Sleeping Dogs

Wolf stood in the shower and let the heavy flow of water pour over him. He needed to be soothed. When he moved, he could feel a small hitch in his back where he had taken the jolts of the bus ride across Arizona. He had been awakened a few times during the night, not by the sounds of cars, the motel ice machine or the voices in other rooms, but by his mind running through its accumulated clutter. Each time, when consciousness came, he would find himself in midthought, sometimes in midsentence, fully aware of the specious train of logic he had been following in his sleep.

The last time, he had been thinking about Meg. He hated to think about her now when he was awake, because she was gone forever. He never had any trouble recalling the sight of her, or even the scent of her perfume. He had been constructing a dream about her; in it he would live, and then he would go back and look at her. It wouldn’t be easy to accomplish, because women of her class ventured off the enclosed, protected parks their husbands inherited less and less often as they grew older. They were occupied with their children until they sent them away to some awful boarding school, and after that they saw a select group of friends who were, after so many generations, so closely related that they looked like sisters. When he reached this part of the dream, the sense of loss and disappointment woke him up, and he began to scheme in the darkness for some way to go home. At some point in the night he had let go of it, and awakened to the one thing the darkness and isolation had let him forget. He had been doing his feeling and thinking on the premise that he was a constant, unchanging being, that the continuity of his memories and consciousness somehow guaranteed that he was the same. But now, as he became more alert to the physical world that chilled his bones, put pressure on his joints and reflected his body in mirrors, he remembered. When he was asleep, or when nothing reminded him of it, he felt exactly the same as he had the first time he had put on his Little League baseball uniform. He could even remember the incredible whiteness of the flannel, and feel the softness of it against his legs. That was the ridiculous part of memory, or one of the ridiculous parts. It was only his body that wasn’t still ten years old.

Wolf dried himself with two of the big rough white towels and walked into the bedroom. There were really two problems now, and the way to get through this was to look at them separately. The old men were the big problem. He had done the right thing by going to Las Vegas. Little Norman might be able to convince them that the best thing they could do was to let Carl Bala stay in his cage and forget about helping him with his revenge.

The other problem was new to him. He knew that Little Norman must have been telling the truth. Tony Talarese had been wearing a wire. It was the only thing that explained the commotion in the kitchen when he had popped the bastard. It had been so obvious; why hadn’t he figured it out? Because it was such an outrageous idea that his mind had somehow blocked it. But now the New York police knew something about him. Hell, they must know a lot about him if they could have five cops waiting for him in the Los Angeles airport a few hours later. Because that’s what it had been; he had seen the whole thing wrong. It wasn’t four cops looking for a shooter; it was five cops looking for him.

He sat down on the bed and thought about this, and it was still wrong. The New York police couldn’t have gotten on a plane and caught up with him like that. They would have needed to take practically the next flight out of New York, and what could they expect to do in Los Angeles? They wouldn’t have jurisdiction. Now it fell into place inevitably. It wasn’t the New York police; it was federal cops—the FBI. It fit better anyway. They were the ones who were always bugging telephones and taping microphones to people, and they wouldn’t have to put anybody on a plane; they would simply make a phone call to the Los Angeles office to have their agent bring four bozos across town to scoop him up.

Wolf dressed quickly and walked across the street to the pay phone outside a small diner. He had twenty dollars in quarters, two ten-dollar rolls that he had bought from the sleepy change girl posted near the slot machines in the lobby of his motel in Las Vegas. He had picked up the habit from Little Norman in the old days, and it had come back to him. Little Norman had always told him that his hands were too small to use by themselves. A fist wrapped around a roll of quarters might lose a few hundredths of a second getting there, but when it did it would make an impression.

He put a quarter into the telephone and dialed the number. The operator came on the line and said, “Please deposit three thirty-five.” He laboriously pumped fourteen quarters into the slot, and after the fourteenth, the operator wouldn’t go away until she had said, “You have fifteen cents’ credit.” Then it sounded as though she were climbing into a jar and then screwing the lid on after her. And finally he heard the ring. It sounded different from the ones here, sort of bubbly and quick, and it made him feel as though he were home. It was maddening. He was listening to her phone, and he could see the room in his memory.

“Hello?”

“Hi,” he said. “I’m going to have to talk fast.”

“After leaving me alone this long, I should say you are.” He tried to remember how long it had been since he had heard anyone talk with a smile in her voice.

“Not to make excuses. It’s the connection. Wiring problems, I think.” She would understand that. It was from one of those silly books she had made him read. The British spy had detected a couple of ohms of extra resistance on the line to his reading lamp, and concluded it must be a bug. An American would have gone through the place with a bug detector. You could buy one for twenty-five bucks.

“Oh,” she said. Then, “Oh.”

It was the FBI that worried him. In another book she had forced on him he had read that the National Security Agency had the capability of recording every transatlantic telephone call. The book hadn’t said whether they did it, or what use they made of all those tapes, but if they didn’t share them with the FBI, they were stupid. He had heard a lot about American intelligence services, but he hadn’t heard that they weren’t devious enough.

“I’m going to have to stay longer than I thought,” he said.

“Why? Can you-”

“It’s because I made a mistake. I’d like to say it was something else, but it wasn’t.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

This was the hard part. If they were listening, it had to be plausible nonsense. “Yeah. It’s funny I should be thinking about this right now, but I can’t get it out of my mind. The best thing you could do is spend today rearranging things. Maybe move your clothes and stuff. A good place might be at the north end, where the bed used to be.” He spent a second hoping she had gotten it, and knowing she couldn’t have. He thought of Yorkshire pudding, and there was an archbishop, but if he got that crude, they would have it before she did.

But she said, “Oh. The present arrangement isn’t good?”

Her voice had the sort of concern he was listening for, but he needed to be sure. “I’ve done a lot of this kind of decorating,” he said. “If you take my advice, I think it will brighten things up a lot.”

“Is it … that dark now?”

He was satisfied. She knew. “It just struck me as a good idea. I’d love to look the place over myself, but I just can’t get away right now. I’m hoping I’ll be able to soon.”

“I’d be very sad if you couldn’t.”

“I would too.”

There was a long silence on the other end, and he thought he could hear her breathing. It began to bring her back as a physical presence: the barely detectable scent on her hair, the incredibly soft skin just in front of her ear, and then, “I wanted to say,” Margaret said, “just in case we don’t get to speak again soon, that I …” She paused and then said the next two words softly: “love you.” He drew in his breath to answer, but she went on rapidly. “Please don’t answer, because it wouldn’t mean anything if you did right now. I wouldn’t have said it today either, but I thought I’d better, given the circumstances. These things often don’t get said, and then you regret it and all that. I know this is being unfair to you in case you wanted to say it for the same reasons, but that’s the way it is.”

“I love you.”

“After all that? It makes me feel worse than I thought, because it’s so typical of you.”

“I’ve got to go now. Don’t forget what I said.”

“Michael, wait!”

“What?”

“That was stupid of me. I’m sorry. I just—you know. I hope it’s not long. But if it is, I’ll—”

“Don’t.”

He hung up the telephone and heard a loud jangle as the machine dumped the load of quarters into its collection box. As he watched for a break in the traffic so that he could get back across the street to his motel, he felt worse. He hadn’t made her understand. He should have told her something closer to the truth. He wasn’t delayed; he was probably dead. The dons might sit back and wait while he disappeared and then tell Carl Bala in his prison cell that it was just one of those things, but if he didn’t disappear, then he was in trouble. After allowing him a decent interval, they would change their minds. And already the people who worked for Carl Bala would be out in force, hanging in all the places where he had ever been seen, watching for him. He might be able to avoid them for a time, but not forever.

He had never worried much about the authorities before. He still didn’t think they could catch him, except by some gigantic stroke of blundering good luck, but what if they could actually keep him from leaving the country? He had just used up the only passport he had that would get him past the computerized scanners they had installed in the airports since he had left, and there was no way he could try again to buy one. What had happened in Buffalo had closed that down for all time.

He had to get out before Bala had time to replace Talarese and Mantino and Fratelli and the new men got things organized enough to come after him. What could it take, two or three days? A week at the outside. What the hell else did the old son of a bitch have to do?

Wolf was starting to feel a kind of claustrophobia. Somehow the country had shrunk. Ten years ago it had been a place full of possibilities. He could disappear simply by fading into a crowd, or take a quick jump that put him five hundred miles away so they would have to start looking for him all over again. Now everything seemed to be a lot closer to everything else. He had to find out something about this FBI business.

Sergeant Bob Lempert had spent most of his career under suspicion. In 1965 he and an older cop named Mulroy had been assigned to stay in a hotel to be sure nothing happened to a bookmaker named Ricky Hinks before he could testify in the conspiracy trial of Paul Cambria. Ricky Hinks was later found to have slipped into the bathroom, cut the shower curtain into strips with a razor and tied them together to make a rope. He had then used it to lower himself from the bathroom window to the alley below, where he had been shot to death by persons unknown. It was considered to be bad luck all around—certainly for Ricky Hinks, who must have lowered himself into the gunsights of some obstructors of justice; but also for officers Mulroy and Lempert, because he had died without revealing how he had managed to slice up the curtain with an electric razor, or lower himself sixty feet on a twenty-foot rope. The internal inquiry was not released in detail, the Gary police chief was quoted as saying, because it was inextricably intertwined with an ongoing investigation. The two officers involved had done their duty.

But from that moment on, Bob Lempert’s career took a detour into limbo. He was considered to be a competent cop at a time when cops who were eager to respond to those two A.M. “domestic disturbance” calls from sparsely patrolled neighborhoods, or to venture into the very asshole of the city to check out “shots fired” reports were at a premium. Jobs were plentiful in Gary, Indiana, for healthy white veterans who could read, and not many of them paid less than a cop made, so there was no point in throwing away a good body. Lempert remained a trusted member of the force, the kind you wanted behind you when you kicked in a door. But this trust went only so far. You didn’t want him behind you if you kicked in certain very expensive doors, and you didn’t want him in plainclothes, where he could get too used to the availability of payoffs. But for your B and E’s, your Aggravated Assaults, your “Shut Up and Go Back in Your House Because I’m the Law” situations, you couldn’t do much better than Bob Lempert.

Lempert had made sergeant when he was pushing fifty. In his case, it was a sort of honorary title because nobody wanted him put in charge of anything. This was not because the aroma of the 1965 incident had lingered in the nostrils of the powerful for so many years; it was because from time to time the odor returned. In the mid-seventies, when Eddie Parnell, the challenger for the presidency of the laundry union, was killed with his two brothers on the eve of the election, people pointed out that Eddie and his family were not completely ignorant that some such thing might happen. All three of them wore pistols in shoulder holsters twenty-four hours a day, and would not have opened the door to just anybody who took the trouble to rap his knuckles on it. It would have had to be somebody they had no reason to suspect, somebody who could walk in armed without being frisked, somebody they couldn’t have simply told to come back tomorrow after the ballots had been counted. It would have had to be a cop.

In the eighties there had been a number of puzzling incidents, notably the strange death of a known cocaine dealer named Milo “Mucho Más” Figueroa. He had been shot down at his heavily fortified house after firing several ineffective shots with an AK-47 into trees near two officers. In the inquiry it was learned that the two officers had no search warrant because they had not intended to enter the dwelling; in fact, they were off duty and had simply been fired upon as they were passing by. Odder still were Mr. Figueroa’s garb, consisting of a sleeveless T-shirt and silk boxer shorts; the hour he had chosen to go berserk, which was four A.M.; and the fact that he had chosen to defend his fortress from outside its walls. None of this would have merited a page in the annals of cocaine-induced paranoia except that when the premises were thoroughly searched, not a milligram of cocaine was found, nor any currency. One of the off-duty officers who assisted at Mr. Figueroa’s suicide was Bob Lempert.

Lempert could not be considered a bitter man, in spite of all this coincidence and bad luck. He was, in fact, cheerful most of the time. He had stayed on the force long after he had done his twenty years, and showed up for work each day ready with either a joke of his own or a laugh at someone else’s. Today he was in a worse mood than he had been in since the Internal Affairs Division had called him in to ask about the death of Miriam Purnaski, the jeweler. That time he hadn’t really been prepared since it had been such a rush job. Miriam Purnaski was one of the modern practitioners of the ancient process of changing money into gold, then changing it back again in another country. At some point in her career she had lost her appreciation for simplicity and begun performing the same kind of alchemy simultaneously for several local dealers in recreational chemicals. Then she had made the mistake that attorneys and accountants sometimes do, which was to merge the accounts of several clients. Having made this first step into unsound bookkeeping, she had gradually betrayed her fiduciary responsibility for the funds of the Cambria family entirely, and begun feeding what she received into the big end of the funnel, paying out what she needed to at the small end, and paying herself whatever profit she could make in between. When mutual-fund managers did this, it was called an administration fee; when money laundresses did it, it was called skimming. At the moment when Lempert had learned about this, he was told that she was already on her way to the airport and that he had an hour to stop her.

Afterward, when the shooting team had grilled Lempert, he had been able to explain her unfortunate accident adequately. The woman had sideswiped a police car because she was in such a rush to get to the hospital, having been shot in the abdomen by persons unknown, probably in a robbery attempt. But what had put him in a bad mood was learning what was in her suitcases only after the ambulance had arrived. It was more than a million in cash, and bank deposit books with numbers in them that were so big they didn’t have any meaning.

Lempert was in the same kind of mood today. Paul Cambria had told his man Puccio to get the word out: the Butcher’s Boy had come back. If he were the sort of man who had a lot of luck going for him, he might have managed to drop the hammer on the bastard, because Lempert was one of a small, select group of people who had seen the Butcher’s Boy up close in the old days and was still alive. About fifteen years ago, Lempert had worked with him. At least that was the way he would have put it to Paul Cambria if he had been important enough to talk to Cambria personally. Actually, he had been the driver—or he would have been, if necessary. It was the night when the Butcher’s Boy was supposed to walk through the back door of the Garibaldi Social Club and quietly rid the city of the menace of Andy Ugolino. The idea was that afterward, if things weren’t quiet, Lempert would pull up in a squad car, everybody else would run the other way, and the Butcher’s Boy would slip into the back seat and get a ride across town. As it happened, things had gone very quietly, and the police escort hadn’t been necessary, but Lempert had seen him twice—once before, and once while he was walking out of the social club.

The problem was that the Butcher’s Boy had also seen Lempert. At the time Lempert had believed that it was likely to be useful in the future to get to know all the important people he could. Important people knew other important people, and opportunities could come from anywhere. He even had the odd notion that they might get to be friends. Lempert was an ordinary guy, after all, and he had never heard anything about the man that said he wasn’t one too. When he said it to himself, he had a picture in his mind. He didn’t analyze it, but the essential elements were that the guy would be somebody you might drink a beer with in a neighborhood bar, and that he should have some passing interest in sports, maybe enough interest to place a small bet now and then. There was a subtle bond between men whose lives were contested, who could keep living only as long as they won. That wasn’t exactly Lempert, but he had been in some tight spots.

So he had contrived to meet the bastard. Puccio had told Lempert he was going to see the guy the day before and give him the money. It was supposed to be in a restaurant called The Golden Cock, and Puccio had wanted to be sure there wasn’t some plan to raid the place that day because the cops knew there were slot machines in the room upstairs. Puccio didn’t want to be sitting in the place holding a hundred thousand in cash when some idiot rookie with a fire ax in his hand burst in through the back door to arrest illegal gamblers. But even more fervently, he didn’t want to be sitting across the table from that particular man when the cops came in. Lempert assured him that the place was not due to come up on the list until August, and maybe not even then, but it gave Lempert an excuse to show up and meet the Butcher’s Boy.

It was a mistake. He wasn’t an ordinary guy. Lempert walked up to the booth in the corner just as Puccio was saying something in a low voice about whacking Ugolino. The man was a disappointment at first glance. He didn’t look like much—no big shoulders or bull neck, and he was wearing a herringbone tweed sport coat with no tie. He had thin, sandy brown hair and brown eyes, and his fingers were long and thin, like a musician’s. One hand was sort of playing with his napkin on the table as though he were preoccupied, and his eyes seemed almost dull as they passed across Lempert. Then he looked up. “Sit down.”

Lempert had grinned and pulled out a chair, but then he noticed that Puccio was scared shitless. “What the fuck?” he whispered. “Get out of here.”

Lempert’s grin lingered on his face because he didn’t know what to do with it. The man repeated, “Sit down.” This time he let the napkin slip a little, and Lempert’s grin disappeared. Under the hem of the napkin he could see the black muzzle of a silencer aimed at his belly, and the hand was preparing to pull the trigger of the pistol through the napkin. He sat down.

The man turned his expressionless face on Puccio. “Keep your money.”

“But he’s—”

“I know who he is. He’s your cop.”

“Look,” said Puccio. “He just made a mistake. Please. Don’t kill him.”

Lempert had never heard these terms applied to himself before. Even after he had seen the gun, it had not occurred to him that he had done anything that could conceivably raise the stakes to that level. On reflection, he realized that he should have known before the gun, as soon as he had seen the eyes. They were not the eyes of a man who was afraid or angry. They weren’t even eager, like the eyes of a cat or a dog about to tear something up; those eyes had a kind of excitement or anticipation. This was not an ordinary guy. Lempert had been a cop for a long time by then, and he had seen something like this before. He didn’t know a lot about what he was looking at, but he knew that if this man started to smile, Lempert was going to dive for the floor and try to get his gun out in time.

The Butcher’s Boy said, “I won’t. I’m going to get up in a minute. You’re both going to sit where you are until I’m gone. Don’t send for me again.”

Puccio looked at Lempert, a quick glance that was intended to communicate a lot of things at once. It said something like, “See what you did?” But it also said, “If you speak or move or even change your expression, we’re going to die. And if I die here like this, I’ll hound you through hell for all eternity.” Puccio was like that. He never forgot or forgave or made allowances. He was a brilliant man, and it was his tragedy that the Cambria businesses had grown so large that he couldn’t handle all the details himself. Lempert let all the life go out of him and sat there, barely breathing. “Look, kid …” said Puccio. “I apologize. I’m embarrassed. The money just doubled. I’ll throw in another hundred thousand out of my own pocket.”

“The job’s not worth that.” It was a strange thing for a man to say. “The price isn’t the issue.”

Puccio nodded, but slowly, and he didn’t talk with his hands the way he usually did. “I know. I’m sincere. I’m trying to make up for this and show you I’m a serious man.”

The Butcher’s Boy looked at Puccio for a minute, then said, “All right.”

Lempert wasn’t sure he had heard correctly at first because he was busy remembering the sight of the Goschia brothers. Puccio had actually had them hung on meat hooks in the freezer of the Ritzmar Quality Packing Company, like some don in a movie. Only he had taped the button on the electrical track so that they were still going around and around when the rest of the employees came to work on Monday morning. Lempert had arrived just after the Homicide guys, and they were still up there. The rumor was that they had run their own football pool in the plant and had cost Puccio about ten thousand dollars in receipts.

Puccio was already saying, “I know you’ll get out, but just in case …”

The Butcher’s Boy let his eyes settle on Lempert and said, “I want him. No sense having everybody in town see my face.”

Afterward, Puccio didn’t kill Lempert, but he did everything he could to make him think he was going to. As soon as the Butcher’s Boy had gone, he shrugged his shoulders, chuckled and patted Lempert on the back. “We dodged it that time,” he said. The only reason Lempert could think of why Puccio would behave that way was if he didn’t expect to see Lempert again.

When Lempert had tried to stammer out, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Puccio had said, “It’s forgotten. Just don’t do it again.”

It was only after Ugolino was dead and Lempert was still alive that he started to take breaths that actually kept enough oxygen going to his brain. At that point he understood what was going on. By the time he had arrived in his squad car to watch the Butcher’s Boy come out of the social club, Ugolino had been dead almost an hour. That was what the coroner’s report had said. Lempert read it three times to be sure. But what gave him such chills that the skin on his jowls tightened and made his whiskers actually rise to the touch was that the death was listed “natural causes.” The best he could figure it was that the bastard had somehow gotten to Ugolino in the crowd and injected him with something that made his heart stop, and then let him slip down under the table at the booth in the back before anybody saw him. Who the hell would try to kill somebody like Ugolino that way? But whatever he had done, he had hung around for an hour inside the building before leaving.

Paul Cambria had gone to Ugolino’s funeral, with his foreman, Puccio, in attendance. In the surveillance photographs, the two of them had looked dignified and mournful as they accepted the homage of Ugolino’s family and friends. Two hundred thousand was a bargain. They didn’t just get to see Ugolino dead, they got to eat him afterward, like cannibals.

Now the Butcher’s Boy was supposed to be back. It made Lempert’s jaw ache to think about it. He could get rich in the fraction of a second it took to exert four ounces of pressure with his right forefinger. But it wasn’t just money; the invisible men who quietly owned the planet would be so pleased that they would give him a charmed existence. Nothing could ever touch him again. The secret agony he had felt and lived with since the first time he had been passed over for promotion twenty-odd years ago would be transformed in an instant into a cosmic joke. Sergeant? Hell, governors didn’t live the life he would live if he were just lucky enough to be standing there when the bastard showed his face. It was exactly like winning the lottery.

But there were problems. Puccio had called him to give him the news, and he wasn’t looking at it like an early payday. That meant Paul Cambria wasn’t either. Paul Cambria was one of the men who ran things in the world, and that put him just below the old men themselves, the ones you saw only in blurry photographs. If Paul Cambria had something to worry about, then the rest of the human race was in trouble.

But at work two days later, he learned why a thinking man like Puccio wasn’t seeing this development as an opportunity, but as an occasion that might cause his name to be left out of next year’s phone book. The FBI was in an uproar because suddenly, for no known reason, Antonio Talarese, Angelo Fratelli and Peter Mantino had stopped being suspected organized-crime figures and become homicide victims. The FBI wasn’t just sending circulars, but was making urgent inquiries to learn if anyone in any big-city police station had ever heard of anyone aka “Butcher’s Boy.” Lempert could almost feel the velvety texture of the first cushion-soft stack of hundred-dollar bills. The bastard wasn’t out depopulating the civilized world. He was on some kind of a batch job, slicing off a few of the heads that stuck up above the crowd. Lempert didn’t have to ask himself who was likely to be the next of the heads; Puccio had told him. Lempert was going to get rich.

Lempert sat in the back of the van he had taken from Impound and watched the line of people inching slowly toward the front door of the Cinema Marrakesh. Over the door the giant 1930s marquee had actually been washed, and a couple of thousand burned-out light bulbs had been replaced. Some of the plaster carvings on the lintel had actually had a little gold paint slapped on them too. The green, foot-high letters on the marquee said only BELLADONNA. The movie had so many big stars in it that there wouldn’t have been room for them, and maybe it didn’t make any difference, because everybody knew what it was and who was in it, and the star was supposed to be the director, anyway.

In a way, it was ridiculous for Paul Cambria to take his wife to a movie like that, even if it was an opening. It had to be comical to him. The idea was supposed to be that this beautiful young girl, the daughter of some Mafia guy—not a local boy, but an old Sicilian with a mustache—takes over after his untimely death and gets very rich. To the real thing, someone like Paul Cambria, it had to be pretty strange. Those guys didn’t even tell their wives what the hell they did for a living. It was also odd that Cambria would sit in the dark with a thousand people for two hours. Maybe he thought his guys needed to know that he wasn’t going to pull in his horns just because there was somebody looking for him.

Anyway, it was a one-shot deal. They were having an opening in Gary only because the writer or director or somebody was from here, and because some of it had been filmed in town. One day there were a couple of trucks here, some guys with lights they turned on in the daytime, and a lot of confusion, because this was roughly the place where Punch Mayall had been blown away in the thirties, but that was about it. There hadn’t been any movie stars within a thousand miles of here. The real opening was going to be in Hollywood tomorrow, and that was where you would see the stars, not just these schmucks in corduroy coats with patches on the elbows and big thick glasses.

Lempert judged that his chances might be good tonight. If Cambria was in the theater, his guys would be there too. They would be all around, stuck to him like shit to a blanket. The Butcher’s Boy would know that too. Still, he might just be crazy enough to want to go inside anyway and cut Cambria’s throat while they were all sitting around with their thumbs up their asses, but you couldn’t bet your future on how crazy somebody was. You had to assume that he knew what he was doing. He would get Cambria afterward. All Lempert had to do was sit in the warm van on the swivel chair and wait and watch for the muzzle flash. It was like a duck hunt. When he had parked the van here this afternoon, he had taken the precaution of writing himself a ticket and sticking it under the wiper so that nobody else would decide to do it.

He had thought this through very carefully, and he was ready. He had a Ruger Mini-14 next to him, all sighted in on the front of the theater with a four-power night scope. It would take about half a second to put his shoulder to it, pop the window and draw a bead on the bastard as soon as he saw him. A beginner wouldn’t have thought of the Ruger. The barrel was short enough to swing around in a van without banging it on something. Lempert was a good target shooter. He knew that if he could just get a clear view for the first shot, so the target would stay put, he could punch four or five holes in him within two seconds after that.

When the ushers in their brand-new, old-fashioned bellboy suits came out and shut the doors, Lempert studied what was left outside. There were eight uniformed patrolmen that he could see, picking up a little overtime pretending to control the crowds that were already inside the building watching the movie. He looked through the scope at each of their faces in turn. There was Jimmy Clinton and his partner, Bucklin—looking like the Pillsbury Doughboy with all the fat he had put on in the last few months. And—oh, shit—Olney and Winks. They were the ones to watch for. They had managed to wangle this assignment, of course. It was probably easier than just signing in and cooping in their car in the cul de sac off Breckinridge. He didn’t like seeing veterans out here. One or two of them might be calm enough to realize what was happening in time to put a round or two into the van. The other four he didn’t know. All of them were young, and one was a woman, so at least it wasn’t the Butcher’s Boy in a uniform. He was certainly capable of thinking of that one.

Lempert turned in his swivel chair to study the upper windows on the street again. If you assumed the bastard wasn’t out-and-out berserk, you had to imagine that he might find his way into one of those buildings with a rifle. Lempert saw no changes from the last time he had looked. There were no glows from dim lights on the ceilings, no shades raised a little, no objects visible. He ducked his head, made his way on his knees to the front of the van and peeked out the windshield. There was nothing up the street that could be construed as a problem. The traffic was moving at the usual rate. He crawled to the back window and moved the curtain half an inch. There were no new vehicles parked along the street, no knots of people the Butcher’s Boy could join to get a closer look at the place.

There was one more thing that Lempert had to check. He opened the back door of the van, swung his legs to the street and quietly closed the door. There wasn’t any point in locking it with eight uniforms loitering around across the street, and unlocking it made noise, so he left it. He walked away from the theater and turned the corner on Fourth before venturing to look over his shoulder. His colleagues were standing around now talking to each other instead of watching the place. Probably not one of them had any idea that Paul Cambria was even here. He wondered if that would have made a difference. Probably not; you had to know the rest of it before it meant anything.

Lempert turned again at the alley behind Chautauqua Avenue, put his head down, pulled his collar up and jammed his right hand into his jacket pocket so that he could grasp his service revolver before he took the first step down the alley. If the Butcher’s Boy was in one of the buildings, he would have a car waiting in back of it, or, at most, one street over. Whatever happened with Paul Cambria, he would need to have a reliable, invisible way of getting in and then getting out. The one thing Lempert remembered about his experience with the bastard ten years ago was that he thought things through. He would probably have a couple of ways out.

Lempert made his way up the alley, trying to look like a schlemiel who was watching the ground to keep from stepping into a puddle, but every few yards he scanned the old brick buildings, fire escapes and the dumpsters, looking for a change. He wasn’t afraid he would miss a parked car, but he might miss something else—a broken window, or a garbage can moved a couple of feet so it could be used to climb in through a vent. It wasn’t that he had any intention of going into an empty building after him: not this one. But if he just knew where the bastard was, he was pretty sure he had him. All he had to do was wait. The waiting reminded him that it was time to take a leak. He looked up and down the alley, then stepped into the shadows behind the shoe store and urinated against the wall. It was a delicious feeling because of the danger and the darkness.

Lempert continued up the alley another block before turning onto Sixth and crossing the street to the other side. The cops standing out on the sidewalk would be cutting the amenities short about now and getting into their squad cars to rest their feet, which meant they would have nothing to do for about two hours but stare up the street and watch the lights change. He made it across while they were still gathered in a gaggle in front of the theater, then made a circuit of Atlantic Avenue behind the theater and back to Fourth. If tonight was the night the bastard was going after Cambria, then he hadn’t done anything much to get ready.

Lempert made his way back to the van on Chautauqua, still walking along with his head down and his collar turned up. As soon as he had passed the last parked car, he stepped into the gutter and followed it to the rear of the van. He had swung the door open and was all the way inside when he felt it. He stopped moving, but just to be sure, the son of a bitch slid it up his back and let the cold muzzle touch the nape of his neck. It was the kind of thing any of them would do because Puccio had taught them to be sadists. He was angry, but he supposed he would have to go through the whole idiotic cross-examination before he reminded this one that Puccio had called him and that he was doing no more than what Puccio wanted everyone to do.

“What do you want?” said Lempert.

“I want you.”

Holy shit, it wasn’t them; it was him. Lempert started to shiver. He was on his hands and knees, and his damned elbows wouldn’t stop shaking and giving out on him; what if the bastard thought all this twitching was some kind of a lame attempt to struggle? Suddenly he was overcome by a clear vision of his stupidity, and it brought a sort of repentance. What the hell could he have been thinking, coming out here to try and ambush a man like this? The money wasn’t even real anymore.

“I think you remember me.”

Lempert started thinking about a move a burglary suspect had tried on him once. He had told him to lie facedown and kiss the pavement, but when the guy got on his hands and knees he sprang forward like a damned gazelle, so all Lempert could do was trip the guy and then put the boots to him. The Butcher’s Boy could open fire and blast his spine. Then, as if he were a damned mind reader, the voice said, “Don’t do anything. I’m going to take the gun because I want to talk.”

As the invisible hand reached into his jacket pocket and took the service revolver, Lempert felt a secret joy. But then the hand went directly to his right ankle and took the other one too, the .32. “What do you want to talk about?”

“First I want you to crawl up to the driver’s seat and pull out of here.”

“Why should I?”

“Because I won’t need to kill you if you do.”

The answer mesmerized Lempert. Need to? But of course he would say anything to get Lempert to drive out of here. If he burned Lempert here, he wasn’t going to be able to walk away whistling. Eight cops—even those eight cops—were not going to let him do that. But need to? It gave him a tiny bit of hope that he might get out of this. If the Butcher’s Boy didn’t want to kill him, maybe he still had a chance. And even if Lempert somehow reversed things and managed to kill the bastard instead of having the bastard kill him, what was he going to say to the eight cops himself? What was the dead suspect doing in the van? He crawled to the seat, pulled himself up, started the engine and tried to look in the mirror to back up.

“Turn the lights on,” said the Butcher’s Boy.

“Oh, yeah,” said Lempert. He could barely get his hand to stop shaking so that he could turn the switch. Oh, God. He really had forgotten them, and now the bastard thought he was playing some trick.

As he started to turn out onto the street, the Butcher’s Boy said, “Go straight while we talk.”

Lempert obeyed, and he decided the bastard had made a mistake. There was something about driving—the thing he had spent eight hours a day doing for more than twenty years—that revived him. He was in control of all this power, so he couldn’t be powerless. “So why didn’t you kill Paul Cambria?”

“I don’t have anything against Paul Cambria. I came to see you.”

Lempert’s bravado disappeared. He had to talk to him, to say something that wasn’t in the groove of the bastard’s logic. “How do you even remember me?”

“Things come back to me. I figured you’d be hanging around Cambria, so I found him. You’re still a cop, right?”

“Yeah.” Oh, sweet Jesus. What could this be about? The bastard didn’t say another word for three blocks. Then he got it. Carlo Balacontano. Ten years ago. The bastard had some wacko idea that because Lempert was a cop he could get to Carl Bala in a federal prison. What happens when he finds out Lempert can’t?

Finally, “I want you to get something for me. I’ll pay you.”

It was coming. Maybe he could convince the bastard with some bullshit story: if you come to the prison with me, all I have to do is flash my badge and they’ll let us in armed. Bang. “What do you want?”

“Pull over up here.”

Lempert looked around as he slowed down. He made a guess; this man wouldn’t shoot him in front of a copying store that was still open, and next door to a bar that had barely begun its prime hours, and across the street from a pizza place. He stopped the van by the curb, but didn’t turn off the engine until the man said, “Come on. We’re going in there.”

The bar? He must mean the bar. Lempert turned off the engine. “Drop the keys on the floor and come out after me.” He dropped the keys on the floor, then waited until the bastard got out. He looked for an opportunity, but there was none. Then they were both on the street, and he could see the bastard in the light. He hadn’t changed much. It was almost eerie. He was six feet away, and had the service revolver in his hand, and his hand in his coat, and Lempert had no doubt that if he moved wrong or tripped on something and stumbled, he would have a hole in him before he hit the ground.

They walked into the copying store. There were typewriters and computers for rent, and lots of envelopes and colored paper for sale, and about a dozen Xerox machines in two rows. When Lempert saw the kid behind the counter, with his long, greasy ponytail and dark, bushy eyebrows that showed over the tops of his dark glasses, he decided there was a God. He remembered pulling this kid out of a 280Z after following him for ten blocks. It was the end of the month, and Lempert needed to write a few more tickets, so he had decided that this kid was going too fast. The kid had smirked at him, so he had whirled him around, slammed him against the car and frisked him, then put the cuffs on him and made him lie on the ground while he searched the car for drugs. If only he had found some, or planted some. Then this kid wouldn’t be the one to lean on the counter and smirk at him while he got his brains blown out.

“Here’s what I want,” said the Butcher’s Boy. “I want a copy of whatever the FBI is sending out to the police computers about me.”

“The NCIC file? How am I supposed to do that?”

“Maybe somebody will fax it here from the station, or Washington, or whatever. Maybe you can get one of these computers onto a phone line and call it up. Anyway, do it.”

“Give me a minute to think.”

“If you do it, I’ll pay you. If there’s some trick or something, I”—and then he paused for what seemed like a long time—“won’t.”

Lempert went to the kid at the counter. “I want to use a phone.”

The kid recognized him. He hesitated, and Lempert had the impression that he was scared, but it gave him no pleasure. “Here’s the phone.”

Lempert only briefly considered saying something on the phone that made no sense. Who could say what this man knew? He dialed the squad room and heard McNulty’s voice say, “Police Department Metro Division.” Of course it had to be McNulty working tonight, somebody who not only didn’t like Lempert but was also so stupid that his partners wouldn’t ride in a car with him unless they had personally checked the shotgun to be sure there wasn’t a shell in the chamber when he stuck it in the rack.

“It’s me, McNulty. Lempert,” he said. “I need a favor.”

“Don’t we all,” said McNulty.

Lempert thought for a moment. What was in his desk? Nothing that would get him into this much trouble. “I want you to look in the lower left-hand drawer of my desk, and fax the stuff in the file folder on top to me.”

“So where are you, Paris?”

“This is serious.”

“Where you at?”

Lempert turned to the kid, who was pretending to be dusting a shelf with a cloth. “Give me the fax number here.”

As the sheets rolled out of the machine, the Butcher’s Boy barely looked at them. He just took them out of the tray, glanced at them, folded them with one hand and stuffed them into his coat pocket. Most of the time he watched Lempert. What kept driving Lempert crazy was that the kid at the counter knew him. He was watching the proceedings out of the corner of his eye, and unless he was retarded, all this must have struck him as strange. He could probably see the lump in the Butcher’s Boy’s coat where he held Lempert’s service revolver. But he also knew that Lempert was a cop, and naturally would assume that the Butcher’s Boy was a cop too, and since cops carry guns, there was nothing strange going on at all. Anybody else would slip out the back door and dial 911. Even this kid would if it was anybody else but Lempert. Now the bastard was probably going to kill them both, walk out of here and drive away in the van. The keys were on the floor.

Finally the machine stopped grinding out pages. The Butcher’s Boy said, “That’s good enough. How do you usually get your money?”

Lempert knew he didn’t mean his police pay. “A post-office box.”

“Write it down and give it to me.”

Lempert couldn’t believe it. “You’re really going to pay me?”

As the Butcher’s Boy looked at him, Lempert could tell that he was being evaluated, and that somehow the assessment wasn’t good. “I said it.”

Lempert smirked. “Yeah. I heard you.”

“People lie to you a lot?”

“About money? Just about everybody.”

The Butcher’s Boy looked at him with a mixture of pity and distaste. “Then it’s your fault. You should have killed the first one.”

The man was absolutely serious: he had killed the first one. Lempert could tell, and it had a strange effect on him. For a few minutes he had been gaining strength. He had begun to look at the hand that gripped his revolver and feel a certainty that his hand was bigger and more powerful, and just a minute ago he had begun to wonder if maybe it wasn’t faster too. He had begun to visualize how he would grab it while it was still in the pocket and break it at the elbow, and his blood had started to warm in preparation for the moment. But now the other feeling had returned, the one he had felt when he had first met this man years ago. Not this time, not this man. He simply was not somebody you could do that to and have any real expectation of succeeding, because you couldn’t surprise him. A dozen people must have already tried whatever he had just thought of, and all of them were dead.

Lempert wrote the post-office-box number on a piece of paper that was meant to refill the fax machine and watched the free hand pick it up and put it in the pocket with the other sheets. But then Lempert was distracted. The back door of the copying store, the one that opened onto the parking lot of the plaza, sent a glint of light in his direction. It had moved, and the reflection of the overhead fluorescents had flashed too. As he watched, he could see the reflection swinging a little, back and forth. Somebody he couldn’t see had touched it. A sick feeling came over him; it was somebody testing to see if the back door was locked.

Apparently the Butcher’s Boy hadn’t seen it. He said, “You’ll get some money in the mail in a couple of weeks. Let’s go.” He tossed a twenty-dollar bill on the counter where the kid could see it and moved toward the front door. Then he stopped. “Coming?”

Lempert was sweating again. Whatever happened next, he was going to be in the middle of it, standing here without a weapon or a place to hide. If it was cops, he could give a yell and dive to the floor, and they would know enough to fire. He hoped it was cops. But how the hell could it be? It must be either the wind or Puccio’s men. God, he hoped it was Puccio’s men. Even if they were the ones who actually got him, Lempert would share in the credit. It was only fair.

* * *

As Albert Salcone stood outside the back door, he saw Ficcio across the door from him, reaching out his hand. Salcone gasped, then realized there was no way to keep Ficcio from touching the door. He pressed himself against the back wall of the building, blew the air out of his lungs and waited. As he watched the door swing back and forth a little, he forced the hatred he felt for Ficcio to drain out of his mind. Ficcio was a kid by today’s standards. In Salcone’s day, by the time you were nineteen, either you were in some jungle wearing camouflage fatigues or you were in jail. Now a kid that was nineteen might not have been in a real fight in his life.

Salcone turned to Ficcio and shook his head disapprovingly. Maybe Ficcio understood. At least he looked crestfallen. Salcone hoped he was devastated, but there was no way to explain to him now why he should be. Either the door was unlocked, in which case it would offer no resistance when they moved in, or it was locked. If it was locked, then when one of them tried to get in for real, it wouldn’t budge and he would have to fire through it. Either way, there was nothing lost. The one thing you didn’t want to do was test it and let the occupants know you were coming.

Salcone had been planning to have Ficcio go in through the back door alone while he waited in the street at the front of the store. But that wasn’t going to happen now. So much for all the cunning that had gotten them this far—Puccio’s and his own.

Puccio had come up to him in the theater and told him to find out what he could about the van that had been parked in the street across from the building. He had said there was something peculiar about it, and Salcone had known Puccio long enough to forget about asking questions and get out there. When he had sneaked to the rear corner of the van a while ago, he had peered inside and seen something every bit as peculiar as Puccio had suspected, but not as ominous. It was Bob Lempert, sitting in a swivel chair like the ones bass fishermen installed in their boats so that their butts wouldn’t get sore.

He had gone back inside and told Puccio that it was only Lempert, but Puccio had not been reassured; he had been puzzled. He had said in Italian, “He can’t be doing that for the police department. The only reason he might is if he was pretty sure the Butcher’s Boy was coming to get Paul. I told him to keep his eyes open like everybody else, but he’s too lazy to sit out there all night without getting paid.” He thought about it for a moment. “You know, he’s just stupid enough to have seen something in the police reports and kept it to himself so he could collect on the contract. Do me a favor. Go out and find a place to keep an eye on him, where he can’t see you. And take Ficcio with you.”

Salcone had responded to that with a raised eyebrow, and Puccio had read it instantly. “I know. But you might need somebody to come in and get me, and he won’t attract attention.” Then they could hear the movie starting, and it was time to move.

Salcone had led Ficcio out the back of the theater and up the alley to Salcone’s car. He had thought about the situation for a moment and then gone around to the trunk and pulled out the two MAC-10’s. He had shown the kid how to flip off the safety and put it on automatic, then handed him the gun and told him to keep it on the floor by his feet, where he wouldn’t make a mistake and take off the roof of the car with it.

Then they had driven around the block and come up the street looking for a vantage point from which they could see whatever it was that Lempert was watching for. But at that moment, the van was pulling out of its parking space and moving up the street. Salcone had followed it nearly a mile, to this store. It wasn’t until the van’s doors opened that he had seen that Lempert hadn’t been alone in the van. The truth was much more startling than anything Puccio had imagined. Lempert had hired himself out to the Butcher’s Boy. He was driving the getaway car.

Salcone had forced himself to take a moment to think about what he had seen. It made sense for the Butcher’s Boy to hire Lempert. Lempert knew enough about Paul Cambria to know where he would be tonight, and how to get close enough for a shot, and probably how to get past the police afterward. Salcone didn’t have time to send the Ficcio kid back in the car to the theater for help, and anyway, that would leave Salcone stranded here if Lempert and the Butcher’s Boy decided to leave. He would have to kill the two of them right here.

He had brought Ficcio up to the back door of the copying store and told him the plan. What he had neglected to tell the boy was that when Ficcio stepped through the back door and opened up with the MAC-10, it didn’t much matter what he hit. Salcone would be at the front of the building. By the time Salcone stepped in, either the Butcher’s Boy would be dead, or he would be busy killing Ficcio. But then, without warning, Ficcio reached out and pushed on the door. If they had seen it, they hadn’t opened fire. That meant that either they hadn’t seen it, or they were on their way out the front door. Either way, Salcone couldn’t afford the luxury of going around to the front. He had to move.

“All right, kid,” said Salcone. “Go through the door fast as you can, stop and open fire.”

“You mean now?”

“Now.”

To Lempert, everything seemed to happen at once. First, he was surprised to see that the Butcher’s Boy hadn’t waited and made him go ahead. He pushed the front door open, and then he seemed to disappear for a second. Lempert whirled to look over his shoulder just as the back door swung inward hard, so that it banged against the wall. He recognized the two guys. One was Salcone, the guy Puccio always talked to in Italian because they came up together in some shithole in Pittsburgh that didn’t even sound like it was in America; and the other was a kid they called something that sounded like Fish, who wasn’t much older than the one who must have ducked behind the counter. They both held little assault weapons that looked sort of like Ingrams, although he had never seen an Ingram from this angle. In fact, from here the angle looked a little off.

Lempert’s body jerked, partly in surprise because even the body feels noise somewhere in the diaphragm when two .45-caliber automatic weapons roar in an enclosed space, and partly because the .45-caliber bullets were punching through his chest, arms, neck and head.

Wolf crouched beside the door with his back to the bricks and covered his face while the machine guns blew the glass out of the front window beside his head. He knew they would be approaching the front of the building fast, to get a shot at him as he sprinted down the street.

The first one was the older man, who walked directly to the empty window frame and leaned out to see which way the prey had run. Wolf looked up at the underside of his chin and fired the revolver through it. When the man toppled forward, he still held his little MAC-10. As Wolf snatched it out of his grip, he realized he had seen the man somewhere in the old days. He leaned inside the ruined window and opened fire on the second man, who was approximately where anyone would be, squatting low beside the front door that he didn’t have the guts to open. Then Wolf dropped the MAC-10 on the body and looked at the face again. He remembered where he had seen the man; he was the one who used to keep the security people busy while Puccio stole suits off the loading docks of clothing stores in Pittsburgh. In the old days he’d had more meat on him, and looked like a longshoreman or a trucker. Now he had flecks of gray in his hair, and wore photogray glasses—sort of distinguished, like a professor. Seeing him here like this was not a pleasure. Little Norman must have failed.

As he walked to the van he kept his pace leisurely. He got into the driver’s seat, picked up the keys, started the van and, as he pulled away from the curb, glanced into the copying store. From this height he could see that the kid at the cash register still was not ready to peek up over the counter. It was hard to blame him.

Wolf could feel his heart beating faster than he liked it to. What the hell was wrong with these people? They must have seen Lempert and followed the van, and then the older one had seen Wolf. Coming through the back door together like that was the tactic of losers; it was the way addicts robbed grocery stores. Then somebody had panicked or made a mistake and opened up on Lempert. Or was it even a mistake? It was as if the whole world had lost all sense of the way things were done and the way men behaved, so you couldn’t even figure out what they thought they were trying to accomplish.

The words “the slaughter of the innocents” came into Wolfs mind. That had been Eddie’s term for it. Presumably it was something that had happened in the Bible, but he had never looked it up. He remembered Eddie arguing with a man who was trying to collect on the same contract. It was one of the few times Eddie had ever let the boy work with colleagues, because he considered them to be competitors by nature and acquaintances only through some regrettable coincidence of geography. But this time Eddie and the boy had found a major prize. A man named Frank Basset had run a small-time burglary ring based on restaurant reservations. He had placed confederates as waiters and busboys in the best establishments, and each night they would go over the lists to see who would be at the restaurants, leaving their houses empty. If it were particularly tempting, Basset would hit the house. If a woman came in wearing diamonds, for instance, they would know that her house was worth the trouble. Eddie had sniffed as soon as he had heard this. “Well, for Christ’s sake, if she’s wearing them, then they’re not going to be in the house, are they?” But that had not been the only flaw. Wolf couldn’t remember the details, except that there had been a child and a baby-sitter in one house, and that the owner had been a lawyer with friends who had connections. Eddie had heard about the large, open contract at a time when he had been feeling vulnerable.

Eddie had found Basset in a small town north of Syracuse along Lake Ontario. It was winter, and most of the cottages near the lake were closed. Apparently there had been some plan in Basset’s mind to go to Canada, because Wolf remembered a big boat frozen in the ice along the shore where it had been tied up. But when Eddie and the boy surveyed the house, Eddie had a nasty surprise; he discovered that he and the boy were not the only ones who had found Basset.

A man named Cathead Maloney drove past in a two-tone Pontiac just as Eddie was peering at the target through binoculars. Eddie had dragged the boy to his car, and followed. Eddie had been so angry when he had caught up with the Pontiac on the lake road that he had rushed to its side and flung open the door. Then he calmed down rapidly; Cathead Maloney had three other men with him.

Eddie had proposed that they share the danger and rewards, and Cathead had agreed in theory to the proposal. Their arguments had come over the execution. Cathead had decided that the way to get Basset was to wait until dark and approach the house from the lake side, walking on the ice to surprise him. Eddie pointed out that if a light went on, there would be six of them standing in the middle of a featureless white backdrop that stretched behind them at least forty miles, too empty to hide on, too slippery to run on, and probably too thin to hold their weight since Lake Ontario was too deep to freeze with any solidity.

Cathead responded that if the ice was thick enough to strand a twenty-five-foot boat with a car engine in it, then it would hold five men and a boy, and implied that anyone who passed up six-to-one odds against a mere sneak thief, with the advantages of darkness and surprise, didn’t really want to work very much.

Eddie held his temper, although the last part had nettled him. He countered that Frank Basset never worked alone; he’d had three men in the restaurants and four working the houses, and if he were alone now, he wouldn’t need a twenty-five-foot boat in the first place. From this point the discussion deteriorated, until finally Eddie uttered his benediction. “I give up. It’s all yours, Cathead. Have a ball. It’s going to be the slaughter of the innocents.”

Eddie had been right. There had been at least six very tense, alert, heavily armed men in the cottage, and Cathead Maloney and his partners had received the full benefit of their ability to find a light switch in the dark and aim a rifle afterward.

Wolf drove along Route 90, across the state line into Chicago, then pulled off the interstate. He went past a gas station, and noticed a set of three pay phones near the men’s room. He glanced at his watch, then patiently wheeled around the block and pulled in beside them. He walked into the office, asked the tired young man sitting on the high stool for the key to the men’s room and opened the other roll of quarters he had bought in Las Vegas. It was four-thirty in the afternoon in Las Vegas, and unless things had changed for no reason in two days, Little Norman would be in the Sands having breakfast. The efficient machine voice told him to put in more money, and he did. He asked the hotel operator to page Norman.

Seventy-five cents later, he heard the voice. “Yeah.”

“Norman.”

“I thought I wasn’t going to hear your voice again.”

“I ran into trouble. Did you do what I asked?”

“You know what that is, kid. It takes time. I started.”

“How does it look?”

“How can it look? Carl Bala lives to eat your eyeballs. The Castigliones know that if they forget that you did the old man ten years ago, they lose respect. The New York families aren’t sure they can pretend that Tony T wasn’t right in their back yard when you came to see him.”

“Are you giving up?”

“No, but it’s a fantasy. The old men aren’t like that. You chose this life. You knew what it was.”

“Norman?”

“What?”

“Tonight some people came for me. I’m going to assume that the man they worked for didn’t get the message yet. It’s a gesture of good faith.”

“Oh, shit, kid. They don’t care about your good faith. Just run.”

“I’m running, Norman. Tell them.”

“Right. Just remember, I don’t work for you. I work for them.”

Wolf hung up the phone and walked back to the van. It was time to get out of the area. The simplest thing to do was to try to drive another twenty miles to O’Hare Airport and find a room in a small motel in the neighborhood, where there were miles of them. It was already beginning to feel like a long night.

At the cashier’s counter in the Sands coffee shop, Little Norman was preoccupied. He paused for a moment before placing the telephone back on its cradle. He was watching the liquid-crystal display on the little screen that stuck up over the back of the telephone. It still held the number: (312) 555-8521. Illinois. Chicago area.