I closed my eyes for a split second and let the sounds alone hold sway, recalling how the street stocks squealed more than the late models, since their wheels were configured like those of a regular car. Late models are designed only for tracks like this, and have their right front wheels canted in at an angle to put more rubber on the road during a tight left turn. At eighty miles an hour, the pressure on that one wheel can reach two tons. The point of the exercise, of course, is better contact, which means late models don’t squeal as much as their smaller, lighter, more home-built counterparts.
From the sound alone, therefore, I knew I was hearing the same kind of car Leo had worked on in the family barn for hours on end, dreaming of the day he’d qualify for the big leagues.
“What’re you doing?” Sammie’s voice in my ear cut through the cheering, the nonstop loudspeaker chatter, and the deafening sound of the engines.
“Sorry—reminiscing.” I looked once more at the vehicles below, noticing how each driver seemed isolated and alone in his or her cockpit, as if maneuvering a spaceship through an asteroid shower.
I resumed climbing alongside a crowd remarkable only for its normalcy—all blue jeans, T-shirts, and baseball caps, with a smattering of older folks, the men sporting suspenders stretched over comfortable guts.
We didn’t have any luck finding Mullen. The current race came to an end, a “Victory Lane” banner was quickly rigged on the track facing the crowd, and the announcer grabbed a mike and proclaimed the teenage winner, who was so enthused he leapt onto his car and jumped up and down on the roof. The whole ceremony was over in minutes flat, the banner was removed, and before we’d reached the bottom again, the pace car, sporting a flashing yellow light bar and a boldly painted “Cody Chevrolet” sign, was already positioning to lead the next field of cars, this time late models.
As we cut away from the stands and passed before the crowded concession booth, heading back toward the gate, I saw Rob gesture to us from his post. I waved back as he yelled, “He just went by. I told him you were looking for him.”
But in that instant, I was no longer thinking about Danny Mullen. Attracted by Rob’s yelling over the line of cars behind him, a man straightened from laboring over a late model’s engine and looked up in our direction.
It was Walter Freund, dressed as one of Mullen’s pit crew.
Sammie saw him, too, and immediately began running.
Freund’s reaction was fast and lethal. He sprinted toward us, reached Rob in five steps, and chopped him on the side of the neck, felling him like an ox. He then pulled the old man’s revolver from its holster.
“Gun,” I yelled at Sammie ahead of me.
Sam swerved as Walter aimed and fired a round, her feet slipping on the inclined walkway and causing her to slide like a home-base runner into several men coming out of the rest room. I crouched quickly, steadied my elbow on my knee, and drew a bead on Walter. Too many people were standing behind him for me to risk a shot.
“Police. Drop the gun,” I yelled.
Instead, he shot carelessly at me and then broke for the car parked next to the one he’d been working on, temporarily losing himself in the crowd.
I jogged up to Sammie, who was already fighting off several helping hands. “He’s gone for a car.”
We bolted for the gate, where Rob still lay prostrate, surrounded by a confused crowd of gawking people. The gunshots had blended without notice into the sound of crackling exhausts, so many who’d actually seen Walter fire still didn’t understand what had happened.
I paused long enough to check Rob’s pulse. His other hand reached up and swatted me away. “Get the bastard,” he said, “I’m fine.”
There was a small explosion of sound from where Walter had disappeared, and a yellow late model suddenly leapt backward into the service road paralleling the pits, scattering people like chickens under attack. I saw Walter’s grim face through the plastic windshield as he wrenched the steering wheel around to straighten the car out.
He had but one way to go. Due to the line of cars behind him and the crowd clogging the service road, the only outlet was the entrance to the track. Spewing twin clouds of acrid blue smoke, his car burst toward that direction, almost hitting Sammie and me as it sped past.
Incongruously, we both gave chase on foot, guns out, topping the small embankment enclosing the track just as Walter skidded onto its surface, cutting off the pace car and causing the entire pack behind it to scatter, brakes and tires squealing. To the sound of several collisions, I reached the pace car’s passenger door, pulled it open, and yelled at the astonished driver, “Police. We have to stop that man.”
Sammie piled into the back seat as I slid into the front, and the driver—a young man with a sudden broad smile on his face—took off much as Walter had moments before.
Again, our quarry’s options were limited. He couldn’t make the loop and head back out the entrance chute, since a tangle of race cars was now blocking his way. The grandstands, a tall fence, and a hill cut off other potential exits, so, about halfway down the length of the track, he did the only thing left to him—he cut violently to the right, vaulted over the lip of the track, and took off across the grass toward the parking lots, two rooster tails of dirt marking his progress.
Laughing by now, our driver followed suit. I could hear Sammie behind me being thrown around like a rag doll.
“Seat belt, seat belt,” I yelled at her over the engine noise, while I struggled to follow my own advice. “What’s your name?” I asked the driver.
“Sean. Glad to meet you. He kill someone or something?”
We hit a trough, and I smacked my head against the roof. “Yeah.”
His hands still on the wheel, he said, “Use the radio. Tell them to call for backup.” He had a portable radio wedged under his thigh. I grabbed it, keyed the mike, and said, “This is a police emergency. Call the cops and tell them we have an officer down and are in pursuit. We need assistance.”
The laconic reply was, “Got that. VSP’s already been notified.”
Ahead of us, Freund leapt onto the roadway and fishtailed toward the parking lots. Moments later, with a sickening crunch from underneath, we did the same. Sean let out a yell and hit the gas.
“This thing going to hold together?” I shouted, grabbing the dash.
“Hell if I know, but I’ve always wanted to open ’er up.”
We barreled down between a row of parked cars, grateful to be on a smoother surface, even if it was still dirt. I kept my fingers crossed no pedestrians would suddenly appear. In the straightaway, Walter widened the gap between us.
“Don’t worry about him losin’ us,” Sean declared.
“Why not?” I asked skeptically.
“’Cause he won’t be able to turn right worth shit.”
Those words were still in the air when Walter reached the end of the lane in front of us, cut right to make the corner, and went sailing into a row of cars, sending a shower of sparks into the night air. That canted right front wheel, solely designed for left turns, had bit into the dirt with all the effectiveness of a skinny bicycle tire. We were back on his tail as he recovered and regained speed.
The next stretch played to his favor, however, going downhill in a wide left turn, at the bottom of which the surface returned to asphalt. We were nearing the exit to Thunder Road and the state highway beyond.
“Let’s hope your friends are on their toes,” Sean said, “’Cause this boy’s options are just about to open up.”
Walter seemed to sense the same thing, while simultaneously catering to his vehicle’s one drawback. As he hit the end of the entrance road, he predictably turned left.
I grabbed the radio again. “Anyone out there?”
The response was scratchy, the range being only a mile or so. “Go ahead.”
“We’ve gone left out the entrance. Tell VSP to set up roadblocks.”
Nothing came back except static.
“Guess we’re on our o
wn,” Sammie said from the back.
Sean needed no more urging to apply the speed. I hoped his skill matched his ambition as I felt my back press against the seat—especially as we topped a rise, all four wheels off the ground, and saw Walter ahead of us swerve to avoid an oncoming pickup truck.
Either his lack of skill or that front wheel did him in. He fishtailed slightly, puffs of blue smoke curling from his rear tires, and then he began to slide. As Sean hit the brakes and started us into our own controlled skid, I saw Walter’s car give the pickup a glancing blow and go sailing across the ditch. He smashed into a tree about five feet off the ground and landed with the finality of a dictionary hitting the floor. As we shuddered to a halt not fifteen feet behind him, only slightly out of true with the road, I was suddenly aware of both silence and stillness, even before Sean killed his engine.
I stepped out, glanced over at the pickup’s astonished driver, still frozen with his hands on the wheel, and crossed the ditch to Walter’s car. It was shattered, flattened, surrounded by debris, and utterly, totally at peace.
Sammie was right behind me. “You see him?”
“Not yet,” I said softly. I approached cautiously, gun drawn, aware of sirens closing in from afar, and crouched low so I could see through the passenger window. Walter Freund was holding the steering wheel in a lethal embrace, his rib cage seemingly welded to the car. Blood was everywhere.
He hadn’t had time to fasten his seat belt.
I straightened and turned to Sammie. “Of the three men who killed Phil Resnick, it looks like we’re down to one.”
29
WE RETURNED TO THE TRACK AFTER THE STATE POLICE took over the crash site. The evening’s events had been canceled, and thousands of departing spectators were being detoured through various exits, forcing Sean to inch along in a parody of his earlier glory. By the time we got back to where the late models were parked, Danny Mullen was long gone and his crew was tight-lipped about his whereabouts.
I found it a frustrating end to a day that had begun far more hopefully.
In contrast, Sammie seemed curiously upbeat. “Too bad Walter committed dumbicide, but at least now we know who to focus on.”
Since I remembered she’d been on a tear to go after Mark Mullen earlier, she now had me guessing. “Danny or Mark?”
She stared at me. “Danny. You know God-damn well he tucked Walter out of sight ’cause he was on the payroll. No frigging way that’s some kind of fluke.”
I didn’t disagree. “What about his brother?”
“Same thing. They’re in it together. One guy does up-front showboating, the other one breaks legs and raises the money. All we need now is enough to justify a warrant for all his paperwork, and I bet we get him cold.”
I remained silent in the face of her enthusiasm. “You don’t think so?” She challenged me.
I hesitated before answering. “I don’t doubt Danny’s got dirt under his nails, and I don’t doubt Mark wants to be governor. I do wonder how neat and tidy it all is.”
Sammie was dismissive. “But it is neat and tidy. That’s what’s fouled us up from the start—Phil Resnick, Owen Tharp, Brenda Croteau, Walter Freund, Billy Conyer. All of them were like cobwebs hitting us in the face, keeping us from seeing the root cause of it all. If you take it back to the Mullens, it gets real simple.”
I thought back to what was the biggest objection to William of Occam’s famous razor in his day—that if the answer to a problem was arrived at by extracting or excluding all pseudo-explanations, who was to decide which of those was superfluous and which had merit? Might the process not become too simplified and miss a vital truth?
I decided to hold off debate and take advantage of Sammie’s reborn energy to get her to open up a little. “I’m glad you got the bit back in your teeth.”
That caught her by surprise. She looked out the side window at the passing darkness for a while before finally saying, “Yeah, well.”
“I owe you an apology,” I continued. “I think I’m partly to blame for what happened between you and Andy.”
She switched her gaze to me. “How?”
“After I talked to him about hanging out at the Dirty Dollar, drinking with Billy Conyer and the others, I dropped the ball. I knew Brenda used to go there, too. It would’ve been logical to find out if they knew each other—I did ask him, but only in passing. I should’ve checked into it. If I had, it might’ve made things easier for you.”
She merely shrugged. “I doubt it. Any way you look at it, he lied to me. Wouldn’t’ve mattered when I found out.”
“You really loved him.” It wasn’t a question.
“Whatever that is.”
“Don’t be so cynical. It doesn’t make you a sucker because you fell for the wrong guy. Everything in life takes practice, otherwise every teenage hot flash would end up in a lifelong commitment.”
She flared up a little. “I’m not a teenager.”
I kept silent, hoping I’d uncorked things enough that they’d start flowing on their own.
After a pause, she added, “It just felt so right. He was really good company.”
“You sure you were right to dump him?”
She surprised me by sighing tiredly. “Yeah. You know, it’s funny, saying what good company he was. It’s almost like hearing someone else talking. He wasn’t that good company. To tell you straight, he was mostly just terrific in bed. And I was really horny. Sounds pathetic, but that’s what I miss the most right now. I never did have what I see with you and Gail—the deeper stuff.”
I laughed. “Better not go too far with that. We’re looking for a place for me to live right now.”
She stared at me in total amazement. “What?”
I flapped my hand dismissively in the air, “It’s not that big a deal. We’re putting things back to where they were before she was raped. If anything, it’s a sign of restored health. We lived apart all those years because we knew we were probably too independent to share the same roof. Not that it was a bad experience—it was actually kind of nice—but you got to stick your neck out sometimes to make things work. Gail’s strong again, and she needs her space.”
“And you?”
I thought of how poorly words stand in for one’s feelings sometimes. Reducing all that Gail and I were going through to a few snippets of rationalized thinking made it feel trivial and painless, which it definitely was not.
But Sam didn’t need to hear that right now.
“It works for me, too. That house was always a little big for my taste, and it looks like Gail’ll be commuting a lot to Montpelier when she starts up with StayGreen. I think I’d be better off with a small place I can call my own. I’ve been missing my old habits. I like to play music and read. I’ve been thinking of setting up a woodworking shop, like I had when I was a kid.”
Sammie still seemed shocked by what I was admitting.
“You know,” I told her, “sometimes the trick to making a relationship work is realizing you don’t have to see eye-to-eye on everything. You don’t have to like the same things, or keep the same hours, or have the same ambitions. You don’t even have to live in the same house. If you admire and respect and love one another, the rest is just details that can always be worked out. I think a lot of people fall apart because they get tangled up in a skirmish they turn into a major battle.”
“You telling me something here?” she asked a little sharply.
“I doubt it’s anything you don’t already know. You’re an aggressive, type-A perfectionist. That’s good on the job—a bit of a pain sometimes—but you got to learn to shift gears when you’re at home. Didn’t you like staying home when you were with Andy, just putting your feet up and watching TV or whatever?”
She didn’t answer. The hurt she was feeling was eloquent enough.
· · ·
My concern that Sammie was overrating the Mullen brothers—to the exclusion of all others—was eased the next morning when Harriet told me over the in
tercom that a woman was waiting in the hallway to see me.
I stepped outside to find Sandy Corcoran sitting on the park-style bench we kept there for people awaiting Breathalyzer tests or to settle their parking tickets. She was still rigged out in black—heavy boots, a leather jacket, and several chains looping this way and that—but her demeanor was significantly more civil.
“Hey, Sandy,” I greeted her. “What’s up?”
With a hint of medieval clanking, she reached into one of her pockets and handed me a key. “Belonged to Walter. With him dead, I figured maybe you should have it.”
I held it in my palm. It was obviously to a safe-deposit box. “He give it to you to hold?”
“I guess. He called it his insurance policy and told me to hide it where no one could find it. ’Cept him, of course.”
“You know what it is?”
She shook her head and stood up. “Don’t want to neither.”
With that, she thudded down the hallway.
· · ·
It took some doing finding the bank that owned the key, and even more on Jack Derby’s part to legally fit the key to the lockbox and take hold of its contents. When he did, what we had was a single cassette tape.
Given what we’d all been through so far, it seemed only fair to share the tape’s contents with everyone involved, so the premiere took place in Derby’s conference room, with most of my squad, most of his office—including Gail—and Tony Brandt attending.
J.P. waited until we’d settled down before hitting the play button. Walter Freund’s voice filled the air. “I got him out of the motel, like you said. He’s stashed at a friend’s place.” The other voice was obviously on the far end of the phone line.
“What’s he saying?”
“Same thing—he wants to be taken care of.”
“Or?”
“Or nothing. He wants to be checked out. He’s scared he’ll get cancer or something. He looks like shit. And he’s probably right—that junk rotted his clothes, for Christ’s sake.”
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