Deadline

Which is exactly what had happened.

He’d taken one look at Jeremy’s bullet wound and had known immediately that his son wasn’t going to make it. It might have been a slow, internal leak, but without surgical repair, he would have eventually been drained dry.

There was no sense in crying over it. It was what it was, and Jeremy knew that as well as he did.

“This place was great so long as nobody was looking for us,” Carl had told him. “But now, the heat’s on. They’re gonna be combing the countryside for us. I’ve got to get out of here. You know that, don’t you?”

Of course Jeremy had recognized the necessity of his retreat. If the head of the snake was chopped off, the snake died. Carl couldn’t be captured or killed. If he was, everything he’d stood for, everything he’d done, would have been for naught.

Jeremy didn’t argue with his decision or plead with him to stay. He didn’t ask to be taken to a hospital where his life might have been saved. No, Jeremy had accepted his fate like a true crusader.

Carl could have done without seeing the tears in his eyes when he’d handed him the revolver loaded with only one bullet. Jeremy had inherited that sentimental streak from his mother. It manifested itself at the worst times, when it was damned inconvenient or impossible to deal with.

Like at Golden Branch. He’d thought Flora would never stop bawling, even after they were safely away. Like that time when he’d cut short their Canadian vacation. Both she and Jeremy had cried then. The last time Jeremy had visited the cabin before she died, the two of them got weepy.

Carl didn’t have any patience for tears. Regret? Wasted energy. You did what you had to do. You moved on.

Like he was doing now.

He’d come to the trailer the night he left Saint Nelda’s Island. He’d had another car parked in a long-term garage several blocks from where he’d left Bernie’s car. At that point, no one was after him. The greatest danger he’d faced had been walking after dark in that part of town, where the crime rate was high. Bernie of the rickety hips would have been easy prey, but he reached the garage without being accosted.

It was an old facility. No cameras, no nosy attendant. He’d reconnected the battery cables, which he’d left disconnected so it wouldn’t run down, and the car started without a hitch. He’d crossed the state line into South Carolina singing along with the car radio.

The fifties-era Airstream, sans trailer, was parked not too far as the crow flies from the cabin. It had been there since the day he’d bought it off a commercial fisherman who’d fallen on hard times and was moving to live with his in-laws somewhere in the Midwest.

He’d been happy to unload the Airsteam to the elderly man who had a hearing problem and walked with a cane. The story Carl had spun was that he was escaping the nursing home that his ungrateful children had consigned him to. The fisherman, resentful of Fate himself, sympathized, took his cash, gave him a bill of sale, and never looked back.

Over the years, the aluminum tube had sunk deep into the soil. A thick vine had grown up over the rounded rear of it and over one third of the top. That helped camouflage it, although someone would have had to have ventured deep into the boondocks to spot it in the first place.

What he feared most was that he would return to it after an absence to find that a homeless person, teenagers looking for a hangout, or meth cookers had made themselves at home.

But the trailer was derelict enough to discourage even the most desperate trespassers. The night he’d left Saint Nelda’s, he’d found it empty, but musty-smelling. It had been so stifling inside, it was like being in a convection oven. But he’d spent almost twenty-four hours there before reuniting with Jeremy at the cabin.

During that time, he’d prepared his hideout for when it might be needed, which a gut instinct had told him would be soon.

His instinct had proven to be unfailing. Headly’s presence in Savannah had represented a turning point in their forty-year-old rivalry. For the first time in their turbulent history together, they were in the same place at the same time.

It had been seventeen years since Carl had been credited with a crime, but the FBI agent hadn’t given up the chase, retired, gotten slow and fat. No, Headly was here, and, according to news accounts, he was recovering well from the gunshot.

It seemed to Carl that a long-overdue showdown was inevitable. He looked forward to it. Last night, after bidding Jeremy a final good-bye, he’d come to his hideaway to plan and prepare for it.

He’d provisioned the Airstream with nonperishable food, bottled water, and paper goods. He had changes of clothing to fit various guises. He’d stockpiled items bought over time at hardware and variety stores. One never knew when something would come in handy.

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This morning, he’d shaved every hair from his head, using several disposable razors and large amounts of shaving cream in order to make his scalp as slick as a billiard ball. He’d also shaved his eyebrows off. Eyelashes weren’t a problem. He didn’t have many left anyway.

To his face, he applied a moisturizer with a green tint. It was supposed to reduce ruddiness in a woman’s complexion, but what it did for him was give his complexion a yellow-grayish cast.

He dressed himself in oversized clothes and put on a large baseball cap that virtually rocked on top of his skull each time he moved his head. Checking himself in the cracked mirror, he laughed.

He’d achieved the look he was after.

* * *

“I apologize for lying to you last night.”

Dawson decided to get the apology out of the way first. They’d had their dinner—Amelia was a good cook—followed by ice-cream sundaes and two rounds of Chutes and Ladders. The boys had gone to bed reluctantly, but finally they were asleep.