Sleeping Dogs

“Where you at?”

Lempert turned to the kid, who was pretending to be dusting a shelf with a cloth. “Give me the fax number here.”

As the sheets rolled out of the machine, the Butcher’s Boy barely looked at them. He just took them out of the tray, glanced at them, folded them with one hand and stuffed them into his coat pocket. Most of the time he watched Lempert. What kept driving Lempert crazy was that the kid at the counter knew him. He was watching the proceedings out of the corner of his eye, and unless he was retarded, all this must have struck him as strange. He could probably see the lump in the Butcher’s Boy’s coat where he held Lempert’s service revolver. But he also knew that Lempert was a cop, and naturally would assume that the Butcher’s Boy was a cop too, and since cops carry guns, there was nothing strange going on at all. Anybody else would slip out the back door and dial 911. Even this kid would if it was anybody else but Lempert. Now the bastard was probably going to kill them both, walk out of here and drive away in the van. The keys were on the floor.

Finally the machine stopped grinding out pages. The Butcher’s Boy said, “That’s good enough. How do you usually get your money?”

Lempert knew he didn’t mean his police pay. “A post-office box.”

“Write it down and give it to me.”

Lempert couldn’t believe it. “You’re really going to pay me?”

As the Butcher’s Boy looked at him, Lempert could tell that he was being evaluated, and that somehow the assessment wasn’t good. “I said it.”

Lempert smirked. “Yeah. I heard you.”

“People lie to you a lot?”

“About money? Just about everybody.”

The Butcher’s Boy looked at him with a mixture of pity and distaste. “Then it’s your fault. You should have killed the first one.”

The man was absolutely serious: he had killed the first one. Lempert could tell, and it had a strange effect on him. For a few minutes he had been gaining strength. He had begun to look at the hand that gripped his revolver and feel a certainty that his hand was bigger and more powerful, and just a minute ago he had begun to wonder if maybe it wasn’t faster too. He had begun to visualize how he would grab it while it was still in the pocket and break it at the elbow, and his blood had started to warm in preparation for the moment. But now the other feeling had returned, the one he had felt when he had first met this man years ago. Not this time, not this man. He simply was not somebody you could do that to and have any real expectation of succeeding, because you couldn’t surprise him. A dozen people must have already tried whatever he had just thought of, and all of them were dead.

Lempert wrote the post-office-box number on a piece of paper that was meant to refill the fax machine and watched the free hand pick it up and put it in the pocket with the other sheets. But then Lempert was distracted. The back door of the copying store, the one that opened onto the parking lot of the plaza, sent a glint of light in his direction. It had moved, and the reflection of the overhead fluorescents had flashed too. As he watched, he could see the reflection swinging a little, back and forth. Somebody he couldn’t see had touched it. A sick feeling came over him; it was somebody testing to see if the back door was locked.

Apparently the Butcher’s Boy hadn’t seen it. He said, “You’ll get some money in the mail in a couple of weeks. Let’s go.” He tossed a twenty-dollar bill on the counter where the kid could see it and moved toward the front door. Then he stopped. “Coming?”

Lempert was sweating again. Whatever happened next, he was going to be in the middle of it, standing here without a weapon or a place to hide. If it was cops, he could give a yell and dive to the floor, and they would know enough to fire. He hoped it was cops. But how the hell could it be? It must be either the wind or Puccio’s men. God, he hoped it was Puccio’s men. Even if they were the ones who actually got him, Lempert would share in the credit. It was only fair.

* * *

As Albert Salcone stood outside the back door, he saw Ficcio across the door from him, reaching out his hand. Salcone gasped, then realized there was no way to keep Ficcio from touching the door. He pressed himself against the back wall of the building, blew the air out of his lungs and waited. As he watched the door swing back and forth a little, he forced the hatred he felt for Ficcio to drain out of his mind. Ficcio was a kid by today’s standards. In Salcone’s day, by the time you were nineteen, either you were in some jungle wearing camouflage fatigues or you were in jail. Now a kid that was nineteen might not have been in a real fight in his life.

Salcone turned to Ficcio and shook his head disapprovingly. Maybe Ficcio understood. At least he looked crestfallen. Salcone hoped he was devastated, but there was no way to explain to him now why he should be. Either the door was unlocked, in which case it would offer no resistance when they moved in, or it was locked. If it was locked, then when one of them tried to get in for real, it wouldn’t budge and he would have to fire through it. Either way, there was nothing lost. The one thing you didn’t want to do was test it and let the occupants know you were coming.

Salcone had been planning to have Ficcio go in through the back door alone while he waited in the street at the front of the store. But that wasn’t going to happen now. So much for all the cunning that had gotten them this far—Puccio’s and his own.

Puccio had come up to him in the theater and told him to find out what he could about the van that had been parked in the street across from the building. He had said there was something peculiar about it, and Salcone had known Puccio long enough to forget about asking questions and get out there. When he had sneaked to the rear corner of the van a while ago, he had peered inside and seen something every bit as peculiar as Puccio had suspected, but not as ominous. It was Bob Lempert, sitting in a swivel chair like the ones bass fishermen installed in their boats so that their butts wouldn’t get sore.

He had gone back inside and told Puccio that it was only Lempert, but Puccio had not been reassured; he had been puzzled. He had said in Italian, “He can’t be doing that for the police department. The only reason he might is if he was pretty sure the Butcher’s Boy was coming to get Paul. I told him to keep his eyes open like everybody else, but he’s too lazy to sit out there all night without getting paid.” He thought about it for a moment. “You know, he’s just stupid enough to have seen something in the police reports and kept it to himself so he could collect on the contract. Do me a favor. Go out and find a place to keep an eye on him, where he can’t see you. And take Ficcio with you.”

Salcone had responded to that with a raised eyebrow, and Puccio had read it instantly. “I know. But you might need somebody to come in and get me, and he won’t attract attention.” Then they could hear the movie starting, and it was time to move.

Salcone had led Ficcio out the back of the theater and up the alley to Salcone’s car. He had thought about the situation for a moment and then gone around to the trunk and pulled out the two MAC-10’s. He had shown the kid how to flip off the safety and put it on automatic, then handed him the gun and told him to keep it on the floor by his feet, where he wouldn’t make a mistake and take off the roof of the car with it.

Then they had driven around the block and come up the street looking for a vantage point from which they could see whatever it was that Lempert was watching for. But at that moment, the van was pulling out of its parking space and moving up the street. Salcone had followed it nearly a mile, to this store. It wasn’t until the van’s doors opened that he had seen that Lempert hadn’t been alone in the van. The truth was much more startling than anything Puccio had imagined. Lempert had hired himself out to the Butcher’s Boy. He was driving the getaway car.

Salcone had forced himself to take a moment to think about what he had seen. It made sense for the Butcher’s Boy to hire Lempert. Lempert knew enough about Paul Cambria to know where he would be tonight, and how to get close enough for a shot, and probably how to get past the police afterward. Salcone didn’t have time to send the Ficcio kid back in the car to the theater for help, and anyway, that would leave Salcone stranded here if Lempert and the Butcher’s Boy decided to leave. He would have to kill the two of them right here.

He had brought Ficcio up to the back door of the copying store and told him the plan. What he had neglected to tell the boy was that when Ficcio stepped through the back door and opened up with the MAC-10, it didn’t much matter what he hit. Salcone would be at the front of the building. By the time Salcone stepped in, either the Butcher’s Boy would be dead, or he would be busy killing Ficcio. But then, without warning, Ficcio reached out and pushed on the door. If they had seen it, they hadn’t opened fire. That meant that either they hadn’t seen it, or they