Tag Man

by Archer Mayor

  He also knew about ballistics and made sure of two things while on the job: He always used frangible ammunition, to ensure that the bullet fragments were many and untraceable, and he always went for a contact head shot, to guarantee the effectiveness of his trademark single lethal shot. He was a decent marksman, but why bother aiming when such bravado was unnecessary?

  He slipped the pistol into its holster, stubbed out his cigarette, killed the motel room lights, and opened his curtains to reveal the parking lot beyond.

  Brattleboro. Totally hick town. Nothing to do, nothing to see. No strip joints, no X-rated-movie houses, no hookers as far as he could find. Even the bars sucked—filled with too much music, too much designer beer, and too many people all laughing and pretending to have a good time. Leo liked his bars quiet, dark, and cheap—designed for serious drinkers.

  He opened the door and stepped into the balmy night air. At least the weather was holding. He walked to the end of the balcony, took the metal staircase down into the parking lot, and crossed over to the anonymous rental car he’d driven up from Massachusetts. Leo didn’t own a car. He didn’t see the point. Everything he needed was either included in the contract or available over the Internet when he wasn’t working. As for the rest, he walked or took a bus. He lived in the kind of neighborhood where his particular appetites could be met within a four-block radius.

  He pulled into the Putney Road, as clotted with fast food joints and cheap motels as any commercial strip anywhere, and headed south, back into downtown. Brattleboro had three interstate exits, which had surprised him, given its size. The first had offered one motel and limited amenities; the second, little to nothing except a major feeder road heading east and west; and the third had landed him right at the top of the miracle mile he was now navigating. Perfect for him—a nondescript environment with a quick on-ramp heading out of town.

  But for the moment, that escape route could keep. Now, he wanted inside the belly of the beast. That’s where the target worked, and where he’d seen him earlier.

  He crossed a bridge over the confluence of the Connecticut and West rivers, exchanging the Putney Road’s commercial stretch for a long, curving, tree-lined avenue accented by stately Victorian mansions. Not as fancy as some he’d seen in Massachusetts, but holding their own in the useless-hard-to-heat-antiques category.

  They were also a good foretaste to the redbrick downtown next in line. He hated towns like this—throwbacks to a time of sweatshops and union busting and market manipulation. He understood New England’s vanity about its antiquity and fusty customs and highborn ways. And despised it all. The people he came from had been under the heels of those traditions for more than two hundred years, as servants, slaves, and immigrant factory workers. He was delighted to be one of the few who could speak now and then of his independence with a well-placed bullet.

  Fuck ’em all, was his motto.

  Not that he was transposing any of that social outrage onto his target. In fact, that poor slob just looked like a working stiff to Leo.

  But he still didn’t care. The money was good, the target looked easy, and anyone who’d earned a visit from Leo Metelica clearly hadn’t been minding his manners, no matter how working-class he might seem.

  Metelica was a practical socialist.

  He parked his car in the public garage on Elliot Street, near the entrance and aimed toward the exit, as he did every time similar circumstances presented themselves. Also from habit, he took note of the surveillance cameras to make sure none of them had a clear shot of his face as he headed for the street.

  It was late. Earlier, he had eaten at the restaurant where Dan Kravitz worked, both to confirm that he had the right target and to study the way the man moved. It didn’t amount to research per se, since it didn’t truly inform Metelica of Kravitz’s habits or preferences, but he saw himself as a cheetah assessing a gazelle from a safe distance—it was a form of zeroing in, and, for Metelica’s basic style of operation, it was enough.

  His plan was equally unsophisticated. He was going to wait for Kravitz to lock up, as he’d been informed he did every night, follow him to a suitably dark and isolated spot, and kill him.

  Or not.

  Metelica was no fool. He knew that sometimes things didn’t work out according to plan. And if he didn’t get an opportunity tonight, then he’d use the time to learn more about Dan’s routine and kill him tomorrow night.

  He walked down the sidewalk to where he’d noticed a dark alleyway opposite the restaurant, and vanished from the glare of a distant streetlamp to see what developed. He saw the purpose of his visit across from him, working a mop up and down the length of the empty dining room, where the chairs had already been upended and parked atop the tables.

  To Metelica’s right and left, as far as he could see along the street, there was not a movement.

  Twenty minutes later, Kravitz put the finishing touches on his evening’s work, killed all but the night-light above the bar, and vanished from view, Metelica presumed to maybe grab a jacket or something else from a closet.

  Instead, after a minute, the light on the second floor, directly above the restaurant, came to life, revealing what appeared to be an apartment.

  “What the hell?” Leo said quietly.

  He stayed where he was, hoping to see something appear in one of the windows. He was soon rewarded with Dan’s profile passing by.

  “Jesus Christ,” he told himself. “The motherfucker lives there.”

  Metelica faded a step back into the gloom, rethinking his plan. This was something he’d never considered. How the hell was he supposed to ambush a man behind the locked door of a building he never left?

  As if to answer that very question, the second-floor light just as abruptly turned off.

  His heart quickening, Metelica waited hopefully. A dark shadow appeared from the rear of the restaurant, followed by Dan’s outline at the entrance as he opened the door and stepped into the street.

  “Gotcha, you son of a bitch,” Leo murmured.

  In fact, Dan Kravitz had caught sight of his unknown nemesis immediately upon closing the restaurant door.

  Once more, Dan’s fanatical sensitivity to his surrounding world’s makeup—a skill that had failed him outside Gloria Wrinn’s house, if for good reason—served now to reveal the just-barely-discernible shape of a man across the street.

  Suspicious, he swung right, away from well-lighted Main Street, and headed west down Elliot, toward the gloom of an increasingly residential neighborhood.

  But he didn’t keep to that course. Instead, as much to torture his tail as to discover his identity, he suddenly crossed the street by the parking garage Metelica had used and took the metal staircase connecting Elliot Street to Flat Street some thirty feet below. It was an exposed and noisy route, and he knew it would force his pursuer to wait for him to reach the bottom before engaging the top step, for fear of attracting too much attention.

  He was right. Only dimly, as he left the ground floor of the garage to cross Flat Street, did he hear the stealthy sounds of someone discreetly giving chase.

  Flat Street was aptly named. Running west to east alongside the rock-strewn Whetstone Brook, it was one of the few level pieces of Brattleboro’s hilly terrain.

  It was toward the Whetstone that Dan now proceeded, and the newly built pedestrian bridge leading to the Brattleboro Food Co-op’s parking lot on the other side. Here, he intended to confront his fear and either lend it credibility or prove it to be a figment of his highly tuned paranoia.

  As with so many of the town’s nooks and crannies, this area was well known to him, along with its current conditions—up to the Dumpster having been placed at an odd angle near the bridge’s entrance, and the nearest streetlamp bulb having died the night before. He was counting on his follower’s losing sight of him in the shadows, and not seeing him duck behind the large metal bin instead of crossing the bridge.

  Dan cautiously peered out to see the man emerge from th
e garage into the light hanging over the facility’s front ramp.

  Dan’s fears instantly yielded to reality. This man he recognized. He remembered seeing him at the restaurant, sitting near the door, eating an appetizer only and—most important—paying close attention to what Dan was doing.

  He hadn’t liked it then, so seeing him again struck him with dread. That was the burden for paranoids—there was no joy in being proven right.

  Dan quickly looked around, his night vision having kicked in. He found a short piece of two-by-four lumber shoved under the Dumpster and worked it loose to have it ready, all the while listening for his stalker’s approaching footsteps over the rush and tumble of the nearby water.

  He crouched to lower his profile as the quiet scrape of a shoe indicated the man’s proximity, and then slipped in behind him, a mere two feet from his back.

  “Don’t move. Don’t turn around.” Dan poked him in the back with the two-by-four.

  Metelica froze in place, his hands slightly extended to his sides. Christ, he thought. How the hell did that happen?

  “Why’re you following me?” Dan asked.

  “I don’t know who the fuck you are,” Leo tried bluffing.

  “You were watching me at the restaurant.”

  Leo scowled. There must have been fifty people in the place. It was jammed.

  “I was having a meal, like everybody else. That’s what restaurants are for.” He began wondering how to make his move. The implication was that Kravitz had a gun on him, or at least a knife.

  “You were having the hummus appetizer, and you didn’t finish it once you were sure who I was,” Dan countered.

  “You know what I was eating?” Leo blurted, too astonished to be coy.

  “I also saw you in the alley a few minutes ago, waiting.”

  Metelica shook his head slightly. No one had told him this pecker had X-ray vision. What the hell was going on? He hadn’t asked why Kravitz was wanted dead. Now he was beginning to understand.

  “The people who hired me want to talk with you,” he tried, back to calculating his next move. Generally, if a man has a gun, he doesn’t care if his target sees him, so that meant a knife—maybe.

  “They knew how to get you onto me,” Dan said. “That means they know how to use a phone.”

  “It’s not that kind of conversation,” Leo went on, suddenly aware that what little he did know of Kravitz’s background might be useful. “It involves your daughter.”

  That was a mistake. Dan instantly hit him with the two-by-four, hard enough to make him stumble onto the bridge.

  “You slimy bastard,” Dan yelled at him, following the blow with a kick. “You don’t go there.”

  Instincts overriding strategy, Leo used his forward momentum to stagger ahead a couple of feet, pull his large .45 from its holster under his jacket, and twist around to bring Kravitz down any way he could.

  But it wasn’t to be. Dan moved like a tomcat and sidestepped out of Leo’s vision in a blur. The next thing Leo felt was an explosive pain in his right wrist as Dan’s club sent the large pistol clattering to the wooden decking. In almost the same move, Dan then swung the two-by-four in a full circle and used it as a battering ram to punch the hit man once, hard, in midchest, sending him reeling backward.

  That was the penultimate sensation of Leo Metelica’s life. Immediately after, he felt the bridge railing strike the small of his back, followed by a split second’s weightlessness, wrapped in the sound of rushing water.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “That’s it? A jumper?”

  Ron Klesczewski turned to see Willy Kunkle step onto the bridge and glance at the dead man below, whose broken body was draped face-up over a large boulder, his legs weaving gently back and forth as the water tried to tug him the rest of the way to the Connecticut River downstream.

  “Would I bother you for that?” Ron said with a smile.

  “Somebody pushed him?” Willy approached until he was standing beside his old colleague, making them both look like spectators admiring a scenic landscape.

  It was early morning. The bridge had been cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape. Three uniformed cops were standing around, working on cups of coffee since there was nothing to do with the two passersby who had stopped to watch. The medical examiner had yet to arrive, and the state’s attorney had barely been called.

  Whoever this was—pasty pale and ghastly—had simply become the reason for a carefully orchestrated process.

  “Take a good look,” Ron urged. “You won’t even have to get wet.”

  Willy studied the set piece more carefully, squinting slightly to compensate for the twenty-foot distance.

  “Far out,” he finally said.

  Ron glanced at him. “You get to the empty holster?”

  “You find a gun?” Willy asked in response.

  “Nope. We might. The dive-team guys are getting ready over there.” He gestured vaguely toward the co-op parking lot, half of which was blocked by a nearby building. “But it could be in somebody’s pocket right now.”

  Willy pointed without removing his elbow from the railing. “You can see where he crushed the back of his head. See the deformity?”

  Ron merely nodded.

  “I guess you have a canvass going,” Willy suggested.

  “Yup.” Ron remained gazing at the man below and added, “We’re also looking for whatever regulars might have been around here last night—delivery people, late-night workers, and the rest.”

  Willy straightened with a grunt. “Let’s just go down there and yank him out. We don’t need any dive team. This is stupid.”

  Ron had expected no less, but was saved by the appearance of a group from the parking lot. “There they are, and the ME.” He headed toward them and the embankment leading to the water’s edge. “No need to piss off several agencies simultaneously, after all.”

  “Yeah,” Willy growled. “What a thrill.”

  The procedure was sadly familiar. A member of the dive team waded out into midstream, suited up for safety’s sake—minus the flippers and tank—and tethered to the shore by two of his colleagues. Willy predictably snorted with disdain, but Ron was more appreciative of the history behind many of the procedures they increasingly followed. People had been injured or killed because situations just like this one hadn’t appeared life-threatening.

  The diver never got deeper than his knees. The water was fast but shallow, and no less dangerous for that. He moved slowly, taking photographs with his waterproof camera, then carefully looped a rope around the body and maneuvered it to where his backup team could tow it to shore.

  There, the assistant medical examiner took over, examining his subject from head to toe, lifting and opening its clothes without actually removing them. By then Willy had suffered enough by his standards, and all but shoved the poor man aside as he “assisted,” in his words, in completing the survey.

  Ron observed and took note. Due to the case’s appearing to be a homicide, it was going to end up as Willy’s anyhow. In the same vein, the medical examiner didn’t mind, either, knowing that by protocol, the body would soon head north for autopsy. Plus, his boss in Burlington was okay with local cops going through a decedent’s pockets for evidence. It just meant less paperwork for him down the line.

  As a result, Ron bided his time before getting close enough to study the body’s water-bleached face.

  “Head trauma, like we thought?” he asked Willy.

  The latter stepped back, expertly peeling off his one latex glove by pinning it under his useless left arm and exerting a single smooth gesture.

  “Yeah—totally smashed up. Probably from the fall. Indicates he went backward, though, so he didn’t jump. Plus, I found an indentation smack in the middle of his chest—a rectangular bruise, as if something hit him square in the sternum.”

  He squatted again and almost touched the man’s right wrist. “And there’s this.”

  Ron leaned forward. The hand appeared
out of alignment somehow.

  “Fractured,” Willy explained. “Right before he died, so no bruising, really, no swelling. That probably explains the missing gun. He was holding it.”

  Willy pointed to a square of canvas that he’d laid out on the riverbank. On it were the few items he’d removed from the body.

  “The missing gun’s a .45, by the way. That’s the ammo he was carrying.”

  Ron’s eye widened. “That’s quite the cannon.”

  “There’s more,” Willy continued. “They’re frangible rounds, like what air marshals use. No penetrating power at all. And I found an extra barrel.” He held up a short black cylinder, already wrapped in an evidence bag. “Which is even weirder.”

  Ron looked at him, expecting more. Weapons were not an interest of his. He carried a gun as part of the job, and had even used it to shoot someone, which was, thankfully, unusual for most Vermont cops, but he paid the whole topic little attention. Willy’s past as a sniper made him an almost obligatory firearms aficionado, however.

  Of course, he was also a pain in the ass, and so didn’t allow Ron’s silence to serve as a prompt for the next obvious question. Ron sighed and patiently asked, “Why’s that, Willy?”

  Kunkle gave him a pitying look. “Come on, Ron—ace detective like you? The only reasons you swap out barrels is either you target shoot on an Olympic level, or you don’t want anyone matching bullets to your gun—assuming you also police your brass after shooting so they can’t match that, either.”