Dead Watch

“Miss, if I said one more word, they’d fire my ass. Think of the guilt you’d feel.”

“I’d manage somehow,” she said, but she was smiling at him.

“Call Johnson Black.” He glanced back at the house. “Miz Bowe is going to bed. If you’re planning to stay all night, I hope your car has a heater.”

Inside the house, the lights were going out.

20 

Jake cruised the neighborhood for half an hour before the Times reporter left. He saw her car pulling out of its parking space, followed the taillights until she turned left at the bottom of the hill, eased up to the stop sign, then far enough out into the street to make sure that she’d kept going. When she was out of sight, he touched the speed dial on his cell phone, let it ring once, then turned the car around. Madison came down the side of the house carrying her overnight bag.

“I hate doing this,” Jake said when she got in the car. “This is way more dangerous than stealing that laptop. Maybe we just oughta call the cops.”

“No. If it’s the wrong guy’s DNA in Madison, we’d never find him. And we’d look like morons for pointing the FBI at Goodman. We’d have no credibility left at all—and I don’t have that much now.”

“But hanging you out there . . .”

“I won’t be hanging out. Besides, the car’s a problem that you can’t solve without me.”

“If it weren’t for that . . .”

“Did you bring me the shotgun?”

“Yes.”

“Then drive.”

They got out of Washington in a hurry, stopped at a Wal-Mart and picked up a box of contractor cleanup bags, kitchen gloves, and four infrared game-spotter cameras. From there it was west and south on Interstates 66 and 81, stars out, listening to classic rock on satellite radio, lights sparkling above them on the mountains as they drove down the length of the Shenandoah. As they went past Staunton, Madison said, “We’re getting close?”

“Another half hour.”

They could see the lights of Lexington when they cut right into the mountains, good roads narrowing to twisting black-topped lanes. Jake stopped at a dark place, a hillside looming to their left in the starlight, a deep valley on the right. “This is the trailhead for the park,” he said. “It’s three miles across the hill down to Billy’s place. If they come in navigating with maps, I think it’s about 90 percent that they’ll leave their car here. It’s what I’d do. They’ve got a straight shot across the hill and they’d come down on top of us. If they’re good in the woods, nobody would ever see them.”

“We can’t be locked into this, though,” Madison said. “We’ve got to work out some options.”

“Yeah. They could leave their car along the road, but the problem is, it might attract attention. Might have a cop note the tag number. There’s really no other place to park, and if you put it back in the woods, then it might really attract attention; you’d be trespassing. This parking area, you see a car in there fairly often. We just have to take care that they don’t blindside us.”

“Or send in the Virginia State Police. We don’t want to shoot any policemen.”

“That’s a problem. But they won’t. They won’t want anybody to see the package until they get a look at it first. It’s gonna be Darrell and whoever was with him at Madison.”

“You’re too confident, Jake,” Madison said.

“I know how these guys think,” Jake said. “That’s how they’d do it. That’s how I’d do it.”

“What if they’re already there?”

Jake smiled: “Then we’re toast. But I don’t think they’d start shooting if they saw you. You’d be too hard to explain.”

The question of Darrell Goodman’s arrival was the one that bothered them most: they talked about it, off and on, all the way down to the cabin. If the bug in Madison’s house was monitored often, Jake thought, they’d come in at dawn. If it was monitored less frequently, they might not come until evening, or the next morning.

“If they’re not here by then, we’ll have to pull out,” Jake said. “Danzig will be going public with the package.”

From the parking area to the end of Billy’s driveway was a long loop of narrow blacktop. The driveway began with a nearly invisible indentation in the tree line. Fifty feet in, invisible from the road, was a locked gate and the beginning of a gravel track. “Billy’s is the only place back here,” Jake said. “We’re on his land now.”

“Dark,” Madison said. Then: “What if they have those night-vision things? Darrell was military, he probably could get National Guard equipment.”

“If they can’t see us in the daytime, they can’t see us at night. And if you keep yourself down, they won’t see us.” He got out and opened the gate with his key, drove the truck through, and locked the gate behind them.