Joe Kurtz Omnibus

by Dan Simmons

  Kurtz was dimly aware that he was somersaulting through the cold air, looking up at the dark rectangle of window fifteen feet above, his assailant’s face white against the blackness there. Then Kurtz hit the solid canopy with his back, smashed through the rotten plaster and lathing and rebar, and fell another fifteen feet to the snowy pavement below.

  A hundred yards away through blowing snow, snug in the driver’s seat of the Cadillac SUV, Hansen heard none of this. He turned the ignition, heard the V-8 roar to life, set the heater to maximum, and flipped on the halogen headlights.

  He had just raised his hand to the gearshift when there came a soft tik-tik and thirty-two pounds of C-4 explosive rigged under the floorboards, in the engine compartment, behind the dash, and especially carefully around the 40-gallon fuel tank, exploded in tight sequence.

  The first wad of explosive blew off Hansen’s feet just above the ankles. The second batch of C-4 blew the hood a hundred feet into the air and sent the windshield flying. The main packet ignited the fuel tank and lifted the two-and-a-half-ton vehicle five feet into the air before the SUV dropped back onto burning tires. The interior of the Cadillac immediately filled with a fuel-air mixture of burning gasoline.

  Hansen was alive. Even as he breathed flames, he thought, I’m alive!

  He tried the door but it was buckled and jammed. The passenger seat was twisted forward and on fire. Hansen himself was on fire. The wood-and-polymer steering wheel was melting in his hands.

  Not knowing yet that his feet were gone, Hansen lurched forward and clawed at the dashboard, pulling himself through the jagged hole where the windshield had been.

  The hood was gone; the engine compartment was a well of flames.

  Hansen did not stop. Reaching up and over with hands of molten flesh, he grabbed the optional roof rack of the Cadillac and pulled his charred and burning legs out of the wreck, twisting free of the interior, dropping himself away from the flaming mass of metal.

  His hair was on fire. His face was on fire. Hansen rolled in the deep snow, smothering the flames, screaming in agony.

  He crawled on his smoking elbows farther from the wreck, rolling on his back, trying to breathe through the pain in his lungs. He could see everything clearly, not knowing that his eyelids had fused with his brow and could not be closed. Hansen held his hands in front of his face. They hurt. He saw in a surge of disbelief bordering on a weird joy that his fingers had bloated like hot dogs left too long on the charcoal grill and then burst and melted. He saw white bone against the black sky. The flames illuminated everything in a sixty-yard radius.

  Hansen tried to scream for help but his lungs were two sacks of carbon.

  A silhouette walked between him and the burning vehicle. A man. The dark shape knelt, leaned closer, showed a face to the flames.

  “Hansen,” said John Wellington Frears. “Do you hear me? Do you know who I am?”

  I am not James B. Hansen, Hansen thought and tried to say, but neither his jaws nor tongue would work.

  Frears looked down at the burned man. Hansen’s clothes had peeled off and his skin hung in greasy folds, smoking like charred rags. The man’s face showed exposed and burned muscles like cords of slick red-and-yellow rope. Hansen’s scorched lips had peeled back from his teeth, so he seemed to be caught in the middle of a wild grin. The staring gray eyes could not blink. Only the thin column of Hansen’s breath rising into the frigid air from the open mouth showed that he still lived.

  “Can you hear me, Hansen?” said Frears. “Can you see who I am? I did this. You killed my daughter, Hansen. And I did this. Stay alive and suffer, you son of a bitch.”

  Frears knelt next to the charred man for several minutes. Long enough to see the pupils in the monster’s eyes widen in recognition and then become fixed and dilated. Long enough to see that the only vapor rising into the cold air from Hansen now was no longer breath, but steam and smoke from the cooked flesh.

  Distant sirens rose from the direction of the lighted city—the habitat, John Wellington Frears thought, of the other men, the civilized men. He rose and was ready to walk back to the Lincoln parked a block away when he saw something that looked like an animal crawling toward him through the snow of the parking lot.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Mickey Kee stood at the open window for a minute, staring down at Kurtz’s body through the hole in the metal canopy and then glancing up at the vehicle burning in the distance. He was curious about the explosion, but he hadn’t let it deter him from his work.

  His charge from Mr. Gonzaga had been—kill Kurtz, then kill Millworth. In Mr. Gonzaga’s words, “Any fucking cop crazy enough to hire me to kill somebody is too fucking crazy to be left alive.” Mickey Kee had not disagreed. Mr. Gonzaga had added that he wanted Kurtz’s head—literally—and Kee had brought a gunny sack on his belt to transport the trophy. Mr. G planned to give Ms. Angelina Farino a surprise present.

  Kee had been mildly disappointed twenty minutes earlier when Millworth and his two sidekicks had come into the station like the Keystone Kops shuffling along in body armor. He’d followed them to Kurtz, knowing that the time was not right to take care of Millworth, that it was too risky with all of that firepower in the hands of clowns. Now this explosion. With any luck, Millworth was no longer a factor. If it hadn’t been the homicide detective’s pyre, then Mickey Kee would drive to Millworth’s house and take care of things there. The evening was young.

  Moving silently even over broken glass, Kee circled the mezzanine and went down the stairs, across the rotunda, and out the front door. Kurtz’s body had not moved.

  Kee slipped his Beretta out of its holster and approached carefully. Kurtz had made a mess coming through the overhang. Rebar hung down like spaghetti. Plaster and rotted wood were scattered around the body. Kurtz’s right arm was visibly broken, the bone visible, and his left leg looked all twisted out of position. His left arm was pinned under his body just as he had fallen on it. There was blood soaking the snow around Kurtz’s head and his eyes were wide and staring fixedly at the sky through the hole he’d made in the overhang. Snow-flakes settled on the open eyes.

  Mickey Kee straddled the body and counted to twenty. No breath rising in the cold air. Kee spat down onto Kurtz’s open mouth. No movement. The eyes stared past Kee into intergalactic space.

  Kee grunted, slipped away the Beretta, pulled the gunny sack from his belt, and clicked open the eight-inch blade on his combat knife.

  Kurtz blinked and brought his left hand up and around, squeezing the trigger of the Compact Witness .45 he’d pulled out during his fall. The bullet hit Mickey Kee under the chin, passed through his soft palate and brain, and blew the top of his skull off.

  The .45 suddenly grew too heavy to hold so Kurtz dropped it. He would have liked to have closed his eyes to go away from the pain, but Kee’s body was too heavy on his damaged chest to let him breathe, so he pulled the body off him with his left hand, rolled over painfully, and began crawling on his belly toward the distant flames.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  John Wellington Frears drove Kurtz to the Erie County Medical Center that night. It wasn’t the hospital closest to the train station, but it was the only one he knew about since he’d driven past it several times on the way to and from the Airport Sheraton. Despite the storm, or perhaps because of it, the emergency room was almost empty, so Kurtz had no fewer than eight people working on him when he was brought in. The two real doctors in the group didn’t understand the injuries—severe cuts, lacerations, concussion, broken ribs, broken wrist, damage to both legs—but the well-dressed African-American gentleman who’d brought the patient in said that it had been an accident at a construction site, that his friend had fallen three stories through a skylight, and the shards of glass in Kurtz seemed to bear that story out.

  Frears waited around long enough to hear that Kurtz would live, and then he and the black Lincoln disappeared back into the storm.

&
nbsp; Arlene made it through the weather to the hospital that night, stayed until the next afternoon, and came back every day. When Kurtz regained consciousness late the next morning, she was reading the Buffalo News, and she insisted on reading parts of it aloud to him every day after that.

  On that first day after the murders, Thursday, the carnage at the train station almost crowded out the news about the blizzard. “The Train Station Massacre,” the papers and TV news immediately christened it. Three homicide detectives were dead, a civilian named Donald Rafferty, a petty criminal from Newark named Marco Dirazzio, and an Asian-American not yet identified. It was obvious to the press that some sort of straight-from-the-movies shoot-out between the crooks and the cops had taken place that night, probably while Captain Robert Gaines Millworth and his men were working undercover.

  By that afternoon, the chief of police and the mayor of Buffalo had both vowed that this cold-blooded murder of Buffalo’s finest would not go unavenged—that every resource, including the FBI, would be used to track down the killers and bring them to justice. It would, they said, be the largest manhunt in the history of Western New York. The vows were made in time to be picked up by the prime-time local and network news. Tom Brokaw said during the lead-in to the report, “A real—and deadly—game of cops-and-robbers took place in Buffalo, New York, last night, and the body count may not be finished yet.” That odd prediction came true when the authorities announced late Thursday that the dead bodies of Captain Millworth’s wife and son, as well as another unidentified body, had been discovered that morning at the captain’s home in Tonawanda. One city alderman was quoted during the late news saying that it was inappropriate for a captain of Homicide on the Buffalo Police Department to live in Tonawanda, that city law and department policy required residence within the city limits of Buffalo for all city employees. The alderman was largely ignored.

  On Friday, the second day after the murders, the dead Asian-American was identified as Mickey Kee, one of alleged Mafia Don Emilio Gonzaga’s enforcers, and rumors were circulating that Detective Brubaker, one of the fallen hero cops, had been on the payroll of the Farino crime family. Chief Podeski’s sound bite that night was: “Whatever the complicated circumstances of this heinous crime, we must not let it blind us to the incredible bravery of one man—Captain Robert Gaines Millworth—who gave his life and the lives of his beloved family for the people of Erie County and the Niagara Frontier.” A hero’s funeral was being planned for Captain Millworth. It was rumored that the President of the United States might attend.

  Kurtz had surgery for his left leg, right lung, and both arms that day. He slept all that evening.

  On Saturday, the third day, Arlene attended the funeral of her neighbor, Mrs. Dzwrjsky, and brought a tuna casserole to the family afterward. That same day, the Buffalo News ran a copyrighted story that canceled the President’s visit: a world-famous violinist named John Wellington Frears had come forward with documents, photographs, and audio tapes showing that Captain Robert Gaines Millworth was an imposter, that the city had hired a serial child-killer with no history of law enforcement in his background, and that this imposter had once been James B. Hansen, the man who had murdered Frears’s daughter twenty years earlier. Furthermore, Frears had evidence to show that Millworth/Hansen had been in the pay of crime boss Emilio Gonzaga and that the Train Station Massacre had not been a cops-versus-robbers fight at all, but a complicated gangland killing gone terribly wrong.

  The Mayor and the chief of police announced on Saturday afternoon that there would be an immediate grand jury investigation into both the Gonzaga and Farino alleged crime families.

  On that third evening, the CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, and CNN news all led with the story.

  On the fourth morning, Sunday, it was revealed by the Buffalo News and two local TV stations that Mr. John Wellington Frears had produced an audio tape of a telephone conversation between Angelina Farino Ferrara—a young woman recently returned from Europe, a widow, and someone never connected to the Farino family’s business of crime—and Stephen “Little Skag” Farino, calling from Attica over his lawyer’s secure phone. The transcript ran in that morning’s edition of the Buffalo News, but copies of the tape were played on radio and TV stations everywhere.

  Ms. Farino:

  You’ve been hiring cops to whack people. Detective Brubaker, for instance. I know you’ve put him on the payroll that used to go to Hathaway.

  Stephen Farino:

  What the [expletive deleted] are you talking about, Angie?

  Ms. Farino:

  I don’t care about Brubaker, but I’ve gone over the family notes and I see that Gonzaga’s got a captain of detectives on the arm. A guy named Millworth.

  Stephen Farino:

  [no response]

  Ms. Farino:

  Millworth’s not really Millworth. He’s a serial killer named James B. Hansen…and a bunch of other aliases. He’s a child-killer, Stevie. A rapist and a killer.

  Stephen Farino:

  So?

  And so on. Along with the transcript, the Buffalo News released a list of forty-five names that included cops, judges, politicians, parole-board members, and other Buffalo-area officials shown to be on the Gonzaga family payroll, along with the amount they were paid each year by Gonzaga. There was a shorter list—eight names—of lesser cops and minor politicians who were in the pay of the Farino Family. Detective Fred Brubaker’s name was on the second list.

  On the fifth day, Monday, three of the most expensive lawyers in the United States, including one famous lawyer who had been successful in the O.J. Simpson defense years ago, all now in the hire of Emilio Gonzaga, held a press conference to announce that John Wellington Frears was a liar and a scoundrel, as well as someone intent upon slandering Italian-Americans everywhere, and they were prepared to prove it in a court of law. Their client, Emilio Gonzaga, was suing John Wellington Frears for slander to the tune of one hundred million dollars.

  That evening, Frears appeared on Larry King Live. The violinist was sad, dignified, but unwavering. He showed photographs of his murdered daughter. He produced documents showing that Gonzaga had hired Millworth/Hansen. He showed carefully edited photographs of Millworth/Hansen posing with other murdered children—and with Frears’s own daughter. When Larry King pressed Frears to tell how he had come by all this material, Frears said only, “I hired a skilled private investigator.” When confronted with the news of the hundred-million-dollar lawsuit, Frears talked about his battle with colon cancer and said simply that he would not live long enough to defend his name in such a lawsuit. Emilio Gonzaga and Stephen Farino, said Frears, were murderers and child molesters. They would have to live with that knowledge, Frears said. He would not.

  “Shut that damned thing off,” Kurtz said from his hospital bed. He hated Larry King.

  Arlene shut it off but lit a cigarette in defiance of all hospital rules.

  On the sixth day after the massacre, Arlene came into the hospital to find Kurtz out of his bed and room. When he returned, pale, shaking, trailing his IV stand, he would not say where he had been, but Arlene knew that he had gone one floor up to look in on Rachel, who was in a private room now. The doctors had saved the girl’s remaining kidney and she was on the road to recovery. Gail had put in the necessary papers to become Rachel’s legal guardian, and the two spent hours together in Rachel’s room each evening when Gail got off work.

  On the seventh day, Wednesday, Arlene came in with a copy of USA Today: Emilio Gonzaga had been found in New York City that morning, stuffed in the trunk of a Chevrolet Monte Carlo parked near the fish market, two .22 bullets in the back of his head. “A double tap, obviously a professional hit,” said the experts in such things. The same experts speculated that the Five Families had acted to end the bad publicity. “They’re sentimentalists when it comes to kids,” said one source.

  But Kurtz was gone on that seventh morning. He’d checked himself out during the night. The previous evening, an inquiring
mind from one of the newspapers had come by the hospital to ask Kurtz if he was the “skilled private investigator” mentioned by John Wellington Frears.

  Arlene checked the office and the Royal Delaware Arms, but Kurtz had taken some essentials from both places and disappeared.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-NINE

  The week Joe disappeared, she’d had to move everything out of their basement office so the city could tear down the building. Gail and some friends helped her with the move. Arlene stored the computers and files and miscellaneous stuff in her garage out in Cheektowaga.

  The week after that, Angelina Farino Ferrara phoned her. “Did you hear the news?” asked Ms. Ferrara.

  “I’m sort of avoiding the news,” admitted Arlene.

  “They got Little Skag. Shanked him eleven times in the Attica exercise yard last night. I guess it’s true that cons don’t like Short Eyes any more than the Five Family bosses do.”

  “Is he dead?” asked Arlene.

  “Not quite. He’s in some sort of high-security secret infirmary somewhere. They won’t even let me—his only surviving family member—visit him. If he lives, they’ll move him out of Attica to some undisclosed location.”

  “Why are you telling me?”

  “I just thought Joe would like to know if you happen to talk to him. Do you talk to him?”

  “No. I have no idea where he is.”

  “Well, if he gets in touch, tell him that I’d like to talk to him sometime. We don’t exactly have any unfinished business between us, but I might have some business opportunities for him.”

  “I’ll tell Mr. Kurtz that you called.”

  That same afternoon, Arlene received a check for $35,000 from John Wellington Frears. The note on the check said only: “Wedding Bells.com.” Arlene vaguely remembered discussing her idea with him the day they were together at her house. The news that evening reported that the violinist had checked himself into a hospital—not Erie County, but an expensive private hospital in the suburbs. A few days later, the newspaper said that Frears was on a respirator and in a coma.