The agents who’d come by earlier in the day had evidently got the super’s back up when they’d made him open Nolan’s apartment door, so much so that I suspected I could have gained access merely by listening to the guy bitch about their attitude for ten minutes or so. The twenty-dollar bill I produced cut that down to three minutes, which in my estimation was money well spent.
As the super let me in, I noted that the lock plate was shiny, and there was evidence of recent repair to the doorframe.
“The police do that?” I asked, nodding at the lock and the evidence of damage.
The big man shook his head wearily. “That was last week. Lot of people looking for Mr. Nolan.”
“Must be a pain in the ass,” I said. “Having to deal with this, I mean.”
The super shrugged and looked around, as if to say this kind of incident was hardly unusual with his tenants. I guessed the guy was probably just happy the rent was paid up.
The apartment was cramped and smelled of stale cigarette smoke and dampness. Despite the scarcity of furniture, it was a mess, and probably had been almost as bad even before agents Gorman and Anderson had conducted their search. Takeout menus and magazines devoted mainly to guns and barely legal teens mingled with empty beer cans and stained pizza boxes. The agents had gone through the mostly emptied drawers, opened Nolan’s junk mail, and moved the furniture around: not exactly what you’d call thorough. Maybe they’d refrained from a more rigorous search because Nolan himself wasn’t actually wanted in connection with any crime, and they’d decided he was so tangential to the manhunt that finding him didn’t justify much more than the time it took to knock on his door. I thought different, and perhaps that was why I came up with a different result.
In ten minutes, I had kicked loose enough leads to put me on what I thought was the right track. In the otherwise empty closet, I’d found a single clipping from a magazine article about Caleb Wardell. One corner of the clipping was creased over and flattened, as though it had been stored in a box or file under a lot of other papers. Probably a lot of other news clippings in a proud father’s collection.
Virtually everything else I needed was in the trash: a bunch of crumpled bookies’ slips showing amounts in the high hundreds and a soaked and dried-out again beer mat from a place called Jimmy’s Bar and Grill that sported a telephone number scrawled in blue ballpoint pen. The number put me through to one of the bookies represented in the crumpled ball of slips. The sound and manner of the voice at the other end of the line told me it was the kind of operation that would not be above breaking the occasional leg.
Feeling a hunch, I Googled Jimmy’s on my cell phone. It was a steakhouse in a place called Allanton, a tiny village in the southwest of Nebraska that seemed to be a popular hunting and fishing location. The bookies’ slips explained the busted lock and the absence of Nolan. The beer mat might suggest a possible destination, given what I knew about him from the magazine interviews. Besides being a lousy gambler, Wardell’s dad was a hunter. Like father, like son. I just hoped the similarity wasn’t too exact.
I thanked the super and went back outside to the rented Caddy. I dialed the number for Jimmy’s and waited. I was about due a lucky break — maybe Nolan would be there right now. A deep voice answered on the eighth ring, loud rock music and raucous laughter in the background.
“Jimmy’s?” He said it slowly, like he wasn’t entirely sure.
“Hi, I’m looking to speak to one of your customers,” I said.
“We’re not the…” The voice at the other end paused, trying to think of what it was he was not. “The Yellow Pages, buddy,” he finished, sounding mildly pleased with himself. Like a kid who’s managed to remember what two and two makes.
I came back quickly before the hang-up I could sense coming. “He told me I could reach him there.”
Another pause. When the guy at the other end spoke, he sounded unsure. “Got a name?”
“Eddie Nolan.”
I heard a sharp intake of breath. It was as though I’d yelled a four-letter word at a church coffee morning.
“You’re gonna need to speak to Brenda.”
“Well, can I?”
“Huh?”
“Speak to Brenda?”
“She ain’t in. Try tomorrow morning.”
I started to ask what time, but the genius on the other end had terminated the call.
I pondered the conversation for a couple of seconds, then took the road atlas thoughtfully supplied by the rental company from the side pocket in the driver’s door and worked out the route to Allanton. It was another two hundred and fifty miles to the west. If I was wrong, this detour would send me hopelessly off course. But if I was right…
It felt right. With everything I knew, Allanton felt right.
Carol’s voice chimed in from the back of my mind: Anything you don’t know?
I glanced down at my phone, half expecting to see the picture from Coney Island. It wasn’t there, just a stock image of a dandelion clock.
“Always,” I said aloud. There’s always something you don’t know. But that didn’t change my mind about Allanton.
I mulled over the idea of driving straight through before deciding I’d be better off getting some sleep while I could. The genius had said the person I needed to talk to would be in tomorrow morning. Unless the bar opened unusually early, that probably meant Brenda was the manager and that she’d be on site to carry out administrative tasks. That was good; it would mean not having to deal with a bar full of potentially hostile regulars.
I locked the Cadillac’s doors, reclined the seat and, despite the discomfort, fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. I woke at four and turned the key in the ignition. I drove south on North Twenty-Seventh Street, took a right on O Street, then merged with I-80 and put the pedal to the floor. By the time the six a.m. news turned all my assumptions upside down, I was two-thirds of the way to Allanton. Too far to turn back.
DAY THREE
27
Four hundred miles southeast of Lincoln, Missouri State Highway Patrol Trooper Abel Williams pulled his cruiser to a halt on the shoulder of Highway 65. He was about as deep into the Busiek State Forest as someone could get without being on his way out again, five or six miles from the nearest streetlight. The remains of the vehicle were far enough off the road that he’d probably have driven right by if he hadn’t spotted the last embers of the conflagration.
He got out of the car, withdrawing his gun from its holster. Probably just teenagers down from Springfield, burning a car they’d stolen and taken for a ride. And probably they’d be long gone. Still, it was better to be safe than sorry.
The stink of burnt plastic was carried upward by a chill wind out of the woods. Williams descended the gentle incline toward the dying glow between the trees, unhurried. He unclipped his flashlight from his belt as he walked — it was a heavy-duty Maglite, weighing two pounds and as good as a club as it was as a light source. But he didn’t turn it on just yet, even when the branches overhead began to thicken as he moved deeper into the woods.
The wreck was farther down than he’d thought at first; its apparent proximity had been deceptive. Perhaps some kind of optical illusion caused by the position of the trees or the temperature of the air or some other damn thing. Still, he kept the flashlight off and the gun aloft — safety on, because he didn’t want to put a foot in a rabbit hole and blow his own head off. He stopped and listened, suddenly feeling very alone and isolated now that he’d walked thirty paces from the car.