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Perry had gone the other way. His face looked like beef jerky, dark and shriveled up with deep lines. He looked like one of those guys you saw with several coats on, sleeping in a refrigerator box. Killing him would be an act of mercyput the poor bastard out of his misery. |
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Toward that end, Jerry carried his briefcase. But he had no intention of putting a hit on Jack Perry, at least not yet. Technically, he was still on hold with Roman's clients, and he wasn't about to do them a freebie. Besides, his gut instinct told him that Jack Perry was worth a lot more to him while he still had breath. |
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Jerry traveled in a different rental vehicle every day, staking out Jack Perry's trailer and following him on local errands. The guy drove around in a black Chevy van with a bad muffler pipe hanging from wires. During those three days he never had a guest and never visited anybody. When he wasn't in his trailer or conducting affairs about townstops at the banks, the laundry, the post officehe would take excursions to a small town west of Boston. |
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Twice Jerry followed him up a dead end with no street sign, circle back, then park in front of number 12a white colonial, where he'd sit for ten or fifteen minutes as if waiting for someone. But nobody came out to meet him, and he never left the van. He'd just sit and watch the house. Then he'd drive off, sometimes stopping by a school down the street, where he would again sit and watch the kids at recess. Yesterday he broke the pattern and got out. He stood by the chain-link fence around the field, apparently interested in one particular kid. A boy about eleven or twelve. It might have been his kid from a broken marriage. |
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Jerry was not sure what he was after, but he knew that he had only a few days to find out before the guy would be taken out. Muzzy named the trailer parkRumson's Mobile Homesbut not which of the three hundred rigs was Jack Perry's. It was the manager in the park's office who directed him to the Winnebago. In passing, he told Jerry that if he was a bill collector, he had come none too soon, because Perry had just paid his last week's rental. On Saturday he was pulling up stakes and heading to Tucumcari, New Mexico, for good. He had had it with New England winters, he'd said. |
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That was bullshit, of course. Jack Perry knew that his number |
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