or devious. A good PR guy knows when to promote and when to back off and do the gal a favor. He is always in when the press calls: he never gives her the feeling that, all things considered, he’d rather be in Philadelphia than sitting in a maintenance truck at six o’clock on a rainy morning talking to her. He is an expert at damage control, and if the story is going to be critical, he sometimes earns his pay more for what’s left out of a piece than what’s put in.
Bowman had been a reporter himself in a previous life and he knew the routine. He knew what her deadlines were, just as he knew that she seldom did stories of that nature. “We’d like to meet a guy at the airport, Mickey,” she had said, “and we’re not sure yet whether we’ll want to announce ourselves after he gets here.” Bowman’s dad had been in the Seabees in the big war, she told me later: he had passed along that can-do mentality to his son. Bowman was waiting when we arrived. He got us through security, verified when and where Scofield’s plane would be coming in, and now we sat with Trish wedged tight in the seat between us, the airport VISITOR tags clipped to our lapels.
I sat quietly splitting my concentration. One side of my brain listened to the shoptalk between Aandahl and Bowman while I thought about our killer with the other half. I thought about a blind woman in Baltimore who had been left alive in the middle of a nine-day rampage, who had later gone mad and been committed. Trish was telling Mickey Bowman about a great public-relations man she knew by phone but had never met. The guy worked for United Airlines in Miami, and he had all but written her first big story for her on deadline. A plane had been hijacked: FBI sharpshooters had gotten under the aircraft without the hijacker’s knowledge, and one was trying to crawl up the plane’s nose assembly before the gunman figured out where they were. The United man had an office window that looked down on the scene. Trish sat at a desk across town, her phone rigged through a headset, taking verbatim descriptions as the United guy talked the story out to her. “They killed the hijacker,” she said, “but I’ve never forgotten that PR man. You’re pretty good yourself, Mick.”
This was high praise from someone who never dealt in bullshit, and Bowman knew it. “Mickey used to be a bureau chief for the AP in Indianapolis,” Trish said for my benefit. I joined the small talk and learned a few things about wire-service reporters. But I was still thinking about the blind woman in Maryland.
At six-thirty sharp a burst of noise came through Bowman’s radio. “Your bird’s on the ground,” he said. At almost the same instant a car materialized, a black Cadillac that came slowly up the runway and stopped, idling about thirty yards to our right. The two men sitting in the car would be Scofield bodyguards, I guessed. Bowman started his engine and cleared away the steam from our windows with his air blower. I had to hand it to him: he must be curious as hell about the story we were doing, but he never asked.
A sleek-looking jet nosed its way around the corner and came toward us. “Well, what do you think?” Trish asked. I told her I tried not to think, I just react, and Bowman laughed when she did not. She was letting me call the plays, at least for now. It had been my decision to get on Scofield’s tail as soon as he touched down at Sea-Tac; I just wasn’t comfortable waiting around for him to show up at the Four Seasons. When you’re dealing with a fruitcake like Pruitt, a lot can happen in ten miles.
The plane taxied in and came to a stop. The ground crew rolled out a steel stairwell, a door opened, and a man got out and popped open an umbrella. Then Rodney Scofield stepped out in the rain. I didn’t need a formal introduction: he was an old man whose snowy hair curled in tufts under the edges of his hat, whose ruddy face—as near as I could tell from that distance—was all business. This was his clambake, he was the boss. The grunt beside him held the umbrella over his head, and the two grunts in the Caddy got out and stood at attention. He was at the bottom of the stairs when Leith Kenney emerged from the aircraft. Kenney looked just as I’d pictured him, which doesn’t happen often when all you have is a voice to go by. He had a neatly trimmed beard: he was slender and tall and had the word
Here we go, I thought.
We went south, a surprise. I was happy to have done something right for a change and picked up Scofield at the airport. The Cadillac whipped into 1-5 and headed for Tacoma like a homing pigeon. Bowman followed without question: Trish would owe him a big-league debt when it was over. The Caddy cruised at the speed limit and Bowman kept our truck two or three cars behind it. We didn’t talk: just sat rigid, tense in the seat. After eight or ten miles, the Cadillac turned off the highway and took to a two-lane, state-numbered road. Bowman dropped back but kept him-in sight, cruising along at forty.
The rain had stopped and the sky was breaking up into long streaks of blue. A stiff wind blew down from Rainier, buffeting the truck as we rocked along. I thought we must be due east of Tacoma now, skirting the city on Highway 161. It was small-town suburban, broken by stretches of open country. Snow blew off the mountain in the distance, a swirling gale driven by the same wind that rolled down the valley. We came to a river, crossed it, and arrived in the town of Puyallup.
The Cadillac stopped. Pulled off to the side of the road.
We drove on past and I got a glimpse of Scofield and Kenney confering over something in the backseat.
“They’re looking at directions,” Trish said. ‘’ Double-checking.‘’
“Then we’re almost there.”
Bowman hung a left, did a quick U-turn, and came cautiously to the corner. We could see the Cadillac still parked off the road in the distance. We sat at roadside and waited.
They came a minute later. Bowman allowed just the right gap to develop, then swung in behind them. I wasn’t too worried: none of the guys in the Caddy looked like pros to me, meaning the only way they’d make us was by accident. The Caddy hung a right, into a road that ran along the river. The place they were going was about half a mile along, a small cafe well back from the road. There was a gas pump out front and a couple of junk autos at the east side of the building. The yard was unpaved, puddle-pocked from all the rain. “Pull in,” I said, and Bowman did, taking a position between cars on the far end. Scofield and Kenney got out and went in, leaving the two grunts alone in the car.
