The Sniper's Wife (8 page)

Willy regretted having broached the subject, and tried to get back on track. “Why did you break up, though? You said that was only part of it.”

Andy put on a philosophical look. “Part of it, all of it. Hard to tell, when you think back. I mean, I’m no shrink, and she had a lot of issues, probably before you ever met her, so who knows where all that crap comes from? And I wasn’t in such a great place, either—a super bad choice for her, looking back. But you know how she was: all that energy… hard to resist. And I don’t resist too well anyhow.”

He toyed with his coffee cup a little before adding, “I always felt weird about that, you know? Her being your ex. I hope that never pissed you off too much.”

Here, at least, Willy could be perfectly honest. “Never did. I thought you’d be a good match.”

Andy smiled ruefully. “So did I. We might have been, if she’d gotten you out of her system. And even with that, the first two or three years were great, after she finally moved in with me.” Suddenly he laughed with embarrassment. “That’s pretty good, huh? Turns out I was more ticked off at you than you were at me, and I was the one living with her. Boy.”

After a moment’s stilted silence, Willy asked, “How’d she get hooked?”

Andy looked pained. “Know what I said about my being a bad choice for her? That was no lie. I didn’t see it coming…I guess that’s nothing new. What with the divorce and living with me and her mom rejecting her, I should’ve known better. But I was too busy doin’ deals and living hard. By then, I’d taken her for granted, too. She was just sort of there all the time.”

He was having trouble forming his words. He passed a hand across his face as if to clear it of cobwebs. Willy thought the beer might be having both a liberating and a fogging effect by now.

Finally, Andy sat up straight and admitted, “Look, you got good reason to punch me out for this, but I guess I got her into that shit. I was doing a little myself then—pills and some heroin, and the booze like always. I hate to admit it, but that’s what got her started. She didn’t want to be left out more than she already was, and since I was doin’ it anyhow, I didn’t see any harm. I know it sounds bad—I mean, it is bad—but we were clueless. It was fun, felt good, the money was startin’ to roll in. By the time I woke up, she was pretty far gone. Heroin’s a hard habit to break.”

He didn’t add anything for a while, concentrating on the empty coffee cup as if it contained nitroglycerin.

Willy prodded him in a quiet voice. “What happened, finally?”

Andy didn’t meet his eyes. “Well, we did break up, of course. Her talking about you, me bitching that she was either zoned all the time or out trying to score. It got pretty ugly, and I didn’t have the patience for it. I never been too good with that, either.”

“You threw her out,” Willy suggested, paying him back a little for the you-broke-her-heart refrain.

Andy looked at him then, an almost pleading expression on his face. “No. I mean, she did move out and we did have one last big fight. But I was too screwed up to be that decisive. It just sort of fell apart. I guess, though,” he added after a pause, “that I didn’t stop her, either. And I didn’t go after her.”

“How long ago was this?”

Andy rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. “Years. A few years. Shit, I don’t remember.”

“You ever keep up with her?”

He shook his head. “Nah. Damn, this sure doesn’t look good, does it?”

Willy pursed his lips, thinking, it’s not about you, but said instead, “When she was out trying to score, do you know who she dealt with?”

Andy was obviously confused by the question. “Who she got her stuff from?” He scratched his head. “Jesus… I don’t … she started with people I introduced her to, but after things got crazy, I put the word out to shut her down. I don’t know who she used after that. It doesn’t matter anyway—even my old dealers are all dead, gone, or in the joint by now. Why all the questions?”

“You heard she’d cleaned up, though, right?” Willy persisted, ignoring him. “You said you’d talked to Bob. You knew about my new job.”

Andy squirmed in his seat. “Damn, you really are a cop, aren’t you?” He smiled guiltily. “Okay, yeah. I did hear. I mean, I asked and Bob told me. I was curious, you know? You reach a certain age, you get married, settle down, begin to think back—you and me, ’Nam, Mary… I started to wonder. The stuff you did when you were young starts to mean more.”

“You called Bob out of the blue?”

“I had his number from when Mary was still around. She used to call him to find out about you. Pissed me off, actually. I told her to cut it out, but I kept the number. He was surprised to hear from me—I think even a little embarrassed—but he sort of gave me the condensed version of what was going on. I felt bad about putting him on the spot.”

Which explained why Bob hadn’t admitted to the phone call, Willy thought.

He noticed Andy was looking at him with a pointed seriousness all of a sudden, his drunkenness apparently evaporated.

“Enough, Willy. Why the third degree?”

Willy hesitated, pondering the value of his information and when its release could serve him best. Now seemed as good a time as any.

“She’s dead. That’s why I’m down here.”

Andy stared at him in silence for a moment, his mouth half open, his hands tight around the coffee cup.

“Jesus,” he finally murmured, barely audible amid the noise around them.

“They found her with a needle in her arm,” Willy added for effect, wondering why, right after the words left his mouth. Andy had been helpful and straightforward, undeserving of such brutality. But by his own admission, he’d also taken a fragile woman, introduced her to drugs, and then tossed her out. Regardless of his sensitivity now, he’d been as bad as Willy on this score, if in a different manner, and Willy didn’t see treating him any more lightly than he treated himself.

Andy sat back in his seat and swallowed hard. After taking a shuddering breath, he said softly, “That’s pretty cold, Sniper. Just like the old days.”

“I didn’t introduce her to the shit in that needle,” Willy said.

Andy’s face turned dark red. He awkwardly rose to his feet and glared down at him. “The hell you didn’t. You don’t know the basket case I inherited. You fucked with her head so good not even the heroin had any effect. Shit…I was just the poor dumb slob standing between what you did to her and where she ended up. She was like on autopilot all the way.” He leaned forward, his anger climbing. “Don’t you lay that shit on me, you goddamn cripple. You don’t get off the hook that easy.”

He stood there breathing hard for a moment, before finally straightening and adding as he left, “The meal’s on you, jerk. I hope it wipes you out.”

Willy sat at the table for a long while afterward, almost motionless, trying to do what he’d done so well for years: batten the hatches and bottle up the turmoil.

But as he’d suspected they might even before he’d arrived in this city, certain survival techniques were beginning to fail.

Chapter 8

S
ammie Martens parked in the narrow driveway behind Joe Gunther’s car and killed the engine. Gunther lived in a converted carriage house tucked behind a huge Victorian pile on one of Brattleboro’s residential streets. The town was littered with such ornate buildings, in both the high-and low-rent districts—remnants of a past industrial age when New England and its dozens of sooty redbrick communities pumped their commodities into a growing, hungry, affluent society. Now the former showpiece homes of bosses and middle managers ran the gamut from private residences to run-down apartment buildings, depending on how the town’s neighborhoods had settled out.

It was late, and Sammie knew she had no real reason for being here, that nothing could be gained from it, but the lights showing through Gunther’s windows encouraged her nevertheless. After all, it was the nature of Joe’s character, and of how he’d encouraged them all to speak freely with him, that had prompted her to come here in the first place.

She swung out of the car into the sharp evening air and closed the door softly behind her. The carriage house was small enough that it reminded her of a toy railroad model, or something designed for dolls—seemingly an odd kind of place for an old cop to live, unless you knew him.

Gunther wasn’t cut from the Marine Corps model of square-jawed law enforcement, although he had that military experience in his past, including time in combat. If anything, given her aggressive style, Sammie fit that image better. Instead, Gunther could almost be fatherly: quiet, thoughtful, slow to anger or to rebuke, and unusually attentive to his people’s personal dilemmas. He had periodically gone to extremes to keep Willy out of trouble, but he’d also watched out for Sammie’s well-being over the years, as he had most of the people who’d ever worked with him.

Willy had groused to her occasionally that the “Old Man,” in his words, was compensating for having no kids or wife, and that he should mind his own business. Sammie not only disagreed, but knew the comment had more to do with Willy’s shortcomings than with Gunther’s. Joe didn’t have kids or a wife, true enough, but he had been married long ago to a woman who’d died of cancer, and was involved with another, for well over a decade now, with whom he had a devoted if quirky relationship—including not only separate residences, but also absences lasting for weeks on end when she was working at her lobbyist job up in Montpelier. Their alliance was obviously something only the two of them fully understood, but it seemed to work quite well.

Sammie could only envy them there. Her love life had been as turbulent and dreary as Joe’s had been placid, and her present involvement with Willy hardly seemed proof of a cure.

The front door opened to her knock and Joe Gunther stood before her with a plane in his hand and wood shavings sprinkled across the front of his pants. “Hi, Sam,” he said, unperturbed by the late hour. “Come on in. I was just goofing off in the shop.”

He’d converted a small barn off the back of the house into a woodworking shop. It was a newfound hobby for a man who used to only read and listen to classical music on those rare evenings he wasn’t working late. Sammie found it endearing, imagining her boss as a late-blooming elf, priming his talents to make toys for Santa. Except that she also knew it was largely a front. For all his softspoken ways and seeming imperturbability, Joe Gunther was actually more of a Clydesdale: an unstoppable force who compensated for a lack of genius with a doggedness second to none. Sammie had seen him plow through adversity, pain, and personal loss with stamina and courage she could only imagine.

“You want a cup of coffee?” he asked, ushering her in.

“No. I’m okay.”

He took her jacket and hung it on a nearby hook and invited her into the small living room around the corner, whose back door, standing ajar, led directly into the wood shop. He gestured to her to take a seat and, placing the plane on the coffee table between them, settled into an old armchair, scattering a few wood shavings onto the rug.

“You heard from Willy yet?” he asked.

“No,” she admitted.

“Which is why you’re here,” he suggested gently.

She looked at him ruefully. “Yeah. I’m sorry to be a pain. I’m just worried.”

“So am I,” he admitted, which surprised and comforted her. “I even called Detective Ogden again to see if he knew anything. Which he didn’t,” he added in response to her hopeful expression.

“So, what’re we supposed to do?” she asked.

Gunther shrugged. “There are options. Technically, he’s AWOL, so we could act on that. For the moment, I’ve just put him on bereavement leave, which is stretching things a bit for an ex-spouse. But we’re not too busy right now, and the rest of us can handle his caseload, so I don’t see the harm, and I sure don’t see blowing the whistle on him.”

“And in the meantime, we wait?” she asked, her voice rich with impatience and frustration.

He nodded. “Yup. He’s got to work this out.”

Sammie slapped her leg with her hand. “Work what out? I understand he feels guilty about messing up their marriage, but that was years ago. From what he told me, she wasn’t the most stable person in the world to start with, and he wasn’t the one who put her on drugs. I mean, Christ knows he’s no saint, but it takes two to tango. What’s he doing down there?”

Gunther smiled softly. “Seeking absolution, I would guess. He’s a man driven by devils. By guilt now, anger when he went to Vietnam, self-loathing when he hit the bottle. Right now, I figure he’s hoping he can get himself off the hook somehow, even if he’s convinced he’ll never succeed. If we’re lucky, he’ll come home when he runs out of gas.”

Sammie stared at him in silence. He laughed and held up a hand. “All right. That’s a little too easy, but don’t you forget how you felt about him in the old days. I’m really happy you two are together, but our Willy is a handful. You should remember that and protect yourself a little.”

Sammie didn’t answer, choosing to fix her eyes on the dark fireplace across from her.

“Right?” he repeated.

She glanced at him, slightly irritated. But she knew him well, having worked under him for more than ten years, first at the Brattleboro PD with Willy and then for this new outfit, and she knew he didn’t say such things without reason. She swallowed her defensive first reaction and considered what he’d said. It was true that when she and Willy were first on Joe’s detective squad, they’d fought like dogs, protecting their turf and taking swipes at each other at the slightest provocation. They laughed a little edgily about that now, when they were feeling sure of each other, but it was hard sometimes not to believe that their current affection was merely the same old passion with a twist. Willy was sometimes hard to love.

That thought process finally made her nod in response to Joe’s question. “I guess so. You’ve known him a long time. Did he ever tell you about Vietnam?”

Gunther thought awhile. “Sort of. I was able to fill in some of the blanks from my own time in combat. He did a lot of long-range recon work, deep into the enemy’s back pocket. It got pretty ugly sometimes—guys making up their own rules as they went and not saying much when they got back. I know his nickname was the Sniper, if that tells you anything. I guess it described his attitude as much as any specialty he had. And he wasn’t alone there. The war had fallen apart, the American public was sick of it, the rest of the world thought we were the pits. The Kennedys and Malcolm X and Martin Luther King had been assassinated one by one. Urban riots were the norm. You’re young enough that it all looks kind of quaint and antiseptic now. But there were serious doubts we’d survive as a nation. When Willy went off to fight, returning vets were already being met at the airports by protesters spitting on them and calling them baby killers. Those were very tough years.”

“Why did he go, then?” she asked.

“I always thought it was because he was ready to kill somebody—he just had sense enough to want to do it legally.”

Sammie stared at him wide-eyed. “He told you that?”

Gunther shook his head. “No. He had a tough time growing up. I don’t know all the details, but by his late teens, I guess he was a basket case. He tried the cops first. Apparently, that wasn’t enough. The military suited his needs better anyway. It was a post-World War Two army, transfixed by the Great Red Menace—basically the same bunch who’d trained me earlier. They weren’t the sensitive guys who let you enlist to ‘Be all that You Can Be.’ Back then, it was kill the gook. Simple.

“Willy allowed himself to be turned into the equivalent of a human knife blade, probably hoping for some sort of cathartic release. Except that it only complicated things and added to the baggage he was already carrying.”

“He is pretty certifiable sometimes,” Sammie said.

But Joe shook his head. “My back pocket psychology is that we’re all giving him the support today he craved growing up, but since he’s literally been to the wars and back, he doesn’t know how to accept it. He needs it, wants it, and hangs around to receive it, but he’ll flip you the finger when you pony it up because he sees all dependence as a sign of weakness.”

Sammie pondered that for a while, a frown growing across her face. “Sounds like I got stuck with another Froot Loop.” She smacked her forehead with the heel of her hand in mock penitence. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

Gunther laughed, but his eyes were serious. “You really believe that?”

“What’s not to believe?” she asked him. “You’re describing a guy who needs help but who kicks whoever’s helping him in the teeth so he can maintain his selfimage. That sound like a pick of the litter to you?”

“It wouldn’t be if it weren’t a work in progress. He is improving.”

She wanted to argue the point, but she couldn’t. It was true. Willy had learned to control his alcoholism through sheer willpower. His more flagrantly self-destructive behavior was largely a thing of the past. When they were alone together, he’d exhibited tenderness and warmth she’d never thought him capable of in the old days. And, as naive as it sounded even to her, there was the art—the pencil sketches he did, often while on stakeout, quickly and efficiently with that powerful, dexterous right hand, turning out images of subtle beauty.

Still, it pissed her off. “Why can’t I fall for a normal guy?”

Joe Gunther gazed at her affectionately. “Because you’re not a normal woman.”

“Perfect. I really wanted to hear that. What was Mary like?” she asked after a pause.

He thought a moment before answering, “There’s a danger right now of just seeing her as a junkie loser. But when I met her, she was naive and shy and damaged and a real sweetheart. And she worshiped Willy, probably for all the wrong reasons. The way that marriage ended burned both of them terribly—her because of the betrayal she’d suffered, and him because it was the latest and biggest example of his failure as a human being. I don’t know what Mary was up to in New York, but it was more than just being a victim. ’Cause she was smart, too, and, after Willy, good and angry. Whatever she was planning by going down there, you can bet that getting even was part of it.”

Sammie shook her head. “I just hope he’s not the target, even from the grave.”

At around the same moment, back in New York’s Lower East Side, Willy Kunkle stood quietly in the shadows of an empty warehouse, hidden behind a concrete buttress, watching a small piece of urban theater play out at the end of the block. There, along a darker stretch of East Broadway, a young man paced the sidewalk, a quirky combination of self-confidence and nervousness. Dressed in the quasi-uniform of baggy pants, sneakers, watch cap, and loose logo jacket, he bounced back and forth like an eager dog prowling a dock, awaiting the return of its owner’s boat. But the boats, in this case passing cars, went back and forth in a blur, seemingly ignoring him.

Until one slowed, veered slightly to get out of traffic, and then stopped. The young man’s body language instantly changed. Now diffident, almost surly, he reluctantly approached the car as if it had a bad odor, and condescended to bend ever so slightly at the waist to address the driver through the passenger-side window. There was a short conversation, after which the young man—a drug dealer’s so-called steerer—straightened dismissively and gestured to the driver to pull over to the entrance of an alleyway directly across from Willy’s observation post. His role fulfilled, the steerer returned to keeping a lookout for both customers and cops.

Willy continued watching as a small boy suddenly appeared on a bike, despite the late hour and poor visibility, and rode up and down the street without apparent purpose—the mobile perimeter sentry, activated by the driver emerging from his car. This man, white, conservatively dressed, clearly on edge, looked up and down the sidewalk before crossing to the alleyway and pausing at its opening. Willy extracted a small, inexpensive telescope he kept in his coat pocket for such occasions, and focused on the dimly lit scene.

Barely visible, the outline of a man appeared from the gloom beyond the buyer. The two conferred briefly, the dealer taking something from the buyer, after which he reached above his head to one of the upper support brackets of the roll-down metal curtain protecting a shop window next to him, and retrieved a small package—all in a gesture as smooth and fast as a hummingbird sipping from a flower.

The buyer took the drugs, quickly broke away, returned to his car, and joined his brethren in the flow of traffic. The whole thing took about two minutes.

As a final sign of returning normalcy, the underage bicyclist rolled to a stop opposite his perch barely within sight of the steerer, and waited for the next heads up.

Willy smiled and pocketed the telescope, having found what he was after. He separated himself from his hiding spot, walked down the side street, crossed East Broadway, and approached the steerer at an angle that put the young man between him and the opening to the alleyway.

Like any midrange occupant of the urban food chain, the steerer noticed Willy early and warily, stopped his restless weaving, and turned to face the threat, while balancing on the balls of his sneakered feet, ready for flight. One hand drifted toward the right-hand pocket of his jacket.