Hangman: A Novel (8 page)

“Rufus!” she called and clambered down the steps, jogging lightly while she tried to fix his position from the barking, growing louder now. She’d forgotten her coat, and it was cold. The wind swept through the trees and the pines danced in rows down the middle of the yard. She didn’t like going back there too far. Once you lost sight of the house, it felt like you were in a forest.

“Rufus?”

The dog was squealing. It must have gotten its head down one of the rabbit holes and scared itself to bits. That had happened before.

Martha listened, scanning the trees. All she saw was brown on brown.

“Rufus?” she said, shakily. Then louder: “Okay, boy, here I come.”

Her phone rang again.

“
Not now
, Mom.” She wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction.

Martha wished she’d brought her coat. The wind was really cold and the branches of the scrub brush would scratch her bare arms as she followed the little trail that wild animals had cut through the yard.

She called out ahead.

“Rufus, calm down, it’s me.”

Silence.

Then, a little further on: “Where are you, boy?”

The barking went higher, the dog’s vocal cords straining in fear, and Martha turned slightly left, pushing through a dry pricker bush.
Oh God
,
don’t let him have stepped on a nail or something. Oh, Ruf—

She pushed past a shaggy, squat pine tree and there was Rufus, or at least his snout, sticking up from the ground behind some swaying grass and brush. He must have tumbled into a hole, and being the little thing he was, couldn’t get out.

Martha blew out a breath in relief. Now to get him out and into the warm house.

Rufus stopped barking and began to whine, his snout shaking.

She dropped to her knees. “Oh, Ruf, you dumb little boy. How’d you get down there?” He was in a hole, all right, behind a screen of wiry branches. He’d probably dug it on one of his expeditions, tearing through the dirt looking for God knows what.

Behind the hole was a thick bush, untrimmed like everything back here, that looked as solid as a green wall. It was too cold to go around to it and search for a way in. Martha pushed her hands into the thin mesh of branches in front of her and brought her head in just behind, trying to get a look at what was holding the dog down.

Across from her, a branch snapped.

Martha, startled, looked up. A man in a red mask was watching her. He pulled on a rope that snaked through his hands and something rose up with a ripping sound.

“Oh, God,” Martha cried and then the rope caught her throat.

She gagged, her throat closed tight. The man gave a hard tug on the rope, bending over at the waist like he was swinging a pickax, and Martha’s feet lifted in the air and she was twirling.

Twirling. Trees. Then blackness. Then the back of her house. Blackness. Different trees.

Martha tore at the rope digging into her neck. She twisted slowly and on her second turn she saw the man with the red mask tying the end of the rope to a big elm.

Spinning, slowly, around and around, the tops of the trees like one woven crown. There the house through the trees, then the green pines, then the man bending to pick up something. A bowling bag.

Around she spun, the sunlight going dark. Two more turns and the man was standing in front of her. The red mask had holes for his eyes and mouth and it was tight on his face. The man reached out and grasped her leg, stopped her twirling.

Martha gagged and kicked, stars exploding in her peripheral vision like fireworks, but it only made the rope dig deeper into her neck.

“You’re about sixteen,” a voice said. A memory like a streak of blue light came to her in the spreading darkness, a song they used to sing on the playgrounds when she was a girl.

Hangman, Hangman, what do you see?

Lights sparked in her brain and then faded out. Blue, green …

Four little girls, cute as can be
.

Brilliant red. With a gasp, the rope around her neck slackened and she fell hard to the ground. She clutched at the cord. It was still tight around her neck. Little specks of hot bright light jabbed at her brain. Her breath rasped in through her throat. She couldn’t scream, could barely breathe. The rope was still tight, choking off her oxygen, making her sleepy.

The red mask came closer. He was kneeling down, studying her face. The eyes were in shadow.

Martha spit something up. His eyes crinkled in concern and he wiped the spit from her cheek. He turned and she saw he was unzipping the bowling bag; it was an old one, like from the ’50s, pale almost yellow leather with tiny cracks and then red, dirty red leather with a gold zipper. He unzipped it slowly, the two sides of the bag parting like he wanted to make the moment last. Martha stared at the mouth of the bag as it opened. Her mind was dazy.

What was inside the bag?

Her head spun, voices singing dreamily to her.

Hangman, Hangman, where do they go?

She heard the zipper tugging along the steel teeth. The sound stopped and she stared at the black gaping mouth of the bag. The man’s hand going in.

Down on the ground
,

Where the daffodils grow
.

Abbie was running toward the spot where she’d left the
van. Cops streamed by her in their long yellow rain slickers, like dusters in the Old West. She dialed a number on the phone.

Perelli’s number rang three times before he picked it up.

“Yeah?”

“I found something at the escape scene,” Abbie said. “I think it comes from Hangman. It’s a brochure for Hoyt Lake. It’s fresh.”

“Hoyt? Where’d he get it?”

“Maybe it was in his papers. Maybe the guard brought it to him. But I think it means he’s headed for Buffalo.”

Silence.

Abbie took a deep breath. “You need to move the perimeter back to the city limits.”

Perelli snorted. “Stop traffic coming in from the west? We can’t do it. We’ve all decided to try and trap him up there.”

“Because you didn’t know where he was heading. Now we know. Roadblock the three exits downtown. It’s the likeliest route.”

“Not if he comes in on 33. Or on foot. How do you even know the brochure was his?”

“It came from him. It rained here last night, I just looked it up. The
paper is dry. No one else comes up here. He’s thinking about Delaware Park.”

More silence. Abbie knew she only had to think cop-wise. Perelli had to think of the politics of it, of TV stations, of the risk and reward in a larger picture.

“Fuck, you’re right,” he said. “We’ll put up roadblocks on the three exit ramps off 90. Maybe we can do the same on 33.”

Abbie waved to the van driver, thirty feet away, smoking by the side of the road. He tossed the cigarette into a ditch and turned back toward the van, with Abbie following.

“One other thing,” she said. “The murdered guard was talking to Flynn in his cell, asking him about the last girl.”

“What the hell for?”

“Not sure yet.”

“Raymond is on his way up to you. Meet him at the prison.”

And he was gone.

Abbie heard the Saab before she saw it, the turbo protesting
as the driver swung into the parking lot. She swung around. The Saab came whooshing up from between two parked trucks and the brakes shrieked as the driver pulled away at the last minute, missing her thigh by about three feet.

Raymond nodded at her from behind the windshield.

She walked to the driver’s door.

“Move over,” she said.

“I can drive.”

“Not my car you can’t. Move over.”

Abbie got in and shifted into drive. Gravel pelted against the undercarriage as she swerved in the parking lot and headed toward the exit. When they were out on the main road, she took the folded brochure out of her inside pocket and handed it to Raymond.

“This the brochure?” he said. “Goddamn, you white people know how to enjoy yourselves. I didn’t even know they had rowboats out there.”

“What’s Perelli doing?”

Raymond whistled softly.

“In about twenty-five minutes, there’s going to be the proverbial
ring of blue steel around the city. Checking every car coming in. And now it’s your case.”

Raymond flashed her a smile. Abbie felt her heart sink.

I’m the last line of defense, Abbie thought. The city was going to lose its collective mind, and she would be the poster girl for the investigation. The quiet life on Elmwood Avenue, her sanctuary, seemed like a tiny black-and-white photo quickly receding into the distance. She thought of Mills, her boyfriend, and wished very badly that he was near her, touchable.

The traffic was knotted in lines on 20A. She jumped off at an exit and tried the back roads. There the red brake lights winked back at her from the dark lanes. Night was falling. She caught sight of a huge looming shape—all spindly arms—and thought for a moment that an airplane was falling out of the sky and pitching nose-first into the earth, but realized it was a wind turbine. The farmers of Wyoming County were finally getting some return for the lonely windswept acres.

So Hangman had turned ghost, evading the search parties that were tramping over the corn stubble and gliding past the barricades of the itchy-fingered troopers and town sheriffs. He was resurrecting his legend, turning his image from a pathetic brain-injured gimp that had been nearly forgotten back into what he was. A fiend, a killer of girls.

They were starting to respect him again. Hangman would enjoy that, she thought.

“I need you to check the bank accounts for the dead CO, Carlson,” said Abbie. “See if there are any large deposits in the last, say, six months.”

“Why?”

“Carlson was asking Hangman about the girls,” she said.

Raymond’s eyes crinkled up in confusion. “When?”

“Before he escaped.”

“
Before
he escaped? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sure it does,” Abbie said. “Someone else wants information. And they were willing to pay for it.”

Raymond hummed. “Getting any financial info right now is gonna be tough. The family and the union won’t like us poking around in his personal life. He’s the only hero we have right now, you know.”

“I know,” Abbie said, braking to avoid a slow truck, then accelerating along the breakdown lane. “But if we find out how he escaped, we might get accomplices. Hangman eluded capture for months. If he has an accomplice, they’re likely to be less skilled than he is.”

“Point taken,” said Raymond.

“Who was the lead on the original Hangman case?”

Raymond stared off. “Shit, who was it? I can see him.”

“Big Irish guy?” Abbie said. “Red face?”

Raymond chuckled.

“Kearney, you’re bad. But yeah, he was a County product. He’s retired now. What the fuck was his name?”

He snapped his fingers. “McGonagle. Charlie McGonagle.”

“Is he in the County?”

“Yeah, he hangs out at a cop bar on Seneca, last I heard. Del Sasser’s Bar and Grill on Seneca.”

Abbie handed him her phone.

“Punch it into Google Maps. I need to talk to him.”

Opening the door sent a wedge of light across the old
linoleum flooring. Faces turned from watching the news station where
Hangman: Trail of Terror
ran across the bottom of the screen in red. Three or four of the faces looked vaguely familiar—her father’s old friends, perhaps. She knew what kind of place it would be; the County didn’t have retirement homes for cops, it had bars. One reason she left Raymond outside. A young woman would be startling enough, let alone a black man.

The bartender, an older man with a short-sleeve dress shirt above a stained apron fraying at the strings nodded.

“Charlie McGonagle?” Abbie said.

“Over here,” said a voice.

He watched her approach, his head tilted back at an angle as if she were poisonous and he didn’t want to set her off. He didn’t put his hand out. Charlie McGonagle was dressed in a black leather jacket, not the motorcycle type but a blazer, a little too big for him. His hands were big and meaty. He had a scar near his left eye, but his face was striking, memorable even, its cheeks pockmarked with old acne craters, the nose sharp and red. His eyes were blue and sly, his hair was the
color of old carrots. Dyed, Abbie thought. His potbelly was under control, but it strained the green knit sweater he was wearing. He had a gold chain around his neck and on it was a miniature gold badge.

Her heartbeat dropped down and she nodded. At first glance, McGonagle looked like a bookie or a boxing promoter or a “friend” who comes to ask you when you’re going to have the third installment of that money you got from the local loan shark. There were two kinds of detectives when it came to clothes. There were those like her father who dressed like English squires, who took their first big paycheck when they moved up from patrol and went to the best store in town and ordered brown leather shoes that shone like mirrors, Irish walking hats, checked wool pants, and white oxford shirts, ties with a floral pattern or maybe a conservative stripe. Who had a certain mental image of the detective as the prince of the department and dressed to match it. Maybe guys like her father wanted to put as much distance between themselves and the perps on the street, to emphasize that they represented Society with a capital S, so they dressed like what they imagined the gentry to be. Upper-class swells with a dash of boulevard style.

That was her dad. Dressed to the nines to go see a dead bouncer rotting in an alley down near Chippewa.

Something twinged in Abbie’s chest. She’d forgotten for just a second that her dad was dead. It happened to her once or twice a day. She caught her breath; it was like a rib had shifted and brushed her heart.

Then there were the other kind, those like McGonagle, who dressed closer to the men they chased. Who wore leather and gold chains and black, always black. They wanted people to know they were associated with the hard men in the city. A whiff of danger and uncertainty. They
wanted
you to look at them and not know for a tantalizing second or two which side they were on, whether you were about to be greeted with a gruff “Buffalo PD” or smacked in the mouth. Men like McGonagle enjoyed blurring the lines. They were comfortable with evil. Maybe they even saw the humor in the chase, or the futility.