The Butcher watched them as they stood in front of the tony Claridges Hotel waiting for the man's private car to pull up. It did so, just as it had the previous evening and then again around ten o'clock that morning.
No serious mistakes so far by the couple. Nothing for him to pounce on.
The driver of the private car was a bodyguard, and he was carrying. He was also decent enough at what he did.
There was only one problem for the bodyguard – the girl obviously didn't want him around. She'd tried, unsuccessfully, to have the older man ditch the driver the night before, when they had attended some kind of formal affair at the Saatchi Gallery.
Well, he would just have to see what developed today. The Butcher pulled out a few cars behind the gleaming black Mercedes CL65. The Merc was fast, more than six hundred horsepower, but a hell of a lot of good that would do them on the crowded streets of London.
He was a little paranoid about working again, and with pretty good reason, but he'd gotten the job through a solid contact in the Boston area. He trusted the guy, at least as far as he could throw him. And he needed the six- figure payday.
A possible break finally came on Long Acre near the Covent Garden underground station. The girl jumped out of the car at a stoplight, started to walk off – and the older man got out as well.
Michael Sullivan pulled over to the curb immediately, and he simply abandoned his car. The rental could never be traced back to him anyway. The move was a classic in that most people wouldn't even think of doing it, but he couldn't have cared less about just leaving the car in the middle of London. The car was of no consequence.
He figured the driver-bodyguard wouldn't do the same with the two-hundred-thousand-dollar Mercedes, and that he had several minutes before the guy caught up with them again.
The streets around the Covent Garden Piazza were densely packed with pedestrians, and he could see the couple, their heads bobbing, laughing, probably about their 'escape' from the bodyguard. He followed them down James Street. They continued to laugh and talk, with not a care in the world.
Big, big mistake.
He could see a glass-roof-covered market up ahead. And a crowd gathered around street performers dressed as white marble statues that only moved when someone threw them a coin.
Then, suddenly, he was on top of the couple, and it felt right, so he fired the silenced Beretta – two heart shots.
The girl went down like a throw rug had been pulled out from under her two feet.
He had no idea who she was, who had wanted her dead or why, and he didn't care one way or the other.
'Heart attack! Someone had a heart attack!' he called out as he let the gun drop from his fingertips, turned, and disappeared into the thickening crowd. He headed up Neal Street past a couple of pubs with Victorian exteriors and found his abandoned car right where he left it. What a nice surprise.
It was safer to stay in London overnight, but then he was on a morning flight back to Washington.
Easy money – like always, or at least how it had been for him before the cock-up in Venice, which he still had to deal with in a major way.
Chapter 56
JOHN AND I MET that night for a little light sparring at the Roxy Gym after my last therapy session. The practice was building steadily, and my days there made me happy and satisfied for the first time in a few years.
The quaint idea of normality was in my head a lot now, though I'm not sure what the word really meant.
'Get your elbows in,' Sampson said, 'before I knock your damn head off.'
I pulled them in. It didn't help much, though.
The big man caught me with a good right jab that stung like only a solid punch can. I swung and connected solidly with his open side, which seemed to hurt my hand more than it hurt him.
It went on like that for a while, but my mind never really got into the ring. After less than twenty minutes, I held up my gloves, feeling an ache in both shoulders.
'TKO,' I said through my mouthpiece. 'Let's go get a drink.'
Our 'drink' turned out to be bottles of red Gatorade on the sidewalk in front of the Roxy. Not what I'd had in mind, but it was just fine.
'So,' Sampson said, 'either I'm getting a whole lot better in there or you were out of it tonight. Which is it?'
'You aren't getting better,' I deadpanned.
'Still thinking about yesterday? What? Talk to me.'
We both had felt lousy about the tough interview with Lisa Brandt. It's one thing to push a witness like that and get somewhere; it's another to probe hard and get nothing out of it.
I nodded. 'Yesterday, yeah.'
Sampson slid down the wall to sit next to me on the sidewalk. 'Alex, you've got to get off the worry train.'
'Nice bumper sticker,' I told him.
'I thought things were going pretty good for you,' he said. 'Lately anyway.'
'They are,' I said. 'The work is good, even better than I thought it would be.'
'So what's the problem then? Too much of a good thing? What ails you, man?'
In my mind, there was the long answer and the short answer. I went for the short answer. 'Maria.'
He knew what I meant, knew why too. 'Yesterday reminded you of her?'
'Yeah. In a weird way, it did,' I said. 'I was thinking. You remember back around the time when she was killed? There was a serial rape going on then, too. Remember that?'
Sampson squinted into the air. 'Right, now that you mention it.'
I rubbed my sore knuckles together. 'Anyway, that's what I mean. It's all like two degrees of separation these days. Everything I think about reminds me of Maria. Everything I do brings me back to her murder case. I kind of feel like I'm living in purgatory, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that.'
Sampson waited for me to finish. He usually knows when his point has been made and when to shut up. He had nothing more to say at the moment. Finally, I took a deep breath, and we rose and started up the sidewalk.
'What do you hear about Maria's killer? Anything new?' I asked him. 'Or was Giametti just playing with us?'
'Alex, why don't you move on?'
'John, if I could move on, I would. Okay? Maybe this is how I do it.'
He stared at his shoes for half a block. When he finally answered, it was begrudgingly. 'If I find out something about her killer, you'll be the first to know.'
Chapter 57
MICHAEL SULLIVAN HAD STOPPED taking shit from anybody when he was fourteen or fifteen years old. Everybody in his family knew that his grandpa James had a gun and that he kept it in the bottom drawer of the dresser in his bedroom. One afternoon in June, the week that school got out for him, Sullivan broke in and stole the gun from his grandfather's apartment.
For the rest of the day, he moseyed around the neighborhood with the pistola stuck in his pants, concealed under a loose shirt. He didn't feel the need to show off the weapon to anybody, but he found that he liked having it, liked it a lot. The handgun changed everything for him. He went from a tough kid to an invincible one.
Sullivan hung out until around eight; then he made his way along Quentin Road to his father's shop. He got there when he knew that the old man would be closing up.
