He kept his right hand pressed against the knife wound.
In the rearview mirror, he checked his face.
It wasn’t pretty.
He didn’t care.
Suddenly a thought came to him.
The gun-where was it?
The knife was there, on the floorboard to the right, but the gun wasn’t visible.
He twisted to see if it was on the back seat.
It wasn’t.
Damn it.
He pulled to the side, left the engine running with the clutch in neutral, and searched under the seat. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t anywhere.
It was gone.
It must have flown out the window during a roll. If he went back he might be able to find it, but then again- maybe not.
What to do?
He was weak.
The sane thing to do was to abort before he ended up dead. He kept the front end pointed south with his foot on the pedal. There were no other cars. He was alone in the universe.
Five minutes passed.
The knife wound was losing its pain, receding more into a dull throb.
He checked the rearview mirror and saw something he didn’t expect.
A car was back there, a quarter mile or so, too far to see how many people were inside or if they were male or female.
It wasn’t closing.
It wasn’t dropping back.
It was a perfect shadow.
River watched it for a number of heartbeats, then took his foot off the pedal, coasted to the side of the road and stopped. He picked the knife off the floorboard, secured it behind his back under his belt and stepped out.
The sky spun.
He leaned against the vehicle to keep from falling.
A drop of blood dripped into his eye.
82
Wilde stood up and pulled London to her feet, then put his arms around her. “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me what it is that’s not pretty.” London squeezed him and looked up into his eyes for a heartbeat before pulling away.
“I wish I hadn’t done it,” she said. “Believe me when I say that.”
“Done what?”
She slumped onto the bed next to the suitcase.
“Me and Crockett were partners in the Mexican deal,” she said. “It was actually my idea, not his. I was the one who approached him, not the opposite. The deal was simple. He bankrolled all my trips down there over the years. He greased the skids so that I could be away from the law firm for months at a time without getting fired. He was also in the wings to help me if I got caught or ended up in jail or something like that. In return, if it turned out that I actually did come across something of value, we’d split it fifty-fifty. On my last trip down there, I came across the map. You already know about that part.”
The cigarette was down to Wilde’s fingertips.
“Hold on.”
He stepped into the bathroom and threw the butt in the toilet after lighting a new one from it.
He blew fresh smoke.
“You said he hired the guy who tried to kill you last night.”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
London exhaled.
“Okay, when I got back from Mexico, I didn’t tell him about the map-not at first,” she said. “I pretended like nothing out of the ordinary happened.”
Wilde wrinkled his face.
“So you double-crossed him.”
“No,” London said. “Well, yes, but only at first. He could tell I was lying and kept pressuring me to find out what I was hiding. Then someone broke into my house.”
“Him?”
London shrugged.
“Maybe but I don’t think so,” she said. “I think it was some third party.”
“Who?”
“I don’t have a clue,” she said. “Anyway, I was scared at that point. I came to you for protection.”
Wilde nodded.
“Right, I know.”
Her eyes held his briefly then flicked away. “I wasn’t completely honest with you though,” she said. “I gave you a map to hold. It wasn’t the original one. It was a decoy.”
“What are you saying, that it was a copy?”
“It wasn’t even a copy,” she said. “It was just something I made up.”
“So it doesn’t show the location of a treasure?”
London shook her head.
“No, it’s just a worthless piece of paper,” she said.
Wilde tilted his head.
“So where’s the original?”
“I have it,” London said. “It’s somewhere safe.”
“Where?”
“That’s something I can’t tell you,” she said. “Here’s the thing-at the same time I was going to you for protection, Crockett was putting more and more pressure on me. I decided to do the same thing with him that I did with you, namely give him a false map.”
“Did he think it was real?”
She nodded.
“Yes, the same as you.”
“So you double-crossed him at that point.”
Her breath shortened.
“I’m not proud of it,” she said. “But I was the one taking all the chances. I was the one with my ass in the dirt. I was the one who figured out where to look.” A beat then, “I was going to pay him back in the end, everything he invested-tenfold. The only thing I didn’t want to do was to cut him in for a full fifty percent. He hadn’t earned
