by John Verdon
The object that had caused it was still embedded there. It looked like two knife blades joined at one end to form a strange U-shaped weapon. Then he recognized what it actually was. It was one of the sharp metal joist hangers that had been delivered with the lumber. The obvious explanation was that the explosion had propelled that nasty piece of hardware with terrific force at the man with the rifle, cutting his throat. But that led to other questions.
Did the man set off the explosion himself, then suffer this unintended consequence? But it seemed unlikely that he would have detonated the device while he was still within range of the debris. Perhaps he detonated it by accident? Or in ignorance of the strength of the explosive charge? Or was he the unfortunate accomplice of a second individual who acted too soon? But questions like these begged a more fundamental question.
Who the hell was he?
Violating crime scene protocol, Gurney grasped the man’s heavily muscled shoulder and, with some effort, rolled him over for a better view of his face.
His first conclusion was that the man was definitely not his neighbor. His second conclusion, delayed by the lack of light and by the man’s spectacularly broken nose, probably caused by falling on his face, was that he’d seen that face before. It took a few moments for the identity to register.
It was Mick Klemper.
That’s when Gurney noted a second odor, not as subtle as the blood itself. Alcohol. And that led him to a third conclusion—one that was assumption-ridden but plausible.
Klemper, possibly like Panikos, had seen—or been told about—the Criminal Conflict program teaser, with its promises of sensational revelations, and it had provoked him to take action. Drunk and enraged—perhaps in a crazed effort at damage control, or driven by fury at what he surely would have perceived as a broken promise—he’d come after the man who was betraying him, the man who was ending his career and his life as he knew it.
Drunk and enraged, he’d come gunning for Gurney, skulking around the woods, sneaking up to the house as darkness fell. Drunk and enraged, he hadn’t given a second thought to what a dangerous place that might be.
Chapter 57
Pocket Full of Posies
Once again Gurney faced the simple, urgent question: What now?
In a less pressured position, he might have chosen the sanest and safest option—an immediate call to 911. A state police officer, however demented his motive might have been for being on the scene, had been killed. Though perhaps unintended, his death was hardly accidental. Occurring as the direct result of a felony—the reckless detonation of the explosive—it was murder. Failure to report this, along with the pertinent background information, to the appropriate authorities in a timely fashion could be construed as obstruction of justice.
On the other hand, much could be excused by the immediate pursuit of a suspect.
And perhaps there was a way to bring the local police to the scene without entrapping himself in the prolonged questioning that was sure to occur and thus losing what might be his last real chance to catch Panikos and untangle the Spalter knot.
After turning Klemper’s body back over to its original position—hoping that the techs summoned to the scene wouldn’t be sharp enough to discern any evidence of the interference—Gurney scrambled back behind the corner of the house and called out in a low voice to Kyle.
Less than half a minute later the young man was standing next to him. “Jeez, is that … is that … somebody … over there on the ground?”
“Yes. But forget about it for now. You didn’t see it. Do you have your phone?”
“Yes, sure. But what—?”
“Call 911. Tell them everything that happened here up to the point when we climbed out the window—the flat tire, the explosion, my belief that the tire had been shot out. Tell them that I’m ex-NYPD, that after the explosion I saw some movement on Barrow Hill, that I told you to hide in the thicket, that I took your motorcycle and went in pursuit of whoever I thought was up there. And that’s all you know.”
Kyle’s gaze was still on Klemper’s body. “But … what about …?”
“Our lights were out, it’s dark, your father sent you up to that thicket to hide. You never saw the body. Let the 911 responders find it themselves. You can be as surprised and disturbed by it as they’ll be.”
“Surprised and disturbed—that should be easy enough.”
“Stay in the thicket until you see the first cruiser coming up through the pasture. Then come out slowly and let them see you. Let them see your hands.”
“You still haven’t told me what happened … to him.”
“The less you know, the less you’ll need to forget, and the easier it’ll be to be surprised and confused.”
“What are you going to do?”
“That depends on the situation on the hill. I’ll give it some thought on my way up there. But whatever it is, it needs to happen now.” He got back on the bike, started it as quietly as he could, turned it around, and headed slowly around the back of the house. Confident that the structure was providing sufficient cover, he switched the headlight on and guided the softly rumbling bike slowly toward the old cow path that led to the large field separating his property from Barrow Hill.
He was pretty sure that the roundabout arc he was taking would prevent anyone on the top of the hill from seeing the headlight of the bike approaching. Then he could make his way up the north-side trail, a switchback with no direct visibility from the top.
All this sounded fine, as far as it went. But it didn’t go far enough. Too much was unknown. Gurney couldn’t escape the feeling that he was heading into a situation where the guy on the other side of the table had not only higher cards, but a better seat and a bigger gun. Not to mention a history of winning.
Gurney was tempted to blame everything on the cynical, duplicitous creeps at RAM-TV whose timing “mistake” with the Criminal Conflict promotion announcements was almost certainly a deliberate decision. More promotional exposure meant a bigger audience, and a bigger audience was their number one goal. In fact, it was their only goal. If someone should die as a result of that decision, well … that could create the biggest ratings boost of all.
But the difficulty with blaming it all on them, vile and venal as they were, was that he knew that he owned a piece of the problem. His piece had been his pretending, mostly to himself, that the plan made sense. It was hard to maintain that illusion now—as he struggled to keep the BSA upright, negotiating a tortuous route through clumps of briars, waist-high aspen saplings, and groundhog burrows that would have made the outer edge of the unmowed field a challenge even with perfect visibility. On a murky night it was a nightmare.
As he neared the foot of the hill, the terrain grew rougher and the jouncing movements of the headlight beam through the bushy weeds filled the area out in front of him with erratic shadows. Gurney had faced tough conditions before in the endgame of a battle with a dangerous opponent, but this was worse. Without time to think, to evaluate pros and cons and levels of risk, he felt forced to act.
Forced was not too strong a word for it. Now that he was within striking distance of Panikos, letting him get away was unthinkable. When he was this near his quarry, the gravitational field of the chase grew stronger and the rational assessment of risk began to fade.
And there was something else. Something very specific.
The echo of the past—stirring a force within him far stronger than reason.
That searing memory of an escaping car, Danny sprawled dead on the pavement. A memory that gave birth to an iron conviction that never again—never again, no matter the danger—would a killer so close get away from him.
This was something far beyond the niceties of rationality. This was something burned by unbearable loss into the circuits of his brain.
Having reached the opening to the north trail, he needed to make an immediate decision, and none of the options was encouraging. Since Panikos would probably be equipped with an infrared sco
pe and infrared binoculars, any effort to get to the top of the hill would likely be fatal long before Gurney could get within Beretta range. The only way he could think of to neutralize the man’s technological advantage was to put him on the run. And the only way he could think of to make him run was to give him the impression that he was outnumbered and outgunned—not an easy impression to create in the absence of backup. For a few moments, Gurney considered roaring full throttle up the switchback trail, shouting orders to imaginary cohorts, shouting replies in other voices. But he dismissed it as too transparent a ploy.
Then it occurred to him that a solution was at hand. Although he’d have no actual backup, the appearance of backup might be enough—and a very solid appearance of backup would soon be on the scene. A police cruiser or two, maybe three, hopefully with all their lights flashing, should be driving up any minute now through the pasture in response to Kyle’s 911 call. Their arrival would be clearly visible from Panikos’s likely position up by the tarn—and the sight of them should create a sufficient impression of manpower to dislodge Panikos and persuade him to retreat down the back trail to Beaver Cross Road.
That would all be for nothing, however, if Panikos established a large enough lead on Gurney to slip away into the night—or, worse, to pull off the trail unobserved and wait in ambush. To avoid that possibility Gurney decided to maneuver the BSA as quietly as he could to a location about three quarters of the way up the switchback, wait for the arrival of the cruisers in the pasture, and then play it by ear, depending on Panikos’s reaction.
He didn’t have to wait long. No more than a minute or two after he’d reached his intended position on the trail—within striking distance of the hilltop—he saw the oscillating colored lights through the trees at the far side of the field. And almost immediately he heard the sound he was hoping for—an ATV, loud at first, then beginning to recede—meaning that Panikos was, at least for the moment, behaving as anticipated.
Gurney revved up the idling BSA and maneuvered as fast as he dared through the remaining switchback segments. When he reached the small open area by the tarn, he turned the throttle back to idle for a moment to listen for the ATV and judge its position and speed. He guessed it was no more than a hundred yards down the back trail.
As he turned toward the trailhead and his headlight swept across the clearing, his eye caught first one oddity and then another. Resting on the flat rock that offered the best view of Gurney’s house was a bouquet of flowers. The stems were wrapped in yellow tissue. The blossoms were a deep brownish red, a color typical of dried blood—and also the most common color of the local August mums.
He couldn’t help wondering if the bouquet—or “posies” in the words of the nursery rhyme—had been intended for delivery to him, perhaps as a final message to be left on his dead body.
The second oddity was a black metal object, half the size of a carton of cigarettes, on the ground between Gurney and the bouquet. His reaction to that was sudden and physical, yanking the handlebars to the right and twisting the throttle. The bike pivoted sharply, propelling a shower of dirt and pebbles into the darkness and accelerating along the edge of the tarn.
Had he failed to get out of the way as quickly as he did, the explosion that followed would have killed him. As it was, the only negative effect was a painful blast of dirt and small stones against his back.
In response to this attempt on his life, he called out in his best team-leader voice. “All units converge, back slope, Barrow Hill. Remote explosive. No casualties.” The idea was to increase the pressure. Make Panikos get reckless, make mistakes, lose control. Maybe hit a tree, flip into a ditch. The goal was to stop him, one way or another.
The unforgivable thing would be to let him get away.
To let the red BMW race off into the distance and disappear forever.
No. That wasn’t going to happen. No matter what, that wasn’t going to happen again.
He couldn’t let Panikos get too far ahead. At two hundred yards, for example, he might have the space and time he’d need to come to a sudden stop, turn, steady his weapon, and get off a good shot while Gurney was still too far away to have a chance with the Beretta.
With his attention alternating rapidly now between the ATV taillights and the rutted trail, Gurney was neither gaining nor losing ground. But with every passing second on the bike, he could feel his physical motorcycle memory returning. Like skiing after a long layoff, heading down that trail was bringing back his timing and coordination. By the time they emerged onto the paved surface of Beaver Cross, the ATV still about a hundred yards ahead of him, Gurney felt confident enough to open up the throttle all the way.
The ATV seemed unusually fast—apparently built or modified for racing—but the BSA was faster. Within a mile, Gurney had reduced the gap between them to fifty, maybe forty yards—still too far for a pistol shot from a motorcycle. He figured he’d be close enough in another half mile or so.
Perhaps sensing the same possibility from the opposing point of view, Panikos veered off the paved road onto a roughly parallel farm track that ran along the verge of a long cornfield. Gurney did the same, in case the little man decided to head off into the cornfield itself.
Even more rutted than the Barrow Hill trail, the farm track imposed its own speed limit of twenty to thirty miles per hour, taking away the BSA’s open-road advantage and preserving Panikos’s lead—even widening it a bit, since the forks and shocks of his machine were more suited to the surface than Gurney’s.
The track and its adjacent cornfield sloped down to the relatively flatter but still severely uneven terrain of the river valley. At the end of the track, Panikos continued on into the abandoned pasture of what Gurney had been told was once the region’s largest dairy farm. Now a patchwork of large grassy hummocks and muddy rivulets, it gave the ATV a distinct advantage over the BSA, widening Panikos’s lead to the original hundred yards and then some, impelling Gurney to push the BSA at insane speeds through the equivalent of an unlit slalom course. There was a primal simplicity in hot pursuit that anesthetized fear and suppressed any reasonable calculation of risk.
In addition to the red taillights that he was zeroing in on, he began catching glimpses of other lights farther down the valley. Colored lights, white lights, some seemingly fixed in place, some moving. These at first had a disorienting effect on him. Where the hell was he? Bright arrays of lights were as uncommon in Walnut Crossing as meadowlarks in Manhattan. Then, when he saw an arc of orange lights slowly rotating, it came to him.
It was the Ferris wheel at the Summer Mountain Fair.
Panikos was still widening his lead through a wet depression of boggy land that separated the former pasture from the higher and drier square-mile field that was home to the fair and its parking areas. For a few desperate seconds, Gurney thought he’d lost Panikos in the sea of vehicles surrounding the perimeter fence of the fair itself. But then he caught sight of the familiar taillights moving along an outer parking lane in the direction of the exhibitors’ entrance.
By the time he reached that entrance himself, the ATV had already passed through it. Three young women wearing FAIR SECURITY armbands, evidently in charge of controlling that admission point, looked disconcerted. One was on a walkie-talkie, the other on a cell phone. Gurney pulled up next to the third. Straddling the bike, he flashed his NYPD-Retired credentials at her as he spoke. “Did an ATV just run this gate?”
“Damn right! Kid on a camo four-by-four. You after him?”
He hesitated for half a second at the word “kid” before realizing that, seen fleetingly, Panikos would give that exact impression.
“Yes, I am. What was he wearing?”
“Wearing? Jeez … I … maybe some kind of shiny black jacket? Like one of those nylon windbreaker things? I’m not really sure.”
“Okay. Did you see which way he went?”
“Yeah, freakin’ little creep! Right through there.” She pointed at a makeshift alleyway between one of
the main tents and a long row of RVs and motor homes.
Gurney passed through the gate, headed into narrow passage, and proceeded to the far end of it, where it connected with one of the fair’s main concourses. The carefree look of the ambling crowd seemed to preclude any recent encounter with a speeding ATV—meaning that Panikos had probably slipped through one of the many spaces between the motor homes and could now be anywhere in the fairgrounds.
Gurney pivoted the BSA and sped back up the alley to the gate area, where he saw that the three young women had now been joined in their consternation by a sour-faced cop—no doubt one of the locals moonlighting in the security detail.
Gray-haired and paunchy, stretching a uniform that might have fit him ten years earlier, he eyed the BSA with a blatant combination of envy and contempt.
“What’s the problem here?”
Gurney showed his ID. “The guy who ran your gate a couple of minutes ago is armed and dangerous. I have reason to believe he shot out a tire on my car.”
The cop was eyeing the ID like it was a North Korean passport. “You carrying?”
“Yes.”
“That card says you’re retired. You got your carry permit on you?”
Gurney flipped quickly to the section of his wallet that displayed the permit. “There’s a time factor here, Officer. The guy on the ATV is a serious—”
The cop cut him off. “Remove that from your wallet and hand it to me.”
Gurney did so, his voice rising. “Listen to me. The guy on the ATV is a fugitive murder suspect. Losing him now would not be a good thing.”
The cop examined the permit. “Slow down … Detective. You’re a long way from the Rotten Apple.” He wrinkled his nose unpleasantly. “This fugitive of yours have a name?”