Tag Man

by Archer Mayor

  Then she began to weep.

  * * *

  Lester and Sammie sat side by side in the darkness of the gas station’s back room. They were beside Route 2 in Massachusetts in a place appropriately enormous for the heavy traffic it bore—a combination deli, grocery store, coffee shop, and service station. The nonstop bustle of dozens of people was muted by a heavy, locked door.

  Before them was a large flat-screen monitor and a DVD player. Sam was holding the remote.

  “What was the time on that printout?” she asked Lester.

  He checked the document that J.P. had extracted from the GPS in Lloyd Jordan’s BMW and read off the time stamp opposite the Sunoco’s address.

  She uttered something unintelligible, followed by, “I knew I’d screwed it up. Not enough sleep.”

  “Emma still working up a storm every night?” Lester asked.

  Sam scrutinized the remote as she spoke, trying to decipher which button to hit for fast-forward. “Not a storm. She quiets right down once I’m feeding her, but it’s still every few hours. She’s a peaceful baby otherwise.”

  Lester was smiling in the dark, nodding. “My daughter was like that. My son? Hell on wheels. Screamed for weeks. Have no idea why we didn’t murder him. I guess as soon as you’re about to, they do something cute to buy a little more time. Amazing process.”

  Sammie was laughing.

  “How’s Willy faring?” Lester asked.

  With almost anyone else—except Joe, of course—she might have read into the question. But Lester was a nice man, and she took his curiosity at face value.

  “Good,” she said, her eyes glued to the screen. “He gets up and brings her to me, changes her diapers, plays with her. He’s a good dad.” She quickly cut him a glance, adding, “And he and I’ll both shoot you if you repeat any of that.”

  Les was also transfixed by the whirring images before them. “My lips are sealed, but I’m not even remotely surprised. I always thought Willy was a softy at heart.”

  Sam let out a bark of laughter. “You’re an idiot, Les. Willy’s heart is as dark as the bottom of a well. But he loves that child and I guess he tolerates me as her mother.”

  She tacked on, “And that goes for me, too, ’cause most of the time, I could kill him.”

  Les opened his mouth to answer, but then pointed and said instead, “There.”

  She immediately froze the image to reveal Lloyd Jordan standing just inside the gas station’s entrance, looking around. He crossed to the coffee dispenser, poured himself a cardboard mug full, and retired to a small corner table with a direct view of the front door. The time on the screen matched not only what J.P. had discovered from the Bimmer, but one of the receipts that Willy had found in the trash of Leo Metelica’s Lowell apartment. It was that coincidence that had brought them here, accompanied by a Mass state trooper and the warrant he’d prepared for them. The trooper had stepped outside to use the men’s room and get some coffee.

  Sam didn’t go to fast-forward again, instead making them wait as long as Lloyd did for his appointment. Lester didn’t speak; neither of them wanted to miss a single detail. Through the following eight minutes, they watched Lloyd nurse his drink, glance at the flow of people coming and going, and occasionally consult the clock on the wall. He seemed relaxed, however, with his legs crossed and his body slightly slouched. For a man about to meet a contract killer, it seemed like just another day at the office. Eventually, he pulled a folded newspaper from his back pocket and laid it on the table beside his elbow. He did not open it.

  “Ooh,” Lester commented. “Real spy stuff.”

  Leo Metelica appeared the same way Lloyd had earlier, stopping at the door and casting about. He saw his contact immediately, of course, but ignored him to continue his survey, eventually also using the coffee machine before ambling over to the table next to Lloyd’s and settling down. He made a show of checking his watch and looking around some more, before at last acknowledging Lloyd with an unheard question. Lloyd pretended to listen politely, pointed to the newspaper inquiringly, and then handed it over with a smile.

  Leo took the paper but didn’t actually open it up, placing it flat on his own table and pretending to read the headline facing him.

  “Sure,” Lester said again. “That looks normal.”

  Lloyd stood up after that, straightened his back, left the eating area without a backward glance, and paid for the coffee on the way out the door.

  Leo watched him leave, surreptitiously checked the inner fold of the paper for the envelope Sam and Les assumed was there, and then followed Lloyd’s suit, shoving the paper into his pocket in the process.

  “Voilà,” Lester announced, retrieving their copy of the DVD. “That oughtta play well in court.”

  Sammie nodded and added, “Not to mention get us a warrant to access the Hummer’s OnStar location finder. I’m looking forward to telling Lloyd that his own pretensions pointed us straight to him.”

  * * *

  Lloyd loved his Hummer. It was huge and gleaming black, trimmed with enough chrome to qualify it as pure bling. As a kid, he’d watched Cadillacs and their ilk purring through the neighborhood, carrying cold-eyed, self-satisfied bigwigs with bodyguards and nervous women. He remembered his mixture of contempt and envy and remembered as well his ascribing the former to youthful ignorance as he became rich enough to buy fancy cars himself.

  But he never drove this tank to town. Not the big town, in any case. The BMW was tasteful by Boston standards, but the Hummer? Even Lloyd could still not completely rationalize its use on his old home turf. The part of him that had become what he’d once envied still housed a fragment of the kid who could recognize a male ego in need of toys.

  Now, however, he was feeling pretty satisfied with himself. His plan was working to perfection. After a day-and-a-half stakeout—another good reason to have chosen the roomy Hummer—he’d seen Kravitz arrive at the post office and disappear inside just long enough to allow him to stroll down the sidewalk, pretend to fumble and drop a book he was carrying, and stick two separate homing devices onto the rear of Kravitz’s rusty Subaru sedan as he bent down to retrieve it, all in one smooth swoop.

  Very sweet.

  Back behind the wheel and relocated virtually out of sight, he could train a pair of binoculars on the post office’s front door and see his target cautiously step out, watchful and on edge, all as expected, and reluctantly get back into his vehicle.

  Lloyd smiled to himself. Poor bastard. He had no choice. The empty post office box had to have told him that the e-mail was a hoax—a way to get him out into the open. But what to do? He had to return to his darling daughter, wherever she was. She was Dan’s whole life, even if she didn’t have her father’s smarts—all his efforts to be invisible within society blown by a kid who couldn’t stay off Facebook. That’s how Lloyd had discovered where she attended school, and how he’d been able to tip over the first domino in locating his nemesis. Talk about irony.

  “What to do? What to do?” Lloyd repeated, watching Dan’s car pull away from the curb.

  The trip to Pownal took most of the day. Dan drove around half of southern Vermont, up long hills with spectacular back views of the road behind, along dirt roads capable of throwing dust a hundred feet into the air, down dead ends along which he eventually double-tracked, all to catch anyone potentially tailing him.

  And all to no avail. Through every such maneuver, Lloyd merely hung back, following the small blip representing Dan’s car on his video display, and giving the sucker miles of room. He’d even assumed Dan would eventually stop and check for bugs, which is why he’d deposited two of them, and was delighted when his console informed him that the more openly placed of the pair had been removed and thrown to the side of the road. This, Lloyd had calculated, would lessen enough of Dan’s mistrust to make him start thinking about heading home.

  And it worked. By mid-afternoon, Lloyd saw the blip representing Dan leave Route 7, cross the railroad tracks at
the old Green Mountain Race Track, and come to a stop behind the ancient stadium.

  “I’ll be damned,” Lloyd muttered in admiration. “The man does know his rabbit holes.”

  * * *

  As events would have it, however, Lloyd’s pride in his hardware was shared by the trio of Joe Gunther, Willy Kunkle, and Lester Spinney, who were following their success with the BMW’s GPS unit by latching on to the Hummer’s On-Star locator beacon and using it to lead them to precisely the same spot.

  But they weren’t the only ones.

  Despite Dan’s care and hard work, his efforts to disappear and to offer his daughter shelter ended up merely highlighting the paradox that sometimes those most eager to fade away often became the most eagerly sought.

  And so it was that Paul Hauser, with no technology or subterfuge, was also in the neighborhood, having been here ever since the Kravitzes had first arrived.

  He might have lost Dan in Gloria’s house during the chase to the roof, but Hauser hadn’t given up. In the manner to which he’d adapted his life—in his own way, as ghostly, quiet, and self-effacing as Dan—he’d been tracking the latter all along.

  Dan was the only living soul who had ever seen the contents of that suitcase, and to Paul’s thinking—which had taken on a peculiar shape over the years—that made him a man who needed to be stopped.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Dan sat in the rickety aluminum lawn chair and gazed out at the panorama before him. He was inches from the plate glass window of the stadium’s highest vantage point—the uppermost of the stacked sky boxes that Sally had noticed upon their arrival. These were really like small apartments, seemingly placed as afterthoughts on top of the building’s vast flat roof, six cubes arranged in a perfect double row.

  The view was impressive, as the front wall of each of them was all glass, and perched well over one hundred feet above ground level. Below, as in an archaeological dig of an ancient Roman sports arena, the vague outline of the racetrack’s enormous oval was just discernible in the overgrown grass and weeds circling the stagnant pond. Beyond were the railroad tracks gleaming in the setting sun; still farther off was Route 7, thinly traveled and as white as an ironed flat ribbon; and finally, the remnants of the Green Mountain foothills, petering out on their way to becoming the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Overhead, the sun to Dan’s back had colored the clouds a virulent and gaudy swirl of variegated pink, which changed in shade and tone as he watched.

  He’d been troubled earlier, after traveling all the way to the post office to retrieve the school’s mail and finding nothing. But right now, a day later, faced with this overwhelming beauty, he allowed himself a moment’s relaxation. He’d noticed nothing around the post office, had seen nothing in the rearview mirror, despite the endless switchbacks and false turns on his way back, and had disposed of the tracking device he’d found attached to his car—a discovery that, while alarming in itself, had both confirmed his concerns and partially addressed them.

  He rose to his feet to see Sally next door, to make sure that she, too, was enjoying this natural light show. The sky boxes were interconnected by a back hallway that also led to a staircase down into the vast stadium itself. The rooms had been a mess when he and Sally had arrived, but they’d swept and tidied up two of them, and moved a few pieces of somewhat functional furniture from elsewhere in the building to vaguely emulate a pair of living quarters. It wasn’t great, but he was hopeful that it would hold until the next development—whatever that might be.

  He wasn’t thrilled to have been reduced to a wait-and-see position, feeling but never seeing suspicious movement all around him, and unable to distinguish reality from any figments of his already sharpened wariness.

  He left his room, marched down the few feet to the next door, and entered his daughter’s room, already speaking her name, “Sally…”

  He got no further. The room, as flooded with pink light as his own, was empty.

  He frowned and reflected for a moment. Rick, his contact here and the place’s caretaker, should have left for home by now. He’d greeted them warmly earlier, and he and Sally had immediately hit it off, he being just the grizzled type of old-timer that she loved to chat with.

  That being said, she wouldn’t have necessarily known of his work hours, and might have gone down to swap stories.

  Dan headed for the stairs and the hangar-sized main hall just below, filled with its thousands of banked wooden seats, all seemingly transfixed by the spectacle he’d just been enjoying. In the almost disturbing total silence, he listened intently, straining to hear some evidence of his daughter’s wanderings.

  * * *

  Far below, on the building’s nondescript back side, Lloyd Jordan got out of his car, which dwarfed Dan and Sally’s latest loaner, walked up to a narrow glass employees’ entrance, and—without hesitation—picked up a rock and smacked it through the glass in one smooth movement. He reached through the resulting hole, triggered the door latch, and let himself into a narrow hallway with small, abandoned offices off to both sides.

  He had no clue what the name of this place was, although its purpose once was clear enough, nor did he care. He was sick of the crap that had befallen him, and now that he had its source within reach, he was eager to start rebuilding his life. Not to mention that time was of the essence. If this loose cannon ever shared what he’d stolen with certain Boston-based parties, Lloyd would quickly become an endangered species.

  He had little left to lose.

  He reached a T-intersection with another, longer corridor that ran the length of the stadium, turned left toward a flight of steps he saw far in the distance, and marched off as if he’d been here a dozen times before.

  But he was in for a surprise. Taking the steps two at a time, he surfaced into a single room the size of a football field, packed with hundreds of tables and chairs, located behind and beneath the ramped army of seats facing the racetrack. This was the stadium’s once jam-packed food emporium, now lined with shuttered stalls with fading signs advertising hot dogs, burgers, and soda. Through several wide, sloping bays across from him, he could see the staired entries to the stadium’s seating and glimpsed the view overlooking the racetrack.

  “Jesus,” he murmured. “What the hell?”

  He’d been functioning as if on autopilot until now, responding simply to what appeared before him—Dan at the post office; the blip representing Dan’s car; watching the caretaker leave for the day. Now, abruptly, he was at a loss, feeling like the sole inhabitant of an empty factory.

  Which is when he heard the regular thumping of footsteps resounding above him and echoing through the distant bays.

  Running on soft-soled shoes, he bolted toward the wall of fast-food cubicles and flattened himself out of sight beside one of the ramps, just as the overhead footsteps rounded the corner to enter the food-service area.

  He watched as a teenage girl jogged past him unseeing, headed toward the very staircase he’d used to get here.

  “Rick?” she called out into the stillness. “You still here?”

  Lloyd checked to see if anyone was following, and then soundlessly slipped in behind her, reaching out.

  * * *

  Paul Hauser worked his way along the treeline bordering the stadium’s employee parking lot, grateful to be in motion at last. Neither an athletic nor a young man, and certainly not one to seek the outdoors, he’d been living out of his hidden car for days, after tailing Dan and his daughter here from Bellows Falls. The strain of waiting and watching had plumbed his reserves. His inner resources were slim at best, and he was ruled by random thoughts, colliding images, and seething flashes of anger—a jumble of lunacies in conflict. He could function in the world, if not held to exacting standards, but even that balance was known to wobble when he was upset or dislocated, both of which he was now.

  Dan Kravitz had done him significant harm, throwing off his ability to fake normalcy. Now, all Hauser could see clearly was that by eliminating
Dan, life would return to what it had been.

  Which was why he needed to move now, at last, in part stimulated by the anomaly of the mysterious man leaving that huge car and entering the stadium. As if investigating some God-given sign, Paul had to find out what was going on, and he needed to see it for himself.

  And take action if necessary. Not for the first time, his hand wandered to his waistband, to make sure the gun there hadn’t somehow shifted beyond his grasp.

  * * *

  Dan heard Sally’s distant voice call out, although he was unsure of her wording. He wasn’t inclined to shout in turn, and try to catch her attention, so he merely continued his descent from the building’s roof, traveling along the broad, deeply set steps of the tilted viewing deck, noticing as he went how quickly the light was fading with the setting of the sun. By the time he’d reached the second-story tier of seats, dark shadows were already cascading in from the far corners of the space around him.

  This was also when he heard a crash and a sharp, high-pitched scream, instantly cut short.

  “Sally?” he shouted, and began to run.

  * * *

  “Damn,” Sammie commented, craning forward over the dashboard and squinting into the sun’s remnants. “That place is huge.”

  Joe was at the wheel. “My brother loved coming here, way back when they ran horses. In its day, it was a major deal.”

  “But, Gramps,” Willy cracked from the backseat, “didn’t everybody ride horses when you were a boy?”

  Lester burst out laughing as Sammie twisted around to glare at him.

  But Joe smiled as he trundled the SUV across the train tracks between the highway and the racetrack property and approached the gargantuan hulk that had caught Sammie’s attention.

  “Hey, Techno-Man,” he addressed Lester. “What’s your GPS reading? Is Lloyd’s land yacht in the front or the back of this place?”

  “Back,” Les responded immediately. “And he’s still not moving.”