Catch As Cat Can

17

“So now we have a new motive for the murder of Charlie Vane,” Sunny said. “Good, old-fashioned business get-up-and-go—in this instance, getting up and going to eliminate the competition.” She looked from Val to Will. “Is it really such a big business?”

“You heard Scab talking about people getting twice as much as they paid in Maine for guns they sold in Massachusetts,” Will told her. “In Canada, where the gun laws are even stricter, a gun can go for ten times the price you’d pay here in the States. People build special panels in the doors of cars and trucks to bring them across the border. One bunch was targeting cars with Canadian plates, sticking guns in the bumpers along with a GPS. Unsuspecting drivers would go home, bringing the contraband in for them, then they’d track down the cars for a later pickup.”

“Yipes,” Sunny muttered.

“I know.” Val frowned. “Does that count as slick or sick?”

“Actually, I was thinking I must be in the wrong business.” Sunny shook her head, echoing, “Ten times the price.”

“Sure,” Val pointed out, “if you don’t mind having the ATF after you, not to mention the customs authorities of two countries—and competitors ready to shoot you dead.”

“Yeah.” Sunny sighed. “That part of the business sounds more like our pal the shark of the fish market.”

“The biker gangs up north are way more vicious than Deke Sweeney ever was.” Will looked a little sick. “I’ve seen things—it’s nothing you’d want to talk about.”

Val shifted suddenly in her seat, her elbow digging uncomfortably into Sunny’s ribs. “You’ve got to give this scheme top marks for ingenuity,” she said. “Rather than driving into Ontario or Quebec, Vane could take his fishing vessel and make a bulk transfer to the Canadian Maritimes. I just have one question. How does a fisherman, even a somewhat shady fisherman like Charlie Vane, have the connections to start gun-running in the first place, much less become competition for an outfit like Satyn’s Guard?”

Will sat silent behind the wheel for a long moment. “We’ll have to take a serious look at his friends and associates.”

“There can’t be that many—” Sunny began. Then her voice died down. “Oh.”

“Yeah, ‘oh,’” Will chimed in.

“Uh-huh.” Val’s voice was dry. “One associate comes to mind, with criminal connections.”

“A former mobster, in fact,” Sunny said. “Neil Garret, formerly Nick Gatto. Maybe you should be checking his associates, to see if someone wound up in Canada.”

“To hell with that,” Val said flatly, all trace of her earlier party-girl persona gone. “I vote we go up and get some answers from the horse’s mouth—or whichever end of the horse he really is.”

Will nodded, started the truck, and headed out of town.

“There are still a lot of holes in this theory,” Sunny said as they drove along quiet streets. “For instance, how did these Satyn’s Guard people know to come here to Kittery Harbor?”

“Biker gangs have been recruited as muscle by some of the old-line crime families in Canada,” Will suggested. “Maybe they were able to leverage their position with the Montreal mobsters to track down the Canadian end of the gun-running pipeline.”

“So Garret’s connection talks,” Sunny said.

“No doubt with lots of persuasion,” Val put in.

“And this Kilbane character comes to town to take care of the American end,” Will went on. “He goes to the fish market to take out Neil and finds Treibholz breaking into the place. Maybe Treibholz tries to bargain with him, maybe Yancey shoots first and asks questions later.”

“That explains one thing—why the body was left in the freezer,” Sunny said. “Jasmine said her guy came to town on a big Harley. No way would he try transporting a dead body on a motorcycle.”

That got a laugh from Will and Val. They got out on the county road that led northward to Sturgeon Springs. The town was more countrified than Kittery Harbor. Houses stood farther apart, but unlike the ritzier suburbs, most of that land was scrub forest rather than the elegantly manicured grounds of the new developments.

A graveled drive led through the trees to the place that Neil Garret rented. At least it was supposed to be graveled. Will’s pickup hit a lot of bald spots as he jounced his way to the clapboard house.

Val jumped out as soon as Will stopped the truck, strode to the door, started ringing the bell, and then swore. “Neil told me the stupid thing didn’t work.” She pounded heavily with her fist.

“All right, all right, keep your shirt on.” Neil’s voice came from the rear of the small house. A moment later, he opened the door while still tying the belt around his bathrobe.

“Oh. Val. And, uh, Will. And Sunny?” His voice went up, and so did the corners of his mouth. But Sunny saw the way Neil’s eyes darted among them, trying to figure out the reason for this late-night visit and what he might say to them.

Val didn’t give him a chance to speak. “Considering all the trouble I’ve kept your sorry butt out of, I think it’s really lousy that you decided to play me.”

“P-p-play you?” Neil echoed, somehow maintaining that phony smile.

“Look, Neil, keeping up the dumb act is only going to make me angrier with you,” Val told him. “We’ve figured out the little scam you had going with Charlie Vane—the guns going to Canada.”

That wiped the last traces of a smile off Neil’s face. “I—we—it was—”

He sounds even worse than he did trying to sell those skate wings to that woman, Sunny thought.

“Just tell it straight, and don’t insult our intelligence.” Will spoke over Neil’s babbling.

For a second, Neil seemed to develop a slow leak. His shoulders slumped, his head went down, his gaze drifted to his feet. “I put every dime I had into the shop, and it wasn’t enough,” he said quietly. “I just didn’t figure on how expensive things would be. And how could I raise any cash? The ways I knew how to make money were closed to me.”

He shook his head. “Then I remembered this guy who’d been in the joint with me, Gino Lodestro—they used to drive him crazy, calling him G-Lo for short. He used to tell me the stock market was nothing compared to the gun market.”

“Like making ten times the original price in a single transaction,” Sunny said.

Neil spread his hands. “That’s what Gino said. He used to run guns across the border into British Columbia. But then he headed east, working for one of the old-style families in Montreal. I managed to track him down, gave him a call. He took the cream off the top—offered six times the price so he’d make a handsome profit. All I needed was a way to get the guns to him. Charlie Vane had been moaning about money ever since I met him, so I put the proposition to him. We’d go in fifty-fifty. I scraped together every cent I could and gave it to him. He took care of the buying, going to gun shows. That’s something I couldn’t do. We packed the merchandise in waterproof containers, and Charlie took them for a boat ride.”

“Where was the transfer made?” Will asked.

“A cove somewhere in Nova Scotia,” Neil replied. “Gino had a van waiting, took the whole delivery, Charlie got the cash, and he brought it in with a load of fish. It was supposed to be a one-time thing, to get us back on our feet. Then Deke Sweeney dropped the hammer on us, banning us from the Portsmouth market. Money got tight pretty fast. And when Phil Treibholz showed up . . .” Neil took a deep breath.

“I gave him everything I had left, but it wasn’t enough. Treibholz wanted more. That’s when he went after your cat, Sunny, to show he meant business. I took Charlie Vane out to breakfast, suggested we try another load. He told me no way, just the one time had been too dangerous. He could lose his boat and put his boy in jail. So I had to try and find some other way to raise the money.”

He glanced at Sunny, but she kept quiet. No need to bring Dani and Olek into this, she decided.

“So how did you feel when you heard about Vane getting killed—with a house full of guns?” Val asked.

Neil looked as if he’d just taken a bite of something vile. “I realized he’d been playing me. He must have made a deal of his own with Gino, probably even hauled a couple of shipments without me even knowing. When I think how he gave me this pious song and dance, all the time screwing me over—”

“You could have killed him, huh?” Will said.

Neil’s eyes snapped in Will’s direction. “No, that’s not what I meant,” he said quickly. “I never killed Charlie—or Treibholz. When Phil turned up dead, I figured maybe somebody trailed him from California, and I sweated bullets. Then Charlie got it, and I wondered if it involved our deal with Gino. When I set things up, I got a burner phone and did a little traveling. I didn’t want things to trace back to here, so I gave Gino the impression that I was in Boston.”

“But Charlie Vane may not have been so careful,” Sunny said.

“Maybe not,” Neil admitted. “When Charlie got shot and I realized what was going on, I tried to get hold of Gino. But his number keeps going to voice mail.”

“Not a good sign,” Sunny said.

“Does the name Yancey Kilbane mean anything to you?” Will asked.

Neil shook his head. “Who is he?”

“He’s an enforcer for one of the biker gangs running guns across the border. We think he’s the one who dealt with Treibholz and Vane—and you’re next on his hit parade.” Val thumped Neil’s chest with a forefinger. “Get your go bag. I’m pulling you out of here.”

“But my store—my money,” Neil protested.

“You won’t enjoy either if you’re dead.” Val turned away, got out her cell phone, and hit something on speed dial. “Get your bag,” she told Neil, glancing over her shoulder.

Neil slouched away while Val identified herself over the phone. “I need a pickup, and someplace safe to keep a witness,” she said. The arrangements were made by the time Neil returned with a small travel bag. “We’ve got a quiet place where you can lie low until local law resolves this thing with Yancey Kilbane,” Val told him. “Depending on the results of that, we make a decision as to whether you stay in this area.”

Sunny and Will stayed with Val and Neil until a big SUV came grinding up the gravel path. A pair of men were aboard, and the driver got out, holding up his marshal’s star as he advanced toward the house.

“You Overton?” he asked Val. She produced her own badge. “I’m Kirby, and that’s McDonagh in the passenger seat. Where’s our customer?”

Neil bent and picked up his bag.

“I’ll be riding with you,” Val said. She turned to Will and Sunny. “Well, this has been an exciting evening, but I’ve got work to do.”

Will nodded. “So do I—after I get Sunny home.”

Sunny fought back a yawn. Wouldn’t look good, with all the forces of law and order set to start marching, she thought.

They watched the SUV disappear into the night and then climbed into Will’s pickup. “So what are you going to do?” she asked.

“I’m going to bring in Yancey Kilbane,” Will replied.

“Alone?” Sunny couldn’t keep the worry out of her voice.

“No, this is too important,” Will said. “I’ll arrange for backup.” He sighed. “Even though it means going through the chain of command.”

“Is that such a bad thing?”

“It will take time, and I have a feeling the clock started ticking the moment we walked into O’Dowd’s.” Will frowned. “It’s not a good feeling.”

“Well, Neil is safe,” Sunny pointed out. “Val just spirited him off to the proverbial undisclosed location.”

“She did her part,” Will agreed. “Catching Kilbane is mine. And the longer we wait, the more chance he realizes we’re on to him and disappears.”

He drove Sunny home and kissed her good night—good morning by that point—but she could tell he was distracted. “You know where I’ll be tomorrow,” she told him. “Let me know how it’s going, okay?”

Will nodded and drove off. Sunny turned to open the door and sneak inside—and encountered an accusing pair of gold-flecked gray eyes.

“Sorry, buddy,” she whispered, leaning down to scoop Shadow up. “Things happened.”

Shadow’s nose wrinkled and he wriggled out of her arms, landing on all four feet and stalking off, his tail lashing.

Guess I still have a good whiff of O’Dowd’s all over me, Sunny thought. That counts as two strikes to Shadow.

She crept upstairs and took a quick shower, mainly to get the stink of cigarette smoke out of her hair. As she sat on the edge of the bed in her pajamas, a towel wrapped turban fashion around her head, Shadow shouldered the bedroom door a little farther open and came in, making a big production out of sniffing all around her.

“So, do I pass inspection?” Sunny whispered to him.

Shadow responded by making a leap into her lap. Sunny gently stroked his fur until he lay boneless, purring up at her.

“I’d love to keep doing this, but I have to get up—” She looked at the clock radio and winced. “All too soon.”

She wiggled around to lay on the bed and tuck herself in. Shadow burrowed through the covers and into her arms, a warm and comforting presence as Sunny quickly drifted off.

*

As soon as Sunny started to breathe deeply in sleep, Shadow carefully disentangled himself. He dropped quietly down to the floor, crept out the door, and headed down the stairs. The house was dark and quiet. It was time to patrol.

I should have done more to let Sunny know she did a bad thing, going off and making me wait like that, he thought. But what? This wasn’t something to scratch and bite over, even play-biting. I should have stayed away from her. The way she smelled, that would have been easy.

But then, when she was in her room, slightly damp with all the bad smells washed away . . . Shadow remembered her hands gently petting him and gave a little quiver. No, that was too nice to pass up.

I’ll think of something to make her feel sorry, he decided, padding along the darkened hallway. Next time.

*

Sunny dragged herself out of bed the next morning, winced at her tangled hair, washed her face and brushed her teeth, dressed, and headed down the stairs. Mike had breakfast ready. “I heard you go out with Will. Late night, huh?”

“We may finally have gotten some things straightened out with the case,” she said.

Mike nodded. “That’s his job, though. What about yours?”

“Just the usual Friday rush for weekend bookings,” Sunny said. “I should be able to keep my eyes open.”

She finished eating, went to get her parka, and stopped, shaking her head. The coat still stunk of cigarette smoke from last night’s visit to O’Dowd’s. Sunny picked it up and brought it back to the kitchen. “Guess I’ll have to hang this outside and let it air out.”

Mike waved at the air in front of his face. “Yeah. And maybe knock off smoking all those cheap cigars.”

Shadow appeared in the doorway. But, instead of making his usual beeline to his bowls, he ostentatiously circled around Sunny and the offending coat.

“I guess that makes it unanimous.” Sunny sighed and took the parka outside, hanging it on a wrought-iron curlicue that came down from the light beside the kitchen door.

“I’ll keep an eye on it,” Mike promised, “and occasionally use my nose to see if the fumes have dissipated.”

“Thanks, Dad.” Sunny got another coat and headed out to her Wrangler. She drove carefully in to work, arrived at the office with no problems, and settled into the daily routine.

But she found she couldn’t keep still. She’d be working on e-mails, when suddenly she’d get a vision of Will walking up to an apartment door and a gun battle erupting. Sometimes there’d be uniformed cops with him, and she’d see someone she knew like Ben Semple fall to the ground bleeding. Other times it would be Val Overton. Worst of all, though, her mind’s eye would see Will getting hit by a flying bullet, falling, and then lying motionless. She’d shake her head to bump that image away, but it kept coming back.

Sunny bent over her keyboard, trying to keep her thoughts on work alone, when the door abruptly swung open, making her jump. Will strode in.

“Is it over? Do you have him? Kilbane?” The words fairly burst from her lips.

But Will shook his head. “Ingersoll stuck his oar in, and he wants to dot every I and cross every T before we try to do anything.”

Captain Dan Ingersoll was the second in command in the Elmet County Sheriff’s Department. As a newly elected sheriff, Lenore Nesbit depended heavily on him for proper police procedure—maybe a little too much in this case, Sunny suspected.

Ingersoll wasn’t happy with the way Will tied up the last murder case, she thought. He’s got Will pegged as some sort of glory hound, after a high-profile arrest, whether it’s justified or not.

Will must have been tuned into her mind, because he said, “The captain thinks we’re reaching too far, that we don’t really know who this Bear is.”

“We suspect we know who he is,” Sunny tried to argue, but she knew that wouldn’t move an editor, much less a police captain.

“So I’ve tried to find out more,” Will said. “Your friend Jasmine has had a visitor in her apartment for the last couple of weeks, a guy with a motorcycle. He hasn’t been seen since the ice storm, when he apparently had an accident. The Harley has been under wraps, and Jasmine has hit several pharmacies for medical supplies.”

Sunny frowned, trying to call up a memory. “Jasmine said something last night about Bear being banged up.”

“At least he wouldn’t have road rash.” Will broke off when he saw the look of incomprehension on Sunny’s face. “Usually when a motorcycle goes down while it’s moving, the biker keeps on going and can scrape away a lot of skin on the pavement. On ice, the cyclist is usually more padded, and the ground is more slippery—that’s why the bike goes down in the first place.”

Sunny waved that image aside. “So we know Bear was out the night that Charlie Vane died.”

“So were a lot of people who wound up in hospitals—and a couple in morgues.” Will pulled out a sheaf of papers from inside his coat and put them on Sunny’s desk. “I managed to get copies of Kilbane’s file from a friend in the state police.”

She laid them flat, examining the mug shot appearing on the first page. The markings in the background showed that Yancey Kilbane stood several inches over six feet, and his shoulders were wide and husky. He had a surprisingly snub nose with shaggy brows and a shiny shaved scalp above and a big, bushy Fu Manchu mustache below.

“He doesn’t look very bearlike to me,” Sunny said. “Except for his build.”

“From what I’ve been able to find out, he let his hair grow back and sprouted a full set of whiskers now,” Will explained. “Don’t know if he did it for this job, but it certainly changed his look entirely.”

Sunny turned a page. “At least you have his fingerprints.”

“Yeah, but they won’t help until we’ve got him in custody.” He blew out an exasperated breath. “The problem is that Ingersoll wants to hedge his bets. If Bear doesn’t turn out to be Kilbane, we’re only asking him to assist in our investigation. If he is Kilbane, we might be stepping into World War Three, and the captain wants more than a few patrol officers trying to bring him in.”

Sunny blinked. “So where does he figure on getting this extra help? From Val and the federal marshals?”

“Ingersoll wants the state police tactical team. Which means additional hoops to jump through.” Will shook his head. “And more delay. Now I’m hoping we can get this operation underway before the kids start coming home from school.” He reassembled the papers on Sunny’s desk. “Wish me luck.”

“All of it in the world. And be careful, Will.”

He nodded and left.

Sunny couldn’t eat lunch. She got on the state police web site and saw pictures of the tactical team, feeding new and unpleasant daydreams. They looked professional as all get-out, in helmets and camouflage uniforms, assault rifles at the ready. One photo showed a guy poised with some sort of one-man battering ram beside a door. In Sunny’s mind, however, things kept going wrong. The Yancey Kilbane whose blurry mug shot she’d seen kept appearing in the doorway, wearing what would have been a ridiculous wig and fake beard except for the big handgun he was aiming, making even bigger holes in any things or people who got in his way.

Finally, Sunny couldn’t stand it anymore. She used her computer to get the live stream from the local all-news channel.

Might as well hear it as it happens, she thought.

But there was no news. Oh, there were politics and sports, traffic and weather, and a feature on Seasonal Affective Disorder, but no reports of police activity in downtown Kittery Harbor.

The sky was beginning to darken when Will reappeared at the office door.

“Thank God!” Sunny jumped up from her desk and went to him. But the look on his face stopped her. “The tactical team moved in perfectly. They woke Jasmine out of a sound sleep and probably scared her into a lot more gray hair. But Yancey Kilbane wasn’t there, and Jasmine doesn’t know where her Bear could be. He was in bed when she came off her shift at O’Dowd’s and went to sleep. But he and his stuff were gone. So was her car, by the way.”

He smacked a frustrated fist onto the top of a desk. “I couldn’t keep the place under surveillance without tipping off that we were interested. So while I was doing a lot of paperwork, Kilbane—or whoever—skipped.”

Will took a deep breath. “I apologize, Sunny, but there’s no one else I can talk about this with—at least no one that I’d want to. I’m off to headquarters with the head of the tac team to give a report to Ingersoll and Lenore Nesbit.” He managed to summon up the ghost of a smile. “At least nothing else can go wrong today.”

As if on cue, his cell phone began ringing. Will took it out and brought it to his ear. “Price,” he said. “Hi, Val. I guess news about our foul-up must have traveled fast.” His expression changed as he listened. “What? When? Is there anything we can do? Yes. Yes, I can see that. Keep me posted.”

He clicked off his phone and looked at Sunny. “I know it’s no fun listening to only one side of a conversation. Trust me, you wouldn’t have enjoyed the whole thing. I was wrong. Things could get worse. Val Overton just told me that Neil Garret has disappeared from the motel where the marshals were keeping him under wraps. Apparently he got a text and a little while later was in the wind.”