Deadline (61 page)

“But … who were the other people following me?”

Sutter laughed again, grating on Jake.

“There were no other people.”

“But …” Jake stopped, not sure how to phrase it, to Sutter’s delight.

“Part of the smoke and mirrors. A little embellishment to endear us to you, maybe make you grateful for our protection. Grateful people cooperate.”

“But the guy that tried to kill me behind the store?”

“I was hoping you’d ask.”

Sutter gleefully reached in his briefcase and pulled out a crumpled up blue ski mask. Jake realized instantly the stocky man in the shadows was built exactly like Sutter. And with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach he remembered where he’d first seen the late model brown Volvo now in front of the cabin. It had been parked near the employee cars behind the supermarket. After assaulting him, supposedly scared by Mayhew’s gun fire, Sutter had run into the darkness, only to walk back and drive off after Jake and Mayhew left.

“Another role I played with consummate expertise, if I do say so myself. It takes a lot of skill to hit a man with a baseball bat hard enough to incapacitate him, but not so hard as to knock him unconscious. I’ve had to practice on a lot of people to get it just right. Some of them never woke up!”

Sutter guffawed, like a man so full of himself he imagines everything he says is clever and entertaining.

“I did my job perfectly. Of course, Charlie was a bit slow on the draw. I had to hold that bat up forever. I felt like I was carrying the Olympic torch or something.”

Mayhew didn’t smile. He just twirled something around between his fingers, something metallic, with a dull burnished gold look. Jake recognized it as a shell. A huge .44 Magnum shell. The same hardware that had comforted him when he came in the door had the opposite effect now. It all came down to whose side the Magnum was on, and Jake knew now it wasn’t his.

“Just call me Don Vito Corelone.” Sutter did a bad imitation of Brando in
The Godfather.
“Okay, so I’m not the don. I’m one of his trusty lieutenants. I told you I was in touch with the director himself. Oh, I’m sorry—did you think I was talking about the director of the
FBI?
” Sutter snorted.

“I don’t believe it. Why’d you tell me all that stuff about organized crime if you’re part of it?”

“You were already investigating. We figured in checking around the hospital you might get some ideas from a few of the doctors or somebody. So, why not get you sworn to secrecy on the organized crime angle in case something came out? Besides, I had to sound bona fide, had to make you believe in me, trust me. I’m a bit of a history buff. Unlike Charlie here, I do some pretty serious reading. Probably read half a dozen books on organized crime, and at least a couple on the FBI. I gave you accurate background information, most of it not vital but some important stuff sprinkled in. I hoped it would sound authentic enough to convince you to reciprocate. And you did. When Mayhew came to your rescue, you owed us your life. It made you more willing to talk to us, tell us everything we needed to know about your investigation, and what the police were coming up with. Reinforced your commitment to keep your mouth shut about us, like you agreed. That was the plan.”

Charlie, alias Agent Mayhew, glared at Jake. Pretending to save his life hadn’t produced any emotional bonding between the two. Jake imagined Mayhew had probably been disappointed to play the part of the rescuer and would have been much more comfortable swinging the bat. He was likely going to get that chance in the next few minutes.

“It’s true, my approach to these things is a little unorthodox. I made a few of our superiors nervous. Some of them think I talk too much, if you can imagine that.”

Charlie looked like he agreed, but Sutter was oblivious.

“But I get results. My experience with lying—and I have told an occasional untruth—has taught me it’s too easy to get tripped up. You get details wrong, you start sounding phony. People get suspicious, then they hold back. What I told you had to have the ring of truth. So most of what I told you
was
true, with just enough misleading info sprinkled in to protect our rears in case you violated our little contract. And the more I told you, the more you told me. I never could have gotten that stuff from Marsdon or the psychologist, much less the things you let slip from the police investigation. And even if you talked to your detective friend, I knew we were covered. You couldn’t prove anything. Besides, we were on you. If it looked like you were going to tell anybody, we could take you out any time. No problem.”

Jake knew he had to keep a clear mind, buying as much time to strategize as he possibly could.

“Why did you kill Doc and Finney?”

“You still don’t get it, do you?” Sutter paused. “We didn’t.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I feel almost guilty, closest thing to a confession I’ve made in years. Charlie doesn’t frequent church very much himself, do you Charlie? We do seem to end up at a lot of funerals, though. See, we really didn’t know who killed your friends, or we’d never have set this thing up with you in the first place. Unlike you and the police, we suspected foul play immediately. I guess we’ve got an eye for it. It could have been an accident, but the timing was lousy. Really lousy. It smelled like somebody took him out and wanted everybody, especially us, to think accident. We’re in the business of making accidents’ happen. The odds in the betting pool were two to one against an accident. In any case, we had to know.”

“Why?”

“Your friend was a key man. He had lots of power, lots of potential. A man of influence, confident, secure, a real leader. We got him to get his hands dirty, then we knew he was ours. We were watching him, of course, and we knew we’d have to take him out if he went soft on us. But the boys at the top were thrilled with the doctor. No way they’d ordered a hit. It’s like, you spend a few years training a guy on the job, and he finally starts to really pay off, and then you lose your investment. And the people we work for don’t like to lose investments. We had to know who did it. In our line of work, you can’t afford not to know who. Or next week you’re history, with them laying flowers on your grave and saying what a great guy you were.”

Jake was genuinely interested and tried hard to look it. Sutter clearly enjoyed playing to an audience. That meant more time to stay alive.

“At first the big guys thought it might have been someone in our own circle taking things into his own hands. Like I said, we were watching your friend. He gave us a few scares. Talking a little too seriously with that other friend of yours, though we weren’t sure exactly what he was saying. We were afraid he was having a conscience attack, but it looked like he was getting over it, and we figured things would settle in for a nice long-term relationship in the heart, lung, and kidney markets—sort of the pork bellies and soybeans of the medical exchange.”

Sutter lost it again and was acting more and more like a drunk.
Can only four wine coolers do this to a guy?

“Of course, if we found it was one of our boys acting on his own, we’d have to discipline him. Severely. But within a few days we’d shaken everybody down and knew it wasn’t an inside job. We were clean as a whistle. Then we figured it could be another group moving in on our operation. You never know about that. See, organized crime isn’t the tight little knitting circle you might imagine. We’ve got all kinds of people, lots of them successful business people, established professionals, trying to break into this medical thing. It’s a real bonanza. People will pay big bucks to go on living.

“So maybe a competitor was trying to get in on the act. Maybe they knew Dr. Lowell was our foothold and decided to terminate him. Set us back so they could get a jump with someone else. If so, we had to know. But we’d run out of leads, hit a dead end within a few days of the wreck. We needed hard facts. Oh, we could have eventually found where the car was towed, checked it out, but then what? We don’t have a crime lab, fingerprints on computer, all that stuff. That’s where you came in.”

“Why me?”

“After a lot of discussion—and it still wasn’t unanimous—the brass decided to make contact with you. If you helped us, great. If we helped you, the police could nail them, get ’em out of the way for us. Or if they got off easy, we’d take care of them. In fact, even if they went to prison, we might take ’em out there. Send a message, you know. Piece o’ cake.

“I asked you about organized crime to see if your detective friend suspected anything. It was a great opportunity to find out if they were on to our operation, even slightly. If they were, we would’ve been on the suspect list. I mean, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to tell us one way or another, so we had to come up with somebody who was. Who better than a reporter?”

Jake avoided eye contact with Charlie but sensed he was getting eager to do what he did best.

“Of course, we were relieved when you told us nobody even suspected organized crime—that told us our operation was still undercover. But if another group made the hit, the cops didn’t suspect them either. Your friend’s computer files came a little too close to home. I don’t mind telling you it made me nervous, and now the cops know more than we wish they did. But it was a risk we had to take.”

“So who did do it?”

It was just about pitch dark now, and Jake didn’t want the conversation winding down.

“We still don’t know. Your buddy will keep working on it after you’re gone. If he solves it, he nails the guys who set back our operation. If not, we lose nothing. Well, maybe not nothing. We knew all along we were telling you too much. But that was the beauty of it. You took the vow of silence. Our own little Omerta. But now you’ve outlived your usefulness. Remember the saying. ’If you’re no longer an asset, you’re a liability’? Well, you’re no longer an asset, Woods, and we have only one game plan for liabilities. ’You talk, you die.’ Only this is the preventative version. ’You die, so you don’t talk!”’

Jake had never felt like such a fool for keeping a promise. He’d broken plenty of others he should have kept. Why had he kept one he should have broken?

“Come on, Woods, lighten up. Don’t look so shocked. It’s just our own little euthanasia plan—when people’s lives become too expensive for us, we put them out of their misery. Kevorkian style, but no consent required. Just think of us as your doctor, or your family member who’s tired of paying the medical bills. You understand, don’t you Jake? We don’t want any hard feelings. We’ve become … sort of attached to you. You know, male bonding and all that.”

Sutter laughed again, this time more deliberately, relishing the moment in his perverse way, squeezing out its juices and savoring them.

The dim overhead light caught Sutter’s eyes, which seemed to Jake to have undergone a transformation. The eyes were coal black, lifeless, ruthless, deadly. Shark eyes.
Why didn’t I notice them before?
The eyes seemed subhuman, animal eyes, vicious and uncaring, without conscience, without moral reference points. The eyes of a predator, alive but mechanical. His giddiness was no sign of softness, but an idiosyncrasy of an utterly ruthless man.

“Besides, Jake”—he said Jake’s name with pronounced sarcasm, rubbing in the facade of a personal relationship—“we don’t want you to have to live with that thing Vietnam vets have. What do you call it? Survivor guilt syndrome? You know, how come you lived when your friends died? You should have died too. Well … now you will.”

“But …”

“This is now what we professionals call the pleading, bargaining stage, sometimes known as the procrastination stage. What would you like to say? What can you offer me in exchange for your life? You’re not rich, I know that. Perhaps a favorable column? The promise to quote me fairly and accurately? A year’s subscription to the
Tribune?
Ah, I have it. You could write my biography. Now that’s a tempting offer. Well, what is it, Woods?”

“You can’t expect to get away with this. If I’m murdered—”

“Oh, but we do expect to get away with it. We have before. Why shouldn’t we this time? Besides, this isn’t going to be known as a murder, just a permanent disappearance. Sure, your detective friend will be suspicious, but you didn’t tell him or anybody else you were coming here, did you? Good boy, we knew we could trust you. Even if they knew there was foul play, who will they suspect? Somebody who hates your column? Some group you’ve insulted? Nobody’s going to suspect us—they don’t even know we exist! We’ve got a perfect place to bury you, don’t we Charlie? They won’t find your body for another fifty years when they turn these woods into a housing development. Nobody will remember Jake Woods then. Nobody will care!”

Sutter reached into his briefcase again, its raised lid shielding Jake from its contents. His hand wrapped in a white handkerchief, he lifted something out, something with a familiar scent, and said, “By the way. Have I thanked you for the Walther? A Nazi gun, you said. I’m impressed. I’m handling it carefully, ’cause we’re thinking of possible uses for it. What’s wrong, Jake? You look surprised. We didn’t want you armed, just in case we had to face off with you prematurely. Tell him about it, Charlie.”

Mayhew shook his head.

“Okay, I’m not shy. Charlie’s good with a slim-jim. Took him all of twenty seconds to get in your car. Said he didn’t think you’d leave the game early. Would have done the job earlier, but if you can believe this, he sat in his car listening to the game on the radio, waiting for the rain to stop. Never did, so he finally got out and went to work. That dopey kid freaked him out so much that when he started running away, he squeezed the trigger and almost shot off his own foot. He could break in the car any time, and he waits till you’re coming back—’cause he didn’t want to get wet!”

Sutter rolled his eyes with an exasperated good-help-is-hard-to-find expression. Charlie did not appreciate the ribbing, and no doubt wished he’d never told Sutter what happened that night.

“But how’d you know I had the gun in my car?”

“We didn’t. But you’re a vet and you hunt. Obviously you’ve got a hand gun. And after being attacked behind the supermarket, it was a good bet you’d start packing it. Besides, staging the break-in the day before you and I had a meeting was a timely reminder you should talk with your friends before your enemies took you out.”