by Thomas Perry
The policeman on the lawn jerked in pain, let out his breath in a grunt, then crumpled to the ground clutching his calf. The three security guards looked at him in disbelief, then at each other. Finally it seemed to occur to them that the shot had come from somewhere else. They crouched and swept the horizon around them over their gunsights, looking for a target. But the policeman’s partner was still at the microphone in his car. In his panic he left the external amplifier on, and as he shouted into the radio, his message echoed through the empty streets. “Officer down! This is One X ray Twenty-two. Officer down! Need assistance. Officer down!”
Wolf could see the three security guards now, but he couldn’t see the other policeman in the car. He decided to take a chance. He stood up at the fence and shouted at the frightened guards, “Police officer! Drop those guns!” then ducked and ran along the adobe wall across the front of the house. He knew he must be abreast of the police car now, but he stopped and crouched in the corner of the front yard and listened. “You heard the man,” said the lone policeman. “Drop them!”
Wolf decided he had to increase the sense of danger a little more, or they were going to obey and let the solitary cop get control of the situation. He looked back along the house toward Andalusia Street. He could see that the policemen there had heard either the bullhorn or the radio and were moving toward him through the back yards.
He rolled over the wall to the next yard, then aimed a round over their heads and ducked down. They had seen the muzzle flash aimed in their direction and heard the crack of the bullet breaking the sound barrier as it passed over them, and they responded as he had hoped. There was the blast of a shotgun, followed by eight pistol shots slamming into the corner of the wall. Then he heard three rapid shots fired from the house across the street and judged it was time.
He sprinted to the front of the next house and moved along the façade, then rolled over the next fence and kept moving. There were other sirens in the distance now, all converging on the quiet neighborhood.
Wolf didn’t dare slow down or look back. He trotted unerringly from one fence to the next, each time hoisting himself up and over the identical adobe enclosures, thankful that the sudden, unseasonable start of fall had made it too cold to leave a dog outside all night. At the end of the block he waited and listened for approaching sirens, but it seemed they had all arrived by then, screeching past him on the other side of the wall as he ran from their destination. He pulled himself over the last fence and walked across the street to the far side of Galisteo.
As he walked northward toward the ancient plaza, he crossed a little bridge over the captive river with concrete banks that sliced across the town. As he did, he noticed that it had the strange quality of magnifying sounds. Far in the distance, he could hear a voice shouting into an electronic amplifier. The voice echoed and broke up, but he knew it was another police bullhorn. He also knew, from the rapid reports of guns, that the untrained North American Watch guards had been too frightened to relinquish their weapons. The heavy firing was the sound of the police reluctantly concluding that the guards, either for this reason or because they had killed Mantino or wounded the policeman, represented a danger to the community.
He hurried on toward La Fonda. Right now there would be crackling, fragrant fires of mesquite and piñon in all the big stone fireplaces, heating the bright, intricately glazed Spanish tiles along the mantels. Lots of Santa Fe natives would pass through for a drink on an evening like this, but some of them would have heard that the police were gathering on Andalusia Street. He would pass by the lighted windows and into the subterranean parking garage without crossing the threshold. By the time he had driven the few blocks to Highway 25, the heater of the little Ford would have warmed his hands as much as a fire.
* * *
“I think this is the second one,” said Elizabeth. “If he wanted Peter Mantino, this is the way he’d do it. I think it’s not over.”
“You’re making a hell of an assumption,” said Richardson. “You’ve got to act as your own censor on this kind of case.”
“I know that,” she answered, her voice close enough to a monotone to serve her purpose.
“You’re feeling frustrated and disappointed that we didn’t get him at the L.A. airport, right?”
“I admit it,” said Elizabeth. “I volunteer it, and waive all right to a jury trial, but—”
“All I’m asking,” Richardson interrupted, “is that you think about it. Is it possible—not certain, but possible—that you see another gunshot homicide of another important man and say it’s the same perpetrator because you want it to be? You want another shot at him.”
Elizabeth’s jaw clenched. “You brought me in here to analyze raw data. My preliminary hypothesis when there are two murders of ranking members of the Balacontano family within two days is that a pure coincidence is unlikely. There. I’ve done my job. Your job as section chief is to decide now, this minute, whether to send an investigator out to Santa Fe to find out what actually happened to Peter Mantino.”
“Are you volunteering?”
Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not calling my bluff, you know; I’d love to. But I just went to California, and I have two children who are expecting me to feed them dinner tonight and still be there when they wake up tomorrow. Have things gotten so bad since I left here that you don’t have any real field men for a case like this?”
Richardson shook his head. “No. I just figured out who to send. Give me a minute on the phone with him, and then I’ll transfer him to you.”
“Who is he?”
“His name’s Jack Hamp.”
Elizabeth turned and walked out of Richardson’s office. She had heard the name before. He could be somebody she had met on another case. No, she had read it at the bottom of some report recently. But the button on her phone was already blinking. She punched it.
“Hello,” said Elizabeth. “This is Elizabeth Waring. Is this Mr. Hamp?”
“What can I do for you, ma’am?”
Her expectations oscillated between two extremes. It was the unimaginative-sounding western official voice that California highway patrolmen used when they wrote you a ticket. But she was going to need him in the West, after all, and Richardson had picked him for a difficult situation. If Richardson knew the man’s name, he must at least be competent, and maybe a lot better than that. “I understand you’ve agreed to work with us on this case?”
“Yes, ma’am.” It was the “ma’am.” The last time she had heard it was from one of the prison guards at Lompoc.
“When can you be ready to leave for Santa Fe?”
There was a significant pause; then the voice said, “I’m at an airport now.” Then Elizabeth remembered where she had seen the name: it had been at the bottom of the report on the mess at LAX. Jack Hamp was the birdwatcher.
Hamp walked up Andalusia Street, then down Galisteo to the street behind it. He liked the feel of the sun heating the sidewalks without affecting the thin, cold air. He thought about Elizabeth Waring again. At the time he’d had to pay too much attention to what she was telling him to give her voice the sort of analysis he considered necessary. All he really had on her for sure was that she was in her mid-thirties. She had mentioned that she had young children, but she was old enough to call herself Elizabeth and not have to tone it down by a couple of syllables to Liz or Betty or Bess or whatever. She was not a large woman because there wasn’t the kind of lasting tone that came from the big-boned ones with pink hands that were all knuckles. It wasn’t a question of high or low, because women varied only from alto to soprano anyway, but something about how much real force and staying power was behind the voice. He judged that she was between five feet five and five feet eight, and probably a strawberry blonde or a redhead.
It was a brave guess, even for an expert like Hamp, because not many real redheads went through law school. A lot of the bright ones were like Hamp’s second wife, Donna, who was sort of a career redhead. She was
a trained painter, but apparently she had spent her college years exploring the shades of green, blue and purple she could wear to set off her hair. The marriage had been made in heaven during what must have been a celestial holiday, when everybody up there was blind drunk and frisky. Donna had cried when she had found out he was a cop, but by then it was too late, because he had already verified her credentials as a bona-fide redhead, and she was a committed woman. At the time, his pants were hanging on the rail of her bed with the butt end of his pistol showing, but that hadn’t bothered her. Later he decided he hadn’t given her reaction as much thought as it had deserved. Not that she wasn’t a law-abiding citizen, within certain limits, but she was not a cautious person, or a docile one. They’d had a lively time of it for nearly five years, but it had ended by her going after him with the claw hammer she had been using to attach a canvas to its stretcher bars. Donna’s problem was symbolized in his mind by the fact that she had gone after him with the claw end of the hammer. It was uglier and more spiteful that way, but the bludgeon-death victims he came across professionally almost always got it with the blunt end; it was just more practical.
Maybe Elizabeth Waring had brown hair, the sort that had very tight little curls in it that made it stick out. There was a certain intensity in those women too, and a lot of them went to law school.
Hamp spotted the police sticker on the door of Mantino’s house, and took in the rest of it. The killer had seen it all the way he was seeing it now. The houses were all too close together, the streets too narrow and quiet for an easy shot and a quick retreat. Since the police had found a North American Watch car in the street, he had probably chosen to impersonate a security guard, but something had gone wrong. At that moment the ordinary man would have defeated himself. He would have tried to do something to save his skin—hide in an empty house or look for an escape route the police knew better than he did. But this man had done something else. All policemen were drilled in hesitation, firing warning shots into the air and trying to keep innocent bystanders away. If they’d had a plan, it would have been to contain his movements and assume that his desire to stay alive would make him behave rationally, and therefore predictably. But this one was an aggressor. Any victim was as good as another. Anything that caused confusion or added to the escalating violence was an advantage. His best tactic would have been to give the impression that what he was trying to do was not to run but to kill them.
Hamp looked around. There were lots of long, straight firing lines he could use: adobe walls around the houses to hide his movements, tall trees and thick hedges to complicate their view but not his. In the dark the police had to distinguish which, among the twenty or thirty silhouettes they could discern, belonged to their comrades and which to another man they didn’t even have a description of. By the time there were fifty policemen and armed civilians on the scene, any shot fired had a two percent chance of hitting a murderer and a ninety-eight percent chance of creating one.
This was what the old gangster in the California prison had been trying to describe to Elizabeth Waring. The tape-recorder team in New York had managed to stumble on a man who had never done anything for a living except kill people. He had been doing it for, say, twenty years, and he had gotten pretty good at it.
There was only one stop left to make, and that would have to wait a few hours. Evening was the time for visiting policemen, when you could talk to them in their homes.
Hamp walked to the door of the freshly painted one-story gray house and rang the bell. He could hear a dog barking somewhere in the back, then the loud scratching noise of its toenails as it ran across an uncarpeted floor to sniff under the door. He sensed that it was big, probably a shepherd or a Doberman, and he felt better when he heard a deep male voice cajole it away from the door. “Go on,” it said. “Into the kitchen.” Then, “Kitchen. Stay.” The toenail sound receded into the distance.
A dead bolt gave a metallic clank as the man slipped it. Hamp conceded that the precautions were understandable. Lorenz was an ordinary policeman. He’d have spent enough of his career looking at the work of intruders to develop a desire and talent for home security. His house wasn’t impregnable, by any means, but a burglar would find it discouraging enough to make him move on to the next one. The door opened, and Hamp looked the man in the eye and held out his hand. “Jack Hamp,” he said. “FBI.” Now he rapidly revised his expectations. Lorenz was in his early thirties, over six feet tall and athletic, his black hair cut by a good barber.
The voice was quiet and the eyes were intelligent. “Fernando Lorenz. Pleased to meet you.”
Hamp regretted the lie, but Elizabeth Waring had spent an hour telling him what she knew and what she wanted, and the quickest way to get it was to lie. She hadn’t told him to; he had figured it out on his own. He had been a cop for a long time, and he knew how it felt to wear the uniform. When a cop heard “FBI,” he had a pretty clear idea of what to expect, and of who he was talking to. He might like it or he might not, but he was going to answer questions because he didn’t think he needed to ask them. If you said you were a special investigator for the Justice Department, he was going to spend a lot of time looking at your ID and asking you what you did for a living, and maybe after you left he would make a couple of calls, and maybe find out through his own connections that you had spent the last two years sitting in an airport, or even that you were just doing legwork for a woman lawyer you had never met and he didn’t need to care about. The image that would come to mind was that of a young female assistant DA, and the fact that the office where she did her nails was in Washington instead of at the county courthouse didn’t make any difference. She wasn’t the one whose hands shook while she was strapping on the bullet-proof vest to go in after the barricaded suspect; she was the one who let the suspect go the next day because the paperwork didn’t look to her like it was going to add to her won-lost record—or else on the second day, after the charges didn’t get filed in time because she was at lunch with the councilman from the seventy-fifth district. It was simpler not to have to get past all that.
He followed Lorenz into a small living room furnished with a few large leather chairs and a long couch that had a half-folded army blanket on it. On the wall hung a dark-red Indian weaving that Hamp recognized as a good nineteenth-century pattern.
“Sorry to bother you at home, Lieutenant,” said Hamp, “but I’m sure you understand that we’d like to handle this as quietly as possible. The press seems to take a particular joy in letting the public know when we’re on a case, and this time it might lead to some wrong conclusions.” He had brushed across the sensitive spot without poking it. The police here would be smarting now, defensive because they sensed people were wondering how fifty men had lost a gunfight with one, and disoriented because they didn’t know the answer either. The press would imply that the FBI was wondering too.
Lorenz said only, “Sure. You mind dogs?”
Hamp hesitated, relinquishing the relief that he had felt at having this behind him. “No,” he said. “I used to have one.” If it was a working police dog, he knew from experience that when Lorenz told it to leave him alone he would have to say it in German. Every department in the country figured that the average fleeing suspect didn’t remember enough of what he had learned in high school to get a job, let alone call off a dog.
Lorenz said, “Martha,” in a normal voice, and Hamp heard the toenails again, tapping lightly toward him from the back of the house. He turned and saw a gray-brown standard German shepherd, at least three feet tall, with a chest like a barrel and a huge gaping mouth, emerge from a hallway. She walked past Hamp, gave him a look and then sat down in front of Lorenz’s chair. When he pointed at the couch, the dog leaped up and lay down on the army blanket. “She gets lonely,” said Lorenz. “She and I were Air Police.”
Hamp nodded. “How old is she?”
“Nine.”
“You made lieutenant fast.” Hamp stopped trying to remember his German. It would
n’t do any good. Lorenz had been one of the men Hamp had seen when he was in the marines guarding the most sensitive installations: Strategic Air Command bases, air force communication centers and listening posts, walking the perimeters with guard dogs. The sight of them had always struck him as vaguely poignant. The dogs were given to the men as soon as they were weaned, and man and dog trained together, sleeping together in the same barracks, never more than a hundred feet apart for at least the length of an enlistment, and more often for the life of the dog. If the man was married and lived off the base with his wife, the dog lived with them, and the two would report for duty together. The attachment between them grew so strong that they were like two men, or sometimes two dogs, the one who walked upright representing to the other one mother, father and head of the wolf pack. The loyalty was so blind and unbreakable that when the AP’s enlistment ended, the dog had to be discharged with him because it couldn’t live without him. Hamp had seen them in Thailand, Vietnam and other places, the strange solitary pairs the embodiment of a primal nightmare, the big vulpine creature perfectly capable and even eager to hurl its ninety pounds of muscle and fang into a man’s throat if it would bring a whispered word and a gentle pat from its master, who had trained it to attack even more efficiently than its ferocious instincts would have prompted.
Hamp stared at Martha. The dog lay quietly on the old army blanket and stared unblinking into his eyes, her head resting on her paws. He turned back to Lorenz, who seemed to be looking at him with the same expression. “In your investigation of the break-in at Mr. Mantino’s house …”
There was something about the term break-in that jarred Hamp’s mind. Whatever had happened, the entry was the least of it. But Lorenz’s eyes moved to the dog, and Hamp’s followed. The dog’s ears were up, and its head was turned toward him attentively. Hamp felt a sudden alarm. The dog had sensed that he was feeling uncomfortable, maybe by smell, or by a sound in his voice, and it was already beginning to show little signs of agitation. He had to do something before the animal began to suspect that he wished Lorenz harm. He had to stay on solid, neutral ground and get the master to talk. “Tell me anything you found that the FBI might need to know.” He knew better than to try to talk to the dog or make a friend of her. She had been brought up to feel no interest whatever in any human being but Lorenz. He tried to formulate something that he could say for the dog’s benefit, something scrupulously true and sincere. “I know that’s a tall order. I’m asking you for information without being able to reciprocate.” The dog set her head down again. “Anytime someone like Mantino dies violently, there are possible consequences and implications, and I don’t know yet what they might be. The report says it appeared to be a simple B and E for purposes of robbery.” The dog seemed to be satisfied, so he sat back in his chair.