A Small Town

by Thomas Perry

  She began to look for the label printer she had just imagined, but it didn’t seem to exist outside her mind. Then she went to the only place that looked as though it might contain a mailing list, which was the file drawer of a big old oak desk near the windows. There was no customer list in any of the manila folders in the desk. There was no billing record either. She remembered the four hundred thousand dollars in cash she’d found in Attila’s house. Of course there was no billing list. People paid in cash, and in return nobody kept a list of their names and addresses lying around.

  She knew that she was accomplishing nothing in this workshop, and that the time was passing. Even if the police didn’t connect the bodies she’d left at Stella’s with this shop, some member of the family would probably be here to open up in the morning, a few hours from now. She had spent half her life studying crime scenes—looking, drawing, photographing, and interpreting them. Coming in with a limited list of specific things she needed to find was the wrong way to do this. The right way was to look at the whole scene and let it tell her what it had to say. She stood still in the middle of the room and slowly turned her body, looking for a long time in every direction at the items arranged around the walls and in the center of the concrete floor. There was almost certain to be something useful and accessible in these two rooms. What was it? If it was hidden, where was the hiding place?

  Leah became aware of a bright blinking yellow light coming through the window. She wondered why she had just noticed, and then realized it was the first time a light had stopped there all evening. There was a car in the left-turn lane, preparing to turn into the parking lot where she had parked the SUV.

  She turned off her flashlight. She had to get out. She ran to the counter in the front room, held the rope hanging from the hole in the ceiling, and jumped upward to grasp it as high as she could. She shinnied up the rope and out onto the roof, pulled up the rope, and lay down. She stayed in the dark area beyond the peak of the roof on the side away from the street. She saw the car in the left turn lane waiting for car after car to approach and go by. The driver was patient and determined to make the turn, and that meant he was not abandoning his plan to come into this lot. She threw the rope off the roof to the back of the SUV, where it would not be noticed.

  Outside, the car made its left turn and swung into the lot. The driver, Denes Varga, said, “You know, this is one of the two or three worst nights of my life. Maybe it’s actually the worst.”

  “I know,” Viktor Panko said. “Losing Attila is like cutting off an arm. Georgy Halasz is a loss too, of course, but it’s not the same. Attila was your brother, but he was always like a brother to me too. My own brothers treated me like crap. I practically supported them. They wouldn’t have had gas money without me, but they looked down on me even before I went to prison. You and Attila and Reggie never wavered, never let me down. I feel terrible about this. It’s my fault that he felt he had to protect me.” Viktor was looking into the lot as his cousin drove in. “What the hell? What’s that SUV doing in the lot?”

  Denes looked at the car parked by the shop. “It’s probably somebody from one of the restaurants in the mall across the street. The owners never want the waiters and dishwashers to park where the customers might. We’re closed at night, so they’re probably always parking here. We just don’t know it.”

  “I’d like to give him a real surprise when he comes for his car tonight.”

  “It could be educational.” Denes pulled his car into a space near the rear door of the building.

  The two men got out of their car and walked around to the trunk. They took out four shiny rectangular metal cans filled with kerosene. “I’m sorry we have to do this too,” said Viktor. “I don’t want you to get in a mess with the insurance people or the police.”

  “Not likely,” said Denes. “We often keep a little kerosene around for cleaning the grease and ink off the printer rollers and things like that. The insurance people know that.”

  The two cousins walked to the door, and Denes unlocked it. He stepped in and reached up to the alarm keypad to punch in the code so the alarm didn’t go off. “Remind me to turn that back on when we leave,” he said. “Finding it off is the kind of thing the inspectors might wonder about.”

  “Sure thing,” said Viktor.

  “We should start in the front of the building and then work our way back here to go out the same door,” said Denes. “You’d better follow me. I don’t want to turn on the lights.” The two men walked through the doorway to the front area. “I guess Reggie must have left that door open. But I guess that won’t happen again after tonight.”

  “We better get started.” Viktor lifted a can, twisted the cap off, and began pouring the liquid on the counter, the walls, and the doorway. The smell was thick and spread quickly.

  “Stop!” Leah stepped into the doorway behind them with her pistol aimed in their direction and the small flashlight mounted under the muzzle shining brightly on them. “Police officer. Set the cans down.”

  The man who had the half-empty can set it down. The other froze where he stood beside the counter. There was a second can in front of him.

  Leah said, “Come into the back of the shop, and bring the unopened cans with you. Leave that one where it is.”

  The two men walked into the back room. Leah turned on the overhead lights. The man closest to her was Victor Panko.

  Somehow in the dark, Panko had managed to get a knife out of his pocket and stab a hole in the lower part of the second can. Now the clear odorous liquid was glugging out of the can onto the concrete floor and spreading, some of it running toward the business machines and work tables. He already had a windproof lighter in his hand, and he spun the wheel and dropped it in the pool of kerosene. There was a rush of hot air as the liquid ignited and flames rose toward the ceiling. Panko pivoted and dashed through the spreading flames toward the front of the building.

  Leah shot him just as he reached the doorway, then sidestepped to the other man and held her pistol to the man’s head. She clicked one handcuff on the man’s right wrist and the other on the handle of the file drawer of the desk, locked the drawer, and took the key. She patted him down for weapons, but found none.

  “What are you doing?” he said. “The place is on fire.”

  “Not really my problem. I didn’t start it.”

  She went to the wall of the shop, took a foam fire extinguisher, and sprayed the flames. It took a few minutes for her to get the flames under control, but she succeeded. When the fire was almost out, she dragged the canvas dust cover off the top of a large machine, threw it over the last burning spot, and stamped on it to smother the flames.

  Then she walked to the prone form of Viktor Panko, knelt to feel his carotid artery, and verified that he was dead. She stepped past him and looked into the front of the building but saw no more flames.

  She remained out of the second man’s sight in the front room for a moment, trying to think. When Leah had seen the car turning in, she had climbed onto the counter and pulled herself up to the roof with the rope and pulled the rope up after her. She had hoped that the two men wouldn’t look up and see the hole, and apparently they hadn’t, probably because they hadn’t turned on the lights. She had simply stepped from the roof of the building onto the roof of the SUV and then the hood and slid down, then walked in the same door the two men had opened, and come up behind them. At the moment she was glad Viktor Panko was dead and she was alive. But there was still the second man.

  Leah stepped past the spot where Viktor Panko lay and into the workshop.

  Denes Varga said, “Is Viktor dead?”

  “He has no pulse.” She walked toward her prisoner. She said, “I might as well kill you too. You’re worth nothing to me.”

  The man said, “Hold on. You got no reason to kill me. I was just helping Viktor.”

  Leah said, “You’re his cousin Denes, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll give yo
u an opportunity to earn a full pardon. Here’s how you do it. We want the new names and current addresses of the other eleven men from the prison break that got him out. If you can give me those, you’re safe. If not …” She shrugged.

  “I can get them,” he said. “They’re in the computers.”

  “Fine. Once I’ve got them, you’re free. You can finish burning this place down or go home or leave town or whatever you want. Does that sound fair to you?”

  “Yes.”

  She moved close to him and unlocked the handcuff with one hand. She kept her pistol in her right hand aimed at his chest and stepped back.

  He straightened and walked toward the big machine Leah had uncovered to smother the fire. The machine had a cable running to a computer on the nearby workbench. He pulled a stool from under the workbench and sat at the computer. He turned on the computer, and when the opening screen appeared, he typed a few commands and began to scroll down a list of names and data. The list began to scroll faster, but he was still moving his fingers as though he were typing commands to find something.

  Leah was watching him. “You’re not doing it. You’re erasing the file.”

  She grabbed his wrist, trying to pull his hand away, but he elbowed her aside and launched himself toward the two remaining cans of kerosene. He snatched one up and began swinging it around, throwing the fuel on the card printers, the floor, the benches, and computers.

  Leah shot him once in the chest and he fell to the floor.

  She sat on the stool he had just vacated and stared at him. The whole thing was a disaster. She was here in the place where everything she needed to know was stored. Tonight, she had shot all three of the men who could have given it to her.

  Leah’s eyes strayed along the computer’s cable to the big machine. That was the one that made the licenses and cards. Beneath its stand was a tub about the size of a bathtub made of galvanized steel. It caught her eye partly because all of the machines were high tech, but there was this humble object, like something from a barnyard. She noticed that it was full of pieces of the plastic material of credit cards and licenses. Some pieces she could see were just trimmings, but others had mag-stripes or chips. Some bore parts of photographs, and some had whole pictures. She recognized a couple of logos from banks.

  Leah moved closer. The tub seemed to be the scrap bin for the rejects and the experiments. She knelt beside it and began to reach in and pull out pieces of plastic. Leah began to look at cards and pieces of cards, taking them out of the bin, shuffling through them and dropping them in piles on the floor.

  The Vargas had apparently not thrown their mistakes away and burned or shredded them to keep from being arrested for counterfeiting credit cards and licenses. They had simply dropped them into the tub.

  She went through hundreds of cards, scanning them as she removed likely ones from the bin. Some of them had obvious flaws. About a year earlier, the machine must have gotten a scrap of plastic stuck to its printing surface, and it prevented a small section of each card from accepting a stamp or a print. There were at least twenty-five like that. There were other cards that were supposed to have a chip embedded in them, but the chip was protruding from the surface. In others the design proportions of a set of cards were wrong, or the photo of the supposed owner was crooked or improperly cropped at the top of the head.

  As Leah dug down through the rejected cards, the start and end dates got older. There was a moment when Leah reached the two-year mark. The dates were in the spring two years earlier, and she slowed her searches and looked more closely at each photograph. And then she found something. It was a New York State driver’s license that looked perfect to her. There must have been something wrong with it, but she didn’t see it at first. What she saw was that the picture was the face of Alan Becker, but the name on the license was Michael R. Miller, and his address was on 54th Street in New York City. “Got you,” she whispered.

  They hadn’t been throwing out the mistakes. She supposed nobody dared to leave a couple thousand fake credit cards in their trash. Probably they had planned to destroy the scrap plastic in some prudent way, but had put it off because the tub wasn’t full. She took another double handful and poured them on the floor. Her arm shot out like a snake striking and plucked out another license. “Brian Summers,” she said. “I’d know you anywhere, even if your license is from Mars. Your name is Paul Duquesne.”

  There was Martin Ortega’s picture, but the name was Juan Javier Martinez. It seemed to be a prototype for an ID badge for a company in San Diego—a security company.

  Leah realized why she was suddenly finding failed attempts to make identification for the twelve fugitives. She had dug her way down to the level of March through June two years ago, so this layer of the pile was rich. She knelt there and took out double handfuls of partial or badly printed cards. Some had the pictures of convicts from Weldonville. Others had no pictures, or pictures of other men or women. Sometimes there were driver’s licenses in a false name and then four or five identical credit cards in several names, all of them flawed in some way. She found a few identification cards, Class A driver’s licenses for truck drivers, even pilot’s licenses. Whenever she found any remnant or relic of these attempts, she slipped it into her pockets and kept looking.

  Denes Varga had been shot at least fifteen minutes ago. His blood was on the concrete floor under his body and dribbled away from it in rivulets that had found their way into low parts of the concrete surface and pooled. In the mind of Leah Hawkins, he was dead, like his cousin Viktor Panko. He was not.

  The smell of kerosene had been in every breath Leah had taken since Varga and Panko had poured it in the front section of the building hours ago, so she had almost stopped smelling it. She had not noticed that it had become stronger in the past few minutes, so she didn’t look around and notice that Denes Varga had opened the last can and let it begin to drain, running along the same track as his own blood toward the galvanized tub where Leah was working.

  There was a sound of the metal wheel rasping against the flint, and then a flash that lit most of the air in the building into flame, and then as it subsided into a fire along the floor, Leah had a second of deciding. Move now or die. The fire was about to engulf her and the tub, but Denes Varga was alive. He was trying to burn her to death, but she couldn’t leave him to die in his fire.

  She stayed low, grasping his wrists and hauling back, her arms extended and body leaning backward, dragging the wounded man to the door, trying to see through the haze of smoke that was filling the shop from the ceiling down. She stopped and dragged him to the threshold. Then she saw his face and chest. He didn’t seem to be breathing now. She touched his neck to feel for a pulse. He was dead too.

  She stepped past him and ran toward the tub. There were almost sure to be more cards that would tell her things. She reached the tub just as the flames engulfed it and the plastic inside became something else, a black, bubbling mess. She felt searing heat and pulled her hand back. She had chosen wrong, dragged a dead man out and left the evidence to burn. She retreated to the doorway, switched off the light, and closed the door.

  She ran to the SUV. She untied the rope from the vehicle’s trailer hitch, threw it inside, and scrambled into the driver’s seat.

  She turned and looked in through the windows of the building. In the shop in the back and the customer area in the front, flames were now licking the ceilings. Fire had engulfed the stamping, cutting, and printing machines and the counter, workbenches, desk, and chairs. The flames were all the way to Denes Varga’s body. It was clear the building and its contents would be a pile of charcoal, ash, and unrecognizable metal parts in minutes. She knew the two bodies and the kerosene cans would give the investigators something to think about.

  She turned to look ahead through the windshield. She had made some terrible mistakes tonight, but the two or three things she hadn’t done wrong she had gotten really right.

  Leah drove along a side street, hoping to s
tay away from the big north-south streets like Colvin, but finally took a chance on Delaware for a few hundred yards to reach the expressway entrance to get far from the scene of her crimes. She glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that her face was blackened by soot from the fire she had just escaped. She spotted her purse on the floor in front of the passenger seat, snatched it up, took out some antiseptic wipes, and washed her face and hands.

  She drove to the Niagara section of the thruway, got off in downtown Buffalo far south of the burning building, and drove to her hotel. She pulled into the parking structure, went up the elevator to the second floor, and walked the rest of the way to her room so she wouldn’t meet anyone.

  Leah ran a bath and soaked in the tub until the water got cold. Then she went to bed. As she lay on the tight, clean sheets of the bed and closed her eyes, she knew that in this city at the moment, there were at least two manhunts under way, both searching for her. She’d had a busy day.

  18

  She decided her next visit should be to Alan Becker. He was now Mr. Michael R. Miller of New York City. She had his new name and address, and he couldn’t possibly know it yet. He was on the other end of the state, but it was the same state. She could fly there in a couple of hours. The minute he learned of what had happened in Buffalo, she could lose him. The escapees in other states probably wouldn’t see news of Viktor Panko’s death. News organizations seldom reported murders in other states unless the victim was a celebrity.

  She reserved her flight to New York City. She spent the rest of her time in Buffalo cleaning her hotel room and her rental car and packing. She was determined that if an enterprising homicide detective had a description of the car she’d been driving, he wouldn’t be able to lift her fingerprints from the rental car. She returned the car and made it to the airport terminal early, already thinking about Alan Becker.

  That morning Alan Becker was thinking about a job he was doing today on the north side of Long Island, in Rocky Point. He drove across the Williamsburg Bridge to Queens and along the interstate toward the turnoff at Route 347. He had done very well since the end of his prison existence. The original problem that had gotten him sent to Memphis Penitentiary and then to Weldonville was a job exactly like the one he was doing today. He had gone out to a quiet, prosperous suburb—that time near San Antonio, Texas—to pay a visit to a lady who was in the early steps of obtaining a divorce from a man named Chester “Chet” Grenville.