She was handling the news worse than he had expected, but then again he had no idea how close she and Abe had been. That he hadn’t heard of her didn’t mean the two hadn’t been as tight as real family.
He made a quick decision. “Okay. Just follow me. This won’t take a second.”
“What are you going to do? If the men who killed Abe—” This time she choked off her own words because saying Abe had been killed was the first step in accepting he was gone.
“Don’t worry,” Mercer said with a smile and gripped her upper arm. She was so thin his fingers almost met despite the leather coat. “Like leaving a key under the frog, Abe was a creature of habit.”
He found what he was looking for in the tiny closet off the room Abe Jacobs had used as an office/den. Mercer well remembered the old desk and swivel chair that squeaked only seconds after being oiled, and the club chairs that sat in front of the desk, chairs Mercer had lolled in through many, many evenings while deep in discussion back in Happy Valley. This room was a little smaller than that at Penn State, the view out the window a little more bucolic, but this was exactly like the den Mercer remembered from all those years ago, and he felt certain that Abe had replicated it wherever his career had taken him. In the bottom of the closet was a scuffed Samsonite suitcase made of a hideous blue indestructible plastic. Mercer pulled it free from under a mound of other detritus and set it on the desk. He pressed open the locks and levered up the lid.
Inside were all sorts of old papers, some stuffed in binders, others loose or in yellowed envelopes. There were some black-and-white photographs of people who were long dead and whom Abe had never discussed. There were a couple of books, including a Hebrew copy of the Talmud and a partial field guide for the maintenance of a Sherman tank’s L/40 75mm M-3 cannon. At the bottom of the suitcase was a dirty rag rolled around a flat object about the size of a hardcover book.
Mercer unrolled the rag, and into his hand flopped a brown leather holster for a German P-38 pistol, made not by the fabled Walther Company but under license by Spreewerke and marked by the letters CYQ. Abe’s father had landed in Normandy as a tank’s driver, and by the time he had battled through the Ardennes he was its commander. He had taken the pistol off a dead German officer following the Nazis’ last major pushback against the Allied forces. Below the pistol was a small strongbox. Mercer knew that inside it were Mort Jacobs’s medals, insignia, and military discharge papers. An entire gruesome chapter of both a man’s youth and a continent’s agony neatly tucked away.
“Is that a gun?” Jordan Weismann asked with a mix of revulsion and fascination.
Abe had first shown him the weapon when Mercer was an undergrad, and it had been Mercer himself who convinced Jacobs to allow him to clean the then rust-bound automatic. Abe would never be convinced to actually fire the pistol — he was a New York — born intellectual first and foremost — but out of respect to his late father he let his young protégé restore the P-38 to its original condition. What he didn’t know was that the spare magazine tucked into a slot under the holster’s flap had been loaded all those years before with eight rounds of Federal Premium 124 grain 9mil.
She watched with glassy eyes as Mercer pulled both the pistol and the spare magazine from the holster and allowed the tough old leather to drop back into the Samsonite. He thumbed the release to eject the empty magazine from the pistol’s butt and rammed home the loaded one with a precise slap. He flicked the safety off, jacked the slide to chamber a round, thumbed the hammer back down, and reengaged the safety once again. The gun vanished behind his back and under his bomber jacket.
The cool ease with which he handled the deadly looking black gun brought a flush of unexpected arousal to Jordan’s cheeks. She looked at him in hopes he hadn’t noticed. He had, but his expression didn’t change, for which she was grateful.
“This was Abe’s father’s,” Mercer said. “He brought it back from World War Two. Abe hated the thing. He hated all violence, but he also couldn’t part with it, so he’s been lugging it around from one campus to the next just like that stupid cement frog and the picture of Jerusalem over the mantel.”
Mercer took another look around the study. If there were any clues as to what Abe Jacobs had been doing in the mine to get him killed, they likely weren’t here. Abe kept all his important research material and files in a campus office near his lab. At least he always had. The look on Jordan Weismann’s face was one of doubt and uncertainty. She had to be wondering how a former student of stolid old Abe Jacobs could be so comfortable around a handgun. He wished he had time to explain, but the mental clock in one corner of his mind continued to wind down. The gunmen couldn’t be that far away.
“I need to check out Abe’s office on campus. Do you know where it is?” He took Jordan’s hand, and they started out of the house.
She shook her head. “No, I’m sorry. I just got here yesterday. Uncle Abe was in a hurry to leave, so I didn’t get a tour of the school or anything.”
“Okay. I’m going to stash you someplace, and then afterward you are getting out of town. Where are your parents? Still in Pittsburgh?”
“No,” she said with a defiant edge to her voice. “My mom died three years ago from cancer, and my dad and I aren’t exactly close.”
Mercer paused just shy of the open front door and swung Jordan around so that he was looking her in the eye. “I don’t know you from Adam, but you were a friend of my friend and that’s good enough for me. Take some free advice and do yourself a favor. Unless your father is some sort of monster, there will come a time in your life where you are going to regret not having him around. I lost both my parents when I was twelve, and not a day goes by that I don’t think about the relationship we were supposed to have. Reconcile with your father.”
Her eyes tightened, and a crease formed between her well-maintained brows. “My life is none of your business.”
Undeterred, Mercer said, “I’m sure Abe gave you this same advice on more than one occasion. He had no family, so I know he took on students as surrogates. I was one and so were you. He was a father figure and now he’s gone, Jordan, and your real father is the only one you have left.”
He was about to go on, but movement over her shoulder drew his attention. Jordan was tall enough for him to need to push her out of the way a little to clearly see the tree-lined street. A compact car — a Honda Fit — was driving by much too slowly for the time of day. Mercer had never seen the driver and the man had never seen him, but they both recognized each other as being someone out of place.
The driver was in his late twenties, blond and fit looking. His eyes widened at seeing a couple stepping from the house. Mercer tried to hide his surprise at seeing Abe’s house being cased by an ex — Special Forces type. The driver turned his attention back to the road and buried his foot in the floorboards. The little car didn’t have much in the power department, but it was nearly lost from view by the time Mercer launched himself at his SUV.
He had noticed the car had an Indiana license plate. It had doubtless been stolen by the gunman as he made his way south from the Minnesota mine. The man’s apparent youth also suggested he wasn’t a seasoned professional and was therefore not likely to be alone here in Killenburg. The lead man, the man Mercer had vowed to kill, was here too. Most likely at Abe’s office while he sent his subaltern to search the less conspicuous house.
Mercer felt the SUV’s passenger door slam as he jammed the key into the ignition. Jordan Weismann whipped an arm across her shoulder to buckle her seat belt. She didn’t look over at Mercer, but he could see a tightening of her jaw and the ferocity at one corner of her eye. He knew women enough to know that asking her to get out would be a complete waste of time. Intellectually she knew the risks. He assumed she had never faced a barrage from an automatic weapon, so in a practical sense she had no idea what she was doing, but she had made a choice, and Mercer wasn’t going to talk her out of it.