Jimmy seemed to contemplate the plan, and finally to enlist, but he was a little worried. “You can’t see much.”
“We have to try. Can you show me which one?” Wolf took the sheaf of papers out of the box as he set it down on the kid’s bed. While the little boy shuffled through the pictures, he worked the rubber band off the papers with one hand.
“This one,” said Jimmy, and he held out a picture of his mother standing in front of the Houses of Parliament.
Wolf felt the passport now, and in a second he had it in his coat pocket with the pistol. He took the picture and scrutinized it. “It’s perfect,” he said. “Thanks, Jimmy.” He stood up, returned the photographs and packet of papers to the box and put it back in the closet. Then he turned to the little boy. “I’m sorry I had to wake you up. You’d better turn the light out and go back to sleep now.”
“Okay.” Jimmy clicked the light off and lay back on his pillow.
As Wolf made his way into the hall and closed the door, he could hear the boy stirring. He walked quickly out of the hallway to the living room, stepped into his shoes and moved to the front door. As he opened it, he sensed that he wasn’t alone. He was going to have to kill him.
This time the voice was a tiny whisper. “Good night.”
“Good night, Jimmy.” He stepped outside and closed the door, then hurried down the steps and across the lawn to get to the sidewalk and the place where the darkness began. In an hour he could be on a plane to London.
Jack Hamp crouched in the bushes across the street from the Waring house and watched the lone man walk toward him. The man was cautious, first turning his head to look at Elizabeth’s house, then at the one beside it and finally at the one where Hamp was hiding. He walked slowly, but there was nothing casual or leisurely about it. He had sensed that something wasn’t the way he wanted it, and he was scanning for some sign of another person. It was mesmerizing to watch him. He was
Hamp slowly pulled his big .45 out of his coat, trying to keep the movement steady and silent. He had the hammer cocked and the safety engaged. The man was already moving toward the lawn in front of Hamp; in a second or two he would be on top of him. Hamp spent part of the second remembering that the Butcher’s Boy was probably more than a match for him in the dark. By temperament, training and experience, Hamp desperately wanted not to have to squeeze a trigger on anybody, and this would make him hesitate.
Hamp disengaged the safety with his thumb, straightened his legs enough to bring the pistol up above the top of the bush and hoped that it was all that the Butcher’s Boy could see clearly. “Justice Department. Keep your hands where I can see them.”
It was exactly as he had seen it a dozen times in his imagination. The man didn’t stop to think and didn’t hesitate. In the second that it took Hamp to see that his right hand was going to his coat, it was already there and coming back out. Hamp fired. The report of the heavy military pistol clapped the air and the man took the round square in the center of his chest. As the man flopped backward onto the sidewalk, Hamp could see that he had almost gotten the barrel clear of his coat. It slid off his chest onto the pavement and Hamp walked over to pick it up. He stared down at the man. He was about the right age, and he was nondescript and ordinary enough to have survived for a long time while people were looking for him. Hamp could also see that the hollow-point round had made a terrible mess of his chest.
Hamp looked around him at the lights going on in upstairs windows all along the block. He noticed that his mouth had gone all dry and cottony. The last time this had happened, he had thought it was the shock from taking the bullet in his leg, but it must have been another reaction. He began the process of composing himself for the first of the conversations he would have to go through now: you know the fellow you’ve been trying to find? Yes, the one you’ve wanted for ten years. I’m afraid he can’t tell you anything now. I just killed him. My name is Jack Hamp.
Elizabeth looked at the two sets of fingerprints, and then at the report from the FBI. She had been awake half the night waiting for this, and she wondered if the strain, surprise and sheer fatigue had simply obliterated her ability to comprehend. But it hadn’t. She moved past the standard preprinted paragraph about the required thirteen points of comparison and read the conclusion again. It was positive. Suddenly she remembered that Jack had been waiting even before she had begun, and it was thoughtless to make him wait any longer.
“His name is Gilbert O’Mally. He has four arrests: grand theft, assault, aggravated assault and a parole violation.”
“That isn’t what I’d figured,” said Jack. “I didn’t think they’d even have him on file.” It was going to take him some time to give this the proper amount of reflection. Elizabeth Waring didn’t look the way he thought she would at all, but she was exactly the way he had hoped she would be. The suspect looked pretty much as he had expected, but nothing else about him was right. “I expected no arrests, no convictions.”
“You were right,” said Elizabeth. “Ten years ago was when this man was serving his time for aggravated assault. He’s a local criminal.” She waited for this to sink in, but Jack didn’t say anything. What was he feeling— disappointment, relief? “It isn’t him. This isn’t the Butcher’s Boy. He’s still out there.”
“It’s happening again,” said Elizabeth.
Richardson shook his head. “We don’t think so.” He looked at Hillman, the deputy assistant, for a sign of agreement, but the deputy assistant was staring at something that had besmirched his shirt cuff without actually becoming visible. Elizabeth wondered if this was a rebuff for Richardson’s being presumptuous enough to postulate a “we” that included a deputy assistant attorney general of the United States of America. It was possible; short men were protective of their right to speak for themselves, as though if they were not heard, they would disappear. But Richardson was pressing on. “Martillo worked for Detroit. He was here at the sufferance of Vico, and that sufferance simply wore itself out. Is that hard to believe?”
“Yes.”
Richardson’s lips didn’t quite smile. “The phone company says a call was made on Martillo’s car phone after he was dead. You know who the call went to? Vico.”
“Does Vico have a car phone?”
“Yes.”
“Then he’d know that they list all the outgoing calls.”
“He was caught literally red-handed. The car was found full of blood in his back yard, for Christ’s sake.”
“With three of his own men inside.”
“It was a reprisal. Toscanzio’s people were telling him that he shouldn’t have killed their boy.”
“Okay,” said Elizabeth. “Let me get this straight. You honestly think that Vico had Martillo killed, and then his soldiers called him on Martillo’s car phone to tell him that the deed was done. Then Toscanzio’s people arrived from Detroit and killed the three killers. Then what? Did they put the bodies in the car and deliver them to Vico’s back yard, or did Vico do that himself?”
“Choice number one. They also booby-trapped the fence so that whoever touched it would be electrocuted.”
“Was anybody?”
“Two people, actually,” said Richardson. “Both of them soldiers of Vico’s, and both heavily armed, incidentally, as though they were expecting trouble.”
“And you’re going to try to bring Vico to trial on the basis of this evidence?”
Without warning, the deputy assistant suddenly satisfied himself that he had found the fault on his cuff. He straightened his short arms so that the cuffs would retract into the sleeves of his jacket, then raised his eyes. He never let them move to Richardson, but instead let them gaze into space for a moment, then settled them on Elizabeth. “What do you think happened, Elizabeth?”
“Ten years ago the Butcher’s Boy got into trouble with the Mob. Specifically, Carlo Balacontano hired him, then tried to have him killed instead of paying him. What he did in response was to lash out violently and senselessly, killing several people who had little or nothing to do with the dispute. Since the various families were all suspicious of each other anyway, this created confusion and allowed him some breathing space. What he did
