“Maybe.”
“Can you make sure he gets this?” Again she lifted the white package a few inches from her lap.
“Yes, I can do that,” McCorkle said, anticipating the expression on Haynes’s face when confronted with yet another true copy of Steady’s memoirs.
“I’d hate to see it get lost or misplaced or anything,” she said. “It’s the only copy.”
“I just happen to have a safe.”
“Oh, wow! A safe would be great!” she said, obviously relieved. “Could you also give me a receipt?”
McCorkle nodded, rose and went to the old safe. “What’d you think of it?” he said, giving the combination a turn.
“Of what?”
“The manuscript.”
“Oh, well, I thought it was awfully complicated. All those different countries and funny foreign names. I don’t follow the news much anymore and—” She stopped when McCorkle tugged open the old safe’s door.
“Please turn around, Mr. McCorkle,” she said in a new voice that McCorkle found cold and hard and full of authority.
Instead of turning, he said, “I know that voice. That’s the one they always use when there’s a gun in their hand.”
“It’s a thirty-two-caliber Sauer semiautomatic with a one-shot silencer,” she said.
McCorkle slowly turned around and took in the small semiautomatic with its four-inch silencer. The gun was aimed at his chest, a fairly large target. She held it in a gloved right hand that showed no sign of a tremor. The sealed white package that had been on her lap was now on the partners desk.
“There’s no money in the safe,” he said. “Although you’re welcome to look.”
“But there is a brown paper sack in there. I want you to take it out and place it on the desk. I want you to do that now.”
“Maybe I keep a gun in the safe.”
“Maybe you do.”
McCorkle faced the safe again and removed the brown paper sack that contained the mostly blank manuscript Howard Mott had given to Granville Haynes. McCorkle turned yet again, went slowly over to the desk and placed the sack on it.
“Now pick up the package I brought,” she said.
“And after I pick it up?”
“You lock it in the safe.”
“Sort of a trade, right?” McCorkle said and picked up the white package.
“Right.”
“Now we take it to the safe,” he said as he turned and went back to the old Mosler. “Now we place it just inside.” Slowly, almost tenderly, he put the package inside the safe. “Now we close the safe’s big door.” When that was done, he gave the combination a spin and asked, “So now what do we do?”
“You’ve locked a bomb in your safe,” she said in the same matter-of-fact voice. “It’s powerful enough to blow the safe door and do considerable damage to your office and anyone in it. But the bomb is easily disarmed. All you need to do is remove the package from the safe, unwrap it carefully and lift off the lid. It will then be disarmed. That should take you approximately three minutes. You may wish to look at your watch now because the bomb is timed to go off exactly”—she glanced at her own watch—“three minutes and twenty-two seconds from now.”
McCorkle, still at the safe, his back still to her, looked at his watch and said, “Good-bye, Miss Skelton.”
“Good-bye, Mr. McCorkle.”
When Padillo looked up from his dinner and saw the woman hurrying across the dining room, carrying the brown paper sack, he murmured a quick excuse to the impoverished widow, rose and hurried after the woman with the sack.
Padillo came out of Mac’s Place in time to see her climb into the driver’s seat of a black Mercedes sedan that had tinted windows and a license plate whose numbers had been hidden by packed dirty snow. The Mercedes, its headlights off, rolled away silently and disappeared into the snowy night.
Padillo raced back into the restaurant. As he burst into the office, McCorkle was removing the last of the white wrapping paper from the package. Without looking up he said, “Get out of here.”
“How much time’s left?”
“None,” McCorkle said and peeled off the last piece of white paper, revealing a cardboard box that once had held five hundred sheets of Southworth bond paper. Padillo dropped to the floor. McCorkle turned his head to the right, squeezed his eyes shut, bared his teeth in a snarling grimace and lifted off the box top. When nothing happened, he opened his eyes, looked down and said, “Okay. You can get up.”
Padillo rose, went to the desk and stared down at the open box that contained half a red brick and a Big Ben alarm clock of Chinese manufacture that no longer ticked. The brickbat and the clock were nestled in a bed of the universally despised white plastic packing nodules.
Padillo lowered himself carefully into the chair that Reba Skelton had recently vacated. “Maybe she was just trying to scare you to death.”
