“Ms. Greco, do you expect to arrest Mr. Vermillion anytime soon? Do you have any idea where he might be at this moment?”
Greco was nodding before he finished. When she spoke, she made direct eye contact with the camera. Jack had to admit, she had star power. The camera loved her.
“Yes, we have deployed assets all over the state. We have the assistance of the Pennsylvania State Police as well as members of the ATF and of course the U.S. marshals fugitive pursuit team. We expect an arrest at any time. He can’t hide from justice.”
Another question, from a tweedy geek in the second row.
“Can you tell us anything about the fugitive?”
“I can. As you know, his name is Jack Vermillion. He was being transported to Allenwood under a U.S. marshals escort. Apparently he was able to overcome one of his guards and take the man’s weapon.”
“We understand the guards are dead?”
“Yes. Both of them. He shot them both. In cold blood. We have a witness to the shootings. She was working at the restaurant when the transport arrived. She saw the whole thing.”
“Can we talk to her?”
“No. She’s in protective custody.”
“Do you have any idea where the shooter went?”
Greco shook her head, again looked right into the camera.
“No. But we know he’s traveling in a white van. If anyone out there sees a large white box van with government plates, Echo nine Bravo four one five, we ask that you call nine-one-one and tell the police immediately. This suspect is armed and dangerous. Do not approach him. We cannot stress that too much.”
“Can you tell us what Vermillion was charged with?”
“I can. Mr. Vermillion has been implicated in a cross-border drug and weapons smuggling syndicate. He’s been indicted under the RICO laws of this country, and I have petitioned a federal court judge to grant the government control of his assets under the federal forfeiture laws. That request has been granted this morning.”
Somebody in the middle wanted to know why she was doing that. Did it not seem a bit draconian? Greco frowned at the question.
“The purpose of the forfeiture law is to prevent accused felons who are involved in organized crime to use the proceeds of their criminal operations to delay the progress of justice. To allow Mr. Vermillion to continue to draw on the assets of a multimillion-dollar corporation would severely hamper the administration of justice.”
“But doesn’t the Justice Department have unlimited resources?”
“That’s not the point. As we’ve seen in some recent criminal cases—I’m thinking of the JonBenet Ramsey case here, not to mention Mr. Simpson—money can be used to create barriers in the path of a thorough investigation. Should Mr. Vermillion be exonerated, he will of course regain control of whatever remains of his assets and resources. But he cannot use them to defer justice.”
“Have you already seized the companies he controls?”
“That process is ongoing. A business associate of Mr. Vermillion has … attempted to obstruct the process. That issue is being dealt with in the courts today. I expect a resolution very soon. And that, I’m afraid, is all the time I have today.”
She shook her hair out, glanced to her left, nodded once.
“I would like to stress, however, one final matter. The Justice Department has authorized a reward of one hundred thousand dollars for information leading to the capture of this felon. One hundred thousand. And no further questions. That’s all I can say at this time.”
The image jumped and now Jack was looking at the intake photo the ATF had taken when they brought him into the holding cells at Albany, full face and profile, with the numbers plate, a black board with little stick-on white letters. Vermillion, Jack. Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. 1377620.
It was a bad moment for him, standing in the middle of a Wal-Mart in the middle of middle America and seeing his haggard face staring out at him from the huge screen. He looked angry. He looked dangerous. He looked like a dead man. And he was worth a hundred thousand. Maybe he should turn himself in and claim the reward. He could use the money.
Jack hit the off button, walked away from the screen, bumped into a blocky young kid with a green Penn State jacket on, the kid with his head down, fondling some sort of CD player. The kid looked up at Jack, made a pug-nosed brute face, but Jack was already by him. One thing anyway, it looked like Creek Johnson was holed up in the Alamo and making a fight of it.
Good for him. Jack hoped he was having fun.
He pushed his way to the cash counter and paid $38.63 for the paint and the brushes, which left him a little less than $90, all he had found in Buster’s black equipment bag under the passenger seat of the van. He also had Buster’s Visa card in his back pocket and Sharon Callahan’s service Glock stuffed into the top of his cowboy boot, where it was chafing the hell out of his calf muscle and banging into his shin bone every time he took a step. What the hell he intended to do with either of them was beyond him right now.
The cashier was an elderly woman whose hair looked like cotton candy. Jack could see the shiny dome of her skull under the wispy hair. She had age spots on her cheeks and a huge smiley face on her blue vest, which sported a badge with the name Ida May and the title Sales Associate. She gave him his change and showed him a set of dentures that had been around since the Truman years and needed a lot of repair work. Her hand was shaking as she counted out the coins and Jack wondered if she’d recognized him. Her pale-blue eyes looked watery and she had a slight cataract in the left eye. Under her huge glasses, her eyes looked wide and wet and as raw as egg yolks. Although he tried to track her shaking hands, she managed to spill several coins onto the floor. Jack was bending down to retrieve them when he felt someone bumping past him, the impact pushing him into the side of the cashier station.
He recovered, looked up, and saw the same thick-bodied young man wearing black jeans and a baggy nylon sports jacket, emerald green, with Penn State in white across the back. The boy was leaving at a brisk walk, not even looking back. Jack, already wrapped way too tight, snarled at the boy’s back.
“Excuse me, asshole.”
The boy stopped as if hooked, spun around. He had a bright red face, bumpy and unformed, small blue eyes spaced wide apart, a wispy blond goatee, and of course he wore his ball cap backward like every other brain-dead suburban mutt in every other brain-dead suburban hellhole just like Hazleton. He had on a pair of running shoes big enough to float to Cuba on, floppy sides and laces hanging.
“The fuck you say, faggot?”
Jack stood up, remembered his actual situation. This was no time to be picking a fight with some of the local pond scum. Jack smiled, shook his head, turned back to the elderly cashier, who was staring at the boy with a look of absolute terror. The kid stepped in so close to Jack that he could smell the kid’s sour-milk breath.
Jack looked at him, made eye contact, tried in the silent exchange to make him understand that a fight between them could go either way, but that Jack didn’t really want one right now. It sounds complicated, but guys learn this kind of stuff very early. The kid got it in one and seemed happy to interpret it as a win for slacker mall rats everywhere. He puffed up at Jack some more, the effect spoiled a bit because Jack had four inches on him.
“Just watch the fucking mouth, faggot. Next time—”
“Yeah, thanks. I will. You have a nice day, now.”
Jack turned a shoulder on the kid and smiled at the cashier.
“Sorry for my language, ma’am.”
The woman was watching the boy, who stood at Jack’s right shoulder for another ten seconds and then turned and walked off, trailing a cheap plastic chain of hip-hop slang behind him. When he got through the doors she breathed out through thin papery lips.
“Goodness. My. What a temper.”
“Yes,” said Jack. “I’m sorry about that.”
“Oh never mind,” she said. “I know Jason from around. He’s always been a bad o
ne. You held your temper pretty good there.”
“Thanks,” he said.
“You’re welcome, son. You have a nice day.”
You too, he thought. And enjoy your golden years as a Wal-Mart sales associate, Ida May.
The truck was in a three-story parking garage called Ticknor’s Auto Park, about six blocks away down a four-lane street lined with shopping malls and fast-food restaurants, bleaching white under the summer sun, unmarked by a single growing thing. The parking garage had been under construction, half-built, but the site was deserted when he drove the truck inside. It was as good a place as any to try to do what he had to do.
He walked all the way back to the lot with the fifty-pound can of paint tearing at his shoulder muscles and saw two police cars cruising past him, a Hazleton police car and a Pennsylvania State Police Jeep Cherokee with a roof rack and a shotgun showing in the rear window. The female cop in the Stetson and the aviators never looked his way. The sun was bitter hot on his shoulders and the back of his neck. By the time he reached the car park and walked up the long deserted ramp, he was dripping with sweat and starving.
The truck was on the top floor. The level was unfinished, white with concrete dust, and littered with metal shards. Discarded scaffolding and sections of rusted pipe littered the upper levels. No one was anywhere around. He stopped at the top of the ramp and listened with every nerve ending he had, but heard only the roar of traffic on the street and the pounding of his own heart. He set the can down, used a can opener he’d found in the glove compartment of the transport van to pop the lid. The opener had an enamel crest on it, a sunset against a big saguaro cactus, and the words Big Sky Country in a circle around the picture. He tried not to think about the look in Sharon Callahan’s eyes as she was dying in the hallway of that Denny’s. The opener was clearly hers. She had wanted to be in a gunfight and she got her wish and it killed her, as wishes sometimes do.
He closed his mind on the picture with a hard-locking snap and dipped a brush into the thick shiny green paint. The first stroke across the van left a streaky band of white showing under the dark-green paint. The second pass covered it completely. He kept at it and tried not to think about what he was going to do next because, frankly, he had no damned idea. None at all.
JAY RATS UNIT 552
INTERSTATE 81
TEN MILES EAST OF HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA
1300 HOURS
The next flight out of LaGuardia turned out to be an Appalachian Air shuttle that got Nicky and Casey to Harrisburg at one o’clock in the afternoon. Dexter Zarnas had met them at Capital City Airport in Jay Rats unit number 552, a black Lincoln Town Car with heavily tinted windows and a dashboard full of computer gear and electronics. It was Vince Zaragosa’s best police unit and letting Dexter take it all the way to Pennsylvania was a hard thing for the boss to do. Casey spotted Dexter in the middle of the airport concourse as they came up the arrivals ramp, a slab-sided hulk sitting at the bar drinking a bottle of Heineken, wearing black jeans and boots, a black T-shirt under a gray sports coat, his shaved skull shining under the airport fluorescent lights, his black goatee carefully trimmed. He looked like a corporate biker.
Dexter drained the Heineken as they walked up, nodded once, and they were doing a steady eighty miles an hour on Interstate 81 a few minutes later. Casey waited until they were out of the main traffic press and then asked Dexter where they were going.
“I been trying to meet with the ATF ever since I got here. They were already at Slipstream when I got there. This bitch—sorry, Casey—but this bitch running the show, name of Greco, total stonewall.”
“I saw her on CNN before we left,” said Casey. “She was up there where Vermillion got away. At Beach Haven. She likes the camera, I think. They were talking about a press conference.”
“Anyway, I’m leaving—I’m pissed—and this ATF guy takes me aside, Derry Flynn. He was there at Red Hook. He’s not happy with this Greco broad. Gave me his cell phone number. When they heard about the shooting up in Beach Haven, he called me, told me what was happening. He doesn’t think Vermillion did that all on his own either. From what he saw of Vermillion, he figures the guy’s pretty tame, just a business geek. He thinks Pike was the shooter. But he can’t get this Greco woman to pull her teeth out of Vermillion long enough to consider a different scenario.”
“We’re going to Beach Haven, then?”
“Yeah. If Pike was in on that, somebody would have seen him around. Anybody confirms it, we know we’re on the right track. I never met the guy, but from what I hear, he’d stand out.”
“I’ve met him,” said Casey. “He’d stand out.”
TICKNOR’S AUTO PARK
HAZLETON, PENNSYLVANIA
1330 HOURS
Jack was about halfway through with the passenger side of the van, sweat running down his face and his eyes stinging, when he heard footsteps, shoes grating on the sandy concrete behind him. He set the brush down on the can lid, stood up, and turned to watch as three teenage boys reached the top of the parking ramp and came out onto the deserted level. He recognized the kid with the Penn State jacket right away, and then he saw what was in his hands, a section of rusted rebar about three feet long.
His two associates were also in the usual gangbanger togs, Hilfiger jeans hanging low showing plaid boxer tops, big sweatshirts, one kid wearing a shiny Knicks jacket, the other a black sweatshirt with a picture of a bullet-skulled wrestler and the words Austin 3:16. Both kids were also holding sections of steel rod.
The one on Jack’s left, in the Knicks jacket, was pale white, a dark-haired kid with huge brown eyes—almost feminine—and the mandatory variation on the goatee theme that seems to have caught on with the young and the pointless all across America. The other kid was large, over six-four, and had to weigh in at three hundred pounds. This kid had a big bovine face unmarked by any kind of internal life, dull brown eyes, and a slack hanging mouth. He was nodding his head to nothing at all, a robot movement, mindless as a twitch. Penn State hefted the rebar, stepped forward into the parking area, and the other two—Jack was already thinking of them as Knicks Jacket and Tank Boy—shuffled forward behind him.
Jack shifted his footing and remembered that he had taken the Glock out of his boottop. It was now sitting in the glove compartment of the van. It would take some doing to get at it, and he doubted he’d have that much time. Thinking about it almost lightened his mood; he’d never been a guy who liked weapons or who took comfort from having one around. The Glock banging up his shin bone was just six pounds of useless steel, so he’d set it aside while he went to work on the van. Big mistake, it seems.
Penn State got to within ten feet of Jack and stopped. Knicks Jacket and Tank Boy spread out to the left and right, both of them breathing short sharp gasps through their mouths, Tank Boy still nodding in time to something only he could hear.
“Hello, faggot,” said Penn State.
“Hello yourself,” said Jack, smiling. The sun was shining at an oblique angle through the grid-work bars of the parking garage, painting the floor with hard black shadows and hot white bars. The dusty air looked like it was filled with fire. The place smelled of concrete and wet wood and rusted metal. Every footfall echoed, every word slammed off the walls. Jack knew there was no one else around. Hell, what was he going to do? Call 911?
“We seen your picture there, faggot. On the TV.”
Jack shook his head sadly.
“You know, I really hate that word.”
“What? Faggot?”
“Yeah. That word. I really, really hate that word. Okay, you want to call me something so I can understand how mean you assholes are. But why faggot? I mean, it’s so damn boring. Why not … fuck-head? Or puke? Or scum-sack? I don’t get this whole faggot thing with you kids. Unless, you know, you’re overcompensating.”
Jack’s tone of sweet reason had them off balance, and they took a few seconds to try to figure out what Jack was up to. Since that called for actual workin
g brain cells, they had to give up on it.
“Hey. Fuck you, faggot. There’s cops all over the place want to know where you are. And you right here.”
“I have a quarter. Why don’t you go call one?”
Penn State shook his head slowly, grinning hugely.
“Oh no. Not yet. We gonna fuck you up good. Then we gonna turn in what’s left, collect large. Then we par-tay, dude.”
“Stop talking, man. Let’s just do it!” said Knicks Jacket.
Tank Boy just nodded more energetically and made a kind of low rumbling noise that might have been a laugh or simply an inadequate breakfast. Jack sighed for the nation, for the quality of criminal assholes we now have to settle for in this great country. He thought of Frank Torinetti, of Carmine DaJulia, old Fabrizio Senza the killer barber, all the boys of Astoria. Thugs in his day wore Burberry trench coats, custom-made silk suits, Mara ties, Mauri slippers, had gold rings and loved Verdi, cried like girls at Carmen, drank Barolo, loved hugely, hated brightly, forgave easily, forgot nothing. And look at these sorry mutts we have here. Heartbreaking.
Jack stepped away, got his back up against the wall of the transport van. Having fun yet, you miserable son of a bitch? Down in his belly, he felt a spurt of acid, cold and yet burning. The skin across his shoulders went numb and his chest was tight and hot. Penn State looked like he was trying to find the right moment for a rush. Jack’s vision was going a little rosy around the edges and his heart was hammering inside his rib cage. He was going to die right here. It was insane. Come through three years in Vietnam and get beaten to death by three mall rats in a suburban parking lot. And all of it because he was trying to help his kid get out of Lompoc. It was just too much.
Penn State yipped out a sort of yowling cry and rushed at Jack, who kicked the five-gallon can of paint over into his path, the oily green flood catching Penn State’s floppy rubber runners—Penn State slipped—slammed hard to the floor on his back—the iron bar tumbled loose—Jack stepped in and snatched it up—Knicks Jacket was on him now—Jack ducked one wild swing, felt a thrumming rush as the rebar went past his left temple—Knicks Jacket put way too much in the swing and he stumbled off to Jack’s right—now Tank Boy was coming in—Jack caught Tank Boy’s downward blow on the bar—it drove Jack down to a knee—Tank Boy raised his bar again and Jack managed a sideways blow at Tank Boy’s braced knee—he connected and saw the joint snapping—Tank Boy’s howl was pure animal pain—Penn State was slithering backward in the spreading pool of paint—trying to get to his feet—Knicks Jacket had recovered his balance—swung the rebar again—Jack parried it on his bar—damn, this was just like the pugil-stick exercise they taught you at Lejeune—dropped the end—rammed the butt hard into the boy’s face—Knicks Jacket went backward into the green paint pool and when he hit hard in the center of it his head bounced once with a cracking sound—Tank Boy was holding his ruined knee and hopping to his left—his bloated cheeks dull as candle wax and his forehead bright red with agony—Jack stepped in—braced both feet—set himself—swung the rebar at Tank Boy’s head—felt the brute snap-shock of the blow all the way to his shoulders—Jack was turning away before Tank Boy was all the way down—Penn State had reached the edge of the paint pool and he was scrabbling for a grip, his sneakers making feathery green skid marks on the gray concrete, his hands wet and shiny green—Jack tossed the rebar—heard it bounce and go clanging away—popped the van door and picked up the Glock—his boots slipping as he crossed the enamel—Penn State turned around—saw Jack’s face—the pistol in his right hand—Jack with his war face on—Penn State got to his knees—got to his feet—tried to run—fell facedown on the concrete floor. Jack reached him in three long strides, put the muzzle hard up against the back of the kid’s head.
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