Tourists were aiming fancy cameras into Peter's face. Stupid, grinning bastards. Grinning soldiers with dull black rifles-phony guns that looked as if they had been carved out of soap.
Campbell and the other American man walked right beside him. A very official-looking march. Leading him through the tunnel of ambulance chasers. The other man trying to introduce himself and saying something about Hill, trying to shake Peter's hand.
Then, in the middle of the mad crowd, in the middle of everything, the police chief suddenly swung Peter around. The sweating, heavyset black man stared him right in the face, looked pained and sensitive and a little crazy himself;
'Strange, unaccountable things are still happening on our island,' Meral Johnson said to Peter. The man seemed to pause out of confusion, then tears started down the rolls of his cheeks.
'Jane Cooke was killed this morning,' Johnson whispered to Peter. 'I'm very sorry, mister.'
Mandeville, San Dominica
At quarter to ten that morning, two short-haired men in conservative gray suits had taken Jane-in a wheelchair-out a rear-door exit in the Mandeville Hospital.
As the chair whistled along a flowery path with royal palms and plumbago everywhere, the pretty blond girl was starting to smile again. Laughing for the first time in years, it seemed.
'Re@nds me of Bermuda a little,' one of the men said. 'Reminds me a little of Ironsides,' Jane mumbled, a small joke.
The man pushing her wheelchair laughed through his nose. He was James McGuire, fifty-nine, a paunchy, good-natured sort who reminded Jane of Santa Claus with no white beard.
The second man, James Dowd, was just thirtyone. James Dowd was quieter than McGuire, but very nice. Very old-world Irish.
When the wheelchair was out of sight of Mandeville Hospital, deep in rich green brush, James McGuire stopped pushing.
'Okay, Janie. ' The red-faced man grinned. 'You want to walk, you most surely can walk. You don't want to ride. I sure as heck don't want to push. As the three Americans continued down the path, walking, they began to see more and more colorful birds, and lizards, tree frogs, herinit crabs. An ornery little mongoose was looking for a snake in the grass.
Then the winding path they were on ended abruptly in a flat, breezy field.
Jane, even the two FBI inspectors, let out short gasps of delight and awe. Beyond the field was nothing but shining, royal blue sea.
'You know, I don't think I could be anything but happy in a beautiful place like this. ' James Dowd finally entered the chitchatting. 'I know that isn't strictly logical.'
'That's how you're going to get trapped into staying here. ' Jane smiled at the shy, likable man.
You'll quit your job and. James Without a sound of warning, three men suddenly appeared from behind thick brush and rocks. they wore green windbreakers and sports shirts buttoned to the throat.
'Freeze!' one of them screamed.
At the same time another man started to fire an Uzi submachine gun. A tall blond man.
Both Dowd and McGuire fell backward into high grass. Then two of the men jumped on Jane. One held down her flailing arms; the other pressed a wet handkerchief over her nose, mouth, across strands of her long, curly hair.
Understanding that it was all going to happen again, feeling as if she were on the edge of madness, Jane began to let loose amazing screams she wouldn't have believed possible.
they were putting the dripping cloth all over her face, and she was trying to bite the hand holding it. they were pushing her head back hard into the ground. Finally her arm snapped under a man's heavy leg.
Then everything was the suffocating white cloth. Its acrid, choking smell. Like trying to breathe inside a bottle of glue.
She started to give in to it finally. Blue sky, sun, angry or frightened faces flashing over her. The blond Englishman. Here.... She thought of Peter. Started to cry. Felt like a helpless child under their arms, legs, stomachs...
Then Jane bit down hard into a man's ugly, bulbous thumb.
'Don't fight, Jesus Christ,' one of the men was yelling at her.
'Christ. She's biting my fucking hand!' the second man screamed.
Hospital people-white-coated doctors, nurses finally appeared on the far side of the field. -Which is when Clive Lawson bent down and shot the struggling young woman in the right temple.
Jane thought it was the tall blond man who bent over her. Not quite as good-looking as she'd thought... she wanted to hold Peter just one more time. Then it all seemed so stupid and awful.... Then it was nothing at all.
May 10, 1979, Thursday
Dragnet
Tight. Thousands
Stopped.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The part I was supposed to play around Washington and Europe from the sixth to the ninth was no part,
