“No deal, Wyndham,” Bradshaw said threateningly. At least he’d put his gun away.
“Glade, you can’t expect us to let you go off alone. Be reasonable.” Welker reached into the cupboard for a glass. “And why wait till tomorrow?”
Leah went back to her chair by the fireplace, thoroughly sick of them all. What did he mean—stay cool?
“Okay, I’ll take Leah and Goodyear Harper and go tonight. They’re getting to seem like family anyway.”
“No deal,” Bradshaw said again. “They’re on your side.”
“Goodyear is on Goodyear’s side. Leah never knows what side she’s on.” Glade sat on the arm of her chair. “Do you, Leah?”
She balled her fists, refusing to look at him.
“There, you see?” He laughed and the ice tinkled in his drink. “She’ll be my hostage, to make sure there’s no cross.”
“Who’ll be our hostage?”
“You can keep Cal.”
Leah and Cal looked at each other in astonishment.
“You take Brian and Charlie with you, too. That way everybody’s interests are covered,” Bradshaw said.
“Not in the same car. They follow behind. Leah and I haven’t had a chance for a good talk in days.”
“We’re not that stupid. You’d just lose them.”
“Any car you guys scare up will be well provided with a homing device, anyway.…”
“No deal.”
“Then no papers,” Glade said with flat finality.
“You can’t take Miss Harper,” Welker said. “She’s just out of the hospital.”
“That’s your doing. Her ulcer behaves beautifully when she’s with me. Do you want to go with me, Leah?”
Leah looked around the crowded room.… Joseph Welker had his Harper file, Bradley-Bradshaw had his Charlie. What other little surprises did they have? “I don’t want to stay here.”
Brian appeared at the door. “Joe?”
“Are they in the building?”
“No sign of them anywhere. But I found this downstairs.” He held up a gun.
“I left it there. I lifted it off him this morning.” Glade nodded toward the guard at the drapes. “How many goons were there?”
“We saw two.”
“You’ll find one about ten yards off the balcony to the right under a bush near two boulders about this high. The other one is under a white Ford at the back of the parking lot.” Glade reached down to sweep the Siamese off the floor with one hand. “I didn’t get the license number.”
“How do you know?”
“Because that’s where I left them.”
Welker got back to business. “How long will it take to get the papers?”
“Two, three days.”
“Days!”
“I had ten months to hide them, you know.”
“Then we all start tonight.”
“We don’t all start. Leah and I go alone. Charlie and Brian follow in another car. That’s my last offer. You can meet us at the end of the trip and I’ll deliver.”
“Meet you where?”
“I’ll call you here and let you know when we’re halfway there.”
“How stupid do you expect us to be?” Pete Bradshaw unbuttoned his shirt. Now he looked like Peter Bradley once more.
Brian and Charlie came in wearing identical expressions. “What are we going to do with two stiffs, Joe?” Brian asked quietly.
Welker turned to Glade. “You killed them?”
Leah drew in her breath, felt blood rushing hot to her face.
“That was for Sheila, whoever she was.” Glade walked to the sink to refill his scotch while everyone in the room stared at him.
“See what happens,” Welker said to Bradshaw, finally breaking the long silence, “when you turn these creeps loose in the U.S.?”
“Good point, Joe, good point.” Glade raised his glass to Charlie and his voice turned low and silky, “What are we going to do about Leah’s little ride under the helicopter, I wonder?”
Charlie’s grin looked stuck.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Leah wore her blue jeans again. She sat in the front seat of the white Ford that had been sitting at the back of the parking lot with a body under it.
Glade Wyndham and Joseph Welker argued in low voices outside.
She rolled down her window and gulped at the freshness of night. She was tired but it felt good to be out of that stuffy crowded apartment. The bargaining had gone on forever. Welker had been loath to let Leah go. It must be after midnight.
Both backpacks sat propped against the backseat. Where was he taking her now? Why? And he’d murdered again … just when she’d begun to think he was more to her than a Jason or.…
Glade slid in beside her. Welker handed an envelope in through the door. “The rest when you deliver. And I’d better get that call or we’ll turn every cop in the state out to find you.”
“Don’t forget the cat.” Julie dumped Goodyear onto Glade’s lap. He crawled to the seat between them and eyed Leah without love.
Glade started the engine and drove out of the parking lot onto the service road. Car lights flared across them from behind like searchlights as Brian and Charlie turned to follow.
“What am I doing here? You don’t need me.” The lump in her throat was threatening to outdo the pain in her stomach.
“Well, I couldn’t leave you with them, Leah. After what they’d already done to you. Use your head.”
“I suppose I’m safer with you?”
“I hope so. But there were at least four men in that car that took off and left Sheila in a Volkswagen about to explode.” He handed her the envelope. It was filled with crisp bills.
“So you can be bought.”
“That’s to pay you back for the money I borrowed from your wallet this morning while you were in the bathroom.”
Leah put the envelope in her purse and took out a Kleenex. “What did you do?” she whispered. “Sneak up behind those men and stick a knife in their backs? Or crush their heads with rocks or put a silencer on that gun and—”
“Do you really want to know?” The deadly tone he’d used at Pair-O-Dice Cabins.
She turned away so that she couldn’t see the look that went with that tone. “No.”
They rode in strained silence, except for Leah’s little sniffs as she tried to stop weary tears. The service road came to the highway, the car still alight with the headlights close behind. Glade turned toward Steamboat Springs.
“Killing is wrong.” She stared straight ahead and saw nothing.
“Will you stop sniveling!” The car braked abruptly and Goodyear, who had been leaning over to sniff the radio dials on the dash, tumbled to the floor. “Getting killed isn’t all that fun either. Ask Sheila.”
Just as Goodyear began his leap back to the seat, Glade accelerated and the cat was back on the floor. Leah picked him up.
“Let’s stop arguing.” He glanced into the mirror on the windshield and pressed the gas pedal again. “We’re upsetting the cat.”
“Upsetting the cat! What do you think I am? A little over two weeks ago I found my mother dead in her own blood. I came to Colorado to make a new start and I get beaten and tied to a bed, drug all over the great out-of-doors for days on end, hung from a helicopter and dunked in a frigid lake, have my entire life drug up and put in a file, my family harassed clear back in Chicago, end up in a hospital, and let’s not upset the cat?”
Leah struck Glade on the side of the head.
The white Ford swerved into the other lane. The oncoming headlights blurred together as both cars screeched brakes. They missed each other by a breathless half inch and the white Ford swerved back onto its side of the road slowing so suddenly that the car behind braked with an answering screech.
Leah didn’t know whether to cry or to shake. Finally, she did both and saw the night lights of Steamboat Springs’ main thoroughfare through a mist.
“You know,” Glade said thoughtfully
, “if you’d come loose like that more often, your ulcer might not bother you so much.” And he began to laugh, that rich, full laugh that Leah would hear in her dreams till the day she died.
She swung out again with such force that the Siamese flew into the back seat to escape the fracas. But Glade was ready for her and caught her wrist. Laughing harder, he turned the Ford around a corner so abruptly that Leah fell against him.
They were on a side street. Glade checked the rear-view mirror and swerved onto another street and she was thrown against the door.
They crossed the main thoroughfare again.
“What are you doing? Are you crazy?” Leah was thrown back against her tormentor. “Stop!” The car swerved and she was back on the door. “Glade!” The car slowed, turned another corner, speeded up.…
Leah closed her eyes. Glade was still laughing. She couldn’t look at him or share his excitement. Goodyear landed suddenly on her shoulder, clinging with every toe-nail he owned.
The white Ford stopped. Leah opened her eyes.
“Grab the cat and your purse. I’ll get the packs,” he ordered.
The overhead light came on as he opened his door, went out as he slammed it, came on again as he opened her door.
Leah stepped out on shaking legs, surprised to find her purse in her hand and the Siamese under her arm. “I am at the end of my rope, mentally, physically, emotionally.…” She found herself pushed down behind a smelly garbage can in an alley. “Not that you’d understand the emotionally and—”
“Be quiet, will you?”
“And I can’t go traipsing after you up some mountain.”
He patted the top of her head. “From here on in, you can ride all the way.”
“But we’re leaving the car—”
“I know. Come on, this way.” He took off at a run between two houses.
Somewhere a dog barked and then another. Goodyear hissed and tried to swivel out of her hold. “Wait. The cat.…” Leah slung her purse onto her shoulder by its strap and used both hands to subdue the animal.
They crossed another street and ran between houses again.
“Why do we need the packs if we’re not walking?”
“You’ll see.” He raced ahead of her to the next street and up a dark sidewalk, stopping beside a pickup truck that even in the night shadow looked ready for the crusher. Unlocking the door in the small camper shell on the back, he threw the packs inside and then pushed Leah into the cab.
“Are we stealing trucks now?”
“No.” The entire cab shook when he’d finally coaxed the engine to start. “I bought it today with your money.”
A darkened Enveco heron hovered on one leg above a gas station closed for the night. If it hadn’t been for the corner streetlight she wouldn’t have noticed it at all. It brought back the memory of a yellow Volkswagen exploding in an innocent mountain meadow. “Do all big companies hire goons?”
“No, these guys are probably just for hire by anyone for specific jobs.”
“Like the advertisers,” Leah thought.
YAMPA RIVER, a sign said as they crossed a bridge, and the truck was soon on a highway heading west and leaving Steamboat Springs behind.
“I take it you’re not going through with the deal, after all.” Leah had to shout over the tortured rumble of the old truck. “That’s something.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Why else go to all the trouble to lose Charlie and Brian?”
“I don’t like them. Try to catch some sleep while you can.” Goodyear slept curled between them. But Leah couldn’t manage it. The man next to her was too tense. His very stiffness screamed warning.
“We’re not out of danger, are we?”
“No, we’re not.” His head kept turning from the road ahead to the little round mirror outside his window.
Night pressed in on the truck. Clouds hid most of the stars. The air around Leah exuded oil and dirt and uneasiness.
“If we’re not going to get the papers, where are we going?” Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they were heading for an airport and a plane that would take them to some luxurious hideout in Hawaii or.…
“But we are going to get the papers, Leah.”
“This is the direction they expect you to go. Welker’s been following you on a map with a line moving west across Colorado.”
“Everybody is about two bites from our tail.” They slowed. A car passed from behind. “They have been for quite a while.”
They crossed the Yampa River again. She couldn’t see it in the dark but she heard it briefly as they passed over the bridge. It sounded angry.
“Are those papers worth all this? Are they? I mean, swindles are getting to be a way of life. Are you trying to be some kind of hero?” Leah pushed away the sudden image of the two women passing her so quickly as she screamed about her mother on the front steps in Chicago.
“I’ll be unsung, dead or alive. Does that make you happy?”
Some miles later a town appeared. CRAIG, the sign read.
“Breakfast time.” He pulled the rattling truck over. It was an all-night truck stop. Semis bordered the street on either side.
The Dr. Pepper clock above the coffeepots said it was a quarter of two in the morning. A sign on the cash register informed them, OUR CREDIT MANAGER IS HELEN WAIT. IF YOU WANT CREDIT, GO TO HELL’N WAIT.
A short man in a khaki jacket and a welcoming smile bustled up to them. “Hey, buddy, what’s up? You’re late. I been in and out of this place three times,” he said to Glade and then turned to Leah. “So this is the chick I outfitted for you, huh?”
Glade scanned the room nervously. “Ben.…”
“You guys aren’t just in from the trail. You smell too good.” Ben seemed almost to bounce with energy or excitement. “Hey, am I finally going to get in on the action?”
“More than you’ll like if you don’t keep your voice down. Leah, this is Ben.”
“Ah, the man with the exquisite bachelor’s pad. I think I have your boots somewhere.”
Glade nudged Leah into a corner booth. “Order me something big with eggs in it.” He slipped an arm around the considerable breadth of his friend’s shoulders and hustled him down a narrow hall to the men’s room.
The waitress curled her lip when Leah asked for her poached-egg-on-milk-toast. A Coors Beer sign blinked faulty neon in the window. A heavy man, looking wrinkled and No-Dozed, belched on his stool at the counter, picked up a tall thermos, and walked to the cash register.
Smoke hung in a spaced-out cloud just below the lights in the ceiling. The smell of bacon grease, beer, and cigarettes mingled unpleasantly.
Leah was wondering if she should have ordered for Ben, when he emerged from the hall, looking subdued. He left the diner without even glancing at her.
Glade leaned against a wall in the narrow hall, a phone to his ear, his denim jacket two shades darker than the tight bleached-out jeans. His shoulders blocked the hall, his expression and stance were rigid with that intensity he wore like clothing when his problem gripped him. For an instant Leah wanted him with an intensity of her own. She inhaled stagnant air and looked away.
When Leah looked back to the hall, Glade was disappearing into the men’s room at the back of it. When he emerged he made another call.
They ate quickly. The blood from his rare steak mingled with egg yolk and grease from the hash-brown potatoes that automatically came with eggs in Colorado.
“Who’d you call?”
“Welker. Always keep my promises.” He dipped toast into the mess on his plate.
Leah swallowed and looked elsewhere. “So you’re going to deal.”
“He’s got my brother. But he’s very unhappy about our losing our companions.”
“Ben left.”
“Yeah.” He stared her down over the rim of his coffee cup, daring her to ask about Ben. His knees pressed painfully against hers under the table.
“If we’re not running off, why are you
taking me?”
“I might need your help. If I have to have somebody at my back, you’re still the best bet I could come up with at short notice.”
“I’m no help in dangerous situations and you know it. I can’t—”
“What is it with you?” he snapped. “It’s always I can’t. You don’t know what you can do till you have to. I’ve been out of the country a lot, but the word liberation means revolution. So I was curious.…”
He mopped up the last of the yuk on his plate with the last of his toast. “When I got back to the States, I expected something new. But I got, instead, ‘Glade, I’m tired.’ ‘Glade, I’m scared,’ ‘Glade, I can’t’” He smiled and Leah knew he was waiting for a slap or a kick, bracing for a challenge he could easily overpower and that he might well have gotten.
But the door opened just then and two men entered. Leah froze halfway between a grimace of protest and a false smile. One of the men was pasty-faced, the other dark. Both looked tired and sour. But they noticed Leah and then Glade while trying not to apppear to notice anyone. They couldn’t quite hide their surprise. Neither was a truckdriver, nor a lineman, nor a cowboy coming in the wee hours to sober up on diner coffee.
“That’s interesting. If you’re done, I think we’d better go. But leisurely, naturally,” Leah said.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Glade Wyndham had picked up his cue without hesitation, wrapped the fat and bone of his steak in a napkin, finished his coffee over quiet small talk, and signaled for the check.
Goodyear roused for a steak breakfast as Glade pulled the truck out into the street. “Okay, what spooked you? I saw them when I paid the bill.”
“They didn’t fit. Any more than Welker and aides fit in Steamboat Springs. Any more than you do. CIA agents are supposed to be medium height and unnoticeable. You can be spotted a mile away. And you were, Glade, just now. So was I.”
“I was hired as deep cover. Nobody intended I branch out. What about them? What was it exactly about—”
“Intuition.”
“Oh, Jesus!” But he checked the outside mirror.
“Listen, pig, I’ve lived in cities all my life. And there are some people you work hard to avoid and you pretend not to notice.”
Willing Hostage Page 18
