Hangman: A Novel (2 page)

Carlson braced his shoulders. He reached down and grabbed the prisoner under the left armpit and pulled him up. “I don’t have time to mess around with you,” he said. “As much as I’d like to.”

The prisoner’s eyes were staring at his handcuffs. Carlson watched him, a smile on his lips. He felt in control now.

“You think you can slip ’em, Hangman? Well, go for it.” He laughed and began marching Flynn toward the open part of the horseshoe, where the breeze was coming from.

Five steps. Ten. The wind was making a roaring sound, like in the mouth of a cave.

Carlson leaned over as he frog-marched Flynn. “Why’d you kill them girls?” he said casually.

Flynn didn’t reply. In a little bit, they were standing on the edge of the hill. Eighty feet below them, down a steep cliff covered with scrub and flat rusty-looking rocks, the green carpet of the treetops was cut by a snaking black road. To their left was a gas station, doing some lunch business by the looks of it, with three cars fueling up and another waiting for an open pump.

To their right was a black-shingled roof, angled in the shape of an L.

“You see that?” Carlson said.

The prisoner turned his head slowly, looked down at the gas station.

“No, not that,” Carlson said, pointing at the shingled roof. “That place there.”

Flynn’s gaze rotated slowly to follow the guard’s finger. When they reached the roof, the sound of an indrawn breath.

“Yeaaah, you know it. The Warsaw Motel.”

Flynn’s mouth worked, causing the muscles in his cheek to flex as Carlson watched him. This boy never fattened up on that starchy prison food, Carlson thought. Slim as a panther. The arm was strong, and the muscles were taut now. Oh, Flynn knew this place.

“That’s what I brought you up here to see, Hang-man.”

The prisoner turned toward him. His face was chapped by the wind, the ridges of his forehead red with exposure. The eyes were angry now.

“Where’s the girl?” Carlson whispered. “The last one, Sandy Riesen. The one you brought to the motel. The one they never found.”

That got to him. Flynn’s face contorted now as if he’d tasted raw flesh.

“Did you bury her up here?” Carlson whispered.

He leaned in and kept his mouth next to the prisoner’s ear, blocking his view of the gun as he brought it up in his right hand. Then
Carlson pulled back, and let the prisoner see the Smith & Wesson with the sun glinting dully off its nickel plating.

Flynn’s eyes grew big. Like a horse looking at a dog that had snapped at him before.

“Tell me,” Carlson said. Up here on the hilltop, he could feel a weight in the moment. He had Flynn dead to rights, just the two of them. He could kill the cracker if he chose, say he’d tried to escape and had nearly made it down the hill before Carlson had caught him with a lucky shot.

Justice for those families. His gun hand tingled.

“Last chance, brother,” he said, and his voice cracked just a bit. “It’s been five years now.”

He brought the barrel of the gun up.

“Five.”

He spun the barrel.

“Long.”

Carlson pulled the hammer back, and the snap of the spring was clear in the cold air.

Flynn’s eyes closed.

“Years. Where’s the goddamn girl?”

The prisoner turned. The look in his eyes, it wasn’t what Carlson had hoped for. He’d expected the man to beg for his life, spittle running down his chin. He’d wanted to crack the man wide open, have him begging for mercy.

But Flynn wasn’t crying. His eyes weren’t even on the gun. They bored into Carlson’s like a hot drill.

“You think I’m playing?” Carlson whispered.

Flynn stared him down.

Oh, no, thought Carlson. Don’t tell me that girl, the last one, really is alive. Not after all these years. Christ, what would she even look …

The prisoner was leaning forward. He’d whispered something, but the breeze ruffled in Carlson’s ears at just that moment and all he heard was the wind.

“What?” Carlson snapped. “What did you say?”

Flynn leaned closer. The guard watched his lips, wanting to read the words if he missed them again.

“The girls …”

Carlson shivered at the voice, thin and ghostly, the voice of a man who has nothing to talk to but concrete walls. The guard felt his stomach flutter.

The gun bobbed a little before he got it steady again.

“Yeah. The girls what?”

The sound of the wind rose a bit and Carlson felt his hand sweat on the faceted surface of the gun grip. Flynn whispered:

“The girls are waiting for you.”

Absalom Kearney worked quickly. Down on her knees in
the backyard, she could feel the wind starting to move around the garden. She wanted to get six bags of mulch around her squash plants before lunch. The forecasters said the first frost was going to be a killing one, and the plants were her babies, the first things she’d planted in her first-ever garden.

She took a sheet of
The Buffalo News
—yesterday’s paper was fluttering under a rock next to her—and laid it on the top level of mulch, then piled some of the leafy stuff on top. The plants danced in the wind, the tomatoes red with stripes of green.

She’d put one of the speakers up to the back bedroom window and the radio was playing. It was something people used to do during high school parties back in the County, the two-fisted Irish American stronghold she’d grown up in on the south side of Buffalo. She was playing NPR on the local station,
Science Friday
. She wanted to hear voices as she gardened. The host was talking to some UCLA physicist about the Higgs boson. Dark matter and dark energy and hidden dimensions. Their voices drifted out over the backyard, interrupted by the buzzing of bees and the scrape of leaves as they were blown across the wooden fence before falling to the ground.

Abbie usually loved to feel the loamy mulch on her hands, but she’d just had a mani-pedi the day before and didn’t want to ruin her sparkling red nails. She breathed in the stuff’s rich fragrance as she spread it evenly in the small garden, and smiled as she did so. The big Victorian painted Kelly green was her first place with a yard and she’d surprised herself at how she’d taken to gardening, to anything connected with nature, honestly, as she’d always seen herself as a city girl. But now she wanted to hold on to her first summer here, to have one last crop from her little stakehold.

The fourth bag of mulch was gone. She bunched up the plastic and got up, wiping her forehead with her sleeve and feeling a wave of pleasant tiredness sweep through her. She stopped a moment to watch the wind toss the tops of the hundred-year oaks in the yard next door, Ron and Charles’s place. She’d invite them over for dinner when the tomatoes were ready.

Her neighbors. It felt good to say that. She turned and reached for the next bag of mulch.

“Where’s that man of yours anyway?”

Abbie looked up. A head had appeared over the battered wooden fence that bordered the side of her yard. Ron.

“He’s shopping for his moose-hunting trip,” she said, smiling and sitting back on her haunches. “He’s Canadian, you know.”

Ron rolled his eyes. He was the more sociable half of the couple. Ron was a social worker who dealt with some of the toughest families on the East Side. Charles was a professor at the university, teaching in the English Department, and he had the posture and frostiness of an academic. Abbie had his book on medieval poetry on her bookshelf.

“Nobody’s
that
Canadian. He’s really going to shoot a moose?”

Abbie laughed. “Next month, if he can find one. If not, he’ll drink with his buddies and dream about me.”

Ron scoffed. He had reddish hair and a broad, pleasant farm boy’s face. “I hope for your sake that he doesn’t dream about one of those buddies. Do they have beards?”

Abbie stood up, stretched her back, then walked slowly and laid her arms across the top of the fence. It needed painting. Maybe she could
get it in before winter came. “No recruiting people’s boyfriends. ’Specially mine. How’s Charles?”

Ron made a face. “Fine, I guess. He’s giving one of his tours.”

Abbie’s house lay smack in the center of Buffalo’s arts district. Downtown Buffalo was thick with history and she’d found that a surprising number of her neighbors were involved with preserving it. Half of them seemed to be on the landmark commission, and Charles took visitors through the local sites on guided tours: the Albright-Knox Museum, the Frank Lloyd Wright House, the twin spires of the faded but still glorious Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane.

“Which one is it today?”

Ron rolled his eyes. “I think it’s the architecture special. Or the tour of the old Erie Canal. You know, the
exciting
one.”

“Why doesn’t he start a famous murders of Buffalo tour? I could lead that one.”

“He’s going to be
in
that one if he doesn’t get home soon.”

Abbie gave him a mock-horrified look. “You need a drink, hon?” she asked.

“I do. I have a foster mom whose fat neck I’m considering strangling. You’d be saving a life.”

“Give me ten minutes and I’ll—”

The phone in her pocket buzzed.

Ron, hearing it, widened his eyes and wagged his finger back and forth with an alarmed look on his face. “Oh nuh nuh no. We have an oral contract. My need for alcohol is much more pressing than some …”

Abbie said, “Hush,” brushed her hands off, and reached for the phone. Don’t let it be work, she thought. I could use a drink, too. She felt peaceful, the fall glory of her yard filling her with a strange contentment.

The message was from the Buffalo PD’s emergency channel.

MARCUS FLYNN ESCAPED. ALL PERSONNEL REPORT HQ.

The crowd on the second floor of Buffalo Police Headquarters
was as big as Abbie had ever seen it, except for last year’s mass-disaster training day where the city had simulated a terrorist attack. Then there’d been sheriffs, firemen, deputies, everything in uniform above the rank of school crossing guard, socializing before they’d gone out to tend to the fake victims with blood painted on their faces and leg wounds provided by the university’s theater department. It had been a carnival of local law enforcement, the mood light. Abbie had eaten a hot dog and enjoyed herself.

And why not? As one cop had said, “What kind of dipshit is gonna bomb Buffalo?”

But now there was a dark electricity in the air as Abbie walked through the room. She felt it in her chest. Usually when there was an emergency, you could sense a barely repressed excitement, the guilty little secret of law enforcement. We love the big cases, she thought, the scary ones, the spectaculars. Anything to put us on the front lines and take us away from the dreariness of people stealing from the local Wegmans to feed their kids.

But as she scanned the crowd, she saw something else. Gray, drawn faces, strangely bloodless. Stiff postures, hands clenched behind backs.
A few men with the corners of their eyes ticking. This is like a funeral, she thought, but where nobody knows yet who died.

Chief Albert Perelli spotted her and nodded. He was dressed in a checked blazer and dark slacks, a white shirt open at the neck. He was talking to a sheriff in a broad-brimmed hat who looked like his face had been carved out of granite.

“See me after,” Perelli mouthed, and Abbie nodded back, taking her place at the back of the crowd.

There was a thrum of low conversation as Perelli spoke to the sheriff, his head ducking down to listen. Then he nodded and straightened up, looked over the room. He waved his hand in the air once. There was no platform for him to step on and address the troops, so he stepped up on a sturdy wooden chair.

“Everybody listen up,” he said sharply. The voices in the room subsided almost immediately.

“You’ve all heard the news, I’m sure. Marcus Flynn, aka Hangman, escaped while being transferred from Auburn Correctional to Attica. A Corrections officer was killed by two bullets to the head. His service revolver and his watch are missing. The escape location is about fifty miles east of here and most of you will be headed that way in a few minutes. The collection point is behind 74 Franklin and you’ll be going up in vans to the different checkpoints. That’s what we’re here for. We’re building a perimeter out there and we
will
have this … this …”

Perelli’s eyes grew wide as he looked for the right word.

“This
prisoner
in jail by morning.”

Abbie noted the respect given to Hangman. “This prisoner,” not the usual cop talk of “this freak” or “this scumbag.” Perelli’s eyes swept from left to right.

“We have a hundred and fifty men and women here. Syracuse will contribute, Rochester, too, and the Wyoming County Sheriff’s Department is already manning roadblocks on Route 20A and its feeder roads. Let’s hope that by the time you all get halfway up to Warsaw, the prisoner will be back in custody. I’m sure that’ll be the case but to make it happen I need you to listen very carefully.”

He paused.

“This is not a time for individual heroics, this is a time for what will
work most effectively. And that’s teamwork and communication. You’re going into hunter’s country up there. People have guns and they’re not shy about using them. I don’t want to lose two men in the effort to catch one. Wear your orange vests if you’re going into the woods, and only go into the woods if you’re told to.”

Perelli motioned to a man next to him wearing the sheriff’s outfit.

“This is John O’Neill. In case you don’t know him, he’s with the Erie County Sheriff’s Department and he’s got the duty roster. Most of you will be stationed on the highways and local roads coming west. The Syracuse PD will be coordinating all recovery operations east of the escape point. Know where you are. We’re about”—he swiveled around toward the plain clock on the back wall—“six hours till nightfall and I want Hangman in custody before we get there.”

Perelli paused for a moment, and Abbie saw something troubled in his eyes, a look of uncertainty. That was rare for Perelli, an expert smotherer of all forms of worry.