A twenty, and five — no, six ones!
Yes!
They'd have change machines at the post office, he told himself. Either that or the stamp machines would take ones. They'd have to.
He looked down at his watch. Seven twenty-seven.
Seventy-eight minutes to go seventy-two miles.
Gotta get going… right now!
Oblivious to the rapidly deteriorating weather conditions, Keith Bennington ran for the car.
At seven-thirty that Wednesday evening, the woman finally gave up.
For whatever reason, the cat simply refused to come down from her high-limb perch.
'Okay, be that way,' she muttered to herself as she firmly closed the door to the ancient-tree-decorated living room and turned the dead-bolt knob.
She knew the cat was agitated. She'd been that way ever since the intriguing stranger — what was his name, Henry something? — had left. And to a limited degree, she even sympathized with her sulking pet.
You and me both, babe, the woman thought irritably. Just what we need right now.
After closing and dead-bolting the second connecting door to the living room, the woman walked down the corridor to the door leading to the porch, confirmed that the darkness, the cold, and the now rapidly falling rain had driven away all of her restaurant customers, and returned to the main kitchen.
'Hey, Danny,' she hailed the cook over the loud rhythmic sounds of a Cajun fiddler calling out an old bayou tune.
'Yeah?' The music immediately dropped to a low background level.
'It's dead out there, so I'm going to close up and run out to Costco. We're getting low on hamburger, coffee, hot chocolate mix, and a few other things, and I don't want to take a chance on getting snowed in tomorrow.'
'Tell you what, if you pick up a couple of ham hocks, too,' the young cook suggested after a quick survey of the refrigerators, 'I'll brew up a big batch of navy bean soup. That'll keep the customers happy for a few days if we start running short.'
'Sounds wonderful,' she replied. 'But the way this weather's changing, I'm not sure we're going to have any customers at all the next couple of days.'
'Great, all the more for us.'
The woman laughed.
'Hey, listen,' she warned, 'I left Sasha in her room. She's in one of her moods, so don't go in there.'
'Don't worry. I wouldn't go back there even if I thought she was in a good mood.'
The woman smiled, then placed the CLOSED sign in the window and turned off all the outside lights except those illuminating the pathway and the post office.
'I'll be back in a couple of hours. Don't forget to lock up when you leave.'
Danny agreed, and as she closed the door behind her, she heard the plaintive voice and music of a Cajun fiddler slowly rose in volume.
The brief interchange with the young cook improved the woman's mood greatly, and she began humming to herself as she hopped into her small four-wheel-drive Toyota pickup truck with the strange-looking tracking device mounted on top of the cab, strapped herself in, and headed toward the distant shopping complex in Medford.
At exactly seven minutes after eight, Keith Bennington turned onto Brandywine Road and accelerated the heavy sedan down the dark, narrow, and extremely wet and slippery backcountry lane.
A steady rain had accompanied the panicked congressional aide ever since he left Regis J. Smallsreed's district office, and he'd almost gone off the road twice already, so he knew better than to push his luck.
But it was getting terribly late, and the Rogue Valley International Airport was a good thirty-five minutes away — thirty, if he really pushed it — and Bennington didn't even want to think about how Simon Whatley would react if his congressional aide wasn't there in the lobby waiting to take his briefcase and carry-on luggage the instant he walked off the plane and into the terminal.
Why am I doing this? Bennington asked himself for perhaps the twentieth time that evening as he gripped the vibrating steering wheel tightly, trying as best he could not to drive beyond the safe braking distance defined by the car's intersecting headlights as he peered through the water-streaking sweeps of the windshield wipers into the increasingly violent downpour.
It was a meaningless and useless question because he already knew the answer.
Like all too many of his peers, Keith Bennington was already addicted to the rush of high-level political power. Worse, the man who had led him into that addiction, the man who showed him exactly how to ride the coattails of a political powerhouse like Smallsreed to the maximum benefit of all concerned, was also the man who could take it all away in a heartbeat.
Clash with Simon Whatley just once, and Keith Bennington knew he'd spend the rest of his life in some dreary, meaningless job, remembering the taste of power that had been his… if only for one brief and tantalizing moment.
The thought proved more than the congressional aide could stomach, and he pressed down just a little more on the accelerator as he entered the sweeping turn.
And suddenly, there it was.
The sight of the darkened inn at the end of the long, narrow dark road almost caused Bennington to lose whatever remained of his lunch right there in the car.
No, it can't be closed. It can't be!
But then he saw the lighted path that led to the makeshift post office at one end of the rambling structure.
Bennington accelerated the sedan into the parking lot, skidded to a stop that sent mud and water flying across the wooden deck adjacent to it, and was running up the path and into the rustic post office before the car stopped vibrating on its sorely abused shocks.
The first thing he saw when he entered the office — or more to the point, the first thing he didn't see — was the stamp machine.
This can't be! he thought as his eyes frantically searched every inch of the small area. This is a post office. It says so right there on the wall. There must be a stamp machine here somewhere.
But there wasn't.
He pounded on the roll-down, but no one responded.
A brass slot next to the window smirked at him. DEPOSIT STAMPED MAIL HERE the sign above it said.
What if I put it in there without stamps? He asked himself. Wouldn't they put it in box fourteen anyway, along with a postage due notice, if there wasn't any return address on the envelope?
Because he didn't know for sure, he didn't dare risk it.
He even tried the door on box fourteen, praying that whoever opened it last hadn't closed it fully. But the door remained tightly shut, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't pry it open.
Only when the increasingly desperate congressional aide staggered outside, searching for someone, for anyone at all who might know where he could buy three or four dollars' worth of stamps in the next two minutes, did he notice the door.
The sign said PRIVATE, EMPLOYEE ENTRANCE ONLY, but Keith Bennington, long accustomed to the ready access that came with his proximity to Congressman Regis J. Smallsreed, easily ignored it.
Nobody responded when he knocked loudly.
No alarms went off when he turned the knob and the door clicked open.
So he went in, telling himself that it was clearly an emergency, and he only wanted a few dollars' worth of stamps… which he intended to leave the money for, so it wasn't like he was entering a private residence to steal something, for God's sake. By the time he convinced himself of all that, he barely noticed the PRIVATE, DO NOT ENTER! sign when he turned the dead bolt on the door.
But the third door did catch his attention.
The one with two dead bolts.
Something about them caused congressional aide Keith Bennington to wonder if he shouldn't go straight to the airport, right now, pick up Whatley, explain the situation, take him home, find an all-night market that sold stamps, and then drive all the way back to the Loggerhead City post office to mail the envelope as instructed.
