Sleeping Dogs by Thomas Perry Read Free Book Online Page B

afraid of, but his own friends, because he had talked and she couldn’t protect him. Nobody would have said it, but she knew it, and Nicky Palermo knew it, even though he had been dead for ten years now, and was not even a ghost, but an uncomfortable memory.
    Elizabeth sat up and turned on the light beside her bed. It was four-thirty again, only now it was Alexandria, Virginia, and Las Vegas was a long time ago. She looked over at Jim’s empty side of the bed. It was four-thirty, the coldest, darkest hour out of every twenty-four, and Nicky Palermo was dead, and her husband was dead, and her career was dead. No, her capacity for having or wanting a career was dead. Next week or a year from now, she would be going through it again. There would be a new office that was almost like the last because it was in the same huge building, and new people, some young and eager, and the others quietly and unofficially burned out but carrying too much rank to be randomly reassigned somewhere to fill in for a GS-7. There would be some new special problem the Justice Department thought it could solve with a crack task force—stock fraud or banks or imported flea collars with so much poison in them that they made Rover roll over with convulsions—and Elizabeth Waring would volunteer for anything except Organized Crime.
    She listened to the baby monitor beside the bed. Above the static she could hear Amanda breathing the slow, regular breaths of the innocent.

 
    A s the train added power, slowly clacking out of the station, Margaret sat stiffly, willing it to go faster. She timed her breaths to the precise moments when it passed the poles along the track, and found that she felt smothered, until they were floating past too often to have anything to do with her breathing.
    Cautiously she pretended to look out the window, but craned her neck to use the reflection to look at the other people in the car. In the very back were two elderly ladies in flowered dresses who had raised a redoubt of oversized purses and shopping sacks to repel any smokers who might try to sit nearby. They were wisely returning from a morning at the shore early enough to miss the crowds of horse fanciers and gamblers and be in their flats in time for tea. There were three young boys in the front who could be misidentified as representatives of the very element the old ladies intended to avoid; they had hair cropped in peculiar patterns of tufts and lawns like little dogs, and sported clothing of leather and denim held together with metal rivets. But they were well mannered, merely nudging one another at intervals and pointing out landmarks and milestones that were invisible to Meg. She guessed that these must have some significance in their lives, perhaps scenes of early exploits as they had widened their range away from Brighton and closer to London.
    “Why are we going to London?” she whispered.
    Schaeffer studied her and acknowledged the injustice of it. She looked small and young, her bright green eyes even greener because her pumping heart had brought more oxygen than she had ever breathed into her, and even now something hard and admirable was keeping her from going limp and gray from the shock. She had first approached him out of a sense of adventure, and had stayed involved out of some notion that liveliness was better than torpor, but she hadn’t signed on for this. “It’s the sensible thing to do,” he answered. “Most people leaving town will be going to London, and once we’re there, they have to pick us out of millions of people.”
    “Of course,” she said. “I’m not sure that was what I meant to ask you. I was hoping you’d tell all, as they say.”
    He thought about what had happened. She had come to his house this morning in the full and delighted confidence that she was the wildest creature in the little universe she inhabited. Now the walls had shattered and let real monsters in. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I never should have let