Open Season (41 page)

He didn’t answer, but I could tell he was mulling it over. He turned on his heel and continued down the hallway until we both reached a small study at the back of the house. There he sat on an overstuffed leather armchair—something I’ve always coveted—and crossed his legs with an elegant flourish. I noticed he was wearing tasseled loafers—something I’ve always thought was for the birds.

“So what do you propose?” I realized for the first time he had the same lilt to his voice I’d heard in 1930s movies.

“To put you under wraps for a while until we can get a fix on Stark.”

“As bait?”

“You’re bait right now.”

“He’s dessert.” The voice made us both whirl around, I with my gun in my hand.

Stark was standing in a side doorway, a short, nasty-looking pistol-grip crossbow in his hand. It was pointing directly at Teicher’s chest. Humiliation and anger thunderclapped inside me—the son of a bitch had beaten me to the end.

I motioned my gun at him. “Put it down. You can’t win this—not with that thing.” Teicher was squirming in his chair. “Who is this man?”

Stark smiled and clicked his heels. “Colonel Henry A. Stark, United States Army, probably retired by now.” The crossbow never wavered.

Teicher merely swallowed.

“Come on, Stark, this is stupid. If you move a muscle, I’ll fire. And you only have one arrow.”

“It’s called a bolt and it’s intended for that man’s chest. This didn’t happen accidentally, Joe.”

“What didn’t?”

“This situation. I’ve been waiting for you. And this”—he nodded at the weapon in his hand—“is for your benefit. It is palpable proof that I have but one shot. Not, of course, that I don’t have other weapons on me—ones I can reach and use in just under one second—but that’s my gift to you. You have one second to kill me after I dispatch Mr. Tassel Loafers here; after that, I kill you.”

I stared at him in stunned silence. From the start, this man had dictated my actions with the simpleminded brutality of the weapon in his hand. He had mocked the complexities that had plagued every actor in this drama, from Jamie Phillips’s struggles as a juror to his own daughter’s battle with the ghosts screaming inside her head. He had made his decisions without contemplation, without pros and cons, but merely with a goal in mind. As a bullet seeks its target, so he had sought this final meeting. It was as foreign to my way of thinking as could be, and, I realized now, he had mysteriously known that almost from the beginning. I had been his perfect implement.

That was hard to swallow. I lowered my gun as I might have upon discovering I’d been aiming at my own shadow. “You’ve got to be out of your mind. Cops are on the way right now; that’s why I’m here, and the people out front. It’s suicidal, for Christ’s sake. What’s the point?”

“Put the gun back up, Joe. And I wouldn’t count on the two out front.” He waited for me to comply. I did, suddenly aware that regardless of how I saw things, Stark was going to force them to work his way. It was no time for me to weigh the various aspects of the situation. I either became like him or I was going to die.

“Good.” He gave an approving nod and quickly glanced at his watch. “We have a few minutes yet. You asked me a question the other night that I promised to answer at a later date. I doubt we’ll get much later than this.”

“About Frank?” I was amazed at his performance. Once the arrow—or bolt—was sent into the middle of Teicher’s chest, Stark was going to briefly expose himself to whatever fate might dole out. There was a strong likelihood he had but a few minutes left to live. And yet he was calm, polite, even considerate. I no longer had any doubts that I was dealing with a nut. It scared the hell out of me; it also made me think that the wisest thing to do right now was to shoot him in cold blood. But I didn’t.

He almost beamed with self-satisfaction. “Frank’s death was an auto accident, plain and simple.”

“Bullshit.”

“Didn’t anyone tell you how you were found? With your head held out of the water by your seat belt? That didn’t just happen. I was tailing you two when you went over. You knew that because you joked about it—remember Frank saying he’d drive in that muck just to find out if I was a flatlander?”

I nodded.

“Joke was on you guys. I heard the accident over the bug I planted. I found the hole in the guard rail, checked you both out, propped your head, and called the cops on the roadside phone. Frank was dead when I got to you, Joe. It was an accident, just like the state troopers said.”

“I don’t believe it.”

This time he laughed outright. “You’re a credit to my imagination. Surely you’ve noticed that the bad guys I warned you about have mysteriously disappeared.”

I didn’t answer. The anger at having been manipulated to that extent—and at that emotional level—was strangling me. I dropped my eyes to the gun in my hand, so long ago the symbol of a young cop’s belief that he could thwart the evils of the world through its use. I hated that remembrance and had worked hard to bury it.

“I made them up. I was the one who gassed your apartment. I thought the extra pressure might help. Do you remember the torn scotch tape you found across your door—the one that made you crawl all over your apartment sweating bullets?”

“Yes.”

“I did that. Too good to resist; I couldn’t believe you’d set yourself up so well. And the bug in the phone? Remember that?”

I let him talk. In the back of my mind, I was hoping he might screw up, even in the last minute of the last hour; that he might somehow expose a small gap through which I or someone else might quickly fit and thus let me off the hook.

“When you picked that phone up and a strange voice said your name and then broke the connection, that started you wondering, didn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“So you looked at the phone and realized that it had been placed wrong end around on the cradle. You wondered why, you opened the phone, and out fell the bug. It was a dud, by the way. I never owned the other half of it—the receiving end—but it did its job anyway. All for building up pressure.”

“And Frank’s death wasn’t a part of that?”

“Pure serendipity. How was I going to guarantee having an eighteen-wheeler in the right place at the right time in the middle of a snowstorm? And why would I? You guys were hot on the track of Cioffi and this miserable bastard.” He nodded at Teicher, who looked like he was trying to disappear into his overstuffed seat cushion. “I wasn’t about to get in your way, despite your best efforts.”

He paused for a moment. “You almost got me on the way to Gorham, though. Your pal Kunkle switched cars at the last minute; I’d planted a radio in his. Still, it worked out.”

I thought of Kunkle’s shattered arm. “How? We didn’t see any cars.”

“I followed you with my lights off. I latched onto your taillights and hoped to hell you wouldn’t lead me straight into a ditch. I’ll credit you that much—that was one time in my life I thought I might lose the game… almost lost control.”

“Like when you beat up Susan Lucey?”

His face lost its almost meditative look. “You’re a lousy conversationalist, you know that? Besides, it’s a little late to be probing the dark recesses of my soul.” He looked at his watch again. “In fact, I’d say time’s up.”

The crossbow moved slightly in his hand.

I too knew time was up. Now—finally—I was in a position to stop him before he did any more damage. Still I hesitated. “You killed the man who murdered your daughter. What does this guy matter? He was going to marry her, for Christ’s sake.”

Stark half smiled, “Jesus—what a thought. No, I like things the way they are. I kill him, you kill me—maybe. That’s neat and tidy; and if you’re not fast enough, I live to play a different kind of game for a while.”

“I will shoot.”

“As soon as you published my identity, I was dead anyway—I have ‘friends’ in high places.”

“I could shoot you now, save Teicher, and ruin it for you.”

He smiled. “I don’t think so.”

So that was that. No gray areas. Just yes or no. The years I’d spent struggling for alternate choices were useless to me now. I was back to where I’d started as a rookie cop, back to when my thinking shared the same narrow ledge as Stark’s. My gun felt huge and awkward—a bloody steel monument to stupidity. I barely felt its recoil when I fired.

The arrow flew as my bullet hit him high in the chest and I heard Teicher scream from the chair. Stark slammed against the doorframe and momentarily stood there, motionless, his eyes locked onto mine; then they closed, his body relaxed, and he slid to the floor.

Keeping my gun on him, I knelt by his side and felt for a pulse. There was none. I could hear noises outside: slamming car doors, the sound of broken glass. I walked over to Teicher, who was now whimpering. The arrow had gone through his right thigh and had pinned him to the chair.

“My God. It hurts, it hurts. Jesus, it hurts.”

I laid my hand on his shoulder. My brain was almost totally numb. “Be grateful. It’s a sign you’re alive.”

He stopped for a second and looked at me.

“Sorry. I’ll get some help for you.”

I left him to let the others in, but I paused at the hallway door and looked at Stark again, curled up like a sleeping child on the floor. Fate or divine guidance or whatever had put my bullet in his heart. He had the contented look of a man who’d lived a clean and simple life and who’d left with his affairs fully in order, with no doubts and no regrets.

I envied him all of that.

Now available as an e-book, Archer Mayor’s
Borderlines
is the second Joe Gunther novel.

I ONLY HALF-SAW IT AT FIRST
, a slight movement of brown against brown. I was also far away, so to have noticed it at all was sheer luck. I took my foot off the accelerator and let the car slow down on its own. A glance ahead and into the rearview mirror confirmed I was the only one on the interstate.

The deer hesitated at the edge of the bank leading down to the southbound lane, parallel to my own. Its hide was just slightly darker than the frost-killed grass at its feet, its rack intermixing with the grayish-brown bare branches of the small trees behind it. I rolled the window down, letting the cool November air flush out the car’s stale, warm interior.

The deer shifted its weight and sniffed suspiciously at the breeze, weighing its own inbred caution against whatever was tempting it to cross both broad lanes and the grassy median in between.

I took the engine out of gear and continued rolling until I ran out of momentum, coming to a stop in the breakdown lane as gently as a leaf striking the ground. The deer barely glanced at me. It took two tentative steps away from its cover and froze again.

It had good reason to be fearful. It was November—hunting season—and the antlers on this buck’s head testified to a past ability at staying alive. I moved my own eyes across the distance he had to travel before gaining the trees on my side of the road, wondering, if I were him, whether I’d run the risk.

I decided I wouldn’t but he stepped forward, placing his forefeet on the pavement. I looked around slowly, checking for other signs of life. I didn’t see a thing, not even a bird. Still, I fought the urge to get out of the car, even to press the horn, and instantly end the debate.

The sun, just inches above the low, rounded, dark purple mountains in the distance, had caught him fully now, revealing the subtleties of his coat, the glistening of his twitching nose. I abandoned any notions of becoming his guardian angel and of scaring him away. He—and all of nature’s dominance in this isolated area—was one of the reasons I was up in the sparse northeastern corner of Vermont. Aside from the intrusion of this road and its kin, and a few towns along the way, this was his country, thinly populated, covered with trees, thrust up like a hilly plateau against an omnipotent and often querulous sky. I was the useless outrigger here—far be it for me to tell him what to do.

He moved purposely now, head high, his white-tinged tail nipping back and forth. I could see the tension in his tapered legs, but he kept his poise, as if on parade. He would not give this road the satisfaction of undignified flight.

The rifle shot came as in a church—intrusive, heart-stopping, sacrilegiously loud and startling. The buck froze, its eyes wide with wonder, and then it glanced back at its own hind legs, which were collapsing as if on their own. A second shot rang out as I leapt from the car and began to run toward him. He saw me then, perhaps blamed me as his head fell back and his antlers rattled against the hard, cold surface of the road.

I stopped beside him, breathing hard, the vapor from my lungs encircling my head. The deer was very still, the only movement being the steaming blood slowly spreading from its open mouth. Its eyes were still wide open, still registering my image, I thought.

I looked around. No one was going to appear now. What had happened was flagrantly illegal—discharging a weapon in proximity to an interstate highway. The hunter would wait for me to leave. I wished I had the strength to lift this huge beast onto my car and deliver him to the nearest State Police barracks, and deprive its killer of the satisfaction of possession and of later tall tales of peerless hunting. But I couldn’t.

I bent over, reached out and touched the warm, smooth hide with my fingertips, reminded suddenly of my own losses—real and imagined. If only I’d given warning when I thought none was necessary. I stood up again slowly, anger replacing shock. The location of the wounds indicated that the shots had come from the same side of the road as the deer, but farther south. I began to walk in that direction, cutting diagonally across both lanes of the interstate, my eyes glued to the treeline above the road bank, watching for any movement, listening for any sound. I knew, as if I could actually feel them, that another pair of eyes were watching me come.

I was on the southbound lane’s divider line when I saw it—a flash of fluorescent orange—accompanied by a hunter’s heavy boots crushing the brush underfoot as he moved.