Tucker Peak (32 page)

Sammie’s voice came back on. “Hang on, Joe. We’re getting reports of a sled approaching one of our teams.”

In the intervening silence, I saw Bucky staring straight ahead, having heard every word, his mouth clamped shut with anger under the flowing mustache.

“We near, yet?” I asked quietly.

The Bombardier took a hard lurch into a depression and ground up the far side. “Just a few hundred yards.”

He reached for his own radio mike and asked, “Dick? This is Bucky. You hear us yet?”

“Gottcha, Bucky,” came the weak reply. “Straight ahead.”

“Sammie?” I asked. “You find anyone to pick me up here?”

“Yeah, a deputy named Doug Fleury. He’ll be there in a few minutes. Wait… Hang on… listen to this.” She must have held out her radio to the nearest speaker in the dispatch room, because I suddenly heard, “Base, this is Wilcox. The sled’s coming right at us. I’m leaving the mike open.”

Over my portable, Bucky and I heard the sound of an approaching engine, closing in like a furious insect, followed by a shouted challenge, several gunshots, and then a loud crash, abruptly cut off as by the snap of a switch—no doubt the open microphone being dislodged from where Wilcox had jammed it to transmit.

“Base, this is Wilcox.” The voice was panting a moment later, almost breathless with excitement, and thankfully vibrantly alive. “We’re out of it. He hit us broadside and broke my handlebar.”

“Are you okay?”

“We’re fine. He missed. We fired at him. May have hit him. Not sure.”

“Which direction did he go?”

“He’s angling up at a forty-five from us.”

“You hear all that, Joe?” Sammie asked, her voice much clearer than what we’d been listening to.

The Bombardier came to a sudden stop, almost on top of a snow-covered couple of men, huddled together in a ball.

“Yes, I did,” I answered, jumping out into the cold, slowly fading gray light. The snow came up to my knees. “Where’s my transportation?”

I staggered behind the red-clad rescue squad, which had vaulted off the back deck of the machine and was already surrounding Dick Russell and the inert deputy. I knelt beside them, watching them rapidly and expertly assess their patients.

“How’s the cop?” I asked one of them.

“Still alive,” was the terse reply, almost immediately overshadowed by the sound of a snowmobile drawing near.

A large, black Yamaha slid into view, bearing a helmeted police officer in a dark blue, padded jump suit labeled “Sheriff.” “Which one’s Gunther?”

I half ran, half fell over to him, clawing onto the rear of the machine. “I am.”

“Doug Fleury. Hang on.”

The difference between the Bombardier and the Yamaha was like that between an aircraft carrier and a jet. Doug Fleury had obviously spent a lot of time riding snowmobiles, like thousands of other Vermonters, and handled it with the ease and self-confidence of a cowboy born to the saddle. We tore into the featureless white wash ahead of us, the snow whipping our faces and forcing me—without goggles—to bury my face into my driver’s back for protection, racing at such speed that we sometimes left the ground, the engine howling with released energy.

“Sam?” I yelled into my radio, holding on to the strap at my groin for dear life with one hand. “I’m on the sled. What’ve you got?”

I had to hold the speaker flat against my ear to hear her say, “We’re closing in on him. We got several hits on his engine noise. Looks like he’s heading between the tops of lifts three and four.”

Linda’s voice came on. “That means you have him cornered. He’s heading toward the windmill farm, and it’s got a ten-foot chain-link fence around it, stretching across his path.”

Sammie anticipated my next request. “I’ve got units closing in from both sides. You and two others are coming up the middle. Watch your butt.”

I pocketed the radio and leaned forward to shout into Doug’s ear. “We’re coming up to the windmill farm’s fence. That’s where he’s supposed to be.”

Fleury quickly cut back on the throttle. “How’re we going to know if he’s to the right or the left of us?”

“We won’t, but everybody’s closing in. One of us’ll find him.”

We were both straining our eyes against the impenetrable gray curtain before us, looking for anything that would warn us against simply falling into the unknown.

Fleury saw it first and immediately killed the engine. “There it is,” he said softly in the sudden silence. He pointed at the ghostly, intermittent watermark of a chain-link fence’s crisscross pattern hanging before us in midair.

I could hear in the background the distant whining of more snowmobiles and groomers converging on the area, but more prevalent still was an otherworldly and rhythmic whooshing sound coming from someplace ahead of us. It was deep-throated, heavy and almost made the air vibrate, conjuring up images of a giant scythe swinging ever nearer.

“What the hell’s that?” I asked.

Fleury swung one leg off his machine. “The windmills—give me the creeps.”

He crouched by one side of the snowmobile and unlashed two pairs of snowshoes, handing me one. “How do you want to work this?”

“Nothing dramatic,” I cautioned, attaching the snowshoes, “but being the ones in the middle, we should probably try to get a location on the guy. Don’t engage him in any way, just look for his sled tracks so we can orient the others.”

Fleury nodded once, tested his balance on the soft snow with a few hard stamps of his feet, and headed off toward the left, almost instantly becoming one with the falling snow.

I walked to the fence and cut right, my gun in one hand, the radio in the other, moving as silently as the gently floating elements all around me.

But not for long. I hadn’t gotten ten yards before I heard a shout behind me and the sound of two gunshots. Turning clumsily, I started jogging in that direction, talking into the radio, “Shots fired midline along the fence. I’m going to investigate.”

I almost fell over Tony Busco’s stolen snowmobile, which was at a cockeyed angle. It was entangled halfway through the bottom of the wire fence, having smacked into it with enough strength to have punched a hole. Fleury’s large footprints showed that he’d slipped through in pursuit, rather than waiting as I’d advised—the cowboy image apparently not being restricted to his prowess on the back of a sled.

“Fleury, come in. It’s Joe Gunther.”

Nothing came back. I began squeezing through the ragged opening, noticing as I did a smear of blood across the machine’s shattered plastic windshield.

“Fleury. Come in.”

Still nothing.

“Gunther to all units. We may have an officer down inside the fence, about twenty yards to the left of our machine.”

I continued walking, bent over double, studying the ground before me, breathing through my mouth as if that might make me quieter. With the specter of Tony Bugs in my head, looming up out of the murkiness, gun in hand, ready to take me out, I even turned the radio off so it couldn’t give me away.

All the sound that remained was the ever louder, heavy, rhythmic chopping of gigantic blades slicing through the air, close enough now that I could no longer hear the whine of approaching reinforcements. To hell with Tony Bugs, I was thinking now, the image of Dick Russell and the wounded deputy fresh in my mind. I needed to find Doug Fleury and see if I could help save his life.

What I found first, however, stopped me dead in my tracks. Looming out of the cold, pale environment, revealed in a sudden gust of wind like a towering ghost rising from the ground at my feet, was a thin, white, tubular shaft impressive enough to make me think of alien visitors or a sign from God. Hanging a hundred and thirty feet over me, equipped with three huge, ponderous, black-painted, slicing blades, was one of the summit’s distinctive windmills. Each blade, at least sixty feet long, came flying out of the sky, seemingly aimed at my head, only to reach the end of its arc with the sound of a diving aircraft. One by one, they thrummed by to vanish in the opposite direction, each one following on the heels of its mate, to begin the process anew—once every split second.

My instant and instinctive crouching down brought me almost eye-level to the ground—and to Doug Fleury lying half covered with snow a few feet ahead, one red stained glove clutching a wounded shoulder. Just beyond him, stepping out from behind the tower, a pistol aimed straight at me, was Antony “Tony Bugs” Busco, looking just like his mug shot.

“Drop the gun,” he shouted over the steady beating overhead.

My own weapon was still in my hand, pointed halfway between the ground and him. I was struck by the sudden realization that because of both the protection program’s harboring of this man and our own circumspection in drawing a net around him, this was the first time I’d actually seen him, even though I’d been pursuing his shadow from the very beginning.

“No,” I said. “If you know what’s good for you, you better drop yours. Cops are closing in on this spot from all directions. You can’t get away.”

“Maybe I don’t give a shit,” he said, but I had my doubts.

“Why not?” I asked him. “You protected yourself by entering the Marshals’ program, by killing Jorja Duval to locate Gagnon and Lane—”

“Gagnon was blackmailing me,” he cut in defensively. “That dumb hick. And she wouldn’t tell me where he was—not at first, anyway. Greedy little bastards put themselves into that jam. Thanks for the assist with Lane, by the way,” he suddenly added with a forced smile. “Didn’t know cops could be so helpful.”

Like an engine falling into gear, my brain latched onto his words and conjured up not only the ugly picture of Jorja Duval’s cut throat, her usefulness over, but also the long-awaited realization, by implication, that Marty Gagnon was no longer unaccounted for. Perhaps Busco had run out of places to hide. Certainly his current protectors were going to throw him out. Still, I persisted. “It doesn’t change that you’re a survivor by instinct. Look at you now, still fighting to live. Put the gun down and make that happen.”

“I killed four people, including two cops—three if that one dies.”

“You
wounded
three cops. None of them’re dead. It’s not as bad as you think.”

He tilted his head back and laughed, making me wonder if that might not be the instant to try to outshoot him. I was no longer under the illusion that my babbling would lead to his surrender.

But happenstance tilted the balance. With the sound of an enormous laundry bag sliding down a smooth chute, a huge wedge of rime ice suddenly released from one of the overhead blades and thudded into the snow just a few feet beside us. In the same instant that Tony Busco swung slightly to face this unknown threat, I leveled my gun and fired wildly, hitting him by pure luck in the leg and spinning him like a top, causing his own pistol to fly uselessly away.

Doug Fleury, the silent witness to all this, looked from Busco to me, and back again, before letting his head finally rest against the snow.

“Thank God,” he muttered and closed his eyes.

Amen to that, I thought, feeling suddenly very cold.

HE WALKED WITH A STUDIED INDIFFERENCE, FAKING A CASUAL SWING
to his shoulders but revealing his tension with the stiffness of his arms and neck.

And the look in his eyes. They moved back and forth like a bodyguard’s on alert, watching everyone’s passing face, sweeping the crowd for any signs of unusual movement.

Like my stepping out in front of him from behind a kiosk of phone booths, located in the middle of the Manchester, New Hampshire, airport lobby. “Philip McNally?”

His familiar smile was tight and artificial, and he glanced nervously at Lester Spinney approaching from another angle, and at a uniformed state cop closing in from a third. “You know it is, Mr. Gunther. What’s up?”

As Lester stepped around behind him, took his bag, and began to frisk him, the New Hampshire trooper said, “You’re under arrest on a fugitive-from-justice warrant,” after which he intoned the standard Miranda warning, ending with, “Do you understand these rights as I have explained them?”

McNally’s expression softened, much of the tension draining away, and he ducked his head slightly with a smile. “I guess I knew it wouldn’t work. I don’t know how you found me, though. Conan had no idea. I’m guessing you got him, too.”

“Yup.” I took his elbow and began steering him back through the security checkpoint. We’d already had his luggage removed from the plane.

“Actually,” I admitted, “You told me yourself, when we first met. You said the hassles you were putting up with made Luxembourg look good, or words to that effect. That struck me as odd at the time—most people would’ve said Florida or the Bahamas or even Tahiti. I only realized it later, of course, after we thought you’d gotten away, but Luxembourg must’ve been on your mind for a specific reason. It didn’t take long to find out that it had just the type of banking practices you needed, or to locate the travel agent you used to buy your ticket. You should know, by the way, that the U.S. and Luxembourg just signed a banking agreement allowing us access to your funds. Talk about bad timing.”

We stepped out into the cold air of the airport’s parking lot, where a couple of police cruisers were idling at the curb. Phil McNally stopped briefly and took in a deep breath of air, wistfully commenting at the end of it, “I came pretty close, though, didn’t I?”

I put my hand on the rear-door latch. “You did better than that. You’ve probably destroyed an entire community—from the condo owners and Board members to the lowest lift-ticket taker; you’ve ruined or damaged hundreds of lives. That’s something the judge will appreciate, too.”

I opened the door and shoved him inside.

· · ·

Several hours later I was back in Brattleboro, on the outskirts of town, in a long, low wooden building that had once been the nineteenth-century equivalent of a parking garage—a carriage house designed for up to twenty horses and their vehicles. It was a storage rental facility now, its erstwhile stable doors replaced with a row of heavy padlocked wooden ones, and it had been where first Ron Klesczewski and then a crime lab team had gone to paw through the ill-gotten gains of Marty Gagnon’s career as a thief, early in the investigation.