“The Russian radioman did not appear to be injured, but I’m afraid Carlos died from his injuries.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Pretty sure. The coasties reported to Bath PD that a victim ID’d as an undocumented Mexican was discovered on an abandoned fishing yacht that matches the description of the boat that captured me. Carlos was on that boat and he was barely responsive when I tried to talk to him. I’m sorry to say he probably quit.”
“That’s too bad. His name was Carlos Solis, and he was a good man. That explains why we have not been able to contact him. He reported the rescue and then went suddenly incommunicado. A game warden found his speedboat in a marsh, undamaged. We had a boatyard bring it into Eastport. Cuthbert must have ambushed Carlos somehow and brained him.”
“Yeah. Carlos was bleeding from the head. Who’s Cuthbert?”
Giselle sighed.
“Claude Leon Cuthbert. He’s a rogue agent of The Clem-son Project. Went over to the dark side two years ago, for money apparently. He may own the yacht that picked you up. We’ll call the USCG and confiscate it, but the main issue is our defector. Cuthbert is no doubt going to try to sell him back to Mother Russia for a million or two. He’s not in any of his usual haunts. He seems to have disappeared. We’ve got to find him but I’ve no idea where to even look.”
“He has teamed up with a local lawyer, a mobster-wannabe named Jack Brunson. Brunson, by the way, probably owns the Hatteras, not Cuthbert. I’m thinking Cuthbert used Brunson.”
“Kin to the estimable Agnes Ann Brunson?”
How did Giselle even know Aggie’s last name? Tagliabue had never listed her as a relation or mentioned her to anyone outside of Bath. Maybe Carlos passed on a tidbit. It didn’t matter if he did. Tagliabue just had to get used to the idea that this woman knew everything about everybody, all the time. Her sources must be phenomenal, to say nothing of her memory. He had never seen her refer to anything, paper or electronic. It was all inside her skull.
“Her ex.”
“Ah. How is that obvious fool tied to Cuthbert? Wait, he must be our mystery man, the local source we were warned to expect. Right?”
“I’m guessing affirmative on that. I don’t know how Jack got tied up with Cuthbert. Carlos saw them together in a bar and then a friend of mine saw them on the Hatteras. Brunson is also money oriented, but I don’t see him getting into something this deep on purpose. He did hole the dinghy the hired crew was in, but he probably knew it wouldn’t sink. He was just buying time by slowing them down. Killing Carlos is probably more than he bargained for. He’s not known for getting involved in murder.”
“What about your mate, Joshua White?”
“I believe that was a mistake. I don’t think Maven was meant to sink. Maybe Jack Brunson wanted my boat disabled to keep me out of the way while he worked this deal with Cuthbert. He didn’t know that I worked for you. Maybe he still doesn’t know. Maybe he just wanted to bust my chops for taking over his wife. Maybe the holing of Maven went haywire when Joshua interrupted Magpie planting the bomb.”
“That is Marvin ‘Magpie’ Harris?”
“Yes.”
“The same Magpie who was assassinated at Saratoga?”
“Yes.”
“Did you kill him? Is that why you wanted the false ID?”
He didn’t answer.
Giselle peered at him but said nothing else about Marv Harris. She put her hands flat on the coffee table and sat up straight.
“Okay. Let’s see if we can salvage something from this fiasco. Cuthbert probably still has the defector. He can’t have negotiated a transfer this quickly, but it’s not going to be too long. Brunson is probably sticking to Cuthbert like mayflies on a honey jar. He’s the only one who knows what he’s doing. Where do you think they might be?”
“Brunson has a summer cabin on a lake just outside Saratoga Springs. He’s a major horse racing aficionado, wants to be an owner . . .”
“Hence the disputation over the phenom Francine.”
Tagliabue nodded at her. “The cabin is not common knowledge. I only found out about it last month and I’ve known Jack Brunson awhile now. The sheriff is looking for him in Bath and on Westfarrow. It’s the only other place I can think of.”
“You know where it is?”
“Not exactly. On a lake with ‘berry’ in the name.”
Giselle picked up her phone and said into it. “Find me a lake house in Saratoga, New York, in the name of John Brunson. The lake has the word ‘berry’ in it.” She put the phone down and looked at Tagliabue.
“The sheriff know about our defector?”
“No.”
“How many men are we talking about with Cuthbert?”
“Three, I think. Maybe only two. Brunson has hired some muscle.”
“Okay, you can handle that. If it turns out to be an army, contact me immediately. Meanwhile I’ll be searching for communications and other signals indicating the Russkies are dealing. Cuthbert may have a hidey-hole of his own we are going to try to locate. Here’s a burner cell. Use it only to call me, once. Then destroy it and its card. If I use it to call you, same deal. I trust the one time you call me will be to say it’s over and ask what to do with our defector. If you make a mess, tell me about it then and we’ll take care of it. Got it?”
“Yes.”
Her phone pinged. She looked at it and said, “It’s Loughberry Lake.”
“Got it.”
“If I don’t hear from you, I’ll see that your assets are transferred to Agnes Ann.”
Tagliabue opened his eyes at that.
“You can do that?”
“It would be easier if you two were married, but we’ll take care of it.”
“How do you know we’re not married?”
Giselle only smiled, her enigmatic smile, showing no teeth. “Take the car that picked you up. The keys are in it.”
“I hope you can eat two salads,” he said as he rose to go.
“Don’t worry, Tony. I have friends.”
Tagliabue left immediately, taking Giselle’s 9 mm with him. He didn’t think for a minute that she had forgotten she gave it to him when the food arrived in her room. In the hotel parking garage, he checked the fifteen-round magazine. It was full.
Interstate 87 north of Albany, the capital of New York State, is also known as the Adirondack Northway. Tagliabue took it out of the Hudson Valley and farther into the Adirondack Mountains. He hadn’t eaten lunch but his belly didn’t want food. It wanted to settle things first with Brunson and Cuthbert.
His charge from Giselle was to rescue the defector, assuming the Russian was still alive. The Russian Navy might be just as happy with proof of the defector’s death. Either way, Tagliabue’s gut was tight, his mind running the reels of possible scenarios.
By the time he made it to Loughberry Lake an hour later, the GPS in the big Ford’s dash blinked on a location on the southeast shore. Giselle had located Brunson’s house on a tax map of the area and sent it to Tagliabue. He drove through the locale, noting that Brunson’s cabin sat on wooded acreage that seemed endless. It fronted a narrow road and the lake on the other side of that. There was no other structure in sight. The place looked quiet. He stashed the government SUV on a leafy dirt track a mile away and walked the graveled shoreline road back toward the cabin. When he came to the curve of a small shallow cove, the manufactured lines of the cabin’s front porch broke the symmetry of nature. He ducked into the woods.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE ADIRONDACK BUSHMAN
A man named Hoyt Ballard came to realize that even living on the streets of western Queens County with other homeless people was too demanding socially. His stay in a shelter on one August night left him in clean clothes and with a full belly, but it had also caused the left side of his face to droop with Bell’s Palsy. It had happened before. It was caused by pressure, the demands of life. He didn’t want to talk to people. He didn’t want to act polite and pretend to be gr
ateful for a cot and an overcooked stew once a week. He wanted to be left alone.
The other vagabonds in the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge camp wanted to know about his face once he came back home. When they realized he couldn’t speak clearly, some survival-of-the-fittest reflex kicked in and the men began picking on Ballard, the way chickens will peck at an injured member of the flock. These men, who were outwardly friends of Ballard, weren’t thinking about survival of the fittest, but their minds had become so attuned to the base level at which they existed that the instinct to take advantage of a less fit individual, one who presented less than a serious threat, prevailed without them thinking much about it. Soon they were pushing him, then getting no response or seeing no defense reaction, they began pummeling him. If guilt requires both consent to, and appreciation of, an evil, the homeless men beating Hoyt Ballard may not have been guilty. It made no difference to Ballard, however, who covered his face so that the pain they inflicted would be less noticeable. He knew he was going to have to find an alternative home after his former friends finished beating and robbing him.
They eventually pushed him into the garbage pile and wrangled over his bedding while he struggled to his feet and scrabbled away into the dark and noisy night. He curled up on a slab of concrete broken from an abutment pad, but was afraid to sleep until the entire camp finally gave out of energy. With the slap and whirl of car tires droning overhead, he slept fitfully, snapping awake every few minutes in fear of the hoboes who had once been his friends and who had now drunk his sweet wine and smoked the remains of his stash.
As he shuffled along on Queens Boulevard the next morning, Hoyt came across a bus chartered by the New York Racing Association parked at the curb in front of a corner store. Clumps of men, and a few women, were boarding, most carrying paper cups of coffee and white bags containing a bagel with a schmear or a buttered hard roll. Their faces were buried in racing forms and newspapers. None were young and all appeared phlegmatic, serious about their business. They were a bit rumpled. This was not a holiday excursion, although a few were vulgar in their enthusiasm about a winner or two the day before. These were serious bettors going upstate to feed their semi-addiction. Hoyt Ballard figured he’d fit in, even though he had never placed a bet at a track in his life. His immediate goal was just to find alternative living accommodations.
The busload was heading up to the Adirondack Mountains, to Saratoga Springs, for a day of racing. He wasn’t sure where Saratoga was but decided it was probably better for him than the city streets. He melded with the crowd and found a seat in the back of the bus, away from the groups who drank and ate—and talked. He was alone, the nearest bettors more interested in their racing forms than in one rough-looking man sleeping it off. Hoyt rubbed the side of his face as the door closed with a hiss and the bus drove off in a burst of oily smoke. Once they crossed the Tappen Zee and rolled along the thruway at a steady rumbling speed, he dozed.
Everything was fine for a few hours, until Isaac Fishbine lit up a cigar. He had moved to the empty seat next to Ballard to catch a few winks before they got to the track. The New York Racing Association rep ambled back and said, “You know you can’t smoke on the bus, buddy.”
“It’s for medicinal purposes,” Isaac said, flapping a hand up and down in Ballard’s direction.
A few other men turned around to Ballard’s seat to watch the action. They knew what a homeless man smelled like, and said so. One bettor suggested they leave him be so as to not stir up the stink by his movement, but the racetrack man was having none of it. This bum had infiltrated his big, clean chartered Trailways, threatening the very tradition of honest betting men by sneaking into their midst. He prodded Hoyt Ballard awake.
“You got a ticket for this bus, buddy?”
Ballard looked around frantically, not having had enough sleep and with his numb face disorienting him further. His expression was wild, like a possum in a trap. When he tried to talk, a sound akin to gargling issued forth from his crooked mouth and a string of spittle meandered over his lower lip. The racetrack people leaned away from him—except the association man. He turned red in the face, furious that someone would be shifty enough to board one of the organization’s buses without paying ahead of time like everyone else. It made a mockery of the honor system that enabled the transportation arrangement to function smoothly.
He yelled forward, “Jack, pull this damn bus over soon as you can.”
Minutes later, Hoyt Ballard was deposited on the side of the Northway, watching the men watching him out the back window as their bus roared back onto the highway, spraying gravel behind itself. Ballard turned away and shuffled into the deep woods. He forced himself to keep moving until the sounds of the road were but a hissing murmur in the background. The scene on the bus had raced his heart in fear and embarrassment. The official on the bus could have called the police. A stay in a jail cell with other malefactors was more than he could bear to think of following his abuse of the night before. He felt weak in the knees, wobbly, so he lay down to rest. It was cool in the woods, and remarkably quiet. He slept.
A rumble woke him. It was his belly, talking to him and telling him that it had not seen nourishment in nearly twenty hours. Hoyt Ballard realized he was not going to find a street to panhandle here in these dark woods of the Adirondack Mountains, so he began walking. Afraid to encounter any other representative of officialdom outside the city, he kept to animal trails when he could find them, following alongside a moving creek other times, always angling away from the highway. He walked until the woods got dark at sundown, late on a summer’s evening. When he burrowed into a pile of leaves beneath a massive oak tree and became still, animal sounds began to signal the start of the hunting hour. For some reason, they didn’t worry him. Maybe he didn’t know that black bears were common in the forests of northern New York State, and that they could injure or kill a man. People were the danger to a man like Ballard, not an animal he had never seen.
The hours of traveling through rough terrain had tired him so he was soon asleep. Shafts of light were knifing through the trees when he woke. He started to walk again. The energy he had regained by sleeping soon drained away: he needed food. He forced himself to forge onward, stopping to rest at ever-shrinking intervals, his thighs chafing and his feet beginning to blister. He moaned in agony. Breathing in with a hiss, he let the pain out with every exhale. Finally he could walk no more. He sat next to the creek and removed his cracked boots, cardboard lining showing in places, and plunged his burning feet into the cold, flowing water. Resting while the sting of his open sores ebbed away as his feet turned numb, Ballard looked up from the stream and blinked in surprise. Was that the back of a house jutting out from the trees on a rise above the stream?
He’d hoped to avoid all contact with fellow humans, but he was weak from hunger and knew he had to cadge a meal. Carrying his boots, he trod barefoot through the shallow water and started to climb the slope. His feet couldn’t take the coarseness of the forest floor; he had to sit and wrestle on his blooded socks and boots. When he pushed his creaky body up to the cabin, no one answered his knock. There was no vehicle on the rocked road out front.
Desperate for food, his mind driven to find something to eat, Ballard checked the doors and windows. He was panting by the time he found a bedroom window unlocked and climbed in. He ate crackers and a jar of strawberry jelly from a cupboard. The fridge was empty and off, the door open. The electric baseboard heaters were warm. The water from the kitchen faucet dribbled weakly into a stain on the sink. Sitting on the linoleum of the kitchen floor, his back to the cabinets, his legs stretched out in front of him and his belly bloated from all he’d eaten, Hoyt Ballard tried to make sense of an empty house with electricity on and water left running. Eventually he came to the realization that the people who owned the cabin had left it for the coming winter and would probably not be back until at least late spring. It was a summer house. The mountains in winter might hold some attraction for the owners
once snow blanketed the area, but he didn’t know about that. He did know that the nights were even now beginning to cool down and September hadn’t arrived yet, so he figured the summer people had left.
Someone local would be watching the place for them, however; he was sure of that. He didn’t want to attract attention, so he slept the night on the floor and left in the morning. When he passed a mirror in the bedroom he was using to leave the way he had come into the house, he knew instinctively not to look in it. If he had, he would have seen a straggly man in stained and torn clothing. His face was roughened and marked with permanent dirt, pimpled with sores, and flaked with dead skin. His teeth were discolored, his lips cracked. The body odor which wept out of him like the effluent from a sewer pipe he recognized as his own. It was a familiar smell.
Ballard took the empty jelly jar and cellophane wrappings with him, stuffed into the pocket of his coat with a clutch of hard candy and half a box of raisins.
Thus began a lifestyle for Hoyt Ballard that he eventually worked to near perfection. He trudged through the woods day after day as fall settled on the area until he came to a lake ringed with houses on large lots. Slipping back into the deeply forested wilderness, the grizzled man set up a cave by closing the entrance with boulders and logs, leaving enough of an opening for smoke to drift out from the fire he lit every night and extinguished every morning. On days when he was needy—about once a week on average—he closed his cave and set out in a prescribed direction, south one week, east the next and so on. He visited empty houses, trying for a different one each time. Keys were almost always secreted in a planter or under a stone in the shrubbery. Foodstuffs were his usual targets, but he also stole a blanket here and a winter coat there, trying, though, to leave the burgled cabin as if no one had visited. The local caretakers were interested in storm and freeze damage more than robbery so they never noticed anything missing, as long as there were no broken windows or doors. Owners sometimes wondered about tins of veggies or a bag of candy bars they remembered leaving, but it was never enough to bother the local police about.
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