Vincent Zandri: The Innocent

When I came to the end of a two-track, I found a couple of kids riding their bikes up and down the banks of the closest gravel pit. The pit was a small, man-made canyon with high, steep walls and a pool of cloudy rainwater that had collected like a small lake in the center. The kids pushed their bikes up the banks of the pit on foot. Once they got to the top, they mounted the bikes, gunned them down the pit wall, feet off the pedals, hands off the brakes, finishing up with a crash through the brown water.

Here’s what I decided to do: I got out of the Toyota and walked around a bit until I found fresh tire tracks in the loose, sandy gravel. Beside the tire tracks, I found some footprints that obviously hadn’t come from the two kids. The prints were flat and rectangular-shaped. Maybe size eleven or larger.

I moved closer to the pit.

Just over the edge of the pit wall were some bullets and an empty.38 caliber black-plated service revolver. It was partially buried, but the bullets were scattered about, plainly visible even in the fading light. What I could not understand as I took out my hankie and wrapped it around my right hand before lifting the pistol from the dirt, was why Vasquez’s men would go to the trouble of disarming Logan and Mastriano and unloading the weapon only to toss it a few feet away where anyone with half a brain could find it. Why not just take the weapon with them, add it to their own private armory?

I tucked the recovered pistol into the back of my pants, wrapped the bullets into the hankie, stuffed it into my pocket. Then I called out to the boys. “You seen anybody here today? Maybe a couple of cops in a station wagon?”

The boys looked at each other and then looked back at me like I was crazy. They stared at me, but said nothing.

Not a word. Tough little guys. I knew the type. They sloshed out of the water and started pushing their bikes back up the pit wall.

“Simple question,” I said. “Anybody come driving in here in the past few hours?”

The two boys went on gazing at me with wide eyes and corner-of-the-mouth smiles, as if I were doing handstands in the dirt. The first kid, who wore a red baseball jacket, mounted his bike. The second, smaller kid, who wore aviator sunglasses with mirrored lenses too large for his head, did the same.

“Hey mister,” Baseball Jacket said. “I got two words for you.”

Aviator sunglasses started to laugh like he knew what was coming and I didn’t.

“Screw and you.” Then the boys took off, side by side, down the gravel pit wall and into the water.

Maybe one day I’d see them in my prison. Then I’d have two words for them. Too and bad.

I headed back toward the Toyota. It was time to take care of the inevitable.

I dialed Channel 13 news on my cellular and asked for Chris Collins, the news director and anchorwoman of the small Stormville station. As the keeper I was expected to play my official public relations role, speaking out on the unfortunate escape of convicted cop-killer Eduard Vasquez. But chances were she knew all about the escape, since news of the event must have gone out over the police scanners. And if she knew about it, she must have already formed an opinion.

Anyway, I told Chris Collins most of what I knew. Just the apparent facts. No opinions, conjectures, or even the simplest of thoughts. From Logan’s statement I knew that Vasquez had left his cell at nine in the morning, made it to his eleven o’clock appointment in Newburgh for a tooth extraction. From there he had left the dentist escorted by Officers Logan and Mastriano at about eleven forty-five. Sometime around noon, prisoner Vasquez was overtaken by what appeared to be a heart attack. Not long after, he was rescued by three men in black ski masks driving a black van. As the story goes, Officers Logan and Mastriano took a beating, with Mastriano taking the brunt of the punishment. With the two guards knocked unconscious and, somehow, stuffed into the front seat of the wagon, Vasquez’s men drove them out to the gravel pit and dumped them. Sometime around one-thirty, Logan managed to pull Mastriano from the car. He then dragged him out to the road. Around two o’clock, he hailed down a car and brought Mastriano to the hospital in Newburgh. Logan called the prison. He was picked up from the hospital and brought directly to my office at my request. Then I sent him home.

“But all I really know,” I told Chris Collins, as the sun went down on the gravel pit, “is that Vasquez flew the coop. End of story.”

She wanted an interview ASAP. Chris Collins was a tenacious reporter. Visions of Emmy awards in her big black eyes.

“Not convenient,” I said.

“Just take five minutes of your time, Keeper,” Collins insisted.

“No. Can. Do.”

“But this is big news-”

I took the cellular away from my face.

“You’re giving out, Chris,” I said, pretending to lose the signal.

I hit the end button and dialed my office. Val picked up.

“Hello, doll.”

“Pelton called,” she said. “He really wants to talk.”

“You find Vasquez’s file?”

“I checked the log. No one signed it out.”

“Forget it. If it’s lost, it’s lost. If somebody took it, it’s been shredded.”

“I managed to make copies from the old microfilm. How updated the information is though, is anybody’s guess. ‘Cause I got squat off the computer.”

“You and Dan manage to get copies out to Pelton?”

“Yes.”

“He try to pump Dan for more information?”

“He wants to know what went wrong.”

“How do I know what went wrong?”

“I’m only telling you what he said, boss.”

“What else did he say?”

“You were supposed to drop the ax on two more men last Friday. Here it’s Monday, and he still hasn’t heard anything from you.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“That you wouldn’t be coming back after the dentist,…said you’d be in too much pain to talk or work.”

“Listen,” I said, pulling out the crumpled envelope I’d found in Vasquez’s cell earlier that afternoon. “I want you to write down a California address for me and then look it up in the atlas on the shelf behind my desk.” I read off the address to her. “Then I want you to fax to the sheriff in Olancha, California, the same package Dan faxed to Pelton. Tell them to fax the same material to their contact with the FBI.”

I could tell Val was writing down my orders.

“Anything else?”

“Just remember that I still love you, Val Antonelli.” I smiled even though I was alone.

“Glad to see you’re loosening up, boss,” she said.

“Glad to know you care,” I said. “And don’t call me boss.”

I hung up.

I put the cell back into the glove compartment. But before I turned over the ignition, I decided to get back out of the truck, take one last look at the gravel pit. The wind had picked up now with the coming of night. A dry, hot, wind that swirled the sand around and blew it against my face. I looked at the ground, kicked up some of the loose dirt. It was then that I saw something reflecting in the orange half-light of the setting sun. Some kind of flattened metal about the size of my little finger, with a key ring attached to it. I bent over and slid a small twig carefully through the key ring so that I wouldn’t get my prints on it. I could see right away that it was the key to a set of handcuffs. Logan’s or Mastriano’s cuffs, no doubt. I stored the key in my pants pocket along with the six live rounds and the envelope addressed by Cassandra Wolf, Vasquez’s girlfriend. Once I got back to the office, I’d put everything under lock and key, then decide what to do with it.

But first I walked back over to the edge of the pit.