The one on the floor pushed himself upward with his arms and kicked out at Wolf with his feet. Wolf danced to the side to avoid the swinging legs, then fired down into the man’s back. He took his time aiming the second shot, and it went into the top of the man’s head. He walked cautiously into the dining room and shot the other one in the temple.
Wolf sighed. It hadn’t gone well; he had wanted them alive. He turned on the lights, went to the bathroom, gathered all the towels and pushed them under the two men to catch the blood. Then he frisked the man on the kitchen floor to see if he had any more 9-millimeter ammunition. He found a second clip in the man’s right pants pocket, dug it out, pulled the one he had used out of the pistol and inserted the full one.
He went to the kitchen door, stepped outside to the garage and listened. The man inside was already tugging on the garage door to get out. Wolf waited until he heard the man step away, then slipped the bolt on the door and stepped back around the corner of the garage. The man was standing inside a small square enclosure with a car. There were no windows, and the only door was the one he had raised to get inside. Wolf had a certain morbid interest in what the man was going to do.
Carmine was sweating. When he had called, Mr. Vico had yelled at him. Mr. Vico was a fat old man with a heart condition, and he probably hadn’t yelled at anyone since the Eisenhower administration, but what he had said had been worse than the yelling. At least yelling got rid of some of the anger before he did anything about it. Carmine might survive the yelling, but the other thing was trouble. He’d said that the way car telephones worked was that they billed you for each call, put the number and time you had called on the bill, just like long distance, and that the guy who owned the car had been dead for hours; the police had already scraped his body up off the parking lot for an autopsy.
This had started Carmine sweating. Then, when he had tried to get out of the garage to tell Petri, whose fault it all was, he had found he couldn’t open the damned door. He had practically gotten a hernia tugging on the thing, and still it wouldn’t go up. Now he was getting scared. The first thing he had thought of was to call Castelli and Petri to tell them to come open the door, but the reason he was stuck in here was that there wasn’t any phone in the house for them to answer. Then he had thought of calling Mr. Vico back and asking him to send somebody to tell Castelli and Petri to get him out, but he knew that wasn’t a good idea. Then he had tried to think of who else he could call, but remembered what Mr. Vico had said about the phone numbers being recorded. Anybody he called might know what Mr. Vico knew about phone bills; anyway, at some point they were going to hear, and then they would know he had put their phone numbers on a short list that had been called after Martillo was dead. Also, he had ordered his brother-in-law Gilbert not to drive that big-assed Caddy back to this street. Gilbert would be sitting in the car now, playing the radio and waiting for Carmine to get this over with and walk with the others to the liquor-store parking lot on foot. Except that Carmine wasn’t about to walk anywhere.
Carmine was gradually getting around to admitting to himself that there was only one way out: he was going to have to hotwire Martillo’s car, start the engine and ram his way out the door. He had no idea how long it took to fill up a tiny garage like this with enough carbon monoxide to smother him if he failed. He also worried about what would happen later. Crashing through the door would make a hell of a lot of noise, so he would have no choice but to keep on going, because Petri and Castelli would assume that any big-time disturbance had to be caused by somebody other than Carmine and would open fire. But if he did take off, it would leave Castelli and Petri inside the Butcher’s Boy’s house with the cops on the way and no car in sight. It would be hard to explain, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to get protection from Mr. Vico.
He opened the car door and turned on the headlights, then looked around. There had to be a crowbar or something, but all he could see was a network of studs over bare tar paper. It was weird; what kind of man had a garage with nothing in it but his car? He turned off the lights and went to the door again; he had to get the damned thing open or he was going to regret it. He bent his knees and got down as far as he could. You had to get your legs into it.
Wolf heard the garage door roll up into the roof with incredible violence. It sounded as though it were going to jump the track. Then he heard the hiss of the man’s breathing. It sounded as though his chest were heaving. He let the man walk out of the garage and stagger to the kitchen door. Then the man stopped and wondered why the lights were on inside. Wolf raised the pistol with the silencer on it and put Carmine’s mind at rest.
Wolf dragged the last one into the garage. He was the one lying in the dining room, and he had been at least six feet three and heavy. Wolf closed the garage door, lifted the body into the back seat and propped it up with the other one, then looked at his little display. The three men sat in the car in three different postures of leisured comfort. He moved the last one’s right arm to the back of the seat so it looked as though he were resting it behind the other one’s head, and that helped to hide the hole and the blood.
Wolf opened the garage door again, got into the car, started it and pulled out into the driveway before closing the door again. He backed out as quietly as he could, letting the big car coast down the driveway to the street, then slowly accelerated away. As he drove, he made an inventory. He had cleaned the floors thoroughly, put the towels onto the car seats to soak up some of the blood and then prepared his companions for the ride. He still had two pistols with full loads and silencers, one under his coat and another at his feet under the driver’s seat. He had stuck Little Norman’s in the coat of the corpse in the passenger seat beside him. If he didn’t make any sudden stops or reckless turns, his companions would remain sitting in fairly natural positions. It had been at least three hours since the last of them died, and by now the beginnings of rigor mortis would help. It always started in the jaws and neck, then spread to the torso and legs.
It had taken a long time, but he had probably done as well as he needed to. If the police really went through the place they would undoubtedly find blood, hair and threads from these three, and from him and from the family that owned the house, and their dogs and cats. But they wouldn’t look.
After all these years Wolf wasn’t squeamish about handling bodies, but he didn’t want these three toppling over while he was on the highway. He had taken the precaution of searching their wallets to be sure they weren’t some kind of police, but all he had found was money and credit cards. Their names were Castelli, Petri and Fusco, but by now he didn’t remember which was which. They had all lived in Washington, and none of them had any kind of card that entitled them to medical or dental care. Vico obviously didn’t pay the employer’s share.
He had checked when he had come to town to see whether any of Vico’s businesses still had the same names, and some of them did. They were all called Acme or Apex or AAA or ABC, so that his contacts didn’t have to learn the whole alphabet to figure out where to drop things. Wolf had gone to a lot of trouble to be sure he didn’t run into Vico’s people by accident, but it hadn’t done him much good. He had even driven by the big house Vico lived in just so he would know where it was.
Vico had just finished making a formal complaint to the telephone company’s business representative. He had received a crank telephone call this evening, and had demanded a new unlisted number. While he was talking he could hear the woman clicking away on the keyboard, duly noting his request in the company’s computers in case his lawyer needed it later. He hadn’t decided what to do about Fusco yet. Carmine was the loyal-dog type, and once in a while he needed a rap on the nose with a newspaper, but you couldn’t expect a dog to climb trees for you. He was good enough at what he was expected to do, and right now he was making Vico a hero.
Vico sat back in his favorite chair and stared at the fire. He had always liked a fire. He had a vague sense that there were things he should be doing, but he wasn’t going to move. He was waiting for a call. He had at least two hundred people out there right now actively looking for the Butcher’s Boy, and that was part of his agitation. He had always believed that he had inherited a little bit of his mother’s witch quality. In her youth she had been one of those young girls who dreamed of train crashes and ships going down, and then when she was older she had been the one all the pregnant women in the neighborhood had gone to and asked if their children would be boys or girls. What he was feeling was probably the eagerness of all his people out there—a little bit scared, a little bit excited— as they turned the city into a tiger hunt.
The telephone at his elbow beeped patiently, and he picked it up. “Yeah?”
It was Toscanzio, of course. “You know who this is?” Of course he did; he had been waiting.
“Yes. I was sorry to hear about it. Is your family well?”
“I’ll tell them you asked. We have a little problem, eh?”
“I want you to know I’ve made arrangements for Paul’s … remains to be sent to his family out there. It’s all in their name, just as though they had picked the undertaker out of a phone book, but the bill … where do you want it
