Sleeping Dogs

He hated to throw away the name Charles Ackerman. It had been a comfort since Eddie Mastrewski had given it to him as a child, and it was his oldest possession. Eddie the Butcher had always assumed that someday a lapse of professionalism would put an end to him, and the young boy he had taken in would be alone and running. The first thing he would need was money, and the second was a plausible identity, and Eddie knew how to provide him with both. The money Eddie wrapped in a package that looked exactly like the ones he kept in the freezer for the cat. Like them, it was marked “Giblets and Gizzards for Cat.”

The identity had been almost as easy in those days. Eddie took the boy for a walk in the sprawling forty-acre Catholic cemetery at the edge of town one sunny Memorial Day when hundreds of other families were wandering over the grass and looking uncertain about exactly where Grandpa was buried. He’d had the foresight to buy a small bouquet of forget-me-nots on the way, which he carried with just the right degree of discomfort. They had taken a pleasant walk in the sunshine to look for the gravestone of a child born in 1950, ’51, or ’52 who had died after the age of five but before the age of twelve. They had found six of them, and Eddie had dutifully copied down the names, the dates and his estimate of the cost of the stones.

Then they went to look at a couple of graves of men they had encountered professionally, and Eddie had explained his theory of reasonable fees. It was his hypothesis that the cost of a man’s gravestone should be proportionate to the fee Eddie had received for killing him. Important men left lots of money, had lots of admirers—or, at least, associates—and had heirs who would not miss this final chance to remind people that they had been relations of powerful men. Killing these men was potentially more difficult and dangerous than killing the ones with small domestic granite plaques that bore only a name and two dates. Eddie had appeared satisfied, even though two of the men had eight-foot-high Italian marble structures the size of toolsheds, with carved birds, flowers, statues of angels holding trumpets and lengthy passages of verse that might have been copied verbatim from Hallmark Mother’s Day cards.

The next day Eddie had taken him to the county hall. There Eddie had paid three dollars for a duplicate birth certificate for his nephew, Charles F. Ackerman. He had eliminated the other five possibilities because two had names that didn’t seem likely–he remembered that one of them was Wung Cho Fo; two had graves in the middle of huge empty plots, which meant that they still had lots of living family members the boy might someday meet; and one had a gravestone of such massive proportions and extravagant opulence that it must have been a sign of either conspicuous wealth or a memorable death. Thereafter, Charles Frederick Ackerman used his birth certificate to obtain a social security card, used both to apply for a driver’s license, then opened a bank account in a city a hundred miles away, where he also obtained a library card and a post-office box. Then he began to get on mailing lists, and Charles F. Ackerman took on a kind of life, with credit cards, club memberships and finally even a pistol permit.

In later years, he had built a dozen other identities that he had used and discarded, but he had never done much as Charles F. Ackerman. After Eddie had died, the name had begun to seem precious, and he couldn’t think of it without remembering the sunny Memorial Day when he and Eddie had strolled together on the unnaturally lush green grass, playing the game of finding dead children with approximately the right dates of birth.

Charles Ackerman’s existence wasn’t as well documented as Michael Schaeffer’s, but it was older and deeper, started before the age of computers and well established before a policeman would imagine he’d had the need or the capacity for adopting it. The methods he had used to create the identity were now out of date and impossible, because the trick had been done so many times for so many reasons that the police had put a stop to it years ago. He hated to say good-bye to Charlie Ackerman, but he had to. He had rented the car in Albuquerque under the name, and that had to be the end of it.

The gun had been easier. He had found an advertisement for a firearms show in the Albuquerque newspaper, clipped it, then gone into a gun shop and looked around for something that would inspire the right amount of greed in the heart of an aficionado. He settled on an antique Italian shotgun with ornate scrollwork carved into the stock. It even had a carrying case that looked like a briefcase. He had taken it to the show and walked past the booths run by dealers, but lingered at the card tables manned by private collectors until he had found the right one. The man was in his fifties and had a pot belly that he kept in check with a wide belt with a silver buckle that had a bird dog on it with turquoise eyes. He had five handguns to sell, three of them nickel-plated modern replicas of Colt .45 single-action revolvers with white plastic handgrips like the ones the good guys used in cowboy movies—and two shotguns, one of them a double-barreled ten-gauge that his grandfather might have used for hunting ducks. The man had eyed his gun case and said, “What’d you buy?” He had opened it, and the man’s eyes had widened, then narrowed. “I brought it with me,” Ackerman said. “I’m trying to see if anybody wants to trade.” The man asked, “What would you take?” Ackerman indicated that the Ruger .38 police special on the table in front of him looked pretty good, but he didn’t feel like hanging around all day filling out papers for a handgun. The man thought for a long time, then set his jacket over the pistol and said, “Meet me in the parking lot.”

The transaction was quick and simple, but as he was getting into the car, Ackerman was quietly accosted by a skinny young man who looked like an out-of-work car mechanic. “Didn’t you see anything in there you liked?” His mind compared the two possibilities, cop and thief, and neither won. He just shook his head. “No. Same old stuff,” he said, and prepared to start the car. The man said, “Looking for something in particular?” He decided on thief. “Why? You got something?”

“A few things. I’m a gunsmith. I do modifications, custom work, make a few accessories.” The word accessories interested him enough to get him out of the car. In the trunk of the man’s old Chevy was an oily bath towel, and laid out on it were a few homemade sears for converting M-16’s to full auto, a couple of forty-round banana clips made of two standard twenties welded end-to-end and various devices designed to hold handguns under dashboards and car seats. He took a chance. “I can see why you aren’t at a table inside.” The man grinned sheepishly and then compulsively glanced around to see if anyone was watching. “See anything you like?” He shook his head. “Sorry.” The man looked disappointed. “This ain’t all I got. Give me a hint.” He said, “Ever made a silencer?” The man had.

William Wolf was watching the effect of the sun coming up, hitting the distant face of the low mesa on his left and giving it a pink glow beneath the deep purple of the predawn sky. Driving felt like a novelty. He loved the feeling of enclosure in the small box hurtling down the smooth highway at sixty-five as the sights around him changed. It wasn’t just one object being replaced by another like it, but a change in the possibilities. He had been in New Mexico several times before, but now it looked new to him. There were low, rolling hills that flattened into unexpected places where the level plains dropped abruptly to reveal that they had been plateaus. All of it was covered with dry, knee-high sage that was almost gray, with dark piñons growing out of it like plants at the bottom of a vast ocean. And along the impossibly distant horizon, here and there a mountain would rise, not a range of mountains but a single one, or a saw-toothed ridge of three, tilted a little as though something big had swept over it to push it aside.

He had spent a few hours becoming William Wolf in a motel in Albuquerque, and now the name had displaced the others in his mind. He had repeated it to himself a thousand times, rehearsed introducing himself to imaginary strangers and even planned the signature. It would be two big, fast W’s, each followed by low, cramped scrawls that looked so cursory that some letters might appear to be missing.

The name William Wolf had presented no problem to him. Names were the first accidental training that Eddie had given him as a child. Eddie had never actually taken any legal steps to adopt him, for fear that some public agency would be called upon to visit the home and create a file. Instead he had sometimes referred to the boy as his son, sometimes as his nephew, or even as the child of a friend, as convenience seemed to dictate, and had made up names for him on these occasions. But as soon as he was old enough to learn a trade, the boy had been taught to select his own aliases. Circumstances had never allowed him to attach any interior significance to names. He might be Bob or Ronald at one moment, or “the Butcher’s Boy,” or even “the third one from the end of the line.” It made no difference to him; in a heartbeat he would be the second from the end of the line without experiencing any interior alteration. Names were for other people’s convenience, and their convenience was seldom of any interest to him. For a decade he had found it useful to be Michael Schaeffer; for a day he had resurrected Charles Ackerman; now it was easiest to be Wolf.

Wolf thought about Santa Fe. It was too small to have a serious airport, but it was always full of tourists. The only reasonable choice was to fade into the amorphous, shifting group that came and went each day. He would arrive the way they did and dress the way they did, and that was as near to invisibility as he could get. People in tourist towns let their eyes acknowledge new people only long enough to be sure they wouldn’t bump into them. There was no reason to remember faces because they would never appear again.

Wolf felt the early-morning cold as he got out of the car in the parking structure beneath La Fonda. It was a strange, calm and airless chill that seemed to have been stored in the dark enclosure for a long time. La Fonda was the only hotel he remembered from the old days, a seventy-year-old five-story sprawling adobe building on the corner of the ancient city square beside the palace the conquistadors had built for their governors in 1610. There were already three cars exactly like his that he could see as he walked to the swinging door that led into the hall to the lobby. As he turned the first corner he could see into the big dining room, with its uneven ceramic tile floor and the fifty-foot canopy of painted glass that let in just enough light for the potted trees. There were only a few people sitting under the trees and eating breakfast; he knew that these were probably the ones who had come here from the East, where it was already late morning. There were two young couples who wore ski sweaters, jeans and hiking shoes, and a table of five elderly people, three women and two men, who had the manner of a permanent traveling committee. They each spoke to the whole group and then winked and nudged some particular ally, while the others felt comfortable ignoring what was said.

Wolf could also see a table where four dark-suited businessmen held a serious discussion, looking as though their plane from New York had been hijacked and they had been released, unharmed and unchanged, in the center of this small western town and were now waiting for the answer to their inquiries about whom to buy it from. He glanced around the lobby, first at the registration desk, where a dark-haired woman in her forties made quick, proprietary movements, arranging registration cards and keys to prepare for the morning check-ins. He avoided that side of the room and walked past two ancient Pueblo Indians, a wrinkled, leathery little man and a woman who undoubtedly was his wife, both of them busy opening modern, black sample cases full of silver and turquoise jewelry for display on the bench by the wall.

He drifted past a wooden rack of free tourist pamphlets, selected a Santa Fe street map and walked out the front door of the building to the street. There were a few little patches of the early autumn’s first crisp, hard snow in the square, and the air was clear and thin. He would have been tempted to ask for a room in the hotel, but he knew that Santa Fe was too small. He looked up and down the streets that led into the square. There were the stores he remembered, their windows full of intricately painted Indian pots, handwoven blankets of wool dyed with bright vegetable colors and antique pounded-and-burnished silver bought, by tradition, so cheaply from the once-credulous Indians that it was still called “pawn.” But among the stores was a coffee shop with outdoor tables turned upside down as a concession to the first taste of cold weather. He found it by following a couple in their thirties who were tourists but looked purposeful in their gait, reasoning that nothing else could be open yet.

Inside the door there was a steamy warmth to the air, a comforting heaviness to the dark wooden tables and a glow of hanging antique copper implements that he doubted the employees could even identify, let alone use. Wolf sat at a table and studied his map, while the waitress, a plump blond girl of the type he could imagine leaving college to study astrology, poured him a cup of coffee and left a menu beside him.

Andalusia was one of the narrow, cramped streets that ran parallel to Canyon Road, where he remembered that the galleries were. He had never felt an impulse to own paintings, and in the days when he had lived in the United States it would have been foolish, but he had walked down Canyon Road once, years ago, to pass the time, and he remembered the neighborhood. He judged from the map that he would have to leave the car blocks away and find Peter Mantino on foot.

When the waitress came to stand beside him and said, “Ready?” he answered, “Huevos rancheros,” because he hadn’t had time to read the menu, and it was the only thing he remembered that places like this would have. When she left, he studied the map again, letting it suggest the way things would happen. If things were as they should have been, a man like Peter Mantino would put some obstacles between himself and the world. But six or seven years ago, Mantino had been convicted of a bunch of charges that Wolf couldn’t even remember now, all of the bribery-and-suborning variety. Now he was on parole, supposedly living in voluntary seclusion hundreds of miles from the centers of power in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. All of this had been in the newspapers years ago, and even the reporters clearly hadn’t believed a word of it. But the important part was true: if he was on parole, he couldn’t have the sort of protection he was about to begin needing.

Wolf still had not gotten over the shock of seeing the shooter at the airport, but he had never for a second doubted what had happened. The truth was, there was no way even Carl Bala could send a specialist to kill somebody in the Los Angeles airport. The airport lay unambiguously in the center of Peter Mantino’s empire, and any consequences would fall exclusively on his head: the text of every letter to the editor would mention his name, the resulting crackdown would cut into his profits and the token arrests would make his people cautious and unproductive. He had to have been the one who made the decision, and the man must belong to him.

Mantino had started out running a crew for Balacontano in New York in the sixties, and then gotten to run the family’s interests in the West, supposedly as a reward for faithful service. At the time, people had said there was more to it than that. They said Mantino had begun to attract a lot of loyalty in the family, and Balacontano had just wanted him out there and away from the soldiers. The world was full of little men who knew what big men were really thinking.

It didn’t matter why Mantino had reacted so quickly. Maybe he was still loyal to the Balacontano family, and maybe he was making a safe, easy bid for respect while the old man was in prison and Talarese was out of the way. The only thing that was certain was that Mantino was taking enough of an interest to send shooters into public places. That changed Wolf’s problem into figuring out how Wolf was going to stay alive.

He needed to get out of the country, but nobody was going to let him step onto a plane to London without a passport. He knew of only one place where he might be able to get one after all these years, and that was in Buffalo, over fifteen hundred miles away. It would take time to get there, and time to make the contact, and time for the passport. And every second that passed, he was heating up. He needed to buy some time.

The only thing that gave him hope was that word of his return couldn’t have traveled faster than an airplane unless it was passed by telephone from somebody in New York to Mantino. And Mantino wouldn’t have told a lot of people in his organization that he was going to have somebody killed. That was the sort of thing nobody talked about until after it was accomplished. And it hadn’t been accomplished. The shooter had gotten himself busted in the airport. Wolf had to take advantage of that mistake. The only way was to do the unexpected: Mantino takes a swat at a fly, and the fly goes right up his nose.

Twice in his life he had seen what happened when a capo unexpectedly died. People reacted in different ways. A few would check in at out-of-town hotels and start making phone calls. But a lot of them would stay home and wait for somebody to get in touch with them. Usually it would be some acquaintance—a guy they had been introduced to at the races, or somebody’s cousin they had met at a wedding. The guy would say, “Peter’s dead. You have a problem with that?” or just, “What are you going to do now? If you want to go with us, I can talk to some people.” But until they heard from somebody, they were going to be watching a lot of television with the blinds drawn. Sometimes nobody got in touch, and the trouble just got worse. There had even been one famous time when a boss died, and forty of his friends across the country died the same day. That was what they would be afraid of—not that somebody Carlo Balacontano had put a contract on ten years ago had come for Peter Mantino.

The low brown stucco wall around the yard would present no problem unless it had some electronic component that Wolf couldn’t see from the street. He couldn’t see or hear a dog, and the sign on the gate that said NORTH AMERICAN WATCH—ARMED RESPONSE was comforting. It made it unlikely that Mantino had anything more sophisticated than a conventional alarm system that would summon untrained night watchmen. The house was a single-story adobe-colored building. Like all the others in this part of town, it was required by the building code to look as though the Spaniards had never left, although he suspected that any Spaniards that had made it this far north and east must have been a forlorn, raggedy-assed bunch.

He maintained an even, leisurely tourist’s pace, and studied all the houses on the street with equal attention. At the corner he turned, walked to the street behind Andalusia and examined the houses there. There appeared to be nothing of any consequence to protect any of them, but the situation was still troublesome. There were no cars parked on the narrow one-way street, and he had passed only a few pedestrians during his walk, none of them within blocks of Andalusia. Even if he could get in, getting out would be difficult.

It was dark now, and the cold air was still and crisp. The patches of dirty snow that had melted in the sunlight were now furrows and tumuli of iron-hard ice, and Wolf watched for them so that he could step around them on the sidewalk. In his left hand he carried a paper sack from the store where he had bought the gloves and channel-lock pliers a few hours ago, but now it also contained the Ruger .38 and its silencer. If necessary, he could drop the bag surreptitiously, but for anyone who might see him, the bag was an indicator that he had gone out on foot for a purpose and was on his way home.

He moved along the storefronts on Galisteo Street, keeping under the roof and away from the thick pillars, where he could remain only a shadow. Santa Fe was still a sunlit town for most of the year, even now. The inhabitants were out and in evidence when the bright sunlight warmed the ground, reaching it unimpeded by the extra mile of clouds, smog and dust that covered other cities, and without being blocked anywhere by tall buildings. But when the sun set, they disappeared behind the stone and clay walls, the oldest ones a yard thick. Even the restaurants that catered to the small, quiet night trade were hidden in mazes of courtyards and passageways.

The office of North American Watch was even more difficult to find. It had an entrance to the street, but that had been closed for hours. Behind the dusty Venetian blinds he could see a thin slice of the light from the dispatcher’s desk. He walked around the building to look for the cars. These people were in the peace-of-mind business. They provided louts to drive by every four hours with flashlights, and since this was a state where anyone could wear a gun in a holster unless the weight of it pulled down his pants, they were armed louts. He didn’t know the current procedures, but if they hadn’t changed radically, on a cold night when there were few people on the streets, the management would save a few dollars by keeping some cars in the lot. If a call came in or an alarm lit up the board, they would call the police and then send one of the men in the office on a slow stroll to a car so that he would arrive about the time the cops were composing their theft reports.

It was better than he had imagined. There were three blue-and-white imitation police cruisers parked behind the building, and a fourth at the curb. Wolf walked to it and put his hand on the hood. It wasn’t even warm. He ducked down beside it, opened the door and slipped into the driver’s seat. He felt the ignition for the key, but he wasn’t that lucky. They must have a hook inside the office with the keys hanging on it. He took the heavy pliers out of his bag, pried the bar away from the steering column, wrenched the ignition switch out of its hole and tugged the wires out of the back of it. He pumped the gas pedal to the floor once, touched the two wires together and started the car. He let the engine idle for a moment while he watched the back door of North American. There was no sign that anyone had heard, so he pulled away from the curb. Just as he was passing the building, another set of headlights came up the street behind him. As he turned the corner, he saw the car pull into the space he had vacated. It pleased him. If one of the louts happened to glance out the window, he would see a car where he was looking for it.

Wolf kept the car at a crawl as he moved down the quiet, empty street toward Andalusia. He knew that when he had hot-wired the engine, he had started an invisible timer, but the danger would increase if he deviated from the pace people expected of this car. He made the turn onto Andalusia and allowed himself a little more speed. At 1500 Andalusia he applied the brakes and let the rear end of the car swing out a little, so that he could stop at an urgent-looking angle to the wall. He glanced up at the house to be sure the car was visible through the iron gate, left the motor running and ran up the walk to the door, his pistol in his hand.

He rapped on the thick wooden door, then rang the bell. Inside, he could hear feet pounding down a hallway. He turned to the side so that whoever was looking out through the fish-eye lens of the peephole could see the car. As he forced his eyes to scan the yard like a man looking for something, he felt his heartbeat quicken. It was these few seconds that would decide everything. Then he heard the dead bolt slip out of its receptacle and watched the big door open a couple of inches.

A voice said, “What is it?” and Wolf turned to look into the man’s eyes. He was in his thirties and wore his wavy hair long, cut in a style that seemed out of date until Wolf remembered that it might have come back.

He forced his voice into a tone that would carry it. There had to be enough urgency to make the man forget his natural suspicion and want to find out what was going on, but enough confidence to assure him that Wolf was going to take care of it. “North American Watch,” he said. “You Mr. Mantino?”

The man moved away from the door, and Wolf stepped beside him into the warm chiaroscuro of a dimly lit space. There was a fire burning in the big whitewashed adobe fireplace at the other end of the room. He was startled when he saw a man in his fifties, lean and limber in the way that men were who spent a lot of time playing tennis, moving to a big cabinet on the far wall. “What is it? I’m Mr. Mantino.”

“You got an intrusion,” Wolf said. Almost instantly he regretted it. He had expected to have time to attach the silencer before he fired. But now there were two of them, and they moved in different directions with surprising decisiveness. Mantino turned a key in the lock on the cabinet and reached inside. His hand came back holding a short-barreled shotgun, and he didn’t swing it around like a man gripped by panic, but held it pointed upward. He pumped it and moved into the hallway. “Where is he? Have you seen him?”

Wolf had no time to answer, because now the younger man was beside him, and cradled in his arms was a thirty-ought-six hunting rifle with a large clip in it. “Holy shit,” said Wolf, trying to infuse some incredulity into his voice. “He’s probably just trying to boost your hubcaps or something.”

The young man snapped, “Then he made a mistake,” and stepped toward the rear of the house.

Wolf reminded himself that speed was really a matter of deliberate, economical movement. He fell into step with the younger man, pulling Mantino with him. He took two steps, raised the pistol, shot the younger man in the back of the head, stepped back and swung an elbow into Mantino’s face. He was surprised at how fast Mantino’s movements were—he was already moving away, trying to swing the shotgun around in time. The elbow struck Mantino on the shoulder, and Wolf barely had time to jab the pistol against the man’s chest and fire.

Mantino toppled backward, and Wolf fired three more times as he fell. Each time he fired, there was an instant when he wasn’t sure the shotgun wasn’t coming the rest of the way around. The man’s body made a spasmodic jerk backward each time he was hit, and Wolf had the sense that he was pushing a man toward a cliff by jabbing him with his finger. When Mantino finally hit the floor, Wolf kicked the shotgun away and fired the last round into his forehead.

Wolf stood still for a moment and listened. He’d made a mess of it, and he still had to get out. The security-service car might buy him the most time left where it was, parked in front and still running. The neighbors would assume that someone whose job it was to respond to gunshots had arrived to take charge, and the police, who knew better, would be cautious about barging in without warning the armed and frightened rent-a-cop they would expect to find inside. He began to wipe his prints from the pistol.

He went to the gun cabinet and opened it. There were five rifles of varying makes and calibers, and a whole section devoted to handguns, all fastened to a blue velvet display board. He spotted a Ruger .38 police special, pulled it off the board and replaced it with the gun he had used to kill the two men, then hurried to the back door of the house.

He stepped out the back door, climbed over the fence into the neighbors’ back yard and kept walking toward the next street. As he moved along beside the house, he heard the first of the sirens. Things were happening too quickly, coming now like punches from an opponent he had underestimated. He listened for the route of the police cars. The electronic blips went on long enough for him to hear them on both sides of him before they stopped. He moved to the wall beside the house, knelt among the garbage cans, swung out the cylinder of the pistol he had stolen and pushed in six rounds. Then he remembered the silencer he had brought with him. It had been machined to fit a weapon of the same make and model. Even if it didn’t silence the report of the new pistol, it would suppress the flash a little. In the darkness this edge might keep him alive.

Carefully he raised himself above the level of the garbage cans and sighted between the houses. He saw the police car on Andalusia pull up behind the North American Watch car, and two uniformed policemen get out. After a moment one of them returned to pull the shotgun out of its mount in his squad car. Wolf turned to look at the street behind him and saw two more police cars glide silently to a stop. They seemed to have practiced a drill to cut off the escape of an intruder in these quiet streets.

He ducked down and concentrated on what he had seen of the neighborhood as he fitted the silencer to the revolver. There were no crowds of pedestrians to lose himself in, and not even a passing car to distract the police. He had to break their choreographed plan, and the only way to do it was to add some element that they hadn’t imagined. He considered starting a fire, but he would have to be nearby when the first flames flickered to life, and would be caught in the light. Then another squad car passed slowly up Andalusia. A spotlight mounted on its window strut swept along the thin trunks of the trim shrubbery, sliced down the spaces between the houses, then shot upward to the roofs. Just before it came abreast of his hiding place, Wolf crouched to let it pass, but as he disappeared into the darkness, he retained an image: the spotlight moving along the fronts of the houses illuminated, one after another, bright reflecting signs that read NORTH AMERICAN WATCH—ARMED RESPONSE.

As soon as the car passed, he came up again. He aimed his pistol at the front window of the house across the street and squeezed off a round. There was a faint spitting noise, and he could see that a spiderweb network of cracks had appeared. Pivoting, he shot the back windows of the next four houses, then ducked down to reload. He was satisfied for the moment. No matter how crude an alarm system was, if it was triggered by sound, motion or simply the dislocation of a conductive tape, it would go off when a window broke.

He resisted the impulse to move his wristwatch up to his face in the darkness to time the “armed response.” Now was his time of greatest danger, while the police were still free to run their prearranged tactic unimpeded. He had to hope it would take them a few minutes to analyze the scene at Peter Mantino’s house before they started to sweep the neighborhood on foot. He listened for footsteps or radio voices to reach him, and then heard more engines. There was the squeal of tires at the end of the street in front of him as the North American Watch cars started to arrive.

A voice on a police bullhorn said, “Pull back out of here. This is a crime scene.” But there was no diminution of the sound of engines or dimming of the glare of headlights. “Yeah, you. Get out of here.”

Wolf decided it was essential to see how the competition was faring, so he moved to the gate that led to the front lawn and looked through the crack by the hinges. There were two cars like the one he had stolen, and they had pulled into the driveways of two of the houses whose windows he had shot out. Men in jeans, flannel shirts and sweatshirts were outside the cars now, carrying an odd assortment of handguns and flashlights.

Two of them stood on the lawn across the street, looking skeptically at a policeman who was walking toward them; a third was already at the side of the house, looking over the fence and aiming his flashlight into the back yard.

As Wolf waited for the mix to get as volatile as it needed to be, he glanced behind him toward the Mantino house. In front of it, he could see another North American Watch car pull up in the middle of Andalusia. A large man got out of it, leaving the door open. He already held a heavy, long-barreled revolver in his hand, as though he had driven with it lying on the seat beside him.

Wolf took three deep breaths to ensure that he had expelled all the carbon dioxide he could. It was carbon dioxide in the blood that made the hands shake. He eased his body upward, rested his arm on the top of the fence and fired a single shot.

The policeman on the lawn jerked in pain, let out his breath in a grunt, then crumpled to the ground clutching his calf. The three security guards looked at him in disbelief, then at each other. Finally it seemed to occur to them that the shot had come from somewhere else. They crouched and swept the horizon around them over their gunsights, looking for a target. But the policeman’s partner was still at the microphone in his car. In his panic he left the external amplifier on, and as he shouted into the radio, his message echoed through the empty streets. “Officer down! This is One X ray Twenty-two. Officer down! Need assistance. Officer down!”

Wolf could see the three security guards now, but he couldn’t see the other policeman in the car. He decided to take a chance. He stood up at the fence and shouted at the frightened guards, “Police officer! Drop those guns!” then ducked and ran along the adobe wall across the front of the house. He knew he must be abreast of the police car now, but he stopped and crouched in the corner of the front yard and listened. “You heard the man,” said the lone policeman. “Drop them!”

Wolf decided he had to increase the sense of danger a little more, or they were going to obey and let the solitary cop get control of the situation. He looked back along the house toward Andalusia Street. He could see that the policemen there had heard either the bullhorn or the radio and were moving toward him through the back yards.

He rolled over the wall to the next yard, then aimed a round over their heads and ducked down. They had seen the muzzle flash aimed in their direction and heard the crack of the bullet breaking the sound barrier as it passed over them, and they responded as he had hoped. There was the blast of a shotgun, followed by eight pistol shots slamming into the corner of the wall. Then he heard three rapid shots fired from the house across the street and judged it was time.

He sprinted to the front of the next house and moved along the façade, then rolled over the next fence and kept moving. There were other sirens in the distance now, all converging on the quiet neighborhood.

Wolf didn’t dare slow down or look back. He trotted unerringly from one fence to the next, each time hoisting himself up and over the identical adobe enclosures, thankful that the sudden, unseasonable start of fall had made it too cold to leave a dog outside all night. At the end of the block he waited and listened for approaching sirens, but it seemed they had all arrived by then, screeching past him on the other side of the wall as he ran from their destination. He pulled himself over the last fence and walked across the street to the far side of Galisteo.

As he walked northward toward the ancient plaza, he crossed a little bridge over the captive river with concrete banks that sliced across the town. As he did, he noticed that it had the strange quality of magnifying sounds. Far in the distance, he could hear a voice shouting into an electronic amplifier. The voice echoed and broke up, but he knew it was another police bullhorn. He also knew, from the rapid reports of guns, that the untrained North American Watch guards had been too frightened to relinquish their weapons. The heavy firing was the sound of the police reluctantly concluding that the guards, either for this reason or because they had killed Mantino or wounded the policeman, represented a danger to the community.

He hurried on toward La Fonda. Right now there would be crackling, fragrant fires of mesquite and piñon in all the big stone fireplaces, heating the bright, intricately glazed Spanish tiles along the mantels. Lots of Santa Fe natives would pass through for a drink on an evening like this, but some of them would have heard that the police were gathering on Andalusia Street. He would pass by the lighted windows and into the subterranean parking garage without crossing the threshold. By the time he had driven the few blocks to Highway 25, the heater of the little Ford would have warmed his hands as much as a fire.

* * *

“I think this is the second one,” said Elizabeth. “If he wanted Peter Mantino, this is the way he’d do it. I think it’s not over.”

“You’re making a hell of an assumption,” said Richardson. “You’ve got to act as your own censor on this kind of case.”

“I know that,” she answered, her voice close enough to a monotone to serve her purpose.

“You’re feeling frustrated and disappointed that we didn’t get him at the L.A. airport, right?”

“I admit it,” said Elizabeth. “I volunteer it, and waive all right to a jury trial, but—”

“All I’m asking,” Richardson interrupted, “is that you think about it. Is it possible—not certain, but possible—that you see another gunshot homicide of another important man and say it’s the same perpetrator because you want it to be? You want another shot at him.”

Elizabeth’s jaw clenched. “You brought me in here to analyze raw data. My preliminary hypothesis when there are two murders of ranking members of the Balacontano family within two days is that a pure coincidence is unlikely. There. I’ve done my job. Your job as section chief is to decide now, this minute, whether to send an investigator out to Santa Fe to find out what actually happened to Peter Mantino.”

“Are you volunteering?”

Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not calling my bluff, you know; I’d love to. But I just went to California, and I have two children who are expecting me to feed them dinner tonight and still be there when they wake up tomorrow. Have things gotten so bad since I left here that you don’t have any real field men for a case like this?”

Richardson shook his head. “No. I just figured out who to send. Give me a minute on the phone with him, and then I’ll transfer him to you.”

“Who is he?”

“His name’s Jack Hamp.”

Elizabeth turned and walked out of Richardson’s office. She had heard the name before. He could be somebody she had met on another case. No, she had read it at the bottom of some report recently. But the button on her phone was already blinking. She punched it.

“Hello,” said Elizabeth. “This is Elizabeth Waring. Is this Mr. Hamp?”

“What can I do for you, ma’am?”

Her expectations oscillated between two extremes. It was the unimaginative-sounding western official voice that California highway patrolmen used when they wrote you a ticket. But she was going to need him in the West, after all, and Richardson had picked him for a difficult situation. If Richardson knew the man’s name, he must at least be competent, and maybe a lot better than that. “I understand you’ve agreed to work with us on this case?”

“Yes, ma’am.” It was the “ma’am.” The last time she had heard it was from one of the prison guards at Lompoc.

“When can you be ready to leave for Santa Fe?”

There was a significant pause; then the voice said, “I’m at an airport now.” Then Elizabeth remembered where she had seen the name: it had been at the bottom of the report on the mess at LAX. Jack Hamp was the birdwatcher.

Hamp walked up Andalusia Street, then down Galisteo to the street behind it. He liked the feel of the sun heating the sidewalks without affecting the thin, cold air. He thought about Elizabeth Waring again. At the time he’d had to pay too much attention to what she was telling him to give her voice the sort of analysis he considered necessary. All he really had on her for sure was that she was in her mid-thirties. She had mentioned that she had young children, but she was old enough to call herself Elizabeth and not have to tone it down by a couple of syllables to Liz or Betty or Bess or whatever. She was not a large woman because there wasn’t the kind of lasting tone that came from the big-boned ones with pink hands that were all knuckles. It wasn’t a question of high or low, because women varied only from alto to soprano anyway, but something about how much real force and staying power was behind the voice. He judged that she was between five feet five and five feet eight, and probably a strawberry blonde or a redhead.

It was a brave guess, even for an expert like Hamp, because not many real redheads went through law school. A lot of the bright ones were like Hamp’s second wife, Donna, who was sort of a career redhead. She was a trained painter, but apparently she had spent her college years exploring the shades of green, blue and purple she could wear to set off her hair. The marriage had been made in heaven during what must have been a celestial holiday, when everybody up there was blind drunk and frisky. Donna had cried when she had found out he was a cop, but by then it was too late, because he had already verified her credentials as a bona-fide redhead, and she was a committed woman. At the time, his pants were hanging on the rail of her bed with the butt end of his pistol showing, but that hadn’t bothered her. Later he decided he hadn’t given her reaction as much thought as it had deserved. Not that she wasn’t a law-abiding citizen, within certain limits, but she was not a cautious person, or a docile one. They’d had a lively time of it for nearly five years, but it had ended by her going after him with the claw hammer she had been using to attach a canvas to its stretcher bars. Donna’s problem was symbolized in his mind by the fact that she had gone after him with the claw end of the hammer. It was uglier and more spiteful that way, but the bludgeon-death victims he came across professionally almost always got it with the blunt end; it was just more practical.

Maybe Elizabeth Waring had brown hair, the sort that had very tight little curls in it that made it stick out. There was a certain intensity in those women too, and a lot of them went to law school.

Hamp spotted the police sticker on the door of Mantino’s house, and took in the rest of it. The killer had seen it all the way he was seeing it now. The houses were all too close together, the streets too narrow and quiet for an easy shot and a quick retreat. Since the police had found a North American Watch car in the street, he had probably chosen to impersonate a security guard, but something had gone wrong. At that moment the ordinary man would have defeated himself. He would have tried to do something to save his skin—hide in an empty house or look for an escape route the police knew better than he did. But this man had done something else. All policemen were drilled in hesitation, firing warning shots into the air and trying to keep innocent bystanders away. If they’d had a plan, it would have been to contain his movements and assume that his desire to stay alive would make him behave rationally, and therefore predictably. But this one was an aggressor. Any victim was as good as another. Anything that caused confusion or added to the escalating violence was an advantage. His best tactic would have been to give the impression that what he was trying to do was not to run but to kill them.

Hamp looked around. There were lots of long, straight firing lines he could use: adobe walls around the houses to hide his movements, tall trees and thick hedges to complicate their view but not his. In the dark the police had to distinguish which, among the twenty or thirty silhouettes they could discern, belonged to their comrades and which to another man they didn’t even have a description of. By the time there were fifty policemen and armed civilians on the scene, any shot fired had a two percent chance of hitting a murderer and a ninety-eight percent chance of creating one.

This was what the old gangster in the California prison had been trying to describe to Elizabeth Waring. The tape-recorder team in New York had managed to stumble on a man who had never done anything for a living except kill people. He had been doing it for, say, twenty years, and he had gotten pretty good at it.

There was only one stop left to make, and that would have to wait a few hours. Evening was the time for visiting policemen, when you could talk to them in their homes.

Hamp walked to the door of the freshly painted one-story gray house and rang the bell. He could hear a dog barking somewhere in the back, then the loud scratching noise of its toenails as it ran across an uncarpeted floor to sniff under the door. He sensed that it was big, probably a shepherd or a Doberman, and he felt better when he heard a deep male voice cajole it away from the door. “Go on,” it said. “Into the kitchen.” Then, “Kitchen. Stay.” The toenail sound receded into the distance.

A dead bolt gave a metallic clank as the man slipped it. Hamp conceded that the precautions were understandable. Lorenz was an ordinary policeman. He’d have spent enough of his career looking at the work of intruders to develop a desire and talent for home security. His house wasn’t impregnable, by any means, but a burglar would find it discouraging enough to make him move on to the next one. The door opened, and Hamp looked the man in the eye and held out his hand. “Jack Hamp,” he said. “FBI.” Now he rapidly revised his expectations. Lorenz was in his early thirties, over six feet tall and athletic, his black hair cut by a good barber.

The voice was quiet and the eyes were intelligent. “Fernando Lorenz. Pleased to meet you.”

Hamp regretted the lie, but Elizabeth Waring had spent an hour telling him what she knew and what she wanted, and the quickest way to get it was to lie. She hadn’t told him to; he had figured it out on his own. He had been a cop for a long time, and he knew how it felt to wear the uniform. When a cop heard “FBI,” he had a pretty clear idea of what to expect, and of who he was talking to. He might like it or he might not, but he was going to answer questions because he didn’t think he needed to ask them. If you said you were a special investigator for the Justice Department, he was going to spend a lot of time looking at your ID and asking you what you did for a living, and maybe after you left he would make a couple of calls, and maybe find out through his own connections that you had spent the last two years sitting in an airport, or even that you were just doing legwork for a woman lawyer you had never met and he didn’t need to care about. The image that would come to mind was that of a young female assistant DA, and the fact that the office where she did her nails was in Washington instead of at the county courthouse didn’t make any difference. She wasn’t the one whose hands shook while she was strapping on the bullet-proof vest to go in after the barricaded suspect; she was the one who let the suspect go the next day because the paperwork didn’t look to her like it was going to add to her won-lost record—or else on the second day, after the charges didn’t get filed in time because she was at lunch with the councilman from the seventy-fifth district. It was simpler not to have to get past all that.

He followed Lorenz into a small living room furnished with a few large leather chairs and a long couch that had a half-folded army blanket on it. On the wall hung a dark-red Indian weaving that Hamp recognized as a good nineteenth-century pattern.

“Sorry to bother you at home, Lieutenant,” said Hamp, “but I’m sure you understand that we’d like to handle this as quietly as possible. The press seems to take a particular joy in letting the public know when we’re on a case, and this time it might lead to some wrong conclusions.” He had brushed across the sensitive spot without poking it. The police here would be smarting now, defensive because they sensed people were wondering how fifty men had lost a gunfight with one, and disoriented because they didn’t know the answer either. The press would imply that the FBI was wondering too.

Lorenz said only, “Sure. You mind dogs?”

Hamp hesitated, relinquishing the relief that he had felt at having this behind him. “No,” he said. “I used to have one.” If it was a working police dog, he knew from experience that when Lorenz told it to leave him alone he would have to say it in German. Every department in the country figured that the average fleeing suspect didn’t remember enough of what he had learned in high school to get a job, let alone call off a dog.

Lorenz said, “Martha,” in a normal voice, and Hamp heard the toenails again, tapping lightly toward him from the back of the house. He turned and saw a gray-brown standard German shepherd, at least three feet tall, with a chest like a barrel and a huge gaping mouth, emerge from a hallway. She walked past Hamp, gave him a look and then sat down in front of Lorenz’s chair. When he pointed at the couch, the dog leaped up and lay down on the army blanket. “She gets lonely,” said Lorenz. “She and I were Air Police.”

Hamp nodded. “How old is she?”

“Nine.”

“You made lieutenant fast.” Hamp stopped trying to remember his German. It wouldn’t do any good. Lorenz had been one of the men Hamp had seen when he was in the marines guarding the most sensitive installations: Strategic Air Command bases, air force communication centers and listening posts, walking the perimeters with guard dogs. The sight of them had always struck him as vaguely poignant. The dogs were given to the men as soon as they were weaned, and man and dog trained together, sleeping together in the same barracks, never more than a hundred feet apart for at least the length of an enlistment, and more often for the life of the dog. If the man was married and lived off the base with his wife, the dog lived with them, and the two would report for duty together. The attachment between them grew so strong that they were like two men, or sometimes two dogs, the one who walked upright representing to the other one mother, father and head of the wolf pack. The loyalty was so blind and unbreakable that when the AP’s enlistment ended, the dog had to be discharged with him because it couldn’t live without him. Hamp had seen them in Thailand, Vietnam and other places, the strange solitary pairs the embodiment of a primal nightmare, the big vulpine creature perfectly capable and even eager to hurl its ninety pounds of muscle and fang into a man’s throat if it would bring a whispered word and a gentle pat from its master, who had trained it to attack even more efficiently than its ferocious instincts would have prompted.

Hamp stared at Martha. The dog lay quietly on the old army blanket and stared unblinking into his eyes, her head resting on her paws. He turned back to Lorenz, who seemed to be looking at him with the same expression. “In your investigation of the break-in at Mr. Mantino’s house …”

There was something about the term break-in that jarred Hamp’s mind. Whatever had happened, the entry was the least of it. But Lorenz’s eyes moved to the dog, and Hamp’s followed. The dog’s ears were up, and its head was turned toward him attentively. Hamp felt a sudden alarm. The dog had sensed that he was feeling uncomfortable, maybe by smell, or by a sound in his voice, and it was already beginning to show little signs of agitation. He had to do something before the animal began to suspect that he wished Lorenz harm. He had to stay on solid, neutral ground and get the master to talk. “Tell me anything you found that the FBI might need to know.” He knew better than to try to talk to the dog or make a friend of her. She had been brought up to feel no interest whatever in any human being but Lorenz. He tried to formulate something that he could say for the dog’s benefit, something scrupulously true and sincere. “I know that’s a tall order. I’m asking you for information without being able to reciprocate.” The dog set her head down again. “Anytime someone like Mantino dies violently, there are possible consequences and implications, and I don’t know yet what they might be. The report says it appeared to be a simple B and E for purposes of robbery.” The dog seemed to be satisfied, so he sat back in his chair.

Lorenz hesitated, then began. “You have to understand that this is the biggest disaster for our department in the last hundred years.”

Hamp answered, “I understand. We can …” he sensed that he was in danger again. “I can assure you that I haven’t any intention of letting what you tell me go into wide dissemination, and I’m not interested in the details of what went wrong. I’m interested in the murderer.” The tension seemed to go out of the big dog. She kept her eyes on him for another moment, then looked at her master without lifting her head.

“He hot-wired a car from North American Watch and drove it to the front of the house so the occupants would see it and open the door to him. After that we don’t know the exact order of events—no witnesses, no prints—but here’s what I think. He got them to believe there was some danger, and Mantino and Sobell picked up guns from the gun cabinet in the living room. When Sobell headed for the back of the house with a thirty-ought-six, he shot him in the back of the head. Sobell had to be the first, because it’s pretty hard to do that to a man carrying a loaded weapon if he knows you’re coming. Then he shot Mantino five times in the chest and the front of the head before Mantino could get a shot off.”

“What next?”

“He kept his head, created confusion and got out. He behaved like a real soldier.”

Hamp held Martha in the corner of his eye as he spoke. “I’m interested in this man.” Martha cocked an ear, but there was no agitation. It was just like trying to beat a lie detector, he realized, and pushed on. “Is there anything in this to indicate where he came from, or where he’ll go next?”

“Nothing,” said Lorenz. “In the early fall there are about a thousand hotel rooms available, and about forty percent are rented. We’re pretty close to having all of them accounted for. We’re working on the planes and trains and buses. I’d say he drove in, did his job, then drove out without attracting any attention. He’s got nothing to worry about from anybody around here.”

“Who was Sobell?”

“Male Caucasian, six-one, one-eighty-five, good build, broken nose, lots of his prints on the guns in the cabinet. He was licensed as a private detective, but I can’t find any indication he worked at it much. I think he was a bodyguard.” Lorenz and his dog watched Hamp closely.

Hamp leaned forward. “Do you have any idea why Mantino hired a bodyguard instead of a member of his own organization? Was he afraid of something?”

“I was hoping you could tell me. It got him, though, didn’t it?”

Hamp thought about it. If Mantino was afraid of a paid assassin who used to work for the Mafia, it made a lot of sense. The one who gains the most is the one standing closest when the body falls. But he couldn’t allow Lorenz to start asking him questions. Even if he managed to compose answers, the dog would smell his tension and premeditation and turn on him. “What was missing from the house?”

Lorenz gave Hamp a wry look. “Nothing. Kind of odd, isn’t it? The theory is that he didn’t have time, or made more noise than he’d expected to.”

Hamp recognized that Lorenz was better than he looked—not as an investigator, because anybody could see it wasn’t a botched robbery, but as a cop. He had been pondering the murder, stewing about it for two days, and using the time to look, listen and evaluate. He had found the discrepancies between the official story he was paid to help concoct to keep publicity down and what his common sense told him was true. Now he was working on his own theory. If he was working on it alone, then all he could do was get in the way. But if he was good, there was some small chance that it might lead him, not to the predator who had made a brief and relatively harmless stop in this little community, but to Mantino’s associates. This good man could have no more idea than his dog did what it would mean to bring himself to the attention of those people right now. Hamp eyed the dog and determined to discourage him.

“He wasn’t trying to rob him,” said Hamp. “Washington is sure of that much.” Elizabeth was, at least. The dog sensed Hamp’s discomfort and turned its head to face him. In a moment, he knew, it would slowly align its body with its head, aimed toward him. “It was a hit.”

Lorenz nodded. “Okay. So what?”

“So his death doesn’t fit the standard motivation of an ordinary murder. I don’t know why he was killed, and we might not know for years, but it wasn’t a local matter. Do you understand?”

Lorenz reserved judgment. “Tell me.”

“I’m asking you not to go out and pursue any leads on your own. If something comes up, turn it over to the FBI.” Hamp was tempted to try to frighten him, but he could tell this was not a man who allowed himself to be frightened; to threaten him would just ensure that he would never drop the case.

Lorenz sighed in frustration, and the dog looked confused. Was her master angry at this stranger? She decided not to take any chances. Hamp watched as her big, muscular body sidestepped into line with the head, so that she was hunched on the couch, ready to spring at him if her master triggered the impulse. “Fair enough,” said Lorenz.

“Do I have your word?” asked Hamp. The dog smelled the tension and her master’s uncertainty. She hunched lower and her upper lip twitched, as though she could already imagine the taste.

“Yes,” Lorenz said finally.

Hamp smiled. “Good,” he said, and he meant it. He felt the tension begin to go out of him. “I appreciate it.” He stood up and took a step toward the door, then stopped and patted Martha’s shoulder hard. He could feel the muscle and bone under the fur, like a man’s upper arm. A tongue like a wet slice of ham slipped out between the lower teeth, and the thick tail whipped back and forth.

As Hamp walked to the door, Lorenz shook his hand. “Now, that’s something,” he said. “She doesn’t like people much, but she sure likes you.”

* * *

Hamp sat on the bed and looked above him at the big, crude wooden lintel beam over the door that led to the bathroom. There were lots of Spanish touches in La Fonda, little colored designs hand-painted in unlikely places on the white walls, and even the walls themselves, a foot and a half thick on the outside. It was the sort of building that conveyed a sense of security.

Hamp had seen curiosity take some strange forms in his time, and if a man like Peter Mantino was dead, it was conceivable that some of the people who felt close to him were in town. If they were, none of them would be above bugging the room of a Justice Department field man just to see if his leads were any better than theirs. He decided that all he could do was to turn on the television set to mask some of what he was going to say.

When Elizabeth Waring answered, her voice was almost a whisper. “Hello,” said Hamp. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“Jack?”

“That’s right. I just finished up with the local police here. They don’t have much to go on, but the best guess is a lone man who probably didn’t have anything in mind except to kill Mantino, The second best guess is what’s going in the papers.”

“What’s that?”

“A robber impersonated a security guard to gain entry, found the victims armed and had to kill them to get out.”

“Do you think it’s the same man?”

“I don’t know that two crimes are enough to establish a reliable pattern.”

She sighed deeply enough so he could hear it. “Jack, yesterday I used up a favor in Personnel to look into who you are. I know you probably don’t expect much from me, but please don’t let that keep you from telling me what you think—not what you know, because nobody really knows anything yet. Because I found out I can expect a lot from you, and I’m going to need it.”

Hamp ran this through a second time, and it surprised him. She was manipulating him with flattery. It was exactly what he would have done if he were the one stuck in Washington. She could easily be one of those blondes with long, straight, shiny hair and light, empty eyes who could look at you without blinking and dazzle you with bullshit. “Ninety-nine to one it’s him.”

“Why?”

“There aren’t a whole lot of people who would do it this way. It takes a certain kind of person to walk into the other fellow’s home ground, look him in the eye, drop the hammer on him and walk away. See, Talarese and Mantino were both people he knew probably weren’t alone. If he knew who they were, then he’d know they were as likely to be armed as he was. It’s not like the sort of thing a psycho does, where he wants to watch some defenseless victim get scared and suffer and all that so he can feel powerful. It’s the opposite. He knows he’s outnumbered and probably being hunted, and he has to be sure because he can’t hang around and try again. He does it this way because he knows that the other fellow is going to take a second or two stuttering and fumbling, and he knows he isn’t. You hear what I’m saying, right? He knows he isn’t.”

There was a pause on Elizabeth’s end of the line that sounded as though she were thinking hard. “What’s he doing now?”

“I think he’s already done it. He wouldn’t have booked a Hong Kong flight if he wasn’t trying to get away. I think the reason he went after Mantino has something to do with that. Maybe it was a payoff to somebody to get him out: Mantino had an outsider for a bodyguard, which to me means that he didn’t trust somebody in his own organization. But it’s just as likely that our boy simply wanted to get everybody in an uproar so they’d be too busy putting in bulletproof glass to go out and look for him.”

“Welcome aboard, Jack.”

“What?”

“You just figured out as much about the way he thinks as anybody else knows after ten years.”

“Save the congratulations.”

“Why?”

“Because if I get too good at this, sometime I just might get a look at him.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“I might waste a second or two making up my mind.”