Tag Man (8 page)

“The question to ask,” Joe suggested, “is how this has anything to do with the Tag Man’s visit. Or if it does.”

“That’s what Willy was thinking,” Ron agreed. “What if the Tag Man isn’t as harmless as he looks?”

Joe sounded like Tony Brandt. “Meaning he’s targeting these houses because their owners won’t report what he’s really stealing … That’s interesting.”

Ron was heartened by the other man’s enthusiasm. “I’d like to hand this one off, to be honest. Could get complicated, if any of this is true, and I don’t have the time, the budget, or the manpower, especially now that the detective squad’s been reduced to just me and Tyler. This is the thinnest we’ve been since before your time.”

Joe knew of his troubles—the board of selectmen had been cutting back on everyone’s funding like never before. Still, he chose to avoid that discussion and stick to the topic at hand. “Beware what you wish for, Ron,” he cautioned. “Think of what we just hypothesized: If the Tag Man has that kind of intelligence going for him, and you’re right about Jordan being mobbed up, we’ll be talking major crimes before you know it. And you haven’t even looked into the other victims, right?”

“No,” Ron conceded. “Up to now, we just saw them as targets, not as people who had something to hide. This conversation’s introduced a whole new ball game.”

Joe held up a cautionary finger. “Maybe, maybe not. Don’t forget that all we know for sure is that he leaves a Post-it at every scene. The rest is purely hypothetical.”

“Speaking of which,” Ron added, “the chief thinks blackmail might be an angle, too.”

Joe laughed. “That would add an extra layer.”

“If true, though,” Ron ruminated, “I can’t say I’d mind seeing Jordan twist in the wind for a while. For all we know, the Tag Man could be doing us a favor.” He considered what Tony Brandt and he had discussed along similar lines. “Maybe he’s a masked avenger or something.”

“You really don’t like Mr. Jordan, do you?”

Ron thought back to his encounter not with Lloyd but his wife, whom he truly didn’t envy.

“You’re right,” he agreed. “I don’t. I’d love to bring him down a few pegs. The man’s a jerk.”

Joe stood up and moved to the door, checking his watch. “Ron,” he said on the threshold, Gail’s advice still echoing in his head. “I know this may be out of line, but if you need any help—off the books—don’t hesitate to ask. I’m officially on medical leave, or vacation, or whatever the hell, but I’m thinking it wouldn’t hurt to sink my teeth into something.”

Ron rose and shook his hand. “You working for me? You think I’ll turn that down? You got a deal.”

Joe patted his younger colleague’s shoulder. “You may be singing a different tune a week from now, when you find out what a crazy old bastard I’ve turned into.”

Ron opened his mouth to soften the comment, but then decided to pay the man his due. After all, he thought, I have no idea what he’s going through—or what it’s costing him.

“Let me worry about that, okay?” he said instead. “We’ll just start and see where it leads.”

CHAPTER SIX

“Was Joe here?”

Willy Kunkle looked up at Sammie’s voice. She was standing in the VBI doorway with Emma in her arms. He glanced over at Lester Spinney, who was working at his desk, before answering neutrally, “Nope. Why?”

Lester swiveled in his seat. “Hey, Sam. How’s the little monster?”

“Hi, Les. Still not sleeping through the night.”

“You gotta give ’em time. It’s not like cats and kitty litter.”

“Cute,” Willy groused. “What about Joe?”

“I saw him going into the detective bureau downstairs, so I figured he’d been here.”

“Lester,” Willy said gruffly, “why don’t you check that out—invite him up for a cup or something?”

Lester’s mouth fell half open before he grasped the subtext and rose quickly to his feet. “Sure. Be back in a few.”

He slipped by Sam, giving Emma’s thin blond hair a quick stroke as he passed. “Hi there, sweetie.”

Willy waited for his footsteps to fade before he, too, got up and approached Sam. He kissed his child murmuring, “How’re you doing, little daughter?”

Sammie smiled while shaking her head. “You couldn’t do that with Lester in the room?”

Willy was sniffing Emma’s hair as if it was a cure for melancholy, which it undoubtedly was. “Don’t give me crap,” he barely whispered. “I got an image.”

“Which applies to your street-bum friends,” she countered.

Willy straightened and tousled her hair, which she couldn’t protect with her arms full. “Half of them are your snitches, too,” he reminded her. “What’re you doin’ here? Getting restless?”

“A little,” she admitted candidly. “I’m not bucking to speed things up, but I am getting curious about how things’ll work out when I come back to work.”

He looked at her carefully. “What’s that mean?”

She shrugged and Emma stirred. “I don’t know. I used to pull twenty-four-hour shifts when the shit hit the fan. Now I’ve got something bigger to think about.”

She had thought he would react as he’d trained everyone to expect. Instead, he made a dismissive face and said, “We’ll figure that out. You’re not alone, you know?”

A slow smile creased her face as he retreated to his desk in the office’s windowless corner. “I do know, Willy. Thanks.”

They heard footsteps coming down the hallway, announcing Lester’s return, complete with company. When he entered, however, it wasn’t Joe but Ron who stopped in the doorway, as Lester continued in and immediately asked Sam if he could hold the baby. She handed Emma over willingly. Lester had two of his own, older teenagers by now, and made no apologies for considering himself a dad first and foremost. Several years ago, he had even risked jail time when his son had gotten into a legal bind. Typically, Joe had helped him get out of it.

Lester crossed to his office chair and gently sat down, cradling Emma in his lap. His focus on her excluded everyone else, allowing Sam to give Ron a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

“Hey, stranger. You don’t write, you don’t call…”

“Thank God,” Willy cracked.

Ron laughed. “It’s not like you guys don’t walk by my office every day, coming and going.”

“Good point,” Sam conceded.

“It’s called moving on, Ron,” Willy commented. “We spent enough years in that hole.”

Ron didn’t take offense, taking in the VBI’s spartan furnishings. “Right. You guys really moved up.”

It was true that the VBI, for all its elitist cachet, had never had the funding to match the image. A typically political animal, created by a past governor, reluctantly supported by successive legislatures, and staffed by often quirky and self-motivated defectors from a dozen other agencies, the Bureau had become the law enforcement community’s bastard brother—inside the fold, but awkwardly isolated.

“Tell them what you told me,” Lester said, not looking up because he was touching Emma’s forehead with his nose.

“You’re pregnant,” Willy prompted.

They all ignored him.

“Joe’s working for me, unofficially,” Ron said.

Even Kunkle was impressed. “You’re kidding me. On what?”

“The Tag Man case,” Ron explained. “He walked in a while ago—I thought just to be sociable. He’s kind of at loose ends. On his way out, he volunteered to pitch in.”

There was a moment’s silence, during which Willy said under his breath, “The old man’s really losing it.”

“He is not,” Sammie reacted, flushing slightly.

This time, Lester did look up. “I think it’s the reverse—he wants to get his feet wet again.”

No one responded, each momentarily lost in his or her thoughts about what the “boss” might be up to—and how he’d fare in the process.

*   *   *

Leo Metelica favored a .45 caliber model 1911 semiautomatic. It looked like the one seen in all the World War II movies—big, heavy, black, and ominous—but he’d actually made it himself—in a fashion—assembling it from the best components available, custom fitting them in his kitchen-based workshop. It was beautiful to handle, a perfect fit to his hand with its checkered walnut grips, and a hair trigger and night sights that had set him back a chunk of change.

All to good effect, though. Merely poking the thing into a man’s face was usually enough to wrap up whatever argument Leo was making.

He practiced with it endlessly, at the range and in the woods, training himself in a variety of environments, and he stripped it, cleaned it, and reassembled it incessantly. It was the primary tool of his trade, of course, but in moments of self-contemplation, Leo saw himself physically as a part of the gun, and the gun as a reflection of him.

This was a good thing in his eyes. The gun, or the conviction behind it, was what kept Leo employed, and it was the gun that got people to act—keep their mouths shut, pay what they owed, or, on rare occasions, to stop breathing. Leo hadn’t actually killed too many people—real life wasn’t like fiction, after all, where Sylvester Stallone or Bruce Willis could kill twenty people before strolling away. But he’d used this same gun on three men so far, and it had worked to perfection every time. Quietly, too, because of the silencer he’d also built in his basement. Leo was a handy man, well trained by the navy and by working for his uncle as a kid in a welding shop. Not a great thinker, perhaps—something he’d been told time and again by his betters—but good with tools, and good at getting back at those betters when they least expected it.

He also knew about ballistics and made sure of two things while on the job: He always used frangible ammunition, to ensure that the bullet fragments were many and untraceable, and he always went for a contact head shot, to guarantee the effectiveness of his trademark single lethal shot. He was a decent marksman, but why bother aiming when such bravado was unnecessary?

He slipped the pistol into its holster, stubbed out his cigarette, killed the motel room lights, and opened his curtains to reveal the parking lot beyond.

Brattleboro. Totally hick town. Nothing to do, nothing to see. No strip joints, no X-rated-movie houses, no hookers as far as he could find. Even the bars sucked—filled with too much music, too much designer beer, and too many people all laughing and pretending to have a good time. Leo liked his bars quiet, dark, and cheap—designed for serious drinkers.

He opened the door and stepped into the balmy night air. At least the weather was holding. He walked to the end of the balcony, took the metal staircase down into the parking lot, and crossed over to the anonymous rental car he’d driven up from Massachusetts. Leo didn’t own a car. He didn’t see the point. Everything he needed was either included in the contract or available over the Internet when he wasn’t working. As for the rest, he walked or took a bus. He lived in the kind of neighborhood where his particular appetites could be met within a four-block radius.

He pulled into the Putney Road, as clotted with fast food joints and cheap motels as any commercial strip anywhere, and headed south, back into downtown. Brattleboro had three interstate exits, which had surprised him, given its size. The first had offered one motel and limited amenities; the second, little to nothing except a major feeder road heading east and west; and the third had landed him right at the top of the miracle mile he was now navigating. Perfect for him—a nondescript environment with a quick on-ramp heading out of town.

But for the moment, that escape route could keep. Now, he wanted inside the belly of the beast. That’s where the target worked, and where he’d seen him earlier.

He crossed a bridge over the confluence of the Connecticut and West rivers, exchanging the Putney Road’s commercial stretch for a long, curving, tree-lined avenue accented by stately Victorian mansions. Not as fancy as some he’d seen in Massachusetts, but holding their own in the useless-hard-to-heat-antiques category.

They were also a good foretaste to the redbrick downtown next in line. He hated towns like this—throwbacks to a time of sweatshops and union busting and market manipulation. He understood New England’s vanity about its antiquity and fusty customs and highborn ways. And despised it all. The people he came from had been under the heels of those traditions for more than two hundred years, as servants, slaves, and immigrant factory workers. He was delighted to be one of the few who could speak now and then of his independence with a well-placed bullet.

Fuck ’em all, was his motto.

Not that he was transposing any of that social outrage onto his target. In fact, that poor slob just looked like a working stiff to Leo.

But he still didn’t care. The money was good, the target looked easy, and anyone who’d earned a visit from Leo Metelica clearly hadn’t been minding his manners, no matter how working-class he might seem.

Metelica was a practical socialist.

He parked his car in the public garage on Elliot Street, near the entrance and aimed toward the exit, as he did every time similar circumstances presented themselves. Also from habit, he took note of the surveillance cameras to make sure none of them had a clear shot of his face as he headed for the street.

It was late. Earlier, he had eaten at the restaurant where Dan Kravitz worked, both to confirm that he had the right target and to study the way the man moved. It didn’t amount to research per se, since it didn’t truly inform Metelica of Kravitz’s habits or preferences, but he saw himself as a cheetah assessing a gazelle from a safe distance—it was a form of zeroing in, and, for Metelica’s basic style of operation, it was enough.

His plan was equally unsophisticated. He was going to wait for Kravitz to lock up, as he’d been informed he did every night, follow him to a suitably dark and isolated spot, and kill him.

Or not.

Metelica was no fool. He knew that sometimes things didn’t work out according to plan. And if he didn’t get an opportunity tonight, then he’d use the time to learn more about Dan’s routine and kill him tomorrow night.

He walked down the sidewalk to where he’d noticed a dark alleyway opposite the restaurant, and vanished from the glare of a distant streetlamp to see what developed. He saw the purpose of his visit across from him, working a mop up and down the length of the empty dining room, where the chairs had already been upended and parked atop the tables.