Chapter 2 - The Tail of the Serpent
The rain on Route 2 did not fall in drops; it came down in sheets that looked like grease beneath the sodium-vapor streetlights.
Victor drove. He did not let Marcus take the wheel. Marcus was thirty-five, quick with a wire and brilliant with a digital breadcrumb, but he had grown up with ABS brakes and traction control. Victor had learned to drive on gravel roads outside of Palermo in a three-ton Fiat with a wooden steering box and tires that were mostly pigskin and baling twine. He knew how to feel the moment when rubber stopped biting stone and began to float on mud.
The Yukon weighed nearly four tons with the floor armor and the bullet-resistant glass. It displaced the water in the ruts with a sound like tearing canvas.
“The signal is staggering,” Marcus said from the passenger seat, his laptop braced against the glove box with his knees. The green phosphor glow made his hollow cheeks look like tallow. “The pulse is down to once every twelve seconds. Gregory must have dumped the coin into something lead-lined, or they’re getting down into the culverts behind the chemical plant.”
“He doesn’t know the coin is a transmitter,” Victor said. He shifted into third, the big eight-cylinder engine snarling as they took the curve past the abandoned fertilizer depot. “Gregory was with me when I had the jeweler make the pair. He thinks I carry the live one in my vest pocket. He thinks the one Hannah had was the duplicate—the decoy I kept on the inkstand to fool the housekeepers.”
“Then why did she take it?”
Victor didn’t answer for nearly a mile. The wipers beat their rhythmic, dry scrape against the glass, fighting against the gray deluge.
“Because three weeks ago,” Victor said, his eyes fixed on the black ribbon of asphalt where the reflectors had long since been knocked out by snowplows, “she came in to oil the walnut wainscoting. It was two in the morning. I was sitting there with the bottle of rye and the letters from the clinic in Zurich. The ones about Elena.”
Marcus was silent. Nobody at Harrow Point spoke of Elena Castellano. Her gowns still hung in the cedar closets on the third floor, sixty-four yards of lavender silk and black lace that nobody was allowed to air out, nobody was allowed to pack into boxes, and nobody was allowed to burn.
“Hannah saw the coin on the blotter,” Victor continued. “She told me her grandmother had one like it. An old George III piece. She said her grandmother used to rub the face of the king until her thumb went numb whenever the coal ran out in the winter. She said it made the cold feel like something that had an end to it.”
He swung the wheel hard left, the Yukon’s rear end breaking loose for three yards before the heavy differential locked and threw the truck back into the lane with a violent, spine-jarring jerk.
“I told her to take it,” Victor said. “I told her it was bad luck to leave silver out where the mice could walk on it.”
“She thought she was protecting you,” Marcus murmured.
“She’s twenty-six years old,” Victor spat, the first trace of real fury breaking through the frozen floor of his voice. “She should be thinking about buying ribbons for that child’s hair and whether the milk in the fridge has turned. She shouldn’t be carrying thirty grams of steel and wire through the salt marshes because my estate manager has five hundred thousand dollars in gambling markers floating around the back rooms of Atlantic City.”
Marcus looked down at the screen. “The signal stopped.”
Victor’s left boot moved toward the brake, then hesitated, hovering over the pedal. “Where?”
“The old lime kiln. The one they shut down after the fire in ninety-six. Off the old spur track where the B&O used to switch the sulfur cars.”
“There’s no road in there,” Victor said. “The trestle rotted out during the blizzard of twenty-ten.”
“A Mercedes wouldn’t make it over the ties,” Marcus agreed. “A truck could. Tommy Rake has an F-350 with duals. He keeps it behind his brother’s body shop on Patapsco.”
Victor reached over with his right hand, not looking, and pulled the glove box latch. Inside, beside the registration for a vehicle that technically belonged to a defunct gravel company in Delaware, lay three rectangular blocks of military-grade C4, wrapped in greasy brown butcher paper, each fitted with an M11 non-electric detonator and three feet of slow match.
“They aren’t transferring her to another car,” Victor said.
Marcus turned his head slowly. “Victor... if they’re at the kiln, they aren’t waiting for the Greek’s boat. The water’s too shallow for three miles in either direction. The silt from the dredging operation filled the channel three years ago.”
“They aren’t waiting for a boat,” Victor said. The words came out slow, cold, and final, like stones falling into deep, dead water. “Gregory doesn’t want the Greek to have her. If the Greek gets her, the Greek finds out that Hannah didn’t steal the ledgers. The Greek finds out that Gregory’s been skimming the dry-dock payroll for five years and blaming it on the shipping clerks.”
The Yukon hit the turn-off for the kiln. There was no gate, only two concrete pillars from which the chain had been dragged away years ago by kids in stolen pickups. The road here was not asphalt; it was black cinder and broken refractory brick, half-overgrown with pokeberry and sumac that whipped against the Yukon’s doors with the sound of many small, wet switches.
Victor killed the headlamps.
The world went from gray-and-yellow glare to an impenetrable, slate-colored void. The only illumination came from the faint green phosphorescence of the instrument cluster and the steady, rhythmic flash of lightning three miles to the east, out over the open bay.
“Night glasses,” Victor said.
Marcus reached into the footwell and produced the twin monoculars, their rubber housings smelling of neoprene and silicone grease.
Through the green-tinted lenses, the landscape transformed into an eerie, luminous plain of salt weed and drowned iron. A quarter-mile ahead, the rectangular chimney of the lime kiln rose against the low, scudding belly of the clouds like a broken tooth. Beneath it, sheltered by the overhang of an old corrugated-iron roof that was half-collapsed under thirty years of honeysuckle, sat two shapes.
One was Gregory’s S-Class, its silver trim catching the ambient light even through the mud.
The other was not Tommy Rake’s truck.
It was an international flatbed with an iron crane mounted behind the cab—the kind used by monument makers to set four-ton granite headstones into the clay of catholic cemeteries.
Beside the flatbed, two figures were moving. One was tall, round-shouldered, wearing an overcoat that reached below the knees—Gregory Vance, holding an umbrella in his left hand with the fussy, balanced grace of an old bank clerk who didn't want his bowler hat ruined.
The other was smaller, thick-necked, and held a length of galvanized pipe in both hands.
Between them, kneeling in the black mud where the coal dust had settled fifty years ago, was a bundle of dark wool that did not move.
“Is she breathing?” Marcus asked, his voice shaking slightly as he adjusted the focal ring.
Victor did not use his glasses. He did not need them. He knew the way Gregory stood when he was about to give an order he didn’t have the stomach to carry out himself. He had seen him stand that way in 2008 when they had to drown three litters of bird-dogs because the kennel master had let the distemper get into the straw.
“Get behind the wheel, Marcus,” Victor said.
“Victor, there are three of them. Look at the cab of the flatbed. The interior light is on.”
“I see him,” Victor said. “That’s the cousin from Brooklyn. The one who spent six years in Green Haven for cutting a dry-cleaner with a carpet knife.”
Victor stepped out of the Yukon before the truck had fully stopped rolling. His boots hit the cinder road with no more sound than a wet sponge hitting a carpet. He did not run. A man who runs in a salt marsh loses his breath, and a man without breath cannot squeeze an eight-pound trigger without pulling the front sight three inches to the low left.
May you like
He walked through the high marsh grass, the rain washing the grease from his hair, the Colt held down against his right thigh where the fabric of his trousers would keep the water out of the cylinder until the hammer fell.
***
