Assassin Hunter

by August Palumbo

  “What is it?”

  “I know I screwed up pushing for a wire on the Cliff Dubroc deal. But even though you didn’t know Tanzini would be involved, you were ready for them. You knew you were dealing with hardened criminals. You knew how they act and what they might try. With this Duplessis guy, you’ve got a question mark. You don’t know who he wants killed, or why. From what we gathered on him we know he’s a mean prick. Expect the unexpected.”

  “Thanks for the warning, but I’m ahead of you. I’d rather deal with ten Tanzini’s than one of these off-the-wall guys.”

  We met Lofton in his hotel room. He had several black, plastic attaché’ cases spread on the bed and on the small table in the room. Some were open, which exposed intricate needle gauges and knob controls. Small red and yellow lights beamed from inside the cases; some of them blinked. Lofton took a thin, gold-colored wire from a cellophane package, and told me to remove my shirt. He stretched the wire from the small of my back, around my side, and up the front of my stomach to mid-chest. He slowly and carefully taped the entire length of wire to my skin with a special skin-colored adhesive tape. The only part of the wire now exposed was the last inch on each end. I looked in the large mirror on the wall, and the long tape reminded me of a surgical scar.

  “Turn around, Tony,” Lofton instructed.

  I turned my back toward him, and through the mirror I watched him place a small battery pack that looked like a credit card into the small of my back. He applied the tape over it, and plugged the wire into the pack. Lyle sat on the edge of the bed, and watched the procedure like a boy sitting on a curb watching a construction site.

  Lofton then held a tiny, cylinder-shaped microphone, no bigger than a grain of rice, which he plugged into the end of the wire on my chest. He used several testing devices to check the transmitter and spent a few minutes adjusting the controls in one of the attaché’ cases. He tapped his finger onto the end of the mike and a loud, thumping sound came from the case. He double checked the strength of the battery pack and said, “All set.”

  I buttoned up my shirt as Lofton removed his gun from a dresser drawer and shoved it into his shoulder holster. “How does it feel?” he asked.

  I twisted my body back and forth and felt the tape pull at my skin. “Stiff,” I answered. My voice came out of a speaker in the case that rested on the table.

  “Good, that means the tape is holding.” Lofton looked at both of us. “Okay guys, you’ve got two hours, tops, out of the battery pack. After that the mike goes dead. Get your business done as quickly as possible.”

  Before we left the room I felt a moderate stinging-burning sensation from the wire. I had worn them before, but had forgotten how uncomfortable they were. Lofton explained that the wire would not get any hotter. But if it cooled off altogether, it meant the battery was dead and it would no longer transmit. Lyle helped Lofton carry his equipment to their car, and I got on with the business of forgetting about the wire.

  I took the Camaro west out of Lafayette to Rayne, Louisiana and drove to the Blue Goose. Lyle and Lofton, as well as the other vehicle surveillance team, lagged a couple of miles behind, far out of sight. During the thirty minute drive I sang along with the radio, recited dumb poems, blew raspberries, and whistled, just to aggravate Lyle and Lofton, who were forced to listen to every sound. They could hear me but had no way to respond. I laughed out loud at the thought.

  The bar was an old wooden-framed building located on an isolated section of two-lane highway. It resembled a hunting camp. A large, screened porch wrapped around the front and sides. The shelled parking lot and the building itself were dimly lit. An old, rusted, Dixie Beer sign hung from a metal pole out front with Blue Goose painted across the top of the sign.

  I spoke to Lyle through the mike and gave him my position in the parking lot. I fought the natural tendency to bend my head toward the mike. “It’s ten minutes after ten. There’s a few pickup trucks in the lot, but not Frank’s. I’m parked on the east side of the bar.”

  Twenty more minutes passed, and Frank Duplessis had not shown. Several thoughts came to mind, and I shared them with Lyle through the wire. “After all this, Duplessis gets cold feet? Is this another bullshit case that doesn’t materialize?” I knew the covering agents were as apprehensive as I was, but the veterans had been through this kind of thing before. Just then, a set of high beam headlights appeared behind me. Duplessis had arrived, some forty minutes late. “The subject is here. Start your tape,” I said into the mike.

  Duplessis got out of his pickup and got into the passenger seat of my car. He placed a medium-sized flat cardboard box onto the console between us. The box rattled a little and made a thud when he put it down. “Ten grand,” he muttered. “The other ten when it’s done, right?”

  “Fucking A,” I told him.

  “Everything you need for the job is in there.”

  I unfolded the top of the box and pulled out a stack of bills that totaled ten thousand dollars, neatly wrapped in a paper bank band. I placed the money back in the box and removed a vintage Colt .38 special caliber revolver. The gun had a four inch barrel that had been threaded an inch from the end. Next to the gun was a steel pipe that threaded onto the end of the gun. I screwed it onto the muzzle, then unscrewed it and put it back in the box.

  “That’s the silencer,” Duplessis said. I haven’t tried it myself, but it’ll work.”

  I didn’t answer and checked out the other items in the box: a folding pocket knife, a length of quarter-inch nylon rope, and a roll of gray duct tape.

  “What’s all this crap?” I asked.

  Duplessis then threw me a curve ball. He said the man he wanted murdered lived in Crowley, a town several miles away. “Let’s go, I’ll show you his house.” I had hoped to complete the immediate deal with him there in the parking lot, but I was forced to go with the flow. He directed me into Crowley, about fifteen minutes away, and during the ride explained his motive. “Antoine Broussard fucked up my life.” I said little and hoped to get as much of his story transmitted to tape as possible.

  “I threw my wife out a few months ago. She went to live with her elderly parents. Then she started dating Broussard. He’s got money and lots of it. I’ll never pry her away from that.” Duplessis described in great detail his plan for how to kill Broussard. He directed me to an upscale residential area in downtown Crowley. He pointed out a large, two-story, antebellum style white frame residence with large columns in front. A wide, semi-circle driveway in the middle of the front yard led to the main entrance of the house.

  “The primary elections are Saturday. Broussard is a poll commissioner, he’ll be checking the voting precincts. They close at eight o’clock. About eight-thirty he’ll pull his car into the carport on the west side of the big house and go inside through a side door. That’s where you can jump him and force him inside.”

  “Who else lives here?”

  “Just him, that rotten sonofabitch. But Danielle will be with him.”

  “Danielle?”

  “My wife.”

  “Wait a minute . . .”

  “Don’t worry, I don’t want you to kill her.”

  I parked the car around the corner from the house and turned to Duplessis. “You didn’t tell me anything about somebody else being involved.”

  He looked directly at me. His eyes were opened wide, as if in a trance. He spoke excitedly. “I want you to tie her up. Bind her hands and feet. Then beat her. Make her suffer. Slap her face. Kick her in the tits. But don’t kill her. And call her a whore. Loud! In her ear! Make him watch. Then blow his brains out in front of her. Cut off his dick and shove it in her mouth, then tape it shut. Leave her there tied up near the body until somebody finds her.”

  Now I knew why the other items were in his cardboard box along with the gun and silencer. His eyes had the strangest look I had ever seen. He seemed to get off on just telling me about it, like a man whose dream was finally coming true. I sat silent for a minute and hoped t
he wire was transmitting. It still burned my skin, which was a good indication.

  “I’ll have to kill her, Frank. She’s a witness.”

  “No! No! No!” He shook his head side to side. “I want her back. But I want the bitch to pay for what she’s done. And if she watches him die she’ll know it’s over. She’ll have to come back to me.”

  I didn’t want to overplay my hand, so I fanned the cash he paid me back at the Blue Goose. “Okay, you’ve got a deal.”

  On the drive back to the bar I checked the time and it was almost eleven-thirty. The battery pack was losing power by now, so I sped up and kept Duplessis talking. We arrived in the parking lot and I said, “Have my other ten grand here Saturday night. If your times are correct, I’ll be here at nine-thirty.”

  “No. I want to hear on the news the following day about what happened. That way I know you did it and you’re not ripping me off.”

  “Bullshit, Frank. I’m not sticking around here that long. I’ll be hundreds of miles away by Sunday. You meet me here right after it’s over and I’ll bring you proof that he’s dead.”

  “What proof?”

  “I’ll cut his tongue out and bring it to you. His ear, his eye, what do you want?” I was bluffing, but it worked. Duplessis recoiled at the idea.

  He thought for a minute, then said, “Bring me his wallet, his papers, his wristwatch. I’ll know he’s dead.”

  “You’ll get it. And be sure you’re here with my fucking money or I’ll hunt your ass down too.”

  Before he got out of the car, Duplessis turned back and said, “Be sure, Tony. Be sure to beat her in the face. And don’t forget to call her a whore.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  He got into his truck and drove away. I just sat for a couple of minutes and thought about the bizarre murder plot that had just unfolded. Duplessis had followed Broussard for some time and knew his activities and habits. He certainly wanted Broussard eliminated from competition. But in a strange way, the victim was no more than a prop in his plan to humiliate his wife and drive her back to him. I leaned back in the seat, let out a sigh, and spoke into the mike.

  “You guys got that? What a sick bastard.”

  I carried the box of items Duplessis gave me up to agent Jerry Lofton’s room at the Hilton. I couldn’t wait to get the wire and adhesive tape off. When I arrived, Lofton was securing his equipment. Lyle was busy on the phone with the surveillance agents.

  “Did you copy everything over the wire?” I asked.

  Lofton grinned. “Clear as a bell, we heard every word.”

  I hurried to unbutton my shirt. Lofton stopped what he was doing and directed his attention to retrieving the gear from my body. He slowly unplugged the small mike, then the wire from the battery pack. He cut the adhesive tape parallel to the wire. He stopped suddenly and looked straight at me. “There’s only two ways to do this, Tony. Which way do you want it?”

  “Rip it off.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want the slow peel?”

  I braced myself and said, “Get on with it.”

  He walked around me and manipulated the tape that was stuck so tightly to the skin on my back. He dug his fingernails under the tape, then with both hands pulled sideways with a force that almost threw me into the mirror. I yelled with pain as the tape tore away. Lofton then spun me around and grabbed the end of the tape on my chest. With the same force, he pulled down with a sudden jerk. I was unable to muffle a scream as the tape pulled off a wide path of hair from my chest and stomach.

  “Sorry, pal. But all that tape beats having the wire fall down your ass crack in the middle of a deal.”

  Through the mirror I saw a two-inch wide, red welt down the middle of my body. Lofton pointed to a bottle of rubbing alcohol and cotton balls on his dresser. I used it to remove the remainder of adhesive on my skin. When the pain subsided, Lyle and I sat at the table and examined the contents of the box from Duplessis.

  The wad of money was wrapped in two white paper bank bands with $5,000 printed on each, along with the words “Lafayette Savings & Loan.” The Colt .38 was a six-shot revolver that was originally blue steel, but was now a gray color from age and wear. “An oldie but a goodie,” Lyle said.

  There were six rounds of .38 special ammunition inside a small coin envelope, along with a six-inch blade pocket-knife, a one-hundred foot length of nylon rope, and a roll of duct tape. Except for the bullets, all the items were new. The silencer was hand-machined, a double-cylinder length of pipe with steel wool packed inside and holes drilled through it to muffle sound. Lofton finished packing his gadgets and joined us at the table. We passed the items around to each other for closer examination. I peered at the evidence and said, “A sick bastard, but what an amateur. Silencers don’t work on revolvers. The sound and blast comes out of the cylinder even if the muzzle is muffled. And look at this other shit. He probably went to the corner hardware store and bought it.”

  “Doesn’t something bother you about that?” Lyle asked. “This guy is committed. He made sure you got everything you need to carry out his execution in detail. It’s scary to know there are sickos like this out there.”

  “Every gun has at least one story behind it,” Lofton said as he looked at the Colt. “This gun was made before World War Two, when few records were kept. We probably can’t trace it. Even though the silencer generally won’t quiet a revolver, if it muffles a minimum number of decibels we’ve got him on possession of an assassination device.”

  “You’re right,” Lyle added. “We’ll wait for the lab tests on that one. But we knew going in that we might not get the federal case. So what? We’ve got his ass nailed on the murder contract, and we got him in Acadia Parish. He can’t get the charges deep-sixed there. When he shows up Saturday with the other half of the money, we slam the door on him.”

  “This doesn’t concern me, guys,” Lofton said, “but how are you going to convince Duplessis that Broussard is dead?”

  I looked at Lyle. “We can pull it off. Get the scoop on Broussard and Danielle Duplessis.” I looked at the items in the box, then back up at the other men. “We don’t need a wire Saturday. The risk of Duplessis searching me is greater than the need for more tapes on him. We’ve got plenty already. So . . . no wire. You can take your clandestine doodads back to Washington, Jerry.” They nodded in agreement.

  “Then I guess I’m done here,” Lofton said. “I’ll send you a copy of tonight’s tapes as soon as I get the originals processed. Good luck, boys.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER 24

  “Stake me to a couple of C-notes,” T-Red spoke softly out of the side of his mouth.

  “Sure,” I answered, “but if you win I get the stake back. Fat chance, since you haven’t won since Columbus came over.”

  I rapped on the entrance to the tack shop, a rusted metal door with remnants of gray paint that was full of small dents. The old wooden building with tin roofing sat back from the shell road just outside track property. It was a Tuesday night, which meant the track was dark. The weekly poker game provided relief to some of the gamblers who had withdrawal symptoms from not being able to bet the horses for a night. A dozen or so street characters floated in and out of the game, as well as racetrackers, depending on whose wallet was strong or weak. There was no telling who would be there on this night.

  An apprentice jockey no more than sixteen years old answered the door and walked us through the shelves of horse liniment, vitamins, and salve concoctions. One-hundred pound sacks of oats lined the walls, and the store had a strong medicinal smell. We entered the smaller back room where four men and a woman sat around a large, round card table playing gin rummy to pass the time until more poker players arrived. I knew all of them. They cut the rummy game short when we arrived, and Pierre D’Argonne pointed for us to sit at the two empty chairs. His tan Stetson was cocked back on his head and he puffed thick smoke from the stub of a cheap cigar that contained more paper than tobacco. Phil Tanzini was seated direc
tly across the table from me and winked at me silently as I sat down.

  “Don’t sit next to me, you fucking Jonah.” A loud voice directed the words at T-Red and came from Cabbage Boy, a small black man in a sleeveless shirt that exposed well-developed shoulders and arms.

  “Go play with yourself,” T-Red shouted back while he unfolded the two hundred I had given him.

  “Let’s be gentlemen and play poker,” D’Argonne interrupted.

  “I don’t want that hard luck bastard next to me,” Cabbage Boy insisted. His face was drawn and had a large black cross tattooed on his cheekbones. I recognized it as the initiation cross, given to new juvenile inmates at the Louisiana correctional facility at Scotlandville. Since he was now about thirty years old, he had obviously carried this marker for a number of years. He had other prison tattoos on his arms, the crude permanent marks made by other inmates with India ink and safety pin needles. They verified that he was a convicted felon, having served time, and as such couldn’t be licensed on most tracks. But he was only one of many granted licenses by the Louisiana racing commission for various reasons, one of which was the easy accessibility of governor’s pardons. He was a freelance groom and hot-walker, and had brought stolen property to the game on a regular basis in order to convert it to quick cash.

  “Sit here,” I told T-Red. I got up out of my seat and took the one next to Cabbage Boy.

  “A real diplomat,” said Penny. He was a tall, bronze-skinned man who was always quick with a lighthearted comment. He was also a degenerate gambler who would rather gamble than eat. And he ate a lot. He had a large belly that hung over his beltless pants and wore old deck shoes with no socks. Rounding out the players was Dottie Sinclair, a tough thirty-five year old pony girl. Her stringy, straw colored hair fell around a sun-dried face that contained thousands of small reddish-brown freckles. She rode the lead horses, or ponies, that escorted the racehorses to the starting gate, and doubled as a groom for D’Argonne’s assembly line in the mornings.