I thought about Cody and his FBI badge, and I thought about Richard Douglass, the top attorney in town, and maybe I was a little bit scared of Jeremiah Hubbard, too. At least the Russians used methods I understood, methods I was familiar with. Hubbard worked through different channels entirely, controlling situations with a checkbook instead of a gun. And there was no doubt his checkbook was far more powerful than any number of guns.
Betsy returned from the bathroom, bringing an abrupt end to my conversation with her mother. I paid the bill, relieved myself of some of the coffee, and then went back to the car. I was approaching twenty-four hours without sleep, but I wasn’t feeling it yet.
We drove out of West Virginia and into Ohio. As we headed north, Julie occupied Betsy by playing silly games like racing to see who could find all the letters of the alphabet on road signs. They were both stuck on X for quite a while, until Betsy spotted a hotel sign boasting of expanded cable. She wrapped the game up by finding a Z in a sign for a radio station called “Rock 93, WZPL.” The victory seemed to take something out of her, though, because she fell asleep again around eleven, as we neared Akron.
“Home sweet home,” Julie said as we drove through Akron and continued north on I-77 toward Cleveland. “Somehow I feel safer now.”
I pulled off the interstate at a rest stop a few minutes later. Julie went to the bathroom, but we let Betsy continue sleeping. I leaned against the trunk of the car and called Joe.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Just south of the city. Where are you?”
“Don Gellino’s lake cottage. You remember it?” Don Gellino was a retired cop who owned a small cottage in Medina County. He called it a lake cottage, but the body of water it stood beside wasn’t much more than a large pond. Good fishing, though, if Don was to be believed.
“I remember it. How the hell did you end up there?”
“Don’s in New Mexico for the winter staying with his kids. He left the key with me and asked me to check in on it from time to time. I thought it was as good a spot as any for our purposes.”
“Can’t argue with that. Is Kinkaid with you?”
“Not yet. I’m supposed to call him soon, though. I just didn’t think it would be a real good idea to drop him on Mrs. Weston on top of everything else she’s got to deal with.”
“Good choice,” I said. I didn’t want Julie to see Kinkaid, either. Whether my reasoning for that decision was based on Julie’s welfare or my own feelings for her was another question, and not one I felt like dealing with at the moment. “Julie wants Amy there, too.”
“Why?”
I explained her reasoning as best I could. “It makes some sense, Joe. If there’s anything usable as leverage with Hubbard, it’s going to be the threat of going public.”
“I don’t see why we need leverage with Hubbard. We’re not negotiating a business deal, you know. This woman needs to talk to the police.”
“Let’s do it her way, Joe.”
“Fine.”
I hung up with him and called Amy at her office. I got the voice mail, so I tried her cell phone, and this time she answered.
“Lincoln, I’ve been waiting to hear from you all day. You have no idea how close I’ve come to going to the police with this.”
“With what?”
“With everything, jackass. When I saw the story come over the wire this morning I about died.”
“Story?”
“Yeah, the story about the shootout at the Golden Breakers hotel. Don’t tell me you weren’t involved with it. I’m not that clueless.”
“I was involved with it,” I said. “Did the story give my name?”
“No, it didn’t give any names except the cop they interviewed and the hotel owner, some guy named Burks.”
“Lamar Burks, yeah. So what did the story say?”
“Just that there was an exchange of gunfire in and around this resort hotel early last night, and no arrests have been made. Apparently a desk clerk was beaten up, but she’s in stable condition.”
“There wasn’t anything about someone being killed in this shootout?”
“No. Should there have been?”
I frowned. “Yeah, there should have been. If there was a body at the scene, would the reporters know about it by now, or could the cops be holding out?”
“Press would have it by now,” she said confidently. “All we got on it was a little briefon the national news wire. I called the South Carolina bureau of the Associated Press for more details, and they told me they didn’t have anything else. No one was injured, and no arrests had been made, they said.”
No one was injured. Had I imagined shooting a man in the face? No, that didn’t seem like the type of thing that was easy to misinterpret. I’d killed him. If his body hadn’t been there, the Russians had taken it with them. Once I thought about it, that move made some sense. Leaving the body behind would have tied them to the shootings, and they were probably even more eager to avoid that than I was.
“What happened?” Amy asked.
“I can’t tell you about it now.”
“Dammit, Lincoln-”
“Look, I’ve got much bigger news for you,” I interrupted. “After I tell you this, you’re going to love me.”
“What?”
“I’m back in Ohio, I’ve got Julie Weston with me, and you’ve got an exclusive interview with her if you want it. If you don’t, I can call your buddy Jacob Terry and see if he’s interested.”
“Shut up.”
“Okay.”
“When and where can I talk to her?”
I gave her directions to Gellino’s cottage. She told me she’d be there in an hour, and I suggested she bring a video camera and an inkpad with her. For Julie’s interview to carry any significance, her identity would need to be verifiable, and I figured video and fingerprints should take care of that.
“I’ll see you soon,” she said. “After the night you had, I bet you’re relieved to be getting closer to home and some support.”
Closer to some support, all right. For me and the Russians. I hung up the phone and gazed down the highway, watching the innocuous stream of cars and wondering how long we had until the illusion of safety would be shattered again.
CHAPTER 21
DON GELLINO’S cottage was near Hinckley, a tiny rural town south of Cleveland. I’d been there twice several years earlier, when Gellino had cookouts in the summer. It was a beautiful place. The pond was nestled in tall, thick pines and surrounded on one side by a jagged cliff, and the cottage was small but pleasant. Gellino had spent one June building a massive redwood deck looking out on the water. I’d forgotten just how nice a spot it was until I pulled off the state highway and onto the narrow, rutted gravel drive that led down to the pond and the cottage.
“Who owns this?” Julie asked as we passed through the rows of tall pines.
“A cop who retired four or five years ago and now spends the winters out in New Mexico with his kids. Joe has a key. It seemed like a good spot for us to use today.”
Betsy was awake now, sitting up in the backseat and humming softly to herself. I was impressed with her. In the past ten days she’d been taken from her home to hide in a hotel room, then taken in the middle of the night from the hotel to drive for fourteen hours in a car with a man who was basically a stranger to her. Now she still didn’t have any idea where we were going, but she wasn’t complaining. Agreeable kid.
The gravel drive followed a gentle slope down through the trees, and then the water and the cottage came into view. Joe’s Taurus was parked in front of the little house, but Amy hadn’t arrived yet. There were patches of snow here and there under the trees, and the warm breezes of the South Carolina coast seemed a distant memory.