by Archer Mayor
There was no argument. I heard him give the orders.
“I think we’re in better shape than we thought,” the driver suddenly shouted.
“Why?”
“If he was a real hot dog on that machine of his, he wouldn’t be sticking to this road—he’d be in the woods.”
I looked at his profile and saw him smile—the happy hunter.
I was less thrilled. As I saw it, I was lurching across the countryside like some Keystone Kop with a mysterious cripple out front and a slippery homicidal maniac on my tail—maybe. The fact that Cioffi was not the Evel Knievel of the snowmobile set was of little comfort.
The radio crackled and announced that Klesczewski and a trooper had been dropped off at the trees at the foot of the mountain road. More men were “continuing pursuit.”
I looked out the side window at the slow parade of passing trees. Hotshot or no, I couldn’t imagine that a man on a snowmobile couldn’t outdistance a Sno-Cat as if it were standing still.
“Jesus.” The driver threw the controls and sent us into a grinding, sliding halt. Off to the right was the first Cat, lying on its side, wedged between two trees. McNaughton and one of his men were climbing out of the cab.
I opened my door and McNaughton got in beside me and yelled at the driver. “Get around that and head down the slope to the right. The son of a bitch cut off the road.” He jabbed his radio key. “All units. P-One and P-Two are now on same vehicle.”
We moved forward a couple of yards. A skimobile’s thin imprint sliced between the trees bordering the road and vanished down the steep, treeless slope beyond. The driver continued on until he came to a similar gap wide enough for us. He turned the Cat and paused at the edge.
“Go, man, go.” McNaughton was half-crouching by the door next to me, his eyes glued ahead.
The Cat lurched up and over the bank and plunged with a sickening shudder straight down the slope. Despite the seat belt, I slammed both my hands against the dashboard to keep my teeth from being buried in my kneecaps. McNaughton ended up pressing against the windshield. The Cat’s engine noise climbed to a scream, the gearbox began a high-pitched whine, and the snow burst from the thrashing caterpillar treads like foam from a tempest-tossed ocean. There was no room for any more sound, but as I glanced at McNaughton’s face, I could see he was shouting into the mike.
The roller-coaster dive lasted for what seemed like an hour—probably two minutes. At its bottom, we found a half-buried wooden fence, and caught between two of its broken rails was the red snowmobile. Our driver killed the engine and wiped his face with his glove.
The sudden quiet impressed us all. Without a word, we opened our doors and swung out onto the treads. Dimly, high above, we could hear the other Cat laboring up the mountain road. The smashed snowmobile was alone.
“I guess he couldn’t stop in time,” McNaughton said quietly. He spoke into the radio, bringing everybody up to date.
In the meantime, his trooper reached back into the cab and brought out three pairs of snowshoes and handed a couple to us across the roof. We all sat down on the treads to put them on.
Far below, to the right, came a series of shots, first two sharp and high-pitched, as from two stones rapped together, followed by the mechanical rattle of a machine gun.
“Holy shit,” McNaughton murmured. We looked at each other and waited. Several minutes passed during which we heard the other Cat pause at the top of the slope.
The radio crackled. “Officer down. We need help. This is P… Shit, I don’t know. Move it.” It was Klesczewski’s voice.
“P-Four from P-Seven. We’re on our way.” I recognized Tyler.
I reached inside the cab and unhooked the transmitter. “P-Four from P-Two. What happened?”
“A second snowmobile blasted through us. He caught Reynolds right in the chest. It looked like a Mac 10. I don’t think he’s going to make it.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m real sorry, Lieutenant.”
“What about the shooter?”
“We got off two shots, but it was like fighting a hail storm. He’s on your tail now.”
“Okay. Hang tight.”
I heard the other Sno-Cat start up again and cautiously edge its way over the lip of the mountain. “Why not leave them there as a rear guard?”
McNaughton shook his head. “They’re too thin—better we team up.”
I finished attaching my snowshoes and hopped off the Cat. There is a fraternity among cops despite the bickering and class distinctions.
The saying goes that if a cop is in a jam, he can count on any other cop to at least try to pull him out of it. So I felt sorry for McNaughton. I was also mad as hell it had taken one of his men’s lives to catch his full attention.
They also say that when you’re maddest, it’s usually because you screwed up. Whoever “they” are, they’re right. I, more than anyone, knew how determined Stark was. And yet I’d allowed most of this to happen.
I was standing over the red wreckage of the snowmobile when the second Cat clattered to a halt. Stan Katz appeared at my side in a couple of minutes, carrying my shotgun. I hadn’t realized until then that I’d run off without it.
“Thanks, Stan.”
“Don’t mention it.”
I jerked my thumb back at the second Sno-Cat. “How’d you manage to hitch a ride?”
He smiled thinly. “They still think I’m a cop.”
“You may have to do more than pretend, the way things are going. We’ll need every gun loaded.”
He nodded. “So I heard.”
A momentary silence passed. We could hear the others talking behind us—that and the sound of ammunition being loaded.
“This thing’s a real mess, isn’t it?” he finally added. His voice was quiet, even comforting.
“It’s not our finest hour; I’ll give you that.”
“A failure to communicate, as the saying goes?”
“Let’s just say they fucked up; I fucked up; we all fucked up.”
Katz smiled again. “You’ll never be a MacArthur with lines like that.”
McNaughton stepped into our stillness. “Any tracks?”
I nodded to a crooked line of oblong holes that trailed away from the broken machine. McNaughton swung his snowshoed feet deftly over the fence. “All right, gentlemen. Captain Gunther and I will form the middle. I want a line with ten foot intervals off to either side.”
“What about Stark?” I asked, it seemed for the hundredth time.
“If we get Cioffi, we’ve got a bait for Stark.”
It made sense, as everything had before it—only my trust in sense had gone out the window. I was also troubled that with the arrival of the second Cat, there were only six of us.
“I think we should wait for more people,” I said.
“I don’t.” McNaughton’s voice was flat. “I don’t want to lose the bastard now.”
We spread out, shotguns in hand, like gentlemen at a country shoot, and started off across the snowfield. To both sides of me, I could just perceive the ghostly outlines of my neighbors but no further. I relied on them to be keen to what lay ahead; my own concentration was given to what lurked behind.
We walked for forty minutes in total silence, the only sound being the muffled shuffling of the snowshoes and the occasional squawk from the radios. Even so equipped, it was slow going. Unless you do it regularly, snowshoeing is exhausting work, and in groups speed is reduced to the slowest member. Still, it is easier and swifter than plunging along without them, and I had to admire our prey for his stamina.
But stamina has its limits, especially if your hip is grinding away at the socket, reducing the bone to dust. We found our man eventually, peacefully sitting in the snow, staring at his lap.
McNaughton stepped up to him, the muzzle of his shotgun three feet from his head. “Are you Steven Cioffi?”
Cioffi looked up and smiled slightly. He had the appearance of a man in mid-daydream.
“Answer.”
“Yes.” His voice had a feminine softness to it.
“I have a warrant for your arrest.”
As the New Hampshire men lifted Cioffi to his feet and searched him, finding nothing unusual, McNaughton read him his rights. When he was through, there was a curious lull, a palpable disappointment that the hunt had ended with such a murmur.
McNaughton radioed in to find out if the backup troops were anywhere near. They were not. The weather had bogged everything down, and they were waiting for additional Sno-Cats.
“Well, I guess we slog home.”
I looked around. “Is that wise?”
McNaughton gave me an exasperated glare. “Wise? What the fuck is wise? Our tracks are half-covered already. If we sit it out here, we won’t be able to find our way back, and the backup won’t be able to find us. We might protect this clown, but we’ll all freeze to death in the process. We got to get back. We can hole up in the Cat if you want.”
I rubbed my eyes. Once again it made sense. I felt like I was attending a wake for which the corpse hadn’t quite arrived. I looked over my four companions. “Does anyone have a vest?”
One of the troopers opened his coat to reveal the bulletproof vest underneath. I cocked an eyebrow at McNaughton.
“Give it to him.” McNaughton pointed at Cioffi.
The transfer took place. Then McNaughton clustered us around the prisoner as tightly as our snowshoes would allow. “All right. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Cioffi raised his hand like a boy in a schoolroom. The New Hampshire cop glared at him. “I can no longer walk.”
“The hip?” I asked. He smiled faintly and nodded. “I’m afraid I’ve done it some real damage.”
We rigged a small litter from a couple of shotguns and an extra pair of snowshoes someone had brought along for Cioffi. It was too short to lie on, and sitting astride proved too painful, so Cioffi sat as on a park bench, with both feet dangling off one side. It was a precarious rig, by nature unbalanced, but it was the best we could think of. I walked along one side, holding Cioffi’s hand to keep him from toppling off like a rag doll. Katz was on the other side and McNaughton and one trooper held the point ahead of the stretcher bearers. It was the best we could do to shield Cioffi from any line of fire.
31
SOME FIVE MINUTES into our silent return trip, Cioffi gave my hand a gentle squeeze. “I feel a little silly, holding hands.”
“You’d feel even sillier lying on your back with your legs in the air.”
He let out a small chuckle and nodded. “I suppose you’re right.”
He sighed and tilted his face up, letting the snowflakes collect on his eyelids, as we all used to do as children. It was a gentle gesture, and grotesquely out of kilter with the image we had formed of him. But then, he’d done nothing but debunk that image from the moment we had found him.
In itself, that didn’t surprise me. Violent criminals often reflect startlingly peaceful exteriors. But this man had been made part of a larger and bloodier whole over the past month. The road leading to him had been veiled in pain and deceit and littered with the bodies of friends and strangers alike. Had Helen of Troy been revealed as a fat and pimply teenager with an addiction for chocolate éclairs, the irony would have been no greater.
Perhaps it was because of this absurdity—that the pursuit had utterly overshadowed the prize—that I couldn’t suppress a shared wistfulness with this man, made all the more real by the intertwining of our hands. Somehow, sitting there like a child at the park, he had become less the cause of all this mayhem and more its ultimate victim. The toss by him of the very first stone was ending in an avalanche that would sweep the mountain from beneath him.
“Did you kill her?”
He opened his eyes and blinked at me. The question obviously startled him, as if the correct answer might somehow get him off the hook even now. But then he looked around and let out a little sigh. “Is that man really after me? To kill me?”
“You murdered his daughter.”
He nodded dreamily. “I guess I saw it as self-defense,” he said softly.
I noticed McNaughton turn to say something—no doubt some tough cop wisecrack that would make Cioffi clam up—but he didn’t, and after a moment’s hesitation he turned back to watch where he was going.
Cioffi shook his head and smiled gently. “It was such a long time ago.”
I waited for more, the self-cleansing confession, but he lapsed into silence and studied our joined hands, bobbing chest-high before him. I noticed his false beard was beginning to peel away at the temple. I let a few minutes elapse, but nothing happened. Normally, I might have left it at that—a tentative beginning on which later conversation could be based. But the self-defense line was irresistible. Of all the possibilities that occurred to me while I had stared at the photos of Pam Stark’s bound and strangled body, that one had never even flickered.
“How was it self-defense?”
“To keep Teicher in line.” There was a small pop from behind me, as from a champagne cork sprung from far, far away. Simultaneously, a red dot appeared in the middle of Cioffi’s forehead. He raised his free, mittened hand to it in astonishment and silently toppled backward off his stretcher, landing at Katz’s feet.
“Down,” McNaughton shouted. “Everybody down.”
Both stretcher-bearers dropped like stones, grappling for their sidearms. McNaughton let off two booming rounds from his shotgun. Only Katz and I remained standing, staring at each other as if frozen in time. His left arm and leg were splattered with red and there was a small pink lump of something stuck to his cheek. He looked down the length of his body to his boot, where most of Cioffi’s head rested sleepily. The face, aside from the hole, looked normal enough, but from a point behind his ear, the skull’s contour lost its definition. It looked soft, deflated, and it pumped blood onto Katz’s snowy boot with a rapidly decreasing rhythm.
“I said get down, you stupid bastards.”
I looked at McNaughton, spread-eagled and half-buried, and then I glanced over my shoulder. The mesmerizing, shimmering wall of falling white snow was as impenetrable as ever. I took a couple of steps into it and sensed, more than saw, a small white rectangle detach itself from its surroundings. It was a sheet, propped up by two stakes, looking like one half of a dissected pup tent. I looked over its top at the trampled snow behind it.
“He’s gone.”
I heard some swearing behind me as McNaughton and his two troopers regained their footing and composure. I also heard Katz throwing up.
McNaughton shuffled up next to me, his face red with fury.
“What the fuck is this?”
“It’s a blind.”
“I know what the fuck it is. Oh, Jesus. What a fucking mess. How the hell?”
I pointed at two thin parallel tracks in the snow. “Cross-country skis. He used them to follow our footprints and then waited. Chances were pretty good we’d retrace our steps.”
I left him to curse some more and to radio in the results of our little hike. Katz was kneeling in the snow beyond the body, retching. He’d pulled his foot out of his boot and had left both boot and snowshoe where Cioffi had pinned them. I slipped them from under the head and tried to wipe them off a little with my mittened hand, mostly just smearing them with pink snow. I crouched by Katz’s leg, separated the boot from the snowshoe, and began to put it on him.
He pulled away. “Don’t.”
“Your foot’ll freeze.”
I reached out and straightened his leg, loosened the laces, and put the boot back on. Katz was as submissive as a child.
“What happened?”
“We were ambushed. He stalked us on skis, set up shop behind a white sheet, and blew our friend away with something like a twenty-two, I’d guess.”
“Come on. A twenty-two?”
I finished lacing the boot and stood up. “Explosive shell.” I leaned over him, and flicked the small lump
of brain from his cheek. He stared at it and gagged again. Then he rubbed his face with snow.
In the distance, I could hear the low growl of a Sno-Cat engine. McNaughton was standing over Cioffi’s body. “The troops?” I asked him.
“Yeah. Too little, too late.”
“Join the club.”
32
GAIL FOUND ME FAST ASLEEP on a hallway bench outside Kunkle’s hospital room. I dreamed of her before I saw her, interspersing her face with dim snow-shrouded images of shouting policemen, Eskimos with crossbows, and peaceful half-heads haloed in pink blood.
She brought me back with a few gentle strokes across my forehead. “You want to go to bed?” She smiled.
“Aren’t we in bed?” I blinked hard several times and rubbed my eyes. I leaned forward, propping my elbows on my knees, and looked at the floor. It was speckled linoleum, with bright stripes running down the middle.
Gail rubbed my back; the sensation was muted by my coat.
“What time is it?”
“Almost midnight. How’s Kunkle?”
“Depressed—that’s normal for him. I’ll give him good cause this time, though. Doctor says he might lose the arm. He’ll sure as hell never play basketball again.”
“What happened out there, anyway?”
I rubbed my eyes again. “The roof fell in. It all came apart. Pretty fitting end to this whole stupid mess.”
She stood up and pulled me to my feet. “Come on home.”
It had stopped snowing sometime that afternoon, the storm dissipating with the suddenness of its arrival. The sun had glared from low on the horizon on a snow-thickened landscape of gentle curves and dips. The Sno-Cats had crawled in various directions across this smooth and sparkling world, inanely following Stark’s dim ski tracks, carrying Cioffi and the dead trooper back to the highway or just wandering back and forth across Mount Washington’s broad foot, their growls rendered tinny and ineffectual by the unimpressed white mountains staring down at them.
Gorham had become a town besieged as state troopers, sheriff ’s men and even the town constable marched about in contrasting uniforms, notebooks in hand, radios squawking. Patrol cars, ambulances, snow plows, a coroner’s station wagon all sported blue, red, and yellow flashing lights with a competitive energy wasted on the local population, none of whom was in the way. In contrast to the chaos that had led up to it, this flurry of post-shooting investigations had all the earmarks of textbook efficiency. McNaughton, I and everyone else had been interviewed again and again by the representatives of those offices who now had to pick up our broken pieces. The veiled skeptical glances and toneless questions had done little to bolster what was left of our pride.