The arm went down and he smiled again. “I’ll let you two get cozy. I know you haven’t seen each other in a while.” He walked to the door and picked up my gun. “I’ll leave this on the hood of your car. Good night.”
And he was gone.
Gail twisted around, put both her arms around me and held on tight. I kissed her ear and rubbed her back. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
She didn’t answer, but her grip tightened.
We didn’t talk for a good half hour, which was probably just as well. We ended up instead lying on the couch, with her head on my chest, silently running it all through in our minds, again and again.
Finally she sighed deeply, and asked, “What are you going to do?”
“Gut reaction? I’d like to start by getting everyone out of harm’s way.”
She looked up at mooked upe. “What do you mean?”
“Protecting all the people he mentioned-you, Mother, Leo-all of them.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Police protection maybe. I could get Martha to return to her daughter’s. I could get the state police to watch over Thetford.”
“You can’t do that, Joe; you know it. Shy of putting us all into a tanker and pushing it out to sea, there’s no way of protecting us. If he really wants to, he’ll find us. Besides, he could put you in the same position by threatening a total stranger. It doesn’t need to be one of us.”
The point was inarguable, but seeing him point that gun at Gail’s head had shaken my priorities. What, after all, did I really care about Bill Davis? He was a moral abstraction, a victim of circumstance. It was idiotic that I risk the lives of everyone who mattered to me for some principle no one had liked from the start.
“You’ve just got to keep going the way you have been, Joe. From what he said, the worst thing you could do is to change course. It would force him to set you straight again.”
“And setting me straight means I lead him to his daughter’s killer so he can execute him and fade back into the woodwork.”
“You’ve already pulled him more into the open-he’s no longer the anonymous Ski Mask. Maybe he’ll trip up; maybe you can make him trip up. Just because he says he’s in control doesn’t mean it’s true. Your harping on him and his daughter showed that. I didn’t appreciate that one bit, by the way. You’d have a short life as a psychiatrist-he was right about that.”
That made me smile.
She propped herself up by putting her elbows on my chest and looking me straight in the face. “Joe, you’re a decent, honest man. You can’t do anything other than what you’ve been doing. I know Stark can carry out his threat, but it’s not what he wants. His focus is on finding who killed his daughter, and that’s where yours has to be too. It’s the only way the two of you will ever be on close to an equal footing.”
I rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands. “Christ, I don’t know. I wish I were ticketing cars right now.”
She leaned forward and kissed my chin. “Let’s go to bed.”
29
The procedure for camping on another town’s front step until the bad guy rides in involves more than notifying the local sheriff, much to Hollywood’s chagrin. Nowadays, the hierarchy of the “need-to-know” extends right up to the governor’s office of each state involved. Luckily, it’s quicker than it sounds, although the three days I’d allowed us was still cutting it fine. Due to the notoriety of the case, I wasn’t too worried about hitting snags; nobody wanted this thing to get stalled because of them. But I was worried about leaving Gorham uncovered until all the paperwork was in. So, bending the rules a bit, I gave three of my men official time off and told them to spend their vacations in beautiful Gorham, New Hampshire, where the post office was renowned as one of the world’s tfrue scenic wonders. I forgot to let Katz in on this.
My biggest headache, as I saw it, was keeping Colonel Stark out of the picture. He had prematurely moved into the open when he’d questioned Haffner and killed Lew Hill. It was a mistake he wouldn’t repeat. I was absolutely sure that when I saw him again, it would be for the last play of the game. I only hoped that when that happened, we would already have Cioffi under wraps.
For the next two days, we escorted the paperwork through the process like a kitten through a kennel-very quietly. James Dunn agreed to handle all his office’s details personally, including the typing. A judge was found in the middle of the night to sign on the dotted line. Kunkle drove the papers up to Montpelier and hand-delivered them to the governor’s man responsible for state warrants. He then drove over to Concord, New Hampshire, and made the connection with their people.
In the meantime, I organized the troops, picking my men, coordinating with the New Hampshire State Police-who would actually make the bust-and poring over maps of Gorham to determine the best plan of attack. I did all this in parking lots, other people’s cars and secretly rented motel rooms-all places I was sure Stark couldn’t have bugged beforehand. Through it all, Katz was the perfect gentleman, which was just as well. Including him in all the cloak-and-dagger stuff made most of the people I dealt with think I had totally lost my mind.
The solution to Stark’s following us to Gorham and to Cioffi-brilliant, I thought-was to fly everyone there by helicopter, leaving Stark to watch us vanish into the sky. When I stepped outside the Municipal Building after almost forty-eight hours of nonstop preparations, I knew that part of the plan was shot. It was snowing-heavily.
Kunkle appeared out of the gloom, his head and shoulders speckled white.
“What are you doing here?”
“The chopper pilot said the flight’s off. I guess we drive.”
That’s not what I wanted to hear. “What’s the forecast?”
“This shit for thirty-six to seventy-two hours. It’ll get worse before it gets better. Travel advisories are already out.”
“Damn.”
Kunkle hesitated a moment. “I’ve got Katz in the car, along with the equipment.”
“Equipment” was a euphemism for rifles, shotguns, and bulletproof vests. I appreciated his forethought.
“I guess we go, then.”
He led the way across the parking lot to his car. Katz was sitting in the back.
“Hello, Stan.”
“Hi, Joe. Not quite the weather you were hoping for, is it?”
I slid onto the front seat and Kunkle started the car. “Not exactly.”
We already had three of our men in Gorham, which had miffed the New Hampshire State Police-they felt we were doubting their prowess-so I’d restricted the stricted econd wave to just the three of us. I hadn’t told our new allies who Katz was.
That was a detail he hadn’t overlooked. He knew that once we crossed into New Hampshire, my deal with him had no value. If the state police over there didn’t want him around, that was it. My silence had made him friendlier than I’d known possible-a definite plus. It was going to be a long drive, and I was grateful my two normally overbearing companions had lightened their personalities.
Still, the trip was tense. Looking out the windshield was like staring at an interminable swarm of fireflies on the attack, careening at the car and veering away at the last instant. The sudden appearance of other cars was the only startling reminder that we were still on the road. The memories of my last trip with Frank were real enough to be scary. I kept looking over my shoulder to check for headlights, but except for when we came to the occasional town, there was nothing.
“Did you check the car for bugs?”
“A couple of times. It’s not my car anyway. I borrowed it at the last second from a friend, just to be sure.”
I looked at Kunkle’s profile in the glow from the instrument panel. It made me think of that nursery rhyme about what’s-her-name: “When she was good, she was very, very good…”
It took us all night to reach Gorham, a trip that normally lasted three hours. By the time we rolled to a stop in the parking lot of the Swiss Alpine Lodge, daylight was struggling to penetrate the cotton candy around us.