Dead Watch

be worth at least twenty thousand.
    If he’d sold all his guns, he probably was digging a deep hole. If he hadn’t, if he’d stored them someplace, then they’d have a lead on Schmidt’s best friend . . .
    Jake was ten minutes in the car, already north of Scottsville, heading in to Charlottesville, heading home, when Novatny called.
    Novatny was running, out of breath, shouting. “Where are you? Jake? Where are you?”

5 

    “We’re moving!” Novatny shouted.
    “What? I can’t hear you.”
    “Sorry, I’ve been running up some stairs . . .” Novatny took a deep breath. “We’re getting a helicopter, heading out to Virginia. Are you still in Richmond?”
    “I’m down south of Charlottesville.”
    “Then you’re a hell of a lot closer than we are,” Novatny said.
    “What happened?”
    “The Buckingham County sheriff’s office has a body out in a rural area, a state forest, all burned up,” Novatny said. “They found a charred ID near the body. The ID belongs to Lincoln Bowe.”
    “Ah, man.”
    A moment of confused shouting at the other end, then, “We’ve got a chopper coming, oughta be off the ground in five, ten minutes. There’s a place down there, called, let me see, on my map it’s called Sliders, but it doesn’t look like there’s anything there. Here. Head south on Twenty . . .”
    “Hang on, hang on, let me pull over.” Jake pulled into a driveway, got a notebook from his briefcase, and jotted down Novatny’s instructions. “. . . take a left on 636. You go in there a way, couple of miles, and you’ll come to the Appomattox-Buckingham State Forest headquarters. They’re telling us that’s the best place to put down a chopper.”
    “Have you talked to Danzig?”
    “No. I can’t get to him direct, I’d have to go through some routing. If you can call him direct . . .”
    “I’ll call him. See you at the park.”

    Jake backed out of the driveway, floored it, and the Mercedes took off like a scalded rabbit. He was forty miles away. He had to slow down going through Scottsville, but he didn’t slow much and turned heads as he went through. No cops, he thought, no cops, please no cops . . .
    Over the bridge and out on Highway 20, past Schmidt’s place again, he swerved around a log truck, pushed it to eighty. The countryside was rolling, the road was curvy: perfect for a high-speed run in a German car if you didn’t mind killing the occasional housewife out to get her mail from the roadside mailbox.
    He worried about that, a little, but didn’t slow. Instead he compounded the sin by punching Gina’s number on his cell phone. She came up and he said, “I need Danzig right now.”
    “He’s talking to the president,” she said.
    “Go get him.”
    “Really?”
    “Go in and get him. Get him!” Jake shouted.
    “I’m going to put you on hold . . . hang on.”

    Danzig came up, a worried cut in his voice: “What?”
    “The FBI has a burned body down south in Virginia. There’s a possibility that it’s Lincoln Bowe.”
    “A good possibility?”
    “A charred ID was found nearby and it’s his. The FBI’s moving on it. I’m forty miles away in a car, heading down there fast as I can. We might need somebody to sit on the sheriff’s department, if it’s not too late. You gotta tell the press office, get them working.”
    “Charred?”
    “I don’t know what that means. But apparently, the body’s pretty badly burned.”
    “Why are you only forty miles away?”
    “I’ll tell you about it later. It might not be a coincidence,” Jake said.
    “All right, all right. You go, I’ll take care of it at this end,” Danzig said. “Call me back for anything significant. Anything, even if you think I might already know about it. Call me.”

    He kept the car at eighty, screamed through Dyllwyn, a fast right, then another right onto Highway 60 at Sprouse’s Corner, seventy miles an hour past the county courthouse at Buckingham—hell, none of the cops would be there, he thought—a left on 24, six miles, a helicopter overhead the last mile of it, rolling through the intersection of 636 and coming up on the forest headquarters complex as the black helicopter put down in a graveled parking area.
    Three Buckingham County sheriff’s cars waited on the edge of the parking area, their light racks turning. As Jake pulled in, Novatny and Parker did the weird getting-out-of-a-helicopter hunched-over high step that everybody did. They were trailed