“No indication that there is a second car at the scene — a limousine?” I asked.
“Nothing so far. Hold it, here’s more coming in… Cruiser reports three dead, sir. We had three men in that C car; it looks like they’ve bought it,”
I instructed him to relay word to our radio room to dispatch the closest available AXE unit to the scene. “I want a complete rundown on what happened as quickly as possible. Somebody must have seen it or District Police wouldn’t have gotten the word so fast.” When he was back on the line after passing on my orders, I had more for him to do: “Get on another phone and find out if the Old Man is back yet… No, better yet, have an emergency signal put out on his beeper. I want him to contact me here as soon as he can. I’ll get off the phone now so he can call me.”
No sooner had I hung up than my phone rang again. Scooping up the receiver, I asked, “Have you heard, sir?”
The voice that responded wasn’t Hawk’s.
“Nick? It’s me, Candy.”
Stunned, I almost shouted “Where are you?” at her.
“At a little boutique on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown,” she said. “Why? What’s happened?”
“Where’s Abdul?” I demanded, not taking time to explain.
“Sitting out front in the car. Why, Nick? What’s wrong?”
“Are you sure he’s there?”
“Certainly, I’m sure. I’m looking out the window at him right now. Nick, please tell me what’s wrong. I did as you said and had him stop here, supposedly so I could pick up a sweater that Sherima saw in the window last night and mentioned she wanted. Was that wrong? You said to delay his getting back to the hotel as long as I could.”
I was sure that Hawk must be trying to reach me by that time, but I had to find out something from Candy. “Honey, don’t ask me right now how I know, but you and Abdul stopped at a gas station and he made some phone calls. Do you know to whom?”
She started to ask how I knew about the roadside stop, but I interrupted her and said sharply, “Not now, Candy. Just tell me, do you know who he called?”
“No, Nick. I didn’t go into the station. I tried to keep him from stopping there, but he insisted that we needed gas, and—”
“You know I’d like to hear all about it, but right now I’ve got to hang up. Just do me a favor and keep Abdul occupied for as long as you can. Promise?”
“All right,” she said and sounded hurt that I was brushing off what sounded like a good effort on her part. “Just tell me one thing,” she went on, “is there any word about Sherima?”
“No. But don’t worry. Now I have to hang up.” I could hear her saying something as I pressed down the button that disconnected us, but at the moment, I couldn’t worry about what it was. And, once more, the phone rang immediately. This time I waited until making certain that the voice responding to my hello was Hawk’s before I asked, “Have you heard what’s happened, sir?”
“Yes. I was just coming into the office when my pager went off. I’ve been trying to get you, but your line has been busy.” The last was almost a reprimand.
“It seems to me that I’ve spent my whole life on this phone,” I said grimly, “while other people have been murdered.” Then I launched into an explanation of what I knew about Candy’s trip to Potomac and the events that followed my contacting her there and arranging for her and Abdul to return to the city. “I’m sure that those calls he made had something to do with what happened later on Canal Road,” I said, concluding my report.
“You’re probably right,” Hawk agreed. “Let me tell you what I’ve been able to find out in the few minutes I’ve been back…”
For one thing, three of our men were dead, it appeared certain. Hawk had reached his contact on the District Police force, and after some hasty radio queries to and answers from officers at the scene, it was learned that the car was ours and that the corpses had either been in it or close enough to have been passengers. “And it didn’t crash,” Hawk continued. “The original report was wrong. It blew up — or, rather, a grenade was thrown under it and exploded, flipping it into a ditch. Then, according to the man who reported the incident originally — he’s a tow truck operator who has a radio in his truck and that’s how the police got the word so quickly — a VW camper stopped beside the burning C car. Two men got out of the camper and sprayed the wreck with automatic rifles.”
“Did the tow truck operator get the license number of the camper?”
The witness had been too stunned by the sudden violence that erupted to notice the VWs plate number, Hawk had been informed, but he had managed to provide a pretty good description of the ambushers’ vehicle. Working out of a garage, he was familiar with most models of cars and trucks and the information he supplied already had been put out on an all-points bulletin in the District and surrounding area. Roadblocks were being set up on all bridges and main highways out of Washington, while state police in adjoining Maryland and Virginia were maintaining a steady surveillance on all the principal thoroughfares and had dispatched cruising cars to the less-used roads.
I hadn’t had time to tell Hawk of Candy’s call from Georgetown, and when I did so, his conclusion was the same as that I had reached. “He’s sticking to routine,” Hawk agreed, “to keep from appearing to have had anything to do with setting up the attack on our C car. He probably doesn’t know that one of our men trailing him had come forward on foot and watched him making the calls at that service station. So far as he knows, the C car just halted out of sight and waited for him to proceed back out onto the highway again.”
Something that Hawk just had said rang a bell in my memory, but I didn’t have time to concentrate on it, because he had some instructions to give me. “Stick in your room, Nick, while I coordinate the hunt for that VW camper. I want to be able to reach you when it’s located, then I’ll have a job for you.” The way he said it left no doubt in my mind as to what that job would be once the killers were pinpointed. “And I want you waiting when Miss Knight and that bodyguard Abdul Bedawi return to the hotel. If he sticks to his pattern, he’ll come up to Sherima’s suite to see how she’s feeling.”
“I’ll be here, sir,” I assured him as our conversation ended.
With Hawk taking over control of communications, I expected my phone to be still for a while, but I was wrong. It rang almost instantly again, and when I answered it, the caller identified herself as a clerk in a boutique in Georgetown — the name sounded like something Sly.
“Mr. Carter, I’ve been trying to get through to you, but your line has been busy,” she said. “A lady gave me twenty dollars for promising to phone you and give you a message. She ran out of here so fast she didn’t have time to call herself.”
“What’s the message?” I asked, knowing who the lady had to be.
“She just told me to tell you that Candy said to call you and say that somebody — I just don’t remember the name, she was in such a hurry I didn’t catch it — anyway, somebody drove off and she was going to try to follow him and she would call you later. Does that mean anything to you, Mr. Carter?”
“It certainly does,” I told her. “It means a lot. Did you happen to see which way she went?”
“No, I didn’t. It all happened so fast that I didn’t think to look. She just grabbed a pencil off the counter here at the cash register, wrote down your name and phone number, gave me a twenty-dollar bill and took off.”