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Chapter 20

Willy stood perfectly still in the darkness, adjusting to the cold. He was beyond the glare of a nearby streetlight, in the shadow of a rickety, wooden triple-decker dating back a hundred years, in one of the poorer sections of the village of Bellows Falls.

There wasn't much activity. It was late, the traffic all but petered out. The weather was keeping most pedestrians off the sidewalks, and although there were windows still glowing with light, Willy was pretty sanguine he'd be left alone.

Not positive, though. Bellows Falls was quirky enough to hold back a surprise. A pretty village, with ancient mills, once fueled by the power of its namesake cascade, it was wedged between the Connecticut River and a prominence named Oak Hill, whose sheer bulk appeared to shove and compress the village onto a narrow shelf paralleling the water's edge.

Unfortunately, Bellows Falls had a reputation at odds with its appearance. Where once those mills had kept both mansions and worker housing bustling and trim, now their stagnant silence had relegated too many buildings to the status of neglected, parceled-up tenements.

The spirit of the place struggled on, the efforts of its boosters telling and ongoing, but the sheer weight of its financial challenges was like an iceberg's bulk-just under the surface and massive in proportion.

Sadly, as a result, Bellows Falls was a prime place to conduct police business. Which was why Willy was here now.

He checked his watch slowly, sensitive to making any sudden movements. He'd been here two hours. Ever since being told by old man Griffis that Wayne Nugent had raped Andy in prison, Willy had been in quiet pursuit of the man. E. T. hadn't stopped at just the name. With prompting-and occasional breaks for more beer and some sobbing-he'd also delivered other pertinent details, all of which had helped Willy get a line on Nugent and begin tracking him down.

Not that it had been a huge challenge. Nugent was one of humanity's too common opportunists-neither clever nor calculating, but certainly unhesitating to grasp every offer that came within reach. He randomly raped or robbed or simply self-indulged with drugs and liquor. He stayed with people, sleeping with them, robbing them blind, or both, leaving behind a wake of disgruntled sources all too happy to unload into Willy's accommodating ear.

His latest harbor was a woman in Bellows Falls who lived on the second floor at the top of a narrow exterior staircase, across from where Willy had been waiting ever since he'd spotted Wayne downing shots at one of the watering holes on Rockingham Street.

It wouldn't be much longer. It was after two a.m., when the bars closed. Nugent was guaranteed to push the limit and then stagger out toward his latest version of home.

It was then that Willy intended to intercept him, between one oasis and the next, and to begin a conversation he anticipated would result in Nugent's arrest. Lord only knew how many times Willy had made just such things happen in the past-and Wayne Nugent was just the kind of guy he loved to go after. The fact that the man's involvement with Dan Griffis's misbehavior or Leo's car crash was peripheral mattered less to Willy than his own discovery that a bad man had gotten away with driving a fellow human being to suicide. In Willy's mind, this was merely a logical extension of Joe's initial assignment to pump E. T. Griffis for everything he could get.

Nugent first emerged as little more than a dark motion against a somber background, although Willy, a combat-trained sniper, had little trouble spotting what most would have missed entirely. He pulled back farther into his own shadows and watched as his target drew nearer, studying his hands, his gait, his manner of dress, and estimating from his body language how he might react to a sudden crisis. He also studied the man's clothing to see if any allowances had been made for quick access to a weapon.

Satisfied, he waited for Nugent to walk past, trailing a cloud of cheap beer and cigarette smoke, and soundlessly fell in behind him.

As Nugent reached the bottom of the exterior staircase and placed his hand on the wooden railing, Willy clearly but quietly ordered him, "Police, Wayne. Do not move."

Nugent's reaction was hair-triggered and totally unexpected. He didn't freeze, startle, twist around, or shout in surprise. Instead, as instantly as if he'd been launched from a cannon, and using the riser under his foot as a push-off, he simply propelled himself backward, guided solely by Willy's voice.

Caught completely by surprise, Willy tried fending off the sheer bulk of the body hurtling at him, sidestepping and throwing up his good arm for protection. He staggered backward, hit the hood of a parked car with the small of his back, and catapulted over as Nugent, deflected by the impact, came up against the car's side instead, thereby managing to stay on his feet. As Willy rolled off the hood and fell hard to the ground, Nugent took off at a sprint.

"God damned son of a bitch," Willy swore as he staggered to his feet and gave chase, amazed by the other man's reflexes. Already, Nugent was halfway down the block, despite his inebriated state.

Willy had given no thought whatsoever to asking the local police department for assistance with this, purely on principle. And even now, as his quarry began vanishing into the darkness, he didn't rue his decision. He was hoping, however, that Nugent's adrenaline would run out sooner rather than later.

As it turned out, that didn't matter. When Nugent reached the next major cross street, a car pulled up out of nowhere and-in defiance of typical behavior-came to a complete stop at the sign. With the same reactive fluidity that he'd used against Willy, Nugent ran straight up to the driver's door, yanked it open, pulled out the astonished young man at the wheel, and all but threw him across the sidewalk. In the time it took Willy to cover five yards, the car's rear wheels were burning and squealing as the vehicle peeled away, its open door slamming shut from the momentum.

"Shit!" Willy yelled, shifting directions to aim for his own car, parked within sight. No longer simply irritated at his man for being half rabbit, he was already visualizing ranks of irritated senior officers looming in his proximate future.

He unlocked his car at a run using the remote, half fell in behind the wheel, and jammed the key into the ignition. His one hand controlling the car, he used the same technique as Nugent to slam his door, and swerved around the baffled, dispossessed driver, now staggering in the middle of the street.

From the air, Bellows Falls fit roughly between two major streets that matched up at either end like parentheses placed too close together, and which therefore formed an oval-shaped loop. The one cutting through downtown proper was named Rockingham-where Nugent had spent half the night drinking. The other was Atkinson, where, with Willy in hot pursuit, he was now driving north at exuberant speed. As Willy could have predicted given his present turn of luck, the Bellows Falls Police Department was located just beyond the northern juncture of this loop. And, naturally, it was just as Nugent was approaching this spot, hoping to burst through it and beyond to the interstate entry ramp some five miles off, that a patrol officer, no doubt bored with his own paperwork, left the office in his cruiser and began heading south.

He didn't need a radar to interpret what was approaching. Nor did he have to think twice before hitting his blue lights.

Willy saw the light bar burst to life ahead of Nugent's stolen car. This time, however, his reaction was almost muted. "Christ," he snorted quietly, by now philosophical. "What next?" He quickly moved to turn on his own hidden grille strobes.

Nugent's response was finally predictable. He cut his wheel right, went sliding broadside toward the oncoming cruiser, and, just shy of collision, shot into the parking lot of a gas station at the juncture of Atkinson and Rockingham, intent on heading down the latter in the opposite direction.

The cruiser skidded to a stop, unable to turn without hitting Willy, and swung around instead in his wake, his siren now joining the light show that was jaggedly bouncing off the nearby buildings.

Willy hit the radio transmit button he had mounted to his steering wheel to favor his disability.

"BFPD, this is VBI two-four, directly in front of you. Do you copy?"

The response was a delayed and breathless "Ten-Four. This is M-eight-five-one. What's going on?"

By now, all three cars were tearing down Rockingham, the nearby red-brick walls whipping past at white-knuckle speed. Willy could only hope that no one else would be taking in the sights on a wintry night.

"In pursuit of a stolen vehicle. Better alert everybody on both sides of the river."

A woman's calm voice then broke in. "This is Bellows Falls Dispatch. Do you have a description of the vehicle?"

With a small sigh at the inevitable reprimands to come, Willy rattled off the make, model, and registration of the car ahead, mentioned that it was stolen, and identified Wayne Nugent, knowing that his criminal record would pop up on the dispatcher's screen.

Nugent, in the meantime, was fast approaching a choice: to turn left at the bottom of the village's small square and cross the bridge into neighboring New Hampshire, or continue south to the village limits and select Route 5 into Westminster and the interstate's southern ramp, or west toward Saxton's River and the back roads beyond.

He skipped the bridge, eliminating New Hampshire for the moment, and led the way up and out of town, abandoning, among other things, its quaint and demure twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit-something Willy thought he'd include on the list of offenses he was mentally tallying up, for fun if nothing else.

"Eight-five-one-Dispatch," he heard over the radio from the car behind him, "we're proceeding south on Westminster toward Red Light Hill."

"Ten-four," was the laconic reply.

Westminster Street was merely Rockingham renamed, wider and flatter than it was in the village. Nugent took advantage of this to extend the gap between himself and his pursuers, apparently not knowing, as they did, what lay ahead. At the aforementioned Red Light Hill-actually a four-way intersection-his two easiest choices were either a hard left or a steep hill straight up, unless he opted for an even tougher right turn back onto Atkinson all over again. In all cases, the one common denominator was a need to slow down.

Willy didn't know if Nugent was too new to the area or too drunk and scared to care, but as they approached the junction, he began to realize that the lead car wasn't going to survive.

He eased off the accelerator and keyed his mike, "This is VBI two-four. I think we're looking at a ten-fifty in the making. I recommend we drop back."

The cruiser driver didn't answer, but he made no effort to pass Willy in the straightaway.

Now far ahead of them, the stolen car chose the left-hand turn, not surprisingly shooting for the distant interstate he'd been aiming at when the patrolman had changed his plans. Willy saw little puffs of smoke in the car's red lights as the rear end swerved and the tires burned with a sudden braking, and then the whole package yielded to simple physics. Nugent broke into an uncontrolled skid, his car slithered both sideways and to the right until it caught the edge of a concrete median, and then it flipped, vaulting spectacularly into the night air. It hung there for a split second, as if arrested by a movie projector glitch, before coming down into a gas station driveway, careening into both of the station's outermost pumps.

There was a flash, a flicker, a long and bated pause, and then, almost mercifully, a fireball explosion that made Willy drop onto the passenger seat for cover. A thunderous whump filled the air and compressed his lungs, even inside the closed car, followed by a showering of small, hard objects all around, including one that smashed his windshield.

With the patrolman's yelling on the radio as a backdrop, Willy got out of his car and surveyed the scene before him-a beautiful, constant fountain of flame, with the car and the mangled pumps at its heart.

"Guess there won't be a trial," he said to himself.