He looked over at Susan.
Moot point. No, I never could slap the information out of her. Not for any gentlemanly reasons, but because I could not stand the way she would look at me for having betrayed her.
Susan seemed to be able to read his mind.
She looked at him.
“Could you really slap me around?”
“Absolutely,” he said.
“You are really terrible,” she said, but she took his hand.
He saw a sign reading “Doylestown 8 Miles.”
He freed his hand and reached across and punched the button opening the glove compartment. Then he reached in and took out the microphone.
“Radio check, please,” he said into it.
There was no answer.
“I keep forgetting this is a police car,” she said.
“Well, if we had come in your red Porsche, we would have been a lot easier to spot, wouldn’t we, especially if someone—for example, the FBI—was trying to keep tabs on the owner of a red Porsche?”
He reached across her again and changed frequencies. He again asked for a radio check, and again there was no answer.
He tried it on every frequency he had available. There was a reply on the last one.
“Who wants a radio check?” a female voice responded.
“I’m a Philadelphia unmarked passing through Doylestown. I wanted to see if there was anyone I could talk to.”
“You got the Bucks County sheriff’s administrative channel, Philadelphia.”
“Well, thank you very much,” Matt said. “Nice to talk to you.”
He reached across Susan a final time, turned off the radio,
put the microphone in the glove compartment, and slammed the door.
“Satisfied?” Susan asked.
“Now I know I can call the cops—or at least the sheriff—if I need to.”
“What’s the administrative channel?”
“Beats the hell out of me,” Matt confessed. “But whatever it is, that operator can talk to other people.”
Two or three minutes later, he saw what he thought must be the Crossroads Diner up ahead on the left.
“That it?”
“That’s it.”
“I’ve been in there,” he said. “I once took Penny to a gambling hell in the Poconos and we stopped in there on the way back.”
“A gambling hell?”