Lenora reached across the table and put her hand on Joe’s arm. “You are playing with fire, young man,” she said softly. Poor Joe, she thought. He was not only earnest, he was in love.
“I know, but what else can I do?” Joe asked. “Jamie can’t spend the rest of her life hiding from him.”
“You have a life, too. Don’t waste it on a lost cause.”
Young Joe’s eyes widened. “You think I should just let Gus Hartmann have Jamie murdered and hand her baby over to Amanda?”
“I’m saying that no matter what you do, this thing probably will not end well. Even if Jamie gave up the baby, I’m not sure that her troubles would be over. In fact,” she said, tapping the newspaper clipping with her finger, “if this business in Oklahoma City truly was a failed attempt to kidnap Jamie’s baby and murder her, your troubles aren’t ever going to be over. Look, Joe, I see fear in Bentley’s eyes when he talks to Gus Hartmann on the phone. All the work Bentley has done for Gus over the years has been within the letter of the law, but I think Bentley has figured out more about Gus Hartmann’s business and life than is healthy and it scares him shitless. It scares me shitless. I wish I hadn’t come here tonight. But I’m going to walk out of here and forget everything you told me.”
She stood. “I wish you well, Joe. The only advice I have for you and Jamie is to change your names, leave the country, and watch your backsides. And hope that Gus Hartmann has a fatal heart attack sometime real soon.”
He grabbed her hand. “What about the contract?”
“It’s gone,” she admitted, pulling her hand away. “I decided I’d look it over before I came here tonight. It’s been erased from my computer, and there are no copies in the hard files. I don’t know if Bentley did it or someone else, and I don’t want to know. And I don’t want to ever see or hear from you again.”
Chapter Thirty-five
JOE WATCHED AS Lenora picked up her purse, scooted out of the booth, and stood. Once again men at the bar turned on their stools to stare as the stylish, shapely black woman walked by.
He sat there for a time, stunned by what Lenora had said. And by her fear. His hope of finding a sane way to deal with the threat against Jamie was evaporating.
It was his threat now, too. He had no doubt about that. At this very minute there were people looking for both of them. And that knowledge made him more afraid than he had ever been in his life. Even so, there was an inviolate corner of his being that believed that if he and Jamie could keep their wits intact, they would find a way to prevail, that right would win over wrong.
Maybe they should follow Lenora’s advice and leave the country. But to pull that off they would need new identities and passports. That wasn’t something he could make happen overnight. At some point he would have to get more money. He had invested most of the money that he’d inherited from his aunt Lacy, and he wasn’t sure how quickly he could access those funds. But what if Gus Hartmann had made it all vanish the way he’d made Jamie’s bank account vanish? What if the only money they had was the cash he’d left with Jamie and what was in his billfold?
He left enough money on the table to cover the bar tab and tip then headed for the door. The men who had stared at Lenora paid no attention to his departure. Except for one man. The guy seated at the end of the bar was watching him in the mirror. Joe could tell by the tilt of his chin. The man had the bulked-up muscles of a dedicated weight lifter and was wearing black jeans and a blue shirt.
Out front, Joe looked up and down the parking lot, taking note of the vehicles parked there, then got on his bike and drove around aimlessly for a while. When he spotted the black Ford pickup in his rearview mirror, Joe abruptly turned into a service station and lingered for a time, using the restroom, filling the Harley’s half-full tank, sipping a cup of coffee that tasted as though it had been brewed this morning. When he left the service station, he drove a few miles then without using his turn signal, turned into a convenience-store parking lot and stopped by a drive-up pay phone. As the black truck turned into a McDonald’s across the street, Joe took off down the side street.
The phone lines at Bentley Abernathy’s law office had been tapped, Joe realized. Someone had listened to his phone conversation with Lenora. And the driver of the black truck had been waiting for him at the Holiday Inn.
Fortunately he had lived in Austin for the seven years it took for him to complete his undergraduate and law degrees and knew the city well. He spent a couple of hours randomly driving through a maze of back streets, waiting until he was absolutely certain that no one could possibly be following him. But just to make sure, he headed for I-35, traveling north for a time, then made a U-turn and headed back into central Austin, where he abandoned the interstate altogether and headed across town to Highway 71. He pulled in at the first truck stop.
He parked in the shadows behind the building and carefully wiped the dust off his Harley. Then, leaving the key in the ignition, he retrieved his backpack, gave the bike a good-bye pat, and headed into the sea of parked rigs.
It took him a while to find a ride. The driver was heading for Galveston with a load of wrecked vehicles that had been smashed and stacked on the flatbed like decks of cards. Leon was his name. An older guy with bad teeth. He’d been driving twelve hours straight and needed someone to keep him awake. That was Joe’s job. “I prefer sports talk,” Leon said. “No politics unless you’re a Democrat.”
Once they were on the highway, Leon said, “Start talking, kid.”
In spite of a punch-drunk state brought about by his own sleep deprivation, Joe somehow managed to conduct a mumbling discourse that went from baseball to the historical development of the Democratic Party to the role that team sports played in character development.
After spending a long, lonely day and sleepless night without Joe, the walls were beginning to push in on Jamie. She gave Billy a bath and looked through the newspapers. When she reached the religion section, she read and reread an article printed there, then carefully tore it out of the newspaper and put it into the side pocket of her backpack along with the roll of bills Joe had put there.
Even antsier than before, she washed her hair and did some push-ups. Finally she put Billy in his sling, shouldered the backpack, and headed out the back door. She locked the door behind her and tucked the key in the backpack.
It was a beautiful day with only a soft breeze to ruffle her hair. The gulls circled overhead and the sandpipers raced along the beach. Far out at sea, she could see a large tanker. Closer in there were smaller craft-pleasure and fishing boats.
She walked for a couple of miles. The only people she saw were an older man and a young boy digging for clams. She waved and continued on her walk. On her way back, they were still there. A happy sight. She imagined bringing Billy back here someday to dig for clams and throw pieces of bread in the air for the gulls to catch.
Billy was beginning to protest his confinement, so she took him out of the sling and, holding him so that he faced outward, cut inland a couple of hundred yards for a change of scenery and wound through the dunes, occasionally spotting a hermit crab scampering about. At one point, she knelt in the sand to take a better look at one of the ugly little creatures that confiscate the shells of sea snails for their portable homes. “See there, Billy,” she said. “He carries his house around with him. That’s what we’re going to do when Joe gets back.”
While she was kneeling there, she saw something moving just beyond the stand of beach grass. Holding Billy like a sack of potatoes on her hip, she crept forward a bit and parted the grass just enough to see two men heading toward the cabin. The men were young, athletic-looking, and dressed alike in jeans, navy blue T-shirts, and matching baseball caps. She might have mistaken them for two regular guys out for a walk on the beach except that they were hunched over and keeping to the depressions between the dunes as they approached the cabin.