“I thought maybe …”
“You thought wrong.”
Cory slid from the stool. He had his hand on the first of the two outside doors when the counterman called to him. “Come here.”
“What?”
The man behind the counter reached under a clear plexiglass bowl and took out two sugar-coated doughnuts which he wrapped in a napkin. “Here.” He thrust them toward Cory. “They’re yesterday’s anyway. Now, get out!”
Cory took the pastry. “Thanks.”
“And don’t come back.”
Cory walked into the parking lot and munched the first of the doughnuts. People were unpredictable, he thought. It almost made him sorry for stealing the fifty-cent tip money from the vacant seat at his side.
The middle-class baggage that so encumbered him forced a slow burn of embarrassment. How many hundreds of years ago had it been when he flipped business cards at people to establish his worth and identity? How many decades ago had it been when he had a pocketful of credit cards that could buy the most expensive meal in the finest restaurant?
He entered a lighted phone booth by the side of the highway and finished eating the last of the doughnuts. He dropped one of the precious stolen quarters in the slot and dialed.
The phone was answered on the fifth ring. “Clock and Chime, Fred speaking.”
“Let me speak to Ginny.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line, and then a casual but obviously suspicious reply. “Who’s calling?”
“Her ex-husband.”
Relief in the voice. “Okay, sure. I’ll get her. Hold on.”
Cory held the receiver in clammy palms. He hated to call this ingenuous woman, but she seemed the only option. He heard a clatter on the line as the phone was picked up.
“That you, Williams?”
“I …” He knew the voice. Detective Wilton James was on the phone. They had checked his visitors to the jail and turned up Ginny’s name. When he escaped they had followed her, tapped her phone, and placed her under constant surveillance.
“Come on in, Cory.” The voice was nearly hypnotic. “Tell me where you are, and we’ll come for you. Where are you, Cory?”
Cory hung up. The phone booth was located at the junction of two secondary highways, and the roads were not lit by street lamps. An occasional vehicle passed, its lights dappling against his legs and casting forward his elongated shadow. He walked on and clutched the remaining quarter in his hand.
Ginny would be watched. She would be followed, and her phone would be tapped. He had no doubt that the same surveillance would be made on his defense attorney, his brother, and God only knows who else of his acquaintance. They would watch every available connection. They would check every known haunt. He dropped the remaining coin in a still-damp pocket and walked on. His weapons were few.
He hid in a small park until he judged it was past midnight. He found another phone booth, in a small shopping center a mile down the road.
He dialed Ginny’s number. She answered on the first ring. “Hello.”
“Wentworth’s the best,” were his only words. He hung up. There would be men sitting in the basement of her apartment house with voice-activated tape recorders. They would have heard the words and they would know who called. They would talk to Wilton James and they would wonder. The question was, would Ginny know what he meant and what he meant for her to do?
He returned to the small park and crawled under a picnic bench. A cool night breeze made him shiver, and then he was asleep.
Cory stole his first car on the following morning. It took him three hours to do it. All his military training, his marksmanship, and knowledge of mortgage financing didn’t help. The truth was, he didn’t know how to hot-wire a car. He knew the theory, and how to do it, vaguely; something about crossing the ignition wires under the dashboard, but he feared the length of time it would take for him to figure it out.
He wandered through parking lots and along residential streets filled with lines of parked cars. He looked for one with the keys still in the ignition.
People were getting too damn careful, he thought ruefully after searching his third parking lot. He was hungry. The stale doughnuts of the night before had done little to assuage his hunger. He wanted a bath. The rinse of his dirty clothes in river water had not removed the stench of the filthy barge trip.
A battered white pickup with log shavings in the rear truck-bed had keys in the ignition. The owner had little fear that anyone but the most insane car thief would steal this decrepit vehicle. It was just what Cory needed. He climbed into the truck and turned the key. Surprisingly, the engine kicked over on the first try. It didn’t sputter and sounded well tuned. He threw the truck in gear and drove out of the parking lot.
“Wentworth’s the best,” he had told her over the phone. He hoped that the cryptic message would be enough to bring her to the proper place at the proper time. It was the only clue he could give her based on their short relationship.
He stayed away from major highways and took a winding way back to Deerford. He wanted to see her. The chase had been lonely. He needed someone. If she could only decipher his signal.
His message was a reference to something that happened the first day they stayed together. On the day of the attempted assassination, he had followed her into a supermarket, picked up a bottle of blue-cheese dressing, and told her how good it was. It was a small incident. Would she remember that the dressing was the Wentworth brand? Would she know the message meant for her to meet him in that supermarket at about the same time they had been there that first day?
Perhaps it was too much to hope for an uneducated waitress. He needed her. He needed someone to help him while his beard grew and he changed his appearance sufficiently to walk the streets with some element of safety.
He had to fight the impulse to drive faster. His foot felt leaden on the accelerator. He wanted to hurry, knowing that every minute he spent on the road in a stolen car made detection that much more likely.
He forced himself to drive at exactly the speed limit.
He approached the supermarket in Deerford on the street that ran parallel to its rear. He parked and found the alley that led back to the market’s loading platform. A digital clock mounted in front of a bank down the street told him it was nearly time.
He knew they would be following her. He had no idea if it would be Wilton James’s men or FBI agents. They would work in teams: one in a car outside the supermarket, while a second would follow her into the store. Contact was going to be difficult.
Cory left the stolen pickup and walked briskly down the alley to the loading dock at the rear of the store. He thought about grocery stores. His total past experience seemed to be one of vast indifference. Since his discharge from the army he had only shopped spasmodically. He ate more than half his meals in restaurants, and the other half were hastily thrown together from frozen ingredients. He passively disliked grocery stores, finished his marketing as quickly as possible, and waited impatiently in checkout lines.
He did know that many different people serviced large stores. Supermarkets contained not only employees of the chain, but men and women who worked for bread companies, baby-food manufacturers, and other suppliers who stocked and inventoried other items. A strange man on the floor would not be unusual.
He arrived at the loading dock and jumped to the plat form. He strode inside without hesitation. A line of long white butcher aprons hung on nails near the entrance. He slipped one over his head and tied it at the waist.
A teenager lopped leaves off of lettuce over a sink. He looked at Cory with indifference. Cory nodded, and the produce clerk went back to trimming lettuce.
Double swinging doors gave entrance to the store from the back room. There were small portlike windows in the doors. Cory stood at an angle and glanced out one of the ports. The meat counter ran along the rear of the store, while the front entrance entered into the produce aisle. There were half a dozen shoppe
rs in the store, mostly women pushing carts where little children perched.
Involuntarily, he gasped.
Ginny had entered the store and was pushing a cart slowly down the produce aisle. From time to time she stopped to examine a piece of fruit with studied nonchalance, but her furtive glance down the aisle was nervous.
Cory nearly laughed aloud at the incongruity of the man in the business suit who followed her into the market. He did not recognize or know the man or the agency he worked for, but his status was as obvious as if he had worn a uniform.
The man in the suit kept half an aisle away from Ginny and examined an apple as if it had just fallen from the golden bough.
Ginny made the turn at the meat counter. She was not five feet away from Cory.
A storage area stretched across the rear of the store. Cartons and cases of merchandise were piled to the ceiling. Cory hefted a large carton of paper towels in his arms. He let its bulk cover his face and pushed through the double doors.
Ginny was halfway down the meat counter. Cory took the carton into the third aisle and set it on the floor. He bent to rip the cover from the box as Ginny slowly passed by the aisle.
“Gin,” he whispered.
She stopped stock-still but had some sense enough to pick up a package of pork chops and examine them carefully. He was only a few feet away but would be hidden from the man who tailed her, as he would have stopped at the far end of the produce counter.
“Cory?” her voice was barely audible.
“Don’t talk. There’s an employee’s bathroom in the back room. Ask to use it. It has a window. White pickup at the end of the alley.” He hefted the large carton and walked it back through the double doors into the back room.
The produce clerk had left, and the room was empty. He neatly hung the apron on its peg and went back to the loading platform, where he jumped to the ground and hurried down the alley.
He reached the truck and started the engine. If all went well, Ginny would ask an employee about the rest room, enter the bathroom, and immediately climb out the window. Her watcher would wait patiently by the double doors to the back room to make sure she didn’t leave by the rear exit. They would have less than five minutes before the tail’s suspicions were aroused.
She erupted from the window and ran down the alley toward him. He reached over and opened the passenger door. The truck began to roll as soon as she was inside.
Her arms were around him. “Oh, God, Cory! I didn’t know what happened to you. I’ve been worried as hell.”
He smiled. “Still crazy enough to come?”
“I didn’t have any better offers.”
“You understood my message.”
“Of course. I do the acrostics in the Sunday New York Times. In ink.”
He squeezed her hand. What manner of woman was this—acrostics, yet?
“You know, Cory, I think I’ve been followed since you escaped.”
He laughed. “I know you have.”
“Where are we going?”
“To the seashore. I thought you might like the serenity of the beach.”
“And the summer people haven’t arrived yet, and we can find a place to hole up. I went to the bank and took out all the money I had.”
“That was pretty thoughtful.”
She laughed. “Wait until you hear the amount. Eighty-nine bucks. It won’t get us very far.”
“It helps. I seem to be broke.”
She turned serious. “What happens if they catch us?”
“That depends on who gets us first. Certain parties will shoot us.”
“Oh.”
They drove silently for a few minutes. Cory once again kept to back roads as he wound his way across the small state to the coast. “Thanks,” he finally said.
“What for?”
“For coming.”
“I didn’t have anything better to do. Is this car … truck hot?”
“How would you know about such things?”
“My ex. He was an expert. He was a good-looking con artist. His last trick that I know of happened when he was working for a used-car lot. He’d take a car in on trade. If the tires were decent he’d switch them with a rotten set and then sell the good ones on the side. They caught him eventually.” She sighed. “He had the face of an angel and the soul of a sociopath.”
“You got out of that one; why get involved with me?”
“Because I love you,” she said simply.
They drove their meandering way toward the shoreline without speaking for a long time.
At Lantern City, a small town located on the coast, Cory had Ginny buy groceries and two bottles of liquor. She also went into a nearby drugstore for facial makeup. He waited nervously in the truck while she made the purchases. He had parked the pickup as inconspicuously as possible in the center of the lot and was surrounded on all sides by other cars. It would seem unlikely that a passing police car could easily pick them out, but the waiting was still a harrowing affair.
He saw her crossing the lot, pushing a grocery cart. He helped her load the bags in the truck.
“Where to now?” she asked.
“We’re going to borrow the summer home of some people I know.”
“A little B and E, breaking and entering, is what Tom would have called it.”
“Your ex?”
“Forever so.”
“You’re right.” He drove the pickup carefully out of the parking lot and turned toward the water. “My folks used to have a place two towns down from here. I know the area pretty well. There’s one house in particular that has a few advantages. It has an indoor garage where we can hide this heap, and it’s located away from the crowded part of the beach area. The final advantage is that the owner has pressing business in Deerford and won’t be visiting for a while.”
“You know him pretty well?”
“Norm Lewis and I go back a long way.”
The house was as Cory described it. It was a low ranch that sat on a promontory bracketed on two sides by wetlands composed of tall marsh grass. A tiny secluded beach of pure white imported sand stretched for a dozen yards down to the water, in front of a patio. The nearest neighbor was several hundred yards from the Lewis cottage and separated by a stand of pine. It was ideal for their purposes, and if he remembered correctly, the right front window never did latch correctly.
In the kitchen behind him, Cory could hear Ginny as she flurried about, preparing a meal. He sat at a small table in a sun-room with large windows overlooking the Sound. The bottle of bourbon before him was half empty. He intended to finish the other half.
Arms around his neck. A face nuzzling his. “How about broiled steaks, baked potato with sour cream, and a tossed salad?”
He didn’t answer.
“Don’t like?” She kissed him.
“Terrific.”
“You’re getting bombed, and it’s making you morose.”
“Where’d you learn that word?”
“Back in the days when I did the acrostic in pencil and used a dictionary.”
He looked up at her. Her eyes were wide as she looked down at him with a tenderness he hadn’t seen in her before. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Yes, you did.” She poured a drink. “If you want to get smashed, fine. The dinner will hold, and I could use a drink myself.”
“You have to understand that I’ve been through a bad time recently.”
“I know.”
“I’m not usually mean.”
“I know what you think of me. It doesn’t matter.”
“For Christ’s sake, Ginny! Don’t play the martyr with me. We’re going to be cooped up here until my beard grows out and we can make other arrangements. Don’t lay any guilt trips on me. Okay?”
She swirled the ice in her glass. “Okay. But I still know what you think, and it won’t stop me from being an animal in bed tonight. That is, if you don’t drink too much.”
“I never drink that much.”
/> She looked out the window as the sun settled over the water, “It’s pretty here, isn’t it? I wish we lived here. I mean, permanently and without … you know what I mean.”
“To say the least,” he said with a bitterness he hadn’t meant to express. He had showered for half an hour and found clean clothing of Norm’s that he managed to squeeze into. It had helped some, but the stench of barge dredgings and jail seemed to pervade his nostrils.
He finished the drink and refilled the glass with bourbon. He sipped it. Liquor wasn’t helping. The remembered smell filled the room and surrounded him with a dull mist. His life was shattered past redemption. He would have to fight for survival and battle for the answers to a dozen unanswered questions. He was pitted against force’s that were going to be difficult to overcome. He drank again and felt increasingly bitter.
“Are you ready to eat?” she asked. She sat on an ottoman near his feet and looked up with that damnable little-girl smile.
“No.”
“We’re going to get drunk and mean tonight?”
“Probably. At least I will. You never get mean.”
“Maybe you don’t know me well enough. I have a temper.”
He drank again. “You’re too damn dumb to have a temper.” The words slid from him without conscious thought, and he was immediately sorry he had said them. He looked into her face. She blinked twice, but her smile didn’t fade. “I’m sorry, Gin. That wasn’t fair.”
“I don’t have a college education, if that’s what you mean?”
“That doesn’t mean a goddamn thing.”
“Then why am I so dumb?”
“Because you’re being used and are too dumb even to know it.”
“I don’t mind.”
He slammed his glass down on the table and sloshed liquor over his fingers. “That’s just it. You don’t mind! For God’s sake, you’re liable to be arrested, killed, or both.”
“You need help. You’ll need me to go to the store for you and run other errands.”
“I’ll have a full beard in a few days and I’ll change the color of my hair. You could leave right now. Take the truck to Middleburg and abandon it. Take the bus from there to Deerford. They don’t have anything on you—yet. They might suspect you’re with me, but until we’re actually spotted together they have no proof.”
Game Bet Page 12