and Walt Withers.
“Walt Withers isn’t a hit man,” Graham said. “He’s taken a fall, but not that far.”
“Far enough to be a wheelman?” Neal asked. “The hitter got away in Walt’s car.”
Neal had his own doubts, though. He had left Withers just hours before, dead-drunk. It seemed barely possible that he could have driven a car, let alone made an assassination attempt.
“We’ll get a team out there,” Graham said. “Can you sit tight until morning?”
A team? Neal thought. So far, the old team had blown his location, let in at least three opposing players, and seemed to have given the other team copies of the playbook. He’d had about enough of the team. And there was a practical problem. With security so badly compromised, he couldn’t be sure that any team that arrived didn’t have one or more opposing players on it.
Neal answered, “I think I’ll try a solo sport for a while.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Well, I am doing that.”
A long silence. Neal could almost see Graham rubbing his artificial fist into his real palm.
Then Graham said, “Son, every time something goes wrong, you go off on your own, and every time you do that, you fuck things up worse. You can’t be doing that anymore. You have to stop running away like some sulking thirteen-year-old. You have to stay connected now, son. I know you’re mad and you’re scared, but it’s time to grow up and stay connected.”
“Fuck you, Graham.”
But he’s right, Neal thought. I can’t handle this one on my own.
“What do you have in mind?” he asked.
Graham told him.
“Neal…” Karen stood in the doorway. She saw he was on the phone and so she sat down on the bed.
“Polly says you hate her and she wants to leave,” she said.
“I’ll drive her to the airport,” Neal offered.
“Someone tried to kill her, Neal!”
“And almost killed you instead,” Neal answered. “All because she had to get on the phone and blab to her buddy.”
“She trusted her friend,” Karen said. “Is that such a sin?”
“See?” Neal said. “Trust?”
“Neal…”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Neal said, “she can take a hike. She’s not worth it.”
“I dunno,” Karen said. “A deck and a hot tub?”
“We’re going to have to run, you know,” he said. He reached for her and pulled her close. “I almost lost you. I couldn’t take that.”
“I wouldn’t be so thrilled about it, either,” she answered, stroking the back of his head. “How long will we have to run?”
“I don’t know,” Neal answered. “But we need to get going.”
“I’m going with you,” Candy Landis said, stepping into the room.
“Doesn’t anybody in this house knock anymore?” Neal asked. “And no, you’re not coming with us.”
He was throwing things into a duffel bag when Chuck came back from Brogan’s.
“He has a hell of a bruise and a possible fracture of the cheekbone,” Chuck said. “That lady from the store is driving him to Fallon to check it out. They’re going to stop by for the dog.”
I owe Brogan, Neal thought-big-time. Not to mention the dog.
He could feel Chuck staring at him.
“Yeah?” Neal said. He didn’t exactly have warm and fuzzy feelings toward old Chuck.
“I should remove Mrs. Landis from the area,” Chuck said.
“Well, Chuckles, we’re about to remove ourselves from the area,” Neal said. “And Mrs. Landis is going with us.”
“That’s just not an option.”
Neal turned from his packing and stared up at Whiting, who did not seem particularly intimidated.
“You want options, buy a Buick,” Neal told him. “I don’t think it’s such a good idea, either, but the women insist, and I don’t have the time to argue.”
And between me and me, until I can figure out who is on whose side, I don’t mind having a little leverage in the person of Mrs. Jackson Landis.
“Can you protect her?” Chuck asked.
Neal saw the little bones protrude at the base of Chuck’s jaw and wondered if maybe this was a little more than business.
“I don’t know,” Neal answered. “Can you?”
“Of course.”
Neal zipped up the duffel bag and said, “Yeah, you’ve done a pretty good job so far. She was, what, six feet from a gun barrel, would you say?”
The little bones looked as if they were going to pop right through his skin.
“The danger came precisely from her proximity to that… tramp,” Chuck said.
“Agreed. You could have put that on the wreath,” Neal said. “Look, I don’t know what your feelings for Mrs. Landis are, but if you really want to help her, you’ll let her work this out.”
Chuck looked legitimately puzzled.
“Work what out?”
“See, that’s the thing,” Neal said. “You don’t know and I don’t know, so how can either of us help her? The best thing we can do is step away a little bit and let her do what she needs to do.”
And besides all that good stuff, she’s my trump card and I might need her handy.
“I don’t think this is the time for feminist rhetoric,” Chuck said.
“You’re right,” Neal said. “So try this: If Candice was a devious shit like me or you, she would have come here, found out what she needed to know, gone back to hubby, kept her mouth shut, and let him think everything was hunky-dory. And if you weren’t so much in love with her, you wouldn’t have made that call to Jack and blown what might have been a tremendous advantage. But she’s not cold-blooded enough to be a mole in her own bedroom, and you’re so jealous and so angry at Jack that you couldn’t resist showing him the ace in the hole.
“Now Jack gets to calculate his next moves with the knowledge that Candy is no longer an ally, but an adversary-information that I’d have preferred he didn’t have, but never mind-and we’re left groping around in the fog as to his thoughts and intentions.”
And I’m going to omit the happy news that Jack is apparently cheek-to-cheek with a known gangster who has caravans of empty trucks making deliveries to Candyland, because I don’t know if you and Mrs. Landis already know that, and I don’t want you to know that I know.
“I am not in love with Mrs. Landis,” Chuck said.
“Whatever.” Neal shrugged. “But I need your help and so does Mrs. Landis. Are you going to work with me on this, or what?”
Neal finished loading the jeep and walked back into the house. He’d hammered out a deal with Chuck, who left with the storekeeper-Evelyn, Brogan, and Brezhnev, so he was anxious to get moving.
He went back into the living room and said to Karen, “If the Sisterhood is ready to depart…”
“Funny,” she answered. “Funny boy.”
Polly asked, “Can’t I just take my-”
“No,” Neal answered for the fifteenth time. “There’s not a lot of room and we have to travel light.”
“Yeah, but I need-”
“We can buy things,” Neal said.
We have lots of cash, he thought.
Karen drove because she was the better driver and so Neal could concentrate on what was outside. The first few minutes would be the worst. If someone was going to make a try at Polly in the jeep, he’d have to do it before or near the first possible turn, so Neal held his breath until they were headed west on Route 50 and out of town.
