“You sound relieved.”
“Wouldn’t you be if you discovered your father was a prankster instead of a blackmailer?”
“Not if his pranks got three people killed.”
“Four—counting Horace Purchase.”
“Okay. Four. But if Steady’s memoirs are some kind of never-ending practical joke, wouldn’t a lot of his satisfaction have come from making sure the CIA knew the joke was on them?”
“Sure. It would’ve come from that. And from the money. Don’t ever forget the money.”
“The money turns him into a con artist instead of a prankster.”
“Still better than a blackmailer.”
“So when was the CIA supposed to find out they were the butt of a joke?”
“After they paid Steady the money not to publish. And after they read the manuscript that he’d sent them to make sure they knew what they’d paid to suppress.”
“And learned they’d been had.”
Haynes looked thoughtful and, for the first time, a little sad. “He must’ve had it all planned out—everything except the part about his death.”
“His and the others,” she said, sat up and swung her feet to the floor. “Okay. Now what?”
“Now we go see Howard Mott, stash the car with him and figure out some way to get what Steady wanted.”
“The last laugh—or the money?”
Haynes grinned his inherited grin. “I don’t know yet,” he said. “Maybe both.”
Chapter 42
The first shot sounded like a stout stick being snapped in two. Haynes classified the weapon as a .22-caliber rifle and guessed the shooter to be at least fifty yards away because he heard the shot an instant after the round buried itself in the motel room door.
Haynes spun away from the door he had just closed and tackled Erika McCorkle from the rear, dumping her onto the walk in front of the old Cadillac’s grille. She lost her canvas overnight bag and it skidded beneath the car.
Still half lying on her, Haynes turned his head to stare up at the bullet hole just as another round smacked into the room’s door three inches to the left of the first one. The sound of the snapped-in-two stick again came a split second later.
A third shot took out the light above the motel room door. It was as if the shooter needed to prove that the first two rounds hadn’t been misses, but marksmanship. Haynes slipped McCorkle’s borrowed revolver from his topcoat pocket, crawled off Erika and wormed his way to the left side of the car where he peered around the front tire—the one that had replaced the flat.
As Haynes peered around the tire toward the top of the motel’s U, he glimpsed a dark blue or black sedan speeding off into the night. Haynes rose, stuck the revolver back into his topcoat and helped Erika to her feet. Her mouth was open as she tried to suck great gobs of air into her lungs.
“You hyperventilating?”
She shook her head and kept on gasping.
“I can go get that sack the food came in and you can breathe into that.”
She shook her head again, even more vigorously, and said still gasping, “Nobody—ever shot—at me— before.”
“The shooter’s gone,” he said.
“You sure?”
Haynes nodded. “He wasn’t shooting at us. He was shooting at the door and the light. He hit both.”
“Oh, shit, I’ve never been so scared.”
“You were supposed to be. How is it now?”
“I’m still shaking.”
“I mean your breathing.”
“It’s okay.”
“Then let’s go see Mott.”
“And where the hell can we go after that?”
“How do you feel about Baltimore?” Haynes said.
After retrieving Erika’s canvas bag from beneath the car, they drove slowly toward the exit. Some half-clad motel guests were peeking out of partially open doors, as if trying to decide whether what they had heard were gunshots or backfires. The motel’s owner, shivering outside in his shirt sleeves, gave the old Cadillac an uninterested glance before ducking back into the warmth of the motel office. Haynes estimated that his $100 cash deposit would cover the room and also the cost of damage to the door and the light fixture.
