Sleeping Dogs (19 page)

The transaction was quick and simple, but as he was getting into the car, Ackerman was quietly accosted by a skinny young man who looked like an out-of-work car mechanic. “Didn’t you see anything in there you liked?” His mind compared the two possibilities, cop and thief, and neither won. He just shook his head. “No. Same old stuff,” he said, and prepared to start the car. The man said, “Looking for something in particular?” He decided on thief. “Why? You got something?”

“A few things. I’m a gunsmith. I do modifications, custom work, make a few accessories.” The word
accessories
interested him enough to get him out of the car. In the trunk of the man’s old Chevy was an oily bath towel, and laid out on it were a few homemade sears for converting M-16’s to full auto, a couple of forty-round banana clips made of two standard twenties welded end-to-end and various devices designed to hold handguns under dashboards and car seats. He took a chance. “I can see why you aren’t at a table inside.” The man grinned sheepishly and then compulsively glanced around to see if anyone was watching. “See anything you like?” He shook his head. “Sorry.” The man looked disappointed. “This ain’t all I got. Give me a hint.” He said, “Ever made a silencer?” The man had.

William Wolf was watching the effect of the sun coming up, hitting the distant face of the low mesa on his left and giving it a pink glow beneath the deep purple of the predawn sky. Driving felt like a novelty. He loved the feeling of enclosure in the small box hurtling down the smooth highway at sixty-five as the sights around him changed. It wasn’t just one object being replaced by another like it, but a change in the possibilities. He had been in New Mexico several times before, but now it looked new to him. There were low, rolling hills that flattened into unexpected places where the level plains dropped abruptly to reveal that they had been plateaus. All of it was covered with dry, knee-high sage that was almost gray, with dark piñons growing out of it like plants at the bottom of a vast ocean. And along the impossibly distant horizon, here and there a mountain would rise, not a range of mountains but a single one, or a saw-toothed ridge of three, tilted a little as though something big had swept over it to push it aside.

He had spent a few hours becoming William Wolf in a motel in Albuquerque, and now the name had displaced the others in his mind. He had repeated it to himself a thousand times, rehearsed introducing himself to imaginary strangers and even planned the signature. It would be two big, fast
W’s
, each followed by low, cramped scrawls that looked so cursory that some letters might appear to be missing.

The name William Wolf had presented no problem to him. Names were the first accidental training that Eddie had given him as a child. Eddie had never actually taken any legal steps to adopt him, for fear that some public agency would be called upon to visit the home and create a file. Instead he had sometimes referred to the boy as his son, sometimes as his nephew, or even as the child of a friend, as convenience seemed to dictate, and had made up names for him on these occasions. But as soon as he was old enough to learn a trade, the boy had been taught to select his own aliases. Circumstances had never allowed him to attach any interior significance to names. He might be Bob or Ronald at one moment, or “the Butcher’s Boy,” or even “the third one from the end of the line.” It made no difference to him; in a heartbeat he would be the second from the end of the line without experiencing any interior alteration. Names were for other people’s convenience, and their convenience was seldom of any interest to him. For a decade he had found it useful to be Michael Schaeffer; for a day he had resurrected Charles Ackerman; now it was easiest to be Wolf.

Wolf thought about Santa Fe. It was too small to have a serious airport, but it was always full of tourists. The only reasonable choice was to fade into the amorphous, shifting group that came and went each day. He would arrive the way they did and dress the way they did, and that was as near to invisibility as he could get. People in tourist towns let their eyes acknowledge new people only long enough to be sure they wouldn’t bump into them. There was no reason to remember faces because they would never appear again.

Wolf felt the early-morning cold as he got out of the car in the parking structure beneath La Fonda. It was a strange, calm and airless chill that seemed to have been stored in the dark enclosure for a long time. La Fonda was the only hotel he remembered from the old days, a seventy-year-old five-story sprawling adobe building on the corner of the ancient city square beside the palace the conquistadors had built for their governors in 1610. There were already three cars exactly like his that he could see as he walked to the swinging door that led into the hall to the lobby. As he turned the first corner he could see into the big dining room, with its uneven ceramic tile floor and the fifty-foot canopy of painted glass that let in just enough light for the potted trees. There were only a few people sitting under the trees and eating breakfast; he knew that these were probably the ones who had come here from the East, where it was already late morning. There were two young couples who wore ski sweaters, jeans and hiking shoes, and a table of five elderly people, three women and two men, who had the manner of a permanent traveling committee. They each spoke to the whole group and then winked and nudged some particular ally, while the others felt comfortable ignoring what was said.

Wolf could also see a table where four dark-suited businessmen held a serious discussion, looking as though their plane from New York had been hijacked and they had been released, unharmed and unchanged, in the center of this small western town and were now waiting for the answer to their inquiries about whom to buy it from. He glanced around the lobby, first at the registration desk, where a dark-haired woman in her forties made quick, proprietary movements, arranging registration cards and keys to prepare for the morning check-ins. He avoided that side of the room and walked past two ancient Pueblo Indians, a wrinkled, leathery little man and a woman who undoubtedly was his wife, both of them busy opening modern, black sample cases full of silver and turquoise jewelry for display on the bench by the wall.

He drifted past a wooden rack of free tourist pamphlets, selected a Santa Fe street map and walked out the front door of the building to the street. There were a few little patches of the early autumn’s first crisp, hard snow in the square, and the air was clear and thin. He would have been tempted to ask for a room in the hotel, but he knew that Santa Fe was too small. He looked up and down the streets that led into the square. There were the stores he remembered, their windows full of intricately painted Indian pots, handwoven blankets of wool dyed with bright vegetable colors and antique pounded-and-burnished silver bought, by tradition, so cheaply from the once-credulous Indians that it was still called “pawn.” But among the stores was a coffee shop with outdoor tables turned upside down as a concession to the first taste of cold weather. He found it by following a couple in their thirties who were tourists but looked purposeful in their gait, reasoning that nothing else could be open yet.

Inside the door there was a steamy warmth to the air, a comforting heaviness to the dark wooden tables and a glow of hanging antique copper implements that he doubted the employees could even identify, let alone use. Wolf sat at a table and studied his map, while the waitress, a plump blond girl of the type he could imagine leaving college to study astrology, poured him a cup of coffee and left a menu beside him.

Andalusia was one of the narrow, cramped streets that ran parallel to Canyon Road, where he remembered that the galleries were. He had never felt an impulse to own paintings, and in the days when he had lived in the United States it would have been foolish, but he had walked down Canyon Road once, years ago, to pass the time, and he remembered the neighborhood. He judged from the map that he would have to leave the car blocks away and find Peter Mantino on foot.

When the waitress came to stand beside him and said, “Ready?” he answered, “Huevos rancheros,” because he hadn’t had time to read the menu, and it was the only thing he remembered that places like this would have. When she left, he studied the map again, letting it suggest the way things would happen. If things were as they should have been, a man like Peter Mantino would put some obstacles between himself and the world. But six or seven years ago, Mantino had been convicted of a bunch of charges that Wolf couldn’t even remember now, all of the bribery-and-suborning variety. Now he was on parole, supposedly living in voluntary seclusion hundreds of miles from the centers of power in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. All of this had been in the newspapers years ago, and even the reporters clearly hadn’t believed a word of it. But the important part was true: if he was on parole, he couldn’t have the sort of protection he was about to begin needing.

Wolf still had not gotten over the shock of seeing the shooter at the airport, but he had never for a second doubted what had happened. The truth was, there was no way even Carl Bala could send a specialist to kill somebody in the Los Angeles airport. The airport lay unambiguously in the center of Peter Mantino’s empire, and any consequences would fall exclusively on his head: the text of every letter to the editor would mention his name, the resulting crackdown would cut into his profits and the token arrests would make his people cautious and unproductive. He had to have been the one who made the decision, and the man must belong to him.

Mantino had started out running a crew for Balacontano in New York in the sixties, and then gotten to run the family’s interests in the West, supposedly as a reward for faithful service. At the time, people had said there was more to it than that. They said Mantino had begun to attract a lot of loyalty in the family, and Balacontano had just wanted him out there and away from the soldiers. The world was full of little men who knew what big men were really thinking.

It didn’t matter why Mantino had reacted so quickly. Maybe he was still loyal to the Balacontano family, and maybe he was making a safe, easy bid for respect while the old man was in prison and Talarese was out of the way. The only thing that was certain was that Mantino was taking enough of an interest to send shooters into public places. That changed Wolf’s problem into figuring out how Wolf was going to stay alive.

He needed to get out of the country, but nobody was going to let him step onto a plane to London without a passport. He knew of only one place where he might be able to get one after all these years, and that was in Buffalo, over fifteen hundred miles away. It would take time to get there, and time to make the contact, and time for the passport. And every second that passed, he was heating up. He needed to buy some time.

The only thing that gave him hope was that word of his return couldn’t have traveled faster than an airplane unless it was passed by telephone from somebody in New York to Mantino. And Mantino wouldn’t have told a lot of people in his organization that he was going to have somebody killed. That was the sort of thing nobody talked about until after it was accomplished. And it hadn’t been accomplished. The shooter had gotten himself busted in the airport. Wolf had to take advantage of that mistake. The only way was to do the unexpected: Mantino takes a swat at a fly, and the fly goes right up his nose.

Twice in his life he had seen what happened when a capo unexpectedly died. People reacted in different ways. A few would check in at out-of-town hotels and start making phone calls. But a lot of them would stay home and wait for somebody to get in touch with them. Usually it would be some acquaintance—a guy they had been introduced to at the races, or somebody’s cousin they had met at a wedding. The guy would say, “Peter’s dead. You have a problem with that?” or just, “What are you going to do now? If you want to go with us, I can talk to some people.” But until they heard from somebody, they were going to be watching a lot of television with the blinds drawn. Sometimes nobody got in touch, and the trouble just got worse. There had even been one famous time when a boss died, and forty of his friends across the country died the same day. That was what they would be afraid of—not that somebody Carlo Balacontano had put a contract on ten years ago had come for Peter Mantino.

The low brown stucco wall around the yard would present no problem unless it had some electronic component that Wolf couldn’t see from the street. He couldn’t see or hear a dog, and the sign on the gate that said N
ORTH
A
MERICAN
W
ATCH
—A
RMED
R
ESPONSE
was comforting. It made it unlikely that Mantino had anything more sophisticated than a conventional alarm system that would summon untrained night watchmen. The house was a single-story adobe-colored building. Like all the others in this part of town, it was required by the building code to look as though the Spaniards had never left, although he suspected that any Spaniards that had made it this far north and east must have been a forlorn, raggedy-assed bunch.

He maintained an even, leisurely tourist’s pace, and studied all the houses on the street with equal attention. At the corner he turned, walked to the street behind Andalusia and examined the houses there. There appeared to be nothing of any consequence to protect any of them, but the situation was still troublesome. There were no cars parked on the narrow one-way street, and he had passed only a few pedestrians during his walk, none of them within blocks of Andalusia. Even if he could get in, getting out would be difficult.

It was dark now, and the cold air was still and crisp. The patches of dirty snow that had melted in the sunlight were now furrows and tumuli of iron-hard ice, and Wolf watched for them so that he could step around them on the sidewalk. In his left hand he carried a paper sack from the store where he had bought the gloves and channel-lock pliers a few hours ago, but now it also contained the Ruger .38 and its silencer. If necessary, he could drop the bag surreptitiously, but for anyone who might see him, the bag was an indicator that he had gone out on foot for a purpose and was on his way home.