Брайан Гарфилд - Recoil

“Yeah, well it’s rented.”

Caruso was parking fifty feet away. Mathieson removed his sunglasses briefly to study Bradleigh’s face but then he put them back on.

Bradleigh was waiting for him to say something. Waiting for his forgiveness. Mathieson didn’t give it to him. “You get the papers for us?”

“In the folder.” Bradleigh tipped his head back and Mathieson found the folder in the back seat. He unwound the string closing and opened the brown flap.

“Paul and Alice Baxter,” Bradleigh said.

“Alice? She won’t stand for it. It took her four years to get used to Jan.”

“Jan for Janice. You could try calling her Al.”

Mathieson shuffled through the documents. “Nothing in here for Ronny.”

“We’re still preparing them. He doesn’t need paper ID right away — how often does a kid need ID? But we’re doing a birth-certificate search. We want to find one for a kid named Ronald. We can doctor the last name. Whatever town it turns out to come from, you can always say you were just passing through there when he was born.”

Mathieson stared at Bradleigh. “Do you think we’ll have time to get used to the name this time?”

“Look, Fred — Paul — I know how you feel, and I wish there was—”

“Some way to make it all up to us? I understand, Glenn. I understand it’s not your fault.” He tapped his temple. “I understand it up here. But down in the gut it’s something else. Have you ever felt real honest-to-God flat-out rage? Have you any idea how much it can corrupt your thinking...?”

“You want to take a poke at me? Would that help?”

“Oh for Christ’s sake.”

Bradleigh stubbed the cigarette out. “You’re not in a mood for much talk right now. All right, the tedious details, let’s get them over with. I assume you’ve talked it over with the family. Otherwise you wouldn’t have insisted on a meeting today. Where do you want to go?”

“We’ve got a place in mind.”

Bradleigh shook out a cigarette and offered the pack. Mathieson ignored it. Bradleigh’s smile came slowly. “And?”

“That’s all. We’ve picked a place. It’s on a need-to-know basis, Glenn. You don’t need to know.”

Bradleigh put the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He braced both hands against the top of the steering wheel, straightening his arms, pressing himself back in the seat and staring straight ahead out the windshield. “You want off the hook?”

“Yes.”

“I know how you feel. But it’s not wise.”

“I see. But it was wise to move to Showlow with a retinue a half-blind man could have spotted. It was wise to get tracked there within forty-eight hours.”

“That was my stupid fault.”

“Yeah, it was.” He was in no mood to give Bradleigh an inch.

“All right. I asked for that. But there are still good reasons why you need—”

“It’s my responsibility to look after the safety of my family, Glenn. It may be your job but it’s my life. All I’m doing now, I’m taking the authority that goes with the responsibility.”

“You’re a novice. An amateur. Out there alone you three wouldn’t last any time at all.”

“We’ll have help.”

Bradleigh’s face swiveled. “Whose help?”

“Need-to-know.”

“The fact remains we’re the experts at this. All right, we’ve blundered but don’t forget we caught this blunder in time. An amateur might not have caught it until it was too late.”

“I’m not going to sit here all day and argue the point. You know my position.”

“Your position’s counter to our policy. I’m committed to render every possible protective service.”

“You’ll be doing that best if you turn us loose.”

“Not according to our regulations.”

“Screw regulations, Glenn.”

On the dashboard the temperature idiot-light began to flicker red. The engine idled roughly, skipping a beat now and then, shaking the car.

Finally Bradleigh said, “I’m not just a good German, you know. I don’t just follow every order I get whether I like it or not. But this time I agree with policy. A fair number have turned state’s evidence and then refused our protection. Tough guys. They figured they could hold out on their own. Mostly they get killed. I’m not bragging, Fred. That’s just the way it is.”

“I’m not being a tough guy. I’m not going to stand in one place and dare them to come get me. We’re going to ground and they won’t find us. But a secret’s only a secret as long as nobody else knows it, and this time we don’t want anybody at all to know where we are. Not Caruso, not you, not the President of the United States.”

“You’ve always been a stubborn son of a bitch.”

“Stubbornness got me into this in the first place. If I hadn’t dug in my heels against the well-meaning advice of the whole world I wouldn’t have got into this fix. All right. I haven’t changed. Stubbornness got me in, it’ll get me out.”

“Don’t count on it.”

“It’s all I’ve got to count on.”

Bradleigh stirred in the seat. The red warning light flickered brighter. “I made a stupid mistake. I figured they were looking for you, not for me. It should have occurred to me they’d try to follow me to you. All right, it’s a mistake I’ll never make again. I lost them in Gallup and they haven’t picked me up again. That’s not conjecture. It’s fact. You believe it?”

“Of course.”

“I guess you do. If you didn’t you wouldn’t be sitting here with me.” He crushed the butt out. Mathieson wondered what was going on in his mind: Usually Bradleigh was transparent; now he was struggling with something inside.

Bradleigh said in a different voice, “You know my office number. Call collect. Whenever you want to. If you want money we’ll arrange a postal drop of some kind. Just let me know.” He sounded hoarse and hollow: It was a confession of failure and his accession was a form of penance.

Mathieson had counted on it. It gave him no pleasure; neither did it sadden him. The coldness was something he needed to sustain close inside him for however long it might take to learn to live with the wild rage that these past days had thrown into his life.

Bradleigh leaned across him to open the glove compartment in the dashboard. A box of .38 cartridges rolled out onto the open hinged door. Bradleigh closed his hand around it and then slammed the compartment shut. He pulled his revolver out from inside his shirt and put it with the ammunition on top of the document case in Mathieson’s lap. “You know how to use it, don’t you?”

“Yes. But I don’t want it.”

“You’d better take it, Fred.”

“I’m not a killer. That’s one of the differences between me and them. I doubt I’d shoot even Frank Pastor — even if I had the chance.”

“Your life could depend on it.” Bradleigh’s voice hardened. “Jan’s life. Ronny’s life.”

He saw that it was something that would make a great difference to Bradleigh. “All right,” he conceded.

“I hope you’ll never need it. Just keep a little oil on it.” Bradleigh put the gun and ammunition into the envelope with the documents.

“How do you explain losing your gun?”

“I don’t. It’s personal property. I’ve got two more at home just like it. It’s registered to me, of course. But if you have to use it you know damn well I’ll support you all the way.”

“All the way to my funeral, I expect. If I ever have to use a gun it’ll mean they’ve got too close to us.”

“Just keep it close at hand. Promise me you’ll do that, Fred.”

Mathieson made no answer; he wasn’t going to make promises he didn’t intend keeping and he wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life with a gun in his pocket.