Deadline (20 page)

Walker’s involvement made Armstrong more nervous than he wanted to admit. Anticipating that Walker might pick up the files, Armstrong had had a car parked in each block for five square blocks around the bank. One master key fit them all: one hell of a challenge in two hours’ time, but again the Bureau had come through. He had four additional manned cars standing by, in case he walked out of the covered area and had to be picked up fast. In his pocket he carried a tiny radio, and hoped he wouldn’t need it. With luck, he could wind it up this afternoon, be out of here on the first flight to D.C., and let Chicago worry about the mess he would leave behind.

He had correctly anticipated the general makeup of the bank’s customers. He wore what most of them wore: casual work clothes, no tie, shirt open at the neck. He didn’t wear a sports coat, but luckily the weather was cold enough to allow him an overcoat without suspicion. Just under his left arm, the gun nestled.

A strong wind blew in off the lake. The girl disappeared around the corner and Armstrong fought back a desire to run after her. He continued on at the same regular pace, stopped at the corner, cupped his hands and lit a smoke. Only then, and almost casually at that, did he look down the street. To anyone watching, he was a man adrift, money burning a hole in his pocket, looking around for something kinky to spend it on. He seemed lost in indecision for a few seconds, then moved on down the street after the girl.

Maybe Joanne Sayers was watching him, standing in the throngs just a few feet away. Waiting for him to move, to commit himself. Or maybe, just as likely, she was holed up across town somewhere, waiting for this girl to make her drop and beat it. He was approaching his moment of truth and he knew it. Soon he would have to commit to a course of action and take his chances. His eyes moved on past the girl, scanned the street and picked up the blue Plymouth with temporary tags. There was no one in the car.

He was still one jump ahead of her. He looked back over his shoulder, as anyone might before jaywalking in midblock. The four corners contained a drugstore, a gas station, a department store and a high-rise office complex. He started across slowly, toward the plain black car parked at the curb.

He reached it and slipped under the wheel, just as the girl pulled open the door of the Plymouth. There, in the shadows of his own car, he watched her keenly. She looked puzzled for a moment, then got in and seemed to be reading something. She slipped over and started the car. He started his.

The Plymouth came past him and turned right at the corner, away from the bank. He eased out into traffic and blended in behind her. At the corner she turned right again, then again, and still again, coming back into the same block. She eased the blue Plymouth back into its original parking place, and Armstrong’s heart pounded faster. The Sayers girl had tricked him. They had set him up.

From the window high above the street, Joanne Sayers watched intensely. “There he is,” she said. “Same black car.”

“How can you tell that?”

“It’s the same car. They followed her around the block. Watch him.”

But the black car didn’t stop behind Diana. It went past, down the block and disappeared far beneath them.

Diana, still clutching the two thick folders, stepped out of the Plymouth and started up the street toward the office building. In her free hand, she carried the scrap of paper with Joanne Sayers’ instructions. She stopped at the corner and waited for the light to change.

A block away, Armstrong had made his commitment. He jerked the black car to a stop and leaped out, leaving it in a tow-away zone. He hurried back along the sidewalk toward the office building. For a terrifying moment he didn’t see the girl at all. Then she moved between some people in the intersection. She was crossing the street, coming straight at him. He blended in with some shoppers and she passed not five feet away. He stepped in behind her. The game was over. If Joanne Sayers could see him from wherever she was staked out, it was all over anyway.

The girl went into the office building, and Armstrong followed her in. The place was packed. She stopped at the bank of elevators, and for the next minute Armstrong stood so close he could have touched her. He watched the red floor indicators giving them information on all four elevators. The third one was coming first. By the time it had arrived, the people were packed in around the door, ready to load. They pressed in, the girl among them, Armstrong to the far rear. The girl looked at the buttons but didn’t press any of them. Most of them had been pushed anyway.

The elevator eased upward. It was the slowest elevator Armstrong had ever seen. It slowed at each floor, then squeezed itself to a standstill, waited a few seconds and slowly opened its doors, reluctantly letting the passengers escape. Floor by floor. An eternity. Gradually the ranks thinned, until there were only five of them in the cage.

Two floors from the top, they picked up a contingent of white-shirts going up to the cafeteria. They laughed and talked loudly: four men in their twenties accompanied by two women who looked and talked like secretaries. The girl inched her way back until Armstrong could feel her body against his. He eased his hand up and unbuttoned his coat.

What happened next was like some slow-motion nightmare. The door eased open and there she was. Joanne Sayers stood not ten feet away, nervous as a cat, ready to jump. Her eyes found his perhaps a second sooner than he saw her. In that second, her bag dropped to the floor and the gun was in her hand. Someone laughed, a laugh of disbelief. It cut off abruptly as Armstrong reached for his own gun and tried to push people out of the way with his free hand. Joanne Sayers fired. A woman screamed. The bullet tore through the wood paneling at Armstrong’s elbow. It was a lousy shot, a shot made too quickly, from too many pent-up nerves, and he would see that she never got another. But again, she had that split-second edge. Her second shot tore through his neck, spinning him around even as his own gun was coming up. Shock, cold and sudden, raced through him. He never felt his fingers open, but he heard his gun clatter on the floor. He twisted around and she shot him again as the door closed. Once for good measure in the gut.

The people had parted like the Red Sea, and were littered across the elevator floor at his feet. The elevator shimmied and started down. Armstrong sank back against the wall and reached out for support. There was nothing to grab. He began to slip down to the floor.

Out of shock came panic. One of the secretaries began screaming and one of the men pushed the emergency stop button. The elevator stopped between floors. An alarm went off.

Armstrong sat there, watching his blood ooze out.

S
OMEONE HAD KICKED JOANNE’S
bag in the scuffle, and money was scattered down the length of the hallway. She whirled as the door closed, ready to fire again, but faced only an empty corridor. Everyone in the elevator had jumped back, all but Diana, who leaped out as the shooting started and sat on the floor about ten feet away. Walker stood flat against a wall, waiting. An alarm went off, and almost at that exact second the express elevator came. Joanne Sayers grabbed her bag, leaving the loose money on the floor, and pushed them ahead of her into the cage.

The elevator stopped only once going down, at the halfway point. Two men got on, so engrossed in some corporate argument that they paid no attention to the ringing bell. Less than thirty seconds later the elevator reached the ground. The lobby was still full of people, and word was passing among them that there had been a shooting and that one of the elevators was trapped between floors. Joanne Sayers pushed them through it, through the revolving door and into the street. Outside, the world went on as if nothing had happened. Half a block away, the bank looked strangely different, all its menace gone. People hurried past, unaware that a shooting had happened. The distant wail of an ambulance was already dying out. It was for somebody else.

Walker looked back just once. Joanne Sayers was about twenty yards behind them, the bag draped over one wrist while the other hand, still clutching the gun, was buried in the pocket of her dress. And Walker, though he really didn’t like himself for it, was thinking story. He couldn’t help it; that’s how his mind worked. The shooting of an FBI man was a story. But it was one he would never write, because he had been swept out of it, because he had lost his objective voice and was now a part of it, because of half a dozen reasons that might not make much sense to anyone else. Let them have it, it was nothing more than a cop story on its face. The real story was still to come, still to worm its way out of those files that Diana clutched against her breast.

They reached the Plymouth and Joanne motioned them inside. Again, Walker drove. He had to give Joanne her due. She handled herself in a crisis like one cool number. Inside the car, she took charge as if nothing had happened. She told Walker to drive straight ahead, straight past the door of the office building. By then a crowd was beginning to gather on the sidewalk by the front door. She didn’t look back. As with everything else unpleasant that happened to her, she found a way to deal with it and move on. The bank robbery, the years of loneliness, the long strings of faceless men, the death of a little girl she had loved very much: these things were part of an irretrievable past. Add to that the terrors of the elevator. It was done, gone. Maybe later she would have a reaction, when she was alone and wouldn’t show her weakness to anyone. Now Walker didn’t even hear a slight quiver in her voice.

“Well,” she said. “That was too bad.”

That was all they said for a while. Walker understood without talking that they were finished with Chicago. He drove south and east, the way they had come, and she didn’t correct him. Maybe she was confused. Maybe she didn’t know yet where they were going or what they would do when they got there. Somewhere outside Gary, he said, “You’re taking a hell of a chance, you know, sticking with this car.”

“You think I haven’t thought of that?”

Again, they lapsed into that awkward silence. She asked Diana for the files, but kindly, her voice just above a whisper. Walker kept his eyes on the road. It was the twilight hour, the worst time of day to drive. The freeway stretched on forever, luring them on.

“I’ve got a hunch,” Joanne Sayers said suddenly. She had brightened visibly. “I don’t think it matters what car we’re in. Mr. Walker, I think maybe we’ve won.”

“I don’t follow that.”

“I know you don’t. But you’ll understand better when you’ve had a chance to read these files. Then you’ll know it all.”

Walker shook his head. “I don’t see what the files have got to do with what car we’re in. Your reasoning doesn’t make sense.”

“Look, think about what just happened back there. Use your head, Walker. There was one man. Just one. Doesn’t that strike you as odd, just a little bit?”

“It struck me,” Diana said. It was the first thing she had said since the shooting.

“Tell him, then,” Joanne Sayers said. “Our star reporter can’t put it together by himself.”

“That’s all,” Diana said. “I thought, where are all the others, and there weren’t any. I kept waiting for them to kill us. To open up on us right there on the street. I’ll never forget that feeling as long as I live. I just knew the place must be crawling with police.”

“See, Mr. Walker, for all your highly touted investigative skills, your girlfriend’s out-thought you. That’s the heart of it. There was only one man. That’s what this whole thing is about. That man and me. Why do you suppose that is, Mr. Walker?”

He didn’t say anything.

“They don’t want the other cops to be involved. They’re taking no chance that these files might get into some police chief’s hands. Or even into the hands of others like themselves, who aren’t involved in it. Does that make sense, people? They want to write an end to it with one bloody period. The end of me.”

“Joanne…”

“I know, I know; you think I’m paranoid. You’ve already told me. Let’s see how you feel after you’ve read the files. For now, let’s play my hunch and stick with this car. It’ll be safer than all the bullshit hassle involved in getting another one. Think about it, Mr. Walker. I’m betting my life that I’m right. They won’t put out any bulletins on us. They’ll go like they’re walking on eggs from here on out.”

She lit a cigarette and cracked open the window. “They don’t want to catch me. They want to kill me.”

They stopped late that night, somewhere in Indiana away from the highway, and found a small motel off the beaten path. The motel consisted of a ring of log cabins, each with two bedrooms and a kitchen. Joanne Sayers put them together in the back room.

“We’ll be up awhile yet,” she told them through the open door. “In the morning you can decide what you want to do.” A moment later she came into the bedroom and dropped the files between them. “Read. Both of you. I want you to read every word of these tonight, and in the morning you can decide for yourself how you want to do it. Keep the door open until you’re done. I want to watch you while you read them.”

It took a long time to go through it all. Walker passed each page to Diana as he read it, and found her waiting for each one. She read with amazing speed, and he had a feeling she never forgot what she had read. Halfway through, the fear began. “I don’t think she should read any more of this,” he said.

“Both of you,” Joanne said through the open door. “That’s why you’re here. I want everybody in the world to read that stuff, Mr. Walker. There’s safety in numbers.”

Two hours later, he closed the diary. They had read that together, with Diana waiting for him to turn each page.

“Now you know,” Joanne said. “Now they have to kill you too. I’m sorry if I seem to draw comfort from that thought, but I do.”

She got up, leaving her gun on the bed, and began to gather up the files. Walker could have reached over and picked it up.

She turned and looked at him, amusement spreading across her face. “Now do you believe me?”

“Yeah, Joanne. I believe you now.”