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“Inconvenience.” Mathieson clenched his eyes against the ache. “I’m sorry—I don’t feel grateful. I don’t even feel relieved. I’ll feel grateful when there’s nobody out there with guns and bombs looking for my wife and my son.”
“I know how you feel.”
Bradleigh’s detachment enraged him. He sat with his eyes closed. He was remembering different people, different times. A cheerful young lawyer and his sparkling young wife and their bubbling three-year-old son. Friendships that were built on laughter and simple enjoyments. They had taken warm pleasure in one another: That had been the center of their world—warmth. He remembered the cramped apartment on Thirteenth Street and the laughter that always filled it—and then a man in a men’s room had handed a white envelope to another man and it had all taken on weight and begun to sink beneath the surface.
He bestirred himself. “Phil Adler’s drawing up dissolution agreements. You’ll have to use that power of attorney for me, wrap things up with him.”
“Sure.”
“Sell the cars, handle the insurance people about the house, you know.” Scrape up the leavings of the life of Fredric Mathieson, 1967–1976—born by fiat and died of fear, aged eight and one half years.
Bradleigh said, “We’ll make it as though you never existed at all.”
4
They had the pool to themselves: noon in a motel. A few cars were parked in the diagonal slots—the day sleepers who didn’t have air-conditioned cars and drove by night. The pool was in the center of the two-story court, out of sight of the street; outside, Bradleigh’s four operatives were positioned to enfilade the entrances. Caruso was the only visible official presence; he wore a loud Hawaiian shirt with the tails out over his slacks and Mathieson knew there was a revolver under his waistband.
“How about a drink?”
She shook her head. “It’s not even one o’clock.”
“What the hell, we’re on vacation.”
She was watching the boy swim across the pool. “I wouldn’t call it that. For God’s sake stop patronizing me, I’m not made out of bone china.” Finally she looked straight at him. “I’m not going to pieces. You can stop treating me as if I were.”
“OK. I’m sorry.”
“And quit apologizing all the time.”
“I’m sor—” And then they both laughed. But it was uneasy laughter.
Mathieson hitched his aluminum chair six inches closer to Jan’s. “Been thinking about where we go?”
She pulled the sunglasses down off her forehead and adjusted them on the bridge of her nose. Now he could no longer see her eyes; but her face kept turning toward the pool. “My mind’s still blank. I wish I could think.” Her face dipped. “It’s so damned unfair.”
“We’ve got to make up our minds, you know. We can’t stay here. Gle
“I know—I know.”
Ro
“Do your surface dives,” Mathieson told him.
“Yeah but it’s not the same thing.” But the boy went off the ladder step, curving neatly through the blue water.
5
Bradleigh went out first. Mathieson heard his soft talk: “All right?”
“All clear.”
Bradleigh waved them out. Mathieson went ahead of Jan and Ro
“Let’s just play it by the rules,” Bradleigh told him. They walked through the archway to the back parking lot. Phosphor lamps on high arched stalks of aluminum threw pools of white light around the tarmac. The three cars were drawn up side by side. Caruso was feeding luggage into an open car trunk.
Bradleigh opened doors for them and stood to one side. “You understand the drill?”
“Seems melodramatic to me,” Mathieson said.
“I know. Think of it as a game you’re playing.”
Ro
“It won’t last long,” Bradleigh said. “A couple of days you’ll be up in those Arizona mountains learning how to be an Indian scout.” He gripped Jan’s hand. “You take care of each other now.”
“Gle
“That’s right.” But Bradleigh smiled a little; Mathieson took his firm brief handshake. “Look after them, Jason. I’ll check in with you in a few days.”
Jason W. Greene. “Take care, Gle
Then they were in the back seat of the Plymouth and Caruso was sliding in behind the wheel. The doors chunked shut, starters meshed, headlights stabbed across the lot. The car on Mathieson’s right pulled away and Caruso drove after it. Mathieson looked around: The third car rolled into place behind them.
They went up along the freeways with the two outrider cars bracketing them front and rear. Caruso kept a steady hundred feet behind the point car. Three in the morning: There was no traffic. Caruso’s small talk dried up quickly. In the back seat Ro
At El Centro the convoy stopped for gas and breakfast: Caruso made a phone call; after a while they were on the road again.
Ro
They crossed the Colorado River into Arizona and the temperature kept climbing. Twice the convoy left the Interstate and went two-laning along straight country roads, into the cotton and citrus towns, all dusty pickups and slow-moving tractors and endless irrigation hoses. The outrider cars ahead and behind were never out of sight. There was no pursuit but Caruso was obeying instructions.
The detouring and doubling-back ate up hours. At noon they were at a drab oasis somewhere near Buckeye and he tried to revive himself by splashing cold water in his face in the flyspecked lavatory. The overcooked hamburger kept coming back at him through the afternoon.
The procession took a roundabout route through the Phoenix suburbs; as the traffic thickened the outriders moved in closer like mother quail. One of the marshals spelled Caruso at the wheel of the Plymouth; Caruso slept with his head lolling while Mathieson and Jan kept Ro
East past the Superstition Range, Florence Junction, up the grades through the smelters of Superior, the mines of Miami and Globe, the dark red earth of the Apache reservation. They switchbacked down the limestone cliffs of the Salt River Canyon, crossed the bridge and stopped at the filling station for gas and Nehis.
Going up the north cliff one of the cars overheated and they waited in the scenic overlook until it could cool down enough to empty a Thermos of water into the radiator. Caruso sat on the stone retaining wall and stiffened whenever a tourist car pulled into the parking strip. Ro
Mathieson took Jan’s hand and they stretched their legs. It was bright and dry but the altitude was enough to take the heat out of the air and there was a mountain breeze.
Above the canyon Caruso took them off the highway and they wound through the back roads of the reservation through Whiteriver and up the twisting bends of the Mogollon Rim into piney woods, with a trout lake on the left, and for the first time Jan gave Mathieson her slow smile. “Almost there.”