The Sniper's Wife (24 page)

Driving very slowly, he closed the gap by only a few hundred feet and then killed his engine to continue on foot. It was an odd sensation, leaving the cloistered security of the car. The huge buildings were so far apart and the spaces between them, once home to vast fleets of container trucks, so wide open that he felt as exposed as if he’d been the only man standing in the middle of a prairie. The vast, flat void of the water beyond didn’t help, of course, introducing its own image of a cold and hostile hole in which the far-distant New Jersey shore lights vanished without reflection.

The building Andy Liptak’s car had entered was far different from the dilapidated warehouse where Ron Cashman had died. This place was a shipping transfer station, designed to handle thousands of tons of material coming off cargo ships and headed for trucks aimed toward the nation’s interior, and vice versa. An erstwhile maze of mammoth corridors, loading docks, and storage areas, it was now compartmentalized to serve a new hoped-for clientele of small manufacturers or people needing extra space for their excess inventory. Once a layout for maximum traffic flow, it had been cut up, diverted, and otherwise thwarted so that as Willy stepped gingerly into its midst, he was hard put to know in which direction to turn. Only by staying very still and listening carefully could he get some sense of activity off to one end of the building.

Slowly, watching for lookouts or warning devices, he began working his way toward the muffled sounds of voices, guided only by the crepuscular light seeping through the occasional broken window. It was like he was wandering through the heart of a gigantic tomb or the base of an ancient pyramid. The night before, in the warehouse with Riley, he’d felt more the way he had when he’d operated behind enemy lines. The familiar sense of calm focus had lent him an inner stillness from which to make decisions based on training and experience. Even when all hell had broken loose, he’d kept on task and gotten the job done.

Here, he was out of sorts, neither in combat nor police mode, thrown by circumstance to act alone and by instinct from a purely emotional basis. Cashman, like opponents before him, had been the enemy, a faceless target. Andy Liptak, by contrast, was wholly other. An old friend, a drinking buddy, a keeper of mutual experiences, the one person who’d known Willy as the Sniper, but who’d chosen not to treat him as such. Andy probably wouldn’t have been accepted as a friend in normal circumstances. He came from a different world, even while being a fellow New Yorker. But in Vietnam, he’d filled a need that fate had chosen to prolong beyond the war, up to and including sharing time with the same woman. Given those facts, the memories attending them, and the sense of betrayal that had finally subsumed them all, Willy was left without much rational latitude. As too often in the past when his boldness had bordered on the suicidal, he was tempted to merely run screaming through these funereal, gloomy spaces, and have it out with Andy Liptak and all the metaphorical baggage he carried, once and for all.

A sudden outburst of sound snapped him out of his dark reverie, making him flatten against the wall as a shaft of light shot down the long, broad passageway he’d been traveling.

“No, Al, this is it for a while. I’m closing up. Things’re getting hot. Cashman’s dead and the cops are starting to swarm. If I were you, I’d lay low or pull up stakes. That’s what I’m doing.”

In the light, Kunkle now saw that the BMW was parked in the gloom just ahead of him, much as it might have been in an alleyway, except that here everything was under a single roof. Andy Liptak was stepping out of a side room, looking back over his shoulder and talking to someone Willy couldn’t see.

“I wouldn’t, not if I were in your shoes,” Andy was saying to some comment Willy hadn’t heard. “Take the money and run. That’s why I gave it to you. You get greedy now, you’ll just get caught. That’s how the cops get most of the people they’re after. Me, I burned my bridges or settled my debts, just like now. Lay low. It’ll be a piece of cake.”

He laughed at whatever he heard in response to that and moved completely outside the room, waving a hand. “Whatever, Al. It’s been real.”

Tired of the waiting, of trying to keep his thoughts in balance, of putting his hopes on a future free of the past, tired even of thinking at all anymore, Willy drifted into the light, his gun in his hand, and said, “Hey, Andy. Got time for one last debt?”

Liptak reacted as though he’d been splashed with scalding water. He spun around, his arms flung out, his mouth open in surprise, making Willy think of a bug flattened against a windshield.

“Jesus Christ. Sniper. What the hell?”

Willy leveled his gun at him, so tired it felt like lifting a cinderblock brick. “It’s over. That’s what. For all of us.”

Liptak gave him a broad, strained smile. “Hold it, hold it. What’s going on? What’re you talking about?”

The man Andy had been speaking with appeared in the doorway. “You okay?” He paused, freezing in midmotion. “Oh, oh. Sorry, guys.”

“Leave,” Willy ordered.

The man named Al was instantly accommodating. “Sure thing. This way?” He pointed down the dark corridor.

“I don’t care.”

Al slid down and away from them both without further ado, adding over his shoulder, “Good luck, Andy. Sorry.”

Liptak blinked once, slowly, no doubt impressed by his friend’s loyalty. “You got a problem with me?” he asked warily.

“I don’t have the energy,” Willy answered. “I know you had Cashman kill Mary. I probably can’t prove it, but that doesn’t matter anymore.”

Andy took a step toward him, his face showing how fast and hard he was thinking. “I’m going into my pocket for a cell phone, okay? Just two fingers, super slow. One call and I make you a rich man. You have any idea how much money I have? I give you three million bucks, I won’t even feel it. Four, if you want.”

“You really are a piece of work.”

Liptak removed a phone from his pocket with his fingertips. Willy had never felt so exhausted.

Liptak moved the phone in front of him and took hold of it with his other hand so he could punch the buttons of the keypad. He was holding the phone awkwardly, pointing it at Willy. “Maybe I am. You have no idea what Mary had turned into. I supported her for years, giving her enough to survive but not so much she could buy a lot of dope. I took care of her, Willy, and it wasn’t easy. She hated me for it—you know how crazy junkies get. And then after she got clean—again, thanks to me—she threatened to destroy me. She’d become a monster, man.”

As he uttered this last statement, he fine-tuned the way he was holding the phone.

“Willy. Dive.”

The shout was Sammie’s, coming from the darkness behind him. Willy did as she ordered without thought, on pure reflex, just as a white-hot lick of flame appeared out of the cell phone’s front end, accompanied by the sharp report of a small-caliber cartridge. As he bounced off the wall and fell to his knees, his left cheek stinging from the slug barely kissing him, Willy smacked his hand, lost his gun, and saw it skitter across the floor, vanishing from sight.

Andy Liptak didn’t hesitate. Swinging the phone gun in Sammie’s direction, he fired twice more into the dark, using her one muzzle flash as a guide. Her shot went wide, but one of his hit her in the leg, making her cry out and spin around. He then ran up to her, kicked her gun away, and grabbed her by the scruff of the neck, half throwing her toward his car. In pain, off balance, and surprised by his desperate violence, Sammie staggered and fell against the car’s fender, where Liptak finally struck her cross the back of the head with the phone, further stunning her.

Willy was almost back on his feet by now, unarmed but intent on charging Liptak, when the latter fired wildly once more in his direction—a haphazard, almost incidental shot—and hit him in the heel of his shoe, knocking his leg out from under him.

Before Willy could get up a second time, Liptak had tossed Sammie into the back of his car and slid behind the wheel. As Willy launched himself at the driver’s door, Liptak gunned the engine and squealed away, careening down the enormous corridor toward the entrance bay he’d used not fifteen minutes earlier.

Willy was left on his knees, his one good hand supporting him, looking like a three-legged dog.

With a sound wedged between a shout of rage and a strangled sob, he staggered back to his feet and began running toward his car.

Chapter 24

I
t was a fruitless effort. By the time Willy reached his car, Andy Liptak’s BMW was long gone. Nevertheless, trusting to instinct, Willy took off in the direction he’d seen Liptak use, flooring the accelerator and paying no attention to any obstacle that couldn’t either be ignored or defeated by the weight of his vehicle. He rammed trash cans, destroyed parking meters, creased several parked cars, and burned through every red light he encountered in his effort to catch some glimpse of the black German car.

Beneath all this frenzy, though, his instincts were still at work, for in short order he found himself within sight of an on ramp to the Gowanus Expressway, one of his tires flat from hitting a curb, but in time to see the BMW heading north at high speed.

As frustrating as that should have been—his quarry within reach but his car out of service—Willy was instead seized with a cold, calm confidence. He knew, as surely as if he’d been left a detailed map, where Liptak was headed. All he’d needed to see was the direction and the fact that Andy had chosen a freeway to take.

Twenty minutes later, his tire changed and his spare gun moved from his glove box to his pocket, Willy was driving north toward Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

It was a long drive, propelled by anxiety and self-recrimination, but accompanied, too, by the realization that the city had slipped behind him like a bad dream after an abrupt awakening. Willy drove automatically, steady and very fast, trusting to luck that he wouldn’t be pulled over, feeling with each passing mile a sharpening sense of purpose. This was his third hasty departure from New York—once to go to war, once in an attempt to escape his past. This time, the most precipitate, also found him the most resolved. With his own fate as tenuous as ever, he felt the job at hand had never been clearer. There would be no second-guessing now. No walks along the road or procrastinating at a diner, as there’d been when he’d left Vermont to find Mary in the morgue. New York, in its confusing, contradictory, all-enveloping way, had finally seen fit to set him free.

He stopped once at a pay phone to call a friend of his in the New Hampshire State Police, telling him he was on a case and needed the address for the license plate he’d memorized off of Casey Ballantine’s SUV. He was given an address in exclusive Castle Island, New Hampshire, located in the mouth of Portsmouth Harbor. He felt no elation or sense of luck turning. He’d remembered Andy mentioning a house in Portsmouth. All this information did was specify his target.

Besides, self-congratulation, never his strong suit, was now as remote as his ability to grow a new arm. All his thoughts through this long, sleepless night were on Sammie, on her miraculous appearance at the last moment, on the fact that she’d tailed him from their meeting at the cemetery, against his wishes. It had been a rare show of willful independence, shown not only for his benefit, but in defiance of the caution that cops especially were supposed to honor.

It wasn’t just her recklessness that so moved him, however, although that was certainly impressive. It was that she’d acted instinctively. Much was made of the fellowship among cops—how they stuck up for each other, created the ballyhooed “thin blue line”—and Willy himself, though he never used the term, had demonstrated that same loyalty.

But rarely had it ever been extended toward him.

It had come time to pay homage, regardless of the confusion that might cause in a man so supposedly committed to solitude and hostility.

Joe Gunther, Ward Ogden, Jim Berhle, Phil Panatello of the Customs/NYPD car theft task force, and a host of others all showed up at the Bush Terminals building shortly after Willy had left in pursuit of Andy Liptak. Responding to Sammie Martens’ call to Joe that she’d followed Willy here and was about to enter the building, what they found instead were Willy’s service weapon, a .40-caliber shell casing, fresh tire marks, a small amount of blood, and, eventually, a rental car in Sammie’s name parked up the street.

Feelings were running high. Officers were missing, along with the primary suspect, and evidence of gunplay was clear to see, as was the fact that it had all transpired without any knowledge or sanction. In a department well known for lopping off the heads of people found responsible for screwups, even Ward Ogden’s lofty perch was beginning to look assailable. It was only he and Gunther working together as a choir that convinced the doubters—including Ogden’s Whip—that without these supposed Vermont renegades, the case would never have progressed this far. Things were looking a little chaotic, fair enough, but in chaos there was still movement, and it was pretty obvious
something
was definitely in motion now.

That indefinable something was a major help to Gunther’s and Ogden’s cause. Rather than going headhunting to lay blame, everyone knew the order of the day was to find the two missing officers and to help them if possible.

In that pursuit, the previous plan of waiting until the banks opened in order to peruse Andy Liptak’s finances was scrapped in favor of a far more aggressive strategy. Now they would round up every known associate from the information they’d gathered, and grill them until something surfaced. Also, alerts were put out on Willy Kunkle’s car and on anyone resembling him, Sammie, or Andy Liptak.

Joe Gunther at last found himself out in the cold. Ward Ogden told him privately to go back to his hotel room and wait by the phone.

For Gunther, a company man, the request was hardly news. Nevertheless, it would result in one of the most anxious nights of his career.

Willy Kunkle arrived at the Castle Island address just as the dawn was defining the ruler-straight line where the Atlantic Ocean met the sky. The house was a traditional New England monstrosity with a huge wraparound porch, a castle’s worth of dormers, turrets, and stainedglass windows, and a lawn running down to the water and deserving of a Kennedy touch football game.

It was also as dark as a tomb. The high-end silver SUV was parked alone at the end of the drive, tucked under a broad portico to keep it safe from the elements.

Willy drove by the place and killed his engine on the edge of the road, knowing it wouldn’t be long before either some rental cop or the real McCoy would notice it and call it in. While not literally a closed compound, Castle Island had all the trappings of one.

Not that he cared. He knew he hadn’t passed the BMW on the drive north, which implied that Liptak had ended up somewhere other than this address. The time factor that had pushed Willy this far at breakneck speed was narrowing fast, he sensed. Liptak’s grabbing of Sammie had been purely impulsive, the spontaneous slipping of an extra card up his sleeve. But now that he’d had time to reflect, he knew that in fact the reverse was true: Kidnapping a cop could only bring him more trouble.

He’d have to kill her or dump her as quickly as possible, so Willy didn’t have time to worry that his own activities might be flagrantly illegal.

He ran across the broad lawn in a crouch, although aside from the possibility of a dog’s coming at him, he wasn’t much concerned with being spotted. In fact, as his reckless momentum took over, he sprang up the porch steps two at a time, shifted his alignment to favor his good shoulder, and simply continued right on through the glass front door, half falling into the lobby amid a galaxy of flying shards. Staggering, he pulled his backup gun out as he continued up the oversized staircase ahead of him, figuring that wherever Andy’s blond girlfriend might be, it was probably in an upstairs bedroom overlooking the water.

His choice of doors at the top proved only half right, however, but it was the half that turned out to be a lifesaver. He burst into an empty bedroom, cut through an adjoining bathroom, and into the master bedroom beyond, just as the disheveled, half-dressed woman on the bed fired a wild, preemptive round with a shotgun at the room’s front door. Willy saw her in profile in the enormous muzzle flash, covered the distance between them in four long strides, and simply took her out from the side like a linebacker, sending them both flying off the far end of the king-sized bed.

Willy rolled as he landed, taking the woman with him, and ended up on top of her, his knees pinning her arms, staring down into her startled wide-eyed face.

He slapped her once, hard. “Where’s Andy?”

She screamed out in pain. “Oh, please. Please. Don’t hurt me. If you want money, I’ll show you where it is. But—”

He slapped her again, hoping to build on her panic to get what he was after. “Listen to me. I want to know where Andy is.”

She was still trying to hide her face from his attacks. “Oh, please don’t. Please—”

He shoved his face to within inches of hers and repeated slowly, “Tell me where Andy is and I disappear. Right now.”

She blinked a couple of times. “Andy? He’s coming up. He’ll be here soon… with a lot of men,” she added as an afterthought.

Willy raised his hand and she cowered, her legs scrabbling beneath him as if that might help her escape.

“He’s not in New York,” Willy said, “he’s not coming here, and he’s running for cover. Where would he go?”

Her answer was startling: “The prison.”

Willy stared at her. “What?”

“The prison at the Portsmouth Navy Yard. He’s renovating it. Took it over from a developer who ran out of money. He spends a lot of time there. He called me on my car phone a few hours ago and told me he’d be going there first. I don’t know why, but that’s why he said he’d be late. He told me not to go there.”

Willy straightened and took his knees off her arms. “Roll over.”

Her face crumpled up in fear once again. “Oh, no. What’re you going to do?”

Willy scowled at her. “Jesus, lady. Put it in park. Roll over. Hands behind your back.
Now.
”

She did as she’d been told. He pulled off the silk belt she had looped around her pajama shorts and tied her hands together. He then looped the free end several times around the bed’s foot and secured it there to keep her from crawling to where she might cut herself free.

“Thanks,” he then said, and left her lying on her face.

Back in New York, Joe Gunther got the phone call he’d been waiting for all night.

“Joe, it’s Ward. We’re taking a Customs chopper up to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Liptak’s got a place near there—someplace named Castle Island.”

“I know it. Very fancy neighborhood. What makes you think he’s there?”

“I’m not sure we do, but your boy Willy does. His car was spotted abandoned near the house. You want to come along? This being your people, Phil Panatello has no problem with it.”

“Of course I do,” Gunther answered. “You have local liaison up there?”

Ogden hesitated. “Not yet. I don’t think so.”

“Contact Janet Scott of the Portsmouth PD. She’ll do what needs to be done. One of the good guys.”

“Got it. Here are the directions for getting to the chopper.”