The Kudzu Kid

by Darrell Laurant

  “I won’t feel sorry for him,” Denny said weakly.

  They flew DeBrocco in with a one-day window—a two o’clock flight into Buffalo, and a two o’clock flight out the next afternoon. The name on the reservation was Phillip Sims, an inside joke to reflect Denny’s love of the New York Giants and their quarterback, Phil Simms.

  This strategy was what made these crimes so hard for local police to solve, when they even bothered to try. The shooter was always from somewhere else. For a hit in New Orleans, it might be Chicago talent; for one in LA, Detroit. Fly in, do it, fly out—the big-money version of a drive-by shooting.

  Of course, Denny DeBrocco/Philip Sims didn’t feel like talent as he descended from the cloying, death-gray clouds into a rainy, typically rotten Buffalo day. He felt scared to death.

  At least the people on the ground had done their homework. Donald Neville—Donnie, to those who knew him well—had a girlfriend, they told him, and he always went to see her on Thursday nights, when he told his wife he was working late.

  “Every Thursday night,” a Buffalo soldier named Mike Pirante told DeBrocco. “Like a clock. And this is Thursday night.”

  The best part about Neville’s philandering, from the peculiar point of view of a hit man, was that he always parked in a lot behind his girlfriend’s apartment complex, well off the street, so no one would see his car. Or, in this case, see him die.

  The car was a gold Corvette, and Neville wore a thick chain around his neck of the same color. He was, DeBrocco decided, a human cliché. More than a quarter of what he took in as a small-time investment broker either went up his nose or out to Vegas. Another significant percentage went to keep his wife content enough not to ask questions. Down the road, his clients would find all this out.

  “The guy’s got a terminal illness,” Pirante said. “He’s out of control. We’re just putting him down, like a sick dog.”

  The plan was simple. DeBrocco would arrive after Neville went up to his second floor love nest, then hide in the parking lot until he came out.

  “Donnie boy comes back to his car and you whack him,” Pirante said. “What could be easier? At least we’re letting the guy get laid one last time.”

  “What if they go out to eat or something?” DeBrocco asked.

  “I’m telling you, they won’t go out. Donnie’s scared shitless that somebody’s going to see him with this other broad, because the last thing he needs is alimony right now. So he goes up, they play around for a couple of hours, and he’s home by eleven thirty. Except this time, he’s not coming home.”

  “Hell, his wife would probably send you a thank you note.”

  Pirante wanted to take DeBrocco out to a place on the North Side for clams, but DeBrocco talked his way out of it.

  “I never like to eat on nights when I kill people,” he explained, hoping they wouldn’t realize he was a virgin.

  So instead of eating clams, he found a Catholic church where they were hearing confessions. Then he realized he couldn’t confess to something he hadn’t done yet.

  He finally settled for sitting in a back pew by himself for nearly a half hour, then lighting a candle before he left.

  DeBrocco had chosen a Ford Escort for his rental car, forest green, something that would be mundane and hard to ID in the dark. The apartment complex wasn’t hard to find, just a block off one of the main streets in the suburb of Amherst. It was called The Crow’s Nest, with a tacky nautical scene painted on the sign.

  If nothing else, it had stopped raining. DeBrocco spotted what had to be Neville’s Vette and parked a couple spaces away. The apartment was directly above him, on the second floor, and he could even see silhouetted figures behind the blinds.

  DeBrocco listened to talk radio for a while, down low, and then started to worry that it would draw attention somehow. So for the next two hours, he sat there hunched in silence, alternately dozing and waking.

  Finally, just after eleven, he saw one of the silhouettes moving across the blinds again, and he thought he heard a door close.

  Suddenly, DeBrocco realized how bad the light was. He’d have to get close. His stomach was knotted, and bad thoughts raced through his mind. What if this guy Neville had already noticed the Escort sitting out there and came out with a gun in his own hand? Or what if he didn’t, but the sound when Denny shot him was too loud, and there was a cop car going by?

  Denny hadn’t wanted to use a silencer because he wasn’t mechanically inclined. Looking at the thing, he was afraid it would somehow stop the bullet from coming out.

  “I’m a moron,” he said to himself as he eased out of the driver’s seat.

  Denny had bad knees, and they were stiff from sitting in the car so long. The cold, wet weather didn’t help. He fervently wished he was back in Jersey, watching the Nets on TV.

  Crouching low, DeBrocco eased around the two cars between the Escort and Neville’s flashy ride and got down on one sore knee—as if genuflecting—next to the passenger side of the Vette. Neville had backed in, for some reason, and so DeBrocco would be approaching from the other side, where he couldn’t be seen in the dark.

  Jesus, DeBrocco thought. I’m so close I could probably choke the sonofabitch to death.

  As Neville’s footsteps came scratching across the asphalt, DeBrocco had one last, panicky thought.

  I sure hope this is the right dude, he muttered to himself.

  He knew he couldn’t let Neville get into the car, because he’d have the windows rolled up and DeBrocco’s .22 pistol might not have the power to penetrate. Fortunately for the shooter, his quarry stopped alongside the car for a moment, instinctively wary, and glanced around the parking lot. Then he fumbled his key into the lock, and the Maytag Man rose up stiffly from the other side of the car—his left knee cracking audibly—and shot Donald Neville low on the forehead.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said softly.

  Neville pitched forward, the direction of his slight momentum, and slid face first down the glass, leaving a bloody smear. A few blocks away, DeBrocco pulled behind a deserted elementary school and had the dry heaves. Good thing he hadn’t eaten the clams.

  Never again did he want that power over life and death that so many others in his professional found exhilarating.

  And for years, he escaped it, comfortably trapped in his bogus TV store. Now, though, Leo was sending him back out into the field.

  “This is a touchy situation,” he said. “We’ve got you a cover down there, and the cops wouldn’t know who you are, anyway, because you’ve never been convicted of anything. As far as anyone is concerned, you’re down there trying to find out if there’s a market for your inventory when the store closes.”

  “You still want to be Phil Sims?”

  The plan was simple. Castelli knew of some Southside Virginia talent, a Danville low-life named Wyatt “Wizard” Bailey. The Castelli had used Wizard one other time for a hit on another casino refugee in North Carolina, but this time he was to be disposable.

  Sam Bishop would be the target, because his vote stood between the Castelli’s and their golden calf. And maybe that punk newspaper editor, if only because he probably knew too much. Then, when those jobs were completed, DeBrocco would eliminate Wizard, thus severing any direct link to the crimes.

  With luck, it would all go down smoothly, since Bailey was known in certain circles for his skill in making deaths look like accidents.

  Nevertheless, there were too many ifs involved to keep DeBrocco’s stomach from churning. Killing a civilian like Neville was one thing. Outwitting a wary outlaw like Wizard Bailey would be a lot harder.

  Bailey demonstrated his caution at the outset, meeting DeBrocco at a barbecue restaurant in Reidsville, North Carolina, a few miles below the Virginia state line. As they stood out in the parking lot, Bailey asked DeBrocco to remove his sport coat and quickly groped him to make sure he wasn’t wired.

  “Sorry to have to do that,” Bailey said, “but I haven’t worked with you before, s
o I have to make sure you’re not some undercover creep—his word for undercover agents. These days, you never know.”

  Bailey didn’t look impressive. Thin almost to the point of scrawniness, he had an overgrown Dale Earnhardt mustache and a seedy haircut that poked out from under a Washington Redskins baseball cap. His accent was pure Southside Virginia.

  Still, there was something about his eyes and his borderline belligerent manner that warned against dismissing him as a lightweight.

  Once they were seated inside, DeBrocco perused an alien menu and asked, “What’s good here?”

  “Pretty much the barbecue,” he was told. “Or, you being from up north, you might try the spaghetti. It’s hard to screw up spaghetti.”

  The waitress was a bit more attentive than DeBrocco was used to, and called both men sweetie.

  “Was she coming on to us?” DeBrocco wondered.

  Bailey offered the first smile of their meeting.

  “Nah, that’s just how they talk down here.”

  Still set on small talk, DeBrocco asked Bailey about his nickname. The hit man used it as a transition into serious business.

  “I used to do magic tricks when I was a kid,” he said. “Now, I still do magic tricks. Want to know how I’m gonna do this one?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  THREATS

  No one heard the rapid popping sounds coming from Cassie Ledbetter’s farm on the afternoon of November 22nd.

  It was a Sunday, and Cassie and her sister Breeze were attending a Wiccan ceremony in Halifax County. Zoe Vaden had talked Fogarty into taking a day off, and they had driven to Richmond.

  What Fogarty couldn’t help but hear, however, was the repeated banging on the front door of the Echo office around midnight.

  Cassie Ledbetter stood there, her long hair tangled and her eyes red.

  “My cats,” she said, choking the words out. “Somebody killed my cats.”

  She handed Fogarty a sheet of notebook paper, a message scrawled on it with magic marker.

  “We don’t need no witches in our naborhood,” it said.

  When she and Breeze returned from their ceremony, Cassie told Fogarty, she found the paper lying atop the carcasses of ten dead cats on their front porch.

  “They were shot,” she said. “It was awful. How could one of my neighbors do something like this? I know some of them thought we were strange, but we all seemed to get along.”

  She seemed so distraught that Fogarty actually reached out and gave her a tentative hug.

  “It’s not your neighbors,” Fogarty said. “I’d look at that company that’s been trying to buy your farm for their landfill. They want you to move, but they want you to think the threat didn’t come from them. You know what I’m saying?”

  Cassie’s forlorn look mutated into an expression of fierce resolve.

  “Those bastards!” she said, slamming her fist on a nearby desk. “I need to look for some stronger spells.”

  “If that works for you, fine,” Fogarty said, “but I’d also go talk to Sheriff Inge. He won’t be able to do anything about it just yet, but you need to get all this on record.”

  Cassie frowned.

  “The sheriff has never paid much attention to me,” she said.

  “Just show him the cats,” Fogarty told her.

  It took him almost an hour and a couple of beers from his upstairs refrigerator to calm Cassie down. After she left, he sat in his office for a while trying to make sense of it all.

  Then he turned around in his chair and wrote a quick story on the incident. Normally, he would have checked to make sure the cats had really been killed, but the look on Cassie’s face told him all he needed to know. He would add a quote from Sheriff Inge later.

  The biggest question was why an outfit as slick as Thaxton-Klein would sign off on something that heavy-handed. Did they really think the real motive wouldn’t be obvious?

  It was close to two in the morning when Fogarty finally went up to bed. He had barely fallen asleep when he was awakened by something—somebody—downstairs.

  At first, he thought it might have been Cassie again, but she had no way of getting into the building. Or maybe Zoe heard about what happened and couldn’t sleep, but she would have called first.

  Then he heard the rumbling sound of the elevator descending.

  “It’s like a goddamned Hitchcock movie,” he thought to himself.

  As quickly as he could manage in the dark, Fogarty found the ladder and quickly headed for the roof, pulling the ladder up after him. The door to the roof fit snugly into the ceiling, and there was a good chance whoever it was wouldn’t see it.

  When the landfill issue had begun to get interesting, to use Daniel’s phrase, the publisher had suggested that Fogarty keep a gun up in the penthouse. Now, Fogarty wished he’d listened.

  The elevator returned, and Fogarty heard footsteps slowly advancing into his living area. Then, a voice.

  “I know you’re here, Fogarty,” the man said. “I saw your car outside. You can come on out. I just want to talk to you.”

  It was a raspy southern voice with strong rural Southside overtones, one with which Fogarty was unfamiliar. His first thought was, it sounded like a person who would spell neighborhood with an a.

  A person with a definite lack of patience.

  “Come on, Fogarty,” the intruder said, his voice rising. “I’m gonna find you. It’s just a matter of time.”

  For the next thirty minutes or so, Fogarty listened as every piece of furniture, old mattress and dusty newspaper relic on the third floor was tipped over or thrown around. Once, he could barely see the beam of a flashlight walking the ceiling, passing right over the door to the roof.

  When he thought about it, Fogarty realized that it would be impossible for anyone to reach that door without a ladder—it was almost twelve feet above the floor. He was beginning to relax a bit when he heard a gunshot, and a bullet penetrated the roof door and went flying off into the night, missing him by less than a foot.

  “You’re up there, ain’t you?” the man ranted. “That’s fine. I’ll be back, or I’ll catch you out somewhere. You ain’t smarter than me.”

  Then the elevator returned to the first floor—something of a problem for Fogarty, because he wasn’t able to summon it back from where he was. Because of an odd electrical glitch, the up button next to the elevator shaft didn’t work.

  But he was in no hurry to leave his refuge, anyway. It was still before dawn, there was no one around downtown, and he knew that his visitor might be lurking, waiting for him to wander into pistol range. Finally, after more than an hour, he went down the ladder and returned to his living space, which was soundly trashed.

  The front door of the Echo office had proved no barrier to his visitor, who apparently popped the lock with a credit card or putty knife.

  “I’ll bet he scared the hell out of the mice, banging around up there,” Fogarty told Zoe over coffee at Sugar’s a few hours later.

  “You scared the hell out of me,” she replied. “I kept calling and calling.”

  “My phone got unplugged in all the confusion,” Fogarty said. “By the way, thanks for coming over and sending the elevator up for me.”

  Since the Echo was printed in South Boston early on Wednesday mornings, they decided to drive down there together and spend the night. But that left a lot of other nights.

  “How about I move in with you for a while?” Fogarty said. “Editor with benefits.”

  “Ordinarily, I’d be all for that,” Zoe replied, favoring him with a lecherous smile, “but I’m not feeling too good about this myself. Remember, I’m the other landowner they want to get rid of. And I don’t have any cats to take the brunt of it.”

  A little later, the two of them marched into Tucker Daniel’s office.

  “Hey, boss,” Zoe asked the publisher. “Got a spare bedroom?”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  REBEL TO THE RESCUE

  Fogarty couldn’t
resist writing a column on the bizarre events of that week for the November 25th edition of the Echo. It ran the day before Thanksgiving, which seemed appropriate. Certainly, Fogarty was thankful to be alive.

  “Someone tried to kill me Sunday night,” he began. “When I look at those words on my computer screen, it seems even more surreal.”

  He went on to describe his encounter with the mystery visitor, then switched from columnist to news reporter and added Cassie’s sad story.

  “A coincidence?” he concluded. “Highly unlikely.”

  The column was stripped across the top of the page, displacing the planned photograph of a local turkey.

  Early on Wednesday morning, as Fogarty and Zoe were waiting for their turn at the South Boston press, Wizard Bailey was driving back up to Randolph County from Danville in his white Ford pickup. He was dressed in full camouflage with wrap-around sunglasses and an orange hat, nothing that would set him apart from the herd of hunters that had invaded the Virginia woods as deer season opened.

  He didn’t tell Denny DeBrocco about the snafu at the Echo office, because he knew all too well that DeBrocco’s employers tended to react badly to failure.

  “Haven’t been able to catch him alone,” he said when DeBrocco asked about Fogarty.

  He and DeBrocco were getting along quite well, though, and he even invited Denny along on his hunting trip.

  “I think the fewer of us out in those woods, the better,” DeBrocco said. “I don’t want any connection with this. It’s your baby. That’s what we’re paying you for.”

  Bailey liked to think of himself as a cut above the usual hit man, a true artist in his profession. His specialty, and the reason he was in demand, was making murder appear accidental.

  He knew how to manipulate the wiring in a house to fool even veteran fire marshals into signing off on an electrical source for a fatal blaze. He never, ever, used an accelerant.

  He was also a master at subtly vandalizing an automobile, particularly the brakes or the steering, to provide an easy answer for why it suddenly veered off the road or slammed into the back of another vehicle.