Deadline (Sandra Brown)

check on him?”
    “I’ll admit, that doesn’t seem like Dawson. Tell me again everything he said.”
    Amelia reiterated the conversation in the stairwell. “Could it relate to what Willard Strong told him?”
    “About a shack that Jeremy owned?”
    “You don’t suppose…Oh, Lord. You don’t suppose that Glenda located it. Surely Dawson wouldn’t go there alone.”
    “We’ve got to tell Gary.” Eva stood up and headed for the door.
    “Eva, no.” Amelia followed her from the waiting room and down the corridor. “You can’t tell him. His blood pressure.”
    “That can be controlled with medication. But if he learns later that I didn’t tell him about this immediately, I can forget our Alaska cruise. He’d probably divorce me.”
    They entered the ward without any of the medical staff seeing them and slipped behind the privacy curtain. Headly’s eyes popped open. He took one look at them and knew instantly that they weren’t there to fluff his pillow. “What?”
    “Tell him.” Eva scooted aside so Amelia could move closer to the bed.
    In a rapid whisper she filled him in, concluding with, “If Glenda gave him an idea of where this shack is, do you think he’d be foolish enough to go there alone and confront them?”
    His gaze moved back and forth between them, ending with his wife, whose distress was as apparent as her resignation. Headly closed his eyes and gave a long sigh. “Fuck.”
    More than a profanity, the word was weighty with despair. Coming from a man of purpose and action, it heightened Amelia’s fear. “They’ll kill him, won’t they?”
    He roused himself and opened his eyes. “Not if I can help it. But goddammit, I’m trapped here. Eva, call Knutz. His number’s in my phone.” Eva moved to the closet where his personal effects had been stored.
    “I don’t know what to tell him.”
    “Let Amelia do the talking.” Looking at her, he said, “Tell him what you just told me. He’ll have Glenda tracked down. He’ll mobilize the local authorities and maybe, just maybe, they’ll intercept Dawson in time.”
    “And if they don’t?” Amelia asked.
    “Carl will probably give him the interview of his career. He’s done it before.”
    Eva stopped dealing with the cell phone and looked at him with alarm. “Gary, no.”
    Amelia, noting her reaction, said, “What? What about an interview?”
    Ignoring his wife’s distress, Headly told her about the coup a Washington Post reporter had achieved. “The day after the interview ran, Carl released him along a rural road in West Virginia. With a bullet through his brain. He was awarded the Pulitzer posthumously.”
    *  *  *
     
    He was in the midst of his nightmare, laboriously clawing his way up the incline toward Hawkins, who was shouting at him from the crest, when he was startled awake by a heron that took flight out of the marsh with a noisy flapping of wings.
    He’d been spared the horrible ending of his nightmare, but he was still shaky and leaking a cold sweat. He dried his face with his shirttail and took a sip from a bottle of water.
    He was surprised he’d been able even to doze, and equally surprised that he was still alive. Had Carl or Jeremy come upon him, he could have been murdered in his sleep. Although he’d had about a two-hour nap, he didn’t feel rested. However, despite his fatigue, and the sun not being completely up, he was impatient to get under way.
    He replaced the battery in his cell phone. That amounted to beaming his location to the authorities if they were looking for him, but he had to take that risk. He needed the phone to help him navigate.
    He took only it and the water bottle with him when he left the car. A weapon would have been superfluous. Jeremy had missed Amelia because of Dawson’s quick action. The bullet he’d fired at Headly hadn’t been a head shot, and it had lost velocity due to the distance, preventing it from inflicting the damage it could have. But regardless of his bad luck yesterday, his marksmanship skills were renowned. A man foundering in a marsh would be easy pickins.
    Dawson had decided to take a zigzagging route from this point, working his way up the trapezoidal-shaped parcel, which was much narrower at the base than at the top, which was farther inland. If he reached the northwest corner without finding anything and this turned out to be a wild-goose chase, he’d follow a diagonal line back to his starting point.
    The water he’d stepped into last