Primed for Murder (31 page)

What would he travel on? He didn’t have a dime on him. As a known credit risk, he didn’t have any acquaintances that would not only stake him to an escape but keep their mouths shut about it as well. His truck was a dead giveaway and useless as a getaway vehicle even if he knew how to hotwire it.

So he’d hitchhike. And beg. And rely upon the kindness of strangers to get someplace where he could start over.

First, though, he had to survive the night.

As Toby rowed, cabins and lights reappeared along both shorelines. He glanced over a shoulder, corrected his course.

He’d stay smack in the middle of the lake until he was past the Giambi place.

Then he’d land at the extreme southern end, half a mile beyond the mobster’s home. From that point it would be only a short hike through hilly woods to Route 20 where, if he was lucky, he could thumb a ride.

Where could he go? How would he get there?

The lights of Giambi’s house should be visible a few hundred yards off to his right but the place was dark now. Still, he could make out the straight line of the wall and the massy bulk of the building inland, standing out against alternating beams of red and blue and white lights that strobed from the structure’s far side.

Funny, sounded like somebody had started setting off fireworks over there. Two deep-throated explosions—BOOM! BOOM!—reverberated over the water but no fiery streamers lit up the sky. Several sharp snaps, like a string of firecrackers, replied in counterpoint, followed by the tinkle and crash of breaking glass. From the darkness, a flame shot out sideways towards the house and a beat later a stuttering noise reached Toby’s ears.

It wasn’t a belated Fourth of July celebration he was witnessing; it was a war between cops and mobsters. The flashing red lights emanated from the tops of police cars. The noises came from firearms.

He stopped rowing opposite Giambi’s house, the better to watch and listen.

Something plopped into the water not ten feet away, between Toby and the house. He couldn’t tell if it was a spent bullet or a fish rising for an insect. To be on the safe side, he ducked low in the boat.

The battle on shore didn’t last long. Withering fusillades from outside made return fire from inside slow and then stop. A thick pall of white smoke hung over the house. Men shouted, their incoherent words drifting across the water. Flashlight beams drew brief, unrecognizable patterns in the night as dark figures closed in on the house and darted inside. The cops were in control.

In Toby, curiosity wrestled with caution and won. There wasn’t anywhere else to go, really, not without transportation and money. He might as well see this thing through to the end.

He steered towards Giambi’s home, pulling the oars in long strokes. In moments, the prow grounded on gritty sand near the darkened boathouse. He climbed out, legs shaky, cold water lapping about his calves and slopping into his ankle-high boots. He pulled the rowboat onto shore where it would be handy if he needed to get away quick.

The house at the top of the slope was still dark, as though those inside hadn’t found a switch. Or maybe somebody had shut down the circuit breaker. Only the occasional wink of a flashlight through a window betrayed the fact somebody was alive inside. Crouching to present as small a target as possible, Toby took a roundabout route towards the house, squishing through close-cropped lawn. He hit the driveway and followed it alongside the house until he could see around front.

Pulled up haphazardly in the turnaround were a half-dozen police cruisers and several unmarked vehicles, doors open like wings, flashing light bars bathing house and grounds with splashes of blue and red and white, blue and red and white, blue and red and white. A policeman with a bandage around his head leaned against the hood of one car, eyes closed. Another uniformed officer was having a wounded arm attended to by a female cop with a first-aid kit. They didn’t see Toby flit past.

The side door of Giambi’s house was wide open and Toby crept towards it. The frame was splintered and the door panel beside the knob was deeply indented as though something heavy had struck it there. The object that had done the damage, a four-inch diameter steel battering ram with handles, lay abandoned beside the entrance.

From inside the house came muffled, unidentifiable sounds. Toby sidled through the doorway, eyes moving, senses alert. The interior was pitch-black, featureless, and Toby shuffled forward, hands outstretched to ward off obstacles. He found a flight of stairs and moved up one, two, three steps. On either side, his fingers encountered smooth wood: a hallway. His toe stubbed against a soft, heavy object and he almost fell.

Toby bent to feel what had tripped him: a big man’s body, still warm but not moving. No heartbeat. Something tacky under his fingers: blood, lots of it. Beneath the coppery smell was a pungent aroma of cordite and layered under that was a tang of garlic. It was Gino, and he was dead as yesterday’s news. Toby stepped over the crumpled bulk blocking the hallway like an industrial-sized bag of fertilizer, and inched across the carpet. If he remembered correctly, the kitchen should be along here to the right.

A light suddenly caught him in the face, blinding him. “Police! Freeze!” Toby shut his eyes but otherwise didn’t twitch. Behind his eyelids the world was brilliant reds and yellows. “On your face,” someone commanded. “Hands behind your back.”

Toby obeyed the orders with alacrity. Light pinned him. Booted feet came closer. Hands patted the length of his body, then roughly aligned his arms and clamped cold steel around his wrists. He was yanked to his feet and propelled down the hall into Giambi’s living room.

The place was a mess and getting messier by the minute. Windows looking onto the lake had been shattered. Shards of broken glass glittered in the beams of many flashlights as dark-clad men—with POLICE printed in glowing neon on their jackets—prowled about.

One man ripped an abstract painting from a wall, flung it to the floor and put his foot through the canvas. Another methodically drew three-inch-deep Xs on cushions and backs of every couch and chair with the serrated blade of a folding knife. A third man kicked a delicate wooden table into kindling.

The tearing, crashing sounds of senseless destruction emanated from every corner of the house.

His captors led Toby through a couple of turns and into a large, windowless conference room that served as headquarters for the police raid. The room seemed crowded. Bright lanterns were placed at either end of a thirty-foot-long mahogany table that showed fresh scratches on its highly polished surface. Comfortable-looking leather captain’s chairs surrounding the table appeared to have been attacked by tigers.

In stark illumination, four men with weapons, all in POLICE-emblazoned windbreakers over bulletproof vests, were clustered around Dezi and the dumpy gray-haired woman Toby had seen earlier. The two females were huddled together on a loveseat in one corner. The men alternately demanded, “Tell us where they are!” or “Give it up, ladies!” or shouted curses. The women remained tight-lipped. Dezi, Toby noticed, had a black eye—courtesy of Artie or her dad or the police? Other battle-attired policemen stood over the blood-splattered bodies of three dark-haired, tough-looking men whom Toby had never seen before.

“Look what I found,” a man holding Toby’s left arm said. The men around the bodies turned to look. One was stocky, sandy-haired: French.

The detective came forward. “Where’d you come from?” he asked. French gestured and the man holding Toby unlocked the handcuffs.

Toby rubbed at red marks around his wrists. “I could ask you the same thing.”

“You first.”

How to play it? The truth seemed best. “I was out boating with your partner.”

“Dixon? Where is he?” French’s green cop-eyes bored into Toby’s.

This is going to be tricky, Toby thought. Cops always took it bad when one of their own bought it, even if the dead man was no damn good. He took a deep breath and let words spill out. “Dixon won’t be joining us. He went for a late swim.”

French frowned. “I don’t follow you.”

“He dived in the lake,” Toby said, “but he didn’t come up.”

The detective’s eyes went wide. “You’re saying he’s dead?”

Prompted by rapid-fire questions from hard men standing too close for comfort, Toby related what had happened with Dixon. “I didn’t mean to kill him.”

The story didn’t seem to mollify the policemen. They shot Toby with large-caliber, high-velocity glares and fingered holstered weapons.

French scratched his chin, studying Toby. He sniffed a cha-cha. “If it’s as you say, Rew, it sounds like self-defense. You’ve got a right to protect yourself, even against a rogue cop.” He sighed and turned away, taking Toby with him. “I knew he was bent, my own partner,” French whispered. “But I never suspected he’d go this far.”

Toby’s face felt hot. “You knew Dixon was crooked?”

French sighed again. “I saw him take payoffs from known mob associates. I told the chief about him months ago and we started an undercover operation, in cooperation with Madison County Law Enforcement, since Cazenovia is out of our jurisdiction. We were giving Dixon rope, watching him, waiting for him to hook up with Giambi. He’d have been arrested along with the rest of the crooks, if it’d worked out that way.” He beat out the opening bars of a nasal tango.

“You gave him too much rope. He almost hanged me with the slack.”

“We had you all the way. There’s a tracking device on your truck.”

“We didn’t take my truck, damn it.” His voice was raw with anger. Toby felt like punching French’s leaky nose. “I got hauled out here in the trunk of Artie’s car.”

“Know all about it.” French reached into a jacket pocket and displayed the miniature transmitter the detective had tried to convince Toby to carry. “I planted this in your new place yesterday, figuring somebody might brace you there. We were just down the road and heard every word, including Artie’s confession of murder.”

What gall these bastards had! “Then you know how close Artie came to shooting.” Toby shook with suppressed rage. “You could have heard me being killed.”

“What are you getting worked up about? You talked your way out of it.” French chuckled. “Bet that doesn’t happen too often with Artie.”

“I couldn’t talk your partner out of trying to kill me.” Toby’s fists clenched into tight balls. “He was sure as death going to do it. If he hadn’t gotten careless, I wouldn’t be talking to you now. Where were you when Dixon took me out in the boat? What plan did you have to protect me out in the middle of the lake?”

“Take it easy. You won and Dixon lost. I hate to say it, but it’s probably best Frank ended up this way.” He glanced at the other men around him and raised his voice. “We can write it up so it looks like Dixon died in the line of duty, make sure his family gets taken care of.” Other men muttered agreement.

“You’ll go along with that, won’t you, Rew?” French said, all earnest. “Dixon’s wife and kids didn’t do anything wrong. No sense making it hard on them.”

“I don’t care. Just leave me out of it from now on.”

Three grunting policemen dragged Gino’s limp corpse into the room, intent upon lining him up with the other bodies on the floor. When they passed, Toby saw the mob soldier had taken half a dozen hits in the body. One large-caliber hole through the thick throat had probably done the trick.

An officer who’d been grilling the women came over. “They won’t talk,” he said to French. “We’ve searched the house and grounds and shore. No dice. They must have got away by boat during the firefight.”

“You pass anybody on your way in, Rew?” French asked him sharply. The detective looked worried.

“Not that I noticed. Missing somebody?”

French ruffled his sandy hair. “Just the main players. We have two live women and four dead soldiers. Old man Giambi, Leo and Artie are all gone.”

Toby wondered if he’d somehow wandered into a Keystone Cops movie. “They were all here when I rowed away with Dixon.”

“They didn’t leave by the front gate, that’s for sure. We smashed it down on the way in.” French tugged an earlobe. “If they didn’t get away across the water—”

“They must still be here,” another policeman concluded.

Toby let out trapped breath. Did he have to do everything for these clowns? He’d better tell them—he’d never feel safe until all the bad guys were rounded up and locked away. “I might know where they’re hiding,” he said.

That got everybody’s attention. He led a troop of armed lawmen, headed by French, through the darkened house. They went out the broken glass doors, across the deck and down the stairs leading to the basement, Toby explaining as he went. Other raiders were already down there, working to crank the generator. As Toby’s group passed through, an engine started up and lights flickered to life. In the marble-floored lounge, Toby found the remote control, turned on the TV and punched up 888. The mirrored door across the room clicked open. There was no elevator, only empty space with taut cables visible running up and down.

French shone a flashlight down the shaft. “The elevator car is down there. I can see it.” His voice echoed hollowly. The detective ordered someone to call SWAT and came over where Toby stood. “Looks like you were right. They’re down there. Is there any other way out?”

“Not that I know of. The treasure vault is supposed to be air-tight.”

“Giambi’s slippery,” French mused. “Wouldn’t put it past him to have another escape route built-in somewhere.”

Chapter 26

As it turned out, there was no other way out of the vault Giambi had built to protect his ill-gotten goodies.

The SWAT relief team soon arrived, along with a fleet of ambulances to carry off dead and wounded. Dezi and Mom Giambi, held as material witnesses, were led away for further grilling. French allowed Toby to remain in the safety of the plush lounge and watch the finale unfold. Black-clad men, faces covered by masks that concealed everything but their eyes, rappelled down the elevator shaft with weapons slung over their shoulders. “Found blood!” someone yelled.