her, shaking her hand.
She went through the metal detector okay, but the security personnel decided to search her handbag. Probably thought they saw a nail clipper in there.
“Think they’ll send someone to Europe after her?” I said, referring to the hit men.
“Not a chance in a thousand,” Grafton said. “Don’t worry about it.”
The security guard finished stirring through Dorsey’s purse and returned it to her. She picked up her carry-on bag and joined the throng going down the concourse. She didn’t look back.
“Let’s get out of here,” Jake Grafton said, turning away.
As we walked I told him, “On the way over here I thought someone followed me from Dorsey’s, then they turned off.”
He walked on, didn’t say anything.
“Maybe I’m being an idiot.”
That’s when Grafton spoke. “If they’re any good they have three or four cars on you. No one follows along as if he’s on a leash.”
“If they were watching Dorsey’s place, they may be on me.”
“The bodies were gone from Dorsey’s?”
“Whoever took them away did a pretty good job cleaning up,” I told the admiral. “No visible blood inside and just traces on the lawn, which will wash away in the next rain shower.”
Grafton gave me his cell number and the telephone number at the beach house. I wrote them on my left hand. “We’ll go separately,” he added. “Don’t go to the beach house unless you are absolutely sure you are not being followed.”
As we rode up in the parking garage elevator, I asked, “What do you think, Admiral?” Perhaps I wanted some reassurance. If so, I didn’t get it.
“I think you and Kelly are in a hell of a tight spot,” Jake Grafton said, then got off the elevator on the fourth floor. The guy sugarcoats everything.
Up on the roof I stepped out of the elevator and hiked a foot up on the nearest trash can. While I worked on my shoelace I scanned the scene, looking for … I wasn’t sure what. People were getting into and out of cars, walking toward the elevator carrying and pulling luggage; several cars were cruising around looking for spaces near the elevator, even though the entire back row of the area was empty.
I plopped my foot down and headed for my car, trying to hike along as if I hadn’t a care in the world except crabgrass in the lawn.
It’s just that I had this itch between my shoulders, one I couldn’t reach to scratch. Maybe it was nothing, but it was there, this feeling that things were going badly wrong and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I wanted to shout, “I don’t know anything! Erlanger doesn’t know anything! Leave us alone.”
Leave us alone — isn’t that the prayer that defines our age? We ask it of the government, the people with causes, the addicted, the crazy, and the starving and oppressed in all those third-world sewers. Leave us alone! Let us live our comfortable little lives without your burdens. Please.
That’s the prayer, and no one ever listens.
I didn’t see Grafton’s car — I wasn’t really looking. I was trying to figure out if anyone was following me. Crazy how your mind works — it seemed as if everyone was following, everyone was looking at me, everyone was going where I wanted to go. When I changed lanes, the car behind me did, too. The guy or gal in front drifted over into the right lane for the off-ramp to Annapolis and the Bay Bridge.
Paranoid. I was paranoid. Relax, I told myself. Drive safely and normally and relax, for Christ’s sake.
So I was doing just that, motoring along at the speed limit like the good citizen I will never be, when a police cruiser changed lanes to get behind me. I glanced at him in the rearview mirror and saw that he was using his handheld mike.
Oh, great!
I checked the other mirrors, looked at the terrain, thought about flooring the accelerator to try to outrun the guy. In this heap?
After a minute and a half the dome light of the cruiser illuminated and began flashing. I drove for another twenty seconds or so, then put on the blinker and began slowing. I pulled off the road, stopped, put the car in park, and lowered the driver’s window.
I watched the cop walk toward me in the driver’s side window. Mid- to late twenties, cool wraparound shades, a buzz cut, wearing a bulletproof vest under his uniform shirt. I’d opened my mouth to ask him what the problem was when he drew his service pistol and said loudly, “Out of the car, slow and easy, hands where I can see them.”
“Officer, what—“
“Out! Now!”
I took my left hand off the wheel, unlatched the door. He backed off just enough to let me open it. I did so, then got out.
He had the pistol leveled in a two-handed combat stance. “Take two steps toward the front of the car, turn toward the hood, and put your hands on it. Now!”
This guy was spring-loaded to shoot. Since I had no choice, I did as he said. “What’s this all about, officer?”
“The computer says your car is stolen, sir. Please cooperate and we’ll get this all straightened out.”
He got too close and I could have knocked the pistol away and decked him, but I didn’t. Ten seconds later, when he kicked my feet aft and deftly pulled the automatic from behind my belt, I wished I had. My opportunity was gone by then, of course.
“On the ground. Lie on your face.”
If he got those cuffs on me, I was dead meat, with a life expectancy that could be measured in hours. The heck of it was I didn’t want to hurt or kill him.
As he snapped one of the cuffs around my left wrist, I rolled hard into him. He fell, grunted as he hit the ground.
I was all over him, fighting him for the pistol, which I knocked out of his hand. It went skidding under the car. He was young, strong, and desperate, probably sure I was going to kill him. All those years of rock climbing and working out had given me tremendous strength in the upper body, and believe me, I needed it then. We rolled around on the ground, grunting and cursing, each of us trying to subdue the other as traffic roared by on the interstate.
There was no way around it — at the first opportunity I popped him in the jaw as hard as I could hit. Stunned, semiconscious, he relaxed, and I leaped up.
The radio was squawking, something about backup help being minutes away. My young fool hadn’t waited; if I had been a killer he would more than likely be dead. He didn’t know that, though, and probably never would.
I couldn’t leave him lying beside the road to be run over, so I picked him up bodily and tossed him in the back seat of the cruiser. I threw his pistol in with him and retrieved mine from where he dropped it. Then I grabbed the key from the ignition and threw it as far as I could. I was sprinting for my car when two unmarked sedans skidded to a halt, one behind the cruiser and one in front of my heap. The drivers and passengers came boiling out of the cars. There were four of them in civilian clothes, and they came on a dead run with drawn weapons.
“Freeze!” the man in front roared, his weapon leveled at my belt buckle.
It wasn’t as if I had a lot of options. I lifted my hands. One of the men dashed in and snapped the dangling cuff around my other wrist, then two of them hustled me into their car. Behind me I heard a shot.
One of them got behind the wheel, and the other jumped into the passenger seat. In seconds we were rolling.
“You fucking assholes!” I roared. “For the love of fucking Christ! You people didn’t have to shoot that cop!”
The guy in the passenger seat turned and slapped me in the face with his pistol, which threw me sideways and stunned me.
When I managed to get back to a sitting position, he stuck his pistol in my face and snarled, “I want the address where Kelly Erlanger is hiding, and I want it now.”
“Or what? You’ll kill me like you did that cop? Stick it up your ass!
