A Small Town

by Thomas Perry

  Leah kept her speed constant, not wanting to appear to have reacted to something. She went on for another block and then turned left to get out to the business district one street over. She parked in the big lot behind a bowling alley and then trotted back across the street and past it to the front yard of the house she judged to be the one behind Stella’s. She kept moving along the side of the house to the backyard, went over the back fence, and reached the yard behind Stella’s house. Maybe she had allowed herself to become overly tense and nothing was wrong, but it wouldn’t hurt to perform a welfare check, just as she’d done hundreds of times at her job.

  She went up the concrete back steps to Stella’s kitchen door and looked in. She saw nobody. The lights were off, but there was a glow from somewhere toward the front rooms, so she could tell the kitchen, the hallway leading to the stairs, and the parlor were empty. Would Stella sit in the dark to wait for her?

  She descended the steps, walked around the house to the driveway, and moved forward beside the house toward the street. At the front corner of the house where the clapboards ended and the side of the wooden porch began, she paused. The porch was about six feet high, so the floor of it was almost at eye level. As she crouched and crept forward beside the porch, she noticed an access hatch on the side of the structure that was about three feet high and two feet wide. She went past it to the side of the steps to see if there were any suspicious cars parked at the curb.

  There was room for only two cars in front of the narrow house, and neither of them had anyone sitting inside that she could see. There was a cough, and Leah froze. Someone was close by. Then there was a squeak as a person’s weight came up off one of the wooden chairs on the porch. There were footsteps moving away toward the far side of the porch like a man pacing. Leah knew that the person up there would reach the far railing and walk back toward the railing just over her head.

  She retreated backward to the hatch at the side of the porch, opened it, crawled inside, and then pulled the hatch shut. She stayed still and reached into her coat to take out the Glock 17 pistol with no numbers on it. She took out the silencer and screwed it onto the threads on the muzzle.

  “Jesus.” It was the voice of a big man. “Where the hell is she?”

  Leah could hear that the man was just above her, leaning his elbows on the railing of the porch above the spot where she was crouching.

  “She’ll be here,” said a second man’s voice. “She’s a cop, and if she thinks her old lady cop friend needs her, she’ll come if she has to run barefoot over broken glass.”

  “I’d like to see that.”

  “Me too. But I don’t think we can add any extra requests, and Stella’s too dead to do it. Now will you please sit down where she won’t see you when she drives up? You’re making me nervous.”

  “You could get on Stella’s phone again and text her to hurry up.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not a fucking moron. Just get your mind off your fear. Think about getting off one perfect shot when she gets here. Visualize it.”

  “The cops could get here before she does. What then?”

  “Then they must be psychic, because nobody called them yet. That’s why I made you use a knife on Stella.”

  Leah Hawkins sat in the dark, dirty space beneath the wooden porch. The only light came from the glow of a streetlamp leaking in through the crack where the hatch met the side if the porch, but when she’d moved inward she’d felt spiderwebs against her face.

  Leah thought about the situation. She was in a dark place listening to two men admitting to murdering Stella Wizshinski and discussing their plan for murdering Leah too. One of them was stupid and frightened. If he got startled into the realization that Leah had already arrived, he would fire off his whole magazine, imagining every shape on the dark street was an enemy. While all that metal was flying around, the other one, the calm one, was probably capable of killing Leah himself.

  Leah crawled a few feet, feeling the way ahead with her hands. She stood with bent knees and touched the boards above her head. She could feel two boards were slightly bent under a weight. She heard a creak as the man sitting in the chair shifted. Leah waited and listened.

  “Damn. I got the old lady’s blood on my pants when her neck spurted. I didn’t see it before. How am I going to get that off?”

  Leah raised her pistol nearly up to the floorboards and touched the surface with her free hand to determine where the weight was.

  “Wash,” said the other man.

  Leah fired three rounds up through the porch floor, then stepped quickly to the place where the other man was sitting. She fired three more shots, heard the man’s body thump on the boards as he fell, and fired another round up through the floor to be sure she’d killed him.

  She dodged to the hatch and stayed there for a few seconds, but there was no return fire from either man. She opened the hatch, and while she used her sleeve to wipe it for fingerprints, she listened for footsteps of other enemies. When none came, she crawled out and pushed the hatch shut. She walked around to the front, climbed the steps, and saw the two men, one lying almost at the rattan blind lashed to the front railing and the other lying beside the wooden chair near the wall.

  Leah squatted, patted down the two men, and took their guns, wallets, telephones, and keys. There was a third phone, and she recognized it as Stella’s. Then she stood and walked down the side of Stella’s house the way she had come. She kept going to the backyard, over the back fence to the neighbor’s, then out to the wider, busier street, and into the bowling alley parking lot to her rental car. She got in and drove.

  When she was five miles away from Stella’s house, she stopped in the parking lot of a supermarket in a lonely space under a high light fixture and examined the identification in the wallets of the two men. One was Attila Varga. The other man was Alex Halasz. She remembered that Halasz was the surname of the other set of Panko’s cousins. Stella had been asking around about the family. She must have asked the wrong person. Leah put the wallets under the seat of the rental car and drove toward Orchard Park.

  The Vargas and Pankos and at least one of the Halasz cousins seemed to be a criminal family, so maybe they wouldn’t be in a hurry to report these two men missing. Leah hoped that the silencer on her pistol had been quieter outside than it had seemed under the porch, so people nearby had thought it sounded like firecrackers or something and didn’t call the cops. Once the Buffalo police were called, the time for certain things would be up. She had taken the men’s car keys, wallets, guns, and phones, but at least one of them must have parked a car nearby.

  Leah drove as fast as she dared, trying to stay on the smaller, darker streets that had stop signs she could ignore instead of bright lights and traffic signals. As she drove, she used her phone to bring up the pictures that her surveillance cameras were seeing at Attila Varga’s house. The cameras were all still in place and all still transmitting. But what they saw was unchanging—a big wooden house with very few lights burning and no movement. She put the phone away and concentrated on her driving. She got onto the southbound branch of the thruway and sped up again.

  She spotted a state police car lying in wait beyond a viaduct ahead, exactly where she would have waited for speeders, but she slowed down by taking her foot off the gas and coasting instead of touching the brake pedal. She didn’t want her car to give the characteristic nose-dip that happened when a speeding driver braked. It was impossible to miss at night when the car’s headlights tipped down to aim at the pavement for a few yards. She kept her foot off the brake long enough for the cop to aim his speed gun at the next car, and then she sped up again.

  Leah didn’t know how strict the cops in the area were late at night, but she didn’t want to get a ticket as she sped away from a double murder on her way to her next crime.

  For the next few miles, Leah drove just a few miles an hour above the posted speed limit, making sure not to go too sl
owly, because that was what a certain kind of drunk driver did—the ones who were so impaired that they could barely keep the car between the lines.

  When she reached the stretch of highway near Attila’s house, she stopped and looked more closely at the footage recorded by the surveillance cameras earlier in the evening. All she saw was the front door opening and then the two men she had killed coming out, getting into a car in the garage, and then driving out past the camera.

  Leah allowed herself to think about Stella and feel the regret and guilt for causing her death. Stella must have asked around about Viktor Panko in the community, and at some point had asked the wrong person. The two men had spent the early part of the evening killing Stella and then prepared to kill whoever had asked her to find Viktor Panko. Probably they had simply looked at Stella’s phone and seen whom she had been calling lately.

  Leah walked around Attila’s house and found a wooden basement door set at a forty-five-degree angle to the house, to cover a set of concrete steps. She pried up the hasp to disconnect the padlock that held the door shut, opened it, and descended the concrete steps to the standard vertical door into the basement. The door was sturdy wood with a small glass window on top. She had to assume that this door would be connected to the alarm system. She studied it, looked inside through the window with a flashlight, and saw a keypad on the wall across the basement room.

  She climbed the steps and looked around her. There was the garage.

  She managed to get into the garage through the side door and returned with a battery-operated electric drill, a Swedish harp saw with a cross-cut blade, and a crowbar. Over the next few minutes, she drilled holes in the lower door panel, removed the blade from the saw, inserted the blade into the holes, and used it to saw out the panel.

  She crawled through the opening into the basement. Using her flashlight to light the way, she climbed the stairs to the kitchen hallway and began to search.

  She searched as quickly as she could, looking for hiding places, opening filing cabinets, drawers, cupboards. In each room, after searching the simple, obvious places, she removed the grates over heating and cooling ducts, looked at the spaces behind paintings and inside closets, and pulled back rugs to look for false floors.

  She kept her phone connected to the surveillance cameras to be sure that they hadn’t recorded any new arrivals, but the driveway remained clear. After two hours she had found four rifles and three shotguns of various configurations and purposes, three handguns, a pornography collection, a supply of marijuana and a smaller supply of cocaine, and almost four hundred thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. She interpreted the cash as proof that Attila had been involved in something he wasn’t interested in explaining to the IRS—probably the forgery business with Viktor.

  Among the things that Leah didn’t find was an address for Attila’s sister Regina, a list of customers, or any other piece of information that could lead to the other ten fugitives.

  Leah took one more pass at the den, a room she had searched before, and in a stack of papers she found a yellow receipt about seven inches long and five inches wide. It seemed to have been torn from a pad of them, and it was written in pen. “Received from: Attila Varga. Item: Rent, second quarter. Amount: $9,000. 59950 Colvin Boulevard, Village of Kenmore, New York.”

  Leah took the receipt with her and went out through the hole she had made in the door. Before she went to her next stop she drove to the airport rental lot and traded her rental car for an SUV that looked nothing like it.

  17

  The building on Colvin Avenue was small, and it seemed to be from an earlier era, when the main roads of the northeast had lots of businesses set far apart in single wooden buildings—hot-dog stands, ice-cream stands, and stores offering souvenirs, personalized signs and light hardware, tickets, maps, and pamphlets for tourists. They were usually set back from the gravel shoulder of the road, with parking in front.

  This one looked as though it had grown at some point, with a disproportionately large section added in back and parking on a paved lot behind. Leah Hawkins noted that the layout kept the parking spaces partially invisible from the street, which was ideal for a business with an illegitimate side.

  No lights were on in the lot or in the building. A sign at the front above the entrance seemed almost intentionally pale. It read, MAILBOXES, COPIES, FAX. The sign seemed to Leah to be a list of dying technology. It might as well say, “Things you don’t need much anymore.”

  Leah drove up the driveway and around the building to one of the hidden parking places and stopped. She got out of the car and walked around the building. She was fairly certain the back door could be jimmied, but she was sure an alarm would go off if one of the doors or windows were opened. Most alarm systems had a delay of forty seconds or so after the alarm began sounding before the signal went to the police station or the rent-a-cop dispatch. If she could open the control box in that time and switch the system off, it wouldn’t get sent at all. This building was small and simple, so she might be able to spot the box from outside.

  She went to the nearest window and shone her flashlight inside. Within about thirty seconds she identified it, attached to the wall at the back of the shop, but it had a large padlock attached to keep it shut, and the lock looked too sturdy to hammer off. She would have to find another way. Alarm systems wired the places that were supposed to open—doors and windows, usually. She would have to look for things that weren’t supposed to open.

  She took out the keys to the SUV, climbed in, backed the vehicle up to the building, stopped, and set the brake. Then she got out, took a rope out of the climbing kit at the back of the vehicle, and tied the rope to the trailer hitch. She walked around to the front of the vehicle. She climbed on its hood and stepped up on its roof and then walked to the overhang of the building’s roof and stepped up.

  The roof was nearly flat, with a slight slant so the water and snow would slide off. She saw vertical vent pipes, but what interested her most was the HVAC unit mounted on the roof. It wasn’t huge, so she tried rocking it. Screws held it fast though, so she took out her folding knife and unscrewed the ones she saw. When she tried rocking it this time, she was able to tilt it much farther. She tied her rope around the upper part of it and walked back along the building to the roof of the SUV and slid down its hood.

  She started the vehicle, put it in gear, and let it drift ahead until the rope was taut. She gradually pushed down on the gas pedal until the car pulled the unit over onto its side. Leah backed up to the side of the building again and climbed back up to the roof. The unit had exposed a gap where the warmed or cooled air was supposed to blow into the building. She untied the rope, pulled up the slack until it was tight, and then tied a loop in the end, held it, and lowered herself into the building.

  Leah used her flashlight to see what was beneath her. She found that she was coming down only a foot or so from the front counter, where the customers came for service. She swung on the rope a little so her feet would reach the counter, and then stood. She took off the rope and jumped to the floor. There was a wall of mailboxes with combination locks in the front. She walked around it to the backside, where the clerks were supposed to stick the mail for postal box renters. She reached in one and looked at the pieces of mail.

  They were old. One held a copy of Newsweek from 2009. Most of the letters in the boxes needed dusting. The wall of mailboxes looked good from in front of the counter, but it wasn’t real.

  She moved on to the back of the room, where there was a door. She tried the knob, but it was locked. She stepped back, raised her right leg, and gave the door a stomp-kick of the sort that she had used in raids. The door cracked on the first try and swung open on the second.

  She let the beam of her flashlight play across the shapes in the back room.

  There was a large photocopier, or maybe it was a scanner. There was a long tablelike machine that appeared to be a four-color printing press. She walked the room, past workbenches tha
t had machines on them attached to computers. She read the riveted-on metal plates that gave the model and serial numbers. One was an embossing machine. Near it was a machine that said it was a seventy-two-character stamping machine for use with 0.03-thickness plastic card stock, with magnetic-stripe coating.

  Credit cards, Leah thought. They didn’t just make driver’s licenses like the one the girl in the restaurant had. They could make credit cards.

  She kept looking. The plate on one machine said it was sold by Miss Ling of Beijing, China. No address, no company name. She assumed it must be illegal.

  The next one was a few sizes bigger, from desktop size to desk size. The label said it was an “instant issuance system.” It said this one had not only mag-stripe but also chip data coding, and it could embed holograms. It said it was compatible with Windows, Mac, and GNU Linux.

  She had found the source, the shop where Viktor Panko and his friends—and an unknown number of other people—had gotten their new identification documents.

  Leah looked around her. There was so much to see, but it conveyed little to her. The machines had been used, and most of them had computers plugged into them, which probably was where the information about the imaginary owners of the new licenses and credit cards had been typed and stored and transferred for printing, coding, and recording in chips and mag-stripes. She needed that information. Even if all she could get for each of the twelve was an address, she would be immeasurably ahead of where she’d been at the start of the night. But the machines all had metal plates that said client data was encrypted.

  It occurred to her that she had a valuable advantage. She knew the address where Weiss’s mother had lived in Naples, Florida. If she could find any list that contained that mailing address, the others would be the addresses of the other killers. What she had to do was find the hypothetical list of mailing addresses, or a computer that was attached to a printer loaded with mailing labels.