The Negotiator: A Novel of Suspense Read online

  Lots of thoughts rattling and racing through my mind right then, but I focused on just one.

  Get out safely.

  I stepped away from the Navigator, taking the keys with me, out of habit, I guess. If I was a smoking man, with matches or lighters, I’d be tempted to set the Navigator ablaze.

  But despite what you see in the movies, setting a car or an SUV on fire is a tough job, needing lots of gas and experience. I had the experience, but not the gas, and definitely not the time to try to experiment.

  I’d have to leave Clarence’s vehicle behind.

  I walked deeper into the woods.

  Two days later I was back home. It had been a long, disruptive, and disquieting journey from Vermont to New Hampshire, by walking and using taxicabs and buses. Food was spotty and the weather was rainy, and the trip gave me lots of time to think and brood. First things first, there was obviously no other party in the negotiation, no Japanese. My job had been to verify the painting as the real deal, and once that had taken place, my job was over. Clarence and I were witnesses to be disposed of.

  That’s it.

  I could see it was a wise decision on George’s part, even though it killed Clarence and had nearly killed me.

  I slowly made my way through the line of woods that bordered my rear yard, went past a cleared area where I stored my canoe for the occasional paddle on the Merrimack, and sat down against an oak tree to look at my house.

  Everything seemed normal.

  Sure.

  Just like that house back in Vermont.

  Once upon a time, folks working for the White House came up with a very weaselly phrase that admitted things were screwed up without assigning blame. “Mistakes were made.” Not, “The President has a poor grasp of political reality and really boffed it.” Or, “The Chief of Staff got hammered last night at Le Cirque, and at the early morning briefing, forgot the difference between Iraq and Iran.”

  Nope, mistakes were made. Nameless, faceless, bodyless folks screwed the pooch, nothing more to see here, let’s move on.

  But not for me.

  I had screwed up, and Clarence was dead.

  Mistakes? Let’s begin: I was seduced by the promise of a very big payday, and I wasn’t my usual suspicious self. I was also seduced by the charming couple in a charming house in a small town in Vermont. What could possibly go wrong with people like that?

  And when I saw the Rembrandt, I should have asked for a private talking with Clarence out on the front lawn, and then gotten the hell out. The Rembrandt had been missing for a quarter-century, and a couple of years ago, the FBI leaked a story that some organized crime outfit from Philadelphia had been responsible for robbing the Isabelle Stewart Gardner. Lots of impressive headlines, breathless television reports, and then, just when most everyone expected the paintings were about to be recovered, nothing. Zilch.

  So if the tale had been true, how in hell would one of those paintings have ended up with an older couple in rural Vermont?

  My suspicion meter should have pegged off the scale, because it certainly looked like somebody had robbed the mobsters and used me to make sure they had the real deal.

  Mistakes, all right, and all of them were mine.

  But George—if that was his real name—had also made a big mistake, back there in Vermont.

  He had shot Clarence first, which made sense. Clarence was the muscle, Clarence carried lots of weapons, he was a threat that had to be eliminated first.

  His next shot should have been me, to either wound or kill. But his first shot hadn’t done the job, and so he had to shoot Clarence one more time.

  Which gave me a chance to escape, to live, and to start thinking of what I was going to do next.

  For a while now I had been watching my house, and nothing had happened. The Smith girls were loudly at play in their back yard, with their happy German Shepherd, bouncing around, yapping.

  Clem, my other next-door neighbor, was in the rear of his own yard, trimming a rhododendron bush that looked big enough to swallow a person.

  But nothing was happening around my house. There were no black, window-tinted vehicles parked in my driveway, and no white van sitting on the road.

  Everything seemed normal.

  I still didn’t like it.

  It started getting dark. I stretched my legs, got up, and casually walked to the rear of my house, like the quiet, normal, and law-abiding citizen I was striving to become one of these days.

  The house search took twice as long as my usual style, and I wasn’t complaining, not at all. Sig-Sauer in hand, I cleared every room, every closet, every cabinet to make sure I was alone. Tiny attic, and then down to the cellar, and then back upstairs.

  Clear.

  I stripped off all of my clothes, took a half-hour shower, and after drying off and getting dressed, I took my old clothes and went downstairs. In my living room, I piled up some kindling and wood in my fireplace, and lit it. When the fire was burning merrily along, I fed in each piece of clothing, stirring it around with a poker, making sure it burned to ashes.

  Then I sat there for a while, staring at the fire, until hunger got me up and into the kitchen, where dinner was a defrosted container of chicken stew I had made last month and a half bottle of an Australian pinot noir.

  Bed time, where I slept deeply and for almost twelve hours.

  The next day I called a local taxi service and met the driver at the intersection of Route 3 and the entrance to Merrimack Banks Road. The driver was a woman with steel-gray bouffant hair and glasses shaped in the style of cat’s eyes. She dropped me off at the Super Wal-Mart in Manchester, where I wandered around the aisles for about thirty minutes or so. Then I went to the parking lot, found my Honda Pilot, and dropped a couple of quarters on the ground. I knelt and checked the under carriage, and, not seeing any suspicious objects, I got in the Pilot, started it up, and got on my way.

  I left my Lexus behind. It was too fine and stood out too much.

  I drove to Milford, a small town about a half hour southwest of Manchester, and spent a productive number of minutes on one of the computers at the Wadleigh Memorial Library, going to the website for the town of Chester, Vermont, and other places.

  Interesting fact number one, outweighing every other interesting fact I was probably going to learn today: No news reports of any shooting in Chester, of a man from Massachusetts being murdered, or that any chaos had erupted at that sweet old house in the rural countryside of the Green Mountain State.

  That was search number one. And when search number two was done, I learned the home at 19 Timberswamp Road was not owned by anyone named George or Beth, or anybody else for that matter.

  It belonged to a real estate company called O’Halloran & Son, of Bellows Falls, Vermont, and once I got their phone number, I went outside to the library’s parking lot and made a phone call, where I eventually spoke to one of the agents, a pleasant-sounding lady named Tracy Zahn. I told her that I was retired to the area and was driving around rural roads in Chester, whereupon I saw this lovely home on 19 Timberswamp Road.

  “Could you tell me who owns it?” I asked. “I know I’m being forward, but it really called to me. Is there any chance it’s for sale?“Well,” she said in a chipper voice. “We manage it. It’s held in trust for a family here in Vermont and New Hampshire. Ever since their mother passed on two years back, they’ve been fighting over what to do with it. In the meantime, we pay the utilities, do the landscaping. But if you are interested in purchasing it, I could start making some inquiries.”

  “Oh, I see,” I said. “Is it being rented, then?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “For real? I thought I saw a vehicle in the driveway when I went by the other day.”

  The real estate agent laughed. “Then you must be mistaken. Nobody’s living there.”

  That
got my attention. Beyond the library were the flowing waters of the Souhegan River, and lots of thoughts were bouncing around in my mind, like an old-style popcorn machine.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “Would you be interested in looking at the house?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “How about if I meet you there?”

  “Hold on, let me check my schedule,” she said. “Mmm … yes, I can see you there. How long will it take you?”

  “About ninety minutes.”

  “See you then … oh, I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Ninety minutes it is,” I said, and I switched off the phone.

  Then I took a casual stroll down to the flowing water, took out the SIM card, and tossed it into the roaring waters, followed by the phone.

  I walked quickly back to my Pilot.

  Ninety minutes later I was back on Timberswamp Road, my senses all jingling and jangling. I stopped for a moment at the dirt road where I had abandoned Clarence’s Lincoln, and walked up, Sig-Sauer in my hand.

  The Lincoln was gone.

  I checked the grass and dirt. I didn’t see any heavy tire marks, which meant the Lincoln wasn’t towed away. It meant someone—or several someones—had come in, re-inflated the tires, got the engine started, and drove it off.

  Pretty damn impressive.

  I went back to my Pilot, pistol still in hand.

  I drove by 19 Timberswamp Road twice. Nothing in the driveway, nothing going on, nothing making sense.

  I returned and decided not to park in the driveway, so I pulled over on the side of the road. I kept the engine running, kept my pistol in my lap, waited.

  Ninety minutes came and went.

  At minute ninety-three, a light green Volvo stationwagon with Vermont license plates came down the road, flashed its headlights at me, and then turned into the driveway. The driver seemed to be on her cellphone, talking away. I got out, holstered my pistol, and stood at the end of the driveway, waited. A woman in her mid-forties came out, holding a file folder, and offering a dazzling smile. She had brunette hair pulled back in a ponytail, khaki skirt above tanned shins and knees, and low-scooped yellow blouse.

  “Hello, I’m Tracy Zahn,” she said, extending her hand, which I shook. Her fingernails and toenails—visible through her open-toed shoes—were painted a bright red.

  “Thanks so much for making the time,” I said. “My, what a beautiful house.”

  “It certainly is, ah, mister … “

  “Built in the early 1800s?”

  “Actually, in 1795 … so close enough,” she said, laughing. It was a genuine, pleasing laugh. “Want to take a look around the property first?”

  “Sure.”

  I went to the front lawn, tilted my head back. The window I had blown through three days ago was hale and hardy, like nothing had happened. I poked around the juniper bushes. None of the branches appeared damaged, but they had all been trimmed back. No bits of glass, or broken road, and gee, not even a shattered wooden captain’s chair.

  But the house still didn’t look like an old, inviting antique anymore.

  “Ready to take a look inside?” Tracy asked.

  The house now looked like a place of evil, where gunshots and cries and the gurgling sound of death would never be heard by far-away neighbors.

  “Sounds fine,” I said.

  She unlocked the door and started her real estate agent spiel. I half listened as I went through the rooms downstairs, noticing a smell I couldn’t quite place, until I realized it was some sort of apple-cinnamon mix that probably came from a number of burning candles, lit to hide the smells of burnt gunpowder, spilt blood, and other bodily fluids.

  Something about the smell tickled at me, and I filed that away for later. I followed her upstairs, admiring the sway of her tight skirt, and we ducked into the bedroom—where her smile seemed wider and her breathing seemed quicker—and then into the upstairs study.

  “This looks … charming,” I said.

  True enough, but I stayed in one spot, not bothering to tour the familiar and deadly room. The window had been expertly repaired and then dirtied up and dinged to make it look like the same age of the other windows. The carpet had also been cleaned, and both captain’s chairs were relatively new, and definitely not the ones Clarence and I had been sitting in two days ago.

  Dear Tracy was going on about well water, perk tests, the efficiency of the oil burner in the basement, and I then moved around the office. I had shot at George twice, yet there was no evidence of any bullet damage to the area around where he had been sitting.

  I idly looked over the desk, opened a couple of drawers. All empty.

  I realized something was off.

  Then I got it.

  Tracy had stopped talking.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Tracy,” I said. “Sometimes I get lost in my train of thought, and most times, it leaves the track and dumps itself in a ravine.”

  That earned me a sweet smile, and she was standing on the other side of the desk, with the two new chairs behind her. She was twirling a loose piece of hair in one finger, and her legs were slightly spread, so they pushed against the outlines of her khaki skirt.

  “Apology accepted,” she said. “Do you see anything you like?”

  I smiled back, took the highway exit to Being A Gentleman. “Yes, this place is fascinating … and I was wondering, I plan to be in Vermont for the rest of the day. Do you know of a good place around here for dinner?”

  “A few,” she said, still twirling her hair.

  “Since I’m a stranger around here, would you be willing to give me directions?”

  “Of course.”

  “And would you join me?”

  Her smile grew wider. “That’s the price of the directions, so I don’t see why not.”

  I went out first and she followed me, locked the door, and when she got to her car, she suggested I meet her at her offices in Bellows Falls, and I said that would be fine. She got into her car and before starting it up, she laughed.

  “You know, you still haven’t told me your name.”

  I said, “You like mysterious men?”

  “Very much so,” she said, the driver’s door still open.

  “Then why spoil the moment?” I gently closed the door and she drove off with a honk and a wave, and I went back to my Pilot, got in, and thought.

  The smell inside the house bothered me.

  Why?

  It was obvious that after Clarence got shot and I successfully escaped, George and his team—it was quite clear from all the work that had been done that George wasn’t just working with Beth—had gone into overtime to put the house back into some semblance of normalcy, including lighting scented candles to mask what violence had happened there earlier.

  So why were the smells bothering me?

  I tapped the steering wheel, whistled the opening theme from Kevin Costner’s “Robin Hood,” and looked back at the house. It seemed to mock me, like it was challenging me to go back inside, where it could guarantee that the third time around, I’d be trapped.

  I flipped the house my middle finger, remembered going in with Clarence, chit-chatting with George and Beth, not smelling much of anything, going up to the office, more chit-chat, and George saying this: Damn, that woman makes the best cookies. Fresh out of the oven today.

  There was no smell of baking when Clarence and I arrived.

  Nothing.

  I started up the Pilot and began driving.

  Less than a half hour later, I stopped at a little store/gas station/bakery on the other side of Chester, called Devitt’s Gas & Go & Baked Goods. There were a couple of small businesses across the road—a florist, small engine repair, beautician—and farther up the street, a one-story motel. I parked to the side of the sagging wood buil
ding, which had a flat roof and painted red clapboards. I went up a small porch, opened the door, a little bell ringing as I did so. Before me were long display cases, and there were doughnuts, pies, cakes, and cookies. Molasses cookies, chocolate chip cookies, and sugar cookies.

  With elaborate sugar swirls on top, like maple leaves.

  Just like the ones Beth had served us.

  A thickset woman came from behind, wearing a soiled chest-high white apron, blue striped blouse, and a sweet smile. Her hands were chapped and soiled with flour.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Gee, I hope so,” I said, pointing to the sugar cookies. “Could I buy one of those cookies, as a sample?”

  “A sample?” she said. “Heck, I think this little enterprise can spring for a freebie.”

  She took a wax piece of paper from a box, reached into the counter, grabbed a cookie, and passed it over.

  I took a good bite, rolled my eyes, and said, “Yes, that’s it … I’ll take a dozen, please.”

  She was happy at that order and as she was packing it up, I said, “Ma’am, you know, the other day I was at this potluck dinner, and this couple came in, bringing these cookies. I couldn’t believe how good they were, and they told me where to find you.”

  “Well, I’m right glad they did,” she said.

  I looked into the case again. “Your apple pie … do you make that with cinnamon?”

  Her eyes twinkled. “I certainly do. Would you like a piece as well?”

  “Why not the whole pie?”

  She laughed, reached behind her, took down a white piece of cardboard and in a few quick motions, made it into a pie box. She put the apple pie in and then quickly taped shut the three sides of the box.

  “So those cookies,” I said. “This is going to sound funny, but I wanted to thank that nice couple who brought them to that potluck dinner. Do you remember them? Older man with white hair, nice smile … his wife was about the same age, but her hair was gray.”

  She started ringing up my purchase. “You know, I believe I do remember them coming in, maybe three or four days ago.”