The Informant

21

THE INVITATION WAS a trap. He looked at the personal ad one more time, let out a breath in disapproval, then started to fold the paper, but his eyes passed over another personal ad and stopped.

"I've known about you for twenty years, but only met you on August 30. You've got troubles, so talk to me."

It was Elizabeth Waring. Another trap, this one from the opposite side of the universe. Both sides had realized how vulnerable he was, and each hurried to roll him in before the other side could. He wondered if, when each of them checked the newspapers today to be sure their ad had run, they would each notice the other ad. Probably Elizabeth Waring would.

He decided that it was time to turn in his rental car and buy a vehicle that nobody was going to care about and want him to return. He drove to two used-car lots before he found the right make and model, the right color in the right condition. It was a Toyota Camry, which he had read was the most popular model in the United States. Even if it hadn't been, there were enough models that looked nearly like it to make it unmemorable. It was gray, and when it was on the road it seemed practically invisible. It was five years old, and so it was cheap but serviceable. He used the bank account he had opened in Scottsdale to write a check for it and signed Charles F. Ackerman.

While the dealer was fitting permanent plates on his car and completing the paperwork, he drove his rental car to a Target store and bought some things he would need for his trip—a case of bottled water, two boxes of trail-mix bars. Then he drove down the street to a Big 5 sporting-goods store and bought a short-barreled Winchester Defender shotgun and five boxes of double-ought shells. He drove to a street near the used-car lot and parked his rental car, then walked to the used-car lot, picked up his gray Camry, and drove it to the rental car. He transferred his belongings from the rental to the trunk of the Camry and then drove the rental car to the airport car rental to return it. He took the rental agency shuttle bus to the airport terminal, then took a cab back to an address one street away from the block where he had left his new car.

As he got onto the road, he felt optimistic. He would watch carefully for anyone following him or seeming interested in him during the next long drive. He had tools to steal license plates in each new state if he wanted. He had food and snacks to prolong his road time, and a couple of baseball hats that made him look like a million other men on the highways. There was no reason for anyone to notice him. He had made himself ordinary.

He drove east on Interstate 80, heading for Illinois. From there he could take Interstate 57 the last few miles into Chicago. He slept the first night in a motel outside Omaha and let himself sleep as long as he could before he returned to the road. The invitation to his ambush had come from his old companion Vince from the Milwaukee job. The invitation from Vince had made him choose Chicago. But if all of the old men had agreed to hunt him, then there could be local Mafia soldiers in the lobbies of hotels in any city.

He drove all day, and when he crossed the line into Illinois, he headed south on Interstate 74 and went to the long-term parking lot at the Willard Airport near Urbana and stole a set of Illinois plates. He stopped the second night in a motel just south of Chicago in Watseka, Illinois, that he judged would be too small to accommodate Mafia soldiers watching the lobby. It was a one-story building with a row of rooms along the outside and a green neon vacancy sign on the tall marquee. The people he saw when he pulled into the lot were middle-class families who had left the interstates outside the big cities to find somewhere cheap and easy to stay. There was no restaurant, so he drove to a hamburger place down the street and brought food with him to eat in the room.

He ignored the parking space right in front of his motel room door and parked his car away from the building so an enemy wouldn't instantly connect it with the room and know which one he was in. He went inside and locked the door, the deadbolt, and the chain, and then pushed the desk in front of the door.

He had spent the first half of his life traveling in the trade, and the long habit of precautions had come back to him. Staying alive was often a matter of premeditation, of anticipating dangers long in advance and doing small things to make them less likely. It was always better to be as close to invisible as possible, better to cut the odds of being noticed, reported, and remembered to a minimum. Everything that could be locked, disguised, or hidden should be. He showered, ate his dinner, watched the television news with the sound on low to see if there was any mention of the incident at the Arizona ranch. When there was none, he put the two loaded Beretta M92 pistols under the spare pillow beside him and lay down to sleep. In a minute or two he dozed off.

He awoke, looked at the glowing clock on the nightstand beside him, and saw that it was only twelve-thirty. There were voices outside. He got out of bed and went to the window. He moved aside a half inch of the curtain at the corner and looked out.

It was a man with brown wavy hair and a woman with long blond hair. They looked about thirty, and wore jeans and T-shirts. The man carried a suitcase about the size of a small carry-on bag. He bent over almost double to fit the key in the door. They'd been drinking. Whenever he said or did anything, the woman would giggle. As they went inside the room beside his, he let the curtain close. The ease he had in hearing them was not good news. Once they were inside, they sounded as though he and they were in the same room. They were no more than eight feet from him, and the wall between them seemed to be without insulation.

He crawled back into the bed and closed his eyes. The two in the next room were fairly quiet. There was a little conversation, barely above a whisper, and then he heard the shower running. The sound was a soft hiss, and after a minute or two it put him back to sleep. A few minutes later he became aware of the voices again, and then the voices stopped. He heard the bed creak as somebody got in. It occurred to him that he should make a noise so they would be aware of how little privacy the wall afforded.

He coughed, and then coughed again. There was whispering. Good. They knew he was here, and they would be aware that if they could hear him, he could hear them. The bed creaked a little more. Someone was getting up. Both of them were. They moved a few feet off. In the dim light he looked at his own room to see where they could be going. There was a small, narrow couch. After a minute he heard a soft moan. "Oh yes. Oh."

"Oh shit," he whispered. He lay down on his side and put the spare pillow over his head so both ears were covered. He was surprised at how little that accomplished. The couple seemed to forget that they had a neighbor.

He sat up, switched on the television set, and watched a late-night talk show, trying to pay attention to the conversation. Over the years he had forgotten about American television, and he saw only a few American films a year so he found he had no idea who the guests were, or the host. Still, it seemed better than allowing himself to listen to the sounds from the next room. The noise grew louder and more distracting until it trailed off. He turned off the television, lay down again, and fell asleep as though he were turning off a light switch.

Then he woke again and thought about the pistols on the bed beside his head. He wished he could go next door and put those two out of his misery. Then he realized the sounds weren't coming from the other side of the wall. They were outside. He looked at the clock again. It was just after three A.M. He went to the window and moved the curtain aside a quarter inch.

There were four men walking along the two rows of cars, looking at license plates and in the windshields and side windows. He watched two of them look at his gray Toyota Camry, then move on. He was glad he had stolen a set of Illinois plates.

The men reached the end of the rows of cars, but didn't seem to have found what they were looking for, and that increased his suspicion that what they were looking for was him. He couldn't see anything that might be their car, but he knew they would have parked it out of sight behind the building, very possibly with the motor idling. He had seen other jobs where the shooters had done that. If the keys were in somebody's pocket and he died, then nobody would get out. If the keys were in the car, then anybody who made it that far would get out.

He knew what must have happened. They had gone to various hotels and motels on the major routes into the city and asked night-desk clerks to watch for a lone man about his age and description. To the ones that had connections, they would ask for the favor of a call. At the other hotels, they would pretend to be private detectives and offer a reward. He dressed quickly.

He hoped it would take them a little time to get ready to shoot their way into his room because his idea would take a few minutes. He had learned something from the couple next door. The walls between rooms couldn't consist of anything more substantial than a frame of two-by-fours covered by two sheets of wallboard. He also knew that the room to the right of his was unoccupied. He'd heard nothing from that side.

The lock-blade knife he'd bought was in his pocket. He opened it, then chose the spot on the wall carefully. It had to be the space behind the small dresser. He quietly moved the dresser aside, then stabbed the knife into the wallboard. It punched through. The consistency was like thick cardboard. He punched through again and again, until he had cut an eighteen-inch square, pulled it out, and confirmed his theory. There was a frame holding up two sheets of wallboard. He punched through the next one with less hesitation. When he had cut the second hole, he pushed the piece through into the next room, then the other.

As he worked, he thought about the men outside. What took the longest on jobs like this was getting the men into proper positions, two on either side of the door. Two would hit the door near the knob with all their weight so it would fly open. The first two would run in low and fast, trying to get a shot in. The other two would come in a bit higher, aiming their guns over the shoulders of the first pair.

His hole was finished. He slithered through it into the next room, and then reached back through and strained to pull the empty dresser back up to the wall after him. He tugged on one side, then the other, to walk it to the hole in the wall, then lay still and listened.

There was no bang, no sound of a foot kicking the door in. Instead, there was a jingle of keys and a scrape as the deadbolt slid out. The door to his old room opened a crack, then hit the desk he'd pushed in front of it. There was a labored scrape as they pushed the desk aside, and then quick footsteps that he could feel vibrating up from the floor to his belly.

"What the f*ck?"

"Where is he?"

Footsteps shook the floor again as two of them burst into the bathroom. "He's not in here."

Schaeffer aimed one of his pistols under the dresser through the hole he had cut. A man lay on the floor in his room to look under the bed. Schaeffer waited. If the man rolled and looked in his direction, he would have to kill him. The man stood up. "What if we got the wrong room?"

"Does that bathroom window open?"

More footsteps. "I don't think so. And how would he get up there?"

"The son of a bitch is famous for doing stuff like that. Jerry said he killed a guy once who locked himself in a bank vault. They opened it up the next morning and there he was."

Whoever Jerry was, he had gotten the story wrong. The bank vault was just a safe room in Angelo Turcio's house in New Jersey. Schaeffer had boiled some bleach beside the air intake, and the chlorine had made Turcio sick. He had opened the door himself and tried to shoot his way out.

"Bobby, go to the desk to be sure we got the right room number and ask if he checked out already."

Somebody said, "We don't even know if he was the right guy."

"Some traveling salesman didn't figure this out and get away before we could slip a key in the door."

He took a couple of seconds to prepare himself for what was going to happen. In a minute they would suspect he'd made a hole and look for it. He saw the two sets of shoes approaching. The dresser was lifted suddenly, one man on each side.

He fired upward into the one on his right, the bullet going toward the groin. The other dropped the dresser as though it were hot, leaving himself open for a moment while Schaeffer fired into his side.

Schaeffer rolled away from the hole and dashed in the direction of the door. As he ran, the other two men fired at the hole, then moved their aim along the wall, punching small blooming holes in the wallboard behind him. He beat them to the door and stopped with both his pistols aimed at the door beside him, the only exit from his room.

The two men spilled out the door of his room, fully expecting to head him off before he got out, but they were terribly late. For a moment their faces showed identical expressions of unwelcome surprise, but he opened fire with both pistols, and left them lying in front of the door.

He sprinted to his car, got in, and drove. He was feeling alert and ready now. He swerved out of the lot onto the highway and quickly found the sign that said 57 NORTH—CHICAGO. It was time to go and see his old friend Vince Pugliese.