size of a pea. He touched his finger to it, brought the finger to his
nose.
Peanut butter. Carried here on the sole or heel of one of Eric Leben’s
boots while Ben and Rachael were in the living room, busily stuffing the
Wildcard file into the garbage bag.
Returning here with Rachael and the file, Ben had been in a hurry
because it had seemed to him that the most important thing was to get
her out of the cabin and off the mountain before either Eric or the
authorities showed up. So he had not looked down and had not noticed
the tread mark or the peanut butter. And, of course, he’d seen no
reason to search for signs of Eric in places he had searched only
minutes earlier. He could not have anticipated this cleverness from a
man with devastating brain injuries-a walking dead man who, if he
followed at all in the pattern of the lab mice, should be somewhat
disoriented, deranged, mentally and emotionally unstable. Therefore,
Ben could not blame himself, no, he had done the right thing when he had
sent Rachael off in the Mercedes, thinking he was sending her away all
by herself, never realizing that she was not alone in the car. How
could he have realized?
It was the only thing he could have done. It was not at all his fault,
this unforeseeable development was not his fault, not his fault-but he
cursed himself vehemently.
Waiting in the kitchen with the ax, listening to them plan their next
moves as they stood in the garage, Eric must have realized that he had a
chance of getting Rachael alone, and evidently that prospect appealed to
him so much that he was willing to forgo a whack at Ben. He’d hidden
beside the refrigerator untii they were in the living room, then crept
into the garage, took the keys from the ignition, quietly opened the
trunk, returned the keys to the ignition, climbed into the trunk, and
pulled the lid shut behind himself.
If Rachael had a flat tire and opened the trunk…
Or if, on some quiet stretch of desert highway, Eric decided to kick the
back seat of the car off its mountings and climb through from the
trunk…
His heart pounding so hard that it shook him, Ben raced out of the
garage toward the rental Ford in front of the cabin.
Jerry Peake spotted the red-and-white iron rooster mounted atop one
mailbox of ten. He turned into a narrow branch road that led up a steep
slope past widely separated driveways and past houses mostly hidden in
the forest that encroached from both sides.
Sharp had finished screwing silencers on both thirtyeights. Now he took
two fully loaded spare magazines from the attache’ case, kept one for
himself, and put the other beside the pistol that he had provided for
Peake. “I’m glad you’re with me on this one, Jerry.”
Peake had not actually said that he was with Sharp on this one, and in
fact he could not see any way he could participate in cold-blooded
murder and still live with himself. For sure, his dream of being a
legend would be shattered.
On the other hand, if he crossed Sharp, he would destroy his career in
the D.S.A.
“The macadam should turn to gravel,” Sharp said, consulting the
directions The Stone had given him.
In spite of all his recent insights, in spite of the advantages those
insights should have given him, Jerry Peake did not know what to do.
He did not see a way out that would leave him with both his self-respect
and his career. As he drove up the slope, deeper into the dark of the
woods, a panic began to build in him, and for the first time in many
hours he felt inadequate.
“Gravel,” Anson Sharp noted as they left the pavement.
Suddenly Peake saw that his predicament was even worse than he had
realized because Sharp was likely to kill him, too. If Peake tried to
stop Sharp from killing Shadway and the Leben woman, then Sharp would
simply shoot Peake first and set it up to look as if the two fugitives