Sleeping Dogs

The bullet had gone through his forehead and out the back of his skull, and he had fallen across the front seat. The problem with head wounds was that they produced a lot of blood. Even though he had pushed the body out the passenger side within a few seconds, there was blood all over the interior; the leather upholstery of the passenger seat had a pool of blood on it that sloshed onto the floor every time he applied the brake, and seeped backward when he stepped on the gas pedal.

The only thing on his mind now was getting onto 1-395 and back to Alexandria before somebody spotted him. He had to find a way to slow everything down. It was as though the pace of things had changed in his absence. Events happened too quickly now, which made it seem as though they didn’t have any relationship to each other. He needed an hour or two in a place where he didn’t have to look over his shoulder. He would have to duck under the surface again and come up someplace else where he could be the one who made things happen. He wished now that he had killed Little Norman instead of talking to him. He had considered it carefully, and thought he’d had nothing to lose. If everybody he had ever known was already eagerly looking for him so that they could get rich, then there was no way he could make things worse, so he had offered a rational, measured bargain: in effect, he would cease to exist, and all they had to do was to let him. But they hadn’t let him, and this was why things were happening so fast.

He reached Alexandria with a small feeling of surprise. He had managed to sedate himself with the simple mechanical task of keeping the car between the lines. He turned onto his street, then into the driveway, opened the garage door, drove the car in and shut the door with the briefest, most economical movements he could manage. As he walked to the front door, he glanced across the street at the house of E. V. Waring. Tonight was going to have to be the night. If he left her body inside the trunk of Pauly the Bag Man’s car and parked it in the right place, maybe he could cause some trouble for them.

As he opened his front door, he saw a piece of paper stuck in the mail slot. When he plucked it out, he could see the engraving that he had selected: “E. V. Waring.” It read, “Please stop by around eight for coffee and dessert. It’s the only way I can thank you for your help this morning, and my pride demands it. The least I can do is welcome you to the neighborhood. Sincerely, E.”

“You know, this wasn’t necessary,” said Wolf. “It’s wonderful, but you didn’t have to do it.” He gestured vaguely at the long dinner table. The dark, polished hardwood stretched for at least five feet past the zone covered with white linen, china, silverware and the remnants of a peach torte. She must have bought it in some other time, when she thought she was going to be cooking for her whole FBI squad, or whatever they called them.

Elizabeth smiled. At least somebody had taught him to compliment the hostess. He seemed to be nice enough, but he was boring—unbelievably, thunderously boring. He didn’t appear to have any interests or experiences that he could be induced to tell her about. Why did she always feel that she had to do this kind of thing? “It’s nothing. I just wanted to thank you for helping with the car and giving me a ride to work. I hope you didn’t get into trouble …”

“Trouble?”

“You were late, weren’t you?”

“Not at all. I was making cold calls.”

“Cold calls?”

“No appointment, no warning. You just drop in on them and see if they’re interested in what you’re selling.”

“What are you selling?” she asked brightly.

“At the moment, advertising space. Want some?”

“I don’t think so.” No wonder he didn’t talk about it. Even he wasn’t interested. “Would you like some more of this torte?”

Wolf looked at the pastry and shook his head. “Save some for your kids. Where are they, anyway?”

“They had dinner at six tonight. If you can call it dinner. Amanda throws it, mostly, and Jimmy evades it. Amanda goes to bed around seven-thirty, and tonight Jimmy fell asleep at eight—a big day at preschool, I guess.” She pointed to the little box on the sideboard that looked like a transistor radio. “If you listen carefully, you can hear Amanda snoring. I’m afraid you won’t get to meet them.”

“Oh. Too bad.” He began to search his mind for a way of killing her so that they wouldn’t see it happen, or walk out here in the morning and find the body. He didn’t want to kill them, and he wanted the maid to find the body.

“Do you like children?” Elizabeth asked. She regretted it instantly, and a wave of something that felt like heat swept over her. It was the sort of question that somebody—somebody very crude and desperate—might ask a single man if she wanted to determine whether he was a suitable prospect. Now he would think that she was pathetic. Then it occurred to her that there was a worse possibility. What if he misinterpreted the whole invitation? She had dragged him over here alone in the evening—well, not alone, because the kids were here, but without any other adults—and he could easily think it was because she wanted to seduce him. Of course he would, when in reality the impulse had been exactly the opposite. She had wanted to assert the fact that she was an independent person who repaid a kindness with an appropriate gesture of thanks. But he could understand this and still imagine that she thought the appropriate gesture of thanks was …

It took him a moment to come back to the conversation. “Uh … I guess so. I mean, I don’t really know much about them, except for remembering being one. But it would be sort of odd not to like them, wouldn’t it? It would put me in a strange position: not liking the members of my species until they were fully grown. So I guess I do.”

She smiled again. She had been imagining it all. He had managed to block another avenue of conversation in the process of reassuring her, but that was no loss; she had been known to drone on about the kids.

Wolf said, “It must be kind of hard taking care of them by yourself. I see you going off to work every day.” At last he had found a way to bring up the husband. Was he at a military base on Guam, or was he going to come through the door in ten minutes to pick up his mail or pay his alimony?

“I have a baby-sitter. She’s a nice woman and the kids like her. But it is hard. You feel guilty for leaving them, and you feel guilty at work because you sometimes have to miss a day or go home early because they’re sick, or whatever. What it is, really, is that when you have kids you need to work more than you ever did, but even when you’re at work, you’re not always thinking about your job, and if it comes down to a choice, the job always comes second.”

If the job came second, she must be a hell of a mother. He had been in the trade for more than fifteen years before he had left, and he had never had to think about the federal government. But now he did. “What do you do at the Justice Department?”

“I’m sort of a bureaucrat, I guess.”

“You mean you’re a lawyer, or an FBI agent?”

“Lawyer,” she said. “My husband was the FBI agent. He got to do the glamorous stuff, and I sit in an office.”

“Was. You’re divorced.” He tried again.

“No such luck,” she said. “Jim died of cancer about a year ago.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” He noted the way she said it. It would be better if he could be alive. She loved him, or had reached the stage where he had a rosy glow around him and she was telling herself that she did. But she was in luck; she was going to be one of those widows who didn’t last long after her husband died.

“Don’t be,” she said. “Everybody loses somebody; if it’s not a husband it’s parents, grandparents. And we had the kids. I’m lucky.”

He nodded. “That’s a nice way to think about it.”

“You sound like you think I’m deluding myself.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Wolf said. “I meant it. We don’t have a whole lot of choice about certain things, and death is one of them. But you do have a choice about how you think about it.”

“That’s true. But I’ve thought about it in a lot of different ways, and I think this is the right one—not because it’s the most useful, but because it’s the most accurate. Most of the time I don’t feel sad. I just miss him.”

Wolf wasn’t really listening now. Something strange was happening. From his seat at the end of the table he