Of course, the man on the phone could be lying. He might not be with the Bureau. Possibly he was hoping to delay Joe until Blick and his friends—or others aligned with them—could get here.
With a shake of his head, Joe turned away from Dewey. He pushed through the door and into the August heat.
Behind him, Dewey said, “Joe?”
Joe walked toward his car. He resisted the urge to break into a run.
At the far end of the parking lot, by the open gate, the young attendant with the shaved head and the gold nose ring was watching. In this city where sometimes money mattered more than fidelity or honour or merit, style mattered more than money; fashions came and went even more frequently than principles and convictions, leaving only the unchanging signal colours of youth gangs as a sartorial tradition. This kid’s look, punk-grunge-neopunk-whatever, was already as dated as spats, making him look less threatening than he thought and more pathetic than he would ever be able to comprehend. Yet under these circumstances, his interest in Joe seemed ominous.
Even at low volume, the hard beat of rap music thumped through the blistering air.
The interior of the Honda was hot but not intolerable. The side window, shattered by a bullet at the cemetery, provided just enough ventilation to prevent suffocation.
The attendant had probably noticed the broken-out window when Joe had driven in. Maybe he’d been thinking about it.
What does it matter if he has been thinking? It’s only a broken window.
He was certain the engine wouldn’t start, but it did.
As Joe backed out of the parking slot, Dewey Beemis opened the reception-lounge door and stepped outside onto the small concrete stoop under the awning that bore the logo of the Post. The big man looked not alarmed but puzzled.
Dewey wouldn’t try to stop him. They were friends, after all, or had once been friends, and the man on the phone was just a voice.
Joe shifted the Honda into drive.
Coming down the steps, Dewey shouted something. He didn’t sound alarmed. He sounded confused, concerned.
Ignoring him nonetheless, Joe drove toward the exit. Under the dirty Cinzano umbrella, the attendant rose from the folding chair. He was only two steps from the rolling gate that would close off the lot.
Atop the chain-link fence, the coils of razor wire flared with silver reflections of late-afternoon sunlight.
Joe glanced at the rear-view mirror. Back there, Dewey was standing with his hands on his hips.
As Joe went past the Cinzano umbrella, the attendant didn’t even come forth out of the shade. Watching with heavy-lidded eyes, as expressionless as an iguana, he wiped sweat off his brow with one hand, black fingernails glistening.
Through the open gate and turning right into the street, Joe was driving too fast. The tyres squealed and sucked wetly at the sun-softened blacktop, but he didn’t slow down.
He went west on Strathern Street and heard sirens by the time that he turned south on Lankershim Boulevard. Sirens were part of the music of the city, day and night; they didn’t necessarily have anything to do with him.
Nevertheless, all the way to the Ventura Freeway, under it, and then west on Moorpark, he repeatedly checked the rear-view mirror for pursuing vehicles, either marked or unmarked.
He was not a criminal. He should have felt safe going to the authorities to report the men in the cemetery, to tell them about the message from Rose Marie Tucker, and to report his suspicions about Flight 353.
On the other hand, in spite of being on the run for her life, Rose apparently hadn’t sought protection from the cops, perhaps because there was no protection to be had. My life depends on your discretion. He had been a crime reporter long enough to have seen more than a few cases in which the victim had been targeted not because of anything he had done, not because of money or other possessions that his assailant desired, but merely because of what he had known. A man with too much knowledge could be more dangerous than a man with a gun.
What knowledge Joe had about Flight 353 seemed, however, to be pathetically inadequate. If he was a target merely because he knew that Rose Tucker existed and that she claimed to have survived the crash, then the secrets she possessed must be so explosive that the power of them could be measured only in megatonnage.