by Archer Mayor
“But they said when it happened, and I thought it was lucky, ’cause I knew I’d be asked,” Greg countered reasonably.
Willy stopped abruptly and fixed him with an analytical look. “That’s very calculating,” he said slowly, sounding impressed. “You’ve given this some thought, after all.”
“Go away, Detective,” Greg said at last. “I didn’t do anything, and you can’t prove I did.”
Willy knew he was right, and stood up as a result, saying nevertheless, “Not right now, but I gotta tell you, Mitchell: You left me with a bad feeling last time we met, and it’s worse now. You’re up to your neck in this, somehow or other, and I will figure it out. I promise you.”
Greg let out a long breath, his face slack. “Do what you gotta do.”
* * *
David Spinney was back at his post, watching Steve Hobart’s house. This was his third night in a row, and despite his lack of success, he was still convinced he’d eventually get to prove that he was no man to cross.
The problem was that he’d also begun to doubt his methods, his reasoning, and even his self-confidence. He’d been able to reflect—following Hobart to the convenience store for beer, or the Laundromat, or even, last night, to nowhere at all—about the value of all this hormonal posturing. He’d received nothing but courtesy and support from the sheriff, his father, and the few other senior officers who knew the details of his mishap. On the flip side, he’d sensed some snickering from a couple of peers who’d added two and two, even though he knew to discount such criticism. So, did his supporters deserve his possibly making things worse?
By keeping on this course, he was withholding evidence in an ongoing investigation—a detail that would no doubt reduce any success to less than Pyrrhic, to the point of costing him his career.
He let out a sigh, wrestling with this niggling bit of maturity, when he was abruptly slapped out of his reverie by the truck’s passenger door flying open, the dome light coming on, and the dark figure of a man sliding onto the seat next to him.
“Fuck,” he yelled in alarm, his hands flying up to no purpose.
His father laughed good-naturedly. “You oughta kill the dome light when you’re on stakeout. Really gives you away.”
“Dad. For Chrissake. What’re you doing?”
Lester raised his eyebrows. “Shouldn’t that be my line?”
David passed his hand across his face. “Jesus. You knew?”
Lester smiled. “I get the big bucks for this stuff, Dave. Be pretty embarrassing if I didn’t notice it inside my own house. Your mom got concerned, I made a few quiet phone calls about your whereabouts, and then I went looking for your distinguished mode of transportation.” He reached out and patted the truck’s dashboard. “That’s the short version, anyway. It only took a couple of nights.” He pointed ahead with his chin. “Anything yet?”
Recovering somewhat, Dave managed to say, “Nope,” while his brain groped for what might be coming next. This was only a variation on his earlier fears. His father had become a hero to him, only in part because he’d once risked his job to extract Dave from the fringes of a drug investigation. Disappointing him once more—again through poor judgment—made him queasy.
But Lester seemed to be on a completely different plane.
“I take it something dawned on you once everybody stopped asking questions,” his father said pointedly. “Like maybe the name of one of the guys who grabbed you?”
“No,” David answered bluntly. “It was his tattoo.”
“Ah,” Lester said, his wording almost theatrically pointed. “So, again, with the passage of some time and reflection, you remembered enough about it to want to confirm that it belonged to whoever’s living over there?”
Dave hesitated, perceiving what the old man was up to. “Right,” he said slowly. “I wanted to bring a name to the investigators, and not just a description of some cartoon figure.”
“Right,” his father agreed happily, watching him closely.
Dave flushed, embarrassed and grateful. “Probably a little dumb, huh?”
“A little enthusiastic,” Lester agreed. “But not over the top, especially since this just came to you tonight, before you were planning to share your sudden recall tomorrow morning.”
This time, David smiled slightly. “How did you know?”
Lester pointed ahead of them. “That him?”
While Dave had been following Lester’s line of thinking, he’d forgotten to keep an eye on Hobart’s address, where his quarry was now getting into his car.
“Yeah,” he said. “Steve Hobart. When I remembered about the dragon tattoo, I ran it through the computer, and out came this guy.” He patted the binoculars, resting on the console between them. “I confirmed it using these, three nights ago.”
“You mean tonight,” Lester corrected him. “With me.”
Dave nodded. “Yes. Thanks, Dad.”
Hobart’s backup lights came on as he eased into the street.
“Wanna keep him company?” Lester asked.
His son fired up the truck’s engine.
Hobart didn’t go far. He drove to the south end of Bellows Falls, headed west on Route 121 into neighboring Westminster, and pulled into the gouged-up, dirt dooryard of a dilapidated rooming house a few minutes later. Dave killed his headlights, drifted over to the side of the road a hundred yards away, and stopped under the cover of a large and scraggly bush, allowing just enough room for his father to train the binoculars through the windshield on the building. As luck would have it, the nearest streetlamp cast enough light on the scene to throw everything into sharp relief.
“Huh,” Lester grunted, adjusting the glasses. “He’s not getting out. Good for us, maybe.”
The rooming house’s front door opened and three men stepped into the light. Both Spinneys watched as Hobart emerged to greet them, exchanging complicated and formulaic handshakes—imitations from urban neighborhoods that would have eaten these four alive in minutes.
“I recognize the older one,” Lester stated. “Who woulda thunk it? The some’bitch got outta jail without telling me.” He turned to his son. “Any of them ring a bell besides Hobart?”
Dave nodded. “Kind of. The one with the thick leather wrist thing, with spikes on it? I remember something scratching my ankle when they picked me up and tossed me in the trunk. I couldn’t figure out what it could be, but that would fit.”
Lester handed over the binoculars and reached for his phone as the group by the car began filing into the building. “I’m calling for a warrant and a backup team, with high hopes these guys’ll be in there for a while.”
“Who caught your eye, Dad?”
“William ‘Bullfrog’ Kruse,” his father answered, dialing. “I arrested him seven or eight years ago, for Internet porn. He swore he’d get back at me when he got out. I’m calling his parole officer, too. That’ll make disturbing their party in there all the easier.”
He paused before adding, “You may have just figured out how and why you were grabbed by these jackasses, Dave. Nice work.”
* * *
It took them over two hours to get everything organized—so much for the oft-televised version of law enforcement’s speediness, and the reality of rural cops getting the right people in the right place with the right paperwork in short order. Nevertheless, as Lester had hoped, time was on their side—Steve Hobart and Bullfrog Kruse were no doubt happy to spend the evening indoors sampling drugs rather than roaming the neighborhood making pests of themselves.
Whatever the truth, Dave Spinney accepted that he’d been relegated to a spectator seat. As both the victim of this case and the one who’d stretched protocol to crack it open, he knew it behooved him to play no active role in corralling these suspects.
But it didn’t mean he couldn’t watch.
As a result, he was still in his pickup truck, sitting alone, still under the shaggy bush by the road, when the signal was given and the night lit up with blue strobes,
bright lights, and shouted commands issued by a heavily armed entry team.
Of course, not everything went as planned, which was almost the rule in such operations. As Dave sat watching people running about, he saw a second-floor window suddenly explode, blown out by a catapulting body tucked into a ball. It curved through the air like a discarded bag of trash before crashing onto the roof of Steve Hobart’s already battered car and bouncing onto the ground.
Dave let out a short laugh of astonishment before realizing not only that the person was still moving—even getting up and struggling to open the car door—but that it was Steve Hobart himself.
“Shit,” Dave said, seeing the distance the nearest cop had to cover in order to stop Hobart from driving off. “I bet they forgot to take his keys out.”
Sure enough. An oily plume of smoke spewed from the car’s exhaust, seconds before Dave started his own engine and threw his truck into gear as Hobart spun his tires and began squealing toward the street.
His heart sinking with the knowledge of what he had to do, Dave launched himself at a tangent toward the quickly approaching rust-stained beater, slamming into Hobart’s vehicle, forcing it across the dooryard, and folding it around the light pole by the edge of the road.
Dave leaped out, pulled out his off-duty weapon, jumped onto his own hood, and jammed the gun into the neck of the semiconscious Hobart.
“You are such a dick,” Dave screamed at him. “You made me fuck up my truck.”
* * *
“I don’t care if Bullfrog copped to grabbing Dave to scare Lester,” Willy complained to Sammie at home later, after hearing of the Westminster raid’s outcome. “There still may be something else goin’ on, and I am goddamned if I’m gonna expose our kid to danger just because we’re all singing ‘la-di-dah, it’s just a bunch of loser woodchucks beating off as usual.’ No fucking way.”
Sammie was nodding patiently. “You got it,” she said soothingly. “We’ll keep Louise on the job and make sure she’s still packing. Emma doesn’t care, and it’s fine with me.”
Willy, however, wasn’t finished. He chose his next words carefully, and voiced them calmly, to better make his point. “Sam, you don’t have to tell me I’m the wacko paranoid around here. I got that. But high-tech cameras coming and going? Guys who get born at twenty years old? And a jailbird so dumb his nickname is Bullfrog putting together the only kidnapping of a cop in Vermont history? Along with two homicides we can’t figure out? Grant me there’s more goin’ on than meets the eye.”
Sam considered the point, knowing him well enough to distinguish a rant from his uncanny insight.
She reached out to interlace her fingers with his. “I’ll not only grant you that,” she told him, “I’ll trust you to figure it out. And along those lines, you’ll be happy to hear that Joe’s asked me to meet with Linda Lucas. She gave him permission for a limited search of Johnny’s stuff at home, to help in locating him.”
“Limited, how?”
She smiled and glanced at the documents spread before them. “She gets to stand by and choose what we see and what we don’t. It occurred to me that I might be able to lean on the tiller a little, now and then, based on what we already got—it’ll help us later, when we’re explaining how we learned what we know.”
He smiled and kissed her. “Attagirl.”
PART TWO
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Tina Panik slipped her hands into the pockets of her tailored slacks and stared out at the waters of Great South Bay. Her fifty-foot motor yacht, temporarily attached to the seawall beyond the Olympic-sized swimming pool, bobbed gently up and down, reminiscent of a cradle rocking its occupant to sleep. It was a manicured scene of lazy luxury, as offhand, casual, and lacking in subtlety as a peach pit diamond worn by a weekend gardener in designer jeans—not atypical of the Hamptons.
Sleep, however, wasn’t something Tina had enjoyed much recently, not since that first completely off-the-wall phone call from Vermont.
“BB” the man had called himself, sounding like a car mechanic and copping a ’tude to boot. Lucky Tina hadn’t been the one answering the phone, or she would’ve told the guy to fuck off. But it had been made to the New York City office Tina’s father had once called the HQ, as if he were Douglas Goddamned MacArthur, which—in his own mind—he probably had been.
It was recorded, of course, as Tina had made sure they all were nowadays, so she received the benefit of BB’s outrage by proxy. That had been the start of it all.
Now, Christ only knew where and how it was going to end.
She sighed and turned at the quiet knock on the all-white living room’s open doorway. “What now?” she asked.
An older man stood on the threshold—slightly built, cheaply dressed, with a small potbelly and a thin, white comb-over. In this glaringly bright, modernist setting, he looked almost comically out of place. Walter, one of her father’s antique retinue, and someone she hadn’t seen in years before this mess. He had brought the phone call to her attention, because—as he’d explained—she was the boss now, and the boss needed to know what was goin’ on. Sometimes the old ways had value. If he hadn’t acted on instinct, God only knows where this might have led.
“Sorry to bother you, Miss Panik,” he said, bobbing his head respectfully. “But Johnny Lucas has disappeared. The cops pulled in his wife for questioning.”
“She going to know anything?” Tina asked.
Walter shrugged tentatively, as if fearful Tina would lash out at him. The small gesture made her reflect once more on how her father must have handled his subordinates. She’d never seen any of that, being the boss’s cloistered daughter. But she’d always imagined Jack Panik to have been a hard man. Her mother down to the entry-level kitchen help had all certainly behaved as if he were someone to displease at high risk.
“I don’t know what he told her about himself,” Walter said. “Or if she even knows about the old days. They met after he moved up there. He was never supposed to tell nobody, but you don’t know about people.”
“You know, though, don’t you, Walter?” Tina asked. “Isn’t that what you said?”
“Yes, ma’am. When we were starting out for your father, Pauli was like a little brother. That was his name back then.”
She held up her hand. “I don’t need details. I just need to know what’s going to happen next—based on your knowledge.”
Walter looked awkward, and spread out his hands feebly. “It’s kinda up in the air.”
Tina pursed her lips and motioned to one of the two ten-foot Roche Bobois sofas bracketing a large coffee table in the middle of the enormous room. “Sit down, Walter. Make yourself comfortable. Would you like a drink?”
Walter perched on the edge of the couch, as comfortable as a cat on a highway. “No, Miss Panik. I’m fine, thanks.”
Tina chose an armchair, sitting back and crossing her legs. “Worst-case scenario,” she proposed. “If Johnny Lucas—let’s just call him that—gets caught by the police, how much crap can come back to hit us?”
Walter appeared slightly pained by her harsh language, looking down at the white wool rug before answering. “It could hurt. He’s not all the way out, like most of the old-timers, but he ain’t in, either, like me. That makes him kind of a bridge, connecting the past with nowadays—but out in the world, if you get me.”
“I get you. And not that it matters, but how many others like him are there, drifting around like bad smells?”
Walter grimaced. “Good one. Right. I guess only a couple by now—guys we had to make invisible ’cause of the hot water they got in, but too loyal to make disappear. Pauli—Johnny—was a good boy. A stand-up guy. Wasn’t nuthin’ he wouldn’t do for Jack Panik. We were like Army Rangers back then—hot to trot and tough as hell.”
Again, Tina held up a hand. “Stay on track, Walter.”
“Sorry, miss. Anyhow, a few of us got carried away, and when your father decided to change the operation slightly, and distance ours
elves from the bad old days, we had to figure out what to do with ’em—the ones that weren’t dead or in jail already. This was when you were still in school—long time ago.”
Tina’s gaze drifted over to the cold fireplace. Despite keeping the past at arm’s length, she wasn’t such an idiot as to have been ignorant of its existence. The Kennedys had cut their teeth running booze across the border, and John D. Rockefeller’s father was a snake oil salesman, after all. On a lesser scale, Jack Panik had merely copied from such ruthless examples of American enterprise—and then concluded his career with an equally adept display of soothing public relations. Tina had only continued the trend, posing as a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, while in fact generating most of her income through insider trading, fraudulent stock deals, and an assortment of white-collar schemes. Nevertheless, she’d known little of her father’s earlier machinations.
She took a breath and asked Walter, “I know I told you to handle this when it started, and not to involve me directly. But I need to know if it’s getting messy. For example, when this BB character called and started screaming about … whoever it was.”
“Hank Mitchell,” Walter said softly.
“He said we weren’t supposed to have killed him. What did he mean by that? Who was Mitchell?”
“A nobody, miss. Just somebody in the way.”
“In the way of what?”
Walter shifted in his seat, getting slightly more comfortable without actually sitting back. “Your father was changing the old ways, like I said. Pau … Johnny was in a jam; Jack needed to clean the money he was taking in. At the time, it seemed like a no-brainer. Give Johnny a new identity and have him set up a money-laundering operation, someplace in the boondocks.”
“Vermont,” Tina filled in.
“Right. Jack already had others like it, around New York. This wasn’t such a leap. And Johnny, who was a go-getter, said that part of Vermont was ripe just then ’cause of a major construction project—a nuclear power plant. He said there had to be a bunch of businesses who’d be good for washing money. And he was right.”
