Wolf heard the garage door roll up into the roof with incredible violence. It sounded as though it were going to jump the track. Then he heard the hiss of the man’s breathing. It sounded as though his chest were heaving. He let the man walk out of the garage and stagger to the kitchen door. Then the man stopped and wondered why the lights were on inside. Wolf raised the pistol with the silencer on it and put Carmine’s mind at rest.
Wolf dragged the last one into the garage. He was the one lying in the dining room, and he had been at least six feet three and heavy. Wolf closed the garage door, lifted the body into the back seat and propped it up with the other one, then looked at his little display. The three men sat in the car in three different postures of leisured comfort. He moved the last one’s right arm to the back of the seat so it looked as though he were resting it behind the other one’s head, and that helped to hide the hole and the blood.
Wolf opened the garage door again, got into the car, started it and pulled out into the driveway before closing the door again. He backed out as quietly as he could, letting the big car coast down the driveway to the street, then slowly accelerated away. As he drove, he made an inventory. He had cleaned the floors thoroughly, put the towels onto the car seats to soak up some of the blood and then prepared his companions for the ride. He still had two pistols with full loads and silencers, one under his coat and another at his feet under the driver’s seat. He had stuck Little Norman’s in the coat of the corpse in the passenger seat beside him. If he didn’t make any sudden stops or reckless turns, his companions would remain sitting in fairly natural positions. It had been at least three hours since the last of them died, and by now the beginnings of rigor mortis would help. It always started in the jaws and neck, then spread to the torso and legs.
It had taken a long time, but he had probably done as well as he needed to. If the police really went through the place they would undoubtedly find blood, hair and threads from these three, and from him and from the family that owned the house, and their dogs and cats. But they wouldn’t look.
After all these years Wolf wasn’t squeamish about handling bodies, but he didn’t want these three toppling over while he was on the highway. He had taken the precaution of searching their wallets to be sure they weren’t some kind of police, but all he had found was money and credit cards. Their names were Castelli, Petri and Fusco, but by now he didn’t remember which was which. They had all lived in Washington, and none of them had any kind of card that entitled them to medical or dental care. Vico obviously didn’t pay the employer’s share.
He had checked when he had come to town to see whether any of Vico’s businesses still had the same names, and some of them did. They were all called Acme or Apex or AAA or ABC, so that his contacts didn’t have to learn the whole alphabet to figure out where to drop things. Wolf had gone to a lot of trouble to be sure he didn’t run into Vico’s people by accident, but it hadn’t done him much good. He had even driven by the big house Vico lived in just so he would know where it was.
Vico had just finished making a formal complaint to the telephone company’s business representative. He had received a crank telephone call this evening, and had demanded a new unlisted number. While he was talking he could hear the woman clicking away on the keyboard, duly noting his request in the company’s computers in case his lawyer needed it later. He hadn’t decided what to do about Fusco yet. Carmine was the loyal-dog type, and once in a while he needed a rap on the nose with a newspaper, but you couldn’t expect a dog to climb trees for you. He was good enough at what he was expected to do, and right now he was making Vico a hero.
Vico sat back in his favorite chair and stared at the fire. He had always liked a fire. He had a vague sense that there were things he should be doing, but he wasn’t going to move. He was waiting for a call. He had at least two hundred people out there right now actively looking for the Butcher’s Boy, and that was part of his agitation. He had always believed that he had inherited a little bit of his mother’s witch quality. In her youth she had been one of those young girls who dreamed of train crashes and ships going down, and then when she was older she had been the one all the pregnant women in the neighborhood had gone to and asked if their children would be boys or girls. What he was feeling was probably the eagerness of all his people out there—a little bit scared, a little bit excited—as they turned the city into a tiger hunt.
The telephone at his elbow beeped patiently, and he picked it up. “Yeah?”
It was Toscanzio, of course. “You know who this is?” Of course he did; he had been waiting.
“Yes. I was sorry to hear about it. Is your family well?”
“I’ll tell them you asked. We have a little problem, eh?”
“I want you to know I’ve made arrangements for Paul’s … remains to be sent to his family out there. It’s all in their name, just as though they had picked the undertaker out of a phone book, but the bill … where do you want it sent?”
There was a long silence on the other end.
“Well, I’ll have it sent to you, and you can decide how you want to handle it.” That ought to give him the hint. Martillo never should have been operating in Vico’s town and not reporting to Vico.
“There’s going to be fallout from this.”
“What do you mean?”
“Our friend in California. Pauly was talking to important people to see if he could work out something in the way of clemency. But the way he went … I don’t see how we can send somebody else to walk into some senator’s office and start all over again. They get skittish when the last guy got a bullet in the head.”
“Have you talked to anybody else?”
“Some people in Chicago.”
“You know what I mean. Did you call anybody in New York?”
“I didn’t think that was a good idea. Look, he’s going to get out sooner or later. When he does, I don’t want to be the one who said we gave up on his problem. Do you?”
Vico’s smile was audible. “I didn’t. I’m working on it right now. By morning I should have something to ship to his people in New York.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Vico could tell that Toscanzio was already trying to figure out if he should call the Balacontano family in New York, or whether there was some way of talking directly to Carl Bala in prison. Let him. If Vico did get the body, he would make sure Bala knew where it came from. If he didn’t, Toscanzio would be the one Bala hated for getting his hopes up.
“That’s good news.”
“I’ll let you know when it’s done.”
“Thank you. My best to your family.”
“Good-bye.”
Vico hung up the telephone and went back to staring at the fire. It was a good feeling. It was as though the whole world—not just the people, but the natural forces, the wind and the stars—were working for him.
Wolf switched off the headlights before he turned the car into the driveway, and stopped it before it could trigger the electric eye that would buzz the intercom inside. He turned off the engine, popped the hood and went around to the front of the car. In the last few days he had found that he wasn’t as good with cars as he used to be. They had changed a lot while he was gone, without changing at all. But he still knew how to yank out wires and hoses.
When he was satisfied, he closed the hood quietly and turned his attention to the electric eye. There was a little light and a receptor on each side of the driveway. If he didn’t disconnect both sides of it at once, a light was going to stop hitting a receptor and it would buzz. The way to handle this kind of system was to put a mirror at exactly the right angle in front of each box so that it detected its own light, but he wasn’t prepared to screw around with that. He studied the system carefully. The wiring would be steel-jacketed and buried inside a pipe, and some of it must run under the driveway. But the vulnerability of a system that had lights was that there must be a way to change a bulb without setting it off.