After the bodies were deposited, Isaac covered the top of the hole with planks that might have been siding from one of the outbuildings, then together they shoveled snow to cover the planks. “That should keep the stink down,” Isaac said. “Wolves can sometimes be a problem out here.”
Scott remained silent. He’d just buried two dead men. First he was going to jail, and then he was going to Hell.
26
IT ALL TOOK A SURPRISINGLY LONG TIME. By the time Scott was done with his shower—he’d nearly scrubbed the flesh off his face, but he still swore he could feel the blood spatters—it was almost six o’clock and dark outside.
Oddly enough, the nerves didn’t hit him until he was drying his hair. As he lowered the towel, the mirror greeted him with an image of a gaunt, pale ghost of the Scott O’Toole he used to know. Now, the wispy goatee and the blue hair looked stupid to him. They were the trappings of a kid trying to look like a man—an innocent boy who fancied himself a rock star. On a conspirator in a murder—a future prison inmate—they were embarrassing. Until a week ago, he’d never seen a dead body; now he’d seen three and had come this close to becoming one himself.
He slumped to the floor and sat there for the longest time, his whole body trembling as the room spun. What was happening? Who was this guy Isaac, and what was this place, with its tunnels and its vaults and its guns? Isaac assured him that the danger had passed, but who was this animal who could do such unspeakable things, yet feel no emotion?
A knock on the bathroom door startled him. “Scott? Are you okay?” It was Isaac.
Scott cleared his throat and tried to sound strong. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“I put some clean clothes for you on your bed. When you’re ready, get dressed and meet me in the living room. We need to talk.”
Yeah, no shit, Sherlock, Scott didn’t say. The shivering still hadn’t settled down when he rose unsteadily to his feet, wrapped the towel around his waist and padded down the hallway to his bedroom.
Five minutes later, he was on his way downstairs. He didn’t know what had happened to the first set of clothes and he didn’t care. What mattered was, he wore a clean shirt and a new pair of jeans, though they fit no better than the others. There were no socks, though, and he couldn’t find his boots.
“I’m going to need a new wardrobe at the end of this visit,” Isaac said from below as he saw his houseguest on the stairs.
Scott wasn’t in the mood to be amused.
Isaac gestured to a chair near the fire. “Have a seat. I think I have some explaining to do.”
Scott lowered himself into the chair, drew his legs up under him. He folded his arms to keep his shaking hands a secret. The heat of the fire felt great.
Isaac poured himself some bourbon from a bottle on the table next to his chair and offered some to Scott, who declined with a quick shake of his head. Isaac capped the bottle and settled into his own chair.
“Scott O’Toole,” he began, “you are the king of bad timing. When I put myself in your position, I think I’d be terrified. You’ve seen horrific things and you don’t know what to make of them. You don’t know what to believe. If I were in your position, I think I’d probably want to run away, as fast and as far as I could, not worrying about who’s right and who’s wrong.”
Something in Isaac’s tone unnerved Scott even more, and as he listened, he worked hard to keep his expression completely impassive.
“Thing is, my friend, I can’t afford to let you run away. Believe me when I say that I don’t like this any more than you do, but you’re in a position to do some very serious harm to me.”
“But the killers are dead,” Scott said.
“Two killers are dead,” Isaac corrected. “There will be more. What did our friend in the tunnel say to you this afternoon before he…died?”
Scott cocked his head. “Why did you dig a tunnel under your house?”
Isaac chuckled as he sipped his drink. “You’d make a good lawyer one day, Scott. Always answer a question with a question. I didn’t dig the tunnel. It’s been there for over sixty years—it’s as old as the cabin. You know what a bootlegger is?”
“A moonshiner?”
“Close. Back during Prohibition, this place was a vacation lodge for bootleggers, a place to get away from it all. Rumor has it that Al Capone visited here once, but old Al is a little like George Washington; if you believe the plaques on the walls, they slept everywhere. Anyway, that tunnel was their escape route, in the event that the law came looking for them.”
Scott nodded. That made sense, actually.
“Now, what did your dead friend tell you in the tunnel?”
“Nothing,” Scott said, even as he remembered the question about Thomas Powell, a very dangerous man.
“You just run into a man in the middle of a dark tunnel and you say nothing?”
“He kicked me in the stomach,” Scott said. “Mostly, I was coughing and sputtering for air. Where did you get all the guns? And if all these killers are after you, how come you don’t have marshals or SWAT team guys here shooting it out for you?”
Isaac’s eyes narrowed as he took another sip. “This is why you’re so dangerous. You think too much.”
Scott felt himself blush. He hated it when people accused him of being smart.
“I wasn’t a hundred percent truthful with you,” Isaac confessed.
“So, you’re not in the witness protection program?”
“Oh, I am. At least I’m supposed to be.” He saw the confusion on Scott’s face and smiled. Taking his drink with him, he stood and walked to the fire. “I don’t know what you think witness protection is like, but I can tell you it wasn’t what I was expecting. It’s like another damn prison, moving all the time, checking in and out with marshals who’d just as soon shoot you as help you. That wasn’t for me.”
“So, you escaped,” Scott said.
“I ditched the program,” Isaac corrected. “I just did it without telling the right people first.”
“So, that guy was FBI,” Scott gasped.
Isaac sighed. “No, he was a hired gun sent to kill me for his reward bounty.”
“So, why don’t you just tell the police and set everything straight? I mean, you’re not required to be in the witness protection program, are you?”
Isaac rubbed the back of his neck and sighed again. Clearly, this was all more complicated than he was willing or able to synopsize. He sat back down in his chair, this time on the very front edge, his elbows resting on his knees. “I used to kill people for a living, Scott. I was one of those people I shot today, only a damn sight better at it. I killed people for Uncle Sam for a while till they got tired of that sort of thing, and then I went out on my own.”
“Freelance,” Scott offered.
Isaac grinned. “Watch a lot of movies, do you? Yeah, I went freelance, working mostly for the Mob. One family would hire me to take out somebody in another family.”
“Anybody famous?”
“I already said that names don’t matter. Anyway, my former business, as violent and nasty as it was, ran primarily on trust. I won’t go into the details, but suffice it to say, somebody along the line betrayed my trust, and I ended up with about fifty feds at my door one morning.”
“You were arrested?”
“Very. Very arrested and very pissed. The U.S. attorney wanted to throw me in a cage forever, but that didn’t suit my needs at all. In fact, they offered me what they thought was a sweetheart deal: if I ratted out all the Mob connections I worked for, they’d keep me out of the general population in prison and make me eligible for parole after twenty-five years. I said, ‘I don’t think so,’ and countered with a deal more to my tastes: I’d testify only if they dropped all the charges against me and put me into the protection program.”
Scott scowled. “That’s it? It was that easy?”
A proud, sly grin began to grow on Isaac’s face. “Well, not quite. My trump card was the work I did for the feds. I
told them that if I so much as saw the outside of a prison, I’d name all those names as well. I guess that scared them.”
“Would you have done it?” Scott asked. “Named the names, I mean?”
Isaac’s grin disappeared. “Here’s some advice, kid. Or maybe a warning, you decide. Don’t ever cross me. I play for keeps.”
Scott felt a chill, despite the heat of the fire. He took a moment to process it all. “So, why’d you leave the program?” he asked. “I mean, you got everything you asked for.”
“You tell me,” Isaac said, leaning back into his chair. “You’re a smart guy. Put yourself in my position. You’ve made this deal with the government, and they’ve gotten their convictions.”
Scott saw it right away. “There was no reason to keep you alive.”
“Worse than that,” Isaac said. “There was damn good reason to make me dead. I’d made their case, skirted jail and signed my own death warrant all at the same time. I used to do this shit, remember. I know how they work. There I was, under their thumb twenty-four hours a day. They knew where I slept and when I slept, what I had for breakfast, who I fucked—oh, sorry.”
Scott grinned, embarrassed.
“I was a sitting duck. So I bolted.”
For Scott, it all kept coming back to Agent Price. “So, how do you know that guy in the tunnel was a hit man, when the FBI is after you, too?”
Isaac shook his head. “But they’re not. They have no reason to be. Not anymore. Remember again, I know these guys. They know that if I was going to rat them out, I’d have done it by now. I have proven to them, through my actions, that everything’s fine so long as they leave me alone.”
“Do they know how to find you?”
“No. At least, I don’t think so. Well, maybe now that the Mob does, I suppose.”
“How did they find you?”
Isaac regarded Scott long and hard before answering. “Do you remember me telling you that I did something stupid?”
Scott nodded.
“Well, what I did was, I let myself be predictable. My father is sick, dying of cancer. For all these years, I haven’t been able to contact him, but when I found out, I had to see him. It’s the one place they’d expect me to go, and I went there. I figure they must have tracked me down.”
The whole thing made Scott’s head spin. It all made sense, though; it all had the ring of truth, as his father would say. Having feared this man just a few moments ago, he now found himself almost admiring him. It was smart, the way Isaac turned the tables on the people sent to arrest him, and then again on the people who had no reason to keep him alive. Isaac knew enough to be very dangerous to the feds, and they had all the opportunity in the world to set their fears to rest. With what Isaac knew about the CIA or whatever, they almost had to kill him.
It was in many ways similar—
A shot of adrenaline launched Scott’s heart into overdrive. He felt the panic building in his gut as he looked up at his host.
“You see my dilemma,” Isaac said.
Scott felt his face flush as his eyes grew huge. “Are you—” He couldn’t bring himself to ask the question.
“Relax,” he said. “I’m not in the killing business anymore.”
“But the silencer. The night scope…”
Isaac gave an innocent shrug. “Toys. I do like my toys. And my hunting isn’t always sportsmanlike. I can drop a deer at two hundred yards in the dead of night.”
Scott’s heart continued to race. Isaac had laid out the logic for him to see. Nobody even knew Scott was here. Why keep him alive when he didn’t have to?
“I said relax, Scott,” Isaac repeated. “Even at the height of my career, I wasn’t in the business of killing kids. Never. It’s not right.”
The words were exactly what Scott wanted to hear, but the soft tone of Isaac’s voice didn’t quite match the hardness of his eyes.
“It’s all about seeing the world from the other person’s viewpoint, kid. That’s the secret to everything there is. And after hearing what you’ve heard, if I were you, I’d run out of here like a rabbit on fire. But you can see how I can’t let that happen.”
Scott shifted in his chair. “S-So, what are you going to do?”
“It’s a problem, isn’t it? The rooms here don’t lock from the outside, and even if they did, there’d be nothing to keep you from climbing out a window. I could tie you up, but let’s face it, that would be just a damn unpleasant way to spend the next few days.”
Scott nodded. Damn unpleasant. Well put.
Isaac smiled and tented his fingers. “I stole your shoes and socks,” he said.
Scott’s jaw dropped. “What?”
Isaac pointed to Scott’s bare feet, tucked under his butt in search of warmth. “I got the idea when I was getting rid of the bloody clothes,” he explained. “It’s ten degrees out there, with snow on the ground. I figure you won’t be going anywhere.” His grin got wider.
Scott felt the cool wash of relief. “That’s it?”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” Isaac explained, almost apologetically. “It’s that I can’t trust you. I can’t afford to. This seemed like a reasonable compromise.”
Scott nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s a fine compromise.”
“Now that the weather is finally breaking, I’ll head off tomorrow to places unknown. The next day or the day after, I’ll drop a dime on you and let people know where you are. That sound simple enough?”
Scott nodded. This wasn’t at all where he thought the conversation was going.
“Good.” Isaac slapped his thighs as he rose from the chair. “What do you say I fix us some dinner?”
BARRY WHITESTONE SPENT EVERY February praying for an early summer. For some reason, summer tourists were just easier to deal with. He guessed that it had something to do with the lower median income of the summer crowds, who were far more likely to be carrying well-worn backpacks than carting thousand-dollar skis on the roofs of their $50,000 SUVs. A man could endure only so many whiny rich New Yorkers.
Plus, during the summer, the president of the United States vacationed elsewhere—places far away, where he could be a thorn in the side of some other town’s police chief. Barry glanced at his watch and smiled. If everything went according to plan—and with Special Agent in Charge Sanders at the helm, things always went according to plan—in less than twenty-four hours, at 7:00 tomorrow night, Air Force One would be wheels-up and on its way out of his hair.
Twenty-three hours, seventeen minutes and nine seconds, for those who keep score. For today, though, work was finished. Time for Barry to be home with his wife and his kids for a dinner that only had to be heated once. Pushing the lock button in the knob, he stepped out into the squad room and closed the door behind him.
“Good night, people,” he said to the few occupied chairs. In a department the size of Eagle Feather, there was no knife and gun club to keep a strong patrolling presence in the wee hours.
“’Night, Chief,” somebody said.
Janey had said something about ham and canned pineapple for dinner, but he was hoping she’d intercept the brain waves he’d been transmitting for her to cook up tacos instead. She often teased him that his tastes in food hadn’t matured since he was in the fourth grade.
He was almost to the exit when the door opened and a breathless James Alexander hurried inside. “Oh, thank God you’re still here,” he said.
Barry held up both hands to stop him. “You just think I’m here. Think of me as a 3-D projection.”
“We need to talk, Barry.”
“Is this about Hertzberger?”
Alexander’s eyebrows danced. “Sure is.”
“Tell me tomorrow.” Barry tried to scoot past, but James cut him off. “James, your boss wants to go home and see his family. Do I need to review the chain of command with you again?”
“According to the FBI, Giovanni Agostini’s last known whereabouts were in the Utah-Idaho-Wyoming area.�
��
The words froze Barry in his tracks. “He’s the squealer, right?”
“Right. The dead father’s son.”
“Why is this important?”
“Because it closes the loop. A direct link from the dead plumber to Maurice. And remember the prints that linked Giuseppe’s house to the moonshine bottle? Well, we picked up some matching latents in the cab of Hertzberger’s truck. Passenger side.”
“The skinny fat guy.”
James’s eyebrows danced again. “On a whim, I asked a buddy of mine in Denver to dust around the truck stop where our man picked up his hitchhiker.” He smiled.
“They found the prints there, too?”
“A thumb and a partial forefinger. Not enough for court, but enough to put our hitcher in all the places. It means we have a murderer on the loose in our fair community.”
“Cooper’s tox screen?”
James’s smile grew larger. “Positive for a drug I can’t pronounce. Simulates heart attacks.”
Barry’s whole body sagged, as if someone opened an air valve. “Goddammit.”
Pulling his keys from his pocket, he turned on his heel and led the way back toward his office.
Day Six
27
THE DAMN EYE KEPT EXPLODING.
The sickening image returned every time Scott closed his eyes, that horrible jet of gore. Lying there in the darkness of his bedroom, he kept rubbing the spots on his face where the brains had hit him.
All that evening, Scott and Isaac had tried to pretend that nothing had changed, that everything was fine; but nothing was. Not a single thing was even close to fine, and while Scott could put on the act in the presence of his host, now that he was all alone in his bed, and the clock inched past midnight, all he could concentrate on was the wrongness of it all.
Murder was murder, no matter how you cut it. He kept thinking about that eye. And the dead man in the yard whom he’d never even seen in life. Movies and television make this business of dying so routine, so uneventful, but the reality was anything but. Those guys were somebody’s sons, and maybe even somebody’s father. Probably somebody’s husbands or boyfriends, and now they were gone. Just like that, their bodies dumped into a pit. It wasn’t right.
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