Basche put on his goggles, then tied the fur-lined hood under his chin and snapped the mouth and nose covering into place. He put his leather mittens on, checked his boot laces and set off with a swinging gait.
The snow was loose and slippery underfoot. Long strides were ungainly. He shifted to a short, choppy shuffle and headed for Tyler’s apartment building.
His feet crunched in a tick-tock manner. His eyes searched the empty streets. He looked over his shoulder repeatedly.
He moved quickly along a side street to the next intersection. Standing in the shadows, he studied Tyler’s apartment building until he located Tyler’s windows. They were dark.
He went back along the side street to an alley and shuffled down the alley to the back of the apartment building that faced Tyler’s windows.
He looked at the iron fire escapes that laddered up the back of the building. He walked to the back wall of the building and looked up. The cantilevered iron stairway required the weight of a tenant fleeing a fire to lower it to the ground. Basche could barely see it. Too high. He looked at the diagonal wrought-iron braces that angled into the brick wall. He jumped and touched one. He jumped again and closed his hands around it, then slipped. On the third jump he gripped it and hoisted himself up. He set himself into a swinging movement and hooked a leg over the brace. With one arm hanging free, he reached out and touched the bottom step of the iron stairway. He got a grip on it and swung out.
His weight carried it down to the ground, and he quickly climbed it.
It was six stories to the top. Basche became intensely aware of the danger as he climbed. The soles of his boots became caked with packed snow that slipped on the slatted metal steps. His mittens slid along the iron rod railings. One slip and his own weight falling would break his handholds and pitch him overside into the night and down to the concrete pavement. In addition he had to climb past backroom windows at all six stories.
It would take only one phone call to surround the building with police. On top of all that, six stories was a long, long climb.
Basche adopted a slow-motion climb, placing each step with great care. He began to feel the strain in his thigh muscles at the third floor. At the fourth floor his breathing was heavy, and at the fifth floor he was perspiring.
At the sixth floor his legs were trembling. He paused and looked at the wrought-iron ladder that led to the rooftop. Each foot would have to be put on a thin iron rung.
For a moment his nerve failed him. He realized that his legs were out of condition. His boots were not made for climbing ice-coated iron rungs.
He turned his head and looked down. Sparse lights illuminated the deep covering of snow far below. If he suffered a muscle spasm on the way up the ladder or if one foot slipped, he was a dead man.
Basche took a deep breath and placed his right foot on the first rung. Then he raised his left foot and began the climb. His trembling legs made his feet rock back and forth on the metal rungs. He relied more on his arms now to pull him up. The inside of his face mask was soaked with his rapid breath.
When his head cleared the roof edge he scanned the rooftop. A blind, amorphous world of white. His eyes squinted through the goggles dancing with grains of blown snow. He looked at the roof ledge. Tile. Humpbacked vitreous brown tile. Slippery as glass. He forced himself to turn and look down. The little cases of lamplit snowfall in the alley seemed far, far down. He felt an urgent need to get off the ladder, to get safely on the roof. He hefted himself up two more rungs, then three, and clambered over the slippery tile ledge.
Basche paused to study the area before him. There was a brick structure to his right—elevator shaft. In the snow it seemed to be a pale, shifting series of dark dots. Another building covered with sheet metal, nearer and smaller, housed the dumbwaiter shaft. Beyond, farther to his left, a dark area that might be an air shaft.
Basche stood up, then threw himself urgently down flat in the snow. Something had whizzed by his head. Yes? His hearing was muffled in the fur-lined hood and the snow was rattling on his goggles. He wasn’t sure. Yet …
He thought about it. Definitely, he’d heard it. It whizzed right by his right ear. A rifle bullet. Lyons? Tyler? Who?
There was no light on the roof. The edges of the roofs were faintly lit by the streetlights.
He studied the skyline and located the blurred lights of the Verrazano Bridge. High structures with lights helped him. He crawled to his left and got the edge of the elevator building between him and a distant Verrazano Bridge light. Now he got definition on the left side of that brick building and a little less on the right side.
He turned his head and studied the dumbwaiter-shaft structure. Not likely. Too small. Besides, the shot had passed his right ear, and that structure was on his left.
He concentrated on the elevator-shaft housing. While watching it, he turned on his side and unzipped his jacket. Then he reached down inside and pulled out the long-barreled target pistol. He felt like a man swimming underwater. He slowly zipped up the jacket. Then he drew off a mitten and probed in his pocket.
His fingers picked out a bullet and brought it to the pistol. The snow stung his hand and the wind drew the heat from it like a bucket of ice water. With the shot in the chamber, he drew on his mitten again, flexed the leather trigger finger and raised himself up on both elbows.
He was ready.
Something low down behind the housing. Something almost beyond the strings of bridge lights. No? Yes. A stick. A round ball.
It was a head. Moving. Searching. Now there was a torso with it, seeming to grow out of the side of the housing. Something human. Then gone.
It was confirmed. Someone had taken a shot at him. He waited, lying flat, feeling the snow cover him, camouflage him. He lay below the level of the wall of the roof ledge.
He waited. The head now appeared on the other side of the building—the left side. The back lighting was better here, and Basche made out the head, a shoulder, the cocked arms and a weapon—maybe a rifle. He waited a moment more.
Squinting, searching, crouching, the figure moved along the wall of the housing. Basche drew his forearms up. He gripped his right wrist with his left hand. He placed the gun barrel in front of his right eye. He squinted and aimed. And slowly squeezed the trigger.
The figure convulsed and spun into the wall. It stepped away one step, as though bowing to the wall in a solemn salute, then slowly fell and sat backward. It rolled over on its stomach and drew up its knees, face on the ground, like a Moslem at prayer.
Basche deliberately removed his mitten, groped for another shot and put it in the chamber. He put the mitten back on, drew himself up on his elbows again in the proper target position and aimed, this time at the round ball of the head.
The gun went tfoo as the barrel flashed its explosion.
Basche reloaded his pistol with another shot. He waited a moment longer, then stood up. He took three careful steps, watching the prone figure before him. He took his flashlight out of his pocket and turned it onto the figure.
Joe Tyler. Definitely. In a Navy pea jacket and a knitted cap caked with snow. From the high collar of the pea jacket a long black-and-orange-barred skater’s scarf of heavy wool extended. An absurd gaiety in knitted wool. Tyler lay dead on his back on the rifle.
Basche leaned forward to look at Tyler’s face.
Then the inside of his head exploded and Roger Basche fell. He was dead before he hit the roof.
The figure on the fire-escape ladder drew back the arm that held the police pistol. Standing on the metal rungs, he carefully located his holster under the slit of his heavy police coat and shoved it in. Then he began the climb down the fire escape six stories and more to the ground. Car 172 was parked in the alley.
15
5:00 A.M. All waited.
Pier 11 Brooklyn was under five inches of snow. Riding the wind, it drove at an angle. It boiled in eddies and swirls off the long roof of the pier shed in bitter cold darkness. The pier and the
ship next to it were an oasis of light in a dark arctic world.
Under the pier, water gurgled as the tide sucked down the Narrows and paraded out to sea in long, prow-raising swells.
A heavily muffled seaman broomed the snow off the gangway into the slapping harbor water. Another worked the snow off the decks and ladders that led to the bridge.
Captain Frank Note looked out the bridge window of the Italian passenger freighter Rochine, length 475, beam 53, draft 27, loaded with 6,223 tons of general cargo and outward bound for the Mediterranean. He frowned at the ship’s chronometer and sighed. “Late,” he said in English. “Damn!”
He watched the waterfront street at the end of the pier.
Down in the cabin, Dan Lyons finished unpacking his small bag. There were only four passengers logged on board, including himself. He looked around the cabin and at the two bunks, one of which would remain empty for the entire voyage. He decided to go back on deck and watch the ship cast off.
He shrugged his way into his heavy overcoat and reached for the cabin door. He hesitated, then turned and opened a drawer. He reached into a layer of undershirts and withdrew a packet of white cards held with a rubber band.
His thumb riffled the tightly wrapped cards thoughtfully. He drew a deep breath and pushed the cards into an inside jacket pocket.
He stepped out onto the freezing deck, palely lit by gangway lights, and nearly staggered back into the cabin from a tremendous blast.
The tug lay off the fantail of the freighter in the Buttermilk Channel, its 45,000-horsepower engines throbbing like a living thing. The tugboat was bedecked with lights that framed it in the blackness of the pre-dawn bay. It gave another steel-piercing snort on its ship’s horn. It propellers held it easily in place against the increasing pull of the tide slipping toward the Narrows.
The captain looked again at the chronometer and again at the quay. He nodded sternly through the bridge window at Lyons and turned back.
Lyons stepped slowly along the steel deck, huddled in his jacket, his head covered by the all-pervasive snow. He bowed his head and thought of Tyler and Basche.
He felt like a pariah, a cursed wanderer of the earth. A killer of men, an unclean one, a fleer from friends in need.
But it was over. All over. And there was nothing more he could do, no reason to stay. The thin thread that bonded friends was broken.
Basche was completely unwrapped. Strangely enough, it was the dedicated hunter, the skillful killer of game who quietly shredded away in the face of the ultimate quarry.
All this waste and human devastation caused by avenging the accidental murder of a criminal who used his freak memory to help conceal enormous sums of the filthiest money on earth. Men get what they deserve. So said Teresa Raphael, Ph.D., Doctor of Divinity, Earth Philosopher, Nobody’s Fool.
Lyons pulled his hand from his pocket and looked at his wrist watch. 5:25. He turned his back to the flying snow and looked up at the bridge. The captain was looking out at the quay. So was the deckhand sweeping the gangway and the other sweeping snow overside off the deck. Lyons turned and followed their eyes. The quay was empty.
The old man, phthisical, frail and thin as a peeled stick, stood bent and ancient under his heavy winter coat and thick woolen shawl that was pinned around his shoulders. His eyes, under shaggy white hair, stared past the brim of his hat at the awesome power of the waiting tug. It shifted its position ever so slightly in the rushing tide, like a stallion quivering with unrest.
The matronly woman who stood with her arm through his spoke to him, bending her shawled head to his ear. “Yes,” she said. “We’ll sail. The captain says we have to sail today. It’s Christmas Eve and no ships stay in port on Christmas anywhere in the world. He says it costs five thousand dollars a day to operate this ship, and they can’t afford to lie in port on a holiday with no stevedores and no one to load.”
The old man spoke in a croupy voice, asking a question. His daughter put her head near his mouth to listen.
“Oh no, Papa. It’s radar. The ship sees through the snow with radar.”
The woman drew her father out of the wind, into the leeside of the superstructure. Solemnly he watched the shifting tugboat.
Abruptly, it was there. A police car turning in from the quay. Its rear end slewed in a wide arc as the wheels clawed for traction. On top, its red light was spinning. As it straightened out, it picked up speed and hastened along the pier. It came to a sliding stop at the foot of the gangway.
A man in plain clothes stepped out of the passenger’s side of the car. He hurried around to the driver’s window and spoke a few words, then hurried up the gangway steps to the main deck.
Lyons watched him with attention, scowling. His pulse began to pound. Something to do with him? His mind began ticking off potential trouble spots. Basche? Tyler cracked and confessed? Someone had followed him to the steamship-line offices? The shot-up apartment. The police had investigated that.
“Look, Papa. The pilot. The police brought the pilot. The streets must be in very bad condition. We’ll go now. In less than ten minutes we’ll be out in the channel. You’ll see. Let’s go inside and watch through the window. I can’t stand another minute of this winter. Oh God, it’ll be so nice in Italy.”
The tug gave two light snorts on its ship’s horn to the pilot.
Lyons reached into his inner pocket and withdrew the packet of cards. He looked at the top one. It was a copy of the T account from Reece’s floor. The name: V. Reece. It was followed by the account number. There were no withdrawals on the credit side. In the debit column there were five entries. Total: $328,000. Vinny Reece’s nest egg. A villa for him and Teresa in Italy a short drive from the Swiss Bank.
Lyons withdrew the rubber band from the cards and riffled them slowly. Names and cities and account numbers with deposits and withdrawals.
Money washed clean in the snows of the Alps and brought back to be invested in legitimate businesses. Money with no record, no antecedents, no ties with the addicted, the gambling, the whoring, the bootlegging or others in the cesspool of society.
Forty-three million dollars. The wind tugged at the cards, lifting their edges. Lyons released Vinny Reece’s card. It fluttered away, scaled, skimmed, then landed on the choppy surface of the bay water. He released another. And another. Then, like a card player, he bent the cards into a bow and let them fire out of his hand into the air. They fluttered away like doves. They blew high, tumbling, scaling, fluttering up over the main deck and into the water. Quickly in the ebbing tide they floated toward the tug and under the pier opposite. Gone. Gone. Gone.
Lyons raised his binoculars and studied them bobbing on the disturbed waters. Some were already curling and sinking. Forty-three million dollars sinking without a trace. He watched them thoughtfully through the binoculars and felt better.
He averted his eyes from the glasses and looked back along the quay. The police car was hurrying away. And another was arriving, slewing around the corner of the pier shed. Car 172. It rolled rapidly through the ever-deepening snow and stopped at the gangway.
A policeman stepped out and slammed the car door. Quickly he crossed to the gangway steps. Lyons trained the binoculars on his capped head as it cleared the main deck.
He had flat black reptilian eyes, and from his right temple, down his cheek and neck and into his police collar, ran a long red scar.
About the Author
William H. Hallahan (1925–2018) was an American novelist of popular literature. He worked as a journalist before embarking on writing in 1970, covering a variety of popular genres: detective fiction, fantasy, thrillers, and spy novels. His 1977 spy novel, Catch Me: Kill Me, won the Edgar Award. Hallahan also published essays on the US military and history.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1972 by the Estate of William H. Hallahan
Cover design by Ian Koviak
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5898-8
This edition published in 2019 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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WILLIAM H. HALLAHAN
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The Dead of Winter Page 18