Hell Bent (27 page)

I stopped in front of the head-high steel cabinet in the corner near where the Karmann Ghia was parked. What interested me was the small, shiny, new-looking padlock on the paint-stained, scratched, and dented old cabinet door, which closed with a loop and hasp. I wondered if a lock would make Gus feel secure about his hiding place?

I opened a couple of toolboxes on the counter and found what I was looking for—a small steel J-shaped crowbar. One end had a curved hook on it. The other end was flattened. It was a little more than a foot long and had a sturdy heft to it.

I wedged a corner of the bent end of the crowbar up under the hasp and gave a hard downward yank, and the hasp broke away from the cabinet door with a loud pop.

The door swung open, and I shined my little flashlight inside.

The cabinet had three shelves. On the top shelf, which was about shoulder-high on me, were some items of clothing still in their plastic wrapping. I pulled one off the top of the stack and looked at it.

It was a fishing vest such as we fly fishermen use for carrying our fly boxes and spools of leader material and our various tools and tubes and bottles and envelopes and plastic containers when we go wading in a trout stream. This one was buff-colored with a zipper up the front, and, like all good fishing vests, it had dozens of pockets of varying sizes.

I looked through the other items on that shelf. All were fishing vests, the identical color, make, model, and size—XL. Six of them altogether.

An odd thing to lock up in a steel cabinet, I thought.

I bent over to shine my light into the shelf under the one that held the vests … and at that moment a blinding light suddenly flashed on in the carriage house.

I straightened, blinked, turned around, and made a visor with my hand. “Who’s that?” I said.

“The question is,” said Herb Croyden’s voice, “what the hell are you doing in my garage?”

“I’m not here to steal your vehicles,” I said, “though they are gorgeous. Get your light out of my eyes, will you please?”

I turned off my flashlight and put it in my pocket. Then he lowered the beam of his light, and I saw Herb standing there beside his Ghia. Behind him, a side door to the garage was hanging ajar. He’d opened it silently. He must have kept the hinges well oiled. I hadn’t heard a thing.

He held his flashlight in his left hand and an ugly square automatic pistol in his other hand. The weapon looked just like the one I’d seen beside Gus Shaw’s dead body. Herb was aiming it at my midsection. The bore looked about as big around as a basketball.

“You don’t need that gun,” I said.

“I’ll decide that,” Herb said. “I see some lights flickering around on my property, I’m not going to check it out unarmed. You better tell me what you’re doing before I call the police.”

“I think Gus may have hidden something here,” I said, waving my hand around to take in the inside of the carriage house. “I think what he hid might have gotten him killed. And the other night a friend of his was also killed, maybe for the same reason.”

“Gus committed suicide,” said Herb.

“Maybe not,” I said.

“So did you find what you were looking for?”

I shook my head. “This cabinet,” I said, pointing my chin at
the steel cabinet I’d just broken into. “Is that your stuff inside? Are you the one who put the padlock on it?”

He shook his head. “It was empty except for a few old paint cans and some jars of nails. I told Gus if he needed to store anything, he could clean it out and use it. If it had a padlock on it, it wasn’t mine.”

“Come over here,” I said, “and see if you can explain this. And maybe you’ll put that gun away?”

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “just don’t shoot me, please.”

Herb came over so that he was standing behind me. “What did Gus put in there?”

I showed him one of the fishing vests, still in its factory plastic wrap.

“Maybe he was going to take up fishing,” he said.

“There are six vests altogether,” I said. “A fisherman needs only one. Shine your light in there. Let’s look on the other shelves.”

“You look,” said Herb. “Show me what you see. I’m going to stand back here with my gun.”

I shrugged and bent to the next shelf down. It held three one-foot-square cardboard boxes. I slid them out and put them on the garage floor.

Herb shined his light on them. The first box contained six brand-new shrink-wrapped television remote-control wands. The second held some coils of red, blue, and white electrical wire and a handful of rolls of black electrical tape. The third box held about a dozen packs of square twelve-volt batteries and the same number of packages of double-A batteries.

I looked up at Herb. “This isn’t your stuff?”

He shook his head. “Must’ve been Gus’s.”

“Make any sense to you?”

“None whatsoever,” he said. “What’s on that bottom shelf?”

I bent down. There were three more cardboard boxes. I slid one out and pried open the top. It held half a dozen smaller boxes, each containing shotgun shells. I showed one of the small boxes to Herb.

“Shotgun shells?” he said.

I nodded. “High-base, twelve-gauge, BB shot. Six boxes. Twenty-five shells per box.” I then opened one of the other boxes. It contained six rolls of nail-gun nails.

I held one of the rolls up for Herb to see.

“Nails,” he said. “I’m getting a bad feeling.”

“Me, too.” I read the stenciled letters on the top of the third box. I did not open it. “It says C-4,” I said to Herb. “This box has got C-4 in it, for Christ’s sake.”

“Plastique,”
he whispered. “What in the name of hell was Gus—?”

“Stand up and turn around.” The sudden loud voice echoed in the big garage. “Move away from there.” It was a deep, booming, familiar voice, and it came from a man silhouetted in the open doorway on the other side of the Karmann Ghia.

“Sarge?” I said. “That you?”

Phil Trapelo flicked on a flashlight and shined it first in my face, then at Herb. “Put down your gun and your flashlight, Herb,” he said.

Trapelo was holding a handgun of his own. He held it out at arm’s length, bracing it with the hand that held the flashlight and aiming it at the middle of Herb’s face.

Herb squatted down and, without taking his eyes off Phil Trapelo, he laid his gun and his flashlight on the garage floor near the bumper of the Karmann Ghia. “What the hell are you doing, Sarge?” he said.

“I’ve had to keep an eye on the lawyer, here,” said Trapelo,
gesturing at me with his gun. “He doesn’t seem to know when to back off.”

I turned to Herb. “You two know each other, huh?”

“I was in a support group with the Sarge for a while,” he said. “After my son was killed.”

“Did it help?”

Herb glanced at Trapelo. “Yes. I made some good friends. People I thought I could trust.” He looked at Trapelo for a minute, then shrugged. “We had a lot in common, of course. They helped me feel that I wasn’t alone.”

“But you stopped going,” I said.

He smiled. “The Sarge, here, can be a little …” He waved his hand.

“Intense?” said Trapelo. He was smiling, too.

“Sarge hates war,” said Herb. “He can get kind of extreme sometimes. Right, Sarge?”

Trapelo nodded. “I don’t call it extreme. I just call it clear thinking. So”—he nodded at the steel cabinet—”yeah, we thought we’d see if we couldn’t introduce some reality testing into the situation.”

I remembered what Pedro Accardo said to me on the phone the night before his throat was slit beside the stream in Acton. “On Veterans Day, huh? Eleven, eleven, eleven, right? You planning to blow yourself up, Sarge? Or is the idea for your followers to blow up themselves while you pull the strings? Gus Shaw and Pedro Accardo got wise to you, right?”

Trapelo looked at me, then at Herb. “You should tell your friend to shut the hell up.”

“Is he right?” Herb said to Trapelo. “Is that why you killed Gus?”

“Somebody’s got to fire the first shot,” said Trapelo. “I say, let it begin here.” I heard the fervor of the true believer in Phil
Trapelo’s voice, saw it in his face. I’d seen that same blaze of conviction in the eyes of televangelists. And serial killers.

“What do you know about Gus’s photographs from Iraq?” I said.

Trapelo shook his head. “Gus thought photographs could make a difference. We disagreed about that.”

“Do you know where they are?” I said. “Did you take them?”

“I don’t—”

That’s when Herb Croyden, who was standing right beside me, suddenly yelled,
“Watch out!”
He ducked and darted sideways and scrambled on the garage floor for his automatic pistol. At the same time, a shot exploded inside the garage, and Herb grunted and staggered backward. His gun skittered across the cement floor toward me. Just as I got my hand on it, there was another shot. I managed to get my finger on the trigger and get off a shot at Trapelo. Then Herb crashed into me and knocked me off balance. As I was falling backward I yanked off two more wild shots in Trapelo’s direction. Then my shoulders and the back of my head smashed against the steel cabinet. The cabinet toppled and crashed onto the concrete garage floor with an explosive clang, and my back slammed onto the floor with all of Herb Croyden’s weight on my chest.

I lay there for a moment, blinking against the darts of pain in my head. Then I took a couple of deep breaths and managed to roll Herb off me and onto his back. I was still holding his gun. I pointed it where Phil Trapelo had been standing. But he was gone.

I got up on my hands and knees and looked at Herb. A red blotch was spreading across the top of his left shoulder. His eyes were clenched shut, but he seemed to be breathing all right.

“Hang in there for a minute,” I said to him. “I’ll be right back.”

I crept toward the open door on the side of the carriage house, knelt beside it, and darted my head outside and back in again. The black-and-white still photograph that registered in my brain showed nobody out there.

I looked again. Saw nobody. Heard no shot ring out.

I patted my pants pocket and found my hand-sized Maglite. I fished it out, then stood up and went outside. I listened to the quietness of the Concord countryside for a moment, then turned on my light.

As I stood there panning my flashlight around the outside of the carriage house, I heard the distant, muffled sound of a car starting up. The sound came from the direction of Monument Street. Phil Trapelo, making his escape, I guessed.

I went back into the carriage house and shined my light quickly on the cement floor in the area where Trapelo had been standing when I shot at him. As expected, I saw no blood.

I went over to where Herb Croyden was lying on his back, knelt beside him, and shined my light on his face. His eyelids were fluttering, and he was taking short, shallow, gasping breaths.

“Herb,” I said. “Hey, Herb.”

His eyes opened. “Did he get away?”

I nodded. “He did. How do you feel?”

“Exactly like I got shot in the shoulder,” he said. He reached up with his right hand, fingered his wound, then took his hand away and looked at it. It was red with blood. “It’s not spurting, is it?”

I used my Leatherman tool to cut away his jacket and shirt. The bullet had entered where the top of his left deltoid muscle joined his arm to his shoulder, and it left a deep gouge through his flesh. It was seeping blood, but not pumping it.

“No arteries were hit,” I said. I cut Herb’s shirt into squares, packed them into a tight, thick compress, and pushed it against the wound. “Can you hold that there?”

Herb reached up and held my improvised bandage on his wound with his left hand.

“As tight as you can,” I said.

He looked at me and nodded.

“Does it hurt?”

“Kinda numb, actually,” he said.

“The bullet took out a hunk of your muscle and kept on going,” I said. “You were pretty lucky. A few inches to the side …”

Herb’s face was pale, but his eyes were clear. “I’m getting a little chilly here,” he said. “This floor is cold. You’re going to call 911 and cover me with something, aren’t you? You’ll find a blanket on the back seat of the Caddy.”

“I’m glad you’ve got your wits about you,” I said. “One of us should.” I opened the back door of the Cadillac, found a khaki-colored army blanket, and spread it over Herb. Then I folded up my jacket and tucked it under his head. “How’s that?” I said.

He nodded. “Much better.” He closed his eyes.

I worried that he’d lapse into shock. “Stay awake, Herb. Please?”

His eyes opened. “I’m awake, okay?”

I fished my cell phone from my pocket, dialed 911, and told the operator that a man had been shot and she should send an ambulance quickly and report it to state police detective Roger Horowitz. I gave her Herb’s address and emphasized that they should come all the way to the carriage house at the end of the long driveway.

Then I called Horowitz’s cell phone number.

“Jesus Christ, Coyne,” he said by way of answering. “It’s
Saturday night. Almost Sunday morning. You got something against me and my wife sleeping together?”

“I just called 911 and told them to contact you,” I said. “I figured they might not, and if they did, I thought you’d want to know why.”

“Called 911, huh?” he said. “What’d you get yourself into this time?”

I sketched out for him what had happened as clearly and succinctly as I could.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “You talking about suicide bombers?”

“Individuals wearing battery-powered fishing vests packed with plastic explosives and nails and BB shot blowing themselves up in public places,” I said. “That’s right.”

“And this Trapelo? He’s the ringleader, huh?”

“Yes. He shot Herb and got away.”

Horowitz blew a big exaggerated sigh into the telephone. “Okay, then. You stay put. There’ll be local cops along with the ambulance. Don’t say anything to them. I gotta make a couple phone calls. Then I’ll be right along.”

“Say hi to Alyse for me,” I said.

“Your pal Coyne says hello,” I heard him say. There was a pause, and then he said, “She says she wishes you’d stop haunting us.”