“How’s Hank?” he asked.

“Still sleeping it off,” I said.

“Good. Ya know,” a touch of New England came through in his accent, “people here are real nice.”

“Mostly,” I said.

“Mr. Travis-”

“Bill. Call me Bill.”

“Fine. Bill, I’ve been wondering something.”

“What?”

“Just what is it you do for a living?” he asked. “If you don’t mind telling me.”

“Financial consultant.”

“Ahh. Okay,” he said. There was a little sparkle in his eyes.

Suddenly I knew that he’d already read everything that his friendly, neighborhood FBI computer could spit out about me. Probably, he knew who my second grade teachers were when I’d forgotten the information a long time ago.

There was an odd and long moment of silence as we smoked.

“Got something for you,” he said finally.

I waited.

He fished something out of his jacket, handed it to me.

It was a photograph.

“What am I looking at?” I asked. The sodium arc light from the parking lot revealed an old black-and-white photograph of three men sitting at a small table. The men looked somber and serious. It was from a time when it was customary to put on your most dour face for a picture.

Then it hit me what I was looking at.

“This is Carpin, isn’t it? Matthew Carpin. The fellow on the right is Bryan “Whitey” Walker. Who’s that in the center?”

“You’ll figure it out, Mr. Travis. Oh, sorry. I’m supposed to call you Bill. Old habits die hard, you know. Kind of like old law men. It’s getting late. Good night, Mr. Travis.”

“Good night, Agent Cranford,” I said.

He turned and went back the way he came, got into his car and left.

I’d have to remember to get rid of that GPS bug on the Suburban.

I studied the photo.

Whitey was already going bald on top by the time he was in his late twenties, but this was earlier than that. The other fellow, Matthew Carpin, was a wiry little fellow. All three men at the table were nattily dressed.

It hit me.

The man in the center was Jack “Blackjack” Johannsen.

Stirrings in the night.

I listened to Julie breathe in the night as the dark thoughts came and went. Even though we weren’t touching, I felt the heat from her.

Around two in the morning the phone rang.

I grabbed for it before I was even fully awake.

“Bill. You are not a very nice fellow.”

“Huh?”

“I said, you’re not a very nice guy.”

I got up, the phone snugged against my ear. Stumbled around in the dark in my underwear. Outside? No good. Bathroom! I went inside in the dark and closed the door behind me, felt for the toilet, put the seat down and sat on it.

I was cold all over.

“You there?” Archie Carpin asked.

“I’m still here,” my voice reverberated off the bathroom walls, echoed back at me. My stomach felt like it had a ball of lead in it, engulfed in a sea of acid.

“That’s good,” he said.

“What do you want?”

“I’ve been thinking about what you said. About negotiations and attitudes and crap like that.”

“Well,” I said, attempting to put some of the nervousness out of my voice. “I guess that’s a good thing.”

“It’s a good thing, Mr. Travis.”

“So you know who I am. Good for you. Then you know that when somebody snaps at me, I snap back.”

“It depends on who draws the first blood, doesn’t it? Also it depends on who’s right and who’s wrong, right?”

“Listen,” I began. I was sitting in the dark, but there was a picture filling up my vision; a perfect picture in three dimensions and with sound and motion. Dock’s life blood squirting out of him and the labored breathing of a dying man. “You drew the first blood,” I told him.

“Not really,” he said. “But I will draw the last blood. That is unless we can come to a meeting of the minds.”

“What’s your bright idea?”

“You bring Julie back to the ranch, and I’ll promise that I won’t hurt her. Or the kid.”

I laughed at him. “Julie’s not mine to give,” I said, “and even if I could, I wouldn’t trust you.”

“But you’d trust her?”

He had a point there.

“I’ll make this easy for you, Mr. Travis,” he said.

I interrupted: “Don’t do me any favors. Only friends do favors.”

“Call it a good will gesture, then. I’ll let the little girl go, in exchange for Julie. Even she’ll go for that.”

“No way,” I said. “No trades.”

“Let me talk to Julie, then.”

“Nope. That ain’t gonna happen.”

The phone clicked off.

I went back to bed, but couldn’t sleep. If the call had been nothing more than Carpin’s attempt to keep me unbalanced, then it had worked.

Somewhere after 3:00 a.m., I went back outside and tapped lightly on Hank’s door. Absently, I wondered if maybe I was being watched from somewhere through a starlight scope. I hoped I wasn’t. I’d never considered myself to be photogenic, but I was willing to bet that I would make a good target.

Hank’s door opened a crack.

“Yeah?”

“You okay?”

“My head is killin’ me. I seem to remember something about red and blue lights. And a jail. Was I in a drunk tank?”

“Yeah.”

“Damn. I gotta lay down.”

“Okay,” I said. “Get some sleep. We’ll get up early and get some breakfast.”

“G’night.”

“‘Night.”

Back inside our almost pitch black room, I lay down and snuggled in with Julie.

And somewhere before sunrise I made my first real mistake. I went to sleep at the wrong time.

CHAPTER TWENTY

“Wake up, Bill.”

It was Hank, shaking me awake.

“What? What?”

“Bill. She’s gone.”

Who’s gone?That’s what I wanted to ask, but before I could even articulate the question, the answer came to me.

“Julie,” I said.

“Yeah.”

My eyes darted around the room. All my stuff was there, but what little she had of her own was gone with her.

I got up on wobbly feet. Probably I looked like hell. I wasn’t starting to hurt yet. I was still in shock. Would be for some time. It would come though. This I knew.

“What happened?” I asked.

“She didn’t bother to check out,” he said. “Ohhh, my head.”

“She must have heard me.”

“Heard you what?”

“I got a call last night. It was Carpin. He wanted to trade the little girl for Julie. I told him no way. She must have been listening on the other side of the door. Decided to take him up on it.”

Hank nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “That must be it. I already went downstairs and talked to the owner. I apologized for the gun-play. Gave him an extra hundred-dollar bill.”

“And, Julie?”

“Oh. She banged on his office door about five-thirty this morning. Used his phone. A half-hour later a light-blue Ford pickup picked her up.”

“Jake. Freddie.”

“Yeah,” Hank said. “Also, she left you a note. It’s both short and sweet.” He handed me the note, written on motel stationery.

Bill, I gotta go. Me for Jessica is not a bad deal. Go home. You’d only get killed. -Julie.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Almost ten. Bill. It’s okay. I was asleep too. We can’t change it now.”

I wanted to curse. It wouldn’t have done any good. Red hot needles of betrayal were beginning to poke at my gut, my heart.

I could see that Hank wanted to ask me a lot of questions. He didn’t, though. Just the same, it was all right there on his face. I wasn’t anywhere near in the mood to talk, but then I guess he knew that.

“Hank. I’ll tell you all you wanna know. Not now. We’ve got to get going.”

I started putting my clothes on.

“Alright,” he said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Right.”

I was warned.

She had told me to run. Very fast.

It didn’t help, though.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

My normal tendency is to go into a state of black despair when I lose someone whom I consider to be close. But I wasn’t depressed. I was angry, but who could I blame? I had known all along that something was going to happen, and that it would be something that I wouldn’t like.