Rayfield took a weary breath and checked his watch.
“Shit, I’d take Nam over this any day.”
“I guess we all got a little too comfortable. Well, it’s time to earn your money, Frank. You and Tremaine just get it done. And while you’re taking care of business, remember this: We all either survive this together, or we all go down together.”
* * *
Thirty minutes later, after his debriefing by Rayfield’s assistant, Michael left the prison building and walked in the light rain to his car. What a sucker he’d been. He felt like tearing up the appeal papers, but he wouldn’t. Maybe he’d put them back into the process. Still, he felt sorry for Rufus Harms. All those years in prison had taken their toll. As Michael pulled out of the parking lot, he had no way of knowing that most of his radiator fluid had been collected in a bucket and poured into the nearby woods.
Five minutes later he looked on in dismay as the steam poured out from the hood of his car. He got out, gingerly raised the hood and then jumped back as a cloud of steam momentarily engulfed him. Swearing angrily, he looked around: not a car or human in sight. He thought for a moment. He could walk back to the prison, use the phone and call a towing service. As if on cue, the rain picked up in intensity.
As he looked up ahead of him, his spirits brightened. A van was approaching from the direction of the prison. He waved his arms to flag it down. As he did so he looked back at the car, steam still pouring out. Funny — he had just had it serviced in preparation for the trip. As he looked back at the van, his heart started to beat rapidly. He looked around, and then turned and sprinted away from the van. It sped up and quickly overtook him, blocking his way. He was about to race into the woods when the window came down and a gun was pointed at him.
“Get in,” Victor Tremaine ordered.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
* * *
It was Saturday afternoon when Sara Evans drove to Michael’s apartment and looked at the cars parked on the street. His Honda wasn’t there. He had called in sick on Friday, something she had never known him to do before. She had called his apartment, but he hadn’t answered the phone. She parked, went in the building and knocked on his door. There was no answer. She didn’t have a key. She went around to the rear of the building and climbed up the fire escape. She looked in the window of his small kitchen. Nothing. She tried the door, but it was locked. She drove back to the Court, her worries increased tenfold. Michael was not sick, she knew that. All this had something to do with the papers she had seen in his briefcase, she was sure of it. She silently prayed that he was not in over his head. That he was safe, and would be back to work on Monday.
She went back to work for the rest of the day and then had a late dinner with some of the other clerks at a restaurant near Union Station. They all wanted to talk shop, except for Sara. Usually a devoted fan of this ritual, she simply could not get into the conversations. At one point she wanted to run screaming from the room, sick of the endless strategizing, predictions, case selections, the subtlest nuances analyzed to death; mushroom clouds from mere mushrooms.
Later that night she lingered on the rear deck of her home. Then she made up her mind and took her boat out for a late-night sail on the river. She counted the stars, made funny pictures from them in her mind. She thought of Michael’s offer of marriage and the reasons she had refused it. Her colleagues would be amazed that she had. It would be a brilliant match, they would say. They would have a wonderful, dynamic life together, with the almost absolute certainty that their children would be highly intelligent, ambitious and athletically gifted. Sara herself had been a scholarship lacrosse player in college, although Michael was the better athlete of the two.