Willy Kunkle stood in the darkness, as he had so often in years past, watching, waiting, one half of him alert and utterly tuned in to what was happening around him, and the other drifting, almost meditative, like a bird on the wing simply enjoying whatever breeze happened by. It was the part of his spirit that he usually put to sketching on a pad he routinely carried in his stakeout car, clipped to the steering wheel as an impromptu easel.
That struck him now as a quaint self-indulgence, like a combat soldier's daydreaming about mowing the lawn back home-mundane, incidental, and completely without meaning anymore.
It was close to midnight. He'd been standing outside Casey Ballantine's upscale brownstone in Brooklyn's increasingly trendy Cobble Hill district for hours, ever since he'd backtracked her address, rather than Carlos Barzun's, from the "CB" initials and the phone number on Ron Cashman's calendar.
Sammie's passing mention of the Seabee Group had been a lifesaver there, if a little misleading initially. Both the calendar and the legal pad that Willy had stolen from the Broad Channel house had proved confusing, cryptic, and largely counterproductive. Whether cautious or careless, Cashman had apparently been incapable of simply writing something down. Instead, he'd doodled, drawn arrows, circles, and boxes, and filled or connected them with initials and abbreviations whose sense was known only to him. There were dozens of these hieroglyphics covering many pages. Only Sammie saying "Seabee" had supplied the key.
Willy still wasn't sure what he was in the midst of tracking, though, having never heard of Casey Ballantine, but it was something, and given his growing impatience and his increasingly precarious position, he wasn't about to let the opportunity slip by. And there had been signs of life inside the brownstone: curtains being drawn and lights going on and off throughout his surveillance, as if someone had been moving around pursuing an evening's normal pattern.
Nevertheless, as the majority of these lights began to stay off, he started wondering about the benefit of standing there much longer.
Which was exactly when the last two lights died on the first floor.
Willy sighed, wondering what to do next. He'd known when he'd found this address that it was at best a long shot. Still, he thought, might as well wait another half hour.
It didn't take that long. Not two minutes later, the front door opened and a tall, blond, aristocratic young woman stepped out.
Willy readied his slender pocket telescope to get a closer look.
Keeping the door open with a small case she unhooked from her shoulder, the woman, presumably Casey Ballantine, began ferrying in and out of the house a small mountain of matching suitcases and several bags of what looked like canned and boxed groceries. As she neared completion, replacing the small case on her shoulder and slamming the door shut, an upscale, oversized silver SUV with New Hampshire plates appeared around the nearest corner and came purring to a stop before the piled luggage, followed moments later by a dark, very new BMW with tinted windows.
No one got out of the BMW, but from the driver's side of the first car, reminiscent of some doting hubby catering to an impatient mate, Andy Liptak emerged, apologizing with hand gestures and virtually leaping to move the woman's possessions into the back of the larger vehicle. As he did so, however, throwing open the rear door right in front of the other car's hood, he angrily but inaudibly summoned the driver to help him out. Then, all smiles once more, he went from lugging things himself to directing this second man-large, slow-moving, and transparently a bodyguard-in doing it for him. In the meantime, he chatted with the young woman, pecked her on the cheek, placed her case on the front passenger seat, and generally fussed about.
After all the bags had been put away and the bodyguard had returned to his vehicle, Liptak gave his girlfriend a squeeze and a kiss, helped her into the huge SUV, and waved good-bye as she drove off.
Then, clearly visible through the lens, his expression metamorphosed once more, turning hard and purposeful, and he walked back toward the BMW. Willy quickly memorized its New York plate number, as he had the New Hampshire one, and faded back into the shadows to retrieve his own vehicle, which he'd exchanged for Cashman's stolen one hours earlier.
He turned on the ignition, but not the headlights, and pulled into the street about a half block behind Liptak's car.
This final revelation linking Liptak to Cashman was less the emotional jolt it should have been and more the settling of the keystone into an archway of time and events dating back to when Willy had introduced his wife to his erstwhile best friend years ago.
Even in Vietnam, Andy Liptak had been a user. Not of drugs, although he'd certainly indulged there as well, but of people, and of any situation that allowed for the smallest abuse of trust. He'd called it working the system back then, of course, using the age-old cliche of the morally corrupt, and in the context of Vietnam, it had in fact appeared just shy of a virtue. He wasn't killing anyone, at least, just lying, stealing, and enriching himself-something he almost had to stand in line to do. Willy-the Sniper-immersed as he'd been in far darker exploits of his own, had barely given it a second thought. Andy had been a welcome source of normalcy to him: a drinking buddy, someone who didn't ask questions and to whom the war had seemed almost a lark.
Only later, when they'd met up in New York, had Willy wondered about those details, if only fleetingly, sidetracked as he'd been by his own demons and poor judgment.
Now, of course, it all came clear to him, like an unnecessary epilogue at the end of a bad play, supplied to those spectators too slow or self-absorbed to have understood the obvious.
As a result, instead of the satisfaction such discoveries usually gave him at the end of his knottier cases, here Willy just felt stupid and used-the last guy in the room to realize that the joke had been on him.
Depressed and distracted as he was by this realization, he didn't see a third car, its lights out like his own, pull into line down the street far behind him. They were still in Ron Cashman's small, weather-beaten bungalow in Broad Channel, so many of them now that it looked like a dentist's waiting room for short-haired, type-A overachievers. Cars clotted the narrow, dark street outside, and murmured cell phone conversations and the muted squawk and hiss of portable radios supplied a steady backdrop to the inner sanctum meeting in the living room between Ogden and his bunch, and a whole new group from the Customs/NYPD task force that Ogden had mentioned to Gunther. Joe Gunther himself, taking advantage of the comings and goings and the fact that he'd become an unknown but familiar face over the last few days, had tucked himself into a corner, hoping to milk his interloper's status for all it was worth. After they left this place, as Ogden had told him, his ties to the investigation would finally be severed.
Phil Panatello, a small, intense, dark-haired man from Customs, was in charge of the task force and was occupying the center of the discussion with Ward Ogden.
"Do you have a record on Casey Ballantine?" he was asking.
"Not a thing," Ogden explained. "Which is obviously why he used her. Having no rap sheet and being the buffer between Cashman's operations half of the business and Liptak's management half, she basically became a fire wall. If it hadn't been for Mary Kunkle knowing both sides, we might still be wandering about in the dark."
Panatello picked up the contents of the envelope Budd Wilcox had handed over hours earlier. It was now getting close to midnight. "Right. So, what was her story?"
"Kunkle used to be Andy Liptak's girlfriend. From what we pieced together, after they split up and she got totally hooked on dope, the guilt kicked in and he began covering her basic financial needs, if just barely. That's obviously something he'd see now as a big mistake. 'Cause while she might've been grateful enough when she was scraping bottom-assuming she could think that clearly-after she cleaned up, she decided she was due some compensation."
"Is that where the Re-Coop comes in?" Phil Panatello asked, consulting another file.
"Maybe in part. Who knows if that was an incredibly ironic money-laundering device, or a deal Mary forced him to set up? There's a lot more digging to do yet. It's clear Mary's life took an upturn about six months ago- the rehab, the enrolling in school, the talk of future plans-which is also when she began contacting Cashman's people, presumably as a conduit to Liptak and his financing. But there's a ton of hypothetical thinking in there. We may never know all the details. We think we have a line on a secret bank account of hers that we were hoping might tell us more." Ogden paused to smile affably before adding, "All yours now, of course.
"You have to admit, though" he continued, "if she did force Andy to finance the Re-Coop, it would show off how complicated the psychology became in all this. It not only got her out of a jam, but a lot of people who'd been in her shoes, as well. 'Cause the Re-Coop deal is a good thing. It's not a con. They really do what they say they're doing, which makes Mary the person they should thank. I'm not saying she was just being altruistic, necessarily- another thing that bank account might show-and I don't guess we'll ever know what her ultimate plans were for Andy. But, considering her modest lifestyle and what we know she forced Andy to do, it doesn't look like she was such a bad egg. It might turn out she was blackmailing a crook not just for a little payback, but to be useful, too."
"Until Ron Cashman killed her, stole what she was holding over Andy, and then kept it for himself. That is what happened, right?" Panatello asked.
Ogden shrugged. "Probably wanted it for a rainy day. I'd almost bet he told Andy he couldn't find it anywhere. You have a location on Liptak yet?"
The Customs agent glanced over his shoulder at one of his men, who shook his head. "No. We think he's on the move. We hit his office an hour ago and found the place sanitized. Combining what you found with what we've been putting together, we have a pretty good picture of his operation, but not where he is. He has a wife out in Long Island. We've been grilling her ever since you called us, but she's clueless-had no idea what he did for a living, legit or otherwise, much less where he might be hanging out."
He handed Ogden a file and opened it to what looked like a flow chart to Joe Gunther, who was craning to see from his corner. "That's a breakdown of what we know so far. Liptak, through Cashman, grabbed cars from wherever he could get them-car dealerships, off the street, airport parking lots, even from way out of town- decided which ones would get top dollar either as parts cars or complete models, and then sent them to chop shops or to overseas and Latin American receivers, shipped right out of New York. Incredibly well organized. One of his people's favorite hunting grounds, by the way, was on both sides of the GW Bridge, which not only provides a quick getaway to New Jersey or New York when the heat's on, but where there're a bunch of limo storage yards to pick through for extra cars. That would explain how Cashman got friendly with La Culebra and how and why he bought the junk that killed Mary Kunkle. And you may be right about the Seabee Group. We found no mention of it anywhere-it was a totally separate deal."
"How did he keep the stolen cars under wraps?" Ogden asked.
"Empty eighteen-wheeler boxes," Panatello answered. "You see them in vacant lots all over the city. Some of those are as abandoned as they look, but most are put there by legitimate shipping container brokers. They get a call for a forty-footer, for example, and they spot it at whatever location they're given, no questions asked, for maybe thirty-six hundred bucks per. From there, the bad guys can either move it or fill it with a couple of cars, rig a dummy shipping document, and put it on a boat. Unless we tear into every big box in every port every day of the week, there's no way we can separate the stolen goods from the legit stuff. What we do find is almost nothing."
Ogden returned the file and waved his hand at all the documents and cell phones littering the table between them. "Is any of this going to help?" he asked reasonably enough. "Sounds like you're still at a loss."
But there, Phil Panatello looked more optimistic. "No. With Mary's facts and figures, we'll be able to shut him down, even if he splits the country. That's what we're doing now-using what you found to send people knocking on doors, checking warehouses, and rounding up peons. When the banks open in the morning, we'll hit him there, too. Guaranteed he knows we're after him by now, so we don't want to lose time."
The cell phone in Joe Gunther's pocket began chirping, making everyone in the room stare at him.
His face flushing, he removed it and held it up to his ear. He listened briefly, asked for a couple of clarifying details, and snapped it shut, looking directly at Ward Ogden. "I think we've got a fix on Andy Liptak." The Bush Terminals line the Brooklyn shore below Red Hook like an endless row of abandoned, pre-World War Two beached tankers, lined up nose first to the uneven, broken-backed wide expanse of First Avenue. Dark, quiet, vast, and cavernous, they speak both of an earlier industrial might and of a changing world in which urban powerhouses like New York have yielded to an evolving national identity, leaving in its wake aging remnants, largely empty, in which only the occasional bare bulb advertises the rare, usually short-term tenant.
Willy followed the black BMW from farther and farther away as the midnight traffic thinned to near nonexistence at the north end of First Avenue. Even with his headlamps out, there was the odd security light that threatened to reveal his presence, so he played a game of hit or miss, sometimes letting the lead car get so far ahead that he risked losing it altogether.
It was with some relief, therefore, that he saw the car's brake lights blaze brightly one last time before suddenly swinging to the right and disappearing into the yawning mouth of one of the pitch-dark pier buildings.
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.