St. Albans Fire

Chapter 19

Gino was angrier than either Dante Lagasso or Tito had ever seen him. He was pacing back and forth in the now-closed social club from where Tito had taken Santo for the last ride of his life.

“Who the fuck is this Joe Gunther? You told me Vermont was hayseed country-bunch of Deputy Dawgs-in and out with no problem. Now the son of a bitch is fucking up my life.”

Lagasso was stirring a small cup of coffee. “I’m not the one who killed someone.”

Gino stared at him. “How the hell was I supposed to know the kid would get horny for some goddamn cow in the middle of the night?”

Lagasso shrugged. “Shit happens.”

Gino returned to pacing. “Shit happens. That’s the best you can do? Quote a bumper sticker? You’re supposed to check these deals out, Dante.”

“They looked solid,” Lagasso said placidly.

“Solid?” Gino exploded. “Is that why you had Santo whacked? You steered me into swampland, Dante.”

“Santo’s different. He was overdue for a correction. I’ll give you that. The Vermont cop figuring him out so fast just means he’s good at his job. Look, you’re not the only one with problems. Santo screwed me up, too, connecting Johnny to me. We’re all just gonna have to weather this out. Shouldn’t be a big deal, now he’s dead. Once they finish buzzing around, they’ll figure out they got nothin’.”

“Right,” Gino said bitterly. “And in the meantime, my life is a fuckin’ nightmare.” He pointed at Lagasso. “And you’re carrying some of the freight for that.”

Lagasso ran out of patience. He glanced at Tito, who slowly rose from the seat he’d been occupying in the room’s far corner.

Gino instantly read the body language. He held up his hand apologetically. “Okay, okay. I’m sorry. I know I fucked up. I didn’t mean it, all right? I’m just a little upset.”

Lagasso moved his finger ever so slightly, and Tito sat back down, his expression unchanged.

“It’s not the first time the cops have come sniffing around,” Lagasso said.

“It’s the first time they’ve visited my girlfriend and then gone yapping to my wife, for Chrissake. I’ve been shut out of my own house. She changed the fucking lock.”

“The girlfriend didn’t take you in?”

“That’s not the point. It’s my house.”

“You got caught fooling around. Bad luck.”

Gino ran his hands through his hair, staring at the ceiling. “I could kill that cop.”

“Not a great idea. Why not just settle down with the girl? You never liked the wife anyhow. Times are different. People won’t care.”

Gino stabbed himself in the chest several times. “I care. It’s a matter of pride. I do good work-clean work. I’m known for it. I worked hard for that reputation. It means something to me that people know I been thrown out of my house and forced to live someplace else, all because of some screwup.”

“You’re making too much of it,” Lagasso said, sounding bored. “You’re crazy about the girlfriend, the wife is crazy about your money. Everything’ll work out. Enjoy playing house while you can.”

Gino stared at the wall for a while, breathing hard, trying to control his anger. “Goddamn John Fucking Samuel Gregory,” he finally said. “He started all this. It’s always the rich guys that’ll cause you a world of shit. Be nice to repay the favor for once.”

Lagasso was done for the night. He admired Gino for his abilities and didn’t mind the finder’s fees he generated. But the guy could be a pain-thin-skinned and quick to blame everyone else for his problems.

“Go home and get laid, Gino. Things’ll look better in the morning.”

“Hey.”

“Hey, yourself,” Gail responded, her voice tinny and distant over the telephone line. “How’re things in Sin City?”

“Close-they actually call this the Brick City.”

She laughed. “Ow. That doesn’t sound like much fun. I thought every city was brick-sounds like it should be a metaphor for something.”

“According to Willy, the whole place is a metaphor for Murphy’s Law.”

“Is that true for what you’re doing down there, too?”

Joe was in his motel room, as he was so often when he called her from the road, with the curtains open and the lamps off, watching an urban kaleidoscope of lights flitting across the walls.

“No, not really,” he answered, not bothering with details. “We’re making headway. It’s hard when you’re dealing with crooks of the Italian persuasion. Pretty close-mouthed bunch. How’re things with you?”

“Actually,” she conceded, “they may be livelier here than they are down there. This battle between the pro-GMOs and the anti’s is really heating up. We’ve had a few arrests on the capitol building steps.”

“You’re kidding. I thought you were locking horns with a bunch of big-business lobbyists.”

“Oh, no. I even got handed a threatening note, and that was before things got exciting.”

His attention sharpened suddenly. “What kind of note?”

“Ah, damn,” she exclaimed. “I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I wasn’t going to, either. It just slipped out. It’s nothing, Joe. A slip of paper. I don’t even know how it ended up in my hand. People give me stuff all the time.”

“What did it say?”

“Something about how I’d better not play with fire. That’s not it, exactly, but close enough.”

Joe felt a chill go through him at the phrasing. “‘Fire’ was the word used?”

“Yes, why?”

“Just a coincidence-the case I’m working on. When did this happen?”

“Joe, before you get all Sherlock Holmes on me, it was no big deal. You should see the chaos around here. The building’s packed every day. All the committee meetings have been moved to the big room, which isn’t big enough. The phone rings all the time, the mail is almost arriving in boxes, and emotions are running very hot. One little message is nothing in comparison. I wish I hadn’t brought it up.”

“It’s okay,” he soothed her. “Did you at least mention it to anyone?”

“Like one of your boys in blue? No. It didn’t deserve that much attention. And before you ask, no, I haven’t gotten anything else like it.”

He decided to change the subject, sensing in her voice less an assuaging of concern than a tone of impatience. “How’s the battle going?”

“Frustrating. You’d think in this state, at least, there’d be more support for the organics and traditionalists, especially since a lot of the organics are going that way purely for the money. Some of them are about as crunchy-granola as Adolf Hitler.”

“He was a vegetarian.”

It was the wrong quip at the wrong time.

“Not funny. You get my point,” Gail said tersely. “The bottom line is, the dumb bastards calling the shots at the state level don’t seem to have any idea that Vermont isn’t Kansas or Ohio. And when people like me point out what should be as obvious as shit on their shoes, all we get is corporate-speak and lame one-liners.”

Joe opened his mouth to apologize, when he suddenly reconsidered. His joke hadn’t deserved such anger. She knew he was agreeable to most of her positions, especially this one, since they’d already discussed it. He’d merely been made the whipping boy for her pent-up frustration. Reasonably, the apology, if she cared to make it, was hers.

She didn’t.

After a long and awkward silence, she said, “Well, it’s getting late and I still have work to do. Good night, Joe. Stay safe.”

The line went dead.

He held the phone for a few seconds more, his eyes on the ceiling. “You, too,” he said softly.

At the far end of that dead phone line, Gail sat on the sofa in her condominium living room, paying no attention to the nighttime view of Montpelier’s distant lights, fanned out like luminescent spray from the dominant beacon of the gold-topped capitol building.

She’d been rude and preachy and self-centered with him. She’d felt interrupted in midwork when he called, irritated when he predictably focused on the threatening note, and angry when he joked about an issue that was consuming her every waking hour.

She pressed the tips of her fingers against her temples briefly, closing her eyes. What was happening? It wasn’t him. He was as stolid as ever-reliable, supportive, loyal, and kind. Nothing if not predictable. He’d given her no reason to act the way she had.

And why had she lied about not getting any more threats? She opened her eyes and looked over at the second slip of paper she’d received, just two days ago, lying like a curled-up leaf in the center of her coffee table. “Back off or pay the price,” it read.

The way she was feeling now, those words had more meaning than their writer could have ever imagined.

Farther north still, in the tiny, somewhat hardscrabble village of St. Albans Bay, just a mile or so west of St. Albans proper, John Samuel Gregory unlocked the door to his upscale condo and tossed his keys onto the table by the lamp.

He paused to admire once more what the lighting revealed-dark-painted walls, expensive carpeting, modern furniture, and recessed spots. He liked this place. The whole area was a dead-end, hayseed, hole-in-the-wall dump. The people were total woodchucks, as dumb as they were gullible. And the women were as easy to impress as kids craving ice cream-and most of them about that experienced in the sack. But this apartment was just right-big, new, well laid out, and with a great view of the bay and the lake beyond-a miracle, given the other buildings in town. Within its distinctly urbanized confines, he could reach back to what he’d enjoyed before his banishment here, and imagine what comforts lay ahead once his plans became reality.

He walked down the hallway and entered the cavernous living room/dining room/kitchen combination, slipping off his designer jacket and draping it over the back of a chair in passing, heading for a side table laden with liquor bottles and crystal glassware. He mixed himself a Scotch on the rocks-the Glenlivet, only, thank you-and wandered over to one of the leather armchairs facing the view. It was dark, of course, past midnight, but there were pinpricks of light always visible, from down both arms of the bay’s embrace-twinklings from other houses and from the occasional passing boat.

He was feeling pretty good, even with the reaming he’d gotten from Clark Wolff earlier that day. He’d told the old man where to get off, of course. He wasn’t going to take any crap from a sorry loser like that. But, in fact, he hadn’t been as pissed as he’d let on. He had the old man dead to rights, after all-he’d bought the damn properties, even if he had done it on the sly. And as for any “improprieties,” as Clark had put it, both he and the cops could shove them where the sun didn’t shine. Suspicions were just that without proof. And as far as Johnny could tell, nobody had anything close to proof.

He took a meditative sip and stared out into the darkness. The lights in this part of the room were dimmed almost to extinction, allowing him a view out the window with minimal reflection.

Not that he could afford to be careless, of course. The cops were working up a lather, talking to everyone they could find. Johnny was confident but not foolish. He didn’t have any direct way to contact the torch-that son of a bitch hadn’t even given him his name-but he would call Dante in the morning, just to make sure that end of things was covered.

Johnny frowned. He really could have done without these complications. It had all started out so well. Like injecting those cows with penicillin-not bad for a city boy-or even better, the old coot and the tractor. That had really been fun, skulking around in the dark, rigging the brake lines like he’d practiced in that garage near the interstate. He’d sort of felt like James Bond. And when the old guy had killed himself good and proper in the crash, nobody had been the wiser.

But the fun was definitely fading.

Johnny took another swallow. Maybe things weren’t so God-damned rosy, after all. Since the cops had talked to Wolff, they sure as hell wouldn’t take long to get to him-or to turn his life inside out. That wouldn’t hold up to too much scrutiny. Then word would leak out, the papers would grab hold, and, all of a sudden, it might not be quite so easy to pull off the scheme they were shooting for.

He squinted slightly, concentrating on the dark void ahead of him, visualizing a string of lights from the fantasy bridge spanning the black water. Christ, what a plan. And, my God, what a pile of money.

There was a movement outside, a ghostly shifting of sorts, floating in the air before him. Gregory sat forward slightly, trying to distinguish between the darkness, the slight reflection in the glass, and his own imagination.

He saw it again and suddenly realized it had nothing to do with the view or the lake or anything outside. It was a shape, a human being, coming up behind him fast and sure, and as he watched, frozen in the split second in which all this occurred, he recognized as in a flash photograph what the figure was carrying in its upraised hand. It was a hook on a handle, used on boxes or hay bales or animal carcasses.

And he watched in helpless disbelief as it came down upon his head.