The Charlie Parker Collection 2

by John Connolly

  The waiting came to an end on a warm, still August night. He woke to the sound of boards creaking outside his room. It was still dark outside, and he did not feel as though he had slept for long. He did not know how they had managed to get so close without being heard. The second floor rooms were reached by way of rickety wooden stairs to the right of the building, and Louis always kept the main door locked at Mr Vasich’s insistence. Yet he was not surprised that they had found him at last. Gabriel had told him it would happen, and he had known it himself to be true. He slipped from beneath the sheets, wearing only his boxers, and reached for the .38 just as his bedroom door was kicked in and a fat man with a round head appeared in the doorway. Behind him, Louis could see another, smaller man hovering.

  The big man had a long-barreled pistol in his hand, but it was not pointed at the boy, not yet. Louis raised his own weapon. His hands shook, not from fear but from the sudden rush of adrenalin into his system. Still, the man at the door misunderstood.

  ‘That’s right, boy,’ said Griggs. ‘You got a gun, but it’s hard to kill a man up close. It’s real –’

  Louis’s gun spoke, and a hole blew dark blood from Griggs’s chest. Louis walked forward, his finger pulling the trigger again, and the second shot hit Griggs in the side of the neck as he fell backward, almost taking Alderman Rector with him. Alderman fired the little .22, but the shot went wild and took out the window pane to the right of Louis. The gun in Louis’s hand was no longer shaking, and the next three shots impacted in a tight circle no bigger than a man’s closed fist in the center of Alderman’s torso. Alderman dropped his gun and turned, his right hand clutching at the wounds in his body as he tried to support himself against the wall. He managed a couple of steps before his legs crumpled and he fell flat on his stomach. He moaned at the pressure on the wounds, then started to crawl along the floor, pulling himself with his hands and pushing with his feet against Griggs’ corpse. He heard footsteps behind him. Louis fired the last bullet into Alderman’s back, and he stopped moving.

  Louis stared at the gun in his hand. He was breathing fast, and his heart was beating so hard that it hurt. He went back to his room, dressed, and packed his bag. It didn’t take him long, for he had never really unpacked it, understanding that the time would come when, if he survived, he would have to move again. He reloaded the .38, just in case these men had not come alone, then stepped over the two bodies and walked to the end of the hall. He opened the door and listened, then cast an eye over the yard below. There was no movement. A beat-up Ford was parked below, both of its front doors open, but there was nobody inside.

  Louis ran down the stairs and turned the corner, just in time to catch a man’s fist across his left temple. He collapsed to the ground, blinded by the pain. Even as he fell he tried to raise the .38, but a boot connected with his hand and forced it to the ground, stamping on his fingers until he was forced to release his grip. Hands grabbed hold of his shirtfront and hauled him to his feet, then pushed him back around the corner until he felt the first step against the back of his calves. He sat down and saw clearly, for the first time, the man who had attacked him. He was six feet tall and white, his hair cut short like that of a cop, or a soldier. He wore a dark suit, a black tie, and a white shirt. Some of Louis’s blood had landed on the material, staining it.

  Behind him stood Gabriel.

  Louis’s eyes were watering, but he did not want the men to think that he was crying.

  ‘They’re dead,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Gabriel. ‘Of course they are.’

  ‘You followed them here.’

  ‘I learned that they were on their way.’

  ‘And you didn’t stop them.’

  ‘I had faith in you. I was right. You didn’t need anyone else. You could take care of them yourself.’

  Louis heard sirens calling in the distance, drawing closer.

  ‘How long do you think you will be able to evade the police?’ asked Gabriel. ‘One day? Two?’

  Louis did not reply.

  ‘My offer still stands,’ said Gabriel. ‘In fact, more so than before, after tonight’s little demonstration of your abilities. What do you say? The gas chamber at San Quentin, or me? Quickly, now. Time is wasting.’

  Louis watched Gabriel carefully, wondering how he had come to be here at just the right time, understanding that tonight had been a test but not certain of how much of it Gabriel had orchestrated. Someone must have told those men where he was. Someone had betrayed him to them. Then again, it could have been a coincidence.

  But Gabriel was here. He had known those men were coming, and he had waited to see what would transpire. Now he was offering help, and Louis did not know if he could trust him.

  And Gabriel stared back at him, and knew his thoughts.

  Louis stood. He nodded at Gabriel, picked up his bag, and followed him to the car. The driver picked up the .38, and Louis never saw it again. By the time the police arrived they were already heading north, and the boy who had worked at the eatery, the one who had left two men dead on Mr Vasich’s floor, ceased to be, except in some small, hidden corner of his own soul.

  14

  They drove north just after breakfast. Nobody followed them. As they left the city, Louis employed all the skills of evasion that he had learned – sudden stops, doubling back on himself, the use of dead ends and meandering roads through residential areas – yet he discerned no pattern among the vehicles in his wake, and neither did Angel. In the end, both were content that they had left the city unencumbered by unwanted attention

  Their conversation of the previous night was not mentioned. It would serve no purpose to disinter it now. Instead, they behaved as they always did, interspersing periods of silence with comments on music, on business, or on whatever happened to strike them at the time.

  ‘Philadelphia,’ said Angel. ‘City of Brotherly Love, my ass. You remember Jack Wade?’

  ‘Cactus Jack.’

  ‘Hey, that’s unkind. He had a skin condition. Nothing he could do about it. Anyway, he once tried to help an old lady across the street in Philly and she kneed him in the balls. Took his wallet too, he said.’

  ‘It is one unfriendly city,’ Louis agreed.

  Angel watched the scenery go by. ‘What’s over there?’ he asked.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘East. Is that Massachusetts?’

  ‘Vermont.’

  ‘Least it’s not New Hampshire. I always worry that someone’s going to take a pot shot at us from the trees when we drive through New Hampshire.’

  ‘They do breed ’em tough there.’

  ‘Tough, and kind of dumb. You know, they refused to pass a law requiring people to wear seat belts?’

  ‘I read that somewhere.’

  ‘You rent a car in New Hampshire, you start it up, and it doesn’t make that beep-beep-beep noise if you forget to put on your seat belt.’

  ‘No shit?’

  ‘Yeah, instead, if you try to put it on, a voice calls you a pussy and tells you to grow a pair.’

  ‘Live free or die, man.’

  ‘I think that was referring to the forces of tyranny and oppression, not some guy who misjudges the brake time on his Prius.’

  ‘Cheap gas, though.’

  ‘Cheap gas. Cheap liquor. Easy availability of weapons.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Louis. ‘Hard to see how that could go wrong.’

  They left the interstate close to Champlain. At Mooers, they took a right and headed through the Forks, then crossed the Great Chazy River, which was little more than a stream at that point. The towns all blended into one: there were volunteer fire departments, cemeteries, old abandoned filling stations at intersections, now replaced by glowing edifices at the town limits, the vintage pumps still standing like ancient soldiers guarding long-forgotten memorials. Some places looked more prosperous than others, but it was a relative term; everywhere, it seemed, they saw things for sale: cars, houses, businesses, stores with paper on th
e windows, no hint now left of their former purpose. Too many homes had wounded paintwork, too many lawns were littered with the entrails of vehicles, cannibalized for parts, and the discarded limbs of broken furniture. They passed through places that were hardly there at all: some towns seemed to exist only as a figment of some planner’s imagination, like a joke on the map, a punchline to a gag that had never been told. Halloween jack-o’-lanterns glowed on porches and in yards. Ghosts danced around an old elm tree, the wind picking at their sheeted forms.

  They stopped for a coffee at Dick’s Country Store and Music Oasis at Churubusco, mainly because they liked its advertising: ‘500 Guitars, 1000 Guns.’ Angel figured that somebody had to be kidding, but Dick’s was for real: to the right of the door was a little convenience store with a fridge full of bait worms, and to the left were two separate entrances. The first led into a guitar and musical instrument shop that seemed to be staffed by the usual benevolent guitar heads and amp aficionados. A young man with long dark hair sat on the floor, trying out a black Gibson, his fingers picking a loose melody in the fading afternoon light. The second door, meanwhile, led into a pair of linked rooms filled with shotguns, pistols, knives, and ammunition, and was staffed by a pair of serious-looking men, one young, one old. A sign warned that a New York state pistol permit was required to even handle a gun. Beside it, a heavyset woman was filling out the paperwork for a four-hundred-dollar pistol.

  ‘I’m buying it as a gift for someone,’ she explained.

  ‘That’s acceptable,’ said the older of the two men, although it wasn’t clear if he was referring to the legality of the transfer or the nature of the gift. Angel and Louis looked on in bemusement, then returned to their car to drink their coffee, and continued north. A wind farm occupied the hills to the west, the blades unmoving, like playthings abandoned by the offspring of giants.

  ‘It’s a strange part of the country,’ said Angel.

  ‘That it is.’

  ‘Lot of people out there who didn’t vote for Hillary.’

  ‘Lot of people in here who didn’t vote for Hillary either.’

  ‘Yeah, fifty percent of them. I don’t care. I always liked her.’

  When they came to Burke, they spotted the first of the brown US Border Patrol vehicles, and although they were only doing five above the limit, Louis slowed down. They almost missed the right on to Route 122 as it grew dark, and only a closed campground, its power outlets covered by upturned plastic trash cans, alerted them to the presence of the turning on to 37. A chimney stack for a house never built appeared on the left, concrete slowly succumbing to the onslaught of green, and then, about twelve miles from Massena, motels appeared, and a Mohawk casino, and Indian smoke shops. A sign advised that they were only a mile from the Canadian border. Another, draped across a warehouse, announced that ‘This is Mohawk Land, not NYS Land.’

  They were close now.

  They stopped in Massena, checking in separately at an anonymous motel and booking different rooms. Louis slept. Angel watched TV, the volume at its lowest audible level, alert to the sound of cars entering the parking lot, of voices, to the presence of anonymous figures in the gathering dark. It was too early for him to fall easily into sleep. He was a night owl by nature. It was mornings that were hard for him. At last, he forced himself to turn off the television and lie back on the bed. Maybe he napped for a time, but he was awake when the clock by his bed indicated that it was after 4 AM, and he stilled the alarm before it had barely had a chance to sound.

  Louis was already waiting in the car when Angel emerged from the room. No words were exchanged, no greetings. Instead, they drove from Massena in silence, their attention fixed on the road, on the darkness, and on the work that lay ahead.

  15

  Louis turned south some five miles west of Massena. After a further six miles, they passed a series of U-shaped pools filled with still water, and old mining works falling into decay, the only remnants of the Leehagen talc mine. Farther back, now slowly being reclaimed by nature, were the ruins of Winslow. They could not see them in the gloom, but Louis knew that they were there. He had seen them on Hoyle’s photographs, and had memorized their position down to the nearest fraction of a mile, just as he knew the position of the two unmarked roads that curved southwest across the Roubaud Stream and into Leehagen’s land.

  They came to the first intersection after 16 miles had appeared on the clock. It was marked ‘Private Property,’ and led to the first bridge over the Roubaud. Louis slowed. To their right, a flashlight blinked once from the trees: Lynott and Marsh, making their presence known. Louis and Angel followed the road for another three miles until they came to the second bridge. Again, they were signaled from somewhere deep among the trees: Blake and Weis.

  The Endalls, meanwhile, had entered Leehagen’s property under cover of darkness shortly after midnight and had traveled, on foot, to the ruins of the old cattle pens, there to keep watch on Leehagen’s house and await the arrival of Angel and Louis. As with the three main pairs, there was no way to communicate with them now that the operation was underway. It did not matter. Everybody knew what had to be done. Phones would have helped, but they were not an option, not here.

  The only ones who were not yet in place were Hara and Harada. They were still in Massena, and would only leave at a prearranged time once Angel and Louis had entered Leehagen’s property, in order to avoid the possibility that a mini convoy of cars might draw attention to what was about to occur.

  Once Louis was satisfied that the bridge teams were in place, he crossed the southern bridge onto Leehagen’s land. They saw no lights, passed no other cars or detected any signs of life on the road. Mostly, the land around them was forest, so they were hemmed in on both sides by trees, but on two occasions they came to man-made breaks in the tree line, hundreds of feet wide: Leehagen’s grazing acres. After two miles, they took a dirt road north again, the forest beginning to thin here, until they came to an old barn, pinpointed on one of their maps, that stood beside an abandoned farm, and there they left the car. They were less than a half mile from Leehagen’s house, and to drive any farther would be to risk alerting its residents, for it was quiet here.

  They armed themselves with Glocks and a pair of Steyr TMP 9mm submachine guns fitted with suppressors and carried on slings, leaving the rest of their mobile armory in the trunk. This was to be a killing raid, fast and brutal, and they did not anticipate the need for longer-range weapons. The Steyrs were simple and effective: easily controllable despite an effective range of up to twenty-five meters; light, with an empty weight of just under three pounds; limited recoil; and a cyclic rate of nine hundred rounds per minute. They each added a spare thirty round magazine for the Steyrs, and a spare clip for the Glocks.

  Ahead of them lay the cattle pens, twin wooden single-story structures painted white. Nearby, a modern blue grain elevator towered over the lower buildings. Angel could smell the lingering odor of excrement and cow urine, and when he looked inside the first of the pens he could see that they had not been cleaned since the animals had been slaughtered. Louis checked the pens to the right, and once they were sure that both were empty, they moved on, using the buildings for cover until they came to the bottom of a small hill that overlooked the Leehagen house about a quarter of a mile to the west.

  Louis had never had any intention of taking Leehagen with a long-range shot, even if the old man had been more mobile than he was. It was not one of his particular skills, even less so since the damage suffered to his left hand while they were in Louisiana with Parker some years before. Had such a shot been available to him, there was no way of knowing if Leehagen might actually have been fit enough to take the air that particular morning, and then there was always the weather to consider. After all, a sick man was hardly going to be wheeled around his property in the cold, and the forecast was for heavy rain. But there was also the son to be dealt with. Louis wanted him as well. If he killed the father and left the son alive, then the vendet
ta would continue. Both had to be taken out at the same time. That meant killing them in the house, with Louis and Angel entering while the Endalls provided cover. It would be done as quietly as possible with silenced weapons to limit the possibility of gunfire drawing unwanted attention to what was being done, but Louis knew that such hopes might well prove optimistic. He didn’t believe that they could get in and out entirely unnoticed, and he recognized that they might well end up fighting their way off Leehagen’s land. At least they would not have to do so alone, and Leehagen’s men would be no match for their ten guns.

  ‘Where are they?’ whispered Angel.

  Louis stared back at the empty pens. This was where they were supposed to rendezvous, but there was still no sign of the Endalls.

  ‘Shit,’ hissed Louis. He considered their options. ‘Let’s take a look at the house, see if there’s any sign of movement.’

  ‘What?’ asked Angel. ‘You’re not going ahead without them?’

  ‘I’m not doing anything yet. I just want to see the house.’

  Now it was Angel’s turn to swear, but he followed Louis to the brow of the hill. The house lay before them, surrounded by a white picket fence. A lamp burned dimly in one of the upstairs windows, but otherwise all was quiet. Behind the house, the lake was a deeper patch of darkness extending toward unseen hills. Louis put a pair of binoculars to his eyes and scanned the property. Beside him, Angel did the same, although his attention was less on the house than on the deserted buildings behind him, so even as he looked to the north he was listening for the sounds of approach from the south.

  They kept watch on the house for five minutes, and still the Endalls had not appeared. Angel was growing nervous.

  ‘We need to –’ began Angel, when Louis hushed him with a raised hand.

  ‘That lit window,’ he said.

  Angel put the binoculars to his eyes once more, and barely caught sight of what had alerted Louis before the white drapes fell back into place again: a woman at the window, and then a man pulling her away. The woman had blond hair, and Angel had clearly seen her face, if only for a second.