They went away and discussed it animatedly. Finally they returned. “Yes,” Jarrett said. “He’s sick, having severe nightmares, and we think he has amnesia. We don’t think jail is the place for him. I have to go to work on Monday, but Linda could stay here with him if necessary.”
“I’ve got some office supplies in the trunk,” the sheriff said. “Seem to remember an ink pad in that bag.” He made no move to open the trunk but stood smoking. When he finished the weed, he dropped it and ground it out beneath his shoe. “This guy seems pretty harmless. Let’s hope he is.”
When I got back from Wal-Mart that afternoon, I did some sit-ups and push-ups to get the kinks out, then went for a run. I stood on the dune looking until I saw the women — they seemed deep in conversation — then I ran the other way along the beach.
That night I fixed steaks and potatoes for dinner on the charcoal grill that sat beside the house in the small yard. While the food was cooking I made a salad. I had even remembered to buy a six-pack on my shopping expedition, so we washed our meal down with beer.
The women didn’t have much to say that night. Kelly dove back into the Goncharov treasure and Dorsey selected a book from the shelves. She read on it a while, then put it back on the shelf and went upstairs. I heard the shower running, then nothing. I figured she went to bed.
I sat on the screened-in porch and thought about the last two days. Bullets, blood, fire, murder … it was like we were in the middle of a war.
Me, I was just a thief who liked breaking into places I wasn’t supposed to be. The agency kept me busy cracking safes, planting bugs, photographing documents in private offices, and the like. All in all, it wasn’t a bad job — I got paid adequately and regularly, although I wasn’t getting rich, and presumably someday I would retire on a comfortable pension if someone didn’t shoot me or I didn’t open a booby-trapped filing cabinet. Or a rope didn’t break while I climbed the side of a building. Or I didn’t get thrown into some third-world dungeon to rot. Or I didn’t pick up a fatal intestinal parasite somewhere or other. Or these hired killers who were chasing me and Kelly — and now Dorsey— didn’t catch me.
What was there to worry about?
Truth be told, I thought about quitting the government off and on for years. Tell the CIA to shove it and go out on my own, burglary for fun and profit. Then I would think about guys I had known, guys like Sal Pulzelli, who didn’t live to retire, and I would think, what the heck, I’ll hang in there. Keep on keeping on. So I’d been hanging in, keeping on. Now Sal was dead and Willie carved up and..
I knew exactly how Dorsey felt.
Why me?
There were some blankets neatly folded on a chair in the living room, so I carried them out to the covered porch and bedded down on a couch. Kelly was still curled up reading.
It must have been about midnight when I awoke to find a woman crawling under the blankets with me. At first I thought it was Dorsey, but it wasn’t. It was Kelly. She was wearing cotton pajamas and she wasn’t interested in anything but sleeping. She snuggled up against me and promptly dropped off.
I wrapped an arm around her and went back to sleep myself.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
When I awoke Thursday morning I found myself alone on the couch with the breeze whipping through the screens. I opened an eye, looked out. The day was here, but the sun had not yet risen. Or maybe it had. There were a lot of clouds up there.
I heaved myself out, put on shorts and my tennis shoes, and went outside. No one sitting in cars, no one peering out a window. Only a few folks out and about at this hour, joggers and dog walkers. I trotted down the street and thundered over the boardwalk across the dune. Birds probed the surf runout, and a garbage truck with balloon tires drove along emptying trash barrels. Here and there people combed the beach for treasures that might have washed up during the night. There was more trash than treasures. Amazing how many plastic milk jugs find their way into the ocean, to drift for months until they wash up somewhere.
I puffed along watching the gulls and the solid gray clouds racing overhead. On the way back I stopped running and walked to cool down.
So what was next? Where should I go from here?
The only leads I had were the contents of the wallets and cell phones I had taken from the dead and injured thugs. Of necessity, the trail must start with those since there was nowhere else.
Should I leave the women here and hunt these people alone?
The women seemed to be sleeping when I got back, so I got a pot of coffee going and went out for doughnuts and a copy of every newspaper sold in this town. When I returned to the house thirty minutes later, I took a quick shower, then settled at the kitchen table drinking coffee, munching doughnuts, and scanning the papers. I could not find a single word about the massacre in West Virginia or the shootings yesterday in Washington. Nada.
I was on my second cup of coffee when Kelly came downstairs. She was dressed in shorts and one of my T- shirts. She poured herself coffee, snagged a doughnut, and sat down beside me to look at the paper.
“Good morning,” I ventured.
She grunted. Well, some women are like that B.C. Before Coffee.
I decided I wasn’t going to mention sharing the couch until she did.
“There’s nothing in here on the shootings yesterday,” she said when she finished with the Washington Post. She put that paper down and picked up the next one.
“I didn’t see anything,” I agreed.
“So it didn’t happen?”
“Apparently.”
When she had scanned the lot, she helped herself to more coffee. She took her time examining the doughnut possibilities before selecting her second victim.
“I’ve read about two-thirds of the files,” she said, “scanned them, anyway. Every one is on political double- crosses and murders and hounding dissidents and faking evidence for show trials of state enemies. The names are coded, but as near as I can tell, every person mentioned is a Soviet citizen or a prominent American or British traitor. I just can’t see anything there that would make anyone in Europe or America feel threatened.”
“Were all the files Goncharov copied about Soviet internal matters?”
“My understanding was that only some of them were. Apparently the only surviving files are on KGB dirty tricks.”
I finished my coffee and frowned into the cup. Put it on top of the newspapers and stretched.
“Can you finish the rest of the files today?”
“I think so.”
I took the magazine from the automatic and checked that the column of shells was full, then pushed it back in place.
“Where do we go from here?” Kelly asked. She was leaning against the counter, watching my face.
“I’ve got a couple wallets and cell phones.”
“What does it mean that none of this mess made the newspapers?”
I eyed her. She wasn’t innocent, naive, or ignorant. Or scared. She was smart and tough. And pretty decent looking. She had been a nice armful last night, but I suppose I shouldn’t be thinking things like that.
“It means that some really big weenie is keeping it out,” I said sourly. “That’s why the cops were cooperating with the killers. We are up to our eyes in a very large pile of shit.”
“I figured that out Tuesday.”
“We’re going to have to be very careful if we hope to keep breathing. No telephone calls, no e-mails, no nothing. We make the slightest noise, they’ll be after us like hounds after a rabbit. What we have to do is figure out who the hounds are.”
I broke the antennas off the two cell phones, then turned them on neither had voice messages queued up,
