The Sniper's Wife (26 page)

Barely breathing at all now, Willy sidled up to the entrance, aware of the tiniest sound from beneath his shoes, and very slowly peered around the corner.

Sammie Martens, bound, gagged, and with a large bloodstain on her right leg, lay propped up against the wall, under the open window where the marks on the floor indicated she’d dragged herself with considerable effort, digging her heels into the floor and pushing again and again.

Willy swung rapidly into the room and crouched to one side of the door, his gun covering the area before him. The room was otherwise empty.

He straightened and crossed over to her, immediately slipping the gag from her mouth.

“Jesus,” she said in a whisper. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

“You, too,” he admitted, putting his gun down so he could work on the knot binding her hands behind her back. “How bad are you hit?”

“Hurts like a son-of-a-bitch, but I can walk. Bullet’s still in there, though.”

Willy thought back to the cell phone gun Liptak had used on her. “What the hell was that, anyway? How’d you know it was a gun?”

“We got an alert on them a few weeks ago. Something you threw out, probably. They’re the latest rage. I thought of it when I saw how he was holding it.”

He gave her a quick, almost embarrassed kiss. “Yeah, well, you saved my butt. Where is he now?”

She shook her head. “Somewhere around. He has a real cell phone he’s been trying to use. It didn’t work down here, so I think he went up.”

Willy glanced over his shoulder at the door. “Which way?”

“Turn right. You got anyone with you?”

He looked at her without comment as she began rubbing her chafed wrists and rolled her eyes. “I should’ve known.”

“Stay put,” he said, and quickly left the office.

Turning the way she’d indicated, he saw a small door in the far corner of the central room, and beyond it, barely visible in the gloom, a spiral staircase. He realized he was looking at the interior of one of the Castle’s four large central turrets he’d seen from the outside.

His gun ready once more, he’d barely started walking in that direction when a figure appeared in the doorway with the suddenness of an apparition.

“Don’t move,”
Willy shouted, leveling his gun.

But Andy Liptak was having none of it. As quickly as he’d appeared, he backed into the stairwell and vanished, accompanied by the sound of footsteps pounding on hollow metal stairs.

Willy ran to the door, paused, and quickly stuck his head past the doorjamb. As in a turret of ancient times, the staircase was a tight spiral, hugging the round walls around the center of a sheer drop, and lit solely by the feeble daylight seeping through the occasional firing slit. The sounds of Liptak’s retreat came from above.

Willy gave chase without hesitation.

He ran, taking the steps two at a time, fueled by the same adrenaline that a marathoner uses to make it to the finish line. And finishing is what Willy had solely in mind by now, now as so often in the past—a near-pathological drive to reach some kind of resolution, which, since he couldn’t locate it in his day-to-day life, he kept trying to find in the face of lethal danger. Discovering Sammie alive had come as a huge relief, but it had made him think, if only in this brief flash of a moment, that he’d come as close to balancing the books as ever he might. That coming to Sammie’s aid had in some way counterbalanced his failure to help Mary.

He heard footsteps above him slow down, falter several times as Liptak neared exhaustion, and finally stop altogether.

Willy charged on regardless.

He saw Liptak sprawled on his back, his mouth hanging open, one hand clinging to the banister as if it were a lifeline, just seconds before he was on top of him. Liptak had a gun out, too, but Willy slapped it aside with a swipe from his own, causing the other man to cry out in pain as the gun went hurtling down the narrow, empty stairwell, some eighty feet straight down.

Willy dropped his pistol on the steps and grabbed Liptak by the shirtfront in his powerful right hand, hauling him up and throwing him across the railing so that he balanced there over the long, empty hole below them. Willy was barely breathing hard.

“Hey, you little turd,” he said softly, his face inches from Andy’s. “You done yet?”

Liptak’s body was as still and stiff as a board. His hands were clenched to Willy’s shoulders in a fierce grip. “Put me down, Sniper. For Christ’s sake.”

Willy felt the fear coming off him like an electrical current. He watched Liptak’s dilated pupils and thought he could see in their depth the darkness of the jungle, of the blackouts he’d suffered as a drunk, and of the pure inky well of his own despair, on the edge of which he balanced every day. He shifted his gaze to the gloomy, bottomless funnel of the stairwell just past Liptak’s left ear, and found there the same image—and perhaps as well, a solution. The nagging thought tugging at the corner of his mind loomed into something more tangible, a synergy combining good timing, pure and brutal justice, and with it, relief.

“What d’you say we go for a little flight?” he suggested.

Liptak’s mouth opened, but it was Sammie’s voice he heard.

“Willy? You all right? Where are you?”

He paused, his muscles tensed for the leap. Liptak’s breathing was now coming in short gasps.

“Willy?” she called again from far below, her voice almost breaking. “Goddamn it, you bastard. Answer me.”

Her anger worked its way through the tangle of his mind, drawing his attention away from the task at hand, if just for a moment.

“I’m up here. With our mutual friend,” he answered finally, reluctantly.

Whether it was something she heard in his voice or just simple dumb luck, she answered, “Well, don’t screw it up doing something stupid, okay? Bring him down here so I can beat the crap out of him.”

Her words echoed up the hollow shaft of the turret, reverberating off the walls. Slowly, he smiled, straightened slightly, and refocused on Andy Liptak’s face.

“You may not believe it, but today’s your lucky day,” he said, and pulled him off the railing and back onto the steps.

“There’s movement by the chain-link fence, southwest wall.”

Gunther, Ogden, Panatello, and Janet Scott all turned to look at the spot indicated by the sharpshooter through their radio earpieces.

“Roger that,” Janet responded. “Do you have a visual?”

“That’s affirmative. Two men and a woman. She’s limping and one of the men looks like he has his hands cuffed behind his back.”

Gunther whispered into her other ear.

“Does it look like the other guy has a useless left arm, probably with the hand stuffed into his pants pocket?”

There was a startled pause. “Hang on.”

Despite the tension, Scott smiled. “That got him.”

“Affirmative,” came the report at last, the tone of voice betraying the speaker’s confusion.

She reassured him. “That’s good news. Hold your positions and wait till they’re out in the open.”

Slowly, awkwardly, three figures emerged from the jagged hole at the prison’s base and picked their way across the rubble and through the torn fencing.

“It’s okay,” Joe Gunther said.

Janet Scott radioed everybody to stand down and ordered in the ambulance hidden nearby as the four of them broke cover and walked to meet Andy Liptak and his escort in the middle of the parking lot.

Gunther’s first concern was for the wounded Sammie Martens.

“You okay?” he asked her as they drew near.

Her smile gave him what he needed to know. “Flesh wound,” she answered. “I’ve always wanted to say that. Just didn’t know it would hurt so much.”

Panatello and his people grabbed Liptak away from Willy and whisked him off toward a waiting car.

Willy shook his head at her. “Such a wimp.”

Ward Ogden gave him an appraising look. “We weren’t sure we hadn’t lost you.”

“Wishful thinking,” Willy told him, but then looked straight at Joe Gunther. “I figured I hadn’t been a big enough pain in the butt yet.”

Gunther studied his face, and seemed to read there the debate that Willy had just barely survived. “Practice makes perfect, Willy,” he finally said.

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GATEKEEPER

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“That’s five dollars even.”

Arnie Weller looked over the shoulder of the balding man holding out a ten-dollar bill and checked on the whereabouts of the young woman he’d seen entering a few minutes earlier.

“Out of ten,” he automatically chanted, not bothering to meet his customer’s eyes. Where was she? He turned briefly to the cash register, his fingers dancing across the keyboard in a blur. He caught the spring-loaded drawer against his hip as it opened, quickly made change, and proffered it to the man.

“Want a bag?” he asked, back to surveilling the rear of the store.

There was a telling pause from the customer, forcing Arnie to reluctanty focus on him. “What?”

The man smiled. “I bought gas.”

Arnie stared at him, briefly at a total loss. “Sorry. Have a nice night.”

Shaking his head slightly, the man slipped from Arnie’s line of vision, through the double glass doors to the right, and into the night where his pickup was parked beside one of the gas pumps.

Arnie saw what he thought was the top of the girl’s head pass behind a row of stacked boxes and six-packs near the bank of fridges along the far wall.
Hardest place to see anyone,
he thought angrily, still nursing a grudge. Two weeks ago, he’d asked a so-called security expert for an estimate on rigging the place with cameras. One week later, he’d bought a gun instead. For a whole lot less.

Bastard.

Arnie Weller ran a clean store, paid his taxes, took care of his employees, most of whom were worthless. He dealt with the chiseling gas company, the wholesale suppliers who screwed him out of habit, and the endless state forms issued monthly to make his life difficult. He paid his insurance, although they never settled his claims, donated to charitable causes he didn’t agree with, and belonged to a chamber of commerce he thought was as useless as tits on a bull. He even cleaned the bathrooms twice a day, despite and not because of the disgusting condition he found them in, each and every time. If his customers were pigs, it didn’t mean he’d join them.

And he put up with the disrespect, the surliness, the petty thefts, and the general offensiveness of the young people and trailer trash who supplied most of his retail business.

All in all, Arnie believed, he was a model businessman, employer, and patriotic citizen.

And he despised every aspect of it.

Three times, he’d been robbed in the past two months, once by a man with a hammer, and twice by people carrying guns. Arnie had known the kid with the hammer and had told the cops right off. They’d caught him hours later buying drugs with the till money. The little jerk had ended up with barely a scratch, being underage. No record, no jail time, just a few weeks in rehab. To Arnie’s thinking, hardly the penalty for threatening a man’s life. This was Vermont, after all, famously one of the best states in which to break any law you liked.

But Arnie had suffered nightmares for weeks, envisioning that hammer coming down on his skull. And that was before the two guys with guns. They had really scared him.

The first had been so nervous, Arnie had worried more about the gun going off accidentally—the ultimate irony. The kid had worn a ski mask, dark with sweat, and his hand had trembled as if he’d been sick. Even his voice had cracked. If the barrel of the gun hadn’t been so real, Arnie might’ve even felt sorry for the poor bastard. But the gun had been real, and the son-of-a-bitch had hit Arnie across the head with it just before he left, for no reason at all.

They’d caught that one, too—a drug user like the first—and him at least they’d put away. But Arnie still had the scar, and the flash of realization that had accompanied its acquisition that one of these days, he might actually be killed for running this marginal, ball-busting convenience store.

Then the latest one had shown up.

Not a kid. Not nervous. An out-and-out bad man.

The gun had been bigger, the hand hadn’t shaken, and he’d worn the hood of his sweatshirt pulled down over half his face, giving him an almost demonic appearance. And he’d clearly enjoyed his work. He’d come around the counter, forced Arnie to the floor, face down, and had emptied the cash drawer himself. He’d even stuffed some Slim Jims into his pocket as an afterthought. Then he’d knelt next to Arnie’s head, had shoved the barrel of his gun into Arnie’s ear, and had cocked the hammer, chuckling all the while.

“Tell me where you live, little man,” the man had whispered.

Arnie had told him, the dread rising up in him, making it hard to breathe.

“Now we both know. You might want to remember that if you’re planning on calling the cops.”

After which he’d reached with his gloved hand between Arnie’s legs and had given his testicles a hard, painful squeeze. “I got you here, little man. Never forget it. Keep your mouth shut or this’ll be nothing compared to what’s next.”

Arnie hadn’t told anyone about him. Not the cops, not his wife, not his buddies. He’d swallowed the loss, had struggled with the fear, had consulted with the security man.

And had bought the gun.

That hadn’t turned out too well. Instead of supplying him the comfort he’d hoped for, the gun had nestled under Arnie’s untucked shirt like a tumor threatening his life. He started judging everyone who entered the place in relationship to the gun—would they force him to use it or not? The anger he’d channeled into visions of shooting the hooded man, were he to dare to show his face again, was gradually replaced by the fear that he really might return—and that Arnie would die for having presumed a cold-bloodedness he knew he didn’t possess.

Tentatively, as he’d done a hundred times since buying the damn thing, Arnie touched the butt of the gun through his shirt with his fingertips, as if the bulk of it against his stomach weren’t enough to confirm its presence.

They were alone in the store, the girl and he, and he knew goddamned well she was hiding back there, biding her time to step forward.

He’d recognized the type, of course, as soon as he’d caught sight of her—underfed, dirty hair, her clothes a mess and probably not her own. Her body language upon entering hadn’t met the two standards of legitimacy— either looking around to get a bearing or heading straight for a known product. Instead, it had been like a rat’s running for cover—from the door to the aisle offering the most cover from Arnie’s view. He’d seen that in shoplifters before. And with both the hammer kid and the nervous man with the ski mask. Although not the last guy.

Still, she was only a girl.

“Miss?” he finally called out, doubtful of the authority he tried to inject into his voice. “Is there something I can help you find?”

“The money,” she answered from a totally different direction. And very nearby.

He swung around, startled, stumbling slightly as his feet tangled. She hadn’t stayed by the fridges. Somehow, she’d circled around, coming at him from behind his own counter, slipping through the narrow gap beyond the hotdog machine at the far end. She was ghostly pale, her red, sunken eyes resting on dark pouches of swollen skin. She looked barely able to stand, much less resist an attack by him.

But in her hand she held a knife, large and glinting in the light, and the gun against his abdomen suddenly felt like an ice cube, sending a deep wave of cold from his stomach out to his extremities.

“Take it easy,” he said.

“Give me the money,” she ordered, her voice barely a whisper.

“You need a doctor.”

She stepped closer and gestured with the knife. What strength she had was clearly being routed to that hand. He had no doubt whatsoever she could harm him if necessary.

And yet, inexplicably to him, staring at another weapon in still another loser’s fist suddenly reversed the coldness he’d just experienced, flushing his face with rage and making him at least think of some heroic counteraction.

But that’s where it stayed—in the thought process. The impotence remained, compounding his anger. He turned toward the cash register, humiliated, presenting her with his back. “You fucking bastards.”

The sound of the till springing open matched the electronic ding of someone crossing the threshold of the store’s far entrance—the one near the hot-dog machine behind the girl.

Despite it being summertime, the man entering had the hood of his sweatshirt pulled partly over his face.

They were a team.

Seeing his nightmare brought back to life threw Arnie into a second reversal. Yielding to fear and fury combined, he pulled his gun from under his shirt, swiveled to face the girl, who was looking over her shoulder at the man in the hood, and fired.

The explosion was huge, deafening Arnie, reverberating off the walls, dropping the girl like a pile of clothes to the floor, and sending the hooded man staggering back in alarm against the door behind him.

His hood slipped from his head as his head smacked against the glass and Arnie, his gun now trained on him, his finger tight on the trigger, saw a wide-eyed, pimply teenager he knew well from past transactions.

They stared at each other for a long, very quiet moment before the teenager finally managed to stammer, “Oh, shit. Please don’t.”

Arnie saw him raise his empty hands in surrender and finally lowered the gun, the realization of what he’d just done slowly settling on him like a fog.

Crumpled and silent on the floor, the girl began leaking a dark puddle of blood.

Joe Gunther didn’t bother showing his badge to the Brattleboro patrolman guarding the convenience store entrance. They knew one another. Gunther had once been his superior.

“Hey, Larry. Who’s running this?”

“The detective’s inside. How’d you hear about it? We barely got here.”

Gunther smiled. “Scanner. Hard to break old habits.”

The patrolman opened the door for him and Gunther stepped from a cool summer darkness filled with flashing red and blue strobes into the store’s harsh fluorescent lighting, suggestive of an operating room.

Or a morgue.

A tall young man with an oddly hesitant manner rose from behind the counter. His face broke into a broad smile as he recognized the new arrival.

“Lieutenant. Good to see you. God, it’s been a while. I didn’t think the VBI went in for things like this.”

He stuck out a hand, realized it was sheathed in a latex glove, and began struggling to remove it.

Joe Gunther quickly grasped him by the forearm in greeting. “It’s okay, Ron. It’s not worth the hassle to put it back on.”

He didn’t bother correcting the other man on his outdated rank. Gunther hadn’t been a lieutenant in several years. It was “Special Agent” now, a burdensome title he still found absurd, but which the political birth mothers of the new Vermont Bureau of Investigation had chosen in a typical effort to impose profundity where it could only be earned over time. “And I’m not here officially—just offering help if it’s needed. You okay with my dropping by?”

Ron Klesczewski shook his head in amazement. “You kidding? Just like old times. Not that we need help. This is more like the inevitable finally happening.”

“I just heard it was a shooting.”

Klesczewski invited Gunther to look over the far edge of the counter at the wide pool of drying blood now spread from one edge of the narrow space to the other. It was smeared and covered with lug-soled boot prints, he presumed from the ambulance crew he’d also heard summoned on the scanner. If not for the slaughterhouse color, it might have looked like the aftermath of a playful struggle in a mud bath.

“Storekeeper shot a nineteen-year-old woman. She’s still alive—barely. He used a .357. Real cannon. I don’t think he had any idea what he was doing.”

Gunther tilted his chin toward a carving knife lying at the edge of the crimson mess. “That hers?”

Klesczewski nodded and quickly glanced at the small notepad in his hand. “Arnold Weller’s the owner. He’s been robbed twice recently, once at gunpoint, once by a guy with a hammer. He bought the gun out of frustration. Said he wouldn’t have shot her if he hadn’t thought the other guy was involved, but I’m not so sure.”

Gunther looked at him briefly without comment. Klesczewski quickly answered the implied question. “Some teenage kid walked in just as these two were facing off. He had his sweatshirt hood down low over his face—it’s a fad right now, plus it’s a little on the cool side. Arnie swore he thought he was a bad guy.”

“The kid was clueless?” Gunther asked.

“Oh, yeah. Went to the hospital, too. He could barely talk, he was so shaken up. Like I said, the whole thing was just waiting to happen—more and more dopers doing more and more rip-offs. Storekeepers getting cranked by the week. Matter of time before somebody killed somebody. Maybe this one was itching for an opportunity, maybe he was just frazzled to the limit.”

Despite the nature of the conversation, Gunther suppressed a smile at his young colleague’s seasoned attitude. Ron Klesczewski had been a fresh-faced detective when Gunther had run the Brattleboro squad a few years back. He’d been given command of it upon Joe’s departure only because Gunther had taken the most obvious successor along with him to his new job. A natural with paperwork and computers, Klesczewski had been slow gaining selfconfidence otherwise. Although things had obviously improved now that he was top dog. Gunther’s amusement was in adjusting the new to his memories of the old.

“She was on drugs?” he asked.

Klesczewski shrugged. “Blood tests’ll probably tell us before she will—assuming she survives. But she has the look, all the way down to the fresh track marks in her arm.”

Gunther gazed once more at the gore covering the linoleum behind the counter—a body’s life blood diluted with the root cause of its own destruction. Ron Klesczewski was perfectly correct about the inevitability of Brattleboro’s increasing dilemma, but he could just as easily have extended it to include the entire state. While bent on pushing the same old romantic, fuzzy image of cows and maple syrup and grizzled farmers muttering “Ah-yup,” Vermont was in fact facing a heroin epidemic. Almost one hundred fatal overdoses had been racked up in the past ten years, and countless more reversed in hospitals and ambulances. Small potatoes compared to Boston or New York, but not so negligible on a per capita basis, in a state of a half million residents. And it was climbing fast. The state police drug task force, which used to count heroin busts in the single digits five years back, was now spending fifty percent of its time on these cases alone.