Deadline (17 page)

“Then why were you afraid?”

“Because it only takes one mistake when you live like that. And because he had some blind spots. One of them was his chauvinism. I told you, George Lewis had to run everything. He’d never take Michelle’s or my word for anything, even if he knew in his heart that we were right. To listen to him talk, you’d think here is a very liberal man. College-educated, with all his instincts and philosophies in the right place. But beneath all that, he was insecure. He needed a woman to boss. Barbara—Michelle—fit that role perfectly. He tried to make me fit it too, but I wouldn’t. Jesus Christ, George could talk some grand philosophy, he just couldn’t live up to it. If I had a suggestion to make, I’d have to work at it for days, plant little seeds of it so he’d think it was his idea to begin with. You ever know anybody like that, Mr. Walker?”

He nodded. “Some of my best friends are knee-jerk pointy-headed idiots.”

“What about you? Can I call you Diana?”

She nodded too. She said, “Sure, I’ve known people like that, but never very well. My family made no bones over where a woman’s place was.”

“Sounds lovely. No wonder you escaped.”

Diana didn’t say anything. After a long silence, Joanne Sayers said, “Listen to me, both of you. What I’m going to say is very important. That fear we were talking about before, it’s still there. Right now I’m scared out of my mind. I’m screaming inside. You wouldn’t know what that’s like. What have you ever had to be afraid of? All I’m saying is, I don’t want to ride all the way to Chicago with a gun in your back. This can be ugly or it can be fairly civilized. Either way, we’re going to do it. It’s my first positive move in ten years, the first time I don’t have to depend on George Lewis to think for me. I know exactly what I’m going to do, and I’ll kill anybody who tries to stop me.

Walker met her eyes in the glass. “I wonder if you would.”

“Don’t wonder!” The gun came up and pressed against his neck. “Don’t wonder,” she said again, but softer. “Don’t make that mistake even for a minute. For the first time I see what I’ve got to do as clearly as I’ve ever seen anything. I know there’s a price to pay, okay, I’m willing to face that. I know the price is high. I’m willing to face that too, but I’m not willing to die to square it. I want to live, even if it is behind a wall. You two are elements of my plan. Nothing more than that. I like you both. I don’t want to hurt either one of you. But I will if you make me. You can count on that.”

They must have gone another ten miles before she spoke again. “I killed a man Friday night.”

Walker looked back at her.

“I’m just telling you that so you’ll know I mean business. I’m not afraid to shoot if I have to.”

There was another long silence. Her words had cast a pall over the car. The quiet was like an increasing weight on all of them. Joanne Sayers broke first.

“Look, I’m not going to kill you. For God’s sake, I was talking about an entirely different situation back there.”

“Who was he?” Walker said. “The man you killed.”

“Who knows? Some agent, you can be damned sure of that. FBI probably, but he might have been from any of the intelligence agencies. They’re all the same to me. When the man came after me, I didn’t ask for his credentials. All I knew was it was him or me, Mr. Walker. You can believe that or not. I don’t care.”

But she did care. She wanted them to believe her; she seemed to need it. “It was him or me,” she said again. “He made the same mistake George made. He underestimated me, and I shot him before he knew what hit him. Then I shot him twice more, to make goddamned sure he wouldn’t get up. Because if he had, Mr. Walker, he’d have killed me, as sure as we’re sitting in this station wagon.”

They had been talking sporadically for a long time, and had crossed into Lancaster County. Diana watched the rolling countryside pass with a growing nostalgia. They were on Route 30 west, at Joanne Sayers’ direction. “We’ll keep to the smaller roads for a while, see how it goes,” she had said. “Maybe later we’ll get on the freeway and make some time, if it feels right.” She seemed content, looking out at the farms, at the rows of trees and buildings in the distance. Diana squirmed and tried to keep her eyes on the road. But her attention wandered across the tilled earth, and Walker knew she was out there somewhere, washing clothes in a bucket behind her house. Watching her father kill chickens. Working through the day to feed the men. No TV, no radio, no newspapers. Books only as a necessary evil. The simple pleasures. Moonlight and laughter and a walk along a riverbed, and even that only occasionally. Mostly work.

Voices from another lifetime.

They passed an Amish family, riding along the highway in a buggy. The man and his sons wore black, wide-brimmed hats, black pants and jackets, pale shirts. The woman wore a long dress and a bonnet. Their horse was a chestnut mare, the buggy simple but well-built. Its wheels were wooden, with no rubber even on the rims.

Diana turned in her seat as the car passed them. Her eyes followed them until they disappeared behind a truck coming along. Her head turned slightly and she looked into Joanne Sayers’ eyes. “Crazy goddamn people,” Joanne Sayers said. “Sometimes I think all people are a little cracked, but I’ll never understand why even crazy people would want to live like that.”

“If you don’t understand it,” Diana said, “why talk about it?”

She turned in her seat and faced the road. Joanne Sayers made a sucking noise with her mouth. “My, aren’t we touchy all of a sudden?”

“Diana comes from around here,” Walker said.

Diana turned her freeze his way, letting him know he had violated a trust. He tried to apologize with his eyes.

“You’re Amish?” Joanne Sayers said in disbelief.

Diana didn’t say anything. She huddled against the door and watched the road.

“I don’t believe it,” Joanne Sayers said. When it became apparent that it didn’t matter what she believed, she said, “Where’s your home?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Come on, I’m interested. I didn’t mean what I said back there. That was just something you say when you get bored, and when you really don’t understand something. Sometimes I’m like that. I say things all the time without thinking first.”

When Diana still didn’t speak, she said, “How was I supposed to know I’d offended you?”

“You weren’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

They let it lie for a while. Suddenly Diana said, “I live…used to live…on a farm. Twenty or thirty miles from here. That was a long time ago.”

“How long?”

Diana told her.

“Is your family still here?”

“Yes.”

“Thirty miles which way?”

“North.”

“North, that’s toward the turnpike, right?”

Walker nodded in the mirror.

“Would you like to go up and see them?”

“No.”

“It wouldn’t bother me any. They wouldn’t have to see the gun. You could have a visit and we’d be gone, just like that.”

“I don’t think so,” Diana said.

“Seems a shame to be this close…”

She turned in her seat and looked at Joanne Sayers. “I don’t want to.”

“All right. Would you even like to drive by?”

“No. Not even that.”

But the spell of the land had come over her. A few minutes later she admitted that she might like to drive by, as long as they didn’t have to stop. She directed Walker onto the next state highway north. Twelve miles up, another state road cut through going east and west. They took that for a few miles, until she directed him north again. They were on a narrow blacktop road, fenced on both sides. Plowed fields, looking barren and abandoned for the winter, stretched away on either side of them. In the distance he saw a barn and a cluster of houses.

“That’s my dad’s place.”

She was dry-eyed, but her hand was shaking. She pointed ahead, where a buckboard was entering the highway. “Watch out for that. Cars look out for horses along these back roads.”

They came up slowly as the buckboard turned toward them. In it was a lone man, perhaps forty years old. They saw him clearly as they approached. Dressed in the Amish garb, he also wore a full beard, which tapered to a point. He had no moustache.

“Some of these horses are skittish around cars.” Her voice was flat, as if the words were simply mouthed without any thought.

“I’m watching,” Walker said.

The man in the buckboard passed slowly. He looked straight ahead as they went by. Again, Diana turned and watched him until he was out of sight.

“You know him?” Joanne Sayers said.

“Yes.”

She seemed very close to tears then, but she didn’t cry. She didn’t say anything as they drove past the houses.

Then, as if no time had passed, she said, “That was my older brother Daniel back there in the buckboard.”

They picked up the interstate after a while. Walker got his toll ticket and soon Lancaster County slipped behind them. Diana sat quietly, lost in thought. Joanne Sayers told him to turn on the radio. A few minutes later, she told him to turn it off. They were well beyond Harrisburg when Walker asked if she would mind telling them her plans.

“This may surprise you, Walker,” she said. “I want to give myself up. I’m tired of running.”

“Why didn’t you do that last Friday? It would have been much simpler then.”

“Not as simple as you think. I told you, I want to stay alive. That’s all I’ve been thinking about these last few days. My best chance of staying alive is to bring it all out in the open. Everything I know about these people you love so much. Once it’s out, I’m no longer a threat to them, am I? The only reason they’d kill me then would be revenge. And they don’t operate that way. That’s one thing I can say for them.”

She lit a cigarette and cracked her window. “You’re to be my instrument, Mr. Walker. I’m going to give you a story you can’t refuse to print. Once it’s in print, the pressure’s off me and on them. Let them squirm for a while. Then and only then will I give myself up. If they catch me before we do that, somebody’s going to die. Never mind. Forget I said that. Do you have any friends in law enforcement?”

He told her about Donovan. For a while she didn’t say anything. Then she began to ask questions. She was annoyed that Donovan had been an FBI lifer. Her questions focused on their personal relationship, and the one thing she kept coming back to was trust. Did he trust Donovan? How had that trust proven itself over the years? And that was how they happened to be in Ohio, just across the state line, when she let him call Donovan at home.

T
HEY STOPPED FOR DINNER
somewhere off the highway. It was a family restaurant, noisy and crowded and well lighted. Joanne Sayers put the gun in her cloth bag and the three of them went in together. An uneasy truce had developed between Walker and Joanne Sayers. It was as if suddenly she understood him, and knew she had nothing to fear. He was a reporter on a story; he would follow it, but wouldn’t try to change it with any heroics. She sat apart from them, in a corner of the booth opposite them, the bag in her lap. “Eat hearty,” she said, smiling. “This party’s on me, remember? And on this trip you never know when you might eat again.”

She seemed to enjoy the lights and the crowd. She tried to press dessert on them, but Diana refused. Then they were all standing at the register together waiting for Joanne to pay the check, and the hostess was taking a long time with the family ahead of them. Suddenly Joanne Sayers grew very nervous. She pushed ahead and put her check on the counter, covered it with three tens and said, “Keep the change.” Then she hurried them out to the car, where they sat for a moment, under the restaurant’s neon light. Joanne Sayers was breathing heavily.

“What’s wrong?” Walker said.

“I don’t know. Just wait a minute.”

They waited for several minutes. She watched each incoming car, scanning the faces of the people as they walked in.

“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “Cat just walked up my spine.”

“You’re just jumpy.”

“You got that right, Mr. Walker.” She gave a nervous laugh. “All of a sudden I’m jumpy as all get-out, and I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the night, I don’t know. It hit me right there at the cash register, while I was waiting to pay the bill. I just felt like the place was full of cops. I got to thinking about that call you made, and suddenly I felt like the place was full of cops.”

“You watched me make it. That was hundreds of miles from here.”

“I know it. But I didn’t stay alive all these years by not trusting my instincts. Right now my instinct is working overtime. Something…not right.” She leaned forward and Walker could feel her breath on his neck. “I think we’d better hole up for the night, see how it looks tomorrow,” she said.

They found a motel half an hour later. It had two bedrooms, and the only windows were tiny crank-outs, too small for a body to pass through. They settled in, Walker and Diana in the back room. After a while, Joanne Sayers asked them to come out to her room, and they sat and talked and watched the news on a flaky TV set. She tried to ask Diana about her home, and got nowhere with that. “We’ll be in Chicago tomorrow,” she said, to no one in particular. “Chicago.” She looked at Walker. “Then you can have your story and we can put an end to all this.”

They didn’t say anything.

“Jesus,” Joanne Sayers said, “I’d give anything for a shower.”

“Go ahead,” Walker said. “We won’t go anywhere.”

“Really?”

“What does that instinct of yours say?”

For almost a minute they battled with their eyes. Then she took her cloth bag into the bathroom and put it on the closed toilet seat. She didn’t close the door. She watched them the whole time, while she stripped off her clothes, even from the shower. She was under the water ten minutes or more, soaking up the luxury of it. She washed her hair with motel soap. When she stepped out, Walker noticed how hard and tan her body was. Diana watched her too. Joanne Sayers had a lovely body, long and lean.

“In Jersey I was in a nudist camp,” she said. “After a while you forget all that crap they beat into you when you’re young. Stuff like being ashamed of your body. It took me a long time to get over that. When I was a kid in high school, I had a phys-ed teacher who was bad news. When I was thirteen, I was very sensitive about having hair on my body.” She touched it with her fingers, then gave it a final pat with the towel. “I’ve heard that’s a pretty common thing with girls that age. This woman embarrassed me every chance she got. Just little things, but to me they seemed like acts of incredible sadism. She really got on my case. And the goddamn system takes up people like that, protects them and punishes you. Somehow they become right and you’re wrong, always. Did either of you read Orwell?
1984?
”