Smugglers Notch Read online

  Conklin took the .32 in his right hand and angled it upward, squeezed the trigger as the culmination of the short, furtive motion. The slug blew out the window and tore into the big officer’s shoulder, spinning him back. A second bullet caught him at the base of the skull, in the knotty lump above the hairline, destroying the spinal column where it entered the brain.

  The other deputy dove to the pavement, tugging at his service revolver. As Conklin pushed open the door, the windshield disintegrated and the front seat was showered with glass. Conklin blinked blood out of his eyes, and the strength went out of him as he saw his brother slumped against the headrest with a piece gone from the bridge of his nose. Another bullet tore out the rest of the glass and Walker yelled and fell over the girl. Conklin got off a slug that went wide of the mark. The officer raised himself for a clear shot that also missed, then scrambled to his feet, still shooting. Conklin ducked under the dash. A bullet slammed into the radiator, and sweet-smelling steam leaked inside the car. Conklin heard a door open and then Stark’s agonized gasp as a bullet sliced into his neck. Using his own door as a shield, Conklin got off two shots at the officer, the second one bringing him down. He ran to the fallen man, watched the breath bubble out of him through a hole high in his chest. He plugged the wound with his gun. As the deputy opened his eyes, he moved the muzzle away, put it to the man’s lips and forced it between his teeth.

  “Understand what I’m doing?” he said. “Do you?”

  He waited. The officer’s eyes flickered, and in that brief moment of comprehension Conklin put weight on the trigger. The back of the man’s head skipped into the road like the rock skimmed over the quarry pool.

  “That’s for Mel, you fuck,” he said.

  He threw away the .32. A pump gun was mounted upright in one of the cruisers, and he brought it back over his shoulder like a hunter returning from the field. Stark had propped himself against the Buick’s single fender skirt. The left side of his T-shirt was wet with blood from an opening in his throat. Conklin stood the weapon beside him and listened to his labored breathing.

  “What now?” the trusty rasped.

  “Sorry, Jeff. All you can do is make your peace with Him.”

  “Fuck that,” Stark said. “I want—”

  “That’s no way to talk.” Conklin slid inside the Buick. Droplets like red tears of rage stippled his brother’s face, and he scrubbed each one away and then kissed him and placed the body across the seat. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the girl cowering against the tailgate. As he went for her, she began shrieking again.

  “Knock it off, Brenda.”

  The girl screamed louder.

  “God damn it, show some respect for the dead.”

  She shut up then, and he climbed into the rear seat for a look at Walker. A dark trickle was congealing against the weight lifter’s cheek. Conklin traced it to a gash hidden in his eyebrow. Spreading the skin beneath the hair, he saw a metal nub embedded in a white ridge of bone. His fingers came away damp and sticky, and he wiped them on his pants.

  “Let’s go,” he said to the girl. “I know a way …”

  Brenda curled around the spare tire, crying to herself. Conklin crawled after her and pushed her out the rear.

  “What do you want with me?” she sobbed. “Haven’t you done enough already?”

  “Me? I didn’t do anything to anybody. It was those cops. …” He shoved her ahead and went back to the cruiser in the weeds. The passenger’s door was unlocked. “Flashy,” he said, “but it’ll do for now. Anyhow, I always wanted to drive one of these things. Get in.”

  The key was in the ignition. When he started the engine, the siren sounded, and he hit half the buttons on the console before the wailing died. Carefully, he tried his foot on the gas. The turbocharger sprinted along the shoulder, trampling a row of seedling maples. Steering with both hands, he guided it into the lane.

  Brownfield said, “I hope Greeley’s out of bed by now.”

  “I hear you,” St. Germain said. “I could do with some sleep myself.”

  “Did I say …?” The young doctor smiled superiorly. “Let me put it another way. I hope he’s done with Roundheels. I can sleep when I get home.”

  St. Germain didn’t know if the joke was on him, but he laughed to play it safe. “You younger guys amaze me. I went steady with every girl I dated since high school. The notion of sharing a woman with my friend … I can’t guess what to make of that.”

  “Greeley’s not my friend.”

  St. Germain braked the ambulance, sighted down a long straightaway as though they were entering uncharted territory. He looked at Brownfield unhappily. “We’re nearly back to Arnold’s Crossing. I don’t see the lights from the roadblock.”

  “Maybe they gave up and went home.”

  “Not those two,” St. Germain said. “They’d stay till they were told they weren’t needed anymore.”

  “Well, maybe they’re not. Maybe they found who they were looking for.”

  “It’s what worries me.” St. Germain leaned on the accelerator, and the blacktop rolled up under the wheels.

  “There’s the sheriff’s car,” Brownfield said. “One of them.”

  St. Germain brought the ambulance to a skidding stop and jumped into the road. His legs wobbled as he saw Art Gray in a puddle stemming from his shattered skull. Ten feet away, Dick Vann lay crumpled on his side. St. Germain put him on his back, stared into the dull eyes, wondering why his own wanted to fill with tears.

  He let Vann down with his cap under his head. Inside the Buick Brownfield was crouched in front examining a man laid out on the seat. St. Germain looked over the doctor’s shoulder, and Brownfield turned to him, shaking his head.

  “That one’s Mel,” St. Germain said.

  “What …? You know him?”

  “The boy they were looking for, that’s his …” He leaned close, satisfying himself that the diagnosis was correct. “Never mind,” he said. “It isn’t important.”

  Brownfield went into the rear and felt for the pulse of a big man sprawled with his knees on the floor. “Head shot,” he said. “Know who he is, too?”

  “Some bastard who no doubt deserved what he got.” As he backed away from the station wagon, St. Germain saw another man slumped motionless against a fender. “There’s your third—”

  Stark moaned without opening his eyes, and Brownfield slipped quickly from the Buick. “Lieutenant, get my bag out of the ambulance.”

  When St. Germain came back, Brownfield had placed Stark flat on the pavement and was pinching the wound in his throat. “How is he?”

  “He’s got both feet in the grave, and all I’ve got to pull him out with are two fingers,” the doctor said. “Advise the E. R. of what we have here. And then bring me some plasma volume extender. The Dextran.”

  St. Germain’s upper body pivoted toward the ambulance, but his feet stayed where they were.

  “Didn’t you hear?”

  St. Germain knelt beside the man on the ground. “Where did he go?”

  Stark’s lips moved. Blood ran out the corners of his mouth.

  “I’m asking you where did he go?”

  Brownfield said, “This man will die if you don’t—”

  “Hear that?” St. Germain bent lower and spoke into the trusty’s ear. “Where is he?”

  Stark opened his eyes, gazed blankly past St. Germain.

  “Conklin. Where do I find him?”

  “Don’t know …”

  St. Germain spread his palm in front of Stark’s face, then placed it over Brownfield’s hand and yanked it away from the wound. The blood spurted down the trusty’s shoulder and then his side and he tried to stanch the flow himself. Seeing color between his fingers, he exhaled deeply, making a gurgling sound in his nose. Brownfield reached out to him. St. Germain blocked the doctor with his back.

  “I figure you’ve got thirty seconds’ worth of blood you can spare,” St. Germain said. “If you don’t tell me what I want
to know, we won’t have to waste much time watching you dry up.”

  Stark shook his head, shut his eyes again.

  “Your choice.”

  Brownfield started back to the ambulance. “I’m not going to stand for this.”

  St. Germain chased after him and threw him easily to the pavement. “You even think of touching that radio, son, I swear I’ll knock you silly.” He took quick steps back to the wounded man. “Where?”

  Stark spit some more blood. “Conklin says he knows a way …”

  “A what?”

  “A road … some kind of shortcut he was always talking about. Said it was a back door to Canada nobody but him knew.”

  St. Germain clamped the wound the way he had been instructed during his brief training as a paramedic and held his hand there until Brownfield returned with an IV bag. Then he stripped the gun belt from Dick Vann’s body and cinched it around his waist.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Brownfield said.

  St. Germain ran to the ambulance and squeezed his legs under the wheel. Dome lights flashing, the big Ford pulled around the doctor and his patient, the answer lost in a scream of burning rubber.

  14

  ST. GERMAIN HUGGED THE center stripe, shortening the road. He ran the light onto 108 past a sign that warned the route was closed through Smugglers Notch. As if anyone would be crazy enough to try the pass in April. Anyone, he was thinking, in a fat-ass Ford ambulance that was even money to come back on the hook from a run around the block. A hot car might make it, say a turbocharged sheriff’s cruiser in cherry shape. But only if it was equipped with the lugged tires that should have been replaced long before Easter.

  A black Cadillac with Connecticut tags crawled away from the Yodler Motel, and St. Germain came up on it sounding his siren. Without waiting for results, he pulled blindly into the oncoming lane, forcing a gray pickup to choose between a head-on and the trees. The driver challenged him to a game of chicken, gunning his motor, drawing a bead on the ambulance—and was the first to flinch. He swerved around St. Germain’s right, shooting him the finger in the consolation round, then ran off the pavement, bringing down thirty feet of chain link fence around the Yodler’s pool.

  Mount Mansfield rose out of the fog, the Front Four doglegged scars on hardwood stands. Mild updrafts lured clouds to the summit where they hovered over the television mast like moored dirigibles. Sputtering in the cold mountain air, the ambulance struggled to maintain fifty. St. Germain downshifted, searching for easy traction. The crash rail at the edge of the cliff had been pounded into a twisted ribbon of steel. On his right was Bingham Falls and the state ski dormitory and a sign announcing the state forest. Another cautioned: STEEP CURVES AHEAD.

  The blacktop paralleled a stream that plummeted from the Notch under a broken cap of ice. He followed it to the Spruce Peak lot, where a row of concrete caissons were set like dragon’s teeth across the highway. On the other side of the barrier the pavement continued under a foot and a half of snow. He swung the ambulance close to the water and then angled back onto the road, his lights trained on studded treads climbing the pass.

  The big Ford balked, found its footing in the turbocharger’s perfect track, and plodded into the gap. The road steepened, the temperature dropping with each added foot of elevation. The rear wheels slid out of the ruts and ground uselessly. St. Germain downshifted again and forced the ambulance up the mountain. If the snow got any deeper he would have to chase the cruiser on foot.

  He tried to remember the last time he had been here, decided it was the summer he’d met Annie, when they had driven up in his old Mustang convertible to hike the Long Trail to Elephant’s Head on the eastern face of the Notch. The rock formations all had names—The Singing Bird, The Hunter and His Dog, Old Smugglers Face—and Annie had promised that he would recognize each one as soon as he saw it. But no matter how hard he pressed his imagination, every rock looked the same to him, and so they had spent the better part of the afternoon, the very best part, screwing in a field of red trillium and trout lillies above Sterling Pond.

  He had told her that he knew all about the Notch, falling for his own story because he had been there twice before as a boy. But it was from Annie that he learned the pass was named by Green Mountaineers bringing contraband to Montreal before the War of 1812, and how it had served as a stop for fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad. In turn, he had boasted of his rumrunner grandfather and how St. Germains had used the gap to bring in bootleg from Canada after the road was paved in ’22, making up all of it as he went along.

  His ears popped. A boulder flecked with mica jutted out of the rocky wall, pinching the route to a single north-south lane. St. Germain moved his holster closer to his hand and eased the ambulance through the blind corridor. The tread marks continued around a shallow turnout where a tank of radiator water lay buried in the snow. He saw tan paint on a glacial erratic and winced as if it had been scraped from his skin. Then the pass crested without warning and he stepped too heavily on the brake, the ambulance lurching toward a frozen brook so that he had to steer hard into the skid to keep from losing the road.

  He was over the hump, looking down at the boarded-up information booth above Big Spring. In summer the small parking area would be overrun with sightseers and rock climbers. But on a frigid spring night he saw only a sign warning motorists to proceed in low gear and a tan police cruiser with steam billowing from under the hood in front of a couple of high-tech outhouses.

  He cut his lights, but flicked them on again in admission that he had taken no one but himself by surprise. He coasted past the information booth and parked well away from the cruiser, stepped into crusted snow with his gun out, his finger through the trigger guard. He moved stiff-kneed down the slope, weight back, fighting his momentum in treacherous footing. The turbocharger appeared to be empty. As he circled around the car, an orange sliver of moon dropped its light over the Notch, and he saw footprints ending in a trampled patch at the outhouses. The thin wood doors were unlocked, secured by a simple latch. He retreated across the brook and picked his way toward them through the woods.

  He heard rustling behind him. The gun came up of its own volition at a raven taking flight from a pine snag. St. Germain watched the bird disappear toward its aerie on Old Smugglers Face. For all he knew, Conklin was lurking deep in the trees, had lured him there for an easy target. He studied the snow again; all tracks led to the outhouses. Because his mind already was made up, he told himself the boy had to be behind one of the doors, waiting for him, only pretending to be hiding.

  He approached from the left. The .38 felt sure in his hand with the same snug grip and delicate balance as his old Chief’s Special. In the weak light he couldn’t say that in fact it wasn’t the same weapon. All guns, like all rocks, seemed alike to him, which probably explained why he never had been able to work up much enthusiasm about either subject.

  He hesitated. Once again he was playing on Conklin’s home court, letting him dictate the rules. He stood off to the side, deciding which door to pull. But the choice was not his to make. To step across to the right was to expose himself to possible fire from the door on the left. Nor could he circle behind without giving Conklin a chance to slip out in ambush at the corner. With a shrug of resignation he extended the barrel and fit the gunsight under the latch and slowly raised it. The faint scraping sound seemed to echo off the cliffs. He leaped away from cover and tore open the door and squeezed off a shot into the blackness, heard wood splinter as the bullet passed through the rear wall. Hands reached for him around the door and he turned the gun on them, forcing it aside when he saw twine around the wrists, a diamond chip on an enameled finger.

  A blond girl with a handkerchief across her face stumbled against him. Blood ran freely from her upper arm, where his bullet had creased the flesh.

  “My God,” he said, “who are—”

  Another shot, like an explosion, shook the walls, and he heard more wood fragment. He wanted
to check the .38, to see how it could have gone off without his touching the trigger, but his thigh was on fire, and then he was on his back in the snow with his feet against the toilet, the upper half of his body jarred by the unexpected cold, thinking, Annie’ll kill me for sure when she finds out.

  The girl made a screeching sound behind her gag. In the exaggerated silence that followed, he was aware of muffled footfalls. He scrambled onto his belly to see Conklin step from the other outhouse with a long gun across his chest, grinning. “The lady or the tiger?” Conklin said, and aimed down at him. St. Germain squeezed off three quick shots as the long gun went off into the snow. Someone cried out in pain and he assumed it was himself until the boy began to hobble toward the brook. St. Germain rose unsteadily. His leg gave way and he fell back, firing once more in the direction Conklin had fled.

  He saw blood on his pants and pressed his hand to the wound. The pain was not as bad as he had thought, the damage done by shotgun pellets and not many of them, the brunt of the charge absorbed by the wood so that the shock was the most awful thing about it. He was picking shreds of fabric out of his leg when the girl, chafing at her bonds, lurched toward him.

  “You okay?” he asked, and tugged the handkerchief below her chin, undid the knots.

  A child’s face empty of color signaled assent. Squatting beside him, she used the gag to sop up some of his blood. “My name is Brenda Jarvis. He took me from a store in Bennington,” she recited. “I was working—”

  “You’re the clerk there?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I heard about you. Half the cops in the state are out looking for you, if it’s any comfort.” He gave her his handkerchief, and she dabbed at her arm, her teeth clicking as the cloth touched raw flesh.

  “What’s going to happen now?” she asked. “Will the other policemen get him?”

  “What policemen?”

  She looked at the uniform for the first time, at the snakes on the breast pocket. “… But you’re carrying a gun.”

  “I’m an ambulance driver.”