Intent to Kill

by James Grippando

  She pulled her dress on over her head and fastened her stiletto heels. “Sorry, pal. That mess you made in my hair doubled the price.”

  Vladimir didn’t argue. It was money well spent. He took another fifty from the envelope. “Now, beat it.”

  She crossed the room with attitude, snatched the cash from his hand, and started toward the door. Vladimir rolled across the bed and beat her to it. She seemed surprised that he would open the door for her, but that surprise turned to concern when he leaned his shoulder against it to prevent her from leaving.

  She smiled nervously. “You want to go again?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, if you have any friends who—”

  “I don’t have any friends.”

  She swallowed hard. “Okay. But if you change your mind, you know how to reach me.”

  He grabbed her jaw tightly and forced her to look at him directly. “That’s exactly right,” he said, his expression deadly serious. “I know how to reach you. I know where to reach you. I know when to reach you. So forget you ever met me.”

  He released the viselike grip on her jaw.

  “Okay,” she said, barely able to talk. “Whatever you say.”

  Vladimir unlocked the deadbolt and opened the door. She left with the haste of a freed hostage, and just as soon as she was gone, Vladimir secured the door with both the chain and deadbolt.

  It was time to get back to business.

  He went to his leather bag, removed his .22 caliber with silencer, and laid the tools of the trade on the bed. The gun was a familiar model to him, but this one was brand new—stolen from a gun shop in New York. It would be used once and then discarded, preferably in deep water. It was his weapon of choice for execution-style killings: barrel in the mouth or to the back of the head, the low-caliber bullet entering the cranium and ricocheting off the inside of the skull, no exit wound, turning the brain to scrambled eggs. Just in case things went wrong, he also packed a 9 mm Glock with two ammunition clips.

  Unfortunately, there was no way of knowing where his prey might be. Vladimir couldn’t search every corner of Pawtucket and Providence. But a guy like Babes wasn’t too savvy. All Vladimir had to do was pick a spot—a logical place that Babes would run to—and wait.

  The Checker crushed out his cigarette, leaned back on the bed, and drew a mental map of his return to the North Burial Ground and the Dawes family crypt.

  55

  IT WAS AFTER SUNSET WHEN EMMA REACHED THE MORGUE.

  All afternoon she had been negotiating with Garrisen’s criminal-defense attorney, trying to get Garrisen to give up the name of the thug he’d hired to kill Yaz, beat up Ryan, and silence Babes. No dice. Garrisen wasn’t talking.

  But by sundown, Emma had a break of another kind.

  The assistant medical examiner was waiting for her in the autopsy room. A wave of ice-cold air flooded in from the air-conditioning ducts overhead, forcing Emma to keep her raincoat on. Beneath the white sheet, laid out on the gurney, was Yaz’s battered body.

  The door opened, and two detectives from the sheriff’s office entered. The woman with them was a dirty blonde—literally. She was dressed like a bag lady in construction boots, flannel shirt, ankle-length skirt, and an old knit beret. A scar from a knife or a nasty fall ran across her chin, and on her neck was a bad tattoo of a long-stemmed rose. The officers led her to the gurney and stopped on the side opposite Emma. The expression on the woman’s face was somewhere between scared and sad.

  “Thank you for coming,” said Emma.

  The woman nodded.

  The senior detective spoke up. “She came by the station this afternoon. Said her friend was missing. From the way she described him, we thought it might be our John Doe.”

  Or Yaz Doe, thought Emma.

  “Are we ready?” the medical examiner asked.

  The woman nodded again.

  The ME started to lift the sheet, but Emma stopped him. “Ma’am, I have to warn you. He suffered a severe blow to the head. This may be disturbing.”

  “I’m ready,” she said softly. From her voice, Emma guessed she was much younger than she looked.

  The ME pulled the sheet back to reveal Yaz’s face.

  The woman gasped and covered her mouth. “It’s him,” she said, and then she quickly looked away.

  The examiner put the sheet back.

  Emma gave Yaz’s friend a moment to regain her composure. “I know this is difficult for you,” said Emma, “but can you tell us his name?”

  “Cookie is what we called him. He loved vanilla wafers. I never knew his real name.”

  “Where did Cookie live?”

  “Here and there,” the woman said with a shrug.

  “Did he have a favorite place?”

  “Well, I ain’t never been to it. But every now and then, I heard him talk about an old crypt in the North Burial Ground.”

  Emma felt like she’d struck gold. “Did he mention any crypt in particular?”

  “If he did, I don’t remember it. Cemeteries give me the creeps.”

  Emma asked a few more questions, but the woman had nothing to add. Emma thanked her and left the follow-up questions to the detectives. From the parking lot, she dialed Ryan on her cell and told him the news.

  “I can be in the North Burial Ground in an hour,” he said.

  “The cemetery is closed after dark,” she said, as she reached her car. “I’m going to send the police.”

  “Don’t do that,” said Ryan.

  “Why not? Babes seems to crave familiar surroundings. It makes sense that he would return there.”

  “I agree,” said Ryan. “But if he sees the cops coming for him, he’ll panic.”

  “It will be fine,” she said. “With Garrisen in custody, Babes is no longer a wanted man in connection with the death of Chelsea or Yaz. The responsibility of the police is not to swoop in and apprehend him. Their sole mission is to bring him home safely.”

  “But Babes doesn’t know that. It’s clear from his phone calls to the radio station that he’s terrified of the police coming to arrest him. He could hurt himself or someone else.”

  Emma realized Ryan had a point. “We could just call the curator of the cemetery to check out the crypts.”

  “That’s even more problematic,” said Ryan. “Babes is already afraid that someone came looking for him after Yaz was killed. What if he bought or stole a weapon to defend himself?”

  “What do you suggest then?” said Emma.

  “I’ll go. No cops or curator with me to send Babes into a frenzy. Babes knows and trusts me.”

  “I’m nervous about that,” said Emma.

  “Don’t be,” said Ryan.

  “I think you’re overlooking something. Whoever killed Yaz and then went looking for Babes is still out there.”

  “He must be halfway across the country now that Garrisen has been arrested.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on that,” said Emma. “A professional finishes the job. The fact that Garrisen is in jail doesn’t call off the contract. In fact, if there is a possibility that Babes is going to testify against him at trial, that only makes the hit more urgent.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. Emma could almost hear the wheels turning in Ryan’s head.

  “Let me do this,” he said.

  Her instincts were saying no way, but she could hear how important this was to Ryan. “Meet me at the entrance to the burial grounds,” she said as she climbed into her car. “We’ll take it from there.”

  56

  NIGHTFALL ONLY HEIGHTENED BABES’S FEARS.

  His new hiding spot in the railroad car was spooky enough in the daylight hours. Babes had taken some comfort in the narrow rays of sunlight shining through the slats and cracks in the old wood. One by one, they were erased—first by a late-afternoon rain, and then by dusk, which turned the walls completely black. The sliding door was partly open, but the distant glow of city lights reached no more than a few fe
et inside the boxcar. He tried to calm himself by thinking of the Boxcar books his mother used to read with him as a child, but that was fiction, and the harmless hobos of the 1930s had long since given way to child molesters and serial killers. This place was a veritable haunted house on rails, worse than a cemetery. At least the crypt had candlelight.

  “What was that?”

  Babes didn’t always talk to himself, but sometimes the sound of his own voice could calm his fears.

  He listened carefully, straining to hear the noise again. The abandoned railroad car was parked under a bridge, and he heard only the steady whine of vehicles overhead. It suddenly occurred to him that perhaps he hadn’t heard anything. He’d felt something. Motion. Forward movement.

  The train is leaving!

  He jumped up from his dark place in the corner and stood perfectly still, arms out, balancing himself like a surfer. But he felt no motion beneath his feet. The boxcar hadn’t moved. It hadn’t gone anywhere in more than a decade.

  Calm down, scaredy-cat.

  The hum of traffic continued overhead. It sounded like a pulsating white noise. But if he really focused on it, he could appreciate the rhythm. Each passing vehicle made the same sound. Coming, it was the hiss of rubber tires on slightly wet pavement: eshh… Going, it was the vibration of the bridge, a slightly fading pitch: eer…

  Car after car: Eshheer, eshheer.

  It was as if they were talking to him. Eshheer.

  Or to someone else. Esh-heer.

  About him. He’s here, he’s here.

  Betrayed by machines and their secret-coded anagrams. They might as well have shouted, Kill him, kill him, kill him.

  Babes screamed in the darkness, ran to the door, and leaped through the opening at full speed. Arms flailing and heart pounding, he flew through the air, and he didn’t stop screaming until he hit the ground and tumbled across the gravel. The fall stunned him. His head hurt and his leg was throbbing. He noticed a tear in his pant leg. The darkness beneath the old bridge made it difficult to see, but he could feel warm, wet blood on his knee. He reached inside the tear. The skin was badly scraped, but not split open. No stitches needed. That was good news.

  Babes pushed himself up and tried to stand. The injured knee delivered a pain so sharp that it stole his breath away. He took a step. It hurt again, but not as much as before. It was like what the team managers always told their ballplayers: “Walk it off, Babes.”

  He put one foot in front of the other and started down the old railroad tracks, working through the pain. He’d had enough of that old boxcar. Going home was not an option, but he could easily retrace his familiar steps to friendlier surroundings.

  Babes started back to the Dawes family crypt.

  In an old stone chapel atop the cemetery’s highest hill, the Checker waited and watched.

  The rain had stopped about an hour earlier, but moisture hung in the air like a cold, wet blanket. A crescent moon was trying to break through the clouds, but for the most part the night was as dark as the crypt itself.

  Vladimir had been casing out the cemetery since sundown. He’d made a careful pass and inspection upon arrival, which confirmed that Babes had not yet returned to the crypt. Logic and instinct told him that Babes would be back—sooner rather than later. The chapel seemed like the ideal place to wait. The Dawes family crypt was at the bottom of the hill, less than thirty yards away. A night-vision monocular with built-in infrared illuminator gave Vladimir a decent view of the North Burial Ground up to about forty yards. He’d picked up the toy from a GI Joe store in Providence for about two hundred bucks. Given the weather conditions, he wished he’d spent the extra dough for better equipment, but it was good enough to stake out the crypt. Every twenty minutes or so, the moon would make a brief appearance through the clouds, and he could get a fuzzy view of the parking lot in the distance. He kept one eye on the comings and goings at the main gate and the other on the Dawes family crypt.

  He knew about Garrisen. It was pure luck that he had caught the report on the evening news back at the hotel. He didn’t care for American television, and the local crap was particularly dreadful. He’d killed most of the afternoon reading a Russian crime novel by his favorite author, Alekseyeva Marina Anatolyevna. Only after finishing it was he desperate enough to switch on the tube and catch the lead story: Connie Garrisen—prominent Boston surgeon, owner of the Pawtucket Red Sox, and husband to Rhode Island assistant attorney general Glenda Garrisen—was under arrest. The reported charges revolved entirely around the death of Chelsea James three years before: vehicular homicide, voluntary manslaughter, and leaving the scene of an accident. There was no mention of the contracted killing of a blackmailer or the disappearance of Doug Wells. Vladimir had no way of knowing whether anyone had uncovered those pieces of the puzzle or whether the police had simply withheld this information for strategic reasons.

  Either way, the Checker had only one reaction: it was time to take out the lead witness against his client, before Garrisen could point the finger at the Checker. The mission was now downright personal—a matter of his own survival.

  Finally, he detected motion in the distance. A shadow in the dark was coming toward the crypt. He adjusted his night-vision monocular, focused, and smiled to himself. His calculations had proved correct.

  Like a hapless housefly, Babes was returning to the spider and his web.

  57

  RYAN REACHED THE NORTH BURIAL GROUND EVEN SOONER THAN he had expected. Emma was waiting for him in the main parking lot. So were a dozen police officers and six squad cars. A seventh car, albeit unmarked, pulled up behind Ryan. Sirens weren’t blaring, but police beacons were flashing, their red-and-blue swirl of authority flickering off the puddle-dotted pavement. Ryan stepped out of his car and went straight to Emma.

  “What’s with the police armada?” he said. “I thought we agreed that I was going to approach Babes alone.”

  “I requested police backup just in case something went wrong. I didn’t expect this much show of muscle.”

  Ryan looked out toward the cemetery grounds. The sea of gravestones and monuments brightened with each sweep of the police beacons.

  “This is enough to wake the dead,” said Ryan.

  “They’re just being cautious. We are talking about the chief witness in a murder-for-hire case against the assistant attorney general’s husband.”

  “We’re talking about Babes,” said Ryan. “If he isn’t freaking out right now, it’s only because he isn’t here.”

  Emma understood and walked over to the sergeant on the scene. “Can we kill the lights, please?” she said.

  Just as the parking lot went dark, Ryan’s cell vibrated. He didn’t recognize the number, but he took the call.

  Babes was on the line—and frantic.

  “Are you with them?”

  Ryan recognized the voice, but the incoming number had thrown him. All he could figure was that Babes had borrowed or stolen someone else’s cell. “Babes?”

  “Answer me right now! Are you with the police?”

  Ryan glanced across the parking lot. Emma was too far away to overhear him, but he got inside his car and closed the door anyway, just to make sure.

  “What police?” said Ryan.

  “Don’t play games with me! I saw all the cars in the parking lot. Did you bring them?”

  The swirling lights had obviously pushed Babes to the edge. Ryan prayed that they wouldn’t push him over it. “Calm down, all right? Take a deep breath and tell me where you are.”

  He paused, seeming to struggle. “I have to hang up now.”

  “Don’t hang up!”

  “If the police are gone, I’ll call you back in five minutes. If they’re still here…”

  Ryan braced himself, afraid of what Babes might say.

  “If the police are still here,” said Babes, his voice cracking, “you’ll never hear from me again.”

  The words chilled Ryan, but before he could respond, the call was ov
er. Babes had disconnected.

  Ryan had to think fast. He wasn’t sure if Babes was suicidal, but the pressure on him had been tremendous over the past few days, and Ryan couldn’t take any chances. He jumped out of the car and ran to Emma and the police sergeant.

  “I just got a call from Babes,” said Ryan. “We’re in the wrong place.”

  “Where is he?” said Emma.

  Ryan searched his memory, but damned if he could come up with the name of the other burial ground in the area. “He’s hiding in that big cemetery on the river,” he said. “Closer to Providence.”

  “Swan Point?” said the police sergeant.

  “Yes, exactly,” said Ryan. “That one.”

  Vladimir tucked his phone into his coat pocket. It was a pirated cell—not as nice as the iPhone he’d gotten for Connie Garrisen, but still effective—so he wasn’t worried about the call being traced back to him. Through the night-vision monocular, he watched from the old chapel atop the hill. At this distance, his equipment wasn’t good enough to get a perfect view of the parking lot, but with all the lights swirling, he didn’t need night vision to figure out what was happening.

  The police were leaving.

  “Excellent job, Babes,” he said.

  Up until twenty minutes ago, plan A had been going just fine. Vladimir had watched Babes enter the Dawes family crypt, figuring that he would wait an hour or so until Babes fell asleep. Then he would skulk his way down the hill, enter the crypt in utter stealth, and finish the job with a single efficient bullet in the head at close range. When the swirling police lights appeared in the parking lot, however, he’d been forced to formulate plan B on the fly.

  He checked his watch. “Two more minutes.”

  “Then what?” said Babes, his voice a pathetic whimper.

  Vladimir pressed the silencer to the back of Babes’s head. After fumbling the first attempted hit on Babes, he was determined to give his client more than his money’s worth.