Dead Even - Mariah Stewart [49]
“It’s more like a spare room with a bed in it. But it’s a nice bed. I brought it up here from my grandmother’s house over the summer. She moved into an assisted-living place and couldn’t take most of her furniture with her, so she divided it up between the grandkids.”
“And there’s a lock on the spare-room door?”
“I’m wounded that you’d think such a thing of me.” He took her by the elbow and led her up the dark path to his front porch. “However, feel free to put a chair in front of the door if it makes you feel better. I think there’s a chair in there—”
“No, no. You’re right,” she said as he unlocked the front door. “We’re both adults, and right now, we have to work together. We’ll have to work together again, I’m sure, in the future. We should both be big enough to put all . . . put the past behind us and move on with our lives, right?”
“Right.”
Once inside, she stopped in the hallway, framed by the light from the front porch, and looked up at him.
“I can do it if you can do it.”
He gritted his teeth, not sure, after all, that he could.
“Sure.” It was easier to just agree at this point. “Great.”
“Great.” She smiled and snapped on the overhead light. “Which way is the guest room?”
Archer sat on the edge of the bed in the cheap motel room he’d rented for the night, just like Burt had told him to do, and waited for the cell phone to ring. He wished he could call home, let his mother know he was all right and not to worry, but Burt told him when he gave him the phone that it was only to be used to communicate with him. Still, Archer was tempted. How would Burt know, anyway, if he called home?
Forget it, he told himself. Burt seemed to know everything.
He wished he knew who Burt was. Maybe if he had a last name, he wouldn’t be so scary.
Nah, Archer decided. Knowing his last name wouldn’t make much difference. Burt would always be scary. He was just a scary kind of guy.
His hands over his eyes, Archer tried to make sense of his life. It had all gotten too crazy, too fast. One minute he’s at the Well trying to score with Lisa Shelton; the next minute he’s putting a bullet in the back of some old man’s head.
God, I didn’t mean to . . . I never meant to . . .
The cell phone rang rudely, and he looked at it for a long moment. What if he didn’t answer it? What if he took the money Burt had given him and just disappeared forever?
What if this all turned out to be nothing more than a bad, bad dream? That the past twenty-four hours had never happened? He’d wake up in his old bed. And, back in Telford, that old man would still be alive. . . .
The phone continued to ring. Finally, he answered it.
“Where were you?” the voice demanded.
“I was, ah, in the bathroom.”
“Next time take the phone with you.”
“Okay.”
“Now, where are you?”
“I’m still in the motel, like you said. You told me to stay here till I heard from you.”
“Well, I think it’ll be okay if you leave now. Take the next bus to the place I told you about. You’ll be okay. No one knows it was you; there’s nothing to connect you to the old man.”
“They know. That woman . . . Cahill . . . she’s gonna know. . . .”
“What?” Burt’s voice went cold. “What did you say?”
“She’s gonna know it was me. They already knew about the game, her and that other guy. The big FBI guy. They came to my house. They told me they knew what—”
“When were you planning on telling me this, asshole?” Burt’s anger rumbled like an avalanche through the phone.
“I . . . I . . .” Archer began to stutter.
“You . . . you . . . what?” Burt snapped. “The FBI was at your house, and you didn’t bother to mention it? She was at your house and you didn’t think that was important enough to tell me?”
“I didn’t get a chance,” Archer began to whine. “You didn’t let me tell you anything. You never give me a chance to say anything.”
“What exactly did they say? What did they want?”
“They . . . they said they knew about the game. About Curtis and Vince and me.”
“You tell me this now, after you do Unger?” Burt swore under his breath.
“I tried to tell you before