“How’s crime?” the man behind the counter asked.
“Oh, so so,” Willard told him. “Gonna be trolling for speeders over on the interstate today. Sheriff told me to write at least five out-of-staters. Damn county commissioners are on him again to bring in some more fine money.”
“You know,” the proprietor said, “the thing I like most about living out here is that there isn’t any real crime. Not like those big cities.” He gestured toward the copy of the Sante Fe newspaper lying on the counter.
Deputy Grimes glanced at the paper. There was a drawing right below the headline. Someone’s face. “That the guy who supposedly took a shot at the Vice-President?”
“Yeah. The President, the Vice-President, and half the cabinet. Cutting a swath through Washington, this one is. Making Lee Harvey Oswald look like a goldfish. And you know something funny? When I first saw that picture on TV last night, I said to the wife, I said, ‘Darn if that don’t look like Henry Charon, that lives up in the Twin Buttes area.’ Crazy how a fellow’s mind works when he sees a drawing like that, ain’t it?”
“Yeah,” said Willard Grimes, sipping the coffee and looking out the window at the lowering sky above the arrow-straight road pointing toward the horizon. He got out a cigarette and lit it as he sipped the coffee.
Oh yeah, now he remembered. Charon. Sort of a nondescript medium-sized guy. Skinny. Real quiet. Drives a Ford pickup.
Grimes ambled back to the counter and stared at the artist’s drawing on the front page of the paper. He squinted. Naw.
“Couldn’t be him, of course,” the proprietor said. “Ain’t nobody from around here going to go clear to Washington to gun down politicians. Don’t make sense. Not that some of ’em couldn’t use a little shootin’. The guy who’s doing it is probably some kind of half-baked commie nut, like that idiot Oswald was. But Henry Charon? Buys gas and food here pretty regular.”
“Couldn’t be him,” Deputy Willard Grimes agreed.
“Now if a fellow had it in for dirtball politicians,” the proprietor said, warming to his theme, “there’s a bunch that need shootin’ a lot closer to home. Remember down in Albuquerque …”
Five minutes later, with another cup of coffee in his hand, Deputy Grimes was ready to leave for the interstate when a game warden drove up to the gas pump and parked his green truck. He came inside. Willard lingered to visit.
The game warden was eating a doughnut and kidding the proprietor when his eyes came to rest on the newspaper. “Don’t that beat all,” he exclaimed. “If that isn’t Henry Charon I’ll eat my hat.”
“What?” said Willard Grimes.
“Henry Charon,” the game warden said. “Got a little two-by-four ranch up toward Twin Buttes. I’ve chased that sonuvabitch all over northern New Mexico. He’s a damned poacher but we could never catch him at it. That’s him all right.”
“How come you didn’t say something yesterday?” Willard Grimes asked, his brow furrowing. “That picture must have been on TV a hundred times already.”
“My TV broke a month ago. That’s the first time I laid eyes on that picture. But I’ll bet a week’s pay that’s Henry Charon. Sure as God made little green apples.”
The envelope containing the lab reports from the Sanitary Bakery warehouse case had lain in the in-basket for four hours before Special Agent Freddy Murray had the time to open it. He read the documents through once, then settled in to study them carefully. Finally he pulled a legal pad around and began making notes.
The corpse of one Antonio Anselmo, white male about forty-five years of age with a partial dental plate, had been found in Harrison Ford’s locked room at the FBI barracks on the Quantico Marine Corps base. The forward portion of his skull had been crushed. Death had been instantaneous. When the field lab people saw the body at eleven a.m. Wednesday, they calculated that Anselmo had died between midnight and four a.m.
Hair, bits of flesh, and minute quantities of blood were found on the landing of the stairwell nearest to Ford’s room. Blood type was the same as Anselmo’s. Threads of clothing and one shirt button had been recovered from the stairs. Marks on the lineoleum in the corridor that might have been made by a body.
Wallet—now this was interesting—both the wallet and a motel key bore partial prints of Harrison Ford.
A shotgun lay beside the body. It also had Ford’s prints. And there was a minute oil stain on Anselmo’s shirttail—a stain of gun oil. No other weapons in the room.
The second report went into great detail about the warehouse, with its six bodies and cocaine processing laboratory. Murray flipped through it uninterestedly.
He settled on the report concerning Freeman McNally’s house. One body in the living room. Fifty-one-year-old white male named Vinnie Pioche. Shot three times, 9-mm slugs, two that entered the back and one that penetrated his right side, apparently while he was lying down. According to the coroner Pioche had been dead when the third shot struck him—no bleeding.
Then this ringer: the pistol that fired the slugs that killed Pioche was in the weapons room and contained no prints.
The report carefully detailed where each of eighty 9-mm rounds had struck in the lower floor of the house. Refrigerator, TV, bathroom—it was quite a list. There were diagrams and Murray referred to them several times as he read.
Cars outside the warehouse. One of them contained stains of human blood on the backseat. The blood matched Pioche’s. The ignition key for this car had been recovered from Harrison Ford’s pocket.
Now Freddy Murray went back to the report on the warehouse. He looked again at the coroner’s detail of Freeman McNally’s injuries. Scrotum partially ripped from the body, severe injury to the right testicle incurred just before death stopped the heart. Death caused by a bullet through the heart, a shot fired into his back from about four feet away.
Ruben McNally—half strangled and severely beaten, but the cause of death was internal bleeding in the brain caused when his nose bone was shoved into the cranial cavity.
Billy Enright …
Freddy sat back in his chair and whistled softly. Jesus. That was the only word that described it. Jesus!
He was still making notes an hour later when Tom Hooper came into the office and sagged into a seat.
“McNally?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you think?” Hooper asked as he took off his shoes.
“Well,” Freddy said slowly as he watched Hooper knead his right foot. “I’m struck by the many points of similarity between the McNally mess and the massacre over at Teal’s.”
Hooper didn’t look up. “Bullshit,” he said.
“No, I mean it, Tom.”
Hooper dropped his right foot and worked some on his left. Then he put them both flat on the floor and looked at Freddy. “No.”
“I admit there are a lot of dissimilarities too, but it really looks to me like another gang wipeout. We are just damned lucky our undercover officer survived with only one bullet in the back.”
Hooper pointed at the pile of reports. “Look at the one for Ford,” he said. “Read me the analysis of the clothes the emergency room people took off him.”
Freddy took his time. He found the passage, perused it, then said, “Okay, there’s some blood, three different types, some brain tissue—”
“Now where in hell do you suppose he got that on him?”
“Tom, in places in that warehouse it was on the walls and in puddles on the floor. He rubbed against it somewhere.”
Hooper put on his shoes and carefully tied the laces. That chore completed, he said, “You and I both know that Ford went into that warehouse and gunned those men. He beat one to death with his bare hands. He went there to do it. No other reason.”
“Now you listen a minute, Tom. We got a ton of facts here but no story. A clever man could string all these facts together to tell any story he wanted to tell. I guarantee you that the lawyer Harrison Ford ends up with will be a damn clever man. If he gets indicted, ev
en I am going to contribute to his legal defense fund.”
Hooper said nothing.
Murray charged on. “You think it isn’t going to come out that the bureau sent him in undercover? Ha! The defense is going to make us out to be a bunch of incompetent paper pushers who couldn’t prosecute Freeman McNally and are now trying to hang our own undercover operative. My God, Tom! The next hundred people we try to recruit to go undercover are going to laugh in our faces!”
“Cops and FBI agents gotta obey the law too. Harrison went over the edge.” The irritation was plain in Hooper’s voice. “Why are we having this conversation?”
“Ford’s mistake was not being in bed sound asleep when Tony Anselmo came calling with his sawed-off shotgun. Then he could have just died in his sleep and none of this mess would have happened.”
“I know he killed Anselmo in self-defense,” Hooper growled. “Nobody’s suggesting charging him for that.”
“You think that fight at the warehouse wasn’t self-defense? My God, Tom. He’s got a bullet in the back.”
Hooper got out of his chair and went over to the window. He ran his fingers through his hair. “So what are you suggesting?”
“I think Harrison Ford has done enough for his country. I’m suggesting we close the file on the McNally case and let Ford go back to Evansville.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
Hooper stood looking out the window.
“We should have busted McNally in September,” Freddy said, more to himself than to his boss.
Tom Hooper had spent twenty-six years in the FBI. He thought about those years now and the various tough choices he had had to make along the way. Freddy irritated him with all this crap about September. They had handled this case right all the way, and circumstances beyond everyone’s control had intervened. His thoughts turned to Ford—the man was not a good undercover agent. Oh, sure, he could think on his feet and he was brave as a bull, but he had too much imagination. He thought too damn much.
He stood at the window tallying Ford’s sins. Goddamn that asshole, anyway. “Ford was planning to gun McNally and all the rest of them, then go back to his room at Quantico. He was going to call us and claim he and Anselmo had struggled and he had been knocked out. That’s why he changed guns at McNally’s house. We’ve got no proof that he killed Pioche. None! It’s plausible that Anselmo killed him before he went to kill Ford. If Ford hadn’t been wounded at the warehouse we might not have been able to place him there. All we would have had is a bunch of corpses.”
“You think?” Freddy said behind him.
“I know! I can read that man’s mind. He’s no cop! He thinks like a goddamn jarhead. Attack! Always attack.”
Hooper turned around. Freddy was perusing the lab reports.
“You listening to me?” he asked Freddy.
“I heard.”
“Ford and McNally. They’re just alike. Screw the law! The law is for those other guys, all those guys who can’t get away with breaking it. They both think like that!”
Freddy folded the reports and stacked them neatly. He took his time with it and examined the pile to make sure it was perfectly aligned, with the files in proper numerical sequence. When he finished he spoke slowly, without looking at Hooper:
“McNally’s out of business. Permanently. That, I thought, was our ultimate goal all along. And the government isn’t going to have to spend a nickel trying him. No board and room in a heated cell for the rest of his life at the taxpayers’ expense. No appeals. No claims of racial bigotry or oppression. It’s all over.”
He picked up the stack of files and held it out for Hooper. “Close the case,” he said.
Just then the intercom buzzed. “Yes,” Freddy said into the box.
“There’s a call for Mr. Hooper from New Mexico. Another identification of that artist’s drawing of the assassin.”
“Tell her I’ll take it in my office,” Hooper told Freddy. He picked up the files and put them under his arm.
The first shots were fired at the soldiers in a poorer section of northeast Washington around two p.m. A detail had halted a beat-up ’65 Cadillac containing two black youths and were marching them toward a truck when someone fired a shot. The soldiers dropped to the ground and began looking for the shooter. The two black youths ran. One of the soldiers in full combat gear ran after them. He had gone about fifty feet when there was another shot and he fell to the sidewalk.
His comrades sent a hail of lead into a second-floor window over a corner grocery, then kicked the door in and charged up the stairs. Inside the room they found a fifteen-year-old boy with a bullet-wound in his arm huddled on the floor. Beside him lay an old lever-action rifle.
“Why’d you shoot?” the sergeant demanded. “Why’d you shoot that soldier?”
The boy wouldn’t answer. He was dragged down the stairs and, in full view of a rapidly gathering crowd, was thrown roughly into a truck for the ride to the hospital. Beside him on a stretcher lay the man he had shot.
“Honkey pigs,” one woman shouted. “Arresting kids! Why you honkies here in our neighborhood anyway? Out to hassle the niggers?”
A brick sailed over the crowd and just missed a soldier. It took the soldiers twenty minutes to run the crowd off.
While this incident was playing itself out, a dope addict in a public housing project two miles away fired a shotgun through a closed door, striking the soldier who was knocking on it full in the face.
The second shot splattered harmlessly against the wall.
The soldiers kicked in the door while the addict wrestled with the lever to break open the double-barrel. His wife was sitting nearby in a chair. She watched silently as two soldiers with their M-16s on full automatic emptied their magazines into her husband from a distance of eight feet. The soldiers were hasty and inexperienced. Some of their bullets missed. However thirty-two of them—the coroner did the counting later—ripped through the addict before his corpse hit the floor.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
WHEN darkness fell the number of incidents increased. The communications room at the armory became a beehive of activity as reports of shootings and angry crowds poured in over the radios.
At the Executive Office Building General Land conferred with the Vice-President. Lacking any other options, they agreed that more troops would be brought in and sent to each trouble spot. General Land ordered in a battalion that was on standby at Andrews Air Force Base.
Jake Grafton was at the armory poring over a map trying to learn which areas had been searched and which had not when he was called to the telephone.
“Captain, Special Agent Hooper.”
“Yes.”
“I thought you’d like to know. We’ve received over a dozen tentative identifications of the artist’s conception of the assassin. Two in the Washington area and others from all over. We’re checking all of them. But I thought you might want to swing by the local addresses. The agents are still there. You ready to copy?”
“Go ahead.” Jake got out his pen.
When the captain had copied and read back both addresses, Hooper said, “I think the most likely ID is one out of New Mexico. Very definite. From a game warden and a gas station proprietor. They think the guy is a rancher out there and a suspected long-time poacher. Real good with firearms. Ran a guide service for out-of-state high rollers for the last seven or eight hunting seasons. A deputy sheriff went out to his ranch this afternoon and looked around. No one there. Doesn’t appear to have been anyone there for a week or so.”
“What’s the name?”
“Charon. Henry Charon. The New Mexico Department of Motor Vehicles gives his date of birth as March 6, 1952. We’ve already got a fax of the driver’s license photo. I’ve seen it. This could be our guy. We’ve got agents showing it to our witness now.”
“Can I get some copies?”
“The agents checking out the local reports have copies. They’ll give . you one. We’ll
send some over to the armory as soon as we can.”
“Like maybe a couple thousand of them.”
“Well, we’ll do what we can. Gonna take a little while.”
“As soon as you can.”
“Sure.”
“How about the national crime computer? This guy have a record or some warrants?”
“We tried. Didn’t get a hit. We’re checking.”
“Thanks for the call, Hooper.”
“Yeah.”
The nearest address was an apartment building on Georgetown Avenue. Jack Yocke drove. When they were stopped at a roadblock, he showed a pass signed by General Greer while Jake, Toad, and Rita displayed their green military ID cards. The sergeant examined the ID card photos and flashed a light in each of the officers’ faces. Two men, both with M-16s leveled, stood where they could shoot past the sergeant.
“You may go on through, sir,” the sergeant said as he saluted. Jake returned the salute as Yocke fed gas.
There was no parking place in front of the building, so Yocke double-parked. “A license to steal,” he gloated.
“Toad, write him a citation,” Jake said before he slammed the door.
The FBI agents were still talking to the apartment manager. Jake introduced himself. One of the agents took him out in the hall. He produced a sheet of fax paper with a picture in the middle. Much bigger than the little photo on a driver’s license, the picture still had the same look: a man staring straight at the camera, his nose slightly distorted by the lens.
“The lady in here says this guy has been a tenant for about a month. We’re waiting for a search warrant to arrive.”
“But I thought this was the New Mexico driver’s license photo?”
“It is. It’s the same guy.”
“Henry Charon.”
“Interesting name. But not the one he used here. Called himself Sam Donally. She asked to see a driver’s license when he signed the lease. She thinks it was Virginia, but isn’t sure. She didn’t write down the number. We’re running Virginia DMV now. Without a date of birth it’ll take a little time.”
“Maybe he used the same date of birth. Easier to remember.”
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