waiting for him to try to slip out with the frightened guests.

  He had a moment of residual terror when he turned the ignition key, but he already knew there was no bomb. They would never have sat in the parking lot to watch it go off. He backed out of the parking space and drove onto the Strip. If any of them noticed him it was too late for them to be sure what they were looking at, because already there were four or five others driving away from the hotel as he’d known they would. The hotel guests would stay to clog the sidewalks and the parking lots and crowd the firemen, but the visiting gamblers would be heading for their cars to go someplace where there damn well wasn’t a fire to close down the tables just when their luck was about to return to them.

  He was out now, in a clean untraceable car with a full tank, carrying about two hundred thousand dollars stuffed into his coat. But as far as they were concerned he was dead already. He had been from the moment some old man’s mind had settled on him and declared him a possible irritant. All that had remained was the mechanical, automatic translation of the thought to accomplishment, and the old man had probably lost interest in specifics of that sort years ago. Having given his frown or his nod or said, “Take him out too,” his mind would have moved to other matters.

  So he was dead. Well fuck them. He wasn’t going to take that. They were damned well going to know he wasn’t dead.