Deadline (19 page)

“I told you…”

That was as far as he got. Armstrong had come alongside and balled up his fist. He drove it into Bill Neal’s gut, without any warning, and Neal wasn’t ready for it. He doubled up on the floor, writhing, gasping for breath.

“Jesus Christ,” he gasped. “You mother…”

Armstrong kicked him hard in the ribs. He felt the bones give. Then he walked to the window and looked down at Kevin Lord in the alley behind the building. “It’s a nice day out, Bill. Too bad you couldn’t cooperate. Hell, you might even be out there now, enjoying the sun. What’s about to happen to you wouldn’t be happening at all.” He came back into the room. Bill Neal had rolled over on his back and was watching Armstrong in absolute terror.

One thing about a yippie’s hair: it was made for grabbing. Armstrong grabbed a big handful and jerked Bill Neal’s head up off the floor. With his free hand he flattened Neal’s nose against his face. Blood poured out of both nostrils.

Armstrong stood up, careful not to get any of the pig’s blood on him. He reached into his coat and took out a pair of rubber gloves. That always scared them. Bill Neal couldn’t have been more frightened. He was living his ultimate nightmare. Armstrong took out his gun, put it through a series of terrifying clicks, grabbed the pig’s head again and held it against his pig-brain.

“Now Bill.” He breathed heavily into the pig’s face. “You got one chance and one only. If you want to sing the same song, it’ll be the last tune you ever play. One time, Bill. Did Joanne Sayers stay here?”

“Yes.”

“Did she have the reporter with her?”

“Yes. And…”

“Never mind the ands and buts. You just answer my questions. When I want some elaboration, I’ll ask for it. Did she use the name Joan Brox?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s she headed?”

“She didn’t say.” Armstrong clicked the gun.

“Later…” Bill Neal was almost beside himself with fear. “Later…overheard her…telling the guy.”

“Walker?”

“Yeah…that’s his name.”

“Telling him what?”

“Chicago.”

“She’s going to Chicago.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“To do what?”

“Don’t know.”

Again came the click of the gun.

“I don’t know!” Neal sobbed. “I swear!”

“Does she have a bank account there?”

“Yeah…yeah. Said she did.”

“Under what name?”

“Brox.”

“What bank?”

“Don’t know.”

“Okay.” Armstrong released his grip and let Bill Neal’s head sink to the floor. “That’s easy enough to check. By God, you’d better be telling me the truth.” He got up and went to the window, motioning for Kevin Lord to come in through the front door. A moment later, Lord mounted the steps and came into the room.

“What happened to him?”

Bill Neal was bleeding into a dirty rag.

“Son of a bitch tried to jump me. He was okay until I mentioned the Sayers girl, then suddenly he went nuts.”

“He tell you anything?”

“Let’s say I got a lead. Book this prick, will you? Call it harboring a fugitive. The Sayers girl stayed here at least one night, with this guy’s full knowledge of who she was. While you’re at it, do a full check on his background. I think you may find a lot of other stuff on him. Christ, do I hate pigs like this.”

“What about you?”

“Never mind about me. I’m gonna follow my nose a bit. You get back to New York and ride herd on Donovan. I don’t trust that bastard any more than I’d trust this one.”

An hour later, Armstrong checked into Philadelphia International Airport for a midday flight to Chicago. He identified himself and got clearance for his gun. He checked the other gun, a precision rifle with a telescopic sight, through luggage.

He didn’t know how much time he had, but Chicago was one hour behind Philly, and that had to be a plus. During his wait, he phoned ahead to the Chicago field office, and cleared his arrival with the SAC. They would have a car waiting for him. They would run down the banks for him, both in town and in the suburbs. That was the kind of job the FBI did better than any other agency on earth. The SAC said he would have the information on Joan Brox by the time Armstrong arrived.

As the plane circled out of Philadelphia, Armstrong almost felt good. He felt better about the Sayers matter than he had in years. That uneasy tension he had learned to live with, the waiting forever for the shoe to drop, was over now. The gods were with him at long last. For the next hour, he savored the job he had done on Bill Neal. Those pigs were all alike. All you had to do was look the part, play a little rough, and they opened up like a sack of beans stabbed with a knife. Just promise them a quick death, and mean it. Their imaginations did the rest.

“N
OW COMES THE TRICKY
part,” Joanne Sayers said.

“Why tricky?” Walker said. “You’ve got the key. It’s not as if you were robbing the damned bank.”

“Tricky because I’m nervous. If anything’s going wrong, it’ll be here. My nerves are shot. I’m afraid I’ll kill somebody if there’s even so much as a sneeze in that bank.”

They were sitting in the blue station wagon, parked around the corner from the Chicago Bank and Trust. Joanne Sayers had directed Walker carefully, so he wouldn’t drive directly past the bank. Diana sat in her place on the driver’s side of the front seat. She hadn’t said much since yesterday.

All through the day their relationship had deteriorated. For a while, yesterday, they had managed an air of civility and near friendliness. But today, as they approached Chicago, Joanne Sayers withdrew into herself once more. She took fewer chances with them, and kept the gun in her lap. Her eye contact with Walker was continuous. She gave clipped, terse orders that took them off the highway and through suburban developments. It was the Philadelphia scene all over, a game of hide-and-seek, with the sought always on the move. They came into town on the Skyway, but she told him to get off and drive toward the lake. They hit Lake Shore Drive, and suddenly they were downtown. They passed Soldier Field, went through the Loop and on beyond Tribune Tower.

“Another
Tribune,
Mr. Walker. The big time.”

“I know. I worked there once.”

“You’ve worked everywhere once.”

They didn’t say anything for a minute. Then Joanne Sayers said, “I’ve got a super idea. Why don’t you offer your story to all the papers at once? Sort of a highest bidder thing.”

“It doesn’t work that way. Not as long as I work for the one.”

“My, such ethics.”

“All right, put it this way, then Newspapers don’t like to pay for stuff. They wouldn’t pay five grand, say, to solve the Kennedy assassination.”

“I don’t believe that. You’re being modest again.”

They had left the downtown, and had reached the edge of Lincoln Park. “Keep going,” she said. “It’s way out near Wrigley Field.”

Twenty minutes later, they sat parked at the curb. Joanne Sayers didn’t move for a long time. Her eyes darted across the street and down it, scanning each face. Her breathing was heavy. A clock hanging over the street said two-thirty.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

They got out and started up the street. Walker and Diana went ahead. Joanne Sayers was about five feet behind them, still looking, her eyes like black snakes. She watched the windows too, looking for faces there, for any sudden flash of light, for any movement that didn’t blend with the crowd. They reached the corner. Half a block ahead, Walker could see the sign: CHICAGO BANK, and under it, in smaller letters, AND TRUST.

She stopped.

“Wait a minute.” She seemed to be struggling for words. “Something’s not right. I can feel it.”

“You’re paranoid,” Walker said.

“Shut up.”

“Joanne, it’s just like in the restaurant last night.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But in this game I only get one mistake.”

“Come on,” Walker said. “Let’s go get the stuff and get this over with.”

“No!” She backed away and clutched the bag against her. “Back to the car, quick!”

In the car, Walker turned and leaned over the back seat. Again the gun had come out and was resting on her lap.

“This is the last step,” he said. “But it’s one you’ve got to make, sooner or later. You’ve really got no choice.”

“There’s always a choice.”

“Look, I’ll go get the stuff for you.”

“Shut up, goddammit, I’m trying to think.”

They waited for about five minutes. Walker saw that her hands had begun to tremble.

“Good idea,” she said nervously. “Or it would be, if you’d just tell me how you’d pass for Joan Brox. They make you sign before you can get into those deposit boxes, Mr. Walker. For a big-time reporter, you don’t know much. No, I’ve got a better idea. Diana will get the stuff.”

“Me?”

“I don’t see anyone else named Diana here.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Listen, sister, I’m not asking you. Nobody’s going to hurt you. It’s me they want. Come on, it’s time you paid your way for all this fun you’re having.” She reached into the cloth bag and brought out some bank forms. “Here’s my signature. Joan Brox. See how simple I made it? Big, sweeping J. Clear letters. Big, sweeping B. Nobody’s going to question you. They don’t have any handwriting experts right there on the spot. They’ll eyeball the two, and if yours looks like mine, you’re in. Simple.”

“I don’t want to,” Diana said.

“Here.” Joanne Sayers ripped some paper out of a pad and passed the bank forms up front. “Practice for a few minutes, until you can write like that.”

“I told you, I’m not going to do it.”

Joanne Sayers sat forward. A mean light had come into her eyes. “How’d you like to see your boyfriend’s brains blown out?”

Diana began to write.

“That’s better,” Joanne Sayers said. She looked over the back seat. “See? You’ve got it already. See how simple it is? I wouldn’t know the difference, would you, Mr. Walker?”

Walker didn’t say anything.

“All right,” Joanne Sayers said. “Take off.”

They watched until Diana had turned the corner and started up the street toward the bank.

“All right,” Joanne said. “Gimme a pencil.”

She wrote something on a scrap of paper.

“Now get out,” she said. “Leave your keys in the ignition.”

She got out behind him, and left the paper on the driver’s seat.

“Now what?”

“Now we walk.” She nodded toward a tall office building on the corner.

They went inside, and caught the elevator for the top floor. From the end of the hall, she could look down into both streets. She had a clear view of the bank, and down the other street she could see the car.

“Perfect. Now we wait. Relax,” she said, as much to herself as to Walker. “If everything’s okay, it shouldn’t take long.”

They waited and watched. Below them, people scurried like ants.

“I’m sorry I had to say that, back in the car,” she said.

He just looked at her.

“Sometimes you have to say things like that, to get people moving. You know I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t shoot you, Mr. Walker.”

She took a deep breath. “Unless I had to.”

The bank was crowded. For the first time Diana understood, if only a little, what Joanne Sayers was feeling. She was tense, and every face was an enemy. Guards seemed to be especially threatening, even when none of them looked at her. She crossed the crowded lobby, waited behind an old man and at last signed the foreign words.
Joan Brox.
A man showed her into the vault.

It was a simple procedure, something thousands of people did every day. But she wasn’t one of them. She had never owned anything valuable enough to be kept in a safe-deposit box. So the man had to show her the routine. Then, alone in the curtained room, she opened the inner box and lifted out the two thick manila folders inside it. Under the folders was the leatherbound book, gold-embossed with a star emblem on its face. She couldn’t resist opening it and looking at the first page. There was a name there: Malcolm Dawes. The handwriting under the name identified him as a Special Agent of the FBI. The date in the upper corner was December 1968.

For some reason, it gave her a shiver. Whatever paranoia had infected Joanne Sayers had also worked its way under her skin. She gathered up the files and slipped the diary into one of the folders. Then she put the box back into its slot and walked out of the bank.

She didn’t look around, but her imagination was running wild. In her mind she saw a street crawling with federal agents, crisscrossing behind her, peering out of dim doorways at her back. If she turned around suddenly, she could almost catch them, but not quite. It was that kind of nightmare.

She walked to the corner and went around it without looking back.

In fact, there was only one man behind her who mattered. The street was teeming with people, and to an untrained eye they all looked alike. It was late on a Wednesday afternoon, payday for several nearby factories, and the lines at the tellers’ cages were long and slow-moving. People went in and out of the bank in a steady stream. Armstrong came out about thirty yards behind the girl. She had surprised him. He had expected the Sayers woman; he had half expected Walker to come to the bank. Guys like Walker would do anything for their stories, and Armstrong was prepared for that. But this was a new face, someone he hadn’t ever seen. That brought up disturbing new possibilities. Joanne Sayers was as slippery as an eel. Had she kidnapped someone else? Was she forcing a new hostage to make the pickup for her? Something like that would be a disaster. Even the possibility shortened his already tight timeframe. The more people involved, the greater the risks. He had to get the files, and fast.

The SAC had been superb. By the time Armstrong had arrived in Chicago, everything had been worked out, every base covered. Chicago had been alerted by Washington: Armstrong was on a priority matter; they were to lend support and ask no questions. If it had been simply a matter of picking up the Sayers woman, it would have been easy. They could have ringed the bank with agents, ringed the whole goddamn neighborhood with agents. But Armstrong knew better. The files were the important things, and Joanne Sayers knew that too. The files had to be retrieved and destroyed, and Armstrong had to know in his mind that there were no copies. That meant no agents, no big stakeout, no one but him and the girl. The Bureau had to stay clear of it, beyond lending assistance in mechanical areas that required sheer manpower.