Open season

34

I groped for the phone with my eyes still closed, hoping the call would be brief enough that I could handle it without fully waking up.

“Gunther?” It was James Dunn.

I opened my eyes. “What?”

“What the hell are you doing? You sound half asleep.”

“I am. Tony sent me home. Said I was a hazard to operations.” I looked at my watch. It was seven o’clock at night.

“Sorry. Thought you’d want to know the judge kicked Teicher loose at the arraignment.”

“What?” I sat straight up.

“Released on his own recognizance.”

“But what about protecting him from Stark?”

“Stark has made no threat against him, real or implied, as the saying goes.”

“But he’s a witness, goddamn it.”

“To what? All the principals are dead.”

“How about Bill Davis?”

“He’s being processed out anyway, and as quietly as possible I might add. That’s a hint, by the way, in case you decide to rub noses with Katz again.”

“Where’s Teicher now?”

“I think he went home.”

I hung up and dialed Brandt. “You hear about Teicher?”

“Yeah. I didn’t want to wake you up.”

“Dunn did the honors. What are we going to do about it?”

There was a pause. “Not much we can do.”

“Stark’s going to kill him.”

“Why? Teicher was going to marry the girl. That’s hardly a killing offense, even if it didn’t work out.”

“Stark doesn’t know that; he just knows Teicher knocked her up-that’s a capital crime in his book. Jesus, Tony, what the hell have you been doing all this time? Paying me lip service? Why did you let me do all that razzle-dazzle with the shotguns at Teicher’s office?”

“You told me that was to squeeze him for a confession.”

“Well, it was, but all I did was soup it up a little. The threat is real, believe me.”

There was a momentary silence at the other end. “What makes you so sure?”

I couldn’t believe I had to replow this field. The frustration made me blurt out: “Because by approaching Teicher like a platoon of Marines, we’ve all but challenged Stark to knock him off. I thought you understood that.”

Brandt’s voice went totally flat. “It wasn’t clear. Why did you go home without laying it out?”

“I thought Teicher would be locked up for a while. The arraignment wasn’t supposed to be until tomorrow. Look, I don’t know what I thought. Maybe I got cold feet, setting Teicher up as bait.”

“You sure choose your moments to be coy.”

I let a petulant flash of anger cover my guilt. “I told you he was in danger. I told Dunn that, too. What the hell did you guys think? That I’d suddenly gone soft in the head? Hasn’t Stark proved he’s nutty enough for something like that? Teicher’s all we have left, for God’s sake.”

“All right, all right, let’s drop it. You challenged him to a duel and Teicher’s the prize. We better get him back under cover. I’ll send a patrol out to his house now to sit on him until you get there.”

I fumbled with my clothes in a blind fury. Once I’d set the ball in motion, I should have covered it like a blanket. There was no excuse for slacking off at the last moment. I’d been complacent and stupid and scared to play by Stark’s rules to the end. As I slammed the door behind me, I inanely swore it wouldn’t happen again.

As it turned out, I was lucky. I found Teicher intact at his home, a patrol car parked out front. But he was obviously not a happy man.

“What do you want?” A superior emphasis was placed on the “you.”

“I just heard you were out of custody. I came to arrange security.”

He gave me a sour expression. “From what my lawyer tells me, you’re the one I should need security against.”

“What did he tell you?”

“That you lured me into confessing; it was blatant entrapment, and it’ll get thrown out of court. He said if I’d kept my mouth shut, my wife would still be with me and I’d se and Itill have a job.”

I was surprised at the speed of his demise. “You travel with a fast crowd.”

“Fuck you, too.”

“None of that abrogates your responsibility to Bill Davis.”

“Don’t give me that.” He turned his back and walked into the house. I followed him. “The only novelty of a man like that being in jail is that he’s innocent of this particular crime.”

I liked him better when he was a bowl of jelly. “I don’t really care if your case is thrown out of court. My job now is keeping you alive.”

He stopped and faced me. “That’s another thing my lawyer pointed out. Why the hell would Stark want me dead? He got his revenge.”

I felt like the boy who’d cried “Wolf” once too often. “That’s not how he thinks. He’s killed or beaten up every person who had anything to do with Pam Stark, including most of the jurors who sent Bill Davis up the river. I watched him torture a man with a knife just for a little information. Do you really think he’s going to ignore some snotty rich adulterer who knocked up his daughter? Not hardly.”

He didn’t answer, but I could tell he was mulling it over. He turned on his heel and continued down the hallway until we both reached a small study at the back of the house. There he sat on an overstuffed leather armchair-something I’ve always coveted-and crossed his legs with an elegant flourish. I noticed he was wearing tasseled loafers-something I’ve always thought was for the birds.

“So what do you propose?” I realized for the first time he had the same lilt to his voice I’d heard in 1930s movies.

“To put you under wraps for a while until we can get a fix on Stark.”

“As bait?”

“You’re bait right now.”

“He’s dessert.” The voice made us both whirl around, I with my gun in my hand.

Stark was standing in a side doorway, a short, nasty-looking pistol-grip crossbow in his hand. It was pointing directly at Teicher’s chest. Humiliation and anger thunderclapped inside me-the son of a bitch had beaten me to the end.

I motioned my gun at him. “Put it down. You can’t win this-not with that thing.” Teicher was squirming in his chair. “Who is this man?”

Stark smiled and clicked his heels. “Colonel Henry A. Stark, United States Army, probably retired by now.” The crossbow never wavered.

Teicher merely swallowed.

“Come on, Stark, this is stupid. If you move a muscle, I’ll fire. And you only have one arrow.”

“It’s called a bolt and it’s intended for that man’s chest. This didn’t happen accidentally, Joe.”

“What didn’t?”

“This situation. I’ve been I’ve waiting for you. And this”-he nodded at the weapon in his hand-“is for your benefit. It is palpable proof that I have but one shot. Not, of course, that I don’t have other weapons on me-ones I can reach and use in just under one second-but that’s my gift to you. You have one second to kill me after I dispatch Mr. Tassel Loafers here; after that, I kill you.”

I stared at him in stunned silence. From the start, this man had dictated my actions with the simpleminded brutality of the weapon in his hand. He had mocked the complexities that had plagued every actor in this drama, from Jamie Phillips’s struggles as a juror to his own daughter’s battle with the ghosts screaming inside her head. He had made his decisions without contemplation, without pros and cons, but merely with a goal in mind. As a bullet seeks its target, so he had sought this final meeting. It was as foreign to my way of thinking as could be, and, I realized now, he had mysteriously known that almost from the beginning. I had been his perfect implement.

That was hard to swallow. I lowered my gun as I might have upon discovering I’d been aiming at my own shadow. “You’ve got to be out of your mind. Cops are on the way right now; that’s why I’m here, and the people out front. It’s suicidal, for Christ’s sake. What’s the point?”

“Put the gun back up, Joe. And I wouldn’t count on the two out front.” He waited for me to comply. I did, suddenly aware that regardless of how I saw things, Stark was going to force them to work his way. It was no time for me to weigh the various aspects of the situation. I either became like him or I was going to die.

“Good.” He gave an approving nod and quickly glanced at his watch. “We have a few minutes yet. You asked me a question the other night that I promised to answer at a later date. I doubt we’ll get much later than this.”

“About Frank?” I was amazed at his performance. Once the arrow-or bolt-was sent into the middle of Teicher’s chest, Stark was going to briefly expose himself to whatever fate might dole out. There was a strong likelihood he had but a few minutes left to live. And yet he was calm, polite, even considerate. I no longer had any doubts that I was dealing with a nut. It scared the hell out of me; it also made me think that the wisest thing to do right now was to shoot him in cold blood. But I didn’t.

He almost beamed with self-satisfaction. “Frank’s death was an auto accident, plain and simple.”

“Bullshit.”

“Didn’t anyone tell you how you were found? With your head held out of the water by your seat belt? That didn’t just happen. I was tailing you two when you went over. You knew that because you joked about it-remember Frank saying he’d drive in that muck just to find out if I was a flatlander?”

I nodded.

“Joke was on you guys. I heard the accident over the bug I planted. I found the hole in the guard rail, checked you both out, propped your head, and called the cops on the roadside phone. Frank was dead when I got to you, Joe. It was an accident, just like the state troopers said.”

“I don’t believe it.”

This time he laughed outright. “You’re a credit to my imagination. imagina Surely you’ve noticed that the bad guys I warned you about have mysteriously disappeared.”

I didn’t answer. The anger at having been manipulated to that extent-and at that emotional level-was strangling me. I dropped my eyes to the gun in my hand, so long ago the symbol of a young cop’s belief that he could thwart the evils of the world through its use. I hated that remembrance and had worked hard to bury it.

“I made them up. I was the one who gassed your apartment. I thought the extra pressure might help. Do you remember the torn scotch tape you found across your door-the one that made you crawl all over your apartment sweating bullets?”

“Yes.”

“I did that. Too good to resist; I couldn’t believe you’d set yourself up so well. And the bug in the phone? Remember that?”

I let him talk. In the back of my mind, I was hoping he might screw up, even in the last minute of the last hour; that he might somehow expose a small gap through which I or someone else might quickly fit and thus let me off the hook.

“When you picked that phone up and a strange voice said your name and then broke the connection, that started you wondering, didn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“So you looked at the phone and realized that it had been placed wrong end around on the cradle. You wondered why, you opened the phone, and out fell the bug. It was a dud, by the way. I never owned the other half of it-the receiving end-but it did its job anyway. All for building up pressure.”

“And Frank’s death wasn’t a part of that?”

“Pure serendipity. How was I going to guarantee having an eighteen-wheeler in the right place at the right time in the middle of a snowstorm? And why would I? You guys were hot on the track of Cioffi and this miserable bastard.” He nodded at Teicher, who looked like he was trying to disappear into his overstuffed seat cushion. “I wasn’t about to get in your way, despite your best efforts.”

He paused for a moment. “You almost got me on the way to Gorham, though. Your pal Kunkle switched cars at the last minute; I’d planted a radio in his. Still, it worked out.”

I thought of Kunkle’s shattered arm. “How? We didn’t see any cars.”

“I followed you with my lights off. I latched onto your taillights and hoped to hell you wouldn’t lead me straight into a ditch. I’ll credit you that much-that was one time in my life I thought I might lose the game… almost lost control.”

“Like when you beat up Susan Lucey?”

His face lost its almost meditative look. “You’re a lousy conversationalist, you know that? Besides, it’s a little late to be probing the dark recesses of my soul.” He looked at his watch again. “In fact, I’d say time’s up.”

The crossbow moved slightly in his hand.

I too knew time was up. Now-finally-I was in a position to stop him before he did any more damage. Sore damatill I hesitated. “You killed the man who murdered your daughter. What does this guy matter? He was going to marry her, for Christ’s sake.”

Stark half smiled, “Jesus-what a thought. No, I like things the way they are. I kill him, you kill me-maybe. That’s neat and tidy; and if you’re not fast enough, I live to play a different kind of game for a while.”

“I will shoot.”

“As soon as you published my identity, I was dead anyway-I have ‘friends’ in high places.”

“I could shoot you now, save Teicher, and ruin it for you.”

He smiled. “I don’t think so.”

So that was that. No gray areas. Just yes or no. The years I’d spent struggling for alternate choices were useless to me now. I was back to where I’d started as a rookie cop, back to when my thinking shared the same narrow ledge as Stark’s. My gun felt huge and awkward-a bloody steel monument to stupidity. I barely felt its recoil when I fired.

The arrow flew as my bullet hit him high in the chest and I heard Teicher scream from the chair. Stark slammed against the doorframe and momentarily stood there, motionless, his eyes locked onto mine; then they closed, his body relaxed, and he slid to the floor.

Keeping my gun on him, I knelt by his side and felt for a pulse. There was none. I could hear noises outside: slamming car doors, the sound of broken glass. I walked over to Teicher, who was now whimpering. The arrow had gone through his right thigh and had pinned him to the chair.

“My God. It hurts, it hurts. Jesus, it hurts.”

I laid my hand on his shoulder. My brain was almost totally numb. “Be grateful. It’s a sign you’re alive.”

He stopped for a second and looked at me.

“Sorry. I’ll get some help for you.”

I left him to let the others in, but I paused at the hallway door and looked at Stark again, curled up like a sleeping child on the floor. Fate or divine guidance or whatever had put my bullet in his heart. He had the contented look of a man who’d lived a clean and simple life and who’d left with his affairs fully in order, with no doubts and no regrets.

I envied him all of that.