The Informant by Thomas Perry Read Free Book Online

file she had been building in a lower drawer of her desk in the back. Each time she was promoted she moved it to her new office, until she had moved from the computer rooms in the basement all the way up to the fourth floor seven years later. Only then did she send it to the archives.
    Three years after that she was looking for it again. She had noticed the same kind of sudden rampage as before. This time it started with Tony Talarese dying in the kitchen of one of his restaurants. Tony Talarese had been wearing a wire for the FBI at the moment when he'd been killed. It was a macabre scene, as she pictured it while listening to the recording. His wife had been standing at the stove wearing a big pair of oven mitts when the shooter had struck. She had shrieked, rushing toward her fallen husband, flapping her arms like a bird to free her hands of the mitts. When she got to him, she hugged him, pulled up his shirt, and then screamed, "A wire! The son of a bitch is wearing a wire!" At the same time, she had spotted the out-of-proportion hysterical tears of two young hostesses and a waitress, and correctly guessed why they were so heartbroken at the death of her husband. At the moment when the FBI agents monitoring the wire burst in, she was shrieking "Whores!" and chasing them with a kitchen knife. The killing moved outward and upward from Talarese. Mafia captains died unexpected, violent deaths, and there were so many explanations for each death that there could be no explanation.
    Some experts said it was the young men trying to get the old men out of the way so they could move up. But Elizabeth noticed that the first casualties had been young men. Others said outsiders must be invading the established Mafia territories, but there were no sightings of possible successors—no Latin American gangs, no black gangs, no bikers, or prison gangs. When a capo fell, nobody took over.
    She was sure it had been him again. He had come back to create trouble for them once more. It had been her theory at the time, and still was, that he had gone somewhere to retire—Brazil, Thailand, Paraguay—and the Mafia, or just some part of it, really, had tried to make good on its old reputation for hunting down its enemies. They had always had great success with sticky-fingered card dealers and addicted drug runners. It would be very different trying to find and punish him. Months later she had listened to a wiretap recording in which one member of the Lorenzo family had told another, "Stay out of it. Don't look for him. If the Balacontano family still wants him, then he's theirs. If they don't get him on the first try, he'll kill some of them, and we'll see what falls out of their hands as they go down. Maybe we'll be able to pick something up—a business, a territory. But stay away from him."
    He was someone they feared with an almost superstitious fear, because they knew him. When he was still in his late teens, he had been the one these men called in when they needed a truly professional murder. In his twenties he knew many of the midlevel soldiers and upper-level dignitaries, at least by sight, and had bargained with some of them, because those were the people who hired outside specialists. Her informants told her he always did what he had agreed to with an icy efficiency, took his pay, and disappeared. There was no trail to his employers, and not much chance that anyone could have followed him away from the final meeting.
    Years later, when something had gone wrong and he had decided he needed to cause trouble, his reputation actually helped. When he began cutting down important men, the ones who recognized the work as his were sure that rival bosses must be employing him to destroy the competition. For a long time it had never occurred to anyone that Carl Bala had simply become so arrogant and overconfident in his growing power that rather than paying this man his fee for a hit he'd done, he had told one of his underlings to arrange an