The Dark Circle, page 17
Diana Larrimore looked at Bull with bleary eyes and said, “He’s not going to like you playing with me like this, Frank.”
I turned my head to glance back into the box stall behind the upright piano. The old garden tools I had seen were stacked along the sides of it, rakes, hoes, shovels, pitchforks, and axes.
“First things first,” said Frank Bull.
Aiming the .45, he pulled the trigger. The bullet took Diana Larrimore in the face and she toppled off the bench without making another sound.
“Big woman … even bigger fucking mouth,” said Bull as the acrid smell of cordite reached my nose. The sound had been shatteringly loud, but he had told Hirka to expect two shots.
“You enjoyed that, didn’t you?
“Yeah, I liked it.”
“Why don’t you kill yourself and double the pleasure?”
He smiled and said, “Now you I’m gonna really enjoy.”
“Pretty hard to convince a coroner I killed myself from fifteen feet away, Frank,” I said. “You afraid to come any closer?”
I needed him closer.
“That’s just fine,” he said walking toward me smiling, “the closer, the better.”
I knew I was going to take a bullet, but there was only one move for me. I dodged left and grabbed one of the pitchforks with my right hand. In the second or two it took to raise the steel tines, I saw the muzzle flash of the .45 from the corner of my eye and felt a pounding wallop in the left side of my chest.
I steadied myself. Grabbing the handle of the pitchfork tightly with both hands, I staggered toward him. Bull was only five feet away by then, but it seemed like a football field. There was no pain yet, just a spreading numbness in my chest.
I saw the goal line. It was his naked, hairy chest under the silk bathrobe. Bull couldn’t take his eyes off the steel tines as he fired again, the bullet catching my elbow this time. Still on the run, I drove the pitchfork straight into his ribcage.
Touchdown.
His face was inches away from mine. It was shiny with sweat, and his eyes bulged with horror as he looked down to see the steel tines buried in his chest. He made a gagging sound as he went over on his back with me on top of him.
Looking up, I saw the door to the barn swing open, and Hirka came through, holding the Colt Python in a shooting stance as his eyes quickly surveyed the room. They went to the dead body of Diana Larrimore first and by then I had the .45 in my hand.
His eyes took in the two of us lying on the barn floor. He fired and I heard it thud into Bull. Holding my gun with both hands, I steadied it on Bull’s head and fired two rounds at him.
The first one spun him around, and he dropped his gun. The second hit him high in the right leg, and he went down on the other knee before collapsing onto his stomach. He didn’t move.
The pain was coming now, and a wave of nausea with it. Fighting the dizziness, I took back my .32 from Bull’s bathrobe and crawled back to the cobbler’s bench to pick up my cell phone from the floor.
“Lauren,” I rasped, my voice losing strength along with the rest of me.
There was no response from the other end. I knew I had to get out of the barn. As I began to crawl toward the door, I saw the glint of something sitting on top of the pile of clothing Diana Larrimore had been wearing. It was her cell phone. I shoved it into my side pocket as I continued crawling on hands and knees across the barn floor.
Hirka was still alive and gripping the wound in his upper thigh with both hands as it bled freely onto the barn floor. He watched me as I went past. His Colt Python was lying near the door, and I took it too.
I was so dizzy by then, it was hard to even remember which direction I had left the truck. I lost track of time as I felt the warmth of the blood flowing down my chest. Then there were the trunks of trees around me. I was in the woods by the highway. I tried to keep going, a few feet at a time, before I had to stop. The pain was now pure agony, a dozen knives in my chest.
I felt someone’s hand on my shoulder and then a flashlight beam in my face.
“Jake!” cried Lauren. “You’re bleeding everywhere. I have to call 911.”
“No,” I said, using my remaining strength. “No police … not now … where is the truck?”
“Right there by the side of the road,” she said.
I couldn’t see the side of the road. I remembered Billy Spellman.
“Text this number for Spellman,” I said. “At the prompt, punch in the word Tank … tell him where we are … an ambulance.”
The murky darkness was spinning me out of control.
“What if you die?” she demanded as she hit the keys of her phone.
“I’m not going to die,” I said, and hoped it was true.
36
The air was frigid and filled with engine noise as we descended toward the fire base at Kandahar. I couldn’t remember the mission … something about a Taliban stronghold.
A face materialized over mine in the helicopter and shouted something at me. I saw he was out of uniform and then realized it was a woman wearing something white and holding a bandage against my chest.
My mind cleared, and I knew where I was. Beyond the woman I saw Lauren, her face contorted with anxiety. An IV bottle was suspended two feet above me. It was hard to breathe as the woman leaned down and pressed her mouth against mine. I faded out again.
I came up out of the void to utter silence. I opened my eyes and saw pale sunlight shimmering past a window curtain. A rectangle of beige carpet was visible below the edge of the bed. I turned my head in the other direction and saw a bank of lights on medical monitors. Lauren was sitting asleep in a hard chair next to the bed. She sensed my movement, opened her lovely green eyes, and took my hand in hers.
“Welcome back,” she said softly.
“Still alive,” I whispered. My voice sounded parched and strange, like my father’s in the hospice place.
“When they brought you in, you had no pulse,” she said. “They gave you a blood transfusion in the helicopter, but you weren’t breathing on your own. Your lung collapsed from the chest wound.”
Her hand felt good holding mine. I was happy to be alive.
“The doctor who operated said you are one tough bastard,” she said, and gave me a drink of water though a straw. It eased the dryness in my throat, and I took some more.
The door behind her swung open, and Billy Spellman walked in.
“You’re a hard man to kill, Captain,” he said with his familiar crooked grin. “Of course, I already knew that.”
He had changed a lot since I had last seen him at Bragg. The features were still the same, blunt nose, granite chin, ax-blade lips with deep lines at the edges of his eyes and mouth, but his full head of hair had turned white. Billy had been the middle-weight boxing champion at Bragg, and he still looked like he could go ten rounds.
“You owe your life to Mr. Spellman, Jake,” said Lauren. “He sent the medevac helicopter that picked us up at Kinderhook and brought us here.”
“He’s not Mr. Spellman,” I said, sipping more water. “He’s the most insubordinate sergeant who ever served under me.”
“Absolutely true,” said Billy.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“A private clinic we use for business executives and celebrities who need drying out in a private setting. They have their own chopper. One of the doctors is a general surgeon. You were real lucky, Jake. The bullet went through your chest without hitting anything important or breaking any ribs.”
“I took the liberty of informing Mr.… Sergeant Spellman of everything you’ve been doing,” said Lauren, “starting with Deborah Chapman on up to the death of Cheryl Larsen.”
“Sir Lancelot meets Inspector Clouseau,” said Billy.
“Those people know we’re in hiding or being hidden,” I said. “You can bet they’re searching hard for us. That state cop Hirka knows I was badly wounded and needed medical help.”
“This place is off the radar, Jake. We have the chopper coming in and out of here all the time, and no one on the staff will say anything. That’s part of their training.”
“Every place with a license will be checked,” I said. “Where are we?”
“Just outside Saratoga Springs,” said Billy.
“How long do I have to be here?”
“It was a sucking chest wound, Jake,” he said. “The doctor inserted a tube in your chest to help the collapsed lung expand and to drain all the excess fluid. If you push too hard now, you’ll get even more buildup. It’s nothing to fool with. If this was an army hospital, you’d be here for a couple weeks.”
“We need to go to ground … a safe house, some place they can’t reach us while I heal up and we plan our next moves.”
“How about a week here, and then we’ll move to the lodge my family owns near Lake Placid?” said Lauren. “No one aside from me will know you’re there.”
“You’ll be on their radar screen too, along with all your family retreats,” I said, shaking my head. “We need to find something else.”
“I have a small apartment in Boston,” said Billy Spellman. “It’s for my special friends. My own staff doesn’t know it exists.”
I tried to laugh.
“I’ve met your ‘special friends’ over the years,” I said. “They’re always blonde with abnormal chest enhancement. We’ll take it.”
“Just try not to cough while you’re in my bed,” he said. “I don’t want to have to clean up all the blood. You still in a lot of pain?”
I shook my head and drifted away again.
37
“The headlines are already fading,” said Lauren on the third morning we were there.
She unfolded a copy of the morning edition of the Albany Times Union and handed it to me. The story of Bull’s death was no longer on the front page. It had been shoved off by fourteen shootings in one night in Rochester and Buffalo. With Hirka alive to spin it, the story hadn’t been reported the way I remembered it anyway.
I winced as I handed the paper back, then gave my eyes a rub. I had only slept a few hours, having asked to be taken off the IV anesthetic drip and codeine painkillers the day before. My chest felt like it was in a gigantic vise and someone kept turning the handle tighter every time I tried to move.
“You don’t need to prove anything,” said Lauren. “I know you’re really Captain America.”
“I don’t want to end up like your brother,” I said, and immediately regretted it. “Sorry.”
“No, you’re right, of course,” she said, letting it go. “I called your friend Fab, like you asked, and he went by your cabin after making sure no one was there. Both animals are fine, and he heated up a bunch of the frozen meals you prepared.”
It was the first time Bug and I had been separated for more than a couple days. It was one less thing to worry about, although I knew she was feeling my absence as much as I was missing her.
“Did Fab ask why I needed the help?”
“If I didn’t know better, I would say that he somehow already knew you were part of the Battle of Kinderhook.”
“He ran the governor’s security detail for years,” I said. “He’s still got a lot of law enforcement contacts in Albany.”
In the published accounts, Frank Bull, a prominent casino executive and philanthropist from central New York, was allegedly killed during a home invasion of his country house in Kinderhook by a crazed lunatic the authorities were still searching for. One of the weekend houseguests, a senior state police investigator named Arthur Hirka, attempted to capture the invader and was badly wounded in the attempt. He was being hailed as a hero by the state police benevolent association.
“Still nothing about Diana Larrimore?” I asked.
“She was never there,” said Lauren. “And neither were you. And there is no mention of an abandoned pickup truck along the highway near Kinderhook, even though you bled a considerable amount in it before we were picked up.”
“So that’s their cover-up,” I said. “Without my dead body there to pin everything on, they obviously decided to limit their exposure. And to put that across requires a lot of juice.”
“That doesn’t mean they aren’t still searching for you,” she said.
“Harder than ever for sure.”
“Billy has scheduled a helicopter flight to Boston for early next week,” said Lauren.
* * *
“I need to start getting back into shape,” I said.
I used the lift switch on the hospital bed to bring the headboard up to a forty-five-degree angle, but when I leaned forward to remove the top bedsheet, the vise clamped my chest again, and I didn’t go anywhere. Lauren couldn’t stifle a smile.
I managed to shift my legs to the side of the bed and extend them over the edge until they were both hanging free at the knees. Supporting myself with my hands on each side of the mattress, I let myself drop the two feet to the floor. My legs couldn’t hold, and I crumpled to my knees. It wasn’t pretty. Lauren helped me back into the bed.
“Tomorrow is another day, Scarlett,” said Lauren.
I spent a good part of the rest of that afternoon trying to replay in my mind the things Diana Larrimore had told me while playing the Moonlight Sonata and drinking a magnum of champagne. I had hoped Lauren was taking notes on what she said, but the music had drowned her words out, and when she finished playing, the volume was too low to pick up anything except my shout not to call 911.
I couldn’t help feeling sadness for the way her life had ended. In some ways, she was as much a victim as the girls she procured to suffer the same fate. I wondered what hold the man had had over her that had turned her into a willing accomplice.
One thing I remembered clearly. She had said that the man who put her in an orgy in Paris when she was a virgin was the same man who had trafficked Deborah Chapman to his followers. And she had referred to the followers being in her little black book. No one kept a little black book anymore, but I knew what the words implied. And then she had pointed at her head and said, “It’s in here.” If that was the case, we were back to square one.
When Lauren left to have dinner, I tried to get out of bed again. This time it went a little better. I remained standing when my feet hit the floor, and I was able to hobble around the bed with one hand braced against the side rails. When I got around to the other side, I was exhausted. It wasn’t exactly a marathon, but it gave me hope.
Later that night, I was sleeping well for the first time and dead to the world when I felt someone shaking me. It was Lauren. The sky I could see through the windows was still pitch-black.
“The clinic director just woke me to say that two plainclothes officers from the state police came here a little while ago. They warned her that the clinic was required by law to report the arrival of a patient with a gunshot wound to the police, and they demanded to see the records of all current patients. The director informed them this was a private clinic and that a subpoena would be required to release any medical records. They said they would be back with one.”
Less than an hour later, I was in a wheelchair and being rolled from my room to the helicopter pad on the grounds of the clinic. During the journey, I happened to look into one of the “reflection lounges” that were filled with flowering plants and artificial waterfalls. A young woman was sitting inside the lounge, stroking two matching poodles. She waved at me as I went by, and I waved back. We were well past her when I realized who she was. I had last seen her on television, performing at halftime in the Super Bowl.
The dawn ride to Boston in the clinic helicopter flew Lauren and me over the Berkshires, and we held hands watching the sun creep over the peaks of the Green Mountains. I remembered Frank Bull telling me about his casino’s fun in the air service, and decided that this one was more my speed.
38
I had never been to Cambridge, Massachusetts, before. It has a certain charm if you’re into revolutionary war history and vegan restaurants. Our apartment turned out to be a few doors down from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s humble, ten-bedroom mansion on Brattle Street. Billy’s own edifice was a four-story, brick federal, and his apartment took up the whole third floor.
“Some aspects of the security business definitely have their financial advantages,” I said as Lauren wheeled me into the elevator that took us up to his place. “It just hasn’t filtered down to the campus security end yet.”
In spite of the creature comforts the place provided, including a small theater for viewing sports and movies and a home spa with a lap pool and a family-size hot tub, all I wanted was to be back at the cabin with Bug, with no one trying to kill me.
An hour after our arrival, a well-toned fitness trainer arrived to help me begin a recovery regimen focused on walking and breathing easier. It didn’t push any boundaries, and when the woman left, I kept going on my own.
One of the toys in Billy’s apartment was an untraceable scrambler phone that Lauren used to stay in touch with her news staff at the Groton Journal. According to her managing editor, the office was under surveillance, and the people doing the spying were not disguising their intentions. She said the men involved looked like off-duty cops, and I wondered if Hirka and his friends had organized a vigilante squad.
On our second day in Cambridge, Lauren interrupted my lunch of chicken broth and green tea to show me a Journal news story detailing Frank Bull’s funeral service. She had sent one of her reporters to attend. It turned out his real name was Frank Bullasseminelo. I could understand why he shortened it.
Three hundred mourners turned out at his local Catholic parish to hear the priest extol Frank as a dedicated family man, a revered elder of the Loyal Order of the Moose, the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Kiwanis Club, and a stalwart golfer. There was no mention of him being a pedophile, rapist, and murderer, nor any gratitude from the congregation that I had removed a pig from the ranks of humanity.
“There’s no mention of Stoneberry,” I said after finishing the article.
