Vanishing Act by Thomas Perry Page B

while they were robbing the corpses, one of them had put another shot through his left temple. That was what I heard.
    "It’s possible that these two robbers were good judges of character and realized in a tenth of a second that if anybody was going to give them trouble it was Jerry C., or maybe he made a move I didn’t catch and the robber panicked. I don’t know. But it looked to me like one of those situations where somebody wanted to kill one particular man and everything else was just to cover that. At this point I start thinking about how this affects my future. I can be excused for that because I’ve just established that I’m the only guy in the room who has one. The room, in fact, is my first problem. It would not take the C.I.A. to figure out who rented the room for the game. There’s also the fact that Jerry C. heard about the game a month before. If he had, just about anybody else could have too. And even if for some reason he didn’t tell his buddies about it, there was his girl."
    "Lenore?" asked Jane.
    "Yeah, Lenore," he said. "Her last name was Sanders."
    "She would go to the police?"
    "The police were my primary concern," said Harry. "But they were not my ultimate concern. One way or another the police were going to find out it was my game. They were also capable of counting the bodies and noticing that mine wasn’t one of them. Would this cause me harm? Some inconvenience, certainly. They would try to find me and hold me for questioning. But there were other considerations. I start thinking about the five original gentlemen I recruited for my game: Villard, Milhaven, Nadler, Hallman, and Smith. I realize I don’t really know much about them. If I get picked up and questioned and let go, are their families and friends going to forget it? Maybe. But in my experience, nobody in this country gets rich by accident. A lot of people who haven’t gotten caught at anything are pretty ruthless. The heirs and colleagues of men like that can be pretty ruthless too. And speaking of heirs and colleagues—"
    "—Jerry Cappadocia," she said.
    "Yes," said Harry. "Him I don’t have to wonder about. I know about his colleagues. A couple of them used to show up once a week in the attic of a furniture store where Handy Andy Gurlich ran his bookie operation to collect the Cappadocia family’s license fees. Any two of them together were evidence that human evolution is not a straight line. There are lots of dead ends and throwbacks.
    "Then there’s the question of heirs. Jerry Cappadocia’s father has a certain renown. He had announced a couple of years back that he was retiring and Jerry would run the family businesses. This is a man who spent forty years building those businesses with his hands, and what they consist of is killing people who don’t give him money. He’s healthy, no more than sixty-some years old. I’ve heard he speaks English like a native, except there are a few words he never learned, like mercy. What is this man going to do when he learns his only child has been killed? It’s true I was a little worried about getting picked up by the police for questioning, but it was only because they’re the ones people call when they hear shots, and they drive through red lights to get there quickly. What was really on my mind was getting picked up later for questioning by Jerry Cappadocia’s father.
    "And that brought to mind another problem. I really didn’t know anything. I saw two men kick in the door and murder six men and then spend five minutes kneeling on the floor to search them. I had never seen either of them before. I didn’t see their car, if they had one. They both wore white coats they stole out of the motel’s linen cart. I saw them through a vent, so most of what I saw was backs and the tops of heads covered with navy watch caps. But if these two shooters read in the papers that there was a guy who was watching them, what were they going to do? I mean, if the first order of business