Billingsgate Shoal (28 page)

With the help of the thermos of coffee I made it home
awake, and rolled up the drive. As I walked to the front door—I
hadn't bothered with the garage—I thought I heard a sound at the
side of the house. I waited three minutes in total silence. Nothing.
My mind was beginning to play tricks on me. I needed sleep, and less
cops and robbers.

The coffee had me going now; I walked to the back of
the house past the small sign that said Atelier and entered Mary's
ceramic studio. I switched on the light. The place was festooned with
hanging plants of all varieties, each one in a huge custom-thrown
urn. I saw her recent work on the big table. They were modeled after
Chinese pots from one of the dynasties, and were trapezoidal in
cross-section with angular, though handsome, lids. Some were two feet
across. It takes a huge amount of arm muscle to throw a pot that big.
They were glazed with a textured drip finish. I stood in silent
admiration in the room. I also resolved to forget about him.
Schilling, the boat, and even Allan Hart. I would tell Joe and anyone
else who wanted to know all about the guns in the Buzarski barn and
the blue van. Then it was up to them. This thing had taken too heavy
a toll on Mary, and on us.

I went upstairs and kissed her awake and loved her
back to sleep. We both said we felt a lot better. I slept very
soundly. In fact I slept so soundly that Mary told me later it was
her third scream from the bottom of the stairs that stirred me. I met
her on the landing. She leaned into me, wailing and moaning in her
nightgown. I felt her nails dive into my right forearm.

"The oven! In the oven, Charlie—my God!"

Then she ran to the bathroom, sick.

In the kitchen I saw that the oven door atop the
stove was ajar. It was at eye level. I crept forward and opened it
with caution. The face of Angel stared back at me. Her eyes were
still open, but dulled. Her hound face wore a quizzical expression.
There was no anger in it, no snarl to the lips. There was no fear
either. Just a confused look, as if asking fate why this had happened
to her. A tiny pool had gathered beneath her severed neck. Not much.
Her long velvet ears hung down between the wires of the baking rack
on which her head rested.

"Oh, my poor Angel," I whispered to her.
 

CHAPTER NINETEEN

BRIAN HANNON'S face crinkled up in disgust as he
stared into the oven.

"And we're selling the stove, Charlie. Right
now! You hear, right now we're selling it! Goddamn thing and—"

Mary was crying hard again and running her twisted
fingers through her hair. It was not only the loss of the pet, the
murder of our dog, that had her on the brink. It was the stealthy
invasion of our home, while occupied: the cold, professional, wanton
terrorism of it. If they thought they had us scared, they were indeed
correct.

"My God that's awful, Doc. That's an awful
thing. Please don't any of you touch anything for a while. Mary, it
might be a good idea for you to get out of this house temporarily
while my men work. Doc, we never found the body. They came in through
the window. Jimmied it up clean as a whistle. They bypassed the alarm
too. They're pros, Doc. They knew exactly what they were doing."

"And the noise I heard coming in the front was
them leaving by the window. They saw my headlights and hurried out."

"Doc, I think their message is pretty clear."

I nodded.

"What they're saying is lay off or you'll be
next."

"The dogs were all outside last night. They were
together, but neither Danny nor Flack barked. How did they get to
Angel without the other two knowing? And how did they catch and kill
her silently? And why did they bring her inside?"

"They did it all for the message. They've showed
they're silent. So quiet that dogs don't wake up when they're near.
They're quick. So quick they can snatch a dog in her sleep and
destroy her without a peep. And finally, you can't keep them out.
They can get to you whenever they want."

I let out a long sigh as I heard Mary trundling up
the stairs.

"That's not encouraging."

"No. I'd be extremely wary if I were you, Doc.
Whatever it is you've been poking around in, forget it. You and Joe
have discovered a body up in Gloucester. Now you stay out of it. Let
the Commonwealth handle it. I guarantee your house will be guarded
twenty-four hours a day."

"And what will you be doing?"

"I am gonna stay with you. I'm gonna be harder
to shake than athlete's foot. Count on it."

He spun around and went to his men. I went to a pay
phone and called the boys and told them to leave their present
dwellings at once; and go to earth elsewhere.

"Call Chief Hannon in two days and let him know
your whereabouts. That's an order."

I saw Joe pull into the drive: I was never so glad to
see him. The rest of the day was taken up with estate and local
police, the dismantling and hauling away of the stove at Mary's
irrational insistence, (although I admitted to myself that I never
wanted to set teeth around anything cooked in that oven again as long
as I, too, lived), and the tramping around through our domicile by
state and local lab teams, who admitted to a person (two of them were
women) that the breakers-enterers-murderers were very clean. No stray
prints were found. The burglar alarm system had been circumvented
with surgical precision. I cornered Joe and Brian on the porch.

"Has either of you any comments about the mode
of entry? Does it not strike you as interesting that this group
appears to be adept at circumventing burglar alarms?"

They nodded at each other without hesitating.

"Well?" 

"Well what? It's always interesting that the
M.O. has a definite pattern. We're up against pros here, that's
certain."

"Yes," I answered, "and pros good
enough to crack an armory maybe?"

"Oh I've thought of that," said Brian.

"Of course. I thought of it right away,"
added Joe.

"Oh you did? But then neither of you apparently
thought that the
Rose
could be running something out of the country—namely guns. Instead
you thought I was off my nut. Since then we've uncovered a body, some
tangible evidence of gun-running, and a direct threat to Yours Truly.
The question is, how seriously are you guys taking this?"

"Very," they answered in unison. I was
somewhat heartened, but not very. To me they still seemed a bit like
Tweedledum and his big fat brother, dee.

"Before he left Joe hugged Mary on the couch and
comforted her.

"I want you at ten-ten Comm. Ave. Tomorrow at
ten," he said as he left.

On Commonwealth Avenue, right at the Boston/Brookline
line, is a large store called Eastern Mountain Sports, abbreviated
EMS. It sells down parkas, snowshoes, camping gear, and mountain
climbing apparatus. The shelves are lined with pitons, nylon
lifelines, ice axes, and small hammers to drive the pitons and steel
rings into cliff faces. All this so people can scale sheer cliffsides
and dangle about underneath ledges and outcroppings like spiders.

The people who die doing this stuff deserve it. It is
nature's way of weeding out the insane.

Hordes of people flock to this emporium. Most don't
pay any attention to the big dun-colored building across the street.
It's blocky and ugly, and is conspicuous in having a splendid array
of aerials and antennae on its rooftops. This is the headquarters
building of the Department of Public Safety for the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts. One of the biggest divisions in the department is the
State Police. Joe has an office in this big building. The day after
we found Angel's severed head in the oven, I found myself on the
third floor of this building seated at a table. Joe sat across from
me. Next to me sat Sergeant Kevin O'Hearn. We were flipping through a
big book filled with black and white photographs.

They were mugshots, but not of people. They were
pictures of weapons: military small arms. I identified one picture
and rapped at it with my fingernail.

"You sure?"

"Yep. Positive. I knew it looked familiar. It's
the M-60."

"Now look in this section."

Kevin O'Hearn flipped through the pages. These were
smaller automatic weapons, assault rifles and submachine guns. I
stopped briefly at one called the Skorpion, a Czech machine pistol,
then went on. It glanced for a few seconds at the Uzi, the fine
Israeli machine pistol made under license in Holland. It is (so
O'Hearn told me) the most widely used submachine gun today. The White
House Guards tote them. Not it; the Uzi was too rounded. The gun I
wanted looked as angular as a hunk of two-by-four. Then I saw it,
complete with the big tubes.

"Here.'This one."

"Sure?"

"As sure as I'm sitting here."

O'Hearn gave a low whistle at Joe, than excused
himself, saying he had to make a phone call.

I remember now I read where these are made: Powder
Springs, Georgia. I could've saved you some time.?

"We wanted a positive visual identification.
Kevin thought it might be the Ingram as soon as I told him about your
escapade out west. The government's been looking for these things for
two months now. You've made quite a discovery."

"They're hot I assume?"

"You could fry eggs on 'em."

"Can I go now? Mary and I are looking at dogs
today."

The first rule when you lose a dog, either to old
age, accident, or murder, is to get another one quick. We had an
appointment to look at the new German sporting breed, the drahthar,
after lunch.

"In a little bit. Major Downey would like to
interview you first. He's on his way now."

"Does he work here or out in Amherst?"

"He's stationed at Fort Ord, California. He's a
major in the United States Army, Ordnance."

"0h."

The phone on Joe's desk rang. He grunted into it and
hung up.

"Major Downey and O'Hearn are down in the range.
Come on down with me and you can see for yourself what man hath
wrought."

"What do you mean?"

"Downey has a real live Ingram with him. You can
see what one of the things'll do."

The range was located in a subbasement, presumably to
deaden the noise of target practice. I heard the hum of ventilating
fans and could smell the bitter odor of cordite. As a sometime hunter
I liked the smell, though I could see why Vietnam veterans would hate
it. Another smell I like is the aroma of Hoppe's powder solvent, used
for cleaning shotguns. We approached a door and I could hear the
solid blam of firearms. The sound was two-in-one because the shot was
followed a millisecond later by the impact sound of the slug thumping
against the inclined steel wall of the range eighty feet away. Joe
opened the door and went in.

There were eight stalls to the range. Troopers and
plainclothesmen occupied about half of them. They wore ear protectors
as they fired their sidearms at the big suspended paper targets at
the far end of the range. The targets were life-sized silhouettes of
the human being. Parts of the body were outlined in white lines, with
various scores. I noticed you got a lot of points for the head and
chest, a bit fewer for the stomach and abdomen, and hardly any for
legs, knees, and such. It was a rather ominous spectacle for the
uninitiated. Most of the men were standing, but sometimes they
dropped to a crouch and fired their weapons held in both hands. When
they did this they emptied the cylinder, pumping off six shots very
quickly. One pistol sounded particularly loud, and I remarked on it.

"Three-fifty-seven magnum. The slug can go
through an engine block. But if you think that's loud, you oughta
hear a forty-four magnum—"

"I have. One of the guys at the gun club has
one. When he shows up at the range everybody else leaves."

We met Major Downey. He looked all business: crewcut,
suntan, leathery skin, no fat, and a crisp khaki uniform with razor
sharp creases. He shook my hand firmly and we all talked briefly
about what I had related to Joe. Then I was told that an army
intelligence team had a surveillance on the Buzarski farm. With the
team were state troopers. The major took me over to a bench, upon
which sat an aluminum case that looked like a suitcase. In fact, it
looked just like a Halbriton photographer's case. Downey flicked open
the latches and opened the lid. Neatly cradled inside a nest of
cut-foam plastic was one of the weird-looking square pistols. It was
identical to those I had seen in the crate in Buzarski's barn.
Alongside the gun was the long metal tube.

"That's it."

"Doctor Adams, ten crates of these weapons
disappeared two months ago from the armory in Schenectady, New York.
They were purchased by the army for special assignments, and were
being stored in the armory prior to being shipped to Fort Ord. The
Em-sixties have been disappearing from a number of storage
facilities. Perhaps you know that three years ago some were taken
from the armory at Danvers."