Under Siege (3 page)

The verbal sparring between the talented newcomer, Yocke, and the pro with thirty years of journalism experience had not prevented a friendship. They genuinely liked each other.

As Yocke marshaled his arguments yet again to fire at the man who wasn’t there, he took stock of the Post newsroom. It was populated by literate, informed, opinionated people, every one of whom subconsciously assumed that Washington was the center of the universe and the Post was the axis on which it turned.

This newspaper and The New York Times were the career zeniths that every journalist aimed for, Yocke thought, at least those with any ambition. Yocke knew. He had ambition enough for twenty men.

Jack Yocke and the photographer were headed for Laurel to interview the Harringtons’ neighbors-and, if possible, the widow herself-when Vinnie Pioche and Tony Anselmo finished their meal and strode out into the gloom of the Washington evening.

They took their time walking toward the parking garage.

A lady of the evening standing on the corner watched them come toward her, took a step their way, then abruptly changed her mind after a good look at Vinnie’s face. Tony knew Vinnie pretty well, and he knew that look. It would freeze water.

Once in the car they drove to a garage in Arlington and beeped the horn once in front of the door, which began to open within seconds.

.

He was standing facing it with his hands in his Pockets when he heard The fat gent inside was smoking a foul cigar. He handed them a pair of keys to a ten-year-old Ford sedan. Tony used one of the keys to open the trunk. Inside was a sawed-off twelve-gage pump shotgun, a box of twenty-five buckshot cartridges, latex surgical gloves, and two nine-millimeter pistols. They pulled on the gloves before they touched the weapons or the car. Vinnie stared at the pistols, then ignored them. Tony helped himself to one and made sure the clip was full and there was a round in the chamber while his companion carefully loaded the shotgun, then placed five more cartridges in his right jacket pocket.

Tony slid behind the wheel and started the car. The engine started on the first crank and the gas gauge read full. He let it idle while Vinnie arranged himself in the passenger seat and laid the sawed-off on his lap, the barrel pointed toward the door.

Anselmo nodded at the cigar smoker, who pushed the button for the garage door opener.

“Nice car,” Tony said to Vinnie, who didn’t reply, He had used up most of his conversational repertoire at dinner, when he had grunted and nodded to acknowledge Tony’s occasional comments on the food or the weather.

Vinnie Pioche had the personality of a wart hog, Tony reflected yet again as he piloted the car across the Francis Scott Key Bridge back into Washington. Still, a more workmanlike hitter would be hard to find. Through the years, when somebody had a contract and wanted it done just right, with no repercussions, they sent for Vinnie. He was reliable. Or he used to be. These days he was getting … not goofy … but a little out of control, out there on the edge of something that sane men rarely see. Which was precisely why Tony war, here. “Make sure it goes

okay, Tony-was

They found a parking place a hundred feet from the row house they wanted, just a block east of Vermont, a mile or so northeast of downtown. Tony killed the lights and the engine. The two men sat silently, watching the street and the occasional car that rattled over the potholes.

Streetlights cast a pale, garish light on the parked cars and the row houses with their little stoops and their flowerpots on second-floor windowsills. This neighborhood was much like home. Here they felt comfortable in a way they never would in the sprawling suburbs with huge lawns and treeshaded dark places and the winding little lanes that went nowhere in particular.

Tony checked his watch. Thirty minutes or so to wait. Vinnie fondled the shotgun. Tony adjusted the rearview mirror and his testicles and settled lower in his seat.

Twenty-six minutes later a yellow cab slowly passed. Tony watched in the driver’s door mirror as the brake lights came on and the cab drifted to a stop in the middle of the block.

“It’s them,” he said as he started the engine. “Remember, not the woman.”

“Yeah. I’ll remember.”

Vinnie got out of the car and eased the door closed until the latch caught. He held the shotgun low against his right leg, almost behind it, and waited.

Tony watched a man and a woman get out of the cab and the cab get under way. Vinnie started across the street.

No one else on the street. The wind was beginning to pick up and the temperature was dropping. Tony turned in the seat and watched Vinnie cross the street and stride toward the couple, now standing on the stoop, the woman digging in her purse.

Vinnie stopped on the sidewalk fifteen feet away from the couple, raised the shotgun, and as the man turned slightly toward him, fired.

The man sagged backward. Vinnie shot him again as he was falling. The victim fell to the sidewalk, beside the stoop.

Vinnie stepped around the stoop and shot him three more times on the ground.

The shotgun blasts were high-pitched cracks, loud even here. The woman stood on the stoop, watching.

A pause, then one more shot, a deeper note.

Now Vinnie was walking this way, replacing the .45 in his shoulder holster, the shotgun held vertically against his left leg.

Anselmo eased the car out of its parking place and waited. Vinnie Pioche just walked. Lights were coming on, in windows opening, a few heads popping out. He didn’t look up.

He opened the car door and took his seat, and Tony drove away, in no hurry at all.

Just before he turned the corner, Tony Anselmo glanced in the driver’s door mirror. The woman was unlocking the door to her town house and looking down off the stoop, down toward the dead man. Well, she had been paid enough and she knew it was coming.

On the flight from Dallas-Fort Worth, Henry Charon sat in a window seat and spent most of his time watching the landscape below and the shadows cast by cumulus clouds. Sitting in the aisle seat, a young lawyer with blow-dried hair and gold cufflinks occupied himself by studying legal documents. He had glanced at Charon when he seated himself, then forgotten about him.

Most people paid little attention to Henry Charon. He liked it that way. People had been looking around and over and through him all his life. Of medium height, with slender, ropey muscles unprotected by the fat layers that encased most other forty-year-old men, Henry Charon lacked even one distinguishing physical feature to attract the eye. As a boy he had been the quiet child teachers forgot about and girls never saw, the youngster who sat and watched others play the recess games. One teacher who did notice him those many years ago had labeled him mildly retarded, an unintentional tribute to the protective shell that, even then, Henry Charon had drawn around himself He was not retarded. Far from it. Henry Charon was of above-average intelligence and he was a gifted observer. Most of his fellow humans, he had noted long ago, were curiously fascinated by the trivial and banal. Most people, Henry Charon had concluded years ago, were just plain boring.

Although the lawyer in the aisle seat had ignored his companion, Charon surveyed him carefully. Had he been asked, he could have described the young attorney’s attire right down to the design on his cufflinks and the fact that the end of one shoelace was missing its plastic protector.

He had also catalogued the lawyer’s face and would recognize him again if he saw him anywhere. This was a skill Charon worked diligently to perfect. He was a hunter of men, and faces were his stock in trade.

He hadn’t always been in this line of work, of course, and as he automatically scanned the faces around him and committed them to memory, in one corner of his mind he mused on that fact.

He had grown up on a hard-scrabble ranch in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. His mother had died when he was three and his father had died when he was twenty-four. The only child, Charon inherited the family place. Weeks would pass without his seeing another person. He did the minimum of work on the ranch, tended the cattle when he had to, and hunted all the rest of the time, in season and out.

Since he was twelve years old Henry Charon had hunted all year long. He had never been caught by conservation officers although he had been suspected and they had tried.

Sagging cattle prices in the late ‘70’s and a thrown rod in the engine of his old pickup changed his life. A banker in Santa Fe laid reality on the table. Unless he devised a way to earn additional income Charon was eventually going to lose the ranch. That fall Henry Charon became a hunting guide. He advertised in the Los Angeles and Dallas newspapers and had so many responses he turned people away.

In spite of his taciturn manner and introspective personality, Henry Charon enjoyed immediate success at his new venture. His gentlemen nimrods always saw trophy animals, sometimes several of them. When one of the corporate captains with his shiny, expensive new rifle needed a little help bringing down his deer or elk, the crack of Charon’s .30-30 was usually unnoticed amid the magnum blasts. Stories of successful hunts spread quickly through the boardrooms and country clubs of Texas and Southern California. Charon jacked his rates from merely high to outrageous and was still booked for years in advance.

The event that changed his life came in 1984, on the evening before the last day of elk season, as he drank coffee around the campfire with his client, who this year had come alone and paid without quibble the entire fee for a party of four. That was the client’s third season.

The client was looking for someone to kill a man. He didn’t state it baldly but that was the drift of the conversation. He didn’t ask Charon to undertake the chore, yet somehow in the oblique conversation it became unmistakable that the demise of a certain board remember at the client’s savings and loan would be worth fifty thousand dollars cash, no questions asked.

The client got his elk the next morning and Charon had him on the plane in Santa Fe by six p.m.

Intrigued, Henry Charon thought about it for a week. Really, when one thought about it objectively, it was hunting tilde and hunting was the one thing that he was extraordinarily good at. Finally he packed a canvas bag and headed for Texas.

The whole thing was ridiculously easy. Three days of observation established that the quarry always took the same route to work in his black BMW sedan. Charon went home. From a closet he selected a rifle that one of his clients from the year before had brought along for a backup gun and had left behind.

Three mornings later in Arlington, Texas, the quarry died instantly from a bullet in the head as he drove to work. The police investigation established that the shot must have been fired from a salvage yard almost a hundred and fifty yards away as the victim’s car waited at a traffic light. There were no witnesses. A careful search of the salvage yard turned up no clues. Asked to assist, the FBI identified several dozen ex-military snipers as possible suspects. There men were all discreetly questioned and their alibis checked, to no avail. The crime remained unsolved.

Two weeks later the money arrived at the ranch in the Sangre de Cristo in a cardboard box, mailed first class without a return address.

The savings and loan man came to the ranch on two more occasions. He was stout, in his late fifties, and wore custommade alligator-hide cowboy boots. He sat on the porch in the old rocker and looked at the mountains against the blue sky and talked about how tough times were in Texas since the oil business cratered. On each visit he mentioned the names of men connected with the savings and loan industry in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The first man subsequently drowned on a fishing trip in Honduras and the other apparently shot himself with a Luger pistol, a family heirloom his father had brought back from World War II, one evening when he was home alone.

The last time Henry Charon saw the original client he brought another man with him, introduced him, then got back into his Mercedes and drove off down the dirt road, dust swirling. The new man’s name was Tassone. From Vegas, the savings-and-loan man said.

Tassone was as lean as his chauffeur was fat. He looked over the house and grounds with a deadpan expression and made himself comfortable on the porch. “Awful quiet out here,” he observed.

Charon nodded to be sociable. He scanned the hillsides slowly, carefully.

“I hear you got a talent.” Charon again examined the draw where the ranch road went down to the paved road. He shrugged. Tassone had his feet on the rail.

“A man with talent can make a good living,” Tassone said. When Charon made no reply, he added, “If he stays alive.”

Charon seated himself on the porch rail, one leg up, his hands on his leg. He turned his gaze to Tassone.

“If he’s smart enough,” the man in the chair said.

Charon stared at the visitor for a moment, as if he were sizing him up. Then he said, “Why don’t you take the pistol out of that holster under your jacket and put it on the floor.”

“And if I don’t?”

Charon uncoiled explosively. He drew the hunting knife from his boot with his right hand and launched himself at the man in the chair, all in the same motion. Before Tasson could move, the knife was at his throat and Charon’s face was inches from his.

“if you don’t, I’ll bury you out here.”

“What about Sweet?” Sweet was the Texas savings-and loan man. “He knows I’m here.”

“Sweet will go in the same hole. He’ll be easy to find. He just drove about a mile down the road and stopped. He’s sitting down there now, waiting for you.”

“Reach under my coat and help yourself to the gun.” Charon did so, then moved back to the rail. The pistol was a small automatic, a Walther, in .380 caliber. He thumbed the cartridges from the clip, jacked the shell from the chamber, then tossed the weapon back to Tasson.

with his eyes on Charon, Tasson holstered the gun. “How’d you know Sweet didn’t leave?”

“The road goes down that draw over there.” Charon jerked his head a half inch. “I was watching for dust. There wasn’t any. There’s a wide place under a cottonwood where the creek still has water in it this time of year. He’s sitting there in the shade waiting for you.”