Tanzi's Luck (Vince Tanzi Book 4)

by C I Dennis

  “So you put Clement Goody together with some big-city dealers. And people start getting killed, and you stand by and watch.”

  “What would you do for a hundred grand, Tanzi? I know about you. You got kicked off the force, too. You’re no innocent.”

  “So now what? You take me somewhere and kill me?”

  “I don’t kill people unless I have to,” he said. He was trying to look tough, but I felt him weakening. Maybe I could talk my way out of this.

  “But you’re all right with letting someone else do it? I saw you when Donald Lussen died. You’re too old for this, Duffy. You’ll never be able to live with yourself.”

  “Lussen was an OK guy.”

  “So am I.”

  “He was going to take us down,” he said. “Same as you.”

  “You’re already going down. The cops know everything. Put away the gun and let’s talk this over. I can help you.”

  “No way.”

  “How are you going to get past the deputies?”

  “I sent them out for lunch,” he said. He smiled. “They were glad to go. You and I are supposed to be watching the place while they’re gone.”

  “Where’s Rose?”

  “She’s collateral,” he said. “Goody’s leaving the country because you fucked everything up, and she’s his insurance policy. Now get in the goddamned trunk.” He popped the back of the Lincoln open with his key and pushed me inside. So much for my persuasive skills.

  Duffy Kovich had said that he wasn’t a killer, but if I had to ride in the trunk of his car for any length of time the pain would do me in. He slammed the lid shut, and my world went back to darkness.

  The car engine started, and we bumped down the grassy hill, every jolt taking a toll on my body. I tried to calculate where we were going by the terrain, the curves, the speed, and the stops. Thirty seconds down the hill to Goody’s house…a minute and a half farther down the long driveway to Hog Back Road…a quick dash to the stop sign where it met Route 15…a couple of minutes at highway speed into the village…slow down…sharp turn left…and then, accelerate again…

  This had to be Route 100, going north. That was the road that led to Donald Lussen’s cabin. Duffy wasn’t going to kill me; he was the delivery man, like I’d guessed. Someone else would do it, and I knew exactly who it was. Karen Charbonneau would complete the job that she had botched two days ago. Open the trunk, pull me out, and put a bullet in my chest, or maybe an arrow.

  When I was a kid playing hide-and-seek, some nimrod would invariably hide in the trunk of a car and get locked in, and the rest of us would have to go find a grown-up, which meant a scolding and the end of the game. It wasn’t just the kids on my street who did this, it was children everywhere, and after enough of them had died from heat stroke or suffocation, the carmakers began installing glow-in-the-dark emergency release handles. The Lincoln was old, but it wasn’t that old: it must have one. I slowly twisted around, every movement making me want to cry out in pain. The handle should be dangling somewhere near the latch. My eyes were fully adjusted to the darkness now, and I couldn’t miss it.

  But it wasn’t there.

  The car made a turn, and the road became bumpy again. This had to be the Old Mine Road that led to Lussen’s cabin. We turned again, and I knew that we were in his driveway, slowing down for the rough patches. We would be at the cabin within seconds.

  I felt the surface underneath me and pulled up a carpet-covered panel that exposed the spare tire. A jack was fastened to the top of the spare, along with a lug wrench. I freed the wrench and inserted the tapered end into where I figured the trunk latch would be, and then pried as hard as I could. It wouldn’t give, no matter how much force I applied or what angle I came at it from. I began to beat on the trunk lid with the wrench. It wasn’t going to accomplish anything, but that hardly mattered. I needed to whack on something because people were trying to kill me, and I wasn’t going to lie here and take it. I would make one hell of a noise on the way out.

  The vehicle pulled to a halt and I heard Duffy’s door open. I continued to bang the wrench against the sheet metal, and at the same time I curled up on my knees with my back against the trunk lid, praying that he would be dumb enough to open it.

  He was.

  The latch clicked, and I burst the lid open. Duffy took a startled step backward, and I swung the tire iron and connected with his crotch. He fell to the ground in pain, gasping for breath, but still clutching the gun.

  For the second time in two days I ran into the woods.

  *

  I don’t do marathons, or half-marathons, or quarter-marathons, or one-sixteenth marathons, or even the fifty-yard dash. It’s all that I can manage to roll out of bed and scramble down the hall to Royal’s bedroom when he panics in the middle of the night and begins to howl. I call that the five-yard dash, and I believe that I hold the record, at least for my age group.

  But injured or not, I had bounded like a whitetail into the pucker brush in a crazed attempt to get out of range of Duffy Kovich’s gun. Make that my gun. He had finessed it from my grasp while I’d been dazzled by the light and weakened by pain and an oncoming seizure. How could I have let that happen? A few years ago he wouldn’t have stood a chance.

  I could beat myself up about that, but the fact was that I had been operating well beyond my abilities since I’d come to Vermont. Sure, I was sick with the whiteouts, but that was only the latest symptom of a larger problem: I was getting older. I was no longer able to shape events to my liking and call all the shots. Taking a bullet to the brain had sapped my confidence along with my strength, and I was a different person now, even if I hadn’t yet accepted it. I was pushing my luck—and everyone else’s—with this fantasy of being able to continue my career as a hard-boiled private investigator. I was soft-boiled at best.

  The farther into the woods I went, the angrier I became: partly at my bad decisions, but mostly because I couldn’t stand hearing myself whine. So what if I wasn’t as sharp and robust as I once was? I still knew more about this business than most people ever will, and I had something else on my side: determination. When I want something, I plod toward my objective, and I sometimes make a few missteps, but I usually get there. I’m a dog with a bone, and when I’ve been screwed over by someone, I’m almost more Chan than I am Vince.

  I was a good quarter-mile away from the car when I stopped for a status check. Status: my wound hurt like sin, I was dehydrated, and I might face-plant at any moment, just as I had two days ago when Karen Charbonneau had tried to kill me.

  But I was still alive. And nobody was going to chase me through the forest like a game animal, because I was going on the offensive, and Clement Goody’s play was about to close down.

  My first task was to fashion a weapon. I broke off a branch from a poplar tree and peeled the bark from one end. I found a stone outcropping that provided a chip of slate to use as a sharpening tool. After fifteen minutes of work I had the beginnings of a primitive spear.

  By now Duffy would have recovered and would be looking for me. I assumed that others were also in the area, as Duffy had intended to deliver me to my executioners. They had Goody’s arsenal to draw from, and I had a sharpened stick. Not very good odds, and I was going to have to watch every step if I was going to move them in my favor.

  I came up with a very basic plan: find a source of water and a hiding place, and wait. Get some rest, and let the weak October sun warm me until it was dark and I could move more freely. I figured that I was somewhere between the clearing where Karen Charbonneau had shot an arrow into me, and Lussen’s cabin below. I’d found a stream that time, but it was elusive now. I spent almost an hour on the move, taking pains to make no noise or sudden motions that would give me away. The Charbonneaus had learned to hunt from their father, and it’s not hard for a trained eye to detect movement in the woods. That was how you distinguished yourself from the amateurs and came home with a dead buck in the back of the pickup. I didn’t want to b
e their prize.

  If I were patient enough, they would be mine.

  I found a tiny brook and a hole nearby under a ledge overhang that might have once been home to a bear but was unoccupied now. I lay on my stomach and drank my fill, and then collected leaves and twigs to make a blind in front of the hole. The space was big enough to crouch in, but not to lie down. That was good: if I let myself sleep, I might not wake up, as the whiteouts had been lingering at the fringes of my consciousness ever since I’d sprung from the trunk of Duffy Kovich’s car.

  I busied myself by continuing to sharpen my stick with the rock fragment. Caveman 101. By the time the light began to fade I had peeled off all of the bark—out of boredom more than necessity—and had whittled a point at the end that could do some damage. Anyone who got in my way was fair game, because I’d had enough of their lies. Duffy Kovich had pretended to be a distressed campus security cop when Don Lussen was murdered, although he probably knew all about it. Clement Goody had invited me to dinner and a striptease, when his real motivation was to string me along, find out what I knew, and then take me out as he had done with Lussen: identify the threat and eliminate it. Carmela Tomaselli and Angus Driscoll had tossed me scraps of information while holding back the important parts. And Karen—she would be up for Best Actress. It wasn’t all acting, she’d said, as if she had cared for me, at least a little. It might have been more convincing if she hadn’t been pointing an arrow at my face.

  I have to disagree with Raymond Chandler: detectives can be married, and maybe they should be, because it makes them more human. Love will constantly remind you that you are imperfect, which is good, because perfection is a dangerous illusion. Falling for Karen was a mistake, but love is all about mistakes, and not accepting the possibility of love in my life would kill me just as certainly as her arrows would.

  None of my philosophizing was helping the searing ache in my hindquarters. I got up and moved around every half hour or so to keep my body from freezing up and to distract myself from the pain. I heard movement near my hideout on a few occasions, but nothing that resembled a person passing by. Maybe they would give up, and I could walk out of here.

  That wasn’t likely. I knew enough to put them all in jail for a long time, and Clement Goody wasn’t the aw-shucks-you-got-me type. He would see this through until I was dead. Even then the cops might be able to build a case against him, but if I was gone and he and the girls were far away, it would be complicated. Goody needed to kill me and run. He had Rose DiNapoli as a bargaining chip, which infuriated me. Rose was the one person who had dropped everything to help me out, and who I trusted completely. I was way more concerned about her safety than I was about nailing Clement Goody, and it only added to my motivation.

  By six o’clock it was dark enough to start moving. I slowly made my way downhill, pausing every few steps to listen. By seven I was back at the primitive road where I’d bolted from Duffy’s car, and it was now completely dark. I walked down the road toward the cabin, staying near the edge of the woods in case I heard someone approaching and had to dive back in. No sounds, no cars, no people. A screech owl, the rustle of an animal, the night breeze gusting through the few remaining leaves, but no human sound.

  Perhaps they had left after all.

  I got to the clearing where the cabin stood just as the moon rose. Matthew Harmony’s yellow Saab was still parked at the edge. The building was in sight, but no light came from it. I circled around it from the edge of the trees, twice. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, aided by the moon, and I finally gained the confidence to approach one of the windows and look inside.

  Just then the headlights of an approaching vehicle cast a glow on the road from below, and I bolted for the perimeter of the woods. I froze behind a bush as a van pulled next to the cabin and the motor stopped. The front doors opened, and two people were illuminated by the interior light. Goody and a woman. It could be either Cindy or Karen—I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t matter, because they were equally dangerous.

  They opened the side door of the van and grabbed a passenger by the arms, shoving the person along the path to the door. I watched the three of them enter Lussen’s cabin, and within a minute the flickering glow of a kerosene lamp lit the windows.

  I could hear voices from inside. One was loud and agitated—it sounded like Rose’s voice, and my pulse jumped with the knowledge that she was alive and was only a few feet from where I hid. I wanted to dash to the cabin and get her out of there, but I waited.

  The talking stopped, and Goody and the woman came out of the front door. I ducked back behind my cover but kept my head high enough to see what was going on. Neither of them talked to the other. They went back to the van and opened the rear door, and this time I could see them clearly: Cindy Charbonneau and her master were dressed in hunting camouflage. Each of them took an assault rifle from the van, along with gear that they fastened to their heads: night vision goggles. Damn. If they happened to look in my direction I would be lit up like a jacked deer. I ducked back behind the bush and crouched to the ground.

  Cindy began to walk up the road while Clement stayed behind. He paced around the area as if he didn’t know what to do next. I caught a glimpse of him, backlit by the cabin window, and got a better look at the weapon; a short-barreled Uzi with a magazine loaded into it, ready to shred me into pieces if he spotted me. That wasn’t a hunting weapon; it was a means of extermination.

  Goody paced for a few minutes and then walked up the road that Cindy had taken. I could do three things: stay here and do nothing, slip back into the woods and look for a more secure hiding place, or enter the cabin and get Rose the hell out of there.

  I chose the third option.

  I was halfway across the clearing when a whiteout hit. It was sudden, and it was a bad one—I fell to my knees and knew that darkness would follow the whiteness within seconds. I would pass out, face down in the grass, and Clement Goody would find me and would kill me. I now realized that this was a set-up: they had placed the bait—Rose—where I would see her and I wouldn’t be able to resist coming to her rescue. Goody and Cindy would be standing a few yards away, waiting for me to fall into the trap.

  I was conscious enough to hear him approach, and I felt him prod me with the muzzle of the assault rifle. I was prostate on top of my sharpened stick, wondering if he would shoot me in the back.

  “Wake up, damn you,” he said. “I want you awake before you die. You need to know how much damage you’ve caused us.”

  I groaned, but I couldn’t lift my head. Goody smashed the butt of the weapon against my side. “Tell me why you did this,” he said.

  “Did what?” I managed to say.

  “Ruined…everything,” he stammered. “I fed you, I offered you my women. I could have saved you. I save people.” He kicked me for emphasis. “God damn you, Tanzi.”

  “You save them, or you kill them?” I said. “Which is it, Goody?”

  “I’ve never killed a living thing,” he said. He was crying now. “This was my mission. Jesus wanted me to spread his love. You were sent to ruin that, but the Lord will prevail.”

  The gun barrel was inches from my face. I slowly rotated my body toward his gun and reached underneath me. “Cindy?” I said, looking beyond him.

  There was no Cindy nearby, but Goody turned his head. I grabbed my homemade spear and shoved it at his chest as hard as I could. It entered the flesh above his belly and he fell back onto the ground, getting off a burst of gunfire into the dark night before dropping his weapon. I heard a sucking noise, as if the air from his lungs was escaping from the wound that I had caused. But it wasn’t air, it was freely-flowing blood, and I knew that the weapon had reached his heart. He would be dead within seconds.

  The preacher made a beckoning motion. He wanted to tell me something, and I leaned over his body.

  “I forgive you,” he said, part whisper and part death rattle.

  Forgive me? I watched as his head fell back and the life slip
ped away. Clement Goody’s final words were to absolve me for the sin of killing him, shortly after he had tried to kill me. I would leave that one to the angels.

  I snatched the Uzi and ran toward the cabin. Rose was inside, tied to a chair next to the kerosene lamp and gagged with a leather strap. I untied her bounds as quickly as I could and released the gag. She took a deep breath and clutched me by the arm. “They’re waiting out there! It’s a trap!”

  “Goody is dead.”

  “Where’s Cindy?”

  A burst of shots rang out, making one of the cabin windows disintegrate in a shower of glass. I pushed Rose to the floor and cradled the Uzi in my arms, pointing it toward the open door. A second burst took out the lamp and spread flaming kerosene across the table. Cindy Charbonneau had returned. If she didn’t shoot us first, we would burn to death.

  I grabbed a cushion from a couch and beat it against the flames. I had nearly contained it when I heard a scream from outside, followed by a single shot.

  Everything was now quiet except for Rose’s and my breathing. I crawled toward the door, keeping low in the darkened cabin. No sound, no movement. A minute passed, or maybe more, because the world was going white, and I was losing track of time. Rose got to her feet and walked over to where I lay.

  “Stay down!” I tried to yell, but it was more of a mumble.

  “It’s over, Vince,” she said. She knelt next to me and put her hand on my shoulder.

  I looked out the open door. Cindy Charbonneau’s body lay slumped backward over Clement Goody’s moonlit form, with the barrel of her gun next to her mouth.

  WEDNESDAY

  I slept for forty-eight hours after the operation, thanks to the thiopental drip. They had weaned me from it earlier in the morning, and it was now evening and I was starting to get my mojo back. I was hooked up to various machines that monitored my heart, my breathing, my brain activity, and a couple others that I didn’t recognize but might have brewed cappuccino or calculated my horoscope. My mother and Mrs. Tomaselli had come and gone, as had my brother Junie, my sister Carla, John Pallmeister, Robert Patton, a dozen different nurses, orderlies, and med students, and Dr. Noelle Jaffe, who’d beamed when she told me that everything went perfectly. Half of my head was bandaged up tight, and I knew that when they removed the dressing I would spend the next few weeks looking like some kind of electro-punk DJ until the hair grew back. I might not want to get my picture taken, but I was grateful to be alive.