Open season jg-1 Page 29

  “Phillips was the only guy who tried to stop this whole mess.”

  “Oh, come, come. His actions are what count. The jury was unanimous-he just tried to get the best of both worlds. Pure hypocrisy.”

  I knew I wasn’t doing this right-that I should be conversational and supportive, trying to get as much out of him as I could. But I was both angry-at him and at myself-and nervous. With everybody poised to move on Gorham in the next few hours, I was now chatting with the one man I wanted kept in the dark. I felt everything I knew was printed across my forehead. “Why the hell didn’t you come to us in the first place and ask us to reopen the case?”

  That brought a chuckle. “Would it have worked?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Stranger things have happened. You never gave it a thought, did you?”

  He waved his hand. “Water under the dam.”

  Another blast of anger made me struggle to get up and lunge at him. He placed his pistol barrel against my forehead so fast I barely saw him move. “Sit back.” He pushed lightly with the gun, and I fell back against the pillows. Gail instinctively reached for my hand. Stark didn’t stop her.

  “Who killed Frank?”

  He looked at me for a long moment and then smiled and rose. “That’s enough for now. I merely dropped by to say hi. Perhaps we’ll meet again later.”

  “When we do, you’ll be in jail.”

  He slowly raised his pistol to where it was pointing at my right eye. “I want you to understand something here, Joe. You are not in control. You are my stalking horse. I put you in place and you’ve done your job. In a short while, the quarry will be exposed and you’ll be expendable.”

  His arm moved slightly to where the gun was pointed at Gail’s head. “But in the meantime, you had better remember: you people live at my discretion. That includes Miss Zigman, your mother, Leo, Martha Murphy, and all the other people you’d better place above your moral outrage. Because if you don’t, I’ll have to remind you how responsible you are for their safety.”

  The arm went down and he smiled again. “I’ll let you two get cozy. I know you haven’t seen each other in a while.” He walked to the door and picked up my gun. “I’ll leave this on the hood of your car. Good night.”

  And he was gone.

  Gail twisted around, put both her arms around me and held on tight. I kissed her ear and rubbed her back. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  She didn’t answer, but her grip tightened.

  We didn’t talk for a good half hour, which was probably just as well. We ended up instead lying on the couch, with her head on my chest, silently running it all through in our minds, again and again.

  Finally she sighed deeply, and asked, “What are you going to do?”

  “Gut reaction? I’d like to start by getting everyone out of harm’s way.”

  She looked up at mooked upe. “What do you mean?”

  “Protecting all the people he mentioned-you, Mother, Leo-all of them.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Police protection maybe. I could get Martha to return to her daughter’s. I could get the state police to watch over Thetford.”

  “You can’t do that, Joe; you know it. Shy of putting us all into a tanker and pushing it out to sea, there’s no way of protecting us. If he really wants to, he’ll find us. Besides, he could put you in the same position by threatening a total stranger. It doesn’t need to be one of us.”

  The point was inarguable, but seeing him point that gun at Gail’s head had shaken my priorities. What, after all, did I really care about Bill Davis? He was a moral abstraction, a victim of circumstance. It was idiotic that I risk the lives of everyone who mattered to me for some principle no one had liked from the start.

  “You’ve just got to keep going the way you have been, Joe. From what he said, the worst thing you could do is to change course. It would force him to set you straight again.”

  “And setting me straight means I lead him to his daughter’s killer so he can execute him and fade back into the woodwork.”

  “You’ve already pulled him more into the open-he’s no longer the anonymous Ski Mask. Maybe he’ll trip up; maybe you can make him trip up. Just because he says he’s in control doesn’t mean it’s true. Your harping on him and his daughter showed that. I didn’t appreciate that one bit, by the way. You’d have a short life as a psychiatrist-he was right about that.”

  That made me smile.

  She propped herself up by putting her elbows on my chest and looking me straight in the face. “Joe, you’re a decent, honest man. You can’t do anything other than what you’ve been doing. I know Stark can carry out his threat, but it’s not what he wants. His focus is on finding who killed his daughter, and that’s where yours has to be too. It’s the only way the two of you will ever be on close to an equal footing.”

  I rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands. “Christ, I don’t know. I wish I were ticketing cars right now.”

  She leaned forward and kissed my chin. “Let’s go to bed.”

  29

  The procedure for camping on another town’s front step until the bad guy rides in involves more than notifying the local sheriff, much to Hollywood’s chagrin. Nowadays, the hierarchy of the “need-to-know” extends right up to the governor’s office of each state involved. Luckily, it’s quicker than it sounds, although the three days I’d allowed us was still cutting it fine. Due to the notoriety of the case, I wasn’t too worried about hitting snags; nobody wanted this thing to get stalled because of them. But I was worried about leaving Gorham uncovered until all the paperwork was in. So, bending the rules a bit, I gave three of my men official time off and told them to spend their vacations in beautiful Gorham, New Hampshire, where the post office was renowned as one of the world’s tfrue scenic wonders. I forgot to let Katz in on this.

  My biggest headache, as I saw it, was keeping Colonel Stark out of the picture. He had prematurely moved into the open when he’d questioned Haffner and killed Lew Hill. It was a mistake he wouldn’t repeat. I was absolutely sure that when I saw him again, it would be for the last play of the game. I only hoped that when that happened, we would already have Cioffi under wraps.

  For the next two days, we escorted the paperwork through the process like a kitten through a kennel-very quietly. James Dunn agreed to handle all his office’s details personally, including the typing. A judge was found in the middle of the night to sign on the dotted line. Kunkle drove the papers up to Montpelier and hand-delivered them to the governor’s man responsible for state warrants. He then drove over to Concord, New Hampshire, and made the connection with their people.

  In the meantime, I organized the troops, picking my men, coordinating with the New Hampshire State Police-who would actually make the bust-and poring over maps of Gorham to determine the best plan of attack. I did all this in parking lots, other people’s cars and secretly rented motel rooms-all places I was sure Stark couldn’t have bugged beforehand. Through it all, Katz was the perfect gentleman, which was just as well. Including him in all the cloak-and-dagger stuff made most of the people I dealt with think I had totally lost my mind.

  The solution to Stark’s following us to Gorham and to Cioffi-brilliant, I thought-was to fly everyone there by helicopter, leaving Stark to watch us vanish into the sky. When I stepped outside the Municipal Building after almost forty-eight hours of nonstop preparations, I knew that part of the plan was shot. It was snowing-heavily.

  Kunkle appeared out of the gloom, his head and shoulders speckled white.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “The chopper pilot said the flight’s off. I guess we drive.”

  That’s not what I wanted to hear. “What’s the forecast?”

  “This shit for thirty-six to seventy-two hours. It’ll get worse before it gets better. Travel advisories are already out.”

  “Damn.”

  Kunkle hesitated a moment. “I’ve got Katz in the car, along with the equipment
.”

  “Equipment” was a euphemism for rifles, shotguns, and bulletproof vests. I appreciated his forethought.

  “I guess we go, then.”

  He led the way across the parking lot to his car. Katz was sitting in the back.

  “Hello, Stan.”

  “Hi, Joe. Not quite the weather you were hoping for, is it?”

  I slid onto the front seat and Kunkle started the car. “Not exactly.”

  We already had three of our men in Gorham, which had miffed the New Hampshire State Police-they felt we were doubting their prowess-so I’d restricted the stricted econd wave to just the three of us. I hadn’t told our new allies who Katz was.

  That was a detail he hadn’t overlooked. He knew that once we crossed into New Hampshire, my deal with him had no value. If the state police over there didn’t want him around, that was it. My silence had made him friendlier than I’d known possible-a definite plus. It was going to be a long drive, and I was grateful my two normally overbearing companions had lightened their personalities.

  Still, the trip was tense. Looking out the windshield was like staring at an interminable swarm of fireflies on the attack, careening at the car and veering away at the last instant. The sudden appearance of other cars was the only startling reminder that we were still on the road. The memories of my last trip with Frank were real enough to be scary. I kept looking over my shoulder to check for headlights, but except for when we came to the occasional town, there was nothing.

  “Did you check the car for bugs?”

  “A couple of times. It’s not my car anyway. I borrowed it at the last second from a friend, just to be sure.”

  I looked at Kunkle’s profile in the glow from the instrument panel. It made me think of that nursery rhyme about what’s-her-name: “When she was good, she was very, very good…”

  It took us all night to reach Gorham, a trip that normally lasted three hours. By the time we rolled to a stop in the parking lot of the Swiss Alpine Lodge, daylight was struggling to penetrate the cotton candy around us.

  The three men I’d sent on ahead had booked two adjoining rooms on the ground floor. It was Ron Klesczewski who answered my knock. He was wearing his undershorts and a T-shirt and was still only semiconscious. That changed when he looked past me.

  “Holy shit. It’s snowing.” He stuck his head out and looked up-a gesture that has never made much sense to me. “Jesus. It’s a goddamn blizzard.”

  He focused on Katz. “My God. What the hell is he doing here?”

  I planted my hand against his chest and pushed him back into the room so we could enter. “Hello to you too. Do you always wake up in such a state of amazement?”

  He blinked a couple of times. “No. Well, I mean… I didn’t expect it; or him. It is unusual, you got to admit.”

  “Katz is observing. Don’t tell the state police who he is or there’ll be hell to pay. Where’s DeFlorio?”

  “Here.” The voice was muffled by the pile of blankets on the far bed.

  “Morning, Dennis. Rise and shine.”

  A hand emerged from the pile and groped for a watch on the night table. Both disappeared and were followed by a groan. “Jesus. Too early.”

  The connecting door to the other room opened, and J.P. Tyler stepped in, shaved, showered, and fully clothed. “Hi, Joe; Willy.” He nodded at Katz without comment or visible surprise. From his appearance, it might have been the middle of the day.

  I pulled open tpulled ohe curtains, without great effect, and switched on the overhead light. “I take it you’re aware of that.” I pointed at the snowstorm.

  “Yeah. Last radio report had it at almost two feet. Worst in years, they say.”

  “Has anyone been in touch with the locals yet?” I knew the answer for DeFlorio and Klesczewski, but I thought I’d be polite. Among his peers at least, Tyler never failed to assume unofficial command.

  “I talked to them after I heard the weather. They’ve been in touch with the Postal Service. Things will be delayed, but they’ll still come through. As far as the state police are concerned, the operation is on without changes.”

  “They still headquartered at the school?”

  He nodded. There was a large school building in the middle of Gorham, several blocks southeast of the post office. The assumption was that a small cluster of cars wouldn’t seem out of place there, even in this mess. Tyler added, “By the way, they managed to get a man inside the post office, posing as a mail sorter.”

  “Has anyone seen Cioffi?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  De Florio had by this time emerged from his blankets and was sitting with his back against the wall. “Are we sure we’re ever going to see him?”

  “Yes. I called his broker yesterday. The deal’s still on. There was a bit of a problem with Express Mail because of the post office box delivery address. Cioffi is anxious to be there when they make the delivery, so we’ll probably see him loitering around the post office.”

  “He’ll be a snowman unless he loiters inside.”

  I checked my watch. “I’m going over to the school. I want to get the lay of the land. You guys meet me there as soon as you can.”

  “You can’t see the lay of the land.”

  Kunkle, Katz, and I trudged back out to the car. We slithered from the parking lot to the road in the gloomy half-light, Kunkle fighting to keep us from the ditch. The motel was on the north end of Gorham, a small, flat town tucked between the parallel curves of the Androscoggin River and the railroad tracks. There was one central street, predictably named Main, which served as a brief convergence for Route 2, running east to west, and Route 16, which cut from north to south.

  We crawled down the deserted street, our eyes searching the white turmoil outside for the post office. We found it in the middle of town, on the right, situated like the hub of a three-spoke wheel amid Charlie’s Restaurant on one side, a small laundromat-supermarket complex on the other, and an abandoned greasy spoon across the street.

  Katz spoke up for the first time in hours. “Well, that answers where he’ll probably be loitering.”

  “I wonder if the state police have a plant in the supermarket, too,” Kunkle muttered.

  The school was several short blocks farther down the street, set back in the middle of its own lot of land. It was a typical Victorian monstrosity, not unlikey, not u the Municipal Building back home. I noticed two Sno-Cats parked by the side, blending in with some town sand trucks and graders. If the weather kept up, they’d be the only way to get around. I hoped someone knew where the keys were.

  We piled out of the car and stumbled up the broad steps toward the school’s large double doors. They swung back before we reached them and revealed a Marine Corps poster come alive-mean of eye, hard of belly, complete with a crew cut perched on a six-foot-four frame. I had to look twice to confirm he wasn’t in uniform.

  He was Captain Kevin McNaughton of the New Hampshire State Police-the man with whom I had coordinated the fun and games ahead.

  He looked icily at Kunkle and Katz. “More? That wasn’t what we discussed.” I shook his hand and stepped in past him. “I know, but this is it. We won’t get in your way.”

  “How can you help it? You’ve got almost as many men as I have now.”

  I sincerely hoped that wasn’t true. “Just consider us troops. Put us where you want us.”

  He closed the door behind us and ushered us into a side office. “You’d think we were after John Dillinger.”

  I took my coat off and laid it across the low counter that split the room down the middle. Two plainclothes troopers were sitting at the back drinking coffee. “It’s not getting Cioffi that worries me. It’s Stark getting him, like I told you in Brattleboro.”

  McNaughton shook his head and all but sneered, “The mysterious masked avenger. He must really be something if you think he’s going to pop up today.”

  “He’s a dedicated man.” I moved to a large table covered with a map of the reg
ion. “Any change of plans with the weather?”

  McNaughton sauntered over. “If anything, I’d cut back, but I suppose I have to put your men somewhere.”

  I looked at the map and thought again of what I might have missed. Since we didn’t know where Cioffi was hiding, we’d planned for four two-car roadblocks-two for Route 2, two for Route 16-to swing into place only after he was identified at the post office; we had to be sure he wouldn’t see us on his way in. McNaughton had one man in the post office-an extra we hadn’t counted on-plus one in the laundromat and one in the restaurant flanking the post office. It was good coverage but thin, which is why I’d brought so many of my own people. I was going to double what he had wherever I could.

  “Do we have access to the greasy spoon?” I pointed at the small rectangle across Main Street from the post office.

  “We can get it. I have the fire chief on call. Does it matter?”

  “You don’t have anyone in there now?”

  “No.”

  “It can’t hurt. In fact, that’s where you and I could hang out-and him.” I nodded at Katz. “If that’s all right,” I added.

  McNaughton sighed and nodded at one of his men. “Call DuBois and ask him for the him forkeys.” He looked down at the map. “So, you want each of your guys to ride shotgun on the roadblocks?”

  “All but one. I’d like Kunkle here in a nonblock car, just in case.”

  McNaughton shrugged. “They been told who’s boss?”

  “Yes.” I looked at my watch. “The post office opens in a half hour. We better get in position.”

  The captain sighed and shook his head, but he reached for his jacket. For reasons I couldn’t figure, he’d insisted on downplaying all this from the start, as if the whole thing were a major inconvenience, best handled by a meter-maid unit.

  The front door opened and Klesczewski, DeFlorio, and Tyler appeared in a gust of snow. The first two still looked half-asleep. I told them which roadblocks they were to share and sent them back out the door along with McNaughton’s troopers.

  We pulled up to the greasy spoon five minutes later, just as the fire chief, looking like a great bundled tree trunk, was unlocking the front door. Kunkle left the motor running.