Tag Man

by Archer Mayor

  “That one’s not either,” Willy commented, his voice serious.

  “What?” Sam asked.

  Willy’s arm appeared between them, his finger extended. “There’s a car parked in the bushes over there, half hidden.”

  She swung her head and stared. “Where? How can you see that?”

  “I was trained to,” the ex-sniper answered grimly.

  “You see anyone inside it?” Joe asked.

  Lester had already extracted a pair of night-vision binoculars from a canvas bag at his feet. Of them all, he was the one who most enjoyed the latest tools of the trade. He quickly brought the glasses to bear as Joe slowed to a crawl.

  “Empty,” he announced.

  “Unless the guy’s on the floorboards,” Willy said.

  “Check it out?” Sam asked.

  Something was playing on Joe’s sense of urgency to keep moving.

  “You get the registration?” he asked.

  “Yup.”

  He sped up. “We’ll do it later,” he said simply.

  Earlier, unknown to them, Dan had given his daughter the scenic tour, traveling the ghost of the old racetrack proper, and thus circling the pond. Joe stuck to the broad, paved access road leading to the northern parking lot, where they could see the narrow end of the building in the distance, looking vaguely like a snub-nosed cruise ship, beached and left to rot in the rapidly growing gloom.

  * * *

  Sally was staggering, fighting to keep on her feet as the man who’d grabbed her half dragged her downstairs by the hair to where Rick kept his office. In his other hand, he held a knife to her throat.

  “One word,” he said in a whisper. “One sound, and I cut your throat.”

  As they dropped below the dining area, she thought she heard a sound far behind them. Her father’s voice?

  She tried feebly to break away, only to have her neck snapped back by another violent yank.

  The man’s face was so close to her own, their noses were almost touching. “You stupid or something? You want to die?”

  She stared at him.

  He stopped at the foot of the staircase, back in the corridor that led to the exit and his car beyond.

  “Answer me,” he insisted. “Or better still…” He let her go and stepped back suddenly, pulling a large pistol from under his jacket.

  She staggered against the wall and stood staring at him.

  He waved the gun toward the stairs. “You want your dad to die?”

  She opened her mouth to protest when he swung the gun around like a snake’s head and almost hit her in the teeth with it.

  “Quiet,” he hissed.

  “No. Please,” she pleaded, barely audible.

  “Then move your ass. Now.”

  He shoved her roughly by the shoulder and she began to stumble in the direction indicated. They heard another shout from upstairs, this one closer and clearer.

  “Sally.”

  * * *

  Hauser took advantage of the abrupt darkness between the woods and the back of the stadium to step clear of his cover and enter the parking lot. Like a dim fire far away, the sky’s lingering pink tinge barely colored the gap overhead.

  His eyes were fixed on Dan’s and Lloyd’s parked cars, and beyond them the small door with the broken glass. A movement inside—the smallest flash of something pale—caught his attention.

  For no reason beyond his own obsession, he saw only what he chose to.

  “Dan Kravitz,” he murmured. “Dan Kravitz,” and he pulled the gun free of his waistband.

  * * *

  “There,” Willy said from the backseat. “Straight ahead.”

  Joe accelerated and ignited his high beams starkly revealing a shabby-looking man in the middle of the parking lot, growing in size as they approached. He twisted from facing the parked cars to the left to looking straight into their headlights, his eyes wide and disoriented.

  Then he suddenly returned to his original position.

  At that same moment, they saw movement at the door—a girl in a white shirt, followed by a man holding something dark.

  “Gun,” Sammie shouted, as a flash of light erupted not from the twosome but from the man standing in the open.

  No one fell by the door, but as the man there raised his own gun to return fire, the shooter swung around once more and brought his weapon to bear on Joe’s car, firing twice. As Joe slammed on the brakes and yelled, “Get out. Get out,” they heard a thud strike the engine block and saw a star explode in the middle of the windshield.

  Despite his disability, Willy got out first, diving into a tight roll and coming up on his feet, drawing his gun from its holster.

  “Don’t move. Police!” he yelled, as Sammie landed beside him, on her stomach with both hands outstretched, clutching her .40-caliber. Joe was still skidding to a stop ten feet off to their side.

  The man before them looked momentarily confused—his gun arm straight out but his weapon silent—until the Hummer’s slamming door startled him.

  He fired a third shot in their direction, the bullet whining over Sammie’s head, before both she and Willy opened up, dropping him onto the pavement like a laundry bag cut from a rope.

  At the same moment, the Hummer burst into life and, squealing tires spewing twin plumes of burning rubber, pulled away, heading south down the parking lot.

  “Get him, Joe,” Willy shouted to his boss, before realizing that their car had been crippled, a thin cloud of steam rising from under its hood.

  * * *

  Just inside the stadium door, unseen by all, Dan Kravitz steadied himself against the wall with an outstretched hand and stared at Paul Hauser’s motionless body, theatrically frozen in the police car’s lights.

  Sally was gone, in the fraction of a second. He’d seen Jordan throw her into his car and peel out while the bullets were flying. He fought to keep breathing.

  He raised a fist in frustration, as if about to strike the wall, before the shouting outside brought him back to the present, and to what needed to be done.

  Without hesitation, he faded backward into the darkness, vanishing as he knew all too well how to do.

  * * *

  Joe was crouching by the fender of the crippled car, gun in hand. “Who’s hit?” he shouted into the night. “Talk to me.”

  “We’re good,” Sammie said. “Willy, too.”

  “I’m okay, boss,” Lester answered from the vehicle’s other side.

  Gingerly, his adrenaline pulsing, Joe stood up. He thought he understood what had happened, if only because he could now rerun it in his head: Jordan gone with Sally; what was presumably Hauser down and not moving, his gun within sight and far from his hand; and as for Kravitz, no sign, but also not considered a threat.

  It was done. He didn’t know the hows or the whys, but it was done—or appeared to be.

  “Okay,” he called out, before reaching in through the car window. “Secure everything. I’m calling for backup and a shoot team and a BOL on Jordan and his Hummer. I’m also going to pass along this bastard’s On-Star information. Let’s do this by the numbers. We have a kidnapping still in motion.”

  The mission was clear—the sightlines truer than they often were in police work—and as Joe began to work the problem with both radio and cell phone from his improvised command center, watching his team spread out and get busy, he felt a calm settle back within him at last, like the yearned-for return of an old and intimate companion.

  His pain and his longing and his chasm-deep regret notwithstanding, he felt in that moment his battered hull roll back onto an even keel. He knew himself then to be a man perhaps in mourning, but a man intact.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Dan stepped inside his inner sanctum—neat, white, windowless, as organized and clean as a museum exhibition—and closed the door behind him, pressing against it with his shoulder blades. He was hot, flushed, his heart hammering, his hands trembling—having a full-blown panic attack.

  F
rom the moment of Sally’s abduction, now four hours ago, he’d been struggling to stay centered.

  But the weight of his doubts about his own sanity was pulling him down. He felt trapped halfway up an endless set of stairs, saddled with a rock-filled backpack that only grew heavier as he ascended.

  “Sally, Sally, Sally,” he whispered, as he had been compulsively for hours, using her name as a guiding light. He was down to his own basic elements now, of repetition, of orderliness, of trying to exert control over anarchy. As he’d driven a truck that he’d stolen near Pownal, after fleeing the racetrack, he’d steered solely with his left hand, using his right to arrange and rearrange the maps and pens and general trash that he’d found scattered across the seat beside him—almost hitting the ditch several times in the process.

  All the while repeating his daughter’s name.

  He blinked several times. Here in his room at least, everything was as he’d left it—every object touched by him, placed by him, brought here by him. Functionality was addressed, the role of each item clear and defined, the very pattern in which they were displayed refined through constant trial.

  There could be no perfection in Dan’s life—no real hope of release from the tensions of his world. But this room, at least, was better than almost anywhere else.

  And if there was any hope for Sally, this was where he might achieve it.

  That very notion cleared his mind slightly. He stopped mumbling her name, took a deep breath, and shook out his hands—like a pianist preparing to play.

  He’d been stricken by what had occurred at the racetrack, but not solely because of Sally. Seeing Hauser and Jordan in the same place at the same time had come as a complete surprise. All his thoughts had been given to the former, whom he’d seen lurking, after all, outside the American Legion in Bellows Falls. The logic had fit: Dan had stumbled over the man’s murder album, and in so doing had disturbed a hornet’s nest.

  But Lloyd Jordan?

  Dan crossed his immaculate room, sat in his wheeled office chair, and rolled over to his filing cabinet, where he’d placed the documents that he’d stolen from Jordan’s office but only glanced at cursorily.

  Part of him felt like an idiot, that he’d never fully addressed the code protecting the content of that material. But ironically, it wasn’t his habit to pry unnecessarily.

  * * *

  Lloyd Jordan might have called Vermont home for a few years, but he’d never had any interest in learning much about the state. The only newspapers he subscribed to came from New York and Boston, the radio he enjoyed was beamed in via satellite, and he generally avoided contact with the locals, all of whom he’d labeled “woodchucks,” in any case.

  He was an urban animal, trained to a different pace, and—more important right now—dulled to a rural environment’s sense of priorities.

  Thus it was that while he knew he should dump the Hummer and figure out how to exploit what he had in Kravitz’s daughter, he had both a crook’s inborn contempt for law enforcement and a city dweller’s inured dismissiveness about street violence.

  What he didn’t compute, therefore, was that kidnapping children in the middle of a police shootout was a showstopper in Vermont, and that every cop within seventy-five miles of Pownal was aware of him and his eyesore vehicle, not to mention its on-board gadgetry.

  Which helped explain why, less than two hours after he’d squealed away from the racetrack, he saw a pair of blue lights flashing in his rearview mirror in Brandon—almost to his goal of Burlington, where he’d been hoping to pause and regroup.

  “Shit,” he said, almost conversationally.

  “What?” his passenger demanded from her seat on the car’s far side, as distant from him as if they’d been riding in a mobile home. He had taken the time to duct tape her wrists and ankles, and to fasten her seat belt, but he had left her free to speak after she’d agreed not to scream or yell.

  He didn’t answer directly. “Well, let’s play devil’s advocate—maybe it’s not me.”

  Without touching the brakes, he twisted the wheel as he passed the fire house, and pulled onto something named High Street, where he immediately hit the accelerator to extend the gap between them and the cruiser behind.

  The blue strobes followed.

  Jordan gave a dour, tight-lipped smile, the situation bringing him back several decades, to when cat-and-mouse car games with the Boston cops had been routine.

  “Here we go,” he said to no one in particular. Far in her corner, Sally did her best to brace her bound feet against the rubber-matted floorboards, as the oversized vehicle began to leap and shudder over the road’s imperfections.

  They could hear the wailing of the patrol car tailing them.

  High Street ran straight for several hundred feet before crossing Park and becoming Marble, just by the church. The Hummer virtually flew through the intersection as Sally closed her eyes against another car’s headlights that seemed close enough to her window to be within reach. An angry, belated horn blast briefly commingled with the siren.

  A split in the road came next, where Jordan bore right based solely on the widest option. By now they were pushing eighty miles per hour, on a dark and narrow residential street.

  There, inevitably, they ran out of luck. Or so it seemed.

  On what would have been a gentle curve on Forest Dale Road, Lloyd caught his left wheels on some gravel, overcompensated to correct the skid, and ended up launching them into a dense growth of trees, which appeared before the broad windshield with the abruptness of a slammed door. Instinctively, they both screamed, Lloyd threw his hands up, and they became enmeshed in an orchestration of slaps, thuds, crashes, bangs, and tearing sounds.

  But they stayed upright, and they kept moving. Through it all, Jordan had kept his foot on the gas pedal.

  Sally opened her eyes to his suddenly yelling, “Yeah. Damn. You son of a bitch.” Through what was left of the windshield and thanks to one headlight only, she saw a smooth and undulating gray-green wasteland, rapidly disappearing beneath their wheels as they kept careening forward, although now accompanied not by a siren but by a raucous orchestra of rattles and metallic complaints.

  “Where are we?” she asked despite herself.

  He was laughing, she thought, almost hysterically. “It’s a fucking golf course. Can you believe that? We got that prick cold.”

  It was a short-lived triumph. Exhilarated by his newfound invulnerability, Lloyd took a low rise before them at full power, throwing them airbound once more, along the edge of a large sand trap, and from there—as if in slow motion—over onto their side.

  There was a deep structural groaning like a metal building collapsing, a feeling of weightlessness amid an all-encompassing whooshing sound, and finally—at last—complete and utter silence.

  Sally blinked, staring straight ahead, hanging upside down by her seat belt, and waited for something else to happen.

  It did. Lloyd Jordan, groaning, crawled out of his shattered side window and disappeared. Several minutes later, accompanied by flashlights and much shouting, the police arrived.

  * * *

  “That rich enough?” Joe asked. “I hate it when cocoa’s too thin.”

  Sally nodded in midsip, her expression appreciative. The two of them were alone in a pleasantly decorated interview room two blocks from Brattleboro’s police, usually reserved for recorded conversations with traumatized children. Sally didn’t totally qualify, but her involvement in all this was vague enough—and Joe had enough pull locally—to allow for a little leeway.

  Still, the camera in the corner and the mic discreetly placed on the low table between them spoke to why they were here, offers of cocoa notwithstanding. This young woman’s father was a suspected criminal, and her role in his activities was unknown.

  It was by now almost midnight.

  “No, it’s good,” she answered after swallowing. “Thank you.”

  “Least I can do for someone who’s been through what you
have,” he said.

  She smiled wearily. “Yeah.”

  “Did you know the man who grabbed you?” he asked.

  Her voice rose. “I have no clue. One second, I’m heading downstairs for a bull session with the maintenance guy, the next it’s people shooting at each other and this crazy man throws me into the car.”

  “Did you see what actually happened? Who was shooting at who?” Joe asked, keeping his tone offhand.

  For a split second, she thought about correcting his grammar, but resisted the urge. Instead, she answered truthfully. “No. I just saw gun flashes all over the place. A bullet whizzed by—I heard that—but that was about it.”

  So she didn’t know that Hauser had died, he thought. “What did the man tell you once you got out of there?”

  She thought for a moment. “He just wrapped the duct tape around me and told me to shut up. That was it until the police began chasing us.”

  “You’d never set eyes on him before?”

  “No.”

  “You ever hear the name Lloyd Jordan?”

  “No.”

  “Your father never spoke of him?”

  That stopped her again. No one yet had associated her with her father this evening. It had just been a succession of people handing her off to one another—all the way here. They’d asked her questions about how she was feeling and whether she had suffered any damage or pain. Nothing about Dan.

  “No,” she said cautiously.

  “Do you know where your father is now?”

  “No.”

  “But he was with you at the racetrack.”

  It came out as a statement. She pondered how to handle it.

  “What were the two of you doing there, Sally?” Joe asked.

  His voice made her study him more closely. It was kind—genuinely fatherly, as if he were an interested friend.

  But even though she remembered meeting him a year ago she knew better.

  “I didn’t say he was there,” she said.

  Gunther smiled, respecting her thoughtfulness. It might stretch things out, getting her to open up, but he suspected that it would make her a more reliable witness once he got her there.

  Assuming he succeeded.