The Sniper's Wife (21 page)
This time Riley actually laughed. “You knew me, you wouldn’t ask.” He turned and began walking away, adding, “You also ain’t the only guy sellin’ guns.”
Cashman hesitated, either thinking things over or waiting for Riley to stop.
But Riley kept on walking, out of the lantern’s immediate reach.
“Wait. Hold on. We got off on the wrong foot here,” Cashman said, replacing his gun.
Riley turned to face him, but stayed where he was. “We stopping the dick-around dance, then? We gonna do business?”
Cashman let out a forced laugh. “Yeah, yeah. You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.” He reached into his pocket and removed a rag-wrapped bundle the size of a hardback book. He laid it onto the barrel’s top with a deep, echoing clang.
Which was repeated by Willy as he brushed past a piece of unseen rebar leaning up against the wall and knocked it over with a startling, reverberating, heartstopping rattle.
The reactions below him were simultaneous and immediate. The sidekick pulled out his gun and stared up at the gallery, partially blinded by the light near his head. Cashman pointed his gun at Riley. And Riley dove for cover farther into the darkness around him.
Three gun flashes filled the air like a triple burst from a fireworks display—the sidekick shooting in Willy’s direction, Willy shooting back, hitting the man in the chest, and Cashman firing at Riley Cox, who let out a grunt, spun around, and landed like a dead tree, bouncing without a twitch.
After that, it was a running firefight between Willy and Ron Cashman, with the latter sprinting toward the back of the building, shooting wildly over his shoulder, and the former keeping pace twenty feet above him, firing through the steel grate at his feet and sending up a row of sparks from the fragmenting bullets.
At the end of the gallery there was a staircase leading down to the ground floor. Willy took it three steps at a time as Cashman slammed through a door on the far wall and disappeared from view.
Breathing hard, his feet hurting from running on the grating, Willy didn’t even hesitate at the door. Seeing Riley drop amid a nightmarish flashback that commingled with images of Mary and Nate somehow finalized a cycle in his head. As he had so long ago, opening his shirt to the enemy soldier for a clean ending to it all, so now did he go after Ron Cashman with suicidal intensity, exchanging self-protection for a longing to stop the guilt and confusion.
There was a hallway beyond the door, leading down a row of abandoned offices. Ahead of him, visible in the harsh light cutting in through a shattered window from a security lamp outside, Cashman leaped over a pile of debris, dove to the ground to use it as cover, and twisted around to kill Willy Kunkle.
But Willy didn’t care. He continued running at full tilt, the bullets singing by his ears as Cashman fired in a panic, methodically squeezing off his own shots, making them count, until he stopped on top of the debris pile and was staring straight down at Cashman’s crumpled, bleeding body.
The dying man looked up at Willy, his gun now beyond his reach, his eyes wide and white in the artificial light. “Don’t shoot,” he said. “Help me.”
Given his fatalistic passion of moments earlier, Willy felt suddenly totally remote, Riley’s inert body blending with countless other killed and mangled corpses, to be filed in a part of his brain he both cherished and loathed.
He used the trick he had earlier of pretending his dead pager was a cell phone, holding it up, half hidden in his hand, and saying, “I’ll call 911 right now if you tell me what I want to know.”
Cashman groaned, tried to move, and rolled his eyes. “Oh, Jesus.”
“You killed my wife?”
“Yes.”
“With dope you bought from La Culebra?”
“Yes.”
“You killed Nate Lee?”
“Yes.”
“You tortured him first to get the goods on me?”
“Yes. Please call.”
Cashman closed his eyes briefly, like a man fighting off sleep. Willy knew he was running out of time.
“Why did you kill Mary?”
Cashman’s breathing was becoming erratic, his fingers flitting against the filthy floor as if trying to escape their dying host.
“Why?” Willy repeated.
The eyes half opened. The answer came as a whisper. “She was… greedy.”
The last word was an exhalation, and after it had drifted away, Willy felt utterly alone.
W
ard Ogden’s voice on the phone was lacking its usual friendliness. “Something’s up you better see. A car’ll be downstairs in fifteen minutes to pick both of you up.”
Gunther groped in the dark to replace the phone in its cradle and peered groggily at the red numbers on the hotel’s radio alarm clock. It wasn’t quite three in the morning. He swung his legs out of bed, padded over to the double door separating his room from Sammie’s, and pounded on it with his fist.
“Sam. Rise and shine. Gotta hit the bricks.”
The door was yanked open with surprising speed and Sammie’s face hovered before him, looking both haggard and anxious. “Is it Willy?”
“I don’t know. Ogden just called. Told us to be downstairs in fifteen minutes.”
Her face contorted with anger. “Shit, he’s done it again,” she burst out, and slammed the door, just missing Gunther’s fingers.
They were downstairs in time to greet a patrol car as it pulled up to the curb of their marginally solvent hotel. The two men in the front were polite but claimed ignorance on the reason for the trip, admitting only that they were headed for Red Hook on detective Ogden’s orders.
The found Ogden at the back of the empty warehouse, beyond a huge central room rigged with halogen lamps and a team of crime scene investigators. Outlined on the floor was the bloodstained drawing of a man, not far from another stain at least as big, along with a dusting of empty shell casings as thick as sprinkles on a doughnut.
Where Ogden was awaiting them, a second human outline lay sprawled behind a random pile of smashed-up office furniture. A gun rested just beyond the reach of one of the outline’s extended arms.
Ogden did not look happy. “Two dead: Ron Cashman with three slugs in him, and a man named Franco Silva, hit once in the heart.”
“I noticed a third stain,” Gunther commented, keeping his voice neutral. He was very aware of Sammie’s tension as she stood beside him, prepared for the worst.
“Man named Riley Cox,” Ogden explained. “Badly wounded, but apparently not lethally. He’s also refusing to talk. We checked his hands for gunpowder residue. He didn’t have a weapon we can find, and right now it doesn’t look like he fired at anyone, either.”
“Which presumably leaves Willy as the missing party,” Gunther filled in the blanks.
Ogden’s response was terse. “Right. Not that we have any proof—yet.”
“Have you come up with a likely scenario?” Sammie asked, her tone purposefully strong and professional.
“We’ve come up with a scenario, whether it’s likely or not.” He jerked his thumb toward the huge room behind them. “Some of it’s from Cashman’s lookout. We found him gagged and handcuffed to a chain-link fence outside. His boss was supposed to sell a gun to someone, we think Riley, although the gun in question is missing. It was a one-gun deal, with the option of a bigger buy if everybody got along. We think your boy took care of the sentry while Riley played the front man. Then he snuck along the gallery to nail the other two. After that, who knows? Riley was found near the middle of the room. The paramedics were phoned by an anonymous caller, probably Kunkle. As for him”—Ogden nodded his chin in the direction of Cashman’s last resting place—“it’s anybody’s guess how he died.”
“You think he might have crawled here after the shootout?” Sammie asked hopefully.
“Not with all these shell casings. He was probably wounded, though. We found him face up and he had one bullet hole in the back. One possibility is that he and Kunkle shot it out western-style. There’s a trail of shells all along the hallway.”
“What’s the other possibility?” Gunther asked, already knowing the answer.
Ogden looked at him grimly. “That Kunkle shot him where he lay. At this point, from what I’ve seen, I wouldn’t put it past him.”
Speechless because he knew it could be true, Gunther returned his gaze to the outline, wishing there was some way he could get it to talk.
“It’s only fair to tell you,” Ogden told him quietly, even gently. “I would seriously like to have a sit-down with Willy.”
The dawn was just paling when Willy Kunkle drove into the ghostly quiet community of Broad Channel. One of the city’s most unusual neighborhoods, Broad Channel was built on an ironing-board-flat island in Jamaica Bay, hemmed in by a few dozen other, uninhabited islands, and located midway between Kennedy Airport and the Rockaway Peninsula, all tucked under the sheltering arm of Brooklyn and Queens combined.
Despite the airport’s proximity, it seemed as if Broad Channel should play host to the Fort Lauderdale set. So sliced into by parallel boat slips, it looked like a chunky comb on a map, and with its wildlife refuge neighbors and proximity to Lower New York Bay beyond Rockaway Point, it seemed perfect for those mega-rich who like both their banks and their recreation within arm’s reach. In fact, as he glanced west across the water, Willy could just make out Manhattan’s prickly skyline beginning to emerge from the night’s tendrils.
But Broad Channel was no rich man’s retreat. Surprisingly, it better resembled a forgotten Florida backwater for seasonal workers. The buildings were extremely modest, middle-class, mostly one-story wooden structures, packed together like mixed spare parts from a variety of construction sets, and lorded over by a congestion of sagging, heavy utility wires crisscrossing the main road from a forest of light, telephone, and power poles.
This wasn’t a total surprise to Willy. He’d heard about Broad Channel, and its reputation as a pretty conservative enclave, suspicious of outsiders and any enlightenment they might bear. He’d also heard, deserved or not, that it was an aggressively all-white neighborhood, and that any and all strangers, regardless of race, were checked out pretty thoroughly.
If one could not afford to live in a gated community, but wished to leave most of the world at the door, this sounded like a fair compromise, assuming the locals let you in to begin with.
Willy slowed down and looked again at the address on the driver’s license he’d stolen off Ron Cashman’s body, along with his wallet and keys, and later his car, which he’d found parked just outside the warehouse. Broad Channel wasn’t on any subway route, and Willy had known that he didn’t have much time before the cops were called in to investigate the firefight in Red Hook. Stealing a car seemed the least of his problems now. Also, he comforted himself with the fact that the license, while equipped with Cashman’s photograph, was in the name of John Smith, which he hoped would buy him some additional time. He hadn’t ruled out that the address might also be fictional, of course, but it would have been foolish to simply make that assumption.
Craning over the wheel, he tried to read the street numbers unfolding in the half-light.
He knew he’d stepped over the line by now. Certainly the Ward Ogdens of the world would want him back in jail for the moment, and out of a job at the very least. And it was possible even Joe Gunther had reached the same point. Lord knows, Willy hadn’t done much to encourage the poor guy to do otherwise.
But Willy was back in overdrive mode now. He’d survived his charge through Cashman’s hail of bullets, he’d discovered that Riley was probably going to live and had done what he could to guarantee it with a 911 call, and he’d been given just enough through Cashman’s last words to propel him once more toward resolving Mary’s death. Never the best of long-range thinkers, Willy was once more consumed with a need to know and heedless of what it might cost him.
He finally found the street he was after, the equivalent of a wide alley lined by more squeezed-together homes, and drove down half the block before parking in front of one of the humbler residences.
He stayed put for a few minutes, with the engine and lights off, watching the street for signs of life. Three or four houses had lights on, perhaps in a bathroom or kitchen, but otherwise things still seemed acceptably dormant. Willy got out of the car, walked quietly and quickly to Cashman’s front door, and slipped the key into the lock, hoping to hell the dead man didn’t have a fondness for pit bull housepets.
He didn’t. The place was absolutely silent.
By the dawn’s strengthening light, Willy took rapid inventory of the small house, deciding how to maximize his time. He figured half an hour overall would be risky but acceptable.
The home’s interior made its shabby outside look good by comparison. Cashman had been clearly uninterested in decor, or cleanliness, or even eating more than cereal, Spam, and /or bread. The whole place felt like a temporary lodging, which in fact it might have been. Given the phony license and his erstwhile livelihood, Cashman quite possibly had several home addresses. Willy could only hope that this one had more in it than dirty clothes, broken furniture, and dying food in the fridge.
He finally found the one exception in a small cubbyhole off the living room, which shared with it a large window overlooking the boat slip.
The desk in this tiny office was a hollow-core door laid across two filing cabinets and covered with bills, newspapers, several phone books from far-off states, three empty beer cans, a calendar with cryptic notations, an assortment of survivalist and weapon catalogues, a legal pad covered with doodles, arrows, boxes, and seemingly unconnected words, and a phone.
Willy didn’t stop to read any of it at first. He was still in the reconnoitering phase, and eager to explore the contents of the filing cabinets.
A loud knock on the front door stopped him cold.
He froze in place, trying to imagine who might be outside.
“John? You in there? It’s Budd.”
Willy remained silent.
The knock came again, slightly heavier. “John. I didn’t see you drive up. You okay?”
Willy very slowly rose from the chair he’d just sat in, careful not to make the slightest sound.
He clearly heard the door latch open and the front door swing back on its hinges. He’d forgotten to turn the lock behind him.
“John?” Now the voice was more tentative, betraying the first inklings of concern.
Willy realized his hoped-for half hour had just evaporated. Trying his best to sound vaguely like Cashman, he growled, “Yeah,” and stepped behind the office door.
Heavy steps approached with renewed confidence, along with Budd’s commentary. “Jesus, man. I thought you were dead or something. Why didn’t you speak up the first time?”
Through the crack in the door, Willy saw a tall fat man flash by, sporting a tight T-shirt, a beard, and tattoos on both arms.
The sheer bulk of the guy dictated Willy’s course of action.
As soon as Budd stepped into the room, Willy threw his
weight against the door, smashing it against the big man and sending him staggering into the far wall, where he hit his head. Not letting him recover from the impact, Willy reached him in two steps, grabbed his hair from the back, and smacked the front of his face into the wall a second time.
Budd collapsed like a felled ox, crumpling to his knees and coming to rest like a drunk taking a quick rest between swigs.
Cursing his bad luck, Willy returned to the desk, grabbed the calendar and the legal pad, and ran for the exit. Whether it was Budd waking up, another neighbor dropping by, or the police suddenly appearing, Willy knew his survival time here was now being measured in seconds.
He reached the car just in time to see a woman appear on the porch next door, squinting against the rising sun’s first glare, trying to see who was at the wheel.
“John?” she called out. “Is Budd with you?”
Willy fired up the engine, did a squealing U-turn, and retreated the way he’d come.
The four of them were back in the interview room adjacent to the detective bureau—Joe, Sammie, Ward Ogden, and Jim Berhle. The mood, once enhanced by a camaraderie cutting across state and department lines, had chilled to where Joe Gunther was thinking he and Sammie might be asked to disappear at any moment.
It was midmorning of the day following the shootout and they were all living on a steady diet of coffee.
Ogden was the only one standing, pacing back and forth across the small room as he spoke. His tone of voice, however, while a little more concentrated, retained much of its familiar calm friendliness. If he did have problems with the Vermonters, he was keeping them to himself.
“Okay,” he said. “Things are getting messy. I’ve got someone baby-sitting Riley Cox. He’s definitely out of the woods, but still refusing to talk, and there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about that. He didn’t have a weapon when we found him, there were no drugs or contraband at the scene, so he knows all he has to do is keep quiet and this’ll go away without a murmur.
“A crime scene unit was sent to Cashman’s legal address in Sunset Park,” he continued. “So far, they haven’t found anything of interest that we didn’t already know, but records search has revealed he had a car, which apparently now is missing.”
“What about the lookout who was hooked up to the chain-link fence?” Sammie asked.
“Vinny West. Nothing there, either,” he told her. “He lawyered up almost as soon as they took the gag off. What he did say was that he never saw who nailed him. He’s got a similar background to the other dead man at the scene—Franco Silva—but nothing with either one of them seems to connect to our case.”
“Actually,” Jim Berhle interrupted in a surprised voice, “maybe we do have something.” He hadn’t been at the crime scene that morning, but now pulled a sheet of paper from one of the several files before him and studied its contents briefly before handing it over to his partner. “That’s Mary Kunkle’s luds and tolls. Look at the seventh number down. I wrote who it belongs to in pencil: Franco Silva. She called him twice in the past month and a half.”
Ogden looked at the list with renewed interest. “No kidding? That’s great. Any cross-reference to his address and her metro stops or receipts?”
Berhle immediately started pawing through the pile at his fingertips, eventually locating the map they’d all worked on earlier. “Right there,” he said, tapping a marked spot with his fingertip. “Both a Metro stop and a receipt, not three blocks away. Sorry. I should have read your pink on the shootout. I would’ve caught Silva’s name earlier.”