The room had two double beds. One lay in the path of the blistering afternoon sun that streaked through the window. He stretched across the other one, intending to rest a short time before trying again to reach Freddie Young in Memphis. When he awoke, the room was dark, except for the glow from the lighted parking area beyond the window. Glancing at the red numbers on the bedside clock, he saw that he had been asleep for hours.
He ate at the restaurant downstairs, then returned to the room and dialed the number for Freddie Young. Still no answer. Wide awake, his senses honed to a fine edge now, Burke came to a sudden decision. He would hit the road.
He had no idea as to exactly where he was going. He only knew that he couldn't sit around all night and worry about Lori and do nothing. When he started out, he turned the old Buick northeast and soon found himself on Interstate 59 headed for Meridian, Mississippi.
He still was not able to accept the reality to which all of the small signs kept pointing. During his years with the Bureau, he had seen firsthand how Hoover and similar men in lofty places would resort to extraordinary means to maintain their grip on power. But he had spent the past several years doing penance for his own role in those abuses. As a result, he had worked to mellow his view of the world, seeking to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, crediting them with decent motives until they proved otherwise. He saw it as the straightforward sort of approach that his mother would have taken. But his mother had never even dreamed of the sort of things he had encountered during the past few weeks.
Burke had reawakened to the conniving nature that too many men of authority seemed to possess. It was like Cam Quinn had said; he'd been hidden away in the Smokies far too long. But he had quickly developed a new prudence in his approach to every new turn of the road. He was learning again to distinguish between illusion and the real thing. Yet there were still some possibilities that lay outside the realm of his belief.
Even so, something in his subconscious seemed to be drawing him toward the northeast, where he would inevitably face a showdown between his hopes and the truth he would prefer to deny.
By two a.m., he raced through a sleeping Birmingham. The troopers were mostly holed up in truckstops at this hour, enjoying their coffee and camaraderie with truckers and waitresses. Eighteen-wheelers ruled the road. He had no problems except when he would get caught behind a heavy-hauler trying to pass another on a hill. What his car lacked in looks, it made up in performance. Most of the time he had the cruise control set around eighty.
By the time he reached Chattanooga, his destination had become clear. Home lay no more than a couple of hours up the freeway and off through the hills. Since he had made no effort to go anywhere near the Smokies for more than two weeks, he doubted that anyone would be keeping a close watch on the place. More likely they would have a static listening post, with someone coming around on schedule to change the tapes.
The sun had just begun to peep over the crest of the mountains, a large red ball that cast long morning shadows across the wooded slopes, when Burke turned into the gravel road leading back to the Oakes house. He pulled up next to the weathered gray barn as he saw Ben walking back toward the house.
The tall, lanky mountaineer stopped and stared at him as he stepped out of the car. "What the hell happened to your face, Burke?" His eyebrows arched like question marks.
"I shaved off the beard. Didn't know whether you'd recognize me or not."
"You sure look like a city dude now." The snicker might have been from a kid who had uttered a dirty word. "Where you been so long? I thought you'd a been back two weeks ago."
"I'll tell you all about it one of these days," Burke said.
"Granny's fixing breakfast. Why don't you come on in? I know you ain't got nothing to eat at your place."
Burke knew he was hooked. You didn't turn down that kind of invitation from a neighbor. Anyway, he was hungry enough to put away more than his share of Granny Oakes' scrambled eggs, sausage, grits, huge biscuits and gravy. There would also be cantaloupe and sliced tomatoes just off the vine.
A white-haired wisp of a woman with gnarled hands and a checkered, leathery face, Granny never sat down, of course. She busied herself cooking and bringing in hot coffee and hot biscuits and whatever else Burke, the two Oakes "boys," as they were called, Ben's three kids and his wife, Emma, might need. Emma tried to help as usual, and got only nasty looks for her efforts. Granny didn't hanker to have anybody else messing around in her kitchen when she was cooking. Emma, a stout, jolly woman with a strange, high-pitched voice, could do the dishes all she wanted.
They didn't pry into Burke's business. It had taken the better part of the first year for these clannish mountain people to warm up to a strange new neighbor who came and went at all hours, sometimes spending days alone on the mountain trails. But after that first spring, when he had pitched in without reservation to help keep a flash flood from decimating their small cattle herd, they had accepted Burke as one of their own. They marveled at his collection of photographs and paid no attention when his camera froze them on paper as they went about their daily chores. But they couldn't hide their concern over the strange goings-on around his house since he had left on an "out-of-state assignment" several weeks ago.
During breakfast, he told them a little about some of the exotic places he had been. The youngsters stared with eyes as big as a barn owl's as he described the sights of Israel and Hong Kong. Afterward, Ben and Hargis walked outside with him. When they saw his head shifting about with a searching gaze, Hargis inquired, "What you looking for?"
"Where's Drum?" Burke asked. It wasn't normal to walk around the Oakes place without encountering the cold nose and wagging brown tail of the old blue tick hound. If you were a stranger, he would bark himself hoarse until one of the family silenced him.
The faces of both men dropped and they half-bowed their heads.
"Dead," said Ben in a mournful voice.
"Dead? I didn't know he'd been sick. What happened?"
"Hadn't been. Happened right after you called, week or ten days ago. He was sprightly as ever one night. Next morning he's stone cold dead. Had a little spot of blood on his neck. That's all. Not tore up like he'd been in a fight with some critter."
"Sorry to hear that," Burke said. Not just because the hound was dead, but because of how he had died. That spot of blood meant a dart gun. And it meant someone had made a surreptitious invasion of the Oakes house to bug it. No doubt the pickup point was the same one that taped any sounds occurring at his house. "When's the last time you saw somebody around my place?" he asked.
Hargis said, "Feller comes every other night, about sundown. We seen him look around the house, then go into the woods a minute and come back out. He don't go inside the house."
"Will he be back tonight?"
"Let's see… yep. He was here Monday."
"Okay, guys. Thanks for the breakfast and for looking after things. I'm going over to get some clean clothes and my Jeep. Then I'll have to head out again. Not sure where I'll be going, but you'll hear from me sooner than two weeks this time. I promise."
Ben looked over at the old Buick. "Want us to tow that wreck back in the holler where we junked our old truck?"
Burke laughed. "No thanks. I think I'll keep it awhile yet."
The house showed no sign of having been disturbed. He didn't bother looking for the transmitters. Let them listen to the crickets and the frogs and whatever else generated enough sound to actuate their tape machine. After he had packed what he needed into the Jeep, he locked up the house and drove into Gatlinburg.