Eddie's Boy E-Book

Thomas Perry

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 402

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Michael Shaeffer is a retired American businessman, living peacefully in England with his aristocratic wife. But her annual summer party brings strangers to their house, and with them, an attempt on Michael's life. He is immediately thrust into action, luring his lethal pursuers to Australia before venturing into the lion's den - the States - to figure out why the mafia is after him again, and how to stop them. Eddie's Boy jumps between Michael's current predicament and the past, as we glimpse the days before he became the Butcher's Boy, the highly skilled hit man who exacted revenge on some double-crossing clients and started a mob war. He's meticulous in his approach as he attempts to pit two prominent mafia families against each other to eliminate his enemies one by one. But will he be able to escape this new wave of young contract killers, or will the years finally catch up to him?

Leseprobe

Praise for Eddie’s Boy

‘Perry makes the distant past as vivid and immediate as the relentlessly paced present.’

—Kirkus Reviews

‘[Perry’s] 1982 thriller, The Butcher’s Boy, won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America and, decades later, remains a notable debut. Perry’s latest, Eddie’s Boy, circles back to that early masterpiece, bringing a long-gestating narrative to an elegant and satisfying conclusion . . . Perry is not a particularly colorful or flamboyant stylist. His prose is lean, clean and typically understated. Its precise, level tone and attention to detail lend his narratives a force and immediacy that compel our attention.’

—Washington Post

‘Perry is a master at finding humanity in criminals . . . [The] Butcher’s Boy [is] unlike any other fictional hit man. He’s a good son who learned his father’s trade and now is trying to unlearn it. Just try not rooting for him.’

—Booklist, starred review

‘The pacing never lets up almost from the first page. The character of Michael is brilliant . . . This is easily one of the most exciting thrillers of the year and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Thomas Perry remains a master of the thriller genre.’

—Deadly Pleasures

‘Thomas Perry’s debut, The Butcher’s Boy, earned him the coveted Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel back in 1983. At the time, the book virtually defined a new subgenre of thriller: the “Hired Killer Summoned Out of Retirement by Someone Trying to Kill Him” . . . A new Butcher’s Boy book arrives only once every decade, if that, and this one is well worth the wait.’

—BookPage

‘Perry is ingenious in working out variations on Shaeffer’s double dilemma, and though there’s nothing especially artistic about all the bloodshed, the book offers non-stop thrills, chills and kills.’

—Toronto Star

Also by Thomas Perry

The Butcher’s Boy

Metzger’s Dog

Big Fish

Island

Sleeping Dogs

Vanishing Act

Dance for the Dead

Shadow Woman

The Face-Changers

Blood Money

Death Benefits

Pursuit

Dead Aim

Nightlife

Silence

Fidelity

Runner

Strip

The Informant

Poison Flower

The Boyfriend

A String of Beads

Forty Thieves

The Old Man

The Bomb Maker

The Burglar

A Small Town

The Left-Handed Twin

Murder Book

First published in the United States of America in 2020 by Grove Atlantic

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2023 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright © Thomas Perry, 2020

The moral right of Thomas Perry to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN 978 1 80471 031 9

E-book ISBN 978 1 80471 032 6

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press UK

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street London

WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

For Jo, as always.

1

Michael Schaeffer had not killed anyone in years, and he was enraged at the fact that he’d had to do it again tonight. He drove the big black sedan along the deserted, winding British lane toward the south under the lightless sky, keeping his speed near the limit of his ability to control the car. Strapped upright with the seat belt in the passenger seat beside him was a man with a small, neat bullet hole through the side of his head. In the rear seats two more men with more pronounced firearm wounds were strapped upright. In the trunk of the car—he still thought trunk even though everyone around him said boot—was another corpse that had bled profusely and was wrapped in a tarp. The sun would rise in a few hours, and he would have to be rid of this car and far away from it before then. He went over his memory of the way this had happened. It had started with a normal conversation with his wife, Meg.

Meg’s family had kept a house near the Royal Crescent in Bath for a couple of centuries, and Bath was where she and Michael had met decades ago and still lived for most of the year. Each spring, she would pick a day when it was time for their retreat from Bath. One day a few weeks ago, she’d had her laptop open on the big Regency desk in her study when he walked in.

Meg had already checked what she called “migration day”—the end of the spring semester in the academic schedules of American universities. She usually began with the ones in and around Boston. During the winter, Boston held over 250,000 students, and each summer a great many of them would be heading for England, most of them stopping in Bath, population 84,000. She used American students as bellwethers, because their movements were predictable, but there would also be hordes from other countries.

“I’ve checked the spring-semester exam schedules. It’s off to Yorkshire no later than May fifth this year.” She meant the family’s historic home, the old estate a dozen miles outside the city of York. York was also a destination for tourists and students in the summer, but the house was off the main routes and was not the best historical example of anything or the site of an important battle or a Roman ruin.

“Got it,” said Michael. “I should be able to pack a razor and a toothbrush by then.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll be reminded. Many times.”

Whenever they stayed in the Yorkshire house, they slept in the second-floor bedroom remodeled in the 1650s for the earl of that generation and his wife and last modernized five years ago. It was one of eight large chambers for the family, but Meg and Michael were childless and the older members of her family had died years before. The lower level of the old house had been designed for public functions: a central dining hall, a big kitchen and pantry behind it, a drawing room, and a library—all modernized in the 1630s, over stone laid in the 1300s, and refurnished many times since then. The top two floors had contained an attic and the servants’ rooms, but were long unoccupied. Meg had spent every day since they’d arrived planning and arranging her annual May party, and Michael helped with the practical work but stayed as unobtrusive as possible most of the time.

Then it was their tenth day back at the Yorkshire house, the day of Meg’s party. The party was important to her, because it was her way to issue greetings to her York friends and their families and the web of relatives and ancient connections who lived in the north. Her May party had gone on for enough years now that it was seen by many as the unofficial start to the part of the year when the island became less cold and wet.

Few if any of the minor aristocracy could afford to keep the garrisons of workers these houses had once employed. So once a year for her party, Meg would retain a gardening company and a crew of cleaners for ten days, a party rental company, a good caterer, and a group of parking attendants.

In her unabridged form Meg was the Honourable Margaret Susanna Moncrief Holroyd. Her family’s holdings in York were first granted in the time of King Edmund in 941, after he had restored Anglo-Saxon control from the Scandinavians. In 946 he was murdered at age twenty-five by a robber in his royal hall at Puckle-church, near Bath. In 1472 Edward IV granted the estate again to that generation’s earl, his close drinking and whoring buddy. When Meg told Michael about it, he laughed, because it had cost the king nothing: it had already belonged to his friend’s family for five hundred years.

The manor house had been given several major renovations over the centuries. The last large one was the result of the April 29, 1942, bombing raid that Hitler ordered after the RAF bombed Lübeck and Rostock. Ninety-two people were killed in York that night, none of them on the estate, but the central hall received a bomb through its roof, which needed to be repaired and restored.

Meg’s party always began as soon as anyone appeared at the front gate and wouldn’t end until she detected a diminution of gaiety late in the evening. In the morning there was a cricket match on the huge south lawn, where the party rental company had set up tables so that Meg could provide tea, pastries, and other refreshments for spectators. At one o’clock the caterers served lunch on the long tables of the great hall. In the afternoon a chamber orchestra performed and a church choir sang. Older adults played sedate outdoor games like croquet, lawn bowling, and lawn darts, and there were foot races and other sports for the young and the irrepressible. The caterers set out a buffet dinner at six, and at eight a rock DJ began playing music on the old pasture on the east side of the house.

That evening the party did not show signs of exhaustion until 11:00 p.m. Meg stopped the music at 11:30 and sent the parking attendants to direct traffic so that cars could get off the estate without hitting each other. She had drivers offer van rides to anyone who needed or wanted one.

Meg was triumphant. “It went smoothly this year, don’t you think?” she asked.

Michael nodded. “Yep. You’ve outdone yourself again.” Meg’s party was one of his least favorite days of each year. Meg was not only an extrovert, but was also strikingly attractive, and had the money and taste to be glamorous. She was generous, witty, irreverent, and socially in demand even now, in her fifties. There were people from the North Sea to the English Channel at intervals of about a half mile who considered her one of their closest friends. Thirty years ago, when she first got romantically involved with an American who had typical American tastes and manners, there were some people in her social sphere who had been horrified, and others who simply shrugged and said that scandalizing snobs was her chief delight, but there was nobody who wasn’t a little sick about it.

As soon as they met, Michael had realized that a man in his special circumstances had no way to survive except to become part of the background. The day he had flown to England, he had left many people in America who wanted him dead, people either burning for revenge or eager to collect on one of the contracts out on him, or whose job it was to put him in prison.

Once he was in England, he made an effort to avoid conversation when he could, and to cut it short if he couldn’t. When Meg’s friends asked what he did for a living, he said he was retired. When they wanted to know from what, he said he’d been in business. When they asked what business, he said it had been so dull that he had promised himself never to bore anybody else about it. He also maintained a lack of visible interest in most things other people said about themselves, and he had learned to keep Meg at the front, where she would attract all the attention.

Trouble had found him a couple of times anyway during their years together. The first time was just a chance sighting. A young American who had seen him once as a child in New York had been sent to serve an apprenticeship with casino operators in England and had spotted him at the horse races in Brighton with Meg and two of her friends. The next time was about ten years later, when an American boss named Frank Tosca had tried to inflate his reputation with the Mafia families by showing that his men could find and kill even the professional murderer who had been known as “the Butcher’s Boy.” Both times Michael had done the only thing he could—kept himself and Meg alive, and then made the person who had ordered his death realize, if only for a second, that he had made a terrible mistake.

Meg’s Yorkshire party was one of the few times of the year when Michael could not be absent, hidden, or anonymous. He was Meg’s husband, one of the hosts of the festivities that he dreaded. When Meg declared this year’s party a success, he agreed, but what he meant was that he had not attracted much attention, had not had many personal conversations, and had not made himself memorable. There had also been no accidents, injuries, or illnesses at the party that would have forced him to deal with any authorities, now or later.

He and Meg stayed up that night until the caterers had cleaned the kitchen, packed their remaining supplies, and departed; the party rental people had loaded their trucks with all their furniture, appliances, tents, and decorations, and driven off safely; and all the extra helpers, parking attendants, and others had been paid and then cleared out. When Michael locked the doors and went up to bed with Meg, he felt a profound sense of relief. The damned Yorkshire party was over for another year.

But it wasn’t. It was not until later that night, when Michael and Meg were asleep, that the final four visitors arrived.

Michael heard the sound from downstairs and identified it instantly. One of the leaded-glass panes of the windows along the side of the great hall had been pried out and slipped, and he heard it smash on the stone floor with a musical sound. He touched Meg’s arm and whispered, “Wake up. Something’s happening downstairs.”

He stood up and remembered that he had locked the pistol he’d brought from Bath in the trunk of their Jaguar so that it wouldn’t be where guests or temporary workers could stumble on it, and at the end of the evening he’d neglected to bring it upstairs.

He got out of bed, put on the clothes he’d taken off at bedtime, stepped into the old smoking room down the hallway, and went to the gun cabinet that had belonged to Meg’s great-grandfather. The guns displayed behind the glass doors were beautiful pieces of workmanship. His hand skipped past the three Purdey shotguns. They were each worth over £100,000. The two Holland and Hollands beside them were worth more. He had once used the Westley Richards with the single trigger and the barrel selector switch on top, so he chose it. This intruder was probably just an incompetent burglar who had cased the house during the party, and if so, Michael wouldn’t have to fire the weapon anyway.

He slipped the gamekeeper’s bag containing shotgun shells off its hook and over his shoulder and opened the gun to insert two shells. He moved down the hall away from the grand staircase and hurried to the back stairs, which had been used by the maids in the old days. He descended quietly, emerged in the kitchen, and stepped into the dining hall.

He saw two men at the window. They had already reached through the empty frame where they had removed the glass and had disengaged the latch. Now they were climbing in.

Schaeffer moved along the inner wall across from the windows until he was abreast of the one they had opened. One of the men looked up and saw him, so Michael said, “What are you doing here? Are you lost?”

The man crouched and aimed a pistol at him. Michael pulled the trigger of the antique shotgun. It roared, and the man was swept backward, as though swatted by an invisible hand.

The second man aimed his pistol at Michael, so Michael selected the other barrel. The shotgun roared again, and that man jerked backward and collapsed onto the floor in a lazy dive.

Michael heard the sound of running feet toward the open window. He ran to the first man’s body, pulled off his hooded rain jacket, put it on himself, then laid the antique shotgun across the second man’s chest. He lay down on his side with the man’s watch cap tugged down on his head and checked the man’s pistol by touch. It was a nine-millimeter semiautomatic, and the rectangular shape of its slide told him that it was a Glock. The safety was incorporated into the trigger mechanism, so he wouldn’t have to search for a catch.

The third man ran to the open window and stepped to one side so he could see the three bodies in the moonlight. He quickly chose the man with the shotgun across his chest, assuming he was Michael, and fired a round into the man’s head.

In a single quick motion, Michael half turned, raised the Glock, and fired it upward into the underside of the man’s jaw.

He stood up, picked up the second man’s pistol, put it in the pocket of the coat he’d taken, and then climbed out the open window.

The grass beside the manor house was wet with dew, and in the moonlight he could see the three men’s shoe prints on it. They clearly had come across the lawn from the direction of the woods on the south side of the estate near the gate.

He looked closely at the wet grass, and once he was in the open, he could see that the feet had not been walking. They had been trotting. It made him think there must have been a time issue. If they had just driven onto the estate, they should have been able to park and walk as slowly and quietly as they wished.

So time must be tight. That meant they must have concocted some sort of idiotic alibi that required them to come here and kill him while their alibi time was ticking. With beginners, the alibi was usually a ticket to a movie or a sports event, something that would not require an actual person to stand up in front of the cops and lie for him.

They had certainly been amateurish. They hadn’t been difficult to kill, and their plan seemed to have been no more than to put themselves in his house while he was asleep and assume that made him practically dead to start. There had to be a car parked somewhere. No, it could be more than that. Anybody who wanted him dead would be an American, and Americans might have an English driver.

He supposed the three were the current generation of American bosses’ idea of professionals. Someone had sent them to England to take him out after all these years. Somebody—maybe a British contact—should have realized that they were not the best choice for driving a long distance over the English countryside at high speed in the dark, getting themselves to Meg’s Yorkshire house, and driving themselves back in time to save their alibi. So somewhere on the property would be a fast car and maybe an English driver. He hoped that if the driver existed, he hadn’t heard the difference between the shotgun blasts and the pop of a pistol. But Schaeffer hadn’t fired the shotgun outdoors, so the thick old stone walls might have muffled the sound a bit.

Michael broke into a trot. If the schedule of the attackers required that they run to the manor house and back, surely it required that he run too. If the driver heard or saw a man trotting toward him instead of sneaking, he’d feel reassured. At least he would until Michael got there.

As he went farther toward the woods, he could smell the exhaust of the car in the night air, and then he could hear the engine, faintly. The car had to be in among the trees. Michael followed the sound and found the car parked just inside the edge of the woods, where the trees were far apart. It was a big black Bentley sedan. The car added to the evidence that these men had not simply been violent burglars. They had been sent to kill him. He approached the car in its blind spot to the right behind the driver’s head.

When Michael was close behind him, the driver jumped and spun halfway around in his seat. He appeared to recognize the rain jacket Michael had taken. “You think that’s funny?” An English accent, but not from Yorkshire. “I ought to leave you here.”

Michael held one of the pistols to the man’s head. The driver was frozen looking up at him, and Michael could tell he was thinking he would have been better off if he had backed into the woods and were still facing the windscreen. He might have stomped on the pedal and sped off.

Michael answered his thought. “You wouldn’t have made it. I’ve killed a lot of men when they tried to drive away. But if you can tell me who sent the four of you after me and why, I’ll let you go.”

The driver seemed to feel cheated of his expectations. He obviously hadn’t been paid yet. “Where are the others? Them three? This was their job, not mine. I was just hired to drive the car.”

“I could tell. That’s why I couldn’t offer them the same deal.”

“I heard shots. Are they dead?”

Michael nodded. “They weren’t as good at this as they needed to be. Did they even know who I am?”

“Maybe they did,” the driver said. His brain seemed to be working frantically. “I don’t.”

“Who do you work for?”

“Nobody. I drive customers on long-distance rides. They found me online.”

Michael flung open the door, dragged him out onto the ground, and held the gun on him. “Somebody owns the Bentley, or owns you, and sent you to do a dangerous job. You wouldn’t have sat waiting for them to finish a murder if they were strangers who hired you online. You shouldn’t have lied. One more chance.”

“I told you the truth.”

Michael fired into his forehead and stepped back from the car and into the trees. He waited for any other man he hadn’t seen to come toward the car, but after a few minutes, none had. He took the driver’s wallet, got into the driver’s seat, and backed the car onto the pressed-gravel drive to the manor house. Then he went inside and turned on the lights in the great hall to look at the bodies.

The first man, who had the shotgun lying across his chest, was dead. The third man, who’d shot from outside, had been fooled by the shotgun and put a bullet through his head. Michael had shot the third man from the floor as he leaned in the window; a bullet under his jaw had come out the top of his head. Michael had some hope for the remaining man. His only wound was the shotgun blast from the other side of the big room. In the dark Michael had guessed that the shells were probably number 7, because the only game anyone had shot here in modern times as far as he knew was pheasant.

He looked closely at the man and felt for the pulse in his neck, but found he had been optimistic. He opened the breach of the shotgun and saw that the shells were number 4, intended for deer and men. He closed the shotgun, set it carefully on the table beside him, and looked up. His eye caught movement at the top of the big staircase.

Standing there in an ankle-length white satin nightgown and a long, lightweight robe was his wife. Meg stood with perfect, erect posture looking down at him.

“Oh, hello,” he said. “I’m sorry for all the noise and commotion.”

“I assumed it must have happened again,” she said. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“It looks as though you’ve got it under control.”

“Yes, it’s pretty much over.”

“What sort of time have we got?” she said. “Should I be throwing on some clothes and running for the car, or do we have time to talk?”

“We’ll make the time,” he said. “I have these two men under the windows, one outside, and another in the wood on the way to the gate. I’ll join you after I’ve cleaned up.”

“You know, Michael, you’re not thirty anymore. Maybe we could ask some men we trust to help out.”

He shook his head. “I’d rather not. Even helping at this stage would make them guilty of serious crimes. That wouldn’t be much reward for being worth trusting.”

“I suppose not.” She turned and walked away from the top of the stairs toward their bedroom.

Michael took a deep breath and knelt beside the two bodies. He searched for wallets, weapons, and other belongings and discovered they both had US passports. He got up, closed and latched the window, and set the broken piece of glass on the table with the shotgun.

He took off the first man’s rain jacket, spread it on the floor, rolled its owner onto it, and dragged him to the door and out to the rear of the Bentley. Then he took the jacket back and used it to drag the second body out, and then used it a third time on the grass for the man he’d shot through the open window.

He had too many bodies to transport in a car trunk. They would have to be in the seats. He hoisted one of them to the rear seat and fastened the seat belt around him, and then another. He opened the trunk and managed to get the head, arms, and torso of the third man’s body up over the edge of the trunk, and then one leg at a time, bending one knee and then the other. The final man was the most difficult. The whole process of loading the car had taken no more than ten minutes, but Michael’s arms, back, and legs felt as strained as if it had taken several hours. He sat on the stone steps until his breathing returned to normal.

He heard Meg’s voice. “I hope you didn’t hurt yourself.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “I’m fine. Do you remember what we did with that blue tarp we bought for the painting last summer but didn’t use?”

“It’s in the carriage house. They used it to shade the coolers for the cold drinks during the day and then put it in there.”

“Thanks.” He got up and walked to the carriage house to retrieve the tarp. When he came back, Meg was looking in the car window at the three killers he had propped up.

“It’s not like you to look.”

She shrugged. “This reminds me that you only get a certain number of days. If you spend any of them without paying attention, it’s as though you weren’t alive at all. Not just the pleasant parts either.”

He opened the passports of the three Americans and was puzzled. They appeared to be genuine, but they said the men’s names were Koslowski, O’Rourke, and Benson. The names of the people who had reasons to kill him were all Italian. These men must all have been hired shooters. He opened the glove box of the Bentley. The registration papers said the owner was a place called Luxury Rentals, with an address in London, but no name of a human being. Time was passing, and he had to move. He looked up at Meg. “Let’s go talk.”

2

They went upstairs to the master bedroom. Michael took some of the clothes he had brought to Yorkshire off the hangers and out of the drawers and laid them on the bed, then folded them quickly in neat stacks.

“What are you doing?”

He said, “I’ve got to drive their car away from here as soon as possible. We can’t have four bodies lying around.”

“I’ll follow you in the Jaguar so you can park them somewhere, and then we’ll go away.”

He looked at her, her bright green eyes still astonishing to him after all the years. Her hair, a dark reddish brown when he met her, was still that color, kept that way by a visit to a salon once a month for years. She had begun noting the arrival of each wrinkle on her face when she was thirty, but had stopped talking about them because she believed the worst kind of narcissism was a person whining about time and her body’s offenses against her.

He still loved to look at her, and he had every day. She’d told him she didn’t mind. “You saw me when I was in my twenties, gorgeous and athletic, and partly for that reason I can bear to have you see me now. I know that who you see includes both then and now.” It was true, like thousands of surprising things she’d said over the years.

He said, “We can’t just go away together and hope this is over.”

“This isn’t the first time they’ve found you.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“The first time it happened we were still young. You lied to me about it.”

“Well.”

“When you came home I didn’t know any of the details, but I knew the gist of it. You made up a story that you thought would make me feel better, and I loved you even more for it. I still don’t know what you actually did to make it stop.”

“The truth wouldn’t have made you like me any better.”

“Don’t be too sure.” She paused. “And then we were happy for years and years, until the night when they came for you again. And that time the men were dead in fifteen minutes, and in twenty you had left me alone again.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve never been somebody who was worth your attention, or your company, much less your love. The attempts to kill me were things I brought on myself that I earned before we met. You never had a reason to stay once the first time happened.”

“The point being not to elicit a tardy apology but to note that tonight it happened—is happening—a third time. Twice in our lives you left me at home and went off to find enemies you had not anticipated would be coming for you. I will only remind you that I have lived with you and loved you for thirty years, thinking of you as Michael Schaeffer, even though I’ve known for at least that long that it was never your name. Now I want you to do me the favor of considering a suggestion.”

“What?”

“I know that right now part of your mind is ranging ahead, thinking about how you get to America and leave me in some kind of storage so I’ll be safe while you go off down some hole to kill whoever is after you. I’m begging you not to.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to take me on a trip, but not to America.”

“Where, then?”

“I don’t know or care. Not to kill somebody. Maybe Australia, where nobody knows you or the people who hate you.”

He took his watch from the nightstand, slipped it on, and looked at it. Time was passing, and he needed to be on the road. He said, “I can’t take you with me. I know that seems debatable, but it isn’t. You have a million friends in England who will be delighted if you would visit them for a month or so. You’ll be as safe as a person can be. I want you to pack up, put a suitcase in the Jaguar, drive yourself to one of their homes, and later, if necessary, another, and another. Stay out of sight for as long as this takes.”

“Then please, just make me a deal. If we can’t go to Australia together, you can go alone. It will buy you time, at least. You can use computers and phones to learn what you can from there. Just don’t rush off to America. Since their first try failed, they’ll be waiting for you there, expecting you.” She hugged him. “Please, Michael. Just give me that much. I’ll know you’re safe for a while. If Australia is safe, I could even join you there.”

He looked at her, then said reluctantly, “I’ll try it.”

She hugged him harder. “Thank you, Michael. I know you’ve got to get going now. Do it. I’ll be packed and off in the Jaguar in ten minutes or so.”

3

He put his leather carry-on bag in the trunk of the car on top of the blue tarp that was spread over the body of the driver, got into the Bentley, and began to drive. He drifted slowly as far as the front gate, watching for a glow of headlights, and then turned south onto the high road and accelerated. He looked at his phone and saw that the distance from York to Manchester Airport was 144 kilometers. He opened the case of the phone, took out the battery, and put the phone in his sport coat.

He could drive now with the three corpses strapped into the seats of the Bentley, but he knew he would have to get rid of the car before there was enough light to see that his passengers were dead. He had to put as much distance as he could behind him each minute of the next hour and a half.

As he drove south, he couldn’t help thinking about how his life had narrowed down to this. He and Meg hadn’t said it, but they both knew that it was unlikely he’d live to return home one more time. He’d had a long life for a man in his line of work. He had begun working at age fifteen and quit at age thirty-one, the week he had met Meg Holroyd. Yes, as she’d reminded him, a few years later he’d had to go back to the United States to kill some people, but not for money. Years after that, Frank Tosca’s men had found him. He had survived his trip to solve that problem too. It had been a long haul. As of tonight, when he’d made the four corpses he had strapped in the seats and placed in the trunk, he had been killing people as needed for about forty-five years, the last thirty just to keep breathing.

Everything he knew about his early life he had heard from Eddie Mastrewski. He could practically hear him talking now as he drove through the night fifty years later. “Your parents just showed up in Pittsburgh, nobody knew from where. They were new and nobody knew much about them. They were in their mid-twenties, maybe twenty-three and twenty-four. This neighborhood—the Flats— was the way it is now, a nice place to live but not fancy. The only place anybody wore a necktie was to church or their funeral. Things looked the same as now—one-family to four-family houses. Your parents rented an upstairs apartment in a big house. They already had you, so they showed up with a lot of toys and books and kid-size furniture and stuff. They also had a bunch of books for grownups, but I don’t know what kind.

“Most of the businesses were already here. The two grocery stores, the three barber shops—Mel’s, the Barbery Coast, and the Hair House—and the four or five women’s salons. There were already the two regular pharmacies, but the chain drugstore hadn’t come in yet. Vincent the tailor has been there since the last ice age, and the same with the Heaven-Scent cleaners and Lana’s Sewing Shop. The liquor stores, the pool hall, Dan’s Shoe Repair, and the pawnshop were left over from when I was a kid. The churches were all around since the 1820s, I think—Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and a few Protestant denominations. I started my butcher shop the year after I got out of the army.

“Your parents never told anybody much, not because they were the kind of people who kept secrets. They just hadn’t been in town long enough to have many conversations before they were killed in the car wreck. In those days I was always in the shop working during the day, and they weren’t customers, so I never actually saw them.”

Other short conversations had taken place at other times. He remembered Eddie saying, “Even the landlady didn’t know much. She didn’t have much to say, except that she thought they might be students because of the books and the fact that they lived a quiet life—no late nights, no boozing—but you could have said that about a lot of people.”

Another time Eddie said, “You were kind of a challenge for the neighborhood. You were about three years old, or a little younger. The cops who came to investigate told somebody that you would probably have to be turned over to the county since they hadn’t located any relatives.”

“The county?” He remembered that he couldn’t imagine what a county would do with him, or with anybody.

“It probably wouldn’t have been so bad,” Eddie said. “What they usually did was place a kid with a foster family, who would take care of him until some other family adopted him.”

“How come they didn’t do it to me?”

“We kind of headed it off. They called a neighborhood meeting one night at Sidderly’s restaurant. We—the grown-ups who sort of owned and operated the neighborhood—talked about it.”

“Who was that?”

“There were three hairdressers, and Mr. and Mrs. Sidderly, since they were there anyway, and the owners of the two pharmacies, the managers who ran the grocery stores, a couple of teachers, some PTA mothers, a couple of ministers, a doctor named Birken who’s since died, and I don’t remember who else. None of us felt we wanted to just hand you to the cops, so we decided to find a way to handle your situation ourselves. After a lot of talk, one of the others said, ‘Does anybody have a suggestion?’

“I’ve always hated long meetings, so I got up and said, ‘You all know me, Eddie the Butcher. I haven’t raised any kids, but I have a good business, a big house, and I can give him a good room, clean clothes, healthy food, and reasonable encouragement. I can also teach him a trade, if he turns out to be up to learning it.’ People talked about it among themselves, and they decided to take me up on it.” He added, “I want you to know I’ve never regretted it. Not for a second.”

Now, looking back on it, Michael Schaeffer had to admit that Eddie had more than lived up to his promise. He had taught him how to cut meat; weigh and wrap the cuts; make change for customers; run a spotlessly clean, sterile shop; pay suppliers, bills, and taxes; and keep up appearances. Eddie had also taught the boy his other profession, the one that the other shopkeepers and businessmen and their families never knew about.

He remembered being about ten when Eddie had begun teaching him that other profession—how to see the best way into a house, how to follow people. They would walk along, and Eddie would deliver muttered observations: “That guy up there? He’s following that woman a hundred feet ahead of him. He’s going too fast. She’s about to go by a bunch of women’s stores, and she’ll slow down to look. Even if she doesn’t go in, she’ll pretend to look at the clothes, but really check her own reflection to see if she looks good. Since she does, she’ll look longer. He should be able to see what’s ahead as well as you and I can, but his brain is in neutral. He’ll come right up on her, close enough for her to feel him. Then he won’t want to pass, so he’ll stop and light a cigarette or something. That will make him stand out even more and spook her.”

“Why is he following her?”

Eddie shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe he’s shy. Maybe he’s a cop. Maybe she’s cheating on him or a friend of his. Maybe he’s nuts.”

It seemed odd now that some of the biggest decisions in Schaeffer’s life were ones he hadn’t even made. They had just seemed to be the conditions for keeping life inside him, made before his mind began fitting sights, sounds, and thoughts into memory.

4

Schaeffer fought the forces of physics to keep the Bentley moving as fast as he could without hurtling off into a field or hitting something along the road. He hated that the British government kept adding new CCTV cameras from one end of the country to the other. He could be completely successful tonight, and there might be a video shot from the top of a pole in some out-of-the way-village, and there he would be, driving this opulent death wagon down the road.

He could only comfort himself with the articles he’d read saying that the cameras had not had any effect on crime statistics. None. Since they’re no good at it, he told himself, he was probably safe. And in England, people who could afford cars like the Bentley often felt they had bought the right to drive them at full speed. Maybe that would keep the cops from assuming he was a criminal.

Schaeffer turned his head and used the rearview mirror to check his passengers. He had pulled their seat belts as tight as he could so that none of them toppled over, but as he hit bumps or made hard turns, their heads nodded or leaned slightly.

He wondered where Meg was driving now. Even thinking about her made him angrier. These killers had come all the way to England and then somehow figured out that this was the season when he and Meg went to the house in Yorkshire. They hadn’t tried to find him out alone somewhere and pop him with a rifle or something. They had come to murder him in his bed, which meant killing Meg too, after she’d seen them killing him first.

He looked at the bodies again and resented them. But he was alive, and they were not. He told himself he should accept that fact as though it were a triumph. He didn’t imagine there would be any other triumphs this trip. Before long, he would probably be cornered, and then dead too.

When he was still forty miles out from Manchester, he put the battery back in his phone and used it to make a reservation for the next flight to Sydney, which would leave at 8:00 a.m. He knew the Manchester Airport was south of the city center, but the details were fuzzy, so he used the map function, which showed him that he needed to get on the M56. He memorized the route, took the battery out again, and drove harder and faster.

It was a bit after 4:00 a.m. now, and at this hour there were no delays. Once he switched to the main highways, most of the traffic was fast-moving trucks heading for the city to deliver the thousands of products that would be unloaded into the stores that morning.

In less than an hour he was on the M56 passing signs that directed him to the big parking lots for the airport. He pulled onto the shoulder of the highway, put on the knitted watch cap he had taken from one of the dead men in the dining room at York, and tugged it down to his eyes. He patted the body beside him and found a pair of tinted sunglasses. The man behind him had a scarf in his pocket with no blood on it, so he took that too, wrapped it around the lower part of his face, then drove on. He picked the first airport lot he saw, pulled in, took a ticket from the machine, and then drove to a remote section of the lot, where he parked the Bentley with the grille aimed off toward an empty field. A sign said there was a shuttle to the airport every fifteen minutes.

He opened the trunk, and took his suitcase out, then spent a few minutes wiping down the car to get rid of his fingerprints. When he looked around him, there seemed to be nobody else waiting for the shuttle. Most of these cars must have been left here in the lot yesterday or even earlier. He walked away from the Bentley and its four dead passengers and toward the farthest sign for a shuttle stop.

5

If anyone was aware of where he’d driven from York, they hadn’t caught up yet, but he had to be alert and keep his eyes open. First, he needed to get to the terminal without attracting any attention. The shuttle would probably not be full at this hour and would probably make the rounds of every lot on the way. He would have to be patient. Nothing raised suspicion among watchers like impatience. Fugitives, terrorists, and thieves all felt each second like the stab of a needle, and today he would too. He couldn’t show it.

In America there were always at least three sets of watchers at major airports. The local police forces always had older retired police officers there to watch for criminals and their bosses. The Mafia watched for people they were interested in—each other or the up-and-coming types who were working to replace them. The third group were thieves. They watched for women who set their purses or carry-on bags on seats around them, for people who didn’t pick up their bags right away when they came out of the X-ray machines or lost track of a bag in the bathroom. They would sometimes pick suitcases off the carousels at baggage claim. If a traveler caught them, they’d say they worked for the airline. He hadn’t flown out of the UK often, but he knew that British airports had the equivalent. He was eager to get past all those people and onto a plane.

Meg had bought his bag as a companion to one of hers. It was a leather carry-on, designed to take a few worries out of travel. It had several zippered pockets on the outside and a shoulder strap consisting of leather sewn around a steel cable, so a thief couldn’t slash it and run off with the bag. This morning he carried it with the strap on his shoulder and kept his hands in his coat pockets as he waited.

Waiting to be taken to a place he hadn’t wanted to go reminded him of working with Eddie Mastrewski. Eddie had told him, “If you’re not sure what’s there, don’t make a mad dash for the city. You can always sneak up on it. Go most of the way there and then stop to look around. Go past the neighborhood where you’re supposed to do the job. If there are people hanging around like they’re waiting for something, turn around and drive out of town. What they’re waiting for is you.”