He stepped over the beam of light and knelt beside the gate. There was a lever that was designed to permit the electric motor that moved the gate to be disengaged in case it jammed, so he pressed the lever and pushed the gate open on its rails. It wasn’t hard to find the circuit box. It was mounted on the brick wall just inside the yard, with a holly bush planted in front of it. He opened the box and watched the electric eyes go out as he flipped the circuit breaker.
He went back to the car, released the brake, shifted into neutral and then hurried to the back to push. In the old days a Lincoln had been a hell of a lot of metal, and he had been wondering if he would be able to move this one up the incline by himself. At first it was hard to get it to budge, but finally it rolled through the gate and ten feet inside before the front wheels turned a little and it headed onto the lawn. He stopped pushing it near a birdbath with a naked nymph pirouetting in the center. Then he went around, reached inside the window, yanked out the keys and put them in his coat pocket with the wires he had taken out of the engine. He took out one of the pistols with a silencer and waited. After a minute or two, the light changed on a street somewhere nearby, and the driver of a big truck began to goad his diesel engine up through its gears. It was the only sound as Wolf walked toward the driveway.
He stopped at the gate. It was big and heavy and made of wrought iron, but it would be hard to keep somebody from moving it the way he had. He decided such a fine gate was worth a few more minutes. Following the dead line from the circuit box to the electric eye, he pulled a few feet of it out of the ground, cut it and stripped the insulation away for two inches. He wrapped the two bare wires around the bottom rung of the gate, then returned to the box and switched the circuit breaker back on. As he climbed over the wall to get back onto the street, he wasn’t sure how the sequence would work, but somebody was going to realize that it was important not to leave Martillo’s car in Vico’s yard, and that the only way to get it out was through the gate. When the button inside didn’t open it, somebody was going to touch the gate.
Wolf had walked half a mile before he found the right place to call for a taxi. On another night he might have stopped in one of the bars he had passed, but tonight Vico would have his army of collectors and parasites out looking for him, and it was always possible that he would run into someone who had seen his face in the old days. He had never had much to do with Vico’s people, but he was through with letting himself be surprised.
The safest sort of place was a telephone booth beside a closed gas station, and he waited until he found one. There were six or seven diseased cars parked beside the building, and he decided that his was one of them. It was the new Chevy on the end, and he had pulled it in there and left it, in case the cab driver was curious. But when the driver arrived, he wasn’t curious. He was young and a little bit frightened because this was the way cab drivers got robbed. Somebody called them from a public address where there weren’t any other people and there wasn’t much light. Then there would be a gun against the driver’s neck, a whole night’s receipts went up some guy’s arm and the driver probably got killed. But this one was okay. He was old—at least thirty-five—and he wanted to go to Alexandria, and he only seemed tired, and looked as though he had some money.
* * *
Jack Hamp’s flight from Chicago was within inches of touching down at Washington National just as a freak tail wind blew in from nowhere, and in order to keep the wing from dipping, the pilot had to give the engines another punch. There was no doubt in Hamp’s mind what was happening because when the wheels touched the ground the tires gave a screech like a buzz saw, and the plane rattled along the runway taking the regularly spaced bumps at about twice the normal speed. He barely had time to brace himself for the drag of the brakes before he felt his head go forward in a bow so that he was looking at his knees. He wasn’t particularly concerned, because a hot-wheels landing wasn’t unusual, but he was impatient because now the plane would have to sit on the runway until the brakes cooled. To pass the time he read over the preliminary report from the Washington office again, occasionally glancing out the window beside him at the men in coveralls down on the tarmac playing flashlight beams over the tires and undercarriage.
He’d seen the whole procedure a few times in his days as a birdwatcher at LAX. The ground crew always stood fore or aft of the wheels because on the rare occasions when they did pop, the hot debris and metal would tear straight out along the wings. There wasn’t a hell of a lot anyone could do until the night air cooled the wheels down to a temperature that would at least let the ground crew move a portable gangway up to get the passengers out.
As he read, he thought about Elizabeth Waring. She might not know who these victims were any more than he did. That was what bothered him most about this case. You had to be an organized criminal yourself to know who these guys Bartolomeo and Martillo were—and a well-organized criminal at that. It didn’t make any sense as an offensive move. The only thing that might help the Butcher’s Boy right now was noise; the victim had to be big enough to cause a stir. If he was in Washington, it would have to be Jerry Vico, or at least somebody who had made his bones with Vico.
The Butcher’s Boy was in a special sort of fix right now. He had to do things which weren’t predictable, but which made some kind of sense in retrospect. If they were predictable, there would be people waiting for him, but if they didn’t make sense when you thought about them later, then they wouldn’t help him get out. The organization would assume that he was completely round the bend, like a rabid animal. If this happened, he was dead, because you couldn’t see something like that and figure you would just wait until it wandered away. You wanted to know exactly where it was during every second until you killed it. If the report said he was popping unknowns who hadn’t done anything to him, then something was missing.
Elizabeth could probably help him out on this one. As he thought about her he felt a shudder of regret and embarrassment. He never should have made that joke about her being ugly; what if she really was ugly? No, it was worse than that. Just about every woman he had met who was worth anything thought that she was ugly. It was some kind of mass delusion. What on earth had led him to trigger a reaction he would have known was likely if he had stopped to think? But there was something about the anonymous present that bothered him. At first it had surprised him and made him feel panicky because maybe he was supposed to have sent her a present and hadn’t known it, so he had pushed it away with the first smart-ass remark that came to mind. He had even said something about its being a bomb, as though nobody would send her anything unless he wanted to …
Hamp could feel his scalp begin to tighten, as though his hair were actually going to stand up. Martillo and Bartolomeo were such little fish that only a criminal would recognize them, and one had. The Butcher’s Boy had seen those guys in Washington and they had seen him, so he had shut them up. It all made perfect sense, but only afterward. Hamp unbuckled his seat belt, stood up and started to sidestep his way into the aisle. The stewardess saw him and hurried up the aisle toward him to let him know he was busted. “Sir—”