“BRILLIANTLY ORIGINAL.”
DONALD WESTLAKE
“When it comes to combining a thick and shifting layer of double-crosses with a witty prose style, Perry is right up there with Ross Thomas and Elmore Leonard.”
The Boston Sunday Globe
“Perry tells a story at once terrifying and amusing. He enriches this story with fascinating characters on both sides of the law and has them speak in crackling, dead-on dialogue.”
Chicago Tribune
“The cross-country flight is made up of pure thrills, plenty of wit and humor, and eventually ends with a climax you’ll have to read yourself.”
Rocky Mountain News
“The Butcher’s Boy is back! And his skills as the cunning and efficient Mafia hit man are still honed as sharply as before … Readers will quickly start rooting for this precision instrument of destruction, relishing his cool escapades and grace under fire—and there is a lot of fire … SLEEPING DOGS is a solid page-turner.”
Mostly Murder
“Slickly executed and well written.”
Daily News of Los Angeles
Also by Thomas Perry:
THE BUTCHER’S BOY
METZGER’S DOG
BIG FISH
ISLAND
VANISHING ACT
DANCE FOR THE DEAD
SHADOW WOMAN
THE FACE-CHANGERS
BLOOD MONEY
DEATH BENEFITS
PURSUIT
DEAD AIM
NIGHTLIFE
Copyright © 1992 by Thomas Perry
All rights reserved.
For Alix
with thanks to Jo
and the Leschers
“At my coming back, I shot at a great bird which I saw sitting upon a tree on the side of a great wood. I believe it was the first gun that had been fired there since the creation of the world. I had no sooner fired, but from all the parts of the wood there arose an innumerable number of fowls of many sorts, making a confused screaming, and crying, every one according to his usual note; but not one of them of any kind that I knew. As for the creature I killed, I took it to be a kind of a hawk, its color and beak resembling it, but had no talons or claws more than common; its flesh was carrion, and fit for nothing.”
—DANIEL DEFOE, Robinson Crusoe
On August 14 at three in the afternoon, Michael Schaeffer noticed a small poster on a board inside the front window of a small teahouse. It said THE AMAZING POWERS OF THE INTELLECT in bold letters at the top, and this attracted his attention. He hoped that there were amazing powers in the intellect, although his dealings with others and many years of self-examination had revealed none that he thought much of. In smaller letters at the bottom, the poster said 14 AUGUST, FOUR P.M. and LYNCHGATE HOUSE, BATH.
He had a little trouble finding it, because in England “Lynchgate House” could mean anything from a private cottage to the corporate headquarters of a conglomerate. By asking directions he discovered it to be a country house not, strictly speaking, in Bath, owned by someone not named Lynchgate. When he arrived, he found a pair of pink, beefy young women at the entrance to smile at everyone and presumably to shut the door when their number approximated the capacity of Lynchgate House. Inside, he followed a middle-aged woman in a flowered dress to a large room with leaded-glass windows that reached from the fifteen-foot ceiling nearly to the floor, and looked out onto a garden with a foreground of topiary trees shaved and worried into the shape of gumdrops and a background of hedges nearly twenty feet high.
The room contained about thirty-five people, all very British and all apparently from the class of British people who always seemed to be busy doing things that couldn’t possibly bring in any money, but didn’t necessarily cost much, either: gardening and bird hikes and lectures. He wondered how many of them knew Latin, and decided that probably all of them did. His eyes settled inevitably on a pretty young woman who was arranging some pamphlets on a table at the front. She bent over as she worked, and he appreciated the curve of her hips under the light silk dress she wore. At this moment The Honourable Meg came in, scanned the crowd and sat down next to him.
The first thing Schaeffer noticed was her skin. It was fair, and appeared to have an even, uniform smoothness like natural ivory, its only variance a slight flush to her cheeks. Her shining dark brown hair made the skin seem to glow, and her bright green eyes looked amused. What she had wasn’t exactly beauty, but perfection, and this was unnerving because it tempted him to scrutinize her for flaws. He sat stiffly in his chair to keep from violating the expanded amount of space that seemed her due.
The girl he had been watching turned around and announced, “Mrs. Purvis will open the meeting with a few announcements on our autumn trip to Atlantis.”
Schaeffer barely breathed. Maybe it was the name of something else, or maybe he had heard the word wrong.
Mrs. Purvis was a slightly plump, enthusiastic blond lady in her forties, and she dispelled his doubts. “After the experience we had last year on our trip to the alien landing strips on the Plains of Nazca, I’d like to beg everyone to pay attention to the instruction sheet when packing this year. We’ll be establishing our base camp on Grand Turk Island. It is tropical, but we’ll be there in hurricane season. During a hurricane, between twenty-five and fifty centimeters of rain may fall in two days, and the winds may be violent, so dress accordingly.”
Michael Schaeffer felt distinctly uncomfortable. He wondered for a moment how this group of people would go about dressing for twenty inches of rain and 150-mile-an-hour winds. The girl who had introduced Mrs. Purvis now launched into a few more details. “Everything we know about ancient Atlantis suggests they wore bright colors, probably lots of reds and yellows. So please try to respect that scheme. There will be ever-so-many lingering spirits about, and it won’t do to offend them.”
Schaeffer slipped out of his seat and moved toward the door. As he made it past the two beefy girls, one of them asked, “Something wrong, Meg?” and he heard a soft voice at his shoulder. “Sorry, dear. We’ve just got to leave. My friend has another appointment.” Then she slipped her arm in Michael’s and pulled him out of Lynchgate House.
Outside the door she didn’t let go of his arm. “Thank you. I’m sorry I had to hitchhike, but when you left it was my last chance. Two persons might have to leave at once for some perfectly benign reason, but if they leave one after the other, it appears to be a trend and they get very upset.”
“Do they?” he said. “You’re welcome.” He tried to turn toward her to remove his arm from her grasp subtly.
“Don’t do that,” she insisted. “They’ll think I just grabbed you for a convenient exit, and they already resent me.”
“Who are you, their psychiatrist?”
“Meg Holroyd. The Honourable Margaret Susanna Moncrief Holroyd. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Where I come from, it would mean you’re a politician, so the ‘Honourable’ would be a lie. Here I suppose it means something else.”