She had started into the living room when his sinewy forearm hooked around her neck. She could smell his musky underarm and feel his hot breath on the back of her neck. She stopped to keep from choking.
"Go slow," he said. "If you get too far ahead, I'll start to get nervous."
She waited.
"Okay, go."
She began to move, and he was with her, his arm and part of his torso pressed against her as she walked. Her sensation was that he was attached to her like some parasitic animal about to feed. She fought the claustrophobic, powerless feeling. She bent her knees and touched the briefcase handles.
"If there's a gun in there, you'd better tell me now."
"I work in the Kennedy building in an office. I don't carry a sidearm."
She took the laptop, cradled it in her arms, and walked back toward the little office with the man keeping his hand on her left arm in a painful grasp. He tugged her to the dining room and pulled out a chair at the table. "Sit here."
She had no idea why he preferred the dining room, but it seemed that he needed to get his way about everything. She set her computer on the shiny polished table, opened it, and signed into her Justice Department account.
"Remember, I'm watching," he said. "Don't make contact with anybody."
She opened her e-mail account, then saw one from John Holman at the FBI and clicked on it. The e-mail filled the screen, and as she read it, she began to scroll down.
"Hold it," he said. "Let's read that."
She stopped and scrolled upward again. He was a slow reader. He was suspicious and irritated when she moved ahead too quickly, as though she were hiding some message she didn't want him to read.
Holman's e-mail described the men the Butcher's Boy had killed in Los Angeles. She heard the man mutter, "Damn," as he read it. Then he seemed to catch himself. "He's had quite a workout."
"It's been that way wherever he's been since Frank Tosca tried to get him killed. Is Tony Lazaretti the one who hired you?"
"What are you thinking-that we'll never get paid?"
"It had crossed my mind."
He was standing just behind her and to the side when he hit her. It was a short, quick backhand to her cheek and jaw that spun her head to the side.
"Oh!" she said, and her hand went to her cheek.
He hit her on the other side with his left hand, then pushed her back and kicked the chair forward so her back hit the floor hard. He hit her again, on the head with his gun, so hard that she saw the ceiling as a red tunnel with him coming at her down the middle of it. She went limp to keep from inciting him to hurt her more, but he hit her with his fist three times. She could tell that she wasn't just feeling the sting from slaps. He was doing damage to the bones in her face.
A red haze grew across her field of vision, and everything seemed to go quiet and dark for a second, but then she could see his face right above hers again with his teeth bared.
"You're not my equal," he rasped. "Don't tell me what's going to happen. I'll tell you what's going to happen if I feel like it."
She managed to croak, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." Her tongue tasted like copper, and she couldn't talk right because her mouth was pooling with blood that dribbled and bubbled out when she tried. "I'm sorry. Please. I didn't mean anything."
He glared at her, moving his head to keep his face in front of her eyes, so he looked like a snake maneuvering to strike. "You're nothing. You understand? They give women like you some fancy title like you were hot shit, but you're nothing. The best you can hope for is to be a hostage, just a piece of meat for bait. Don't imagine you're some kind of player in this. It's between us and him. You're already dead, and I'm keeping you on life support for my own convenience until I decide to pull the plug."
She lay still on the floor with the chair back under her, trying to avoid his eyes by closing hers, until he hit her again. "Look at me!"
She opened her eyes and kept them open, hoping he wouldn't see that they were unfocused because looking at him terrified her. She was weak with fear. She felt that a horrible, sudden, and unexpected change had happened to her, and it made her ashamed and disgusted with herself. She had never imagined what this kind of fear was like, never had any way of picturing herself being so totally defeated. "I understand," she said. "You're the boss. Whatever you say."
His face compressed itself into a smirk. "That's more like it." He stood. "Get up."
With difficulty, she rolled to her side and pushed herself up. She saw a shiny six-inch pool of blood where her head had been and realized her hair was wet. She resisted reaching up to touch it because he might see that as a delay in her compliance with his order, or even a complaint, and he would punish her. The pain in her scalp was no worse than the pain in her jaw or her nose. She got to her knees and then picked up her chair and sat in it.
She brushed the tears out of her eyes and went back to clicking on each of the e-mail updates about the Butcher's Boy, reading through each one slowly, giving him time to satisfy himself that she wasn't tricking him. She didn't dare try a trick. She was afraid of tricks. She only wanted to be alive and keep her children alive. This man was a brute. If she didn't find what he wanted soon, he would kill them all. She felt his impatience, his anger, the growing dread behind it that he might be failing. She slowly came to feel that she understood him and that she could almost read his thoughts. He was nearly out of patience. He needed a clue. If he didn't have a clue soon, she would begin to hear the shouts of her children.
"I've got it," she said. "He's been seen in Philadelphia. I know where he's going. He'll be there tomorrow or the next day."
33
Schaeffer's flight into Baltimore was six hours of sleep. He dreamed that, according to some new set of government rules that made sense in his dream, if he agreed to die voluntarily, he would be permitted to be alive again at a later, prearranged time. The problem was that to his dream self the offer sounded like a con. He was tempted to try it because if what the government said was true, it was the only way he could ever hope to see Meg again. He was trying to construct some test of the government's sincerity when the plane descended a few hundred feet and the change in pressure woke him.
He looked out the window at the grid of lights, the yellow street lamps and blue-white headlights stretching off into the distance and then stopping at the bright edge before the black ocean. The plane swung slowly around to face the west wind and then began its approach.
It occurred to him that he had passed into a new phase of his life now. A year or two ago, Meg had forced him to go to a church for one of the occasions that the local aristocrats were expected to attend. Since the church was the Church of England, it seemed perfectly safe to him. There were no Anglican Mafiosi. The church was in a village outside Bath, where it was unlikely an American visitor would show up. The priest gave a sermon about the "end times" and what each Christian should expect. The term had stuck with him. These were his end times, the phase after the end of his world had begun but before his death. It was highly unlikely, for instance, that he would be alive in a week and almost impossible that he would last a month.
The bosses of the families had clearly figured out that he was going after all of them, and they had hired specialists to find and kill him. He had seen three specialists. It was possible that there were thirty more ranging the country and waiting for him in likely places, and when the news from Los Angeles spread, there could be sixty or seventy professional killers and hundreds of Mafia soldiers, all hunting for him.