the FBI blows him, his girlfriend, and the baby away.
And whose fault would that be?
For the rest of her life, for the rest of our life, I would be the son of a bitch responsible for poor Jennie and/or her precious child getting blown away.
Not Jennie herself. Not even Chenowith. He’s crazy, so it’s not even his fault, no matter what the son of a bitch does.
Me. I would be the son of a bitch.
He looked over at Susan.
Moot point. No, I never could slap the information out of her. Not for any gentlemanly reasons, but because I could not stand the way she would look at me for having betrayed her.
Susan seemed to be able to read his mind.
She looked at him.
“Could you really slap me around?”
“Absolutely,” he said.
“You are really terrible,” she said, but she took his hand.
He saw a sign reading “Doylestown 8 Miles.”
He freed his hand and reached across and punched the button opening the glove compartment. Then he reached in and took out the microphone.
“Radio check, please,” he said into it.
There was no answer.
“I keep forgetting this is a police car,” she said.
“Well, if we had come in your red Porsche, we would have been a lot easier to spot, wouldn’t we, especially if someone—for example, the FBI—was trying to keep tabs on the owner of a red Porsche?”
He reached across her again and changed frequencies. He again asked for a radio check, and again there was no answer.
He tried it on every frequency he had available. There was a reply on the last one.
“Who wants a radio check?” a female voice responded.
“I’m a Philadelphia unmarked passing through Doylestown. I wanted to see if there was anyone I could talk to.”
“You got the Bucks County sheriff’s administrative channel, Philadelphia.”
“Well, thank you very much,” Matt said. “Nice to talk to you.”
He reached across Susan a final time, turned off the radio, put the microphone in the glove compartment, and slammed the door.
“Satisfied?” Susan asked.
“Now I know I can call the cops—or at least the sheriff—if I need to.”
“What’s the administrative channel?”
“Beats the hell out of me,” Matt confessed. “But whatever it is, that operator can talk to other people.”
Two or three minutes later, he saw what he thought must be the Crossroads Diner up ahead on the left.
“That it?”
“That’s it.”
“I’ve been in there,” he said. “I once took Penny to a gambling hell in the Poconos and we stopped in there on the way back.”
“A gambling hell?”
“A mob-run joint outside Stroudsburg.”
“What for?”
He didn’t reply as he turned into the parking lot of the Crossroads Diner. He drove slowly through the complex. Susan showed him where the telephones were. He stopped the car, told Susan to wait, and went inside the restaurant. He took a good look around, found three places from which he could see the bank of telephones, and then left. He got back in the car and started up.
“Okay, show me the house,” he said.
She gave him directions.
Twenty minutes later, they were almost there. “About a hundred yards ahead is the driveway,” she said. “The house is a couple of hundred yards down the drive. If you go in, they’re liable to see you.”
He drove past the driveway, around the next curve in the road, and then stopped.
“What I want you to do,” he said, “is slide over and drive. When we’re fifty yards from that driveway, stop. I’ll get out. Then you drive down the road, turn around again, go back where I turned around, wait until”—he stopped and looked at his watch—“quarter after five, and then come back to where you dropped me off. I’ll get in the back, and you head down the road.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to walk through the woods and take a look at the house.”
“If Bryan sees you sneaking through the woods, he’ll shoot you.”
“I don’t intend to let him see me,” Matt said, and got from behind the wheel and walked around the front of the car.
Susan had not moved.
“Slide over,” he said. “I have to do this.”
“Oh, God!” she said, but she moved.
“Not to worry, fair maiden, I am a graduate—summa cum laude—of the U.S. Marine Corps how-to-sneak-through-the-woods course offered by the Camp LeJeune School for Boys.”
“I don’t want you to get hurt,” she said.
“Neither do I,” Matt said. “And I don’t intend to. Drive, please, Susan.”
She started up.
He opened the glove compartment again and turned on the radio.
“However,” he said as they neared the drop-off point, “to cover every possible eventuality,