The first shot sounded like a stout stick being snapped in two. Haynes classified the weapon as a .22-caliber rifle and guessed the shooter to be at least fifty yards away because he heard the shot an instant after the round buried itself in the motel room door.
Haynes spun away from the door he had just closed and tackled Erika McCorkle from the rear, dumping her onto the walk in front of the old Cadillac’s grille. She lost her canvas overnight bag and it skidded beneath the car.
Still half lying on her, Haynes turned his head to stare up at the bullet hole just as another round smacked into the room’s door three inches to the left of the first one. The sound of the snapped-in-two stick again came a split second later.
A third shot took out the light above the motel room door. It was as if the shooter needed to prove that the first two rounds hadn’t been misses, but marksmanship. Haynes slipped McCorkle’s borrowed revolver from his topcoat pocket, crawled off Erika and wormed his way to the left side of the car where he peered around the front tire — the one that had replaced the flat.
As Haynes peered around the tire toward the top of the motel’s U, he glimpsed a dark blue or black sedan speeding off into the night. Haynes rose, stuck the revolver back into his topcoat and helped Erika to her feet. Her mouth was open as she tried to suck great gobs of air into her lungs.
“You hyperventilating?”
She shook her head and kept on gasping.
“I can go get that sack the food came in and you can breathe into that.”
She shook her head again, even more vigorously, and said still gasping, “Nobody — ever shot — at me — before.”
“The shooter’s gone,” he said.
“You sure?”
Haynes nodded. “He wasn’t shooting at us. He was shooting at the door and the light. He hit both.”
“Oh, shit, I’ve never been so scared.”
“You were supposed to be. How is it now?”
“I’m still shaking.”
“I mean your breathing.”
“It’s okay.”
“Then let’s go see Mott.”
“And where the hell can we go after that?”
“How do you feel about Baltimore?” Haynes said.
After retrieving Erika’s canvas bag from beneath the car, they drove slowly toward the exit. Some half-clad motel guests were peeking out of partially open doors, as if trying to decide whether what they had heard were gunshots or backfires. The motel’s owner, shivering outside in his shirt sleeves, gave the old Cadillac an uninterested glance before ducking back into the warmth of the motel office. Haynes estimated that his $100 cash deposit would cover the room and also the cost of damage to the door and the light fixture.
“How’d we get found so fast?” Erika asked just after Haynes turned onto Wisconsin Avenue and headed south.
“No idea.”
“I thought you were a detective.”
“I was.”
“Well, suppose somebody like us came to somebody like you and said, ‘Hey, we were trying to hide out from the bad guys but they found us and took a few shots at us. So what d’you think we should do now?’ ”
“I’m still a cop?”
“You’re still a cop.”
“Then I’d probably say, ‘How d’you folks feel about Baltimore?’ ”
Since there was no polite way to refuse the freshly baked apple pie that Lydia Mott pressed on them, Haynes and Erika each had a piece, plus a cup of coffee, and then followed Howard Mott in his pyjamas and bathrobe up the stairs and into the study-cum-music room.
Once they were seated, Haynes gave Mott a concise report on the incident at the Bellevue Motel. After Haynes finished, Mott asked his first question. “How long were you there?”
“Five or six hours.”
“Any idea of how you were found so quickly?”
“None — except whoever came looking must’ve had help.”
Mott pushed back the left sleeve of his enormous blue-and-white-striped bathrobe to look at his watch. “You checked into the motel when — around six?”
“Closer to five-thirty.”
“So the shooter found you by eleven — approximately.”
“It could’ve been a lot earlier.”
“Why?”
“Because whoever it was waited for us to come out of the motel room and we were in there for at least five hours.”
“I went out once to get some food,” Erika said.
Mott looked at her and asked, “When was that?”
“Not long after we got there.”
Haynes leaned forward suddenly, betraying his impatience. “The question is still, how did he find us and where does a shooter go for help? Not to the D.C. cops or the FBI — and who the hell else has enough bodies to check every motel in the Washington area?”
Mott smiled slightly. “Those weren’t questions. They were the introduction to a theory.”
“Or an approach from a different angle,” Haynes said. “Answer me this: Who saw and even touched Steady’s old Cadillac other than Erika, myself and Ledell Dark, master mechanic?”
“Horace Purchase,” Erika said.
Mott asked, “He was actually close enough to touch it?”
“Dark claims he was close enough to drool on it.”
“And that means close enough to slap on a sender,” Haynes said.
“An electronic transmitter,” Mott said.
Haynes nodded.
“But why would Purchase be so interested in Steady’s car?”
“It was the last place left.”
Mott frowned. “To do what?”
“To look for the manuscript.”
“Please, God, don’t let him tell me there really is a manuscript.”
“Yes, Howard, there really is a manuscript.”
“You’ve actually seen it, touched it, maybe even read it?”
Haynes nodded.
“Me, too,” Erika said.
Mott sighed. “All right, let’s deal with the car and its sender first, then come back to the manuscript. Okay?”
Haynes again nodded.
“Apparently Purchase was hired to kill you and he also may have been given the additional and earlier assignment of locating and, I presume, buying the Cadillac.”
“Dark claims Purchase offered him twenty thousand cash,” Erika said.
Mott gave his right earlobe a thoughtful tug. “So when Purchase inspected the car, he had the opportunity to attach the electronic device.” Without waiting for comment, Mott continued, still tugging at his ear-lobe. “But all that happened before anyone could’ve known you two would pick up the car. In fact, the idea didn’t occur to me until a few seconds before I suggested it at McCorkle’s. Therefore — and I’m getting a little weary from leaping to all these conclusions — someone was monitoring the car electronically when you picked it up. The someone obviously wasn’t poor Purchase because he was dead. But whoever it was used the sender’s signal to track you to the motel.”
“Sounds about right,” Haynes said.
“Have you attempted to find the gizmo?” Mott asked.
“No.”
“Then that expert marksman may even now be lurking outside my house.”
“Want to run him off?” Haynes asked. “Just dial 911 and tell the cops you’ve got burglars. After they notice your Cleveland Park address, they’ll be here in three minutes flat. Maybe two.”
Mott ignored the suggestions. “When you searched the car for the manuscript, why didn’t you find the sender?”
“Goddamnit, Howard, I told you we didn’t search the car.”
“We didn’t have to,” Erika explained. “We had a flat and by pure dumb luck discovered Steady’d hidden his manuscript underneath the spare tire.”
“But you do intend to look for it?” Mott said.
“When we leave here, I’ll run the car up a lift in some all-night gas station and find the thing in less than ten minutes.”