Tucker Peak

by Mayor, Archer

  “Nothing dramatic,” I cautioned, attaching the snowshoes, “but being the ones in the middle, we should probably try to get a location on the guy. Don’t engage him in any way, just look for his sled tracks so we can orient the others.”

  Fleury nodded once, tested his balance on the soft snow with a few hard stamps of his feet, and headed off toward the left, almost instantly becoming one with the falling snow.

  I walked to the fence and cut right, my gun in one hand, the radio in the other, moving as silently as the gently floating elements all around me.

  But not for long. I hadn’t gotten ten yards before I heard a shout behind me and the sound of two gunshots. Turning clumsily, I started jogging in that direction, talking into the radio, “Shots fired midline along the fence. I’m going to investigate.”

  I almost fell over Tony Busco’s stolen snowmobile, which was at a cockeyed angle. It was entangled halfway through the bottom of the wire fence, having smacked into it with enough strength to have punched a hole. Fleury’s large footprints showed that he’d slipped through in pursuit, rather than waiting as I’d advised—the cowboy image apparently not being restricted to his prowess on the back of a sled.

  “Fleury, come in. It’s Joe Gunther.”

  Nothing came back. I began squeezing through the ragged opening, noticing as I did a smear of blood across the machine’s shattered plastic windshield.

  “Fleury. Come in.”

  Still nothing.

  “Gunther to all units. We may have an officer down inside the fence, about twenty yards to the left of our machine.”

  I continued walking, bent over double, studying the ground before me, breathing through my mouth as if that might make me quieter. With the specter of Tony Bugs in my head, looming up out of the murkiness, gun in hand, ready to take me out, I even turned the radio off so it couldn’t give me away.

  All the sound that remained was the ever louder, heavy, rhythmic chopping of gigantic blades slicing through the air, close enough now that I could no longer hear the whine of approaching reinforcements. To hell with Tony Bugs, I was thinking now, the image of Dick Russell and the wounded deputy fresh in my mind. I needed to find Doug Fleury and see if I could help save his life.

  What I found first, however, stopped me dead in my tracks. Looming out of the cold, pale environment, revealed in a sudden gust of wind like a towering ghost rising from the ground at my feet, was a thin, white, tubular shaft impressive enough to make me think of alien visitors or a sign from God. Hanging a hundred and thirty feet over me, equipped with three huge, ponderous, black-painted, slicing blades, was one of the summit’s distinctive windmills. Each blade, at least sixty feet long, came flying out of the sky, seemingly aimed at my head, only to reach the end of its arc with the sound of a diving aircraft. One by one, they thrummed by to vanish in the opposite direction, each one following on the heels of its mate, to begin the process anew—once every split second.

  My instant and instinctive crouching down brought me almost eye-level to the ground—and to Doug Fleury lying half covered with snow a few feet ahead, one red stained glove clutching a wounded shoulder. Just beyond him, stepping out from behind the tower, a pistol aimed straight at me, was Antony “Tony Bugs” Busco, looking just like his mug shot.

  “Drop the gun,” he shouted over the steady beating overhead.

  My own weapon was still in my hand, pointed halfway between the ground and him. I was struck by the sudden realization that because of both the protection program’s harboring of this man and our own circumspection in drawing a net around him, this was the first time I’d actually seen him, even though I’d been pursuing his shadow from the very beginning.

  “No,” I said. “If you know what’s good for you, you better drop yours. Cops are closing in on this spot from all directions. You can’t get away.”

  “Maybe I don’t give a shit,” he said, but I had my doubts.

  “Why not?” I asked him. “You protected yourself by entering the Marshals’ program, by killing Jorja Duval to locate Gagnon and Lane—”

  “Gagnon was blackmailing me,” he cut in defensively. “That dumb hick. And she wouldn’t tell me where he was—not at first, anyway. Greedy little bastards put themselves into that jam. Thanks for the assist with Lane, by the way,” he suddenly added with a forced smile. “Didn’t know cops could be so helpful.”

  Like an engine falling into gear, my brain latched onto his words and conjured up not only the ugly picture of Jorja Duval’s cut throat, her usefulness over, but also the long-awaited realization, by implication, that Marty Gagnon was no longer unaccounted for. Perhaps Busco had run out of places to hide. Certainly his current protectors were going to throw him out. Still, I persisted. “It doesn’t change that you’re a survivor by instinct. Look at you now, still fighting to live. Put the gun down and make that happen.”

  “I killed four people, including two cops—three if that one dies.”

  “You wounded three cops. None of them’re dead. It’s not as bad as you think.”

  He tilted his head back and laughed, making me wonder if that might not be the instant to try to outshoot him. I was no longer under the illusion that my babbling would lead to his surrender.

  But happenstance tilted the balance. With the sound of an enormous laundry bag sliding down a smooth chute, a huge wedge of rime ice suddenly released from one of the overhead blades and thudded into the snow just a few feet beside us. In the same instant that Tony Busco swung slightly to face this unknown threat, I leveled my gun and fired wildly, hitting him by pure luck in the leg and spinning him like a top, causing his own pistol to fly uselessly away.

  Doug Fleury, the silent witness to all this, looked from Busco to me, and back again, before letting his head finally rest against the snow.

  “Thank God,” he muttered and closed his eyes.

  Amen to that, I thought, feeling suddenly very cold.

  Chapter 23

  HE WALKED WITH A STUDIED INDIFFERENCE, FAKING A CASUAL SWING to his shoulders but revealing his tension with the stiffness of his arms and neck.

  And the look in his eyes. They moved back and forth like a bodyguard’s on alert, watching everyone’s passing face, sweeping the crowd for any signs of unusual movement.

  Like my stepping out in front of him from behind a kiosk of phone booths, located in the middle of the Manchester, New Hampshire, airport lobby. “Philip McNally?”

  His familiar smile was tight and artificial, and he glanced nervously at Lester Spinney approaching from another angle, and at a uniformed state cop closing in from a third. “You know it is, Mr. Gunther. What’s up?”

  As Lester stepped around behind him, took his bag, and began to frisk him, the New Hampshire trooper said, “You’re under arrest on a fugitive-from-justice warrant,” after which he intoned the standard Miranda warning, ending with, “Do you understand these rights as I have explained them?”

  McNally’s expression softened, much of the tension draining away, and he ducked his head slightly with a smile. “I guess I knew it wouldn’t work. I don’t know how you found me, though. Conan had no idea. I’m guessing you got him, too.”

  “Yup.” I took his elbow and began steering him back through the security checkpoint. We’d already had his luggage removed from the plane.

  “Actually,” I admitted, “You told me yourself, when we first met. You said the hassles you were putting up with made Luxembourg look good, or words to that effect. That struck me as odd at the time—most people would’ve said Florida or the Bahamas or even Tahiti. I only realized it later, of course, after we thought you’d gotten away, but Luxembourg must’ve been on your mind for a specific reason. It didn’t take long to find out that it had just the type of banking practices you needed, or to locate the travel agent you used to buy your ticket. You should know, by the way, that the U.S. and Luxembourg just signed a banking agreement allowing us access to your funds. Talk about bad timing.”

  We stepped ou
t into the cold air of the airport’s parking lot, where a couple of police cruisers were idling at the curb. Phil McNally stopped briefly and took in a deep breath of air, wistfully commenting at the end of it, “I came pretty close, though, didn’t I?”

  I put my hand on the rear-door latch. “You did better than that. You’ve probably destroyed an entire community—from the condo owners and Board members to the lowest lift-ticket taker; you’ve ruined or damaged hundreds of lives. That’s something the judge will appreciate, too.”

  I opened the door and shoved him inside.

  · · ·

  Several hours later I was back in Brattleboro, on the outskirts of town, in a long, low wooden building that had once been the nineteenth-century equivalent of a parking garage—a carriage house designed for up to twenty horses and their vehicles. It was a storage rental facility now, its erstwhile stable doors replaced with a row of heavy padlocked wooden ones, and it had been where first Ron Klesczewski and then a crime lab team had gone to paw through the ill-gotten gains of Marty Gagnon’s career as a thief, early in the investigation.

  We hadn’t found much then. We had reason to think we’d find a bit more this time.

  Snuffy Dawson stood next to me as we watched four officers in white Tyvek suits wrestling a heavy chest away from the far wall of an almost empty room, while a fifth stood by, taking photographs of each step of the process. Snuffy was now the happy recipient of much recent media attention, having held several press conferences in order to explain the sheriff’s department’s hat trick in solving a homicide and a major embezzlement case and in busting up a local drug ring. I noted with satisfaction that he repaid our courtesy of keeping out of the limelight by mentioning our help. It was a political gesture on the part of an old pro, and I was hoping it would be useful in VBI’s future interactions with other departments. That was probably wishful thinking, of course. Other cops would just think Snuffy had brought us in because he was losing his grip.

  But it was another small step in our march toward legitimacy. “Have you heard what they’re going to do with Tucker Peak?” I asked him as we waited.

  “Their board of directors hired a bankruptcy lawyer, if that tells you anything. There’ll be the usual claims that the world is ending, and then they’ll find a buyer at ten cents on the dollar and they’ll start it all over again. The rich’ll stay that way and the poor’ll find other jobs.”

  “We found out McNally’s heart condition was bogus, by the way,” I said. “He printed the prescription label on his computer and filled the bottle with generic saccharin.”

  Snuffy snorted softly with disbelief. “Why did he add to the confusion? Burning the pumphouse, blowing the water main, sabotaging the generators? All it did was draw attention.”

  “But not to him. It just gave strength to the rumors about how messed up the mountain was—rumors they did everything they could to spread. Gorenstein’s the better talker of the two. He said the plan was to degrade the resort’s reputation, even push it into bankruptcy if possible. That way, the fake heart problem could believably flare up and let McNally leave gracefully, and the finances would be in such a mess that their little shoplifting might go unnoticed. That’s the main reason McNally kept playing ball with the TPL. He needed them as cover. It was a long shot, but he and Gorenstein were hoping to get away with it free and clear—if they had, they could’ve stayed in the U.S., two mediocre businessmen who’d just been targeted by poor timing, bad luck, and in Gorenstein’s case, a slightly soiled name. The burning of the pumphouse wasn’t part of it, of course. McNally had to destroy it so no one would find out the pumps didn’t exist. If Linda Bettina hadn’t been so efficient McNally could’ve skipped adding arson to his list of offenses.”

  “What’s Kathy Bartlett going to do with Norman Toussaint?” Snuffy asked after a moment’s reflection.

  “Nothing too awful, I guess,” I told him. “There were mitigating circumstances. He’ll probably be on probation forever and owe a small fortune, but I doubt he’ll do jail time. He finally rolled over on McNally, which helped. But the best news for him is that it may have all paid off—the treatments he was paying for seem to be working. I heard this morning that his kid’s turned the corner and might be headed for a full recovery. To be honest, though, I don’t think Toussaint’ll be that lucky. He sold his soul in this deal, and that’s going to haunt him the rest of his life. Too bad McNally doesn’t have the same kind of conscience.”

  The chest now shoved aside, the team of four began tearing up heavy floorboards, all of which had already been sawed through to form a perfect four-foot-by-six-foot rectangle.

  “Your two wounded deputies okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Now they have bragging rights and their wives are ready to kill them both. Tough life. Lucky Tony Bugs was such a lousy shot. I bet he wishes you were a better one.”

  One of the men dropped into the hole with some rope and disappeared from view.

  “I didn’t shoot to wound,” I admitted, although I was happy I had.

  A few minutes later, the man in the hole reappeared and handed several rope ends up to his colleagues. He rejoined them up top and they all four pulled as a unit, lifting a human-size, sausage-shaped bundle wrapped in multiple layers of tarp and plastic, much like a poor man’s mummy.

  “Well, there you have it,” Snuffy said quietly, “as advertised. At least Tony Bugs gave us that much.”

  I looked at the packaged remains of Marty Gagnon, the small-time hood who’d thought himself capable of moving up from simple burglary to blackmailing a mobster whose identity he’d discovered by pure fluke.

  “God,” I sighed. “What a species we are.”

  Snuffy Dawson smiled. “You gotta love it.”

  Excerpt

  If you enjoyed Tucker Peak, look for The Sniper’s Wife, thirteenth in the Joe Gunther series.

  The Sniper’s Wife

  WILLIE KUNKLE DIPPED HIS LARGE RIGHT HAND into the sink and scooped a splash of warm water onto his face, washing away the last of the shaving soap. He straightened, used the edge of a towel hanging to the right of the mirror to mop his cheeks and chin with the same hand, and studied his reflection in the harsh fluorescent light.

  He wasn’t looking for flaws in his shaving. And, God knows, there was no narcissism taking place. Willy was the first to acknowledge his was a purely functional appearance. He had what was necessary: a nose, two eyes, a mouth, none of it particularly remarkable. As far as it went, it was just a face.

  And yet he studied it every morning in the same way, carefully, warily, especially watching the eyes for any deepening of the intensity which even he found disturbing. Had he seen them on somebody else, they were eyes that would have given him pause—eyes which troubled him all the more that they were his. They were what made of the whole truly something to remember, and although he didn’t know it, they were the one feature almost everyone remembered about his face.

  His scrutiny drifted lower, again as usual, to his neck, to his collar bones, and finally to his left shoulder and the useless arm below it. He’d been symmetrical once—at the very least that. Now he was someone who carried an arm as an eccentric might perpetually lug around a heavy, stuffed animal.

  Except that his burden wasn’t that interesting. It was just an arm, withered, pale, splotchy with poor circulation—something straight out of Dachau but pinned to his otherwise healthy body—put there by a rifle bullet in a police shootout years ago. In fact, the scar marked the dividing line between the alive and the dead of his body the way a ragged and permanent tear identifies where a sleeve has been torn from a shirt.

  It did draw attention away from the eyes, though. People overlooked them altogether when describing him as “the cop with one arm.” Which was an advantage, as far as Willy was concerned. He appreciated that a lesser but adequately flamboyant deformity covered for a far more telling one. It suited his personality. And his need. As he’d watched those eyes every morning “those windows
into the workings of his head” he’d actually become grateful for the arm. It was his own built-in red herring.

  He reached up and turned off the light. Time to go to work.

  · · ·

  The visit to Bellevue only aggravated the roiling anxieties Willy was trying so hard to tamp down. Even with a recent and extensive remodeling, the huge hospital and the familiar journey to the morgue reached up like a stifling fog to constrict his throat. As a rookie New York cop so many years before, he’d made this trip a half dozen times, collecting paperwork or dropping things off to help in some busy detective’s investigation. He’d enjoyed being part of something outside a patrolman’s routine, and had found the morgue’s forensic aspects interesting and stimulating: all those racked bodies offering entire biographies to those clever and motivated enough to decipher them. These visits had helped him to believe that although police work at the bottom of the ladder left something to be desired, the promises it held justified sticking it out for the long run.

  Of course, that was before he’d drowned all such thinking in the bottom of a bottle.

  The white coated attendant greeted him at the reception area with little more than a grunt and he followed him down a long, windowless, antiseptically white hallway, through a pair of double doors. There they entered a huge enhancement of Willy Kunkle’s memory of the place: a tall room, shimmering with fluorescence, and equipped with two opposing walls of floor-to-ceiling, square, shiny steel doors. The sight of it made him stop in his tracks, struck by the image of a warehouse full of high-end dormitory refrigerators, stacked and ready for shipment, gleaming and new.

  The attendant glanced over his shoulder. “You are all right?” he asked in broken English.

  Willy sensed the man’s concern was more self-interested than any display of sensitivity. He didn’t want to deal with a hysterical next-of-kin and miss more than he already had of the television program he’d been enjoying out front.