by James Thayer
"You came to the wrong station, pal." Slidell laughed.
He quickly held up the gas nozzle, not to the gas tank cover but to the station wagon's window, six inches from the foreigner's nose. He let the photo drop, and with the swift motion of one who had been smoking since he was nine, he struck a match. He squeezed the nozzle trigger and brought up the flaming match. He laughed crazily.
Gasoline poured into the Ford's cab, splashing onto the foreigner. Slidell ignited the stream. The gas roared as it caught fire, spewing into the station wagon's interior and filling it with orange light and ferocious heat. A wall of flame blocked Slidell's view of the foreigner. He took two steps back, away from the heat, but he held the nozzle out, still filling the cab with a surging, broiling flood of fire.
Slidell giggled in a piercing falsetto. The conflagration churned inside the cab. Roiling flames surged out the open window, almost reaching the roof of the service island. The leaping fire hid everything inside the cab.
Fifty thousand dollars. Slidell dropped the nozzle and fairly danced across the cement to the office. That's more than he'd make in two years working for the Sundstroms.
The station wagon moaned and crackled. The passenger side door was open and flame spilled onto the cement, spreading quickly to the front tires. Black smoke seethed from the burning rubber. The fuel tank exploded with a dull retort, adding its fuel to the firestorm. The old station wagon sank on its blazing tires. Fire consumed the wagon, inside and out, forming a cone of red and orange fire above the blackening vehicle.
"Fifty cool ones," Slidell exulted. He stepped inside the office to grab the phone. "Goddamnit, who do I call?"
The arm was around his neck before the telephone reached his mouth. A hard and massive form stepped up from behind, lifting Slidell off the ground by his neck and choking off a scream of fear and pain and rage. Another arm wound around his chest, holding him in a hug so powerful that Slidell heard two of his ribs break. He lashed back with his feet, finding his tormentor's legs, but the man behind him ignored the kicks as he carried Slidell through the side door into the shop. Slidell tried to yell, but his windpipe was collapsing. With his hands he tore at the arm around his throat, but it only gripped him tighter. The office smelled of burned flesh.
The Sundstroms' tools and equipment filled the shop, leaving only enough room for the stolen Firebird in the far bay that Slidell had expected at any moment. Overhead was a bank of fluorescent lights. Slidell was carried around a portable tool stand toward a drill press, a Sears Craftsman, with the motor housing and belt safety guard six feet above the floor on a column. A half-inch auger bit was in the chuck.
Nikolai Trusov had moved with the swiftness and skill of a man who had spent twenty years as a soldier. He had been almost out of the car before the first gasoline landed on the seat, and the flaming fuel had caught only a small patch of his trailing arm. He had dragged the nylon sports bag containing his rifle after him.
Trusov dropped Slidell, knocked off his cap and grabbed a fistful of his hair. Slidell shrieked as the Russian moved Slidell's head onto the press table below the auger bit. He held Slidell's head, right ear down against the table, and flicked on the engine switch. The drill press whirled. With his free hand, Trusov gripped the pilot-wheel feed and spun it. The drill's mounting collar and chuck brought the auger down.
Boyd Slidell saw it out of the corner of his eye. The giant's hand pinned Slidell's cheek and chin and temple painfully onto the table. The auger descended, whirling evilly, growing in Slidell's sight, coming down for him.
The auger's cutting edge bit into the hair of Slidell's right temple, twisting off the hair and spinning it around the shaft like spaghetti on a fork. The thief wailed, his eyes showing white all around. The bit dipped into skin. Blood rose on the auger's corkscrew blade, then fell away to soak Slidell's hair. Skin twirled up. Then came bits of gray matter, twisted up from the auger's point. Slidell screeched again. Brain worked its way out on the bit's blade. Slidell abruptly slumped, his limbs loose and his head pinned by the auger to the rigid table. His dead eyes were open. His tongue flopped out.
The Russian continued to turn the pilot-wheel feed, bringing the bit down all the way to the receiving hole in the table. Then he locked the tension knob which kept the auger in the down position. A gob of brain and bone had built up around the bit. Blood from the puncture dribbled down Slidell's face and across the table to drip to the floor.
Owen Gray would surely learn of this, of the terrible consequences of a meeting with the Russian. Trusov smiled and looked at the station's west wall, as if he could see through the wall and across the continent. He may have cared more about the drill press's effect on Gray than he did on the hapless victim pegged to the table.
Trusov glanced at his arm, at the slight burn above his wrist. He would have to get a new shirt. He turned away from the body and the drill press, slapping his hands together as if to rid them of dust.
He walked through the office and out to the service island, stepped around the blazing car, picked up his sports bag near a gas pump, and continued west into the night. He looked back at the garage, shook his head, and said to himself, "Crazy Americans."
Hobart is up the valley from Ketchum about as far as an ore team can travel without collapsing in the harnesses, which is why the first white man settled there in 1891, hoping to make his fortune watering and feeding mules. The town is on the Big Wood River at the confluence of Black Bear Creek. The town has 205 people or 212 people, depending on whether one drives in from the north or south. The Green River Ordinance is enforced either direction.
Only a handful of businesses remain, and one of them is the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Saloon, shortened to the Right Saloon by its patrons. At the turn of the century the building had been a bank, and the structure was ornamented along the roof line with embrasures resembling archers' loopholes. An Olympia Beer neon sign glowed in the window to the right of the door.
Owen Gray entered the saloon, and by instinct he stepped to one side until his eyes adjusted to the darkness. The stitches in his leg felt as if they were clawing at him. The saloon's east wall was dominated by a backbar of beveled mirrors and fluted walnut columns and topped by elaborate moldings. The backbar had been carved in New Orleans and brought up the Columbia and Snake rivers on a barge. On one of the backbar's shelves was a stuffed badger, its teeth bared and a claw raised. On another shelf were a cobra and a mongoose, the snake's coils wrapped tightly around the mongoose, and the mongoose's teeth sunk into the snake's neck, one of those taxidermal horrors sailors brought back from the Philippines at the end of World War Two. Trophies hung from the walls—the heads of buffalo, moose, bighorn sheep, and a mule deer. The trophies made the saloon seem crowded, even though the room was empty. The place smelled of cold cigarettes.
He steered around several tables, heading for the pay phone in the hallway to the rest rooms. The bartender emerged from the hallway wiping his hands on his apron. His plump face first registered curiosity at a stranger having found the tavern, then surprise and pleasure.
The bartender stuck out his hand. "I'll be damned, Owen. It's you. Welcome home."
Gray tried not to wince as the bartender vigorously squeezed and pumped his hand. Blisters on his palm and fingers from the axe handle were red and leaking. Gray exchanged a few words with the bartender, a friend of his father's named Ray Miller. The bartender's weak chin was lost under his damp and wagging lower lip. His porcine eyes sparkled as he spoke. He had known Gray all Gray's life.
Miller said, "I hope you're in the Tooths for a happier reason than last time, Owen."
"A little R and R is all," Gray replied. "I stopped phone service out at the place when Dad died, Ray. I need to use yours."
Miller thumbed the pay phone behind him. "Let me post you to a beer when you're done."
Figuring the Right Saloon was not making any profit when its patrons chatted on the phone, Ray Miller had placed the phone only four feet off the f
loor and had shortened the cable to the handset so that a conversation of more than four minutes resulted in neck and back pain, usually requiring a beer to assuage. Gray punched in his calling card number, and a few moments later Pete Coates was on the line.
When Gray was a boy, telephone connections from the Saw-tooths to the outside world were scratchy. He was still tempted to yell into the phone during any long-distance call. But satellites and fiber optics had come to the mountains. Coates sounded like he was next door.
The detective asked, "How you doing?"
"Better."
"Anna Renthal asked about you. Wants to know when you'll be back."
"Frank Luca gave me as much time off as I need," Gray said. "I don't know when I'll be back."
"Can I be blunt?"
"Anything else and I'd be startled," Gray replied.
"You didn't go back to Idaho to kill yourself, did you? Commit suicide like you tried in Vietnam?"
"No."
"Is that a promise?"
"I'm stronger now."
"Where are your kids?" Coates asked.
"I'd trust you with my life, Pete, but the fewer people who know where the twins and John are, the better I'll feel."
"But they aren't near you, are they? Now that we know what Trusov is capable of, it'd be too dangerous for your kids."
"They're safe." The children were with Jeff Moon and his wife in Ketchum, dropped off on the drive from the Boise airport. His eyes closed, Gray pinched the bridge of his nose. "I thought we had him, Pete."
"It was a slam dunk, looked like to me."
"Maybe your first reaction was right, that the police and FBI should have just swarmed the building."
"No," Coates said adamantly. "We would have spooked him for sure. And even if we could have trapped him, you were right when you said he'd kill a lot of my men before we got him. Your plan—give him a target, wait until he exposes himself, then take him out from a long distance—was the only one that would have avoided a bloodbath."
Gray's voice trembled. "Have you figured out how he got Mrs. Orlando?"
"She was last seen a block from your apartment at a laundromat called Sixth Avenue Coin Op. We have no idea how he abducted her."
"So he was onto us all along." Gray's voice was dark with sorrow.
"Looks like it. But we did discover how Trusov set up the shot on the paper passer, Donald Bledsoe. We had wondered how he would know you'd be in the courthouse alley and how he'd have time to set up his hide."
"Yes?"
"We think the Russian was following you, probably waiting for a shot. When you got to the alley to wait for Bledsoe, Trusov climbed a fire escape to the roof of the cafe at the end of the alley, across the street. He wasn't in a building twelve hundred and fifty yards away like he was with the Chinaman, but rather only a hundred yards away. We found his red shell on top of the cafe."
"So he didn't prepare anything, just took an opportunistic shot?"
"We're learning Trusov is a cunning boy."
Anger colored Gray's words. "Have you learned anything else, like why Nikolai Trusov is on my case?"
"That's Adrian Wade's department, and she's taking it seriously. She's in Kabul as we speak."
"Afghanistan?"
"You know any other Kabul? General Kulikov found the name of Trusov's Afghan spotter. And with the name, the U.S. consul in Kabul found the faction he fought for, and still fights for. His clan was aligned with Babrak Karmal and the Soviets during the war, and are now in the mountains. The spotter is from a village named Marjab about ten miles from Kabul. Adrian was on a plane ninety minutes after she got the news. Didn't even go back to her hotel. JFK to Charles De Gaulle to Riyadh and into Kabul."
"Couldn't she telephone him?"
"This fellow is in the hills. She's going to have to drive out to him, probably end up hiking in. But the consul thinks he's been given accurate information about where the spotter is."
"What's she after?"
"Anything that'll explain why Nikolai Trusov is hot for you."
Gray's voice rose. "I've got nothing to do with Afghanistan or the Soviets or with Trusov. Goddamnit, Pete, what's going on?"
"Maybe she'll find out, Owen."
"Yeah, maybe." Gray exhaled slowly. "Your people surrounding the Russian embassy haven't had any luck, I take it."
"Trusov never returned to the embassy to visit his father, and I found out why when I interviewed the old man again. Turns out the son called the father, and the old guy was delighted to tell his boy about all the policemen visiting."
"So Nikolai Trusov never showed up there."
"That's right," Coates replied. "And there's more news, Owen. We found where Trusov has been staying, a place called the Four Leaf Clover Motel in Jersey City. We broke into the place. He's got a box of Owen Gray memorabilia."
"Some of my stuff?"
"In a cardboard box in his motel room closet we found a Hobart High School annual, class of 1967. There's a photo of young Owen Gray wearing a Beatles haircut and a narrow black tie. There's also some recent photos of you—one leaving your Brooklyn apartment leading your son, John, down the steps, another showing you and me carrying gym bags into Sam Owl's place. There's one of you and your girls sitting in the window of a McDonald's. And another of Mrs. Orlando."
"Christ," Gray blurted, "he was following us around."
"And here's something spooky. We also found your bag gloves, the brown Everlasts you thought you had lost."
"So he's been inside Sam Owl's, inside my locker there?"
"Looks like it."
Gray rubbed his forehead. "Damn, Pete, what's going on?"
"This guy isn't going to get out of New York," the detective said. "Trusov's got the mayor and the police commissioner and the FBI director's full attention now. They've flooded this town with people. There isn't a bus station, train depot, airport, or hotel where he can show up and not be spotted. Even the uniforms are carrying his five-by-seven photo on the top of their clipboards. We've released some of the story to the media, and the Russian's photo has been playing big on television and in the newspapers. The whole eastern seaboard and the south and midwest are on the lookout for Trusov. It's just a matter of time."
Gray was hunched over the phone and his neck and shoulders had begun to complain. "The telephone at my place will be restored by tomorrow."
"I'll call with the latest." Coates hesitated, then added, "You weren't kidding me about your promise, were you, Owen? About plunking yourself? You wouldn't go and ruin my whole day, would you?" Coates's lighthearted words were betrayed by his apprehensive tone.
Gray hung up. He returned to the saloon's main floor and waved at Ray Miller on his way out.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Polk County undersheriff Mel Schneider turned his white-and-black off the road and into the Cat's Meow Cafe parking lot in the town of Mentor. He passed a few automobiles and pickups as he slowly headed for a vacant spot in front of the cafe's large glass windows. He glanced at his wristwatch. He was meeting Deputy Mike Dickerson for lunch at the Cat's Meow, and Schneider was hungry. There were two open slots next to a silver Chevrolet Caprice. He pulled in next to the Chevy, set his parking brake, and again brought up his watch. He hoped Dickerson would be on time.
RayAnne Folger owned the Cat's Meow—Schneider could see her startling red hair through the cafe's window, serving three customers sitting at the counter—and she served a fine meatloaf sandwich. Schneider turned the squawk box to low, then rolled down his window to let the breeze in. He'd wait a few moments for Dickerson before going into the cafe.
When Schneider's belly growled with hunger, it did so loudly because it was a big belly, pushing against the steering wheel. Schneider had been on the force almost twenty-five years, and the goddamn squad cars had become less and less comfortable over those years. Now the big man was wedged in between the wheel, the radio and mounted computer to his right, a shotgun on a vertical rack next to the computer, and the s
afety glass that separated front and back seats. Schneider lifted his hat from the passenger seat, forked his fingers through his hair, and placed the hat on his head. His hair had gone gray in streaks. His eyes were close together and faded blue. His thin, bloodless lips made his rare smile vulpine. Reading glasses were in his shirt pocket. He glanced at his watch. His stomach rumbled again. Damn it, Dickerson, get your lard-ass in gear and get over here.
A silver Caprice. Schneider's head jerked left. Christ in his cups, a silver Caprice. The undersheriff opened the car door, stepped five steps to the rear to read the Chevy's license plate. He quickly returned to his car to punch the license number into the computer. The screen told him to wait. He lifted his handset and without the usual radio rigmarole asked, "Where are you, Mike?"
The radio cackled with "Twenty seconds away. I see your bubble in the parking lot. Your gut must be doing the talking again."
The amber computer screen blinked with the information.
"Aw, goddamnit," the undersheriff whispered as he read the screen.
The Caprice had been stolen in Brainerd, Minnesota, three hours ago. The auto's owner had seen a large man wearing a baseball cap low on his head drive by in the car while the owner was getting a haircut. The Caprice's owner had later identified Nikolai Trusov from a photo shown him by a Brainerd police detective. The goddamn New York police had thought this man would never get out of their jurisdiction, and he was already halfway across the country. The FBI now believed Trusov was stealing a new car every hundred miles or so. Earlier that morning a Mercury Cougar had been found in Brainerd that had been stolen in Anoka, a town just north of Minneapolis. The Russian's fingerprints were all over the vehicle.
Undersheriff Schneider peered through his windshield into the cafe. A sticker on the door announced that the Cat's Meow was a member of the Mentor, Minnesota, Chamber of Commerce. A doughnut case was at one end of the counter near the cash register. He knew that six booths were ranged along the north wall. Two customers sat at the booth he could see. He counted four diners at the counter, sitting on stools, their backs to the window. Ketchup bottles and napkin dispensers were visible between their elbows. A large and gleaming stainless steel coffee urn was against the wall. The door to the kitchen was near the coffeemaker. RayAnne was putting a plate in front of the largest man at the counter. He was wearing a tan jacket and a green baseball cap. He lifted a fork and bent to the plate. It had to be Nikolai Trusov.