Tucker Peak

Chapter 22

Linda Bettina muscled her way through the small cluster of cops standing around me in the parking lot in front of the lodge, which at this point consisted mostly of sheriff’s deputies and a couple of state troopers who’d responded to the general alert. Her eyes showed she was in high temper. “What the hell’s going on? I heard somebody was shot, that the road’s been cut off, and I just got a call from that fathead sheriff to take all my people off the mountain, but he wouldn’t tell me why.”

I tentatively laid a hand on her forearm, hoping she wouldn’t feed it to me. “I’m sorry. That was my fault. One of the condo owners just shot a U.S. Marshal and disappeared. The road’s blocked so he won’t get away, but I was worried about employee safety. I know your folks are all over this mountain. I was afraid one of them might get hurt or killed for his snowmobile.”

She shut her eyes briefly and shook her head. When she spoke again, she’d regained her usual composure. “Christ almighty. I thought I’d seen it all till now. I can’t wait to get you bastards out of here. Look, you don’t want my crew gone, you need them as extra eyes. The weather’s about to turn shitty, and they know the terrain like the inside of the Butte’s bathroom. My concern’s more the guests. Who says your nutcase isn’t going to use one of them as a hostage to get out of here?”

“That’s what we were just discussing,” I told her. “If he does, he’ll have to announce himself, knowing full well we won’t let him through. To be honest, right now, a hostage situation would be good news.”

“And one I doubt he’ll use,” said a male voice behind us.

We both turned to see Al Freeman standing there, looking embarrassed.

I opened my mouth to voice my opinion about what had just happened, but he cut me off. “I know, I know. I’m sorry. It was a screwup, plain and simple. I didn’t know Tony’s case officer was in the area. We do that sometimes-run random checks on our clients. He had no idea of the situation, and we didn’t know Tony had caught wind something was up. When Tony saw the officer at the door, he freaked. It was just Murphy’s Law. We weren’t trying to end-run you.”

At this point, I didn’t much care. I also knew that such things did happen, as unlikely as they might seem.

“How many guys can you call in to help?” I asked instead.

“I have eight coming from various corners-a couple of hours out at the most for some of them, and I can get more.”

I turned to Linda as snowflakes began descending-fat, lazy, and very thick-guaranteeing we wouldn’t be getting that helicopter. “You got a deal. We’ll use your troops as eyes and ears, but I want them equipped with at least one cop each. They can come in to buddy up or we can send someone out to them on snowmobiles, but if you won’t give me that, I am going to pull them all off the mountain. As for the guests, the best I can think of is to stop loading the lifts right now and hope that everyone who’s up there skis off in the next forty-five minutes or so to give us a clear field.”

She looked at me grimly. “Let’s move to the dispatch room. We can reach everybody by radio or phone from there.”

I motioned to Spinney. “We’re going to Mountain Ops. Set up a command post right outside the garage and keep your radio handy.”

He gave me a thumbs-up, and I followed Linda as she strode off toward her operational center. I was feeling the earlier adrenaline rush transform itself into an all-too-familiar, slightly slower-paced tactical tempo. The only thing I knew for sure about the near future was that this situation could last for days without allowing for much rest. As when I’d been in combat so long ago, it was time to think of conserving energy.

Less than half an hour had elapsed since Snuffy Dawson’s phone call.

Twenty minutes later Linda Bettina and I, now joined by Sammie Martens, Al Freeman, one of the state police troopers, and Snuffy’s chief deputy were crowded into the resort’s dispatch center-the true brains of Mountain Ops. It had radio, telephone, and computer links to all over Tucker Peak, as well as a bank of small television sets connected to a dozen or more surveillance cameras overseeing the area’s primary gathering spots: parking lots, ski rack clusters, food service courts, and the lift buildings both near the lodge and at the top of the mountain. Before us, a huge whiteboard-mounted map of the resort covered the far wall and had already been sprinkled with cryptic notes in a variety of felt-tipped colors. Linda, a radio headset fitted over one ear, stood at the map, marking the locations of the teams we’d sent out. Over loudspeakers around the room, the air crackled with voices giving updates from the field, and on the TVs, the restaurants, bars, and lobby areas were filling with a growing crowd of confused guests. The whole setup looked like a scruffy movie version of a Pentagon war room.

Unfortunately, the exterior cameras only revealed a thick curtain of falling snow. Wherever Antony “Tony Bugs” Busco was right now, and whatever he was doing, it was going to be difficult getting a fix on him.

“What do you think?” Sammie asked me quietly. “He slip through already?”

“I don’t see how,” I told her doubtfully. “Linda says she’s gotten no reports of a stolen snowmobile. We have watchers at the top of every lift, and they haven’t spotted him. I suppose he could either cross-country ski or snowshoe out, but that doesn’t seem likely, not from what I’ve been told about his physical condition-he’s no jock.”

She seemed to absorb that for a moment, looking around the room, and then asked, “Where’s McNally? You’d think he’d be here sweating bullets.”

It occurred to me then that only Lester Spinney had heard my conspiracy theory in detail, although, having asked Linda about McNally’s whereabouts myself a mere quarter hour ago, I was beginning to feel more confident of it. “He’s apparently disappeared. Nobody knows where to.”

Sammie studied my face, caught by something in my voice. “Except you, maybe?”

I shook my head sadly. “I wish I did. I think he’s dirty, along with his CFO pal. I called Willy five minutes ago and told him to give Gorenstein the grilling of a lifetime to see if I’m right.”

A deep furrow of confusion appeared between her brows.

“I had Gorenstein brought in,” I explained. “I’m betting the condo rip-off was just the tip of the iceberg.”

“You send somebody out to McNally’s house?”

“I had Snuffy send somebody-Christ knows who. Right now, we’re so stretched for personnel, McNally could probably hitchhike naked on the interstate and not get busted. He’ll just have to wait his turn.”

“Unless he’s already out of the country,” she muttered.

A clearly stunned and faltering voice over the radio loud speaker suddenly brought all conversation in the room to a stop. “Base, this is Dick Russell. The deputy and me’ve been shot.”

In the silence that followed, Linda calmly asked, “How bad, Dick? You okay?”

I left Sammie’s side and crossed over to Linda, standing before the map. Soundlessly, she pointed at a red number high on the mountain’s left flank, at the upper reaches of where the condos were located. Dick Russell was the same man who’d thrown me the crowbar during the ski lift rescue days before.

“I’m bleedin’ pretty bad. I think the deputy’s dead. The guy came out of nowhere with a gun. He got the sled.”

Linda turned to me. “Cat’s out of the bag. You nail this bastard or I’ll make you sorry you didn’t.”

Feeling my face flush, I said, “Get me some outdoor gear.” I motioned to Sammie to join us. “I’m catching a ride up there with the medical crew. Sam, you take over here and coordinate with Linda. Keep me informed on our own Tac frequency and have some kind of transportation hook up with me there. Got it?”

She knew better than to argue. “Right.”

I began wrestling into the winter overalls and boots Linda handed me from a peg on the wall. “Get as many cops as you can to close in on that spot, and tell them to ditch their employee escorts. Even a snowmobile can’t get everywhere on this mountain-shut down the major routes. And remember, he may be mounted now, but that also means he’s making noise. Tell everybody to keep their ears open!” I paused and said to Linda. “We’ll get Dick down in one piece.”

She didn’t answer, but her expression told me how much credibility I had left.

Outside the building, waiting with his engine idling, Bucky Arsenault sat at the controls of his Bombardier, one of several designated runners for an emergency such as this. On the back of the machine, with two state police officers carrying shotguns, the medical team was already piling their equipment.

“I jumped into the cabin’s passenger seat and told Arsenault, “Ready when you are.”

He punched the accelerator almost immediately, sending the people on the slippery rear deck scrambling for secure handholds.

The trip up was far different from the last time we’d shared a ride. Bucky kept to his business, expertly cutting through the clotting veil of falling snow with an instinctive feel for the terrain beneath his caterpillar tracks. I paid attention to what was happening ahead of us, talking on the radio to Sammie and consulting the map I’d grabbed on the way out.

“Joe? Dick Russell just told us he saw the sled heading west when it left them, cutting across the face of the mountain.”

“You got people there?”

“They’re fanning out in a semicircle from peak to bowl.”

“How ’bout above where Dick was?” I asked staring at the map. “It looks like a straight shot up and over. Busco might’ve started west and then hung a left.”

Linda Bettina’s voice cut in. “He knows the territory better than you. There’re rocks and ledge too steep to climb that way. He’s got to go right or left before he can head for the summit.”

Sammie’s voice came back on. “Hang on, Joe. We’re getting reports of a sled approaching one of our teams.”

In the intervening silence, I saw Bucky staring straight ahead, having heard every word, his mouth clamped shut with anger under the flowing mustache.

“We near, yet?” I asked quietly.

The Bombardier took a hard lurch into a depression and ground up the far side. “Just a few hundred yards.”

He reached for his own radio mike and asked, “Dick? This is Bucky. You hear us yet?”

“Gottcha, Bucky,” came the weak reply. “Straight ahead.”

“Sammie?” I asked. “You find anyone to pick me up here?”

“Yeah, a deputy named Doug Fleury. He’ll be there in a few minutes. Wait… Hang on… listen to this.” She must have held out her radio to the nearest speaker in the dispatch room, because I suddenly heard, “Base, this is Wilcox. The sled’s coming right at us. I’m leaving the mike open.”

Over my portable, Bucky and I heard the sound of an approaching engine, closing in like a furious insect, followed by a shouted challenge, several gunshots, and then a loud crash, abruptly cut off as by the snap of a switch-no doubt the open microphone being dislodged from where Wilcox had jammed it to transmit.

“Base, this is Wilcox.” The voice was panting a moment later, almost breathless with excitement, and thankfully vibrantly alive. “We’re out of it. He hit us broadside and broke my handlebar.”

“Are you okay?”

“We’re fine. He missed. We fired at him. May have hit him. Not sure.”

“Which direction did he go?”

“He’s angling up at a forty-five from us.”

“You hear all that, Joe?” Sammie asked, her voice much clearer than what we’d been listening to.

The Bombardier came to a sudden stop, almost on top of a snow-covered couple of men, huddled together in a ball.

“Yes, I did,” I answered, jumping out into the cold, slowly fading gray light. The snow came up to my knees. “Where’s my transportation?”

I staggered behind the red-clad rescue squad, which had vaulted off the back deck of the machine and was already surrounding Dick Russell and the inert deputy. I knelt beside them, watching them rapidly and expertly assess their patients.

“How’s the cop?” I asked one of them.

“Still alive,” was the terse reply, almost immediately overshadowed by the sound of a snowmobile drawing near.

A large, black Yamaha slid into view, bearing a helmeted police officer in a dark blue, padded jump suit labeled “Sheriff.” “Which one’s Gunther?”

I half ran, half fell over to him, clawing onto the rear of the machine. “I am.”

“Doug Fleury. Hang on.”

The difference between the Bombardier and the Yamaha was like that between an aircraft carrier and a jet. Doug Fleury had obviously spent a lot of time riding snowmobiles, like thousands of other Vermonters, and handled it with the ease and self-confidence of a cowboy born to the saddle. We tore into the featureless white wash ahead of us, the snow whipping our faces and forcing me-without goggles-to bury my face into my driver’s back for protection, racing at such speed that we sometimes left the ground, the engine howling with released energy.

“Sam?” I yelled into my radio, holding on to the strap at my groin for dear life with one hand. “I’m on the sled. What’ve you got?”

I had to hold the speaker flat against my ear to hear her say, “We’re closing in on him. We got several hits on his engine noise. Looks like he’s heading between the tops of lifts three and four.”

Linda’s voice came on. “That means you have him cornered. He’s heading toward the windmill farm, and it’s got a ten-foot chain-link fence around it, stretching across his path.”

Sammie anticipated my next request. “I’ve got units closing in from both sides. You and two others are coming up the middle. Watch your butt.”

I pocketed the radio and leaned forward to shout into Doug’s ear. “We’re coming up to the windmill farm’s fence. That’s where he’s supposed to be.”

Fleury quickly cut back on the throttle. “How’re we going to know if he’s to the right or the left of us?”

“We won’t, but everybody’s closing in. One of us’ll find him.”

We were both straining our eyes against the impenetrable gray curtain before us, looking for anything that would warn us against simply falling into the unknown.

Fleury saw it first and immediately killed the engine. “There it is,” he said softly in the sudden silence. He pointed at the ghostly, intermittent watermark of a chain-link fence’s crisscross pattern hanging before us in midair.

I could hear in the background the distant whining of more snowmobiles and groomers converging on the area, but more prevalent still was an otherworldly and rhythmic whooshing sound coming from someplace ahead of us. It was deep-throated, heavy and almost made the air vibrate, conjuring up images of a giant scythe swinging ever nearer.

“What the hell’s that?” I asked.

Fleury swung one leg off his machine. “The windmills-give me the creeps.”

He crouched by one side of the snowmobile and unlashed two pairs of snowshoes, handing me one. “How do you want to work this?”

“Nothing dramatic,” I cautioned, attaching the snowshoes, “but being the ones in the middle, we should probably try to get a location on the guy. Don’t engage him in any way, just look for his sled tracks so we can orient the others.”

Fleury nodded once, tested his balance on the soft snow with a few hard stamps of his feet, and headed off toward the left, almost instantly becoming one with the falling snow.

I walked to the fence and cut right, my gun in one hand, the radio in the other, moving as silently as the gently floating elements all around me.

But not for long. I hadn’t gotten ten yards before I heard a shout behind me and the sound of two gunshots. Turning clumsily, I started jogging in that direction, talking into the radio, “Shots fired midline along the fence. I’m going to investigate.”

I almost fell over Tony Busco’s stolen snowmobile, which was at a cockeyed angle. It was entangled halfway through the bottom of the wire fence, having smacked into it with enough strength to have punched a hole. Fleury’s large footprints showed that he’d slipped through in pursuit, rather than waiting as I’d advised-the cowboy image apparently not being restricted to his prowess on the back of a sled.

“Fleury, come in. It’s Joe Gunther.”

Nothing came back. I began squeezing through the ragged opening, noticing as I did a smear of blood across the machine’s shattered plastic windshield.

“Fleury. Come in.”

Still nothing.

“Gunther to all units. We may have an officer down inside the fence, about twenty yards to the left of our machine.”

I continued walking, bent over double, studying the ground before me, breathing through my mouth as if that might make me quieter. With the specter of Tony Bugs in my head, looming up out of the murkiness, gun in hand, ready to take me out, I even turned the radio off so it couldn’t give me away.

All the sound that remained was the ever louder, heavy, rhythmic chopping of gigantic blades slicing through the air, close enough now that I could no longer hear the whine of approaching reinforcements. To hell with Tony Bugs, I was thinking now, the image of Dick Russell and the wounded deputy fresh in my mind. I needed to find Doug Fleury and see if I could help save his life.

What I found first, however, stopped me dead in my tracks. Looming out of the cold, pale environment, revealed in a sudden gust of wind like a towering ghost rising from the ground at my feet, was a thin, white, tubular shaft impressive enough to make me think of alien visitors or a sign from God. Hanging a hundred and thirty feet over me, equipped with three huge, ponderous, black-painted, slicing blades, was one of the summit’s distinctive windmills. Each blade, at least sixty feet long, came flying out of the sky, seemingly aimed at my head, only to reach the end of its arc with the sound of a diving aircraft. One by one, they thrummed by to vanish in the opposite direction, each one following on the heels of its mate, to begin the process anew-once every split second.

My instant and instinctive crouching down brought me almost eye-level to the ground-and to Doug Fleury lying half covered with snow a few feet ahead, one red stained glove clutching a wounded shoulder. Just beyond him, stepping out from behind the tower, a pistol aimed straight at me, was Antony “Tony Bugs” Busco, looking just like his mug shot.

“Drop the gun,” he shouted over the steady beating overhead.

My own weapon was still in my hand, pointed halfway between the ground and him. I was struck by the sudden realization that because of both the protection program’s harboring of this man and our own circumspection in drawing a net around him, this was the first time I’d actually seen him, even though I’d been pursuing his shadow from the very beginning.

“No,” I said. “If you know what’s good for you, you better drop yours. Cops are closing in on this spot from all directions. You can’t get away.”

“Maybe I don’t give a shit,” he said, but I had my doubts.

“Why not?” I asked him. “You protected yourself by entering the Marshals’ program, by killing Jorja Duval to locate Gagnon and Lane-”

“Gagnon was blackmailing me,” he cut in defensively. “That dumb hick. And she wouldn’t tell me where he was-not at first, anyway. Greedy little bastards put themselves into that jam. Thanks for the assist with Lane, by the way,” he suddenly added with a forced smile. “Didn’t know cops could be so helpful.”

Like an engine falling into gear, my brain latched onto his words and conjured up not only the ugly picture of Jorja Duval’s cut throat, her usefulness over, but also the long-awaited realization, by implication, that Marty Gagnon was no longer unaccounted for. Perhaps Busco had run out of places to hide. Certainly his current protectors were going to throw him out. Still, I persisted. “It doesn’t change that you’re a survivor by instinct. Look at you now, still fighting to live. Put the gun down and make that happen.”

“I killed four people, including two cops-three if that one dies.”

“You wounded three cops. None of them’re dead. It’s not as bad as you think.”

He tilted his head back and laughed, making me wonder if that might not be the instant to try to outshoot him. I was no longer under the illusion that my babbling would lead to his surrender.

But happenstance tilted the balance. With the sound of an enormous laundry bag sliding down a smooth chute, a huge wedge of rime ice suddenly released from one of the overhead blades and thudded into the snow just a few feet beside us. In the same instant that Tony Busco swung slightly to face this unknown threat, I leveled my gun and fired wildly, hitting him by pure luck in the leg and spinning him like a top, causing his own pistol to fly uselessly away.

Doug Fleury, the silent witness to all this, looked from Busco to me, and back again, before letting his head finally rest against the snow.

“Thank God,” he muttered and closed his eyes.

Amen to that, I thought, feeling suddenly very cold.