Dead Watch

The conversation grew confused.

After a minute or two, Jake’s hand wandered down her body, and the conversation grew even more confused. And he realized that with the second beer in him, he was going to have to pee, and fairly soon. He also realized that he would cut his legs off before he’d leave the couch.

He thought, What small heads women have, when his hand was behind her head, and at another moment, when his hand was wandering from one breast to another, she misinterpreted it as a fumble and said, “Here, wait a minute,” and helped him unbutton her blouse. He popped her brassiere one-handed and she mumbled, “I see you’ve had some training in brassieres,” and he said, “I was just lucky,” and she said, “Right . . .”

After that, the conversation seriously languished until she laughed, a little breathlessly, and said, “Jake. Stop. Jake, I really, really have to pee. Let me up, you oaf.”

She ran up the stairs to the bathroom. Jake hurried into the first-floor bathroom, flushed a few seconds before she did, washed and dried his hands, checked his hair in the mirror, gargled some water, just in case, and was standing in the living room with his hands in his pockets when she came back down the stairs.

“Hi.” He took her hand and pulled her in and kissed her on the forehead and said, “This brings up the whole question of sleeping arrangements.”

“My God, Jake. Do I have to do all the heavy lifting?”

He slept his four and a half hours. He woke up and felt the weight and remembered she was beside him, listened to her breathe, and then thought about the evening. He should, he thought, quit trying to work the problem. He should take Madison on a trip to London, or Paris, and lie low until the whole thing was done. Then they could come back and go wherever the relationship took them.

Ride horses.

But that wasn’t what he was going to do.

He could close his eyes and see the face of the dead girl in Madison. Cold, bloody, cruel murder.

16 

They ate breakfast together, English muffins, marmalade, and coffee, and Jake said, “You can either come with me or I can ditch you with a friend. I know a retired professor at Georgetown, you’d be pretty secure at his place.”

“Silly goose,” she said. “I’m coming with you.”

He called Gina at the White House and asked, “What’s my schedule, if I have a schedule?”

“Jake, it’s a nightmare here,” she said. For the first time since he began working for Danzig, Jake could hear excitement in her voice. “The guy wants to talk to you, but he hasn’t had time. Let me see if I can interrupt him.”

He listened to electronic noise for a minute, then two, and then Danzig came up abruptly and said, “Stay in touch. I’ll want you on two hours’ notice. Not today or tomorrow, but maybe the day after . . . or the day after that. We’ll want you to talk to Novatny, give him a deposition on the retrieval of the package.”

“Things are proceeding?”

“Yes. We should have it wrapped up in forty-eight hours. Sixty at the outside.” And he was gone.

They took Jake’s car, leaving hers behind in the garage, moving slowly with the congestion across the bridge into Virginia, fighting traffic every inch of the way, a full hour before they broke into a steady flow.

They were in Richmond a little after ten, followed the navigation system to the hospital. As they came up to it, Jake said, “It might be better if she didn’t see you. If you want to shop for a few minutes or maybe talk to your mother.”

She shook her head: “I couldn’t visit Mother for less than four hours. Give me the car, I’ll run over to a bookstore.”

Jake had gotten a room number from Dorn, and went straight up to the surgical-care center on the third floor. He’d spent a lot of time in hospitals, and the smell of the place brought it all back: everything from the scramble to get him to a med unit, to the flight out to Germany, to the hospital in Bethesda, and the small stuff—the sound of the overhead speakers, the beeping of monitors, the hollow sounds of voices in tile hallways, and all the drawers; drawers everywhere.

Cathy Ann Dorn was being wheeled into her room as Jake came down the hall. She lifted a hand and said, “Mr. Winter, I think it’ll be a minute.”

“We have to get her into bed,” the nurse said.

“She’s afraid my ass’ll show,” Dorn said.

Dorn and the nurse went into the room, and two minutes later the nurse came out and said, “She’s got a mouth.”

“Yes, she does.”

Dorn was propped up in bed, a bottle of water in her hand, with a bent straw sticking out of it, sunlight slanting through the window across the bed and her covered toes. Jake said, “Hi,” and checked her out, let her see it. Her face was a mottled black, blue, and yellow, with small healing cuts still showing black. Her upper teeth were