Sleeping Dogs by Thomas Perry Read Free Book Online Page A

because she had any way of fighting or anyplace to run to in her closed second-floor bedroom.
    Then she realized that she had already given a name to the voice she had heard, and the name made it impossible that there was a voice. It was Dominic Palermo, and he had been dead for ten years. She collapsed back on the pillow and let him come back, and the room in the Las Vegas hotel came back with him.
    When she had awakened that night it was dark, but she’d had the disconcerting feeling that she was already late for something. It was a feeling of urgency: something had begun and she was still in bed. It was then that she had heard the knock on the door, and knew that it had been going on for some time. She turned on the light, but it hadn’t helped, and she had put on her bathrobe and slipped the standard-issue .38 police special into its pocket, but that hadn’t helped either, because she had been a novice in those days, and the Justice Department had hired and trained her to analyze information that might result in a trial, not to shoot people.
    But she had opened the door, thinking somehow with sleepy logic that if people were banging on her door at four-thirty in the morning, it had to be urgent, and nobody she didn’t know who had urgent business would bring it to her.
    And there he was, standing in the hallway, and that was when she had heard the whisper. He had said, “You’re Elizabeth Waring,” and then, “Please, can I come in?” This was the sound that haunted her now. It was the saddest sound in the whole world, a man saying, “I’m dying out here. Let me in.”
    Now the rest of him came back too: the way he looked, his dark hair beginning to turn gray, the wide shoulders made less menacing by the big belly, the big, sad brown eyes protesting that he didn’t deserve this. “For Christ’s sake, look at me,” he had said. “I weigh two-thirty and I’m five-eight. I’m over fifty years old. For the last twenty years I’ve cleared over two hundred thousand a year. Do I look like somebody who takes on wet jobs? Hell, they hired somebody to do that. A specialist.”
    Even then, Elizabeth had instinctively understood that what he had told her was immensely important, already more important than anything else about Dominic Palermo. The specialist was the one the Justice Department wanted, the one who would know things. She tried to prompt Palermo. “But we don’t know what to do about a professional like that. Look at all the assassinations. We can’t protect you from that kind of killer unless we know who he is, or at least what to look for.”
    Palermo shook his head solemnly. He said, “Jesus, you must think I’m stupid, pulling that on me. The specialist? Shit, him I’d give you for free if I could. Problem is, I can’t. I never saw him, and I don’t even know his name. When they talked about him, they just called him ‘the Butcher’s Boy.’ ”
    She remembered what she had said: “Nice name.”
    “Yeah,” said Palermo. “Isn’t it?” He was trying to make it sound sarcastic: Look at the sort of thing I have to put up with. But he couldn’t carry it off at four-thirty in the morning, still talking in a whisper because he was afraid.
    And that was what she was feeling now. It was Nicky Palermo’s fear. He had died of it. Nobody would ever have said it that way, but it was true. He had gotten scared enough to decide in the middle of the night to be a witness for the Justice Department, and the only way he could think of to go about it was to turn himself in to the agent who had been visible serving papers and taking depositions that week. Only he couldn’t know that the agent had been visible not by accident but by choice and foresight, because Justice Department thinking at the time was that the only agent on the case whose anonymity was expendable was the one who shouldn’t have been in the field in the first place: Elizabeth Waring. And this had killed him; not the man he was so