Sleeping Dogs

“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