Dead Watch (20 page)

They went away, leaving the strong impression that they would file a report but that nothing would be done.

The headache arrived a few minutes later. The doc came in, said they would keep him overnight, and, “I can give you a little something for that head. When you get home, you can take a Tylenol when you need it, but no aspirin or ibuprofen. You want to stay away from any blood thinners for at least a couple of days . . .”

When he woke up, at five in the morning, he was embarrassed. Embarrassed that he’d gotten beaten up, hadn’t managed to defend himself better. He enjoyed a decent fight, but what happened the night before, he told himself, hadn’t been a fight. It
had
been a mugging, cold and calculated. He thought about Cathy Ann Dorn. Not a coincidence?

But why would Goodman want to slow him down? He’d been cooperating with Goodman . . .

Another thought popped into his head. They’d known he used the back door, because of the sidewalk. Howard Barber had had trouble with the front door . . . if he remembered right, he’d said something to Barber about using the back.

Barber? But why?

Overnight, in the back of his bruised brain, he’d filtered out a few more conclusions.

The attackers had been large, tough, and in good condition. One of them had a hill accent, Kentucky or eastern Tennessee, like that. They were good at what they did. They hadn’t meant to kill him—they could have done that with a single gunshot, or even a couple of axe-handle or pool-cue strokes to the back of the head.

Instead, he’d taken two glancing blows to the head, another on his neck, and a dozen on his back, legs, and one hip. They’d meant to do what they had—to put him in the hospital. If Harley hadn’t been there with his shotgun, and if they’d had another minute, Jake might have been in bed for a week, or a month, or a year. They’d hit him hard enough that if they’d hit bone, squarely, instead of meat, they would have broken the bones . . .

He’d never had a chance: and he was still embarrassed.

And he thought that if he encountered the two men again, in a place where he could do it, he’d kill them. The thought made him smile, and he drifted away on a new shot of drugs, not to wake until eight.

At eight o’clock, he rose back to the surface, thrashed for a moment, and a nurse came in and asked, “How are we feeling?”

“We’re feeling a little creaky,” Jake said. He could feel the bruises, like burns. “Could you hand me my briefcase?”

“The doctor will be here in a minute.”

“Yeah, but my wife is probably going crazy, wondering where I am,” he lied. “I just want to call her.”

He got the phone. When he switched it on, he found four messages from Gina, starting at six-thirty, all pretty much the same: “Jake, where are you? We’re calling, we can’t get you. Call in . . .”

He called. Gina picked up and he said, “You won’t believe what happened, where I am . . .”

Danzig came on a moment later, his voice hushed: “Jesus Christ, Jake, how bad are you hurt?”

“Ah. Not bad. I’m bruised up. I got a few stitches in my scalp, got a headache. They say I’m fine.”

The doc came in to hear the last part of it, pulled on his lip, and shook his head. Jake said to Danzig, “The doctor just got here. I’ll call you from the house. I’m still working.”

“You think, I mean—the Watchmen? Or just muggers? Or what? I mean, it’s a pretty big coincidence.”

“Yeah, I’m thinking about that. Give me an hour or two.”

“What about this Patterson? We wanted you to go see him, but maybe Novatny . . .”

“No, no. Keep Novatny out of this part, or you’re gonna see it all over the papers.” He glanced at the doc. “Listen, I can’t talk right now, they’re about to do something unpleasant to me.”

“Okay. Okay. Well, Jesus, take care of yourself. Call me.” Danzig sounded like his father.

“I’ll call.”

He punched off and the doc said, “Not
that
unpleasant. Get a light shined in your eye, pee in a bottle, give up a little blood. Is it true that you have health insurance?”

He was on the street at ten o’clock, a vague ache in his brain, a hotter, harsher pain where the stitches were holding his scalp together. Sunlight hurt his eyes; he needed sunglasses. And he was really beginning to hurt now. He got a cab, had it drop him at the alley. Cunningham came out on his back balcony and shouted, “That was quick.”

Jake called back, “I owe you, Harley. Big-time.”

“Ah, bullshit, man, glad you’re okay.”

“Couple bottles of single malt, anyway.”

Cunningham threw up his hands. “Now that you mention it,” he said, “you
do
owe me . . .”

Inside, Jake did a quick check of the house, then went into the bathroom and looked at himself. They’d cut a bit of hair away from the scalp gash and put a piece of tape over the stitches. That didn’t look so good. He peeled off his clothes, turned to look at his back. He had a row of cue-width bruises on his shoulder blades, back, butt, and legs, already in the deep-purple stage, with streaks of red. They’d be a sickly yellow-black in a week.

If Cunningham hadn’t been there with his shotgun, if they’d had time to really work on him, he would have needed all the insurance that he had . . . or none at all.

Despite the headache and the bruises, he got Patterson’s home phone number and called. He got an out-of-office phone message that said he was in Atlanta and would be back in the office in four days. The message gave his e-mail address and said that it would be checked daily.

Uh-uh. No waiting in modern times. He went online, got a list of Atlanta hotels, and started calling, beginning with those he thought a political consultant might patronize.

He hit on the third try: Patterson was at the Four Seasons.

He called Gina, told her his problem, got routed through to the White House travel office, and booked on a jet leaving National at one o’clock. He’d have to hustle.

He cleaned up, shaved, showered, dressed, shoved a Dopp kit and a change of clothes in a carry-on bag, called a cab.

The cabdriver was named Charlie, a morose man so fat that he’d crushed the front seat in his aging Chevy. Charlie’s head barely protruded over the back of the seat, showing an untidy mop of hair that looked like a stand of ornamental grass, yellow-white and erect. He worked eighteen-hour days, and was Jake’s cabbie of choice. Charlie took his cab calls in the back room of a twenty-four-hour newsstand, and so could provide a summary and commentary on news from around the country.

He had a disaster that Jake hadn’t heard about: “Big shoot-out between the Border Patrol and the coyotes, down around El Paso. There were some Chinese involved, I guess they were coming across, and somebody started shooting. Two or three dead Border Patrol, a bunch of dead Chinamen. I don’t know about the coyotes. They say the Border Patrol crossed the river chasing them . . .”

“Ah, boy.”

“Well, what you gonna do?” Charlie asked. “Gotta keep them out somehow.”

“The penalty for crossing the border isn’t death,” Jake said. “What else happened?”

“Mostly bad weather. Lots of tornadoes out in Oklahoma and Kansas. Some small town got it, but nobody was killed. Still on strike in Detroit. The Canadian prime minister got a nosebleed during a press conference and he’s at the hospital for a checkup. One of the jurors in the Crippen trial got thrown out because he got caught watching trial news . . .”