“What about Archer?”
“Whatever you want. If you want to go by the hospital, fine.”
She leaned against me. “That must’ve been some fight.”
“It could’ve been better. I had the terrain on my side.”
“Like the Confederates.”
“Yeah. This old fort is still a tough place to take.”
Luke came out and put up the flags. Libby watched pensively from the window.
We ate a simple breakfast with the Robinsons. I left my coat off now and I rolled up my sleeves and put the gun in my bedroll. The three of us made a final tour of Sumter, I promised Libby we’d keep in touch, and we took the morning boat back to the city.
We had the cab drop us at Roper Hospital. All of us went up together. I wasn’t surprised to find Dean Treadwell sitting in the visitor’s chair.
“If you’ve come to see Archer, he still can’t talk. He’s doped up and hurting pretty bad.”
“I just came by to say we’re leaving,” Erin said. “See if anything’s changed.”
“As a matter of fact, yeah. He’s gonna give you the book.”
Her first reaction was no reaction at all. As the moment stretched, she finally said, “Really?” but she was unflappable even when news was sensational.
“Some things just ain’t worth the grief, no matter how much money’s involved,” Dean said. “Naturally, we’re hoping the judge’s offer is still on the table.”
“I’m sure it is. I’ll call him and give you something in writing if you want.”
“He doesn’t think that’ll be necessary.”
“Tell him not to worry, then. Lee will do the right thing.”
“Let’s just go get it,” Dean said. “We want to be rid of it.”
It was like Poe’s gold bug, buried in the sand on Sullivan’s Island. Archer had triple-wrapped it in plastic, put it in a metal box, stuffed the box with plastic bags, and buried it in the dry sand under his back steps.
“He had a hunch,” Dean said. “Sooner or later that bozo would come after us.”
I wondered why now.
“It wasn’t the book. They were lookin‘ for you. Archer made a mistake, said the wrong thing. You know how he can be, sometimes he pops off. This time he never got a chance to say I’m sorry. They never even asked about the book.”
“What if they’d killed him? Nobody’d ever know where it was.”
“At that point, what did he care?”
We looked at each other in the hot noonday sun, two bookmen from different worlds, pulled together briefly by the same quest. Dean lit a smoke and I found a clumsy way of apologizing for the razzing I had given him back in town. “I’ve been thinking about what you said.”
“I said a lot. Sometimes I say too much.”
“I’ve been thinking about one particular thing.”
I didn’t have to tell him, he knew what it was. “Hal Archer’s never told me a lie of any kind, not that I’m aware of. How many friends have you had that you can say that about?”
Not many, I thought. Maybe none.
He shuffled uneasily. “If that’s all, let’s get out of here.”
Fifteen minutes later we were across the Cooper River, heading for North Charleston. None of us said a word the whole way across.
My rental was still where I’d parked it. Dean didn’t offer to shake hands and neither did I. He drove out of the lot and turned back toward Charleston and a moment later we went the other way, north to Florence.
CHAPTER 39
There were towns along every road now. There was sprawl that had never been part of any town at all. There were long fingers of commerce and drugstores and housing developments where only forests and swamps and farmlands had been in that earlier time. Then there had been occasional outposts to comfort a traveler in the wilderness; now there were motels and gas stations, Dairy Queens and Burger Kings, Piggly Wiggly and Winn-Dixie supermarkets and antiques malls. There were X-rated magazine stands and gunsmiths and temples of any god a man wanted to pray to. There were places to stop and get quietly drunk or get a car fixed after a sudden breakdown. No one would ever go hungry or thirsty, get horny or spiritually deprived for more than a few minutes in any direction. What had then been a two-day trek in 1860 was two hours now in air-conditioned ease. But there
