On the screen was an artist’s line drawing. Charon stared. Yes, the artist had got him. Probably from that woman he had met in the lobby as he was leaving the building. Who would have thought she had gotten that good a look? Damn!
The cat saw him and tensed. Grisella Clifton turned and caught sight of him.
“Oh! You startled me, Mr. Tackett.”
“Sorry. I was about to knock.”
She rose from her chair and turned toward him. The cat scurried away. “I’m so sorry. I guess I heard the outside door open, but I was just so engrossed in this … this …”
She turned back toward the television. The artist’s effort was still on the screen. She looked from the television to Charon, then back to the television.
He saw it in her face.
She drew her breath in sharply and her hand came up to cover her mouth. Her eyes widened.
“Oh! My God!”
He stood there trying to decide what to do.
“You’re him! You tried to kill Vice-President Quayle!”
“No, I didn’t,” Henry Charon said automatically, slightly irritated. He had been shooting at Gideon Cohen! And hit him too. That was one hell of a fine shot!
He saw her chest expand as she sucked in air. She was going to scream.
Without conscious thought he had balanced his weight on the balls of his feet, so now he pushed out toward her in one fluid motion with his hands outstretched.
Thanos Liarakos didn’t know what made him turn his head to the right, but he did. She was sitting on a park bench there amid the naked black trees, the streetlight limning her.
He sat behind the wheel of the car staring, uncertain, yet at some level deep down very, very sure.
The man in the car behind laid on his horn.
Liarakos took his foot off the brake and let the car move. He went around the block looking for a parking place. Nothing. Not a single vacant spot. He jammed the gas pedal down and shot down the next street. Every spot full!
Around the corner, looking, the frustration welling rapidly.
He began to swear. The goddamn city, the goddamn traffic engineers and the goddamn planning board that let them remodel these goddamn row houses without driveways and garages — he cussed them all while he thought about Elizabeth.
There, a fireplug. He pulled in beside it and killed the engine. He hit the automatic door lock button on the door and was off and running even as the door slammed shut.
Elizabeth! Sitting out in the rain on a dismal cold night like this. Oh God — if there is a god up there — how could you do this to gentle Elizabeth? Why?
He jogged the last block and darted into the street to see around a tree that was in the way. In the process he was almost run over, but he dodged the delivery van and dashed across the tralffic. Another Christian soul laid on his horn and squealed his brakes.
Liarakos paid no attention. On the edge of the park he halted and looked again.
She was still sitting there. Hadn’t moved.
He walked forward.
As he passed a bench, still seventy-five feet from her, a derelict huddled there spoke: “Hey man, I hate to ask this, but have you got any loose change you could …”
She wasn’t looking around. She was sitting there staring downward, apparently oblivious of the cold and the cutting wind and the steady rain that was already starting to soak Liarakos.
“Some loose change would help, man.” The derelict was following him. He was aware of it but didn’t bother to look behind him.
Her hands were in her coat pockets. The good coat she had worn to the clinic was gone, and in its place she wore a thin, faded cotton thing that looked as if it wouldn’t warm a rabbit. Her hair was a sodden, dripping mess. She didn’t look up.
“Elizabeth.”
She continued to stare at the ground. He squatted and looked up into her face. It was her all right. The corners of her lips were tilted up in a wan little smile.
Her eyes moved to his face, but they looked without recognition.
“Man, it’s a damn cold night and a cup of coffee would do for me, you know? I had some troubles in my life and some of them wasn’t my fault. How about some Christian charity for a poor ol’ nigger. A little change wouldn’t be much to you, but to me …”
He found his wallet and extracted a bill without taking his eyes off Elizabeth. He passed the bill back.
“God, this is a twenty! Are you—”
“Take it. And leave.”
“Thanks, mister.”
Her face had a glow about it. Aww, fuck! She was as high as a flag on the Fourth of July.
“I tell you, man,” the derelict said, “’cause you been real generous with me. She’s in big trouble. She’s strung out real bad, man.”
“Please leave.”
“Yeah.”
The footsteps shuffled away.
He reached out and caressed her face, pressed her hand between his.
The rain continued to fall. She sat with her thin, frozen smile amid the pigeon shit on the park bench among the glistening black trees, staring at nothing at all.
“So what can you tell me?” Jake Grafton asked the FBI lab man.
“Not much,” the investigator said, scratching his head. They were standing in the room from which the assassin had shot Chief Justice Longstreet. The rifle lay on the table. Everything in sight was covered by the fine dark grit of fingerprint dust.
“Apparently no fresh prints. We got a bunch, but I doubt that our guy left any. Be a fluke if he did.”
“Where did the bullet hit the Chief Justice?”
“About one inch above the left ear. Killed instantly. Haven’t got the bullet yet. It went through the victim, through the upholstery and the sheet metal and buried itself in the asphalt of the street. Rifle is a thirty-ought-six, same caliber and make as the one that fired the bullet into the attorney general. Same brand of scope, and I suspect, the same brand of gun oil and so forth.”
The floor of the room in which they were standing had a fine layer of dust on it, and it showed tracks, a lot of tracks, so many in fact that the individual footprints ran together.
“Did you guys make all these?” Jake asked gloomily.
“No, as a matter of fact. Sort of curious, but the guy who did the shooting seemed to come into the room, go to the window, and stay there. He made some footprints, but not many, considering. He didn’t have nervous feet.”
“Nervous feet,” Jake repeated.
The lab man seemed to be searching for words. “He wasn’t real excited, if you know what I mean.”
“A pro,” Toad Tarkington prompted.
“Maybe,” the FBI agent said. “Maybe not. But he’s a cool customer.”
The military curfew was announced at seven p.m., to take effect at midnight. Anyone on the streets between the hours of midnight and seven a.m. would be subject to arrest and prosecution by military tribunal for failure to obey emergency orders. Anyone on the streets in a vehicle between the hours of seven a.m. and midnight would also be subject to arrest. This curfew would be in effect for forty-eight hours, unless it was ended sooner or extended.
The order was news from coast to coast along with the murder of Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Longstreet and the subway massacre. The death toll continued to mount as two of the wounded succumbed to their injuries. One of them was a pregnant woman.
The mood of the nation, as reflected by man-on-the-street television interviews, was outrage. Politicians of stature were calling for an invasion of Colombia. Several wanted to declare war. Senator Bob Cherry was in the latter group. Ferried from newsroom to newsroom by limo, he abandoned his point-by-point criticism of Vice-President Quayle’s efforts and lambasted the administration as unprepared and incompetent. He demanded the troops be pulled out of Washington and sent to Colombia.