“I don’t know. Same purpose as the flat tire, maybe? He wants me out there? He seems to be in a hurry.”
“Jesus! You mean he was just … just out there himself … planting a bomb?”
“Maybe earlier, while I was at the Winklers’, before you got back from Syracuse.”
“Jesus. A bomb? With a timer?”
“More likely a cell phone detonator. More controllable, more precise.”
“So … what now?”
“Where are the keys to your motorcycle?”
“In the ignition. Why?”
“Follow me.”
Crawling, he led Kyle across the floor and out of the room—now flickeringly illuminated through the glass doors by the burning lumber strewn outside—down the back hallway into the dark den. He felt his way around the furniture to the north window, lifted the blinds, opened it, and, with the Beretta still in his hand, eased himself carefully out onto the ground.
Kyle did the same.
Fifty feet ahead of them, between the house and the high pasture, there was a small hardwood thicket, just barely visible at the outer edge of the faint light cast by the fire, where Gurney sometimes parked his rider mower. He pointed at the black bulk of a giant oak. “Directly behind that tree there are two boulders, with some space between them. Slip into that space and stay there until I call you.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to neutralize the problem.”
“What?”
“No time to explain. Just do as I say. Please.” He pointed again, more urgently. “Over there. Behind the tree. Between the boulders. We’re running out of time. Now!”
Kyle hurried toward the thicket and disappeared out of the wavering firelight into the darkness. Then Gurney made his way around to the corner of the house where the BSA was parked. He was fairly sure that in that position it would be out of sight from the top of Barrow Hill. He hoped Kyle was right about the key. If it wasn’t in the ignition … But it was.
He slipped the Beretta back in his ankle holster and straddled the bike. It had been more than twenty-five years since he’d been on a similar motorcycle—the old Triumph 650 he rode in his college days. He quickly familiarized himself with the positions of brakes, clutch, shift lever. Looking down at the gas tank, the handlebars, the chrome headlight, the front fender, the front tire—it all began to come back to him. Even the physical sensation, the recollection of balance and momentum—it was all there, as though it had been preserved in some airtight container of memory, alive and undiminished.
He grasped the throttle ends of the handlebars and started easing the bike up from its leaning position, when a momentary surge of flame from the burning lumber illuminated something dark and bulky on the ground by the asparagus patch. He let the bike settle back on its kickstand, slowly reached down and got the pistol back in his hand. As best he could tell in the fluctuating light, the object on the ground wasn’t moving. It was about the right size for a human body. Something on the near side looked like it might be an extended arm.
Gurney raised his weapon, stepped carefully off the bike, and moved forward as far as the corner of the house. He was sure now that he was looking at the prone body of a man, and at the end of that putative outstretched arm he could make out roughly the shape of a rifle.
He got down on his knees and took a quick glance around the side of the house—confirming that his car was blocking the line of sight between Barrow Hill and the space he’d have to cross to reach the figure on the ground. Without any further delay, he crept quickly ahead, Beretta ready, eyes fixed on the rifle. With about three feet to go, his free hand landed on a wet, sticky patch of earth.
By its subtle but distinctive odor, he realized he was crawling into a pool of blood.
“Ach!” His whispered exclamation was as reflexive as his recoiling from the contact. Having begun his NYPD career at the height of the AIDS terror, he’d been indoctrinated to regard blood as a deadly toxin until proven otherwise. That feeling was still with him. Miserably regretting the lack of gloves, but desperately needing to understand the situation, he forced himself forward. On a scale of zero to ten, the dying light from the scattered debris still burning near the asparagus patch was varying from zero to two.
He reached the rifle first, grasping it tightly and pulling it from the hand that held it. It was a common lever-action deer rifle. But deer season was four months away. Sliding the rifle behind him, he moved closer to the body, close enough to see that the source of the blood on the ground was an ugly wound in the side of the neck—a wound so deep, ripping completely through the carotid artery, that death would have occurred within seconds.
The object that had caused it was still embedded there. It looked like two knife blades joined at one end to form a strange U-shaped weapon. Then he recognized what it actually was. It was one of the sharp metal joist hangers that had been delivered with the lumber. The obvious explanation was that the explosion had propelled that nasty piece of hardware with terrific force at the man with the rifle, cutting his throat. But that led to other questions.
Did the man set off the explosion himself, then suffer this unintended consequence? But it seemed unlikely that he would have detonated the device while he was still within range of the debris. Perhaps he detonated it by accident? Or in ignorance of the strength of the explosive charge? Or was he the unfortunate accomplice of a second individual who acted too soon? But questions like these begged a more fundamental question.
Who the hell was he?
Violating crime scene protocol, Gurney grasped the man’s heavily muscled shoulder and, with some effort, rolled him over for a better view of his face.
His first conclusion was that the man was definitely not his neighbor. His second conclusion, delayed by the lack of light and by the man’s spectacularly broken nose, probably caused by falling on his face, was that he’d seen that face before. It took a few moments for the identity to register.
It was Mick Klemper.
That’s when Gurney noted a second odor, not as subtle as the blood itself. Alcohol. And that led him to a third conclusion—one that was assumption-ridden but plausible.
Klemper, possibly like Panikos, had seen—or been told about—the Criminal Conflict program teaser, with its promises of sensational revelations, and it had provoked him to take action. Drunk and enraged—perhaps in a crazed effort at damage control, or driven by fury at what he surely would have perceived as a broken promise—he’d come after the man who was betraying him, the man who was ending his career and his life as he knew it.
Drunk and enraged, he’d come gunning for Gurney, skulking around the woods, sneaking up to the house as darkness fell. Drunk and enraged, he hadn’t given a second thought to what a dangerous place that might be.
Chapter 57. Pocket Full of Posies
Once again Gurney faced the simple, urgent question: What now?
In a less pressured position, he might have chosen the sanest and safest option—an immediate call to 911. A state police officer, however demented his motive might have been for being on the scene, had been killed. Though perhaps unintended, his death was hardly accidental. Occurring as the direct result of a felony—the reckless detonation of the explosive—it was murder. Failure to report this, along with the pertinent background information, to the appropriate authorities in a timely fashion could be construed as obstruction of justice.
On the other hand, much could be excused by the immediate pursuit of a suspect.