“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.
Chapter 23
He walked with a studied indifference, faking a casual swing to his shoulders but revealing his tension with the stiffness of his arms and neck.
And the look in his eyes. They moved back and forth like a bodyguard’s on alert, watching everyone’s passing face, sweeping the crowd for any signs of unusual movement.
Like my stepping out in front of him from behind a kiosk of phone booths, located in the middle of the Manchester, New Hampshire, airport lobby. “Philip McNally?”
His familiar smile was tight and artificial, and he glanced nervously at Lester Spinney approaching from another angle, and at a uniformed state cop closing in from a third. “You know it is, Mr. Gunther. What’s up?”
As Lester stepped around behind him, took his bag, and began to frisk him, the New Hampshire trooper said, “You’re under arrest on a fugitive-from-justice warrant,” after which he intoned the standard Miranda warning, ending with, “Do you understand these rights as I have explained them?”