The Butcher's Boy (34 page)

floors and walls for hollow places. They'd walk out with their files and maybe they'd figure it out eventually. But by then he might have the name, and they'd be wasting their time.

He was concentrating now. FBI men in Orloff's office. They didn't know what they were looking for. Maybe they didn't even know yet what Orloff was. If they didn't, would they have searched his house? He'd never been to Orloff's house although he assumed there must be one. It had never occurred to him to wonder where Orloff lived until he'd hired the Cruiser to watch him. He had little interest in the brokers and middlemen. He knew and accepted the fact that he wasn't the sort of man they'd want to spend time with, even if it hadn't been dangerous. And if Orloff had invited him there he would have been insulted. He did the work and took the money, but he would have resented any presumption that he cared who gave it to him, or took any interest in the problems and personalities that provided him with a market for his services. Orloff had been a pig. He had noted it, as he noted whatever came within the range of his consciousness, because it might present a problem or a solution, but it evoked no emotional response. But now Orloff was important to him because Orloff had known the name.

He contemplated Orloff as he searched for the address in the telephone book. Orloff had been greedy. So the house would be large and opulent. He memorized the address and returned to the car. But Orloff had been nervous and frightened most of the time, his greed conflicting with his natural cowardice to keep his fat body sweating beneath the custommade silk shirts in fits of excitement and terror. So the house would be difficult to break into, no doubt protected electronically from whatever phantoms Orloff's brain conjured up when it contemplated the possibilities of the night outside the windows. That part presented no problem, because Orloff was dead, and unless he had a family still living there, there would be no one to turn on the equipment.

When he neared Orloff's house, he followed the same procedure he'd used at FGE. He circled the block searching for signs that the house might be under surveillance. He saw nothing that was questionable, so he drove past the house. There were no cars at all in the driveway. Orloff's car had probably been impounded by the police in the investigation, he thought. Maybe because it caught some of the slugs from the shotgun, although there must have been more than enough in Orloff's body for any practical purpose.

He saw no lights in the windows. It was the sort of house he'd imagined.

The low, T-shaped structure gave an impression of careless, sprawling expanse, the two wings sheltering gardens of close-cropped yew and juniper, and yucca.

Another eye would not have noticed that anyone approaching either of the two doors in the wings could be observed from behind through opposite windows in what must be the same room.

He parked the car around the corner and walked to the house. The windows were all tightly latched and bolted, so he contented himself for the moment with examining them to see if he could discern the contact wires or the 166

glow of an electric eye that would show him how to disengage the burglar alarms. He peered through each of the windows, seeing only the dark shapes of the furniture. It took some searching, but at the rear of the house behind a fan-shaped shrub he found the electric meter. He read the meter and sat down and waited patiently for fifteen minutes, then read it again. It was as he'd hoped.

The police had either notified the electric company to turn off the power or simply gone through the house in their methodical, unthinking way and turned everything off. In any case, nothing was drawing electricity. Whatever alarm systems Orloff had installed were so much dead metal.

He thought about the house. Probably one of the doors would be easiest, and it would be less likely to show signs of his entry than the windows. He took another look at the electric meter and froze. The meter wheel was moving.

Something had been turned on. His mind raced—at two thirty in the morning what could it be? The alarm system would take steady continuous power. A light? No. At this hour the person would have to have been sleeping in the house and awakened. He'd been here over twenty minutes and they'd have to have sat in the dark at least that long. Then he remembered. Of course, the refrigerator.

It was the only thing that turned itself on and off. He was safe.

He went to the side door and used a credit card to depress the door latch and let himself in. The door had deadbolts and chains, he noticed, but you had to be inside the house to use them. Orloff would have hated that, he thought, but the alarms would have consoled him. Now that he was inside he could see the two black boxes of the electric eyes, their sensors turned off.

He listened for the refrigerator. He tried to remember where the kitchen window was. He had a mental image of the house plan, and followed it to the kitchen. The refrigerator was unusually quiet—he couldn't hear it at all. He felt for the handle, turning his head away in preparation for the glare of the light. He didn't want to destroy his night vision. There was no light, and in the darkness he smelled the unmistakable odor of rotten food. He closed the door silently and thought. Someone was in this house.

He crouched low and remained motionless. Superiority in the darkness was largely a matter of concentration and patience. "Get yourself a cat, like this one, and watch it," Eddie had said. "A cat will sit for an hour staring at whatever it's after and listening to it. As soon as the thing forgets what a cat is, the cat is on him, so fast you can hardly believe it. Forget all that jungle warfare shit they taught you in the service. You already know how to look like a fucking palm tree.

A cat'll teach you how to look like a shadow, part of the house, a pile of garbage."

He waited until his watch told him it had been five minutes. If he'd been heard by whoever was in the house, they'd either discounted the sound or forgotten it. It was a matter of shaping time to dimensions that didn't fit the normal sense of pace. If they heard a sound they'd listen for a few seconds to hear another. If they didn't, they'd stop listening.

He moved out into the living room, keeping low and close to the wall.

When he reached the first chair he settled down again to wait, crouching beside it in the darkness, listening. Whoever was in the house had been confident enough to turn on a light. That meant he had the only advantage he would need. Now that his night vision was at its best he could see that the living room was large—fifty by twenty-five feet, he estimated. It wasn't a room that Orloff would spend much time in. It was designed for receiving guests in a fashion that would appeal to Orloff's vanity—small tables and lots of chairs, but mostly arranged around the walls, without a focal point. And the shapes of the furniture weren't the sort of thing Orloff would feel comfortable in—too little padding. The furniture would be different in the room he was searching for: thick and leathery, and with seats that wouldn't cramp Orloff's fat ass. But there would be time for that after he'd found the man in the house. He had as much time as he needed.

He decided to move again. Past the living room was a hallway leading to what must be bedrooms and bathrooms. That was where he'd find the room he wanted. Patiently he began to move himself by inches toward his goal, keeping himself low and close to the wall. His mind was cleared now of all thought except thoughts of sight and sound.

Years ago he'd done all of his thinking about what his body was now doing. Eddie had been wrong about cats—he'd learned that from Eddie's cat in the butcher shop. It wasn't that they shaped their bodies to imitate something else. All they did was make sure they didn't look like a cat. It was the eye of the prey that formulated the disguise. The instant that it would take the man he was stalking to decide that the shape in the hallway wasn't a chair, wasn't a shadow, was maybe a man, would be all the time he needed. That instant was the predator's moment, the cat's time.

At the first turning of the hallway he heard the man moving about in the darkness. He turned his head slowly from side to side to locate the exact point the sound was coming from. It was off to the left. It was then that the thin sheet of light shot out from under the closed door.

He stationed himself beside the door and listened. There was a sound of rustling papers, then a drawer opening, then a clicking noise. He listened, straining to sense the direction of movement, while someone walked from one end of the room to the other. There was another rustling, and then his ears detected the sound he was waiting for. The footsteps began to move away from the door. He snatched the door open and stepped into the room, his gun pointed at the sound.

A man whirled to face him, his expression the terrible mixture of animal and human that the instant of terror brought on him. A gurgling sound escaped from the taut muscles of his throat, and he dropped a briefcase on the floor. The instant passed, and the man said, "What?" Then the man said, as though correcting himself, "What are you?" His face betrayed the fact that he sensed that the question wasn't right. He tried "What do you want?"

He studied the man. He was about fifty years old, wearing a charcoal gray suit. Not a burglar. Police? He said, "Throw me your wallet and turn around."

The man seemed to be relieved. He reached into his coat and pulled out a long, thin black wallet, and tossed it toward him, then turned his face to the window.

He didn't bother to catch it. That would only give the man a chance to do something he'd seen on television. He had only asked for it to see if the man had a shoulder holster on or handcuffs, and there were none. He kicked open the wallet. There was no badge.

Keeping his eyes on the man, he said, "What's your name?"

The man said, "Please, take the wallet. There's over a thousand dollars in it."

He repeated, "What's your name?" The man said, "Edgar Fieldston."

Fieldston. Of course. There would be a Fieldston. An Edgar or a Ronald or a Howard or a Marshall. He knelt down and opened the wallet. It was true. Edgar R. Fieldston. A driver's license, credit cards, a Blue Cross-Blue Shield membership.

He said, "Fieldston Growth Enterprises."

The man said, "Yes."

"What are you doing in Orloff's house?"

Fieldston's voice changed. He assumed an air of authority. He said, "Mr.

Orloff worked for me. I needed some papers, and I have every right to be here.

Now take the wallet and leave me alone."

He sensed the wrong note in the voice. It wasn't the bravado of a man trying to scare the sort of perennial loser that held people up for their wallets.

And he hadn't said take the money and leave the wallet. He'd said take the wallet. And to a man like this, the inconvenience of losing the license, credit cards, and identification could be more important than the thousand or so dollars. He said, "No thanks, I've got a wallet."

Fieldston's hands were in the air. Whatever resource he had been using to keep them from shaking now left him. When he spoke, it was with a slight tremor. "What do you want?"

He said, "You."

Fieldston turned toward him, as though unable to control himself. "No, wait a minute. You've got it wrong. I wasn't leaving the country. I'm here now, aren't I?"

He had to keep him frightened. He said, "Bullshit."

Fieldston pointed at the briefcase on the floor and said, "Look for yourself.

I was going to give it to him. Four million dollars. Hell, that's fifty percent a year on his investment."

He had to get him to say the name. He just smiled and shook his head.

Fieldston was frantic now. His voice was shrill and strident. "Yes!" he said.

"It's true. Here it is, and now we're even. I'll disappear where the police will never find me."

He said, "What were you doing in here?"

Fieldston said, "I knew Orloff. He would have kept something here to use 169

against us if there was an investigation. I knew him. Before I left I wanted to find it."

He smiled again. Of course. He said, "No. You wanted it for yourself. To use against us. To save your ass."

Fieldston shook his head. "No. Honestly. I know better than that." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a checkbook. "See?" he said. "Here it is.

It's a ledger of the transactions over the past five years. It's in his checkbook. I found it. We'll destroy it right now and you can tell them everything is okay."

He said, "You should have told them yourself." Fieldston said, "But I was told never to use the telephone to talk to Mr. Balacontano."

The name. He wasn't surprised, just glad it was over. He decided to make it simple. He aimed carefully and placed the single shot in the center of Fieldston's forehead. The pistol spat once, Fieldston's head jerked slightly, and the body crumpled to the floor. He looked at his watch. Not even three o'clock, he thought. Plenty of time.

When Elizabeth awoke there was a moment before she remembered. It was like the moment the mind realizes that the foot onto which the body's weight is about to shift should already have touched solid ground, but didn't. Then there was the rapid succession of feelings—remembering, alarm, and the mind's recognition of an emergency that is somehow already determined and familiar—

not less unpleasant for the recognition, but a mishap of a particular kind and consequence, and therefore accepted with frustration instead of terror. Palermo was dead.

She sat up in bed and looked at the alarm clock. It was almost three o'clock in the morning. She had slept for over eight hours already. The sheriff had driven her to Carson City, and she'd taken a plane back to Las Vegas after waiting until two o'clock for the first flight. It was nearly four by the time she'd made it to the FBI office.

Why hadn't Brayer called her? He hadn't been at the office or at the hotel.

If he'd taken a plane to Washington he should have arrived hours ago. And Connors or Padgett would be there to give him the message: Elizabeth had done it again. Palermo was dead. Go back and try to pick up the pieces of the investigation. It had to be her telephone.