Chat - Archer Mayor [40]
None of which mattered to Willy Kunkle.
Willy was not a Brattleboro native, or a Vermonter, or easily influenced by peaceful precedent. He was a recovering alcoholic, a recovering Vietnam-era sniper, an ex-NYPD cop, and a man whose crippled arm—the ironic gift of another sniper—stood as more of a symbol than an actual disability, since it certainly didn’t slow him down on the job. He was hard-bitten, paranoid, short-tempered, and intolerant.
Of course, as Joe Gunther—his defender against every law enforcement bureaucracy so far—might have put it, he was also insightful, intuitive, hardworking, driven to perfection, honorable, and faithful. And a total pain in the neck.
He was also a born survivor, convinced by everything he’d experienced so far in life that you could never be too suspicious of, or too careful about, people.
As an example of this, he parked his vehicle unobtrusively in the high school parking lot and walked almost invisibly toward the town garage complex, eventually blending into its crosshatching of shadows until he could no longer be seen.
And there he waited.
As it turned out, he waited for quite a while, since Scott McCarty, not atypical of his ilk, was only vaguely aware of time. Nevertheless, he finally drove up in an exhausted Toyota sedan, slithering to a stop on worn summer tires, and killed the engine in the middle of the complex’s dooryard, leaving his headlights on to play across the mashed and rutted landscape of ice and dirty snow created by countless truck tires.
He had someone sitting beside him.
As Scott pushed at his door to get out, he found that it only opened a foot. Through the gap, a cold and muscular hand reached in and grabbed him by the neck.
“You’re late, you little shit.” Still jamming the door with his leg, Willy called out to the passenger, “You, beside him—move a single muscle and you’re dead. Ask Scott.”
Scott nodded nervously. “He’s not kidding, Benny.”
“What’s your name?” Willy demanded of the passenger.
“Benny Grosbeak.”
“And I’m supposed to believe that?”
“It’s true. My parents were hippies and changed their last name.”
“Why’re you here, Benny?” Willy asked.
Benny opened his mouth, but Scott spoke up first. “That’s what I—”
Willy tightened his grip, making him gasp. “Shut up.”
Benny hesitated. “Scott told me about some money.”
“How much?”
“Twenty bucks.”
Willy laughed. “What do you know, Benny?”
Again the pause, followed by “I saw that man.”
“The one in the paper?”
He nodded.
“Which one?”
“The bald guy.” That was the floater, found in the stream.
“Where?”
Now Benny was freer to talk, the truth being out. “At the motel where I work. I’m the night clerk.”
Without prompting, he gave Willy the name of the place, on Brattleboro’s Putney Road, about a mile from where the other John Doe had been found at a far better motel. Willy liked the coincidence. He opened Scott’s door wide with his knee and leaned into the car, so he was face-to-face with the occupants. “Benny and I are going to step outside,” he said. “You are going to stay here, waiting for your money, right?”
Scott nodded again. It was only then that Willy unlocked his fingers from his informant’s throat.
Willy glanced over at Benny, his voice almost gentle. “Okay, Ben, why don’t you climb out and stretch your legs a bit? I want to ask you a couple of more questions.”
Benny complied and Willy circled the car to join him, escorting him until he was beyond earshot of the car. He then positioned the young man with his back to the vehicle, so Willy could see, over his shoulder, Scott’s pale face through the windshield.
“Sorry about the rough stuff,” Willy began. “Scott and I have a history. I gotta pretend to be the tough guy.”
“You do a nice job.”
Willy laughed. “That’s good. I like that.” He reached into his pocket and extracted a twenty-dollar bill, using Benny’s body to hide the gesture from Scott. “This is something extra for your efforts. Scott’ll give you what he