Deadline (Sandra Brown)

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.
    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.
    He and Amelia had shared the last of the white wine. Since she’d been told to stay indoors, they couldn’t go out on the porch, which they would have preferred. Instead they’d taken their wine into the living room and had made themselves comfortable in matching slipcovered chairs.
    They’d kept the window shutters open, the lights off. The precaution of semidarkness was taken only in part because of security issues. Actually they were seeking at least the illusion of privacy.
    “If you had told me what you had in mind, I would have stopped you.”
    “You would have tried ,” he said. “I didn’t want to fight with you about it. I played it the way I thought best.”
    He took a sip of wine. She made several revolutions around the rim of her glass with her index finger. The delay tactics ran out.
    Looking over at him, she said, “Tell me everything.”
    “Are you sure you want to know?”
    “No,” she admitted. “Not at all sure.”
    “Some of it will be painful for you to hear.”
    “I realize that. But if you don’t tell me, I’ll always wonder what he said, and I think that would be worse than knowing the full extent.”
    He started with how he’d found the property based on Glenda’s discovery. “My little covert expedition could have resulted in nothing. But I guess I’ll owe Glenda two boxes of candy this Christmas.” He then described the cabin. “You knew nothing about it?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Basically it was a dump. I thought at first that no one was there. Then Jeremy told me that he could shoot me through the door. Which turned out not to be true.”
    “Were you afraid?”
    “I won’t bullshit you. My heart was in my throat.”
    “You were crazy to go there. Alone. Unarmed. They could have killed you on sight.”
    “That crossed my mind,” he said, grimly understating. “But I was relying on Carl’s ego. I was reasonably sure he couldn’t resist talking to me.”
    “Once before, he confided in a journalist, then killed him afterward.”
    “Headly told you about that?”
    She nodded.
    “He shouldn’t have.”
    “He was preparing me for the worst.”
    He finished his wine and set the empty glass on the end table, signaling that he was getting to the heart of the matter. “He was almost dead when I got there.” He described Jeremy’s condition in clinical language that spared her the graphic ugliness.
    “I called for help, then started asking him questions. He admitted that the house fire was deliberately set to kill the Wessons. He’d been very attached to them, but I guess their usefulness to Carl had expired. He confessed