The sniper's wife

Chapter 25

The Portsmouth naval prison is one of the region's oddest landmarks. Located on the eastern edge of the large island housing the Navy Yard, the now-empty prison dominates most inland vistas like a cross between an ancient fortress and a gigantic, Stalinist apartment block. It is at once stately and hideous, alluring and repellent. Built at the turn of the twentieth century and nicknamed the Castle, it was designed as the Navy's premier highsecurity facility and made to the then-popular template of Leavenworth and comparable hellholes, complete with stacked and terraced jail cells, electrically controlled sliding doors, and shooting galleries for the guards-a James Cagney movie hauntingly frozen in concrete and steel.

Unaware his car had been identified and was now under surveillance, Willy drove to Seavey's Island, showed his badge to the guard at the gate, and was waved through without further effort. Once a beehive of Eisenhower's "military/industrial complex," the Navy Yard was thinly manned now, enough that periodically it had to justify its existence before congressional subcommittees-an unheard-of humiliation in the old days. As a result, while parts of the island were still closely guarded, a good chunk of it was virtually open to the public, an aspect some initial investors had hoped to bank on by transforming the prison into a business condo with some of the best views in town. Until their funding crumbled with only a few rooms gutted and refitted with new windows.

Willy had no idea what Andy Liptak's plans were when he bought the lease from those disappointed visionaries, but he suspected money-laundering probably played a role.

The day had fully arrived by the time he parked nearby. There was a modern bachelor-officer's housing unit within twenty yards of the prison's west wall, so the presence of vehicles went without notice, and it was already late enough that the owners of those cars were at work elsewhere on the island.

Willy took his bearings. The building lay along a roughly north-south axis. It had a central portion resembling a castle keep-ergo the nickname-complete with four looming, crenellated corner turrets, and two asymmetrical wings, both shorter and narrower and equipped with smaller, evenly spaced turrets of their own. The whole was utterly massive, if neglected and weatherbeaten, and seemed well endowed with windows, until closer scrutiny revealed that all of them had been tightly boarded up, lending to the place the look of a medieval Playmobil toy hormonally run amok.

Architectural integrity, however, had been altered long before the windows had been sealed. The "new" section, also called the Fortress, had been tacked onto the tail end of the southern wing to handle World War Two's excess population. Its axis was east-west, it was as tall and massive as the central Castle, but while it tipped a hat to the Castle's architecture with a single turret and some arched windows, the turret was square and the windows were graceless, and the overall aspect was so bland, white, and blockish, it ended up looking like a Montgomery Ward warehouse in need of repair.

But it was also where Willy saw his best hope for gaining entry. The Fortress had been where the developers had done their truncated remodeling and in the process had both breached the exterior walls and punched holes in some of the rusty chain-link fencing designed to keep out trespassers.

Willy cautiously crossed to the foot of the Fortress's walls and cut around to the south wall to get a feel for his surroundings. Before entering this abandoned behemoth, he wanted to know how the ground lay around it.

In fact, it was remarkably desolate. Despite its location in the middle of a major city's harbor and on the edge of a military base, the prison had a distinctly lonely feeling to it. Virtually surrounded by water on three sides and at the farthest distance possible from the island's busiest spot, the building seemed shunted aside, as if not just history but geography had decided its usefulness was firmly in the past.

This isolation became an advantage on the other side, however, and helped explain the eagerness with which those long-vanished developers had eyed the property. The harbor; the city of Portsmouth; the string of bridges spanning the Piscataqua River; Kittery, Maine; and Castle Island, all stretched before it like a peaceful, unblemished maritime panorama. And as if in poignant and ironic contrast to the building he was about to enter, Willy was startled to see the ancient, tumbledown Wentworth-by-the-Sea Hotel just across the water, once host to moneyed visitors from Boston and elsewhere, standing in stark contrast to the far harsher quarters behind him. What feelings those jailed sailors must have had a half century ago, watching the rich and famous being liveried to and from this monumental watering hole, and listening to the laughter and music that once must have emanated from its open windows on a summer night.

Now, both abandoned, empty, and falling apart, they stood as mute witnesses to bygone times, as anachronistic and retrospectively romantic as the contrast between Sing Sing and Jay Gatsby.

Willy, however, saw all this only in passing. What caught his eye and heightened his anticipation was the black BMW parked out of the way, under a tree, as discreetly as possible. Running the risk of being seen, he trotted over to the car and glanced inside, finding what he thought he might-a smear of blood across the backseat-but which still didn't look as bad as he'd been fearing. From that scant evidence alone, he took heart that Sammie was still alive.

He returned to the most likely breach in the prison's exterior wall and slipped inside. Joe Gunther pointed to the tall, blond, athletically built woman in uniform who was standing by the edge of the helicopter landing pad.

"That's Janet Scott," he told Phil Panatello, shouting over the sound of the rotors.

They waited until the crew chief gave them the thumbs-up before jumping out of the aircraft, instinctively ducking as they jogged over to where Scott was waiting.

She gave Gunther a smile as he drew near. "Hey, Joe. Long time. You're traveling in style. I didn't know you were a part of this."

"More of an outrigger than a real part," he admitted, and made introductions all around.

She directed them away from the prop wash into a small concrete building that doubled as a waiting room.

"This is what we've got so far: Your Willy Kunkle apparently broke into the Liptak house-smashed the door down-smacked her around a little and forced her to tell him that Liptak might be holding out in the old naval prison on Seavey's Island." She cast a glance at Gunther. "He really one of yours?"

"As is the one who's missing."

"Granted." She held her hand up as Panatello opened his mouth to say something. "Anyway, that was her story, and it's true that we found her hog-tied on the bedroom floor. But we also found a twelve-gauge hole in the bedroom door where she tried to kill Kunkle as he entered, except that he came in through a different door."

"What about Kunkle?" Panatello asked.

"He went straight to the prison. He was seen scoping it out, including the beemer parked on the far side, and then he ducked inside." She checked her watch. "That was about twenty minutes ago. I've since assembled a multidepartmental tac team and parked them out of sight all around the place, on the water as well. There is blood, by the way, covering the car's backseat."

That introduced a pause in the conversation.

"And there's been nothing since?" Joe Gunther finally asked.

"Not a peep."

Gunther stepped away and absentmindedly watched the chopper crew through the window as they secured their craft to the helipad. Behind him, Scott and Panatello coordinated how to get to the prison without attracting undue attention.

"Worried about your people?"

Gunther turned at Ward Ogden's quiet, resonant voice.

"Willy especially," he admitted. "Mostly because of what he might do. I mean, Sam could be dead by now, which would damn near kill me, but Christ only knows about Willy. He's already in enough hot water-but that'll probably be nothing compared to what he comes up with next."

Ogden smiled enigmatically. "Water may not be that hot."

Gunther's eye narrowed. "Meaning what?"

"Panatello and I were talking during the flight. If he agrees to play along, Wild Willy might just duck this bullet-for the most part, at least. Roughing up Casey Ballantine'll need a closer look by the locals, but right now, from a legal standpoint, what he did in New York might not even surface."

"He shot Cashman, for God's sake."

Ogden shook his head. "Somebody did, but we don't have any evidence and Riley's not talking. Same thing with the assault on Budd Wilcox-he never saw who hit him-thought it was Cashman. And Lenny Manotti's never going to say he was pushed around by a one-armed man. Panatello's bunch are going to be busy enough without dragging Willy into it.

"And," he added, "the Casey Ballantine thing up here'll probably end up in the same place. She'll be way too busy trying to stay out of jail to be pointing fingers at Willy Kunkle."

The voices behind them rose up as people began crowding the exit. Ogden laid a hand on Gunther's shoulder. "I'm not saying I'm right, and I'm not saying it won't all be moot depending on how crazy he gets today, but if I were you, I wouldn't worry about his legal problems too much.

"Of course," he put in almost as an afterthought, "I'm also not sure I'd let him out of Vermont for ten to twenty years, either." The first floor of the Fortress looked like the aftermath of an earthquake. As Willy picked his way carefully through the debris left by the remodelers, he was impressed by both their ambitions and their destructiveness. Walls had been sledgehammered through, holes chopped into ceilings, and massive piles of glass block windows had been gathered where more conventional windows had replaced them. The logic of their plans was just barely discernible through the rubble, and he had to admit, what with the open spaces and the generous views, it did look like a potentially attractive workplace.

But it was also empty of any signs of life. If Liptak was here, he'd apparently tucked himself away inside the building's older, so-called Castle section.

Willy found a single door connecting the addition to the mother ship: a narrow hallway on the ground floor, a concrete tunnel with a gaping, open steel-barred gate, leading into a void so dark, he felt he was stepping into pure space.

His already cautious progress slowed to a tentative creeping, and he placed each foot carefully before the other, gently pushing aside any trash and rubble on the floor to avoid crunching it underfoot. He even opened his mouth to breathe so that he could better hear whatever might be awaiting him.

By the time he reached the end of the connecting tunnel, he was walking blind. He extracted from his pocket a small flashlight he always kept on hand, and, after listening carefully, held it as far away from himself as possible, in case it was used as a target, and switched it on.

What appeared before him was like a still from a black-and-white movie: a long, constricted, towering slit of a corridor, with a wall of boarded-up windows on one side and a stacked tier of rusty caged-in galleries on the other. Both the ceiling and the end of this long room extended beyond the reach of the tiny flashlight, and in the silence he could imagine the voices of thousands of confined men, their hands gripping the bars, or playing cards on the floor between cells. In the still dampness of the air, he could all but smell the sweat, the bland food, and the stink of hundreds of toilets. Willy had visited old, overcrowded prisons before, some almost as decrepit as this one, and knew too well what was missing from the picture now before him.

Satisfied that his light hadn't given him away, Willy took his bearings and found a staircase leading up, walled with more bars. Still moving gingerly, he climbed to the next level, which also took him to the building's west side. There, he came to a balcony inside the second-floor gallery, a row of cells on the right, and instead of a conventional railing to the left, a wall of open vertical bars as far as he could see. The same gloomy silence prevailed, but the sense of vastness was reduced. Now he felt truly entombed, wrapped up by darkness, silence, and aging steel. Everything was made of metal, from floor to overhead canopy, and from everything hung large flakes of peeling gray paint, making him feel he was brushing alongside an endless length of stretched-out alligator skin. As he walked as softly as possible across the debrisstrewn floor, past cell after devastated cell, each with its own rusty bedsprings, toilet, and sink, and each choked with the small, accumulated rubble of the ages, he felt himself being swallowed whole.

The trip felt interminable, but eventually he came to the end of the gallery, to another set of stairs, and finally to a passageway leading to the prison's central administrative area-the heart of the Castle proper.

There he found himself on a balcony with an ornate wrought-iron, mahogany-topped railing, overlooking an immense, three-story-high reception area with an enclosed section in the middle, much like a teller's cage, and several grand staircases more suitable to a Europeanstyle hotel. It was like stepping from Devil's Island into the lobby of the Ritz, albeit right after a bombing run.

Now he was at a loss. The mezzanine he was standing on split in two directions, surrounding the great hall below him, and he also had a choice between the stairs leading both up and down to the ground floor, all with nothing to indicate which direction to follow. Instinctively, he killed his small flashlight to help himself rely solely on his hearing.

A faint scraping sound drew his attention toward the northwest. Turning the light back on, he took the left branch.

This led him to another door, a second slightly smaller room with erstwhile offices lining the walls, and the first trickle of daylight presumably from an unboarded up window.

He pocketed his flashlight and replaced it with his gun. The scraping he'd just barely heard earlier was now loud, rhythmic, and definitely coming from one of the offices ahead.

Barely breathing at all now, Willy sidled up to the entrance, aware of the tiniest sound from beneath his shoes, and very slowly peered around the corner.

Sammie Martens, bound, gagged, and with a large bloodstain on her right leg, lay propped up against the wall, under the open window where the marks on the floor indicated she'd dragged herself with considerable effort, digging her heels into the floor and pushing again and again.

Willy swung rapidly into the room and crouched to one side of the door, his gun covering the area before him. The room was otherwise empty.

He straightened and crossed over to her, immediately slipping the gag from her mouth.

"Jesus," she said in a whisper. "You're a sight for sore eyes."

"You, too," he admitted, putting his gun down so he could work on the knot binding her hands behind her back. "How bad are you hit?"

"Hurts like a son-of-a-bitch, but I can walk. Bullet's still in there, though."

Willy thought back to the cell phone gun Liptak had used on her. "What the hell was that, anyway? How'd you know it was a gun?"

"We got an alert on them a few weeks ago. Something you threw out, probably. They're the latest rage. I thought of it when I saw how he was holding it."

He gave her a quick, almost embarrassed kiss. "Yeah, well, you saved my butt. Where is he now?"

She shook her head. "Somewhere around. He has a real cell phone he's been trying to use. It didn't work down here, so I think he went up."

Willy glanced over his shoulder at the door. "Which way?"

"Turn right. You got anyone with you?"

He looked at her without comment as she began rubbing her chafed wrists and rolled her eyes. "I should've known."

"Stay put," he said, and quickly left the office.

Turning the way she'd indicated, he saw a small door in the far corner of the central room, and beyond it, barely visible in the gloom, a spiral staircase. He realized he was looking at the interior of one of the Castle's four large central turrets he'd seen from the outside.

His gun ready once more, he'd barely started walking in that direction when a figure appeared in the doorway with the suddenness of an apparition.

"Don't move," Willy shouted, leveling his gun.

But Andy Liptak was having none of it. As quickly as he'd appeared, he backed into the stairwell and vanished, accompanied by the sound of footsteps pounding on hollow metal stairs.

Willy ran to the door, paused, and quickly stuck his head past the doorjamb. As in a turret of ancient times, the staircase was a tight spiral, hugging the round walls around the center of a sheer drop, and lit solely by the feeble daylight seeping through the occasional firing slit. The sounds of Liptak's retreat came from above.

Willy gave chase without hesitation.

He ran, taking the steps two at a time, fueled by the same adrenaline that a marathoner uses to make it to the finish line. And finishing is what Willy had solely in mind by now, now as so often in the past-a near-pathological drive to reach some kind of resolution, which, since he couldn't locate it in his day-to-day life, he kept trying to find in the face of lethal danger. Discovering Sammie alive had come as a huge relief, but it had made him think, if only in this brief flash of a moment, that he'd come as close to balancing the books as ever he might. That coming to Sammie's aid had in some way counterbalanced his failure to help Mary.

He heard footsteps above him slow down, falter several times as Liptak neared exhaustion, and finally stop altogether.

Willy charged on regardless.

He saw Liptak sprawled on his back, his mouth hanging open, one hand clinging to the banister as if it were a lifeline, just seconds before he was on top of him. Liptak had a gun out, too, but Willy slapped it aside with a swipe from his own, causing the other man to cry out in pain as the gun went hurtling down the narrow, empty stairwell, some eighty feet straight down.

Willy dropped his pistol on the steps and grabbed Liptak by the shirtfront in his powerful right hand, hauling him up and throwing him across the railing so that he balanced there over the long, empty hole below them. Willy was barely breathing hard.

"Hey, you little turd," he said softly, his face inches from Andy's. "You done yet?"

Liptak's body was as still and stiff as a board. His hands were clenched to Willy's shoulders in a fierce grip. "Put me down, Sniper. For Christ's sake."

Willy felt the fear coming off him like an electrical current. He watched Liptak's dilated pupils and thought he could see in their depth the darkness of the jungle, of the blackouts he'd suffered as a drunk, and of the pure inky well of his own despair, on the edge of which he balanced every day. He shifted his gaze to the gloomy, bottomless funnel of the stairwell just past Liptak's left ear, and found there the same image-and perhaps as well, a solution. The nagging thought tugging at the corner of his mind loomed into something more tangible, a synergy combining good timing, pure and brutal justice, and with it, relief.

"What d'you say we go for a little flight?" he suggested.

Liptak's mouth opened, but it was Sammie's voice he heard.

"Willy? You all right? Where are you?"

He paused, his muscles tensed for the leap. Liptak's breathing was now coming in short gasps.

"Willy?" she called again from far below, her voice almost breaking. "Goddamn it, you bastard. Answer me."

Her anger worked its way through the tangle of his mind, drawing his attention away from the task at hand, if just for a moment.

"I'm up here. With our mutual friend," he answered finally, reluctantly.

Whether it was something she heard in his voice or just simple dumb luck, she answered, "Well, don't screw it up doing something stupid, okay? Bring him down here so I can beat the crap out of him."

Her words echoed up the hollow shaft of the turret, reverberating off the walls. Slowly, he smiled, straightened slightly, and refocused on Andy Liptak's face.

"You may not believe it, but today's your lucky day," he said, and pulled him off the railing and back onto the steps. "There's movement by the chain-link fence, southwest wall."

Gunther, Ogden, Panatello, and Janet Scott all turned to look at the spot indicated by the sharpshooter through their radio earpieces.

"Roger that," Janet responded. "Do you have a visual?"

"That's affirmative. Two men and a woman. She's limping and one of the men looks like he has his hands cuffed behind his back."

Gunther whispered into her other ear.

"Does it look like the other guy has a useless left arm, probably with the hand stuffed into his pants pocket?"

There was a startled pause. "Hang on."

Despite the tension, Scott smiled. "That got him."

"Affirmative," came the report at last, the tone of voice betraying the speaker's confusion.

She reassured him. "That's good news. Hold your positions and wait till they're out in the open."

Slowly, awkwardly, three figures emerged from the jagged hole at the prison's base and picked their way across the rubble and through the torn fencing.

"It's okay," Joe Gunther said.

Janet Scott radioed everybody to stand down and ordered in the ambulance hidden nearby as the four of them broke cover and walked to meet Andy Liptak and his escort in the middle of the parking lot.

Gunther's first concern was for the wounded Sammie Martens.

"You okay?" he asked her as they drew near.

Her smile gave him what he needed to know. "Flesh wound," she answered. "I've always wanted to say that. Just didn't know it would hurt so much."

Panatello and his people grabbed Liptak away from Willy and whisked him off toward a waiting car.

Willy shook his head at her. "Such a wimp."

Ward Ogden gave him an appraising look. "We weren't sure we hadn't lost you."

"Wishful thinking," Willy told him, but then looked straight at Joe Gunther. "I figured I hadn't been a big enough pain in the butt yet."

Gunther studied his face, and seemed to read there the debate that Willy had just barely survived. "Practice makes perfect, Willy," he finally said.