'Yeah, look after Marianne.'
Marianne had her say. 'Please be careful, Joe. And bring Bradley safely back to me.'
'I will,' I promised and pressed the button to end the call.
Then I stabbed in the number that Marianne had narrated.
The ringtone came back at me. And kept on coming.
Deciding I was a little premature in ringing Bradley, I got out of the car and stretched my limbs. From where I was standing I could see the beginning of the Jorgenson estate. The wall that encompassed the landward side of the grounds was a smudge on the horizon. Beyond it I could just make out a hint of the first of the family homes beyond it. A steepled roof with turrets at each corner. But the heat haze was building, so the turrets could simply have been a play of the shifting light.
Quite a large number of tourists were about now. Some had brought blankets. Some had fishing poles and were wandering across the sand dunes that swayed with saw-tooth grass, heading towards the inlet. Others came armed with binoculars, and I thought that there was an inordinate number of ornithologists unless some pretty special birds lived hereabouts. A noisy group of college-aged guys played volleyball on a stretch of open sand. Some of them had bottles of beer in their hands and were posturing for the young women who watched them from their beach towels. I had no beer; I'd brought mineral water with me and I slaked my thirst directly from the bottle.
I should have thought to ask Marianne how far away Bradley's motel was. It would have given me a clearer idea of how long he would be on the road. I didn't even know which direction he'd be coming from. When they'd taken off last night, Seagram had driven north. But the motel could have been in any direction. My plan was to cut him off before he arrived back at the estate and take him back to Marianne. Then the problem posed by Dantalion's apparent survival could be dealt with without the encumbrance of someone I had to protect along for the ride. With that in mind, my obvious recourse would be to park up next to the main entrance gate, but that would likely bring the police down on me in seconds. They'd have been there all night, and there would be more coming and going throughout all of this day, and perhaps many more to come. A strange vehicle with a gun-toting driver would raise the eyebrow of any cop worth his salt.
I decided to wait where I was.
I had a good view of the road, and would recognise the silver sedan Bradley and Seagram had taken off in the night before. If by chance I didn't see them, I'd ring the number for his office on each quarter-hour. I hoped to have made contact by mid-morning at the latest.
While I waited I watched the traffic heading south. I didn't bother with those coming towards me, as none of them would have Bradley on board. Streams of vehicles drove by, some stopped at the layover, but none was a silver Lincoln. I tried Bradley's number. No answer. A quarter-hour and about two hundred vehicles later, and I tried it again. Still no answer.
I wondered if Seagram was clever enough to ditch the sedan and bring Bradley home in a less conspicuous vehicle. Something like an older model station wagon or the black truck with tinted windows I watched sail past. But then I recalled his panic from last night and decided he wasn't fully suited to his chosen career. He would drive the sedan back, because that was what bodyguards drove when they had an important passenger.
Trying the number again, someone picked up. A female voice. Officious. Cop, I thought, and hung up quickly.
It didn't surprise me that the police were in Bradley's office. They'd be trying to make sense of the mayhem that had gone down at two of Bradley Jorgenson's homes, plus that of his cousin Petre, and would quickly tie the family business dealings to the attempts made on their lives. Police officers would be going through the records in Bradley's office in an attempt at identifying who had attacked the houses.
I regretted standing outside the gate when we first arrived, challenging security by shouting angrily at the CCTV camera. The cops would likely be reviewing those recordings right now. Two angry guys demanding entrance, obviously armed and pissed off, would be immediate suspects. Rink's image and mine would be flashing across country to the FBI VICAP HQ at Quantico to try to identify us from their store of mugshots. Not that they'd find us there, but someone with a bit of savvy might think to interrogate military records, and that would finally give us up.
Hindsight's a wonderful thing.
33
The wooden chest in the dead man's living room disgorged its secrets.
It would have been nice to have discovered a cache of weapons but what he found instead were the makings of a disguise that could get him close to Bradley Jorgenson. Each item he lifted out was folded neatly, preserved within layers of tissue paper the way some couples preserved their wedding suits and dresses. Not that the man he'd killed in his bed ever appeared to have been married. Not to a woman at any rate. But he had been married to his career. The love and care with which he'd saved his uniform indicated that. As did the proliferation of photographs that showed him standing alone, or with groups of colleagues, proudly grinning towards the camera.
Dantalion wondered where things had gone wrong for the dead man. Perhaps he'd been injured, or had become sick, or merely grown jaded with the day-to-day, but he seemed to have taken early retirement from his career. He guessed that the man must have left on good terms, otherwise he might have destroyed his uniform in protest.
The uniform was complete. Even down to belts and equipment.
The only things missing were the tools of his office, but Dantalion believed a more thorough search would turn them up.
The trousers might present a problem, the man being shorter in the leg than Dantalion, but he saw a way round that. The shirts might be a little large, but he only had to fool Jorgenson long enough to take him out and then he wouldn't be concerned by how many people saw through the disguise.
First, though, he had to get out of his wet clothes. Take a shower. He had no hydrocortisone cream with him to salve his itching skin, but he hoped the dead man would have moisturising lotions of some kind in his bathroom. And he didn't know of a farm that didn't possess a rudimentary first-aid kit. Or weapons, he reminded himself. There were always guns on a farm.
He had a tepid shower. Not hot, his skin was too raw. Then he dried off with the softest towel he could find. He dabbed body lotion over the exposed areas of skin on his face and hands, but decided that the rest of his body would be fine as long as he kept covered up and away from direct sunlight. He found antiseptic cream in the same bathroom cupboard and cleaned his bullet wounds. The wounds on his arm and cheek were inconsequential. However, the one on his leg was particularly angry-looking, the flesh at the edges red and swollen like collagen- plump lips. He wondered briefly about the effects the infection could be having on his system. But he discarded the notion. Mind over matter.
Then he set to his hair with a pair of scissors, trimming the long strands into a crew cut. His hair was sparse and tufted in places, and he'd never survive a thorough inspection, but with the hat in place the haircut would suffice.
With the same scissors, he unpicked the hems on the trouser legs, letting them down a full inch. Not too bad, he thought, but tucked them into the tops of his boots all the same. With the shirt on, he folded the back over twice and tucked it into the waistband of his trousers, cinched it in place with a thin leather belt. On went a clip-on tie. The collar sagged a little, and he looked like someone who'd been on a drastic diet and hadn't gotten round to replacing his wardrobe yet, but over all he didn't look too bad. He pulled on the jacket and adjusted the wide- brimmed hat to a jaunty angle, admiring himself in a mirror on the bathroom wall. The mark on his jaw was only a graze, not that noticeable if he kept his chin tucked down.
He found a utility closet. Cleaning fluids and brushes and rags were stacked in boxes. On a shelf at head height he found a strong box. Next to it a key. When he popped the lock he found what he'd been looking for.
The gun was a Taurus 85, a five-shot revolver. One of the.38 calibre specials worn by some law enforcement officers as a back-up weapon. There were two rapid loaders filled with standard.38 bullets. This time he wouldn't be conducting a full-on assault on the Jorgenson estate, so ten rounds would be sufficient.
