He glanced at his watch, picked up his suitcase and then walked the room a last time to be sure he hadn’t left anything. That was another thing: The goddamned machines put out so much paper that you practically had to bundle it like a week of newspapers before you could throw it away. Not that you could throw it away, because it was always full of sensitive information that didn’t answer any of the questions any sensible cop would ask.
As Hamp walked into the airport, he considered calling Elizabeth Waring. It wasn’t because she was the person in the home office to whom he was supposed to be reporting. Twenty years of police work didn’t make you more respectful of hierarchies; it only made them one more thing you found out you could live with, like carbon monoxide and bird shit. Ninety-nine percent of the time you were out on your own, driving around town in a car and trying to solve people’s problems by asserting an authority that, if only they knew it, consisted of nothing more than your ability to persuade people that whatever they were contemplating wasn’t worth it. He wanted to call Elizabeth because after a couple of weeks of talking to her two or three times a day, he was fairly sure she would be able to sort the report out for him.
But it was after eleven o’clock in Washington, and young widows with kids had enough to do in the evening without having to explain to somebody who the hell Paul Martillo was, and what he was doing in a parking ramp without a car or a set of keys. There would be time enough for that in the morning, after she’d had her meeting. She probably didn’t know she was having one yet, but this kind of thing always caused morning meetings. All bureaucracies worked the same.
Wolf put the photographs back in the box. “Let me help you with the dishes.” It was going to have to be the hard way. He couldn’t even use Little Norman’s gun because the whole neighborhood would hear it, and when the men across the street heard it, they would know what it was. He was going to have to take the serrated bread knife off the counter and slit this woman’s throat while her two children slept. He would have to hold her over the sink while she bled to death, and then grab the passport out of the box. The worst part of it wasn’t that it was messy; it was that he had gone to a lot of trouble to find Elizabeth Waring, and now what he really felt like doing was just leaving her alone. It had probably been the telephone call. She was no threat to him; she wasn’t even capable of going out at night to do whatever her boss had wanted her to do. In fact she had probably been hoping to be in bed by now. She was simply a nice woman with no husband who had a job that she was good at, and today she had met a man who was polite and didn’t scare her. She wouldn’t go out looking for a man, but if she met one by accident, it would seem all right to her. Women like her probably didn’t get laid very often, and something like this wouldn’t have done any harm. She was smart and sensible enough to know that she was still attractive to men, and if things had been different, he would have liked to accommodate her. Cutting her throat with a kitchen knife wasn’t going to throw the FBI into confusion; it wasn’t going to accomplish anything.
“Anyway,” Elizabeth was saying, “the whole point of this was to thank you for helping me this morning. You’re not doing any dishes in my house.”
Wolf stood, and the moment came and went. “All right, then,” he said. “But I’ll take the garbage out for you on my way home.”
“A deal,” she said. “Going out there at night gives me the creeps.”
Wolf carried the garbage bag out to the side of Elizabeth’s garage, where there were four big cans. He set the bag in a can carefully so that it didn’t make any noise, then fit the lid back on. He looked at the kitchen door, and then at the window. At least she wasn’t standing there to watch him walk down the driveway and across the street to whatever was waiting for him. He could go through the back yard to the next street and then circle around.
Carmine stood up again and walked through the house to the back door, where Petri was waiting. “See anything move out there?”
Petri grunted.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I was shaking my head. The answer is no.”
“What time is it?” He hated asking Petri for the time, but it was so dark in here that he couldn’t read his watch, and so he had to keep making up excuses to ask the others. He would have to start eating carrots, or else get a watch that glowed in the dark.
“About a quarter after eleven.”
Carmine thought about it. “I don’t like it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what if he’s not coming? I mean I don’t want to sit around in here until dawn with a car in the garage that doesn’t belong to him, and sure as hell won’t have his fingerprints on it, and has blood splashed all over the inside of it. If he knew we were here, all he’d have to do is call the cops and say somebody had broken into his house, and I’m not sure I want to bet my life he can’t figure that out.”
“He doesn’t know we’re here, Carmine.”
“I’m not sure I want to bet my life on that either. Where’s the phone?”
“What phone?”
“His phone.”
“There is no phone.”
“No phone at all?”
“No. We went through the place. If there’d been one, I’d have seen it.”
Carmine’s heart began to pound, and then the pressure seemed to move upward to his head. “You went through this whole fucking place, there was no fucking telephone and you didn’t tell me?”
Petri said defensively, “So what?”
“I guarantee you this man had a telephone this morning. You can’t live without a telephone. That means he took it out.”
“Not necessarily. My grandmother didn’t have a phone.”
“This guy isn’t your grandmother, you dumb shit. That’s the first thing you do in a war; you cut the enemy off and isolate him. He’s severed our communications. He knows we’re here, and he’s going to do something about it.”
“So use the car phone.”
“Huh?”
“The car phone. Martillo had a phone in his car. That’s how he called Mr. Vico when he saw the guy in the first place.”
Fusco’s mind scurried back and forth, looking for something that would negate Petri’s suggestion, but he kept coming up with nothing. Finally he muttered, “I didn’t want to have to do that. But now I haven’t got any choice.” He pulled out his pistol, stepped to the back door and whispered, “Keep your eyes open. This is where he’ll make his move if he’s out there.”
Wolf walked through the yard of the house beside his, staying in the shadows and moving slowly, then stopping to listen. He scanned the back of his house. There were no lights on inside, and he couldn’t detect any broken windows. Suddenly he saw his back door open. He froze, then slowly brought Little Norman’s pistol up in line with the doorknob. He couldn’t quite discern the shape of what was pushing it open, but when the door began to close again, the silhouette of a man materialized against the white clapboards.