Free The President's Killers by Karl Jacobs Page B

covered with trays of sandwiches and soft drinks. He helped himself to two Sloppy Joes and a plastic cup filled with lemonade, and squeezed onto a bench laden with boxes of red and white impatiens.
    A bulky police sergeant sat down near him with a grin on his face. He looked familiar, but Moran didn’t remember where they’d met.
    “I hear they found the weapon, Jim.”
    Moran nodded, his mouth too full to reply.
    The sergeant shook his head. “I wouldn’t give a nickel for that sorry son-of-a-bitch’s chances.”
    “Well,” Moran said, “let’s just say I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes right now.”
    He returned to the front desk for a chocolate cupcake and gulped it down. He was wiping his fingers on a paper napkin when the radio man rushed into the office.
    “They’ve got the car, Jim.”
    “Where?”
    “Found it beside some woods. Off Interstate 44. Fifteen, twenty miles from here.”
    It’s over, Moran thought. We’ve got the son-of-a-bitch.

TWENTY-EIGHT
    Except for the raindrops falling lightly on the leaves of the trees and shrubbery, nothing moved.
    The woods of towering oaks and hickories seemed devoid of life. The rain sounded like a thousand dripping faucets, the gentle patter gradually intensifying, then suddenly tapering off again.
    Denny felt only a few cool raindrops on his face and the top of his head, the trees and shrubbery protecting him almost as well as an umbrella.
    He had buried his laptop beneath some rocks in a creek. He didn’t want cops or federal agents to get their hands on the personal information on it. Somewhere he had read that shelters for women encouraged them to dismantle their cell phones to keep their estranged husbands or lovers from tracking them. So he had taken his cell phone apart and tossed the pieces, one by one, into the bushes as he trudged through the woods.
    The trouble was, he was no longer sure where he was going. When he entered the woods, he had headed west, moving parallel to the road, only a few hundred feet behind the houses. After awhile he turned and plunged straight into the woods for maybe a mile, then began to double back toward the east. The radio announcers had said he was believed to be headed south or west, so he kept bearing to the east.
    In places where there was no underbrush, he could see almost a hundred feet through the thin veil of fog around the ramrod-straight tree trunks. The air was thick with the smell of leaves and damp wood. In every direction, the long, dark trunks of fallen trees littered the ground or leaned at grotesque angles against other trees. He had to straddle some to get over them.
    In time, the rain let up and finally stopped. After hiking through the woods for a couple of hours, his thighs and the calves of his legs had begun to ache. But the steep, wooded hills were behind him now, the ground rising and falling in gentle slopes. Off to his right, something moved. He didn’t see it, he sensed it.
     
    There, forty feet from him, was a beautiful doe. Her dark brown and tan fur blending perfectly into the woods around her. She stood perfectly still, the black eyes in the thin face staring at him, ears erect.
    When he slid his right foot forward, the doe bounded off, gliding through the trees as silently as a ghost, its white tail vanishing behind the brush.
    The entire sky was slate gray now. Earlier, it had been a touch lighter in the east, but he could make out no gradations now. For all he knew, he could be walking in a huge circle.
    When he came to a small field, he stopped to study the clouds.
    Tu-pa, tu-pa, tu-pa, tu-pa.
    He dropped to his knees in the waist-high weeds. The helicopter drew closer and closer, but he could see nothing in the sky, only the dark clouds.
    Then he heard a second chopper.

TWENTY-NINE
    Less than an hour after Agent-in-Charge Jim Moran arrived on Old Church Road where the white Hyundai was recovered, an FBI van pulled up and Edwin A. Bambrick stepped out.
    Moran took a deep breath and