But one thing Carter and his superior were sure of: the men were thoroughly loyal. If somehow taken into custody, they would not betray their comrades-in-arms, and the danger would thus remain isolated.
Carter had made a mistake in trying to expand the operation by hiring local talent, like the clowns in Maine and New Hampshire. It had proved to be a debacle, and the cleanup was messy.
But ultimately there was no great harm done. The scope of the operation had to be scaled down, but it remained plenty large enough. And the beauty of it was that any one part could be excised without seriously harming the big picture. That had already been demonstrated in the two New England states.
Once people were in place, the only remaining worry would be the lawyer in New Jersey, who had been sticking his nose into everything. He was proving to be a bigger problem than the FBI.
Consideration was given to eliminating him, but it was considered unwise. It would attract very substantial, and certainly unwanted, media attention, and that negative would outweigh the positive. But the decision was temporary and was subject to revision as events dictated.
Carter was under orders to achieve one hundred percent success, but that was only a goal. He knew that seventy percent would be a huge triumph and would have reverberations that would last for many decades.
Revenge was going to be extraordinarily sweet.
I like to visit clients in prison as often as possible. Actually, that’s not true. It’s more accurate to say that I hate to visit clients in prison. But I do it frequently, because I know what it means to them.
Denise Price, like every other person in her situation, is feeling scared and abandoned. Even worse, she’s feeling helpless. She has no control of her situation and, unless I update her, doesn’t even know what is going on.
As her attorney, her lifeline, just my presence reassures her that there is someone working on her behalf and trying to help her.
The downside, of course, is that my arrival triggers unrealistic expectations. She gets herself to believe that it’s possible I’m bringing the magic bullet that will get her the hell out of here, and when she finds out I haven’t done that, the disappointment is palpable.
I’ve been disappointing all kinds of women for a really long time, but for some reason I hate letting down accused murderers the most.
Of course I experience some disappointment of my own. I’m always somewhat hopeful that the client will remember a little nugget that will help in my investigation, and it rarely happens. It certainly doesn’t happen today. Denise has nothing to offer in that regard.
I ask her if she’s ever heard the name Donald Susser, or if she has any idea why Barry would have been going to Maine. In both cases the answer is no.
After about thirty minutes of letting each other down, I say good-bye, with the promise that I’ll return as soon as I can so I can crush her hopes once again.
On the way out I pick up my cell phone, since visitors are required to check them before they can see inmates. The authorities obviously believe that without this precaution there would be a lot of prisoners escaping by phoning their way to freedom. The ironic thing is that it’s widely known that there are more contraband cell phones in the prison than there are prisoners.
There are two messages from Laurie, asking me to call her as soon as I can. “Are you on the way home?” she asks when I reach her.
“Yes.”
“Good. Crash’s luck continues; we heard from Donald Susser.”
When I get home, Marcus is in the kitchen and Laurie is feeding him. It’s like feeding Shamu, with a couple of minor differences. Shamu ate only fish; Marcus will eat anything. And Marcus could kick Shamu’s ass.
Laurie mentions that she had called Marcus because she wants him to hear about the Susser conversation as well. That means something dangerous is involved, something she doesn’t think I can handle on my own. She’s usually right.
“He’s scared and he’s hiding,” Laurie says. “He’s sure that if they find him, they’ll kill him.”
“Who are ‘they’?”
“He wouldn’t tell me that. He doesn’t trust me—or you, for that matter—but he has nowhere else to turn.”
“Why doesn’t he go to the police?” I ask. Marcus hasn’t said a word; his mouth is too full. I can only assume he’s heard what Laurie’s been saying, since as far as I know he doesn’t have any food stuffed in his ears.
“Because he’s afraid of going to jail. Andy, I think he’s interested in you as a lawyer, that maybe you can get the police to give him some kind of immunity.”
“From what type of prosecution?”
“Again, he wouldn’t say. But he wants to talk to you in person.”
“Here?”
“No, in Maine. He gave me a specific time and place. And he insists that you come alone. Otherwise he won’t talk to you.”
“When does he want to meet?”
“Tomorrow evening at seven. Assuming you want to do this, you and Marcus can take a morning flight.”
“No way. If he says alone, it has to be alone.” I point to Marcus. “Besides, he won’t have finished dinner by then.”
Laurie has it all figured out. Marcus will go with me, but we’ll take different planes, just in case. Then we’ll each rent our own car, and he will go scout out the location for the meeting in advance. He’ll be in place if there’s any reason to cancel the meeting or to intervene if something goes wrong.
“We can’t afford to blow this; it’s our only lead,” I say.
“Andy, there’s a fact pattern for us to look at. And the fact is that the last person to fly to Maine to see Donald Susser is dead.”
She’s making a leap here. We don’t know for certain that Barry Price was going to see Donald Susser. But I understand her point, and while I continue to resist, I don’t do so too strenuously. Marcus has saved my ass too many times for me to pretend it doesn’t need frequent saving.
We plan our strategy. Marcus will take an eight o’clock flight, and I’ll be on the ten thirty. He will both call and text me if there is any reason to abort the plan, right up until the last minute.
Situations like this are way out of my comfort zone, and it’s fair to say that if I’m about to do something that requires Marcus, I shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.
But Marcus’s ability to protect has always been flawless in the past, which is the main reason I am alive enough to still need protection. And I definitely need something to jump-start our case; I just hope that Susser provides it.
Now if Marcus will just stop eating and get the hell out of here, I’ll find out if my going to Maine for the day entitles me to going-away sex.
Portland has my idea of a great airport. It’s modern, spacious, and uncrowded, with signs that actually point you in the right direction and people who smile a lot. The bags come off within five minutes, and the rental car companies are actually in the terminal. This is unlike JFK and Newark, where the rental cars are so far away they feel like they should have their own airport.
I take the highway toward Augusta, and I have to stop a few times to pay tolls. Each of the toll collectors greet me with pleasantries like “Good morning” and “How’s your day going?” As I leave, they all tell me to “Have a nice day.”
It was a short flight, but have I flown to a different planet? It’s cold, these people are sitting in open tollbooths all day doing a boring job, and they couldn’t be cheerier and friendlier. The nicest comment I ever got from a New York tollbooth collector was “Ain’t you got anything smaller?”
Marcus calls me while I’m driving, and when I answer, he says, “Yunh.”
I haven’t picked up on all the nuances of Marcus-talk, even after all these years, so I say, “Marcus?”
That may not have been a specific enough question, because it draws another “Yunh.”
“Are we good?”
“Good,” he says, and I’m relieved that we’re good and that I understood
what he said.
“Good,” I say.
“Good,” Marcus says, since once he latches onto a word he can’t seem to stop using it.
In an effort to break the “good” streak, I say, “I’ll see you later,” and he hangs up. Talking to Marcus makes me nervous, so the end of the conversation causes me to say out loud, to myself, “Good.”
I’ve got plenty of time to kill, so I check the map and see that there’s a town called Damariscotta about twenty minutes from the meeting place. I get there at about one thirty and find a pub called King Eider’s, in the middle of a quintessential New England town.
The atmosphere in the place is terrific; everybody seems to know and like everybody else. There are hundreds of mugs hanging from the ceiling, and apparently the owner of each mug is a member of some kind of drinking and eating club. I can think of worse clubs to belong to.
I have a terrific lunch and hang around for an hour and a half. I’d like to stay longer, but don’t want to call attention to myself. I walk around the town for a while, then stop in the Maine Coast Book Shop & Café for coffee and a great muffin.
All in all, it would be a perfect afternoon, if not for the fact that I have a meeting coming up at which I am concerned that I could be killed.
There’s always something …
Marcus arrived at the meeting location in the late morning. It was next to a remarkable place called Peaslee’s, a combination gas station, convenience store, delicatessen, liquor store, and do-it-yourself car wash in Jefferson. One could live for years and never leave Peaslee’s.
The instructions had been for Andy to be in a vacant building on a piece of land behind the store at 7:00 P.M. It was not a heavily trafficked area and was likely the kind of place where strangers would be noticed. Of course, Marcus would stand out in Giants Stadium during a playoff game, a fact that he was aware of. So he stopped there briefly, put some gas in his car, and bought some food. His goal was simply to get the lay of the land, and he did that.
He drove around the back and took a road up behind a hill. It gave him a straight line of sight, which was enhanced by binoculars. He could see everybody arriving at the place and certainly would know when anyone went around to the back.
But based on the layout, which neither he, Andy, nor Laurie had known about the previous night, Marcus was concerned. He’d be able to tell when someone showed up and whether that person was alone. But he would not be able to tell whether he was armed or what his intentions were.
If Susser came with a weapon, for example, there would be no way Marcus could intervene in time. So he was going to change the plan. He would wait until Susser and Andy were together and then move up close, where he could impact events in his rather aggressive way.
He also had no idea what Susser looked like, but when a car pulled up at six thirty and a man got out, Marcus had little doubt it was him. The reflected light off the store and gas station area showed a young man, maybe twenty-five years old, who looked around warily before going toward the back.
Marcus memorized the license plate on the car, utilizing a tiny part of a near photographic memory that almost no one knew he possessed. Andy wasn’t due to arrive for a half hour, but since Susser was obviously there, Marcus decided to move up closer to be in a position to intervene. He could do so without Susser seeing him, because he was already inside the building.
So Marcus drove down the hill to get to a closer lookout, from where he could approach the building on foot. There was an area that was fairly heavily wooded and would therefore afford him concealment.
Driving down removed the building from Marcus’s line of sight for about three minutes, and when he got to his new position, he saw immediately that the game had changed. Another car had pulled up, though he didn’t see any new people. Therefore, the passengers in the new car had most likely already gone into the building.
Marcus couldn’t be positive that the new car wasn’t Andy’s rental, though he hoped and believed that it was not. Andy was under strict instructions not to arrive until seven o’clock, and it would be uncharacteristic for him to have changed the plan.
But the other side had definitely changed the plan. Andy was expecting to meet with one person, and there was certainly more than that in there now. Marcus had no idea what that meant, but he didn’t want Andy walking into that building the way things stood.
Maybe Susser was one of the people in the building, maybe not. At that point it really didn’t matter to Marcus. There was no way of figuring out the ramifications of the new arrivals, but it clearly didn’t jibe with Laurie’s description of Susser as being alone and afraid.
He looked in the window and saw three men, including the man Marcus had believed to be Susser. They were standing close together and just talking, but it seemed fairly intense, and “Susser” was shaking his head no.
Marcus went around to the door and quietly turned the knob. It was unlocked, which made things easier. Marcus opted not to take out his gun; he didn’t expect he would need it, and at this point there was no reason to kill anyone.
Displaying amazing swiftness, he opened and pushed through the door. To the three men inside, it seemed as if he exploded into the room. If they backed off, Marcus would not hurt them but rather find out what the hell was going on.
They didn’t back off. After a moment of initial surprise, the two newcomers to the room moved toward Marcus, one of them reaching into his jacket pocket for what Marcus decided to assume was a weapon.
He grabbed that man’s arm and snapped it at the wrist, then picked up the screaming man and threw him, full body, at his partner. The flying man was the bigger of the two, so he collapsed the smaller man and they landed in a pile.
Marcus quickly frisked and took a handgun from each of the fallen men. He turned and took a quick look at the man he figured was Susser. He appeared shocked and scared but did not make any threatening gestures, so Marcus didn’t touch him.
Which was just as well, because it was time to talk.
The meeting doesn’t exactly follow my planned agenda. I figured it would be just Susser and me, and he would tell me why he was afraid and what it had to do with Barry Price. I’d help him if I could, if he deserved that help, and then I’d go home to put the information I learned to good use defending my client.
Instead, when I get there, Marcus is in the room with three men, and the place looks like a bomb went off in it. One of the men is holding his arm at an awkward angle and moaning; people moan a lot around Marcus. Another man looks somewhat dazed and out of it, another Marcus trademark.
The three men glance at me briefly, but their real focus is on Marcus. It’s a very logical attitude for them to take.
“What’s going on, guys?” I ask, and Marcus nods to the unharmed man, which serves as a clear instruction for him to answer. But he hesitates.
“Are you Donald Susser?” I ask. It’s an educated guess; he’s unshaven and wearing dirty jeans and a flannel shirt that looks like he hasn’t taken it off since the first Clinton administration. He also looks scared, though with his having just seen Marcus in action, that’s not exactly a surprise.
He nods. “Yes.”
“Who are these two?”
“They’re my friends. That’s Billy Jordan and that’s Teddy Ellis.” Ellis is the one with the broken arm.
“You said we’d be alone. Why are they here?”
“They were sent to kill me,” Susser says, and Ellis shakes his head weakly in disagreement.
“Sounds like really good friends,” I say. “Why were they sent to kill you, and who sent them?”
“We told him everything,” Susser says, meaning Marcus.
If I have to get the story out of Marcus, I should have it by the time of Denise Price’s third or fourth parole hearing. “I want to hear it from you,” I say.
So he tells me that a man named Carter had hired them to commit a murder, though he called it an assassination. He claims they didn’t know who the tar
get was, that Carter hadn’t told them yet. But they were each going to get two hundred thousand dollars for their efforts.
“Why did this Carter pick you three?”
Susser nods toward Jordan. “Because Billy was army artillery; Carter put him in charge.”
“What kind of weapon?”
“We weren’t told yet.”
I ask a bunch more questions, mostly about Carter, but he seems to be pretty much a mystery man. They could be withholding something, though Marcus usually extracts all there is to extract. Susser does say that his two friends were supposed to kill him for talking to Barry Price, which made him a threat to the operation. But he swears they weren’t going to actually do it. They were just going to tell Carter that he was dead and hide him until after things quieted down.
“Why was Barry Price coming here?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t call him?”
He shakes his head. “He called me, said he wanted to talk. That’s how all this started.”
I ask Marcus if he thinks there’s more to be gotten from the three, and he shakes his head. So we let them go, which seems to be something they’re rather happy about.
I decide that we should spend the night in Maine. This is not exactly a tough call. First of all, there are no more flights out of Portland tonight, so the alternative is to spend seven hours in a car with Marcus. It’s not the worst thing imaginable—Hike would be worse—but it’s pretty bad.
But more important, I’m not leaving without talking to law enforcement about Donald Susser and his friends. If there really is to be a murder committed, by them or someone else, it’s information that I can’t sit on.
Marcus and I check into the Senator Inn, on Western Avenue in Augusta, and we head straight for their restaurant. They sell shrimp cocktail by the piece, and when the waiter asks Marcus how many he wants, he thinks for a moment and then says, “Thirty.”
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