Deadline (25 page)

“Ah, Christ.” She threw her clothes into a corner in disgust. “You’re just like all men. A grade-A horse’s ass. You’re so caught up in yourself and your job that you can’t see past your own nose.”

She stripped off one of the quilts and threw it at him. “Sleep on the goddamned floor, then. And I hope you’re sore for a week.”

That had happened two nights ago. Now Walker stood apart from the men behind Arnold Jenkins’ barn and watched the riverbank for her return. She was gone a long time. The men had already begun filing back into the house for the meal when he saw her appear over the hill. She was wearing plain clothes, like the people here, and she almost seemed to blend into the countryside. It would please her to know that, but he wouldn’t tell her, wouldn’t encourage her at all. She came to him and smiled almost shyly. They followed the men into the house and ate a delicious supper by lamplight.

After supper, Jacob motioned Walker outside. They went out of the yard and across the field. The sun was low in the west, touching the treetops, and the air around them was purple.

Jacob came quickly to his point. “Young man, may I ask how long you plan to stay with us?”

“Probably not much longer,” Walker said.

“I wouldn’t want to be inhospitable, but maybe that’s for the best. I want you to know you have my gratitude for bringing my daughter home.”

“She came because she wanted to. Has she decided to stay?”

“She will stay,” Jacob said. “We’ve had some talks, but that part of it hasn’t been touched on. But she will stay.”

“Can I talk to her before we leave?”

“Alone, you mean?”

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

Jacob shook his head. “I think it’d be best if you’d just pack up and move on. I hope you understand what I’m saying. It’s got nothing to do with you…or the lady. She’s a lovely lady, Mr. Walker. But things aren’t what they seem, now are they?”

“No sir. Not quite.”

“That’s all right. I don’t want to know. I’m not asking you anything but to respect my wishes on this. I think it’s best you move on.”

“All right.”

“How about tomorrow? You could get an early start and be home by nightfall.”

“If that’s what you want.”

“Thank you, Mr. Walker.”

Jacob turned and left him there. A moment later Joanne came out. They stood by the fence and watched the sun go down. Behind them, people poured out of Arnold Jenkins’ house. Buggies began moving off down the long dirt road.

“I saw you leave,” she said. “What did the old man want?”

“He wants us to go.”

“That figures.” Her face was grim. “I guess I knew it the moment I saw you two leave. It almost showed in the old man’s face.”

Walker didn’t say anything.

“So what now? Do we go back on the run?”

“There’s no future in that. I think we know what’s to be done.”

“I know, anyway.”

He looked at her strangely.

“The other night I asked you a question, and you never did answer me. I asked what you’d do if I stayed here and became one of them.”

“Be serious.” He took a deep breath. “It’s a silly question.”

“Then humor me. Answer it. Say I just give you the diary and the documents and let you fight it out with those people back there. It’s a coward’s way, so call me a coward. But that’s something you do much better than I do. It’s what keeps you going. I could just disappear. You could tell everyone I’d walked away in the middle of the night. Who’d ever know? And after you got your story, who’d care?”

“It’s a fantasy. They’d find you here, just like they found you before.”

“Maybe so, but it’s my fantasy. It’s the only one I’ve had in a good long time. So think about it, okay? That’s all I ask. I’ve already asked Michael about it. They’d put me up till I found something to do. And that wouldn’t take me long, you know. I’m a survivor, Walker. I’d find a man to take care of me, and I don’t give a damn how religious they are. Everyone isn’t as noble as you are. Or as silly.”

Again he was quiet. The silence stretched between them.

“I’m sorry I said that,” she said. “We shouldn’t be digging at each other. I really do like you.”

“I like you too, Joanne.”

“In a way I’m glad you didn’t sleep with me. Really glad. Because I do like you, and some of that would have been spoiled.” She laughed, but Walker saw only sadness in her face. “Something awful will happen if I go back there. I can feel it. So what I’m saying is, I’m dumping it all on you. It’s all yours now, and God knows you asked for it. In the morning you can take the files with you, but you’ll be going alone. Take the gun too; I don’t want it anymore. I’m staying, Walker. You can tell them where I am, but you’ll be signing my death warrant if you do. I’m staying in either case.”

There wasn’t anything more to say. They walked across the field to Michael’s house, and Joanne told Michael that Walker would be leaving in the morning alone. Later they went to bed. She offered to take the floor, but he wouldn’t have it. They didn’t talk any more. In the morning, Walker was up before dawn, his mind groping with all the problems of his day. Trudy fixed him a breakfast of eggs and bacon and wheat cakes. Neither of the younger Yoders questioned him. Joanne walked with him to the edge of the yard, then leaned over and kissed his cheek.

“So long,” she said. “And good luck.”

He didn’t look back. He walked quickly between the rows until the hill rose up ahead of him. Slowly, as he crossed it, the big house came into view, then the roof of the barn where the car was. He stopped, aware of something strange. A noise somewhere, a car coming toward him. He dropped low in the field as the car turned in from the blacktop road and ran up under the trees toward the house.

It stopped about a hundred yards from where he crouched. The door opened and Al Donovan got out.

D
ONOVAN KNEW ABOUT THE
powers of love and hate, but he had never seen hate demonstrated so vividly as that Friday night. He and Lord had been on the phone, double-checking a report that Walker and the Sayers girl had been seen in Tennessee, when Armstrong walked in. Perhaps walked was too strong a word. Armstrong simply came in, less than forty-eight hours out of surgery. He looked pale and ill, but he was on his feet and he didn’t stagger. The gods had been with him on both counts. The first bullet had slipped past his throat, just missing the jugular, and exited under his ear. Of the two, that was the lesser. That parting shot she had given him, that goodbye kiss as the elevator door was closing, that was the baby intended to kill. Luckily it had caught him twisting around. It had smashed his lowest rib, then burrowed its way down, snuggling, nestling and finally stopping between folds of intestine. The smashed bone hurt like hell, and would for some time, but it had saved him: slowed the bullet just enough to stop it before any vital organs were punctured. After a four-hour operation in Chicago, Armstrong was placed in a private room and pronounced a very lucky man.

Over the near-violent objections of his doctors, he was gone in the morning. Two FBI men arrived and helped him into a waiting car. He was whisked to O’Hare International for a private flight to New York. Aided by heavy doses of painkiller, he slept on the plane, and was helped off in a wheelchair. That was early Friday. He was taken to a hotel near Prospect Park, and registered there by one o’clock. That gave him time for a few hours’ rest before he walked the half block to the FBI resident agency and came in on Donovan and Lord.

It hurt Armstrong to move. Breathing hurt. The heavy bandage around his ribs and gut gave him pain every minute. It especially hurt to talk. His voice had been affected by the bullet’s path, though he was assured it was only temporary. His voice came out as a raspy threat. Everything he said was a threat, as if two tiny devils were fighting with flat bastard files deep down in his throat. If Donovan thought he saw hate in the black eyes of Armstrong that afternoon, he didn’t know the half of it. Armstrong was running on hate.

For the first hour, he communicated mainly with his hands, eyes, and with short messages passed to Donovan and Lord. When he did speak, his voice carried extra menace and authority. He was especially harsh with Donovan. Some of that was undoubtedly Donovan’s fault. He hated guys like Donovan. They played it safe all their lives, then they retired and were pampered till they died. They sucked the federal tit for all it was worth, and their biggest value was in the sheer bulk of their manpower. The FBI could find out about anything in minutes, and for that he could thank the mindless idiots like Donovan, who did the donkey work.

Yes, the FBI could find out anything it wanted to know. Except where that goddamned Sayers girl was.

Whenever he thought about the Sayers girl, his fury began anew. That hurt with a pain all its own. Humiliation was not a crown that Armstrong wore with grace. He could only imagine what they were saying in Chicago. He had let the girl slip through his fingers, and all because he had insisted on playing the Lone Ranger. He actually saw red flashes when he thought about it. He had found the girl all by himself, then he let her shoot him and walk away.

He wouldn’t be dumb enough to try it alone again. He hurt too much; his reflexes were too slow. There was simply nothing he could do, no position he could take, to make the hurt any better. Either he would hang tough or give it up and go back to bed. And he would never do that, not as long as he could stand, not as long as he could sit up. His hate was too great. He remembered a saying he had used when he was younger, when he had balls of iron and knew he could lick the world.
When it gets too tough for everybody else, it’s just right for me.
The thought bolstered him, made him feel flashes of his adolescent heroism, but the pain was as bad as ever.

He sat in the tiny room that Donovan used for an office, and read for the fifth time the stories that Walker had filed from Chicago. Walker had fired his best shot, and they were still in the game. Essentially it was the toothless part of the story, sensational on its face but proving nothing, identifying nobody, meandering harmlessly around specifics and hinting of more to come. Since then, nothing. The
Tribune
had heard nothing from Walker since that first day, if Donovan’s contacts were right. Yes, he had to admit it: sometimes those press contacts did pay off. Surrounding yourself with pricks was the price you paid for it.

Donovan simply hadn’t believed Walker’s story. He believed that Joanne Sayers was forcing him to write it. Armstrong knew better. He knew that guys like Walker needed no forcing. They enjoyed embarrassing the Bureau, exposing the idiots who had made a slip. What made reporters so unbearable was that they did what they did not out of loyalty or patriotism, not even out of any professional ethic, when you got right to the heart of it. It was glory, plain and simple. The lust for a big story, and fuck anybody who got in the way. He had never known any reporter who would give up a truly big story for
any
reason. That was what they lived on, those coal-black headlines that somehow never really told the truth of anything. They were lice, so dishonest and yet so, so self-righteous when it came to their sacred First Amendment. And guys like this Walker were the worst of the lot.

Again Armstrong went through the file on Walker. Agents in New York had been compiling it all week long. He sifted through the items, and occasionally looked out into the street and thought about the girl.

Not the Sayers girl. That other one, that beauty with the dark hair who had gone to the bank and almost led him to his death. A hostage? That had been his first thought, but as time went on it became more and more unlikely. Lord had done some extensive cross-country checking between New York and Philadelphia, Philadelphia and Chicago, Chicago and New York. Nothing. There were no missing persons of her description during the past week. If not a hostage, then what? A friend of the Sayers woman? Again, possible but unlikely. A friend of Walker’s? Armstrong didn’t have great hope for that either. He called Lord in and listened again to his report on Joanne Sayers. Everything was negative. She had no friends at work, had associated with no one outside the plant. She did her job, showed up on time, took little sick leave. She worked straight through her coffee breaks and left half an hour early as compensation. Nobody knew her. It was the same story with the neighbors. So he turned his mind again to Walker, and hit pay dirt at once. He called Walker’s landlady, a nosy old dame who remembered seeing a woman going up to Walker’s flat last Saturday. The description definitely didn’t fit Sayers. The girl had worn a raincoat, and the landlady thought her hair was dark. She had been tall, and had come to Walker’s in the late afternoon.

Then she had been with Walker from the beginning. A girlfriend maybe, some shack job. A whore Walker had brought in for the night. The file on Walker had indicated a hit-or-miss sex life for the past few years. Nothing really steady, nothing of any duration. The girl might be a one-night stand, which would make it tougher. Some piece of fluff that had walked in out of the night from God knew where, and had planned on walking out again a few hours later. Only Joanne Sayers had shown up. That would explain the tension he had seen in the girl as she came to the bank. It might explain why Sayers had left her a note on the front seat, making her drive around the block in order to expose any tail. What it didn’t explain was why the girl didn’t just drive away. How about that, Armstrong? If this was just some whore off the street, why didn’t she keep on going once she had the car, the keys and no gun against her head? Why would she care what happened to Walker?

Damn good question, and the idea of something casual just didn’t wash. The only answer was personal involvement, something the files didn’t show. The girl either knew Sayers or Walker well enough that she could be trusted not to run out. Suddenly his chips were on Walker.

He pushed the buzzer and asked the girl to send Donovan in. His words were part gasp, part groan. “We’re working on the theory that Walker has a girlfriend along for the ride. A special girlfriend.”