above, then walked back to the head of the steps and held his breath.
Paul Martillo was dizzy and gasping for breath. The coat of his suit had big sweat spots under the armpits, and his new shoes were scuffed from trying to catch himself when he slipped on the sidewalk, but what was most annoying was that his ears felt like they were plugged up. He had a vague suspicion that having your ears feel pressure must be a sign of heart trouble, but he couldn’t remember ever hearing anybody say it. He still couldn’t believe he wasn’t running anymore. He had gone all the way to Constitution Avenue and was making the turn up Louisiana before he realized he had outrun the son of a bitch. Then Vico’s men had come along in a car, made a U- turn in the middle of Louisiana and picked him up. As he thought about it now, getting into the car probably had been a mistake. In the first place, his leg muscles were certainly going to stiffen up because you were supposed to walk around for a while and stretch your muscles after a dash like that. In the second place, just in case there was one person inside the Beltway who had not seen him running like a madman across the damned Capitol lawn chased by a hit man, he had given them a good chance to see him getting into a brand-new Cadillac with four of the most obvious-looking hoods that he had ever seen. Two of them had even had guns in their hands when they had picked him up.
Now that he had his wind back, he began to think about the fact that this was going to be over in a few minutes, and Paul Martillo still had to live here. In fact, until this interruption, he had been on his way to see a senator. It was hard enough around here. At least the bastards had a phone in their Cadillac so that he could call Bart, his driver, and tell him where to meet him. When he hung up he even made a little joke to hide the way he felt. “I was afraid I was going to have to call the cops and get them to activate the Thiefbuster on the Lincoln.”
Sitting in the back seat of the Cadillac, he had tolerated the questions from Carmine, the leader of the crew. “So what’s he got on?”
Martillo thought. “I don’t know. A sport coat, a pair of pants. He doesn’t look like anything. Doesn’t Vico have anybody out here who met him?”
“Sure,” said Carmine, “but that was a long time ago.”
“Not long enough,” said Martillo.
There was a little snort that stood for laughter from one of the others. Sure, these jerk-offs thought they were better than Paul Martillo. It was like the guy who came to fix your
At last the car pulled over beside the parking garage. Martillo opened the door and nearly fell out, straightened his tie, pulled his cuffs so that they showed a little beyond the coat and walked into the dark concrete structure. He was a little more upset than he had let Vico’s men see. As he thought about it, he realized it was just possible that Vincent Toscanzio was only doing what the old men had told him to do. They probably figured that if they got Balacontano out, from then on the Butcher’s Boy would be his problem. Carl Bala was a nasty, arrogant maniac in his own right, and he would be capable of getting this one little guy. The old men were smart that way. They thought ahead, which was why they were the old men, and the ones who had come up with them were all buried. On the other hand, this development was good luck for Carl Bala. If somebody didn’t pull some strings in Washington, he was going to sit in jail for a hell of a long time. He would be like the Birdman of Alcatraz, one of those ancient, clean old guys who took up needlepoint or something.
As he walked to the staircase to meet Bart in the Town Car, Martillo noted that the Cadillac was driving up and down the aisles looking for a parking space. This was why those guys were still being sent around town in threes and fours, carrying guns. Given Washington on a day like this at one o’clock, anybody with a brain knew that the lower levels would be filled. It was the only public lot for about ten blocks, for Christ’s sake, and anybody who was ever going to make something of himself would take the ramp to at least the third floor to save some time. That was the real difference between the schmucks and the winners: the winners could think ahead, while the schmucks went around and around the track like donkeys.
Paul Martillo leaned hard on the railing as he started to climb the steps. He knew his shoes must be making a loud noise on the metal steps, but the clanks sounded distant and hollow. He was going to have his ears looked at.
Wolf heard the footsteps, then moved ahead again and looked onto the floor of the garage. The black Lincoln with the driver still in it pretending to read a newspaper wasn’t more than fifty feet from Wolf’s Dodge. He took three deep breaths as he pulled Little Norman’s pistol out of his coat, held it down beside his thigh and turned back to the stairwell. There just wasn’t anywhere to go.
Carmine Fusco had worked for Vico for a long time and he knew what the Butcher’s Boy meant to him. Vico could pick up a couple of million bucks in one morning, just for popping one man. If Vico had a crew working the hotels that was good enough to lift a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of cameras and jewelry every single day, and a guy who trucked it all to another town to sell it for a thousand, which was pretty good, it would still take more than three years to gross a million from the operation. Then you had to add another three years to pay off all those guys. That was how Vico thought, so it was how Fusco thought.
He had let Martillo off at the bottom of the garage and the jerk had stood for it. That was the joke about having somebody like him come to town from someplace like Detroit and not work for Mr. Vico like everybody else. He wasn’t born here, so he didn’t know the city well enough to figure out that anybody who had been spotted in this part of town on foot only had a couple of places where he could have parked.
As Fusco’s brother-in-law, Gilbert, drove slowly up each aisle and turned down the next, Carmine kept the window open and listened. If the Butcher’s Boy was looking for Martillo, he was going to have a chance at him, but if he made any noise it was going to cost him. You had to take some risks to get a guy like this, but Carmine wasn’t about to risk anybody who belonged to Mr. Vico.
Then he heard the pop. It sounded more like something blew up than a gunshot, because the concrete made it reverberate for a second. He poked Gilbert. “Hit it.”
The Cadillac didn’t make much noise when it accelerated, so there was just a scream of tires as the car floated around the corner like a sailboat in a high wind. It was one big, fat slob of a car. In a few seconds it was on its way up the ramp. Now there was a second shot, this one even louder than the first, and it made Carmine see yellow for a second. So much for Martillo. It had to be the coup de grace, the guy putting a hole in his head to make sure he stayed dead. “Stop,” he said. “Let us out, and get ready to block the ramp.”
He and Castelli and Petri climbed out, and then Carmine had a vision of black and silver. With a roar the front of Martillo’s Lincoln skidded around the bend, the rear end swinging about so that the grille and headlights were no more than ten feet in front of him. As he realized that it wasn’t going to stop, he took three steps back to get up on the railing and out of its way. It passed him so close that he felt the wind. He somehow knew that there was a bullet hole with a big crack in the driver’s side window without knowing how he saw it because the car was moving so fast. As it tilted down the ramp it seemed to be flying, and when it hit the first floor it bottomed out and sent up a spray of sparks.
Fusco gave Castelli a push toward the stairs, then looked at Petri and pointed to the left. Fusco walked up the ramp himself. It was good for his status to have the others think that he had all the guts, but the truth was that it was the safest place to be. This guy wasn’t going to shoot the man in the middle first. You might shoot the one on the right, or the one on the left, but you never shot the one in the middle. It was one of those odd things.
Fusco was a little suprised when he made it to the top of the ramp without hearing another shot. But then he saw Martillo’s driver, who was dead as a can of tuna. When he turned his head, he could see Castelli bending over another body in the stairwell. It was Martillo, which left only one likely candidate for the driver of the Lincoln.
“Carmine,” said Petri.
“Wait a minute,” Fusco said. “I’m thinking.”
“Didn’t that guy Martillo say his car had a Thiefbuster?”
Fusco smiled. It figured that Petri would have picked up on that. Ever since those things had gone on the market, Mr. Vico had been on Petri’s butt to think of a way to locate and disconnect them. They were making it dangerous and nerve-racking to boost a car.
Wolf finally found the button that rolled down the window and pushed it. It went only halfway down before the place where his bullet had punched through stuck in the slot and the electric motor hummed without moving it. When he rested his elbow and forearm on the window and leaned, it rolled all the way in. This
