The Sniper's Wife Part 24

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 Gowa.n.u.s 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-w.i.l.l.y 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, w.i.l.l.y was driving north toward Portsmouth, New Hamps.h.i.+re.

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. w.i.l.l.y drove automatically, steady and very fast, trusting to luck that he wouldn't be pulled over, feeling with each pa.s.sing 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 Hamps.h.i.+re 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 Hamps.h.i.+re, 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 fellows.h.i.+p among cops-how they stuck up for each other, created the ballyhooed "thin blue line"-and w.i.l.l.y 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 w.i.l.l.y had left in pursuit of Andy Liptak. Responding to Sammie Martens' call to Joe that she'd followed w.i.l.l.y here and was about to enter the building, what they found instead were w.i.l.l.y's service weapon, a .40-caliber sh.e.l.l 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 a.s.sailable. 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 sc.r.a.pped in favor of a far more aggressive strategy. Now they would round up every known a.s.sociate from the information they'd gathered, and grill them until something surfaced. Also, alerts were put out on w.i.l.l.y 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.

w.i.l.l.y 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 stainedgla.s.s 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.

w.i.l.l.y 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 pa.s.sed the BMW on the drive north, which implied that Liptak had ended up somewhere other than this address. The time factor that had pushed w.i.l.l.y 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 w.i.l.l.y 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, s.h.i.+fted his alignment to favor his good shoulder, and simply continued right on through the gla.s.s 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. w.i.l.l.y 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.

w.i.l.l.y 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.

w.i.l.l.y raised his hand and she cowered, her legs scrabbling beneath him as if that might help her escape.

"He's not in New York," w.i.l.l.y said, "he's not coming here, and he's running for cover. Where would he go?"

Her answer was startling: "The prison."

w.i.l.l.y 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."

w.i.l.l.y 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?"

w.i.l.l.y 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 Hamps.h.i.+re. 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 w.i.l.l.y 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."

Chapter 25.

The Portsmouth naval prison is one of the region's oddest landmarks. Located on the eastern edge of the large island housing the Navy Yard, the now-empty prison dominates most inland vistas like a cross between an ancient fortress and a gigantic, Stalinist apartment block. It is at once stately and hideous, alluring and repellent. Built at the turn of the twentieth century and nicknamed the Castle, it was designed as the Navy's premier highsecurity facility and made to the then-popular template of Leavenworth and comparable h.e.l.lholes, complete with stacked and terraced jail cells, electrically controlled sliding doors, and shooting galleries for the guards-a James Cagney movie hauntingly frozen in concrete and steel.

Unaware his car had been identified and was now under surveillance, w.i.l.l.y drove to Seavey's Island, showed his badge to the guard at the gate, and was waved through without further effort. Once a beehive of Eisenhower's "military/industrial complex," the Navy Yard was thinly manned now, enough that periodically it had to justify its existence before congressional subcommittees-an unheard-of humiliation in the old days. As a result, while parts of the island were still closely guarded, a good chunk of it was virtually open to the public, an aspect some initial investors had hoped to bank on by transforming the prison into a business condo with some of the best views in town. Until their funding crumbled with only a few rooms gutted and refitted with new windows.

w.i.l.l.y had no idea what Andy Liptak's plans were when he bought the lease from those disappointed visionaries, but he suspected money-laundering probably played a role.

The day had fully arrived by the time he parked nearby. There was a modern bachelor-officer's housing unit within twenty yards of the prison's west wall, so the presence of vehicles went without notice, and it was already late enough that the owners of those cars were at work elsewhere on the island.

w.i.l.l.y took his bearings. The building lay along a roughly north-south axis. It had a central portion resembling a castle keep-ergo the nickname-complete with four looming, crenellated corner turrets, and two asymmetrical wings, both shorter and narrower and equipped with smaller, evenly s.p.a.ced turrets of their own. The whole was utterly ma.s.sive, if neglected and weatherbeaten, and seemed well endowed with windows, until closer scrutiny revealed that all of them had been tightly boarded up, lending to the place the look of a medieval Playmobil toy hormonally run amok.

Architectural integrity, however, had been altered long before the windows had been sealed. The "new" section, also called the Fortress, had been tacked onto the tail end of the southern wing to handle World War Two's excess population. Its axis was east-west, it was as tall and ma.s.sive as the central Castle, but while it tipped a hat to the Castle's architecture with a single turret and some arched windows, the turret was square and the windows were graceless, and the overall aspect was so bland, white, and blockish, it ended up looking like a Montgomery Ward warehouse in need of repair.

But it was also where w.i.l.l.y saw his best hope for gaining entry. The Fortress had been where the developers had done their truncated remodeling and in the process had both breached the exterior walls and punched holes in some of the rusty chain-link fencing designed to keep out trespa.s.sers.

w.i.l.l.y cautiously crossed to the foot of the Fortress's walls and cut around to the south wall to get a feel for his surroundings. Before entering this abandoned behemoth, he wanted to know how the ground lay around it.

In fact, it was remarkably desolate. Despite its location in the middle of a major city's harbor and on the edge of a military base, the prison had a distinctly lonely feeling to it. Virtually surrounded by water on three sides and at the farthest distance possible from the island's busiest spot, the building seemed shunted aside, as if not just history but geography had decided its usefulness was firmly in the past.

This isolation became an advantage on the other side, however, and helped explain the eagerness with which those long-vanished developers had eyed the property. The harbor; the city of Portsmouth; the string of bridges spanning the Piscataqua River; Kittery, Maine; and Castle Island, all stretched before it like a peaceful, unblemished maritime panorama. And as if in poignant and ironic contrast to the building he was about to enter, w.i.l.l.y was startled to see the ancient, tumbledown Wentworth-by-the-Sea Hotel just across the water, once host to moneyed visitors from Boston and elsewhere, standing in stark contrast to the far harsher quarters behind him. What feelings those jailed sailors must have had a half century ago, watching the rich and famous being liveried to and from this monumental watering hole, and listening to the laughter and music that once must have emanated from its open windows on a summer night.

Now, both abandoned, empty, and falling apart, they stood as mute witnesses to bygone times, as anachronistic and retrospectively romantic as the contrast between Sing Sing and Jay Gatsby.

w.i.l.l.y, however, saw all this only in pa.s.sing. What caught his eye and heightened his antic.i.p.ation was the black BMW parked out of the way, under a tree, as discreetly as possible. Running the risk of being seen, he trotted over to the car and glanced inside, finding what he thought he might-a smear of blood across the backseat-but which still didn't look as bad as he'd been fearing. From that scant evidence alone, he took heart that Sammie was still alive.

He returned to the most likely breach in the prison's exterior wall and slipped inside.

Joe Gunther pointed to the tall, blond, athletically built woman in uniform who was standing by the edge of the helicopter landing pad.

"That's Janet Scott," he told Phil Panatello, shouting over the sound of the rotors.

They waited until the crew chief gave them the thumbs-up before jumping out of the aircraft, instinctively ducking as they jogged over to where Scott was waiting.

She gave Gunther a smile as he drew near. "Hey, Joe. Long time. You're traveling in style. I didn't know you were a part of this."

"More of an outrigger than a real part," he admitted, and made introductions all around.

She directed them away from the prop wash into a small concrete building that doubled as a waiting room.

"This is what we've got so far: Your w.i.l.l.y Kunkle apparently broke into the Liptak house-smashed the door down-smacked her around a little and forced her to tell him that Liptak might be holding out in the old naval prison on Seavey's Island." She cast a glance at Gunther. "He really one of yours?"

"As is the one who's missing."

"Granted." She held her hand up as Panatello opened his mouth to say something. "Anyway, that was her story, and it's true that we found her hog-tied on the bedroom floor. But we also found a twelve-gauge hole in the bedroom door where she tried to kill Kunkle as he entered, except that he came in through a different door."

"What about Kunkle?" Panatello asked.

"He went straight to the prison. He was seen scoping it out, including the beemer parked on the far side, and then he ducked inside." She checked her watch. "That was about twenty minutes ago. I've since a.s.sembled a multidepartmental tac team and parked them out of sight all around the place, on the water as well. There is blood, by the way, covering the car's backseat."

That introduced a pause in the conversation.

"And there's been nothing since?" Joe Gunther finally asked.

"Not a peep."

Gunther stepped away and absentmindedly watched the chopper crew through the window as they secured their craft to the helipad. Behind him, Scott and Panatello coordinated how to get to the prison without attracting undue attention.

"Worried about your people?"

Gunther turned at Ward Ogden's quiet, resonant voice.

"w.i.l.l.y especially," he admitted. "Mostly because of what he might do. I mean, Sam could be dead by now, which would d.a.m.n near kill me, but Christ only knows about w.i.l.l.y. He's already in enough hot water-but that'll probably be nothing compared to what he comes up with next."

Ogden smiled enigmatically. "Water may not be that hot."

Gunther's eye narrowed. "Meaning what?"

"Panatello and I were talking during the flight. If he agrees to play along, Wild w.i.l.l.y might just duck this bullet-for the most part, at least. Roughing up Casey Ballantine'll need a closer look by the locals, but right now, from a legal standpoint, what he did in New York might not even surface."

"He shot Cashman, for G.o.d's sake."

Ogden shook his head. "Somebody did, but we don't have any evidence and Riley's not talking. Same thing with the a.s.sault on Budd Wilc.o.x-he never saw who hit him-thought it was Cashman. And Lenny Manotti's never going to say he was pushed around by a one-armed man. Panatello's bunch are going to be busy enough without dragging w.i.l.l.y into it.

"And," he added, "the Casey Ballantine thing up here'll probably end up in the same place. She'll be way too busy trying to stay out of jail to be pointing fingers at w.i.l.l.y Kunkle."

The voices behind them rose up as people began crowding the exit. Ogden laid a hand on Gunther's shoulder. "I'm not saying I'm right, and I'm not saying it won't all be moot depending on how crazy he gets today, but if I were you, I wouldn't worry about his legal problems too much.

"Of course," he put in almost as an afterthought, "I'm also not sure I'd let him out of Vermont for ten to twenty years, either."

The first floor of the Fortress looked like the aftermath of an earthquake. As w.i.l.l.y picked his way carefully through the debris left by the remodelers, he was impressed by both their ambitions and their destructiveness. Walls had been sledgehammered through, holes chopped into ceilings, and ma.s.sive piles of gla.s.s block windows had been gathered where more conventional windows had replaced them. The logic of their plans was just barely discernible through the rubble, and he had to admit, what with the open s.p.a.ces and the generous views, it did look like a potentially attractive workplace.

But it was also empty of any signs of life. If Liptak was here, he'd apparently tucked himself away inside the building's older, so-called Castle section.

w.i.l.l.y found a single door connecting the addition to the mother s.h.i.+p: a narrow hallway on the ground floor, a concrete tunnel with a gaping, open steel-barred gate, leading into a void so dark, he felt he was stepping into pure s.p.a.ce.

His already cautious progress slowed to a tentative creeping, and he placed each foot carefully before the other, gently pus.h.i.+ng aside any trash and rubble on the floor to avoid crunching it underfoot. He even opened his mouth to breathe so that he could better hear whatever might be awaiting him.

By the time he reached the end of the connecting tunnel, he was walking blind. He extracted from his pocket a small flashlight he always kept on hand, and, after listening carefully, held it as far away from himself as possible, in case it was used as a target, and switched it on.

What appeared before him was like a still from a black-and-white movie: a long, constricted, towering slit of a corridor, with a wall of boarded-up windows on one side and a stacked tier of rusty caged-in galleries on the other. Both the ceiling and the end of this long room extended beyond the reach of the tiny flashlight, and in the silence he could imagine the voices of thousands of confined men, their hands gripping the bars, or playing cards on the floor between cells. In the still dampness of the air, he could all but smell the sweat, the bland food, and the stink of hundreds of toilets. w.i.l.l.y had visited old, overcrowded prisons before, some almost as decrepit as this one, and knew too well what was missing from the picture now before him.

Satisfied that his light hadn't given him away, w.i.l.l.y took his bearings and found a staircase leading up, walled with more bars. Still moving gingerly, he climbed to the next level, which also took him to the building's west side. There, he came to a balcony inside the second-floor gallery, a row of cells on the right, and instead of a conventional railing to the left, a wall of open vertical bars as far as he could see. The same gloomy silence prevailed, but the sense of vastness was reduced. Now he felt truly entombed, wrapped up by darkness, silence, and aging steel. Everything was made of metal, from floor to overhead canopy, and from everything hung large flakes of peeling gray paint, making him feel he was brus.h.i.+ng alongside an endless length of stretched-out alligator skin. As he walked as softly as possible across the debrisstrewn floor, past cell after devastated cell, each with its own rusty bedsprings, toilet, and sink, and each choked with the small, acc.u.mulated rubble of the ages, he felt himself being swallowed whole.

The trip felt interminable, but eventually he came to the end of the gallery, to another set of stairs, and finally to a pa.s.sageway leading to the prison's central administrative area-the heart of the Castle proper.

There he found himself on a balcony with an ornate wrought-iron, mahogany-topped railing, overlooking an immense, three-story-high reception area with an enclosed section in the middle, much like a teller's cage, and several grand staircases more suitable to a Europeanstyle hotel. It was like stepping from Devil's Island into the lobby of the Ritz, albeit right after a bombing run.

Now he was at a loss. The mezzanine he was standing on split in two directions, surrounding the great hall below him, and he also had a choice between the stairs leading both up and down to the ground floor, all with nothing to indicate which direction to follow. Instinctively, he killed his small flashlight to help himself rely solely on his hearing.