The Fool's Run

dark until we heard the siren and then risked another look. A few seconds later, two men crossed the parking lot and got into a big red Buick with dark windows.
    “That’s them,” LuEllen breathed. Ratface was wearing a tan gabardine trench coat that looked two sizes too big for him. The other guy was a barrel-chested pug in a cheap double-knit suit. He moved with the easy grace of an aging heavyweight fighter.
    “Yeah.” The car pulled away, and we watched it all the way to the freeway entrance. When the phone rang again, LuEllen started across the room. I grabbed her ankle. “Don’t,” I said. It rang thirty times before it stopped. By then the cops were in the parking lot.
     
    WE LEFT THE hotel twenty minutes later on the heels of the cops, hustling the luggage and the computer into the car. We didn’t bother to drop off the keys, but left them with a ten-dollar bill on a bureau. I did clean up the phone and alarm wires, leaving nothing behind but a nearly invisible half-inch hole in the wall.
    “We need some sleep before we can think,” I said. “We’ll head back through Philadelphia and grab a motel somewhere on the other side.”
    “We’re not worried about federal cops anymore?” From the corner of my eye, I could feel her studying my face.
    “No.”
    “You figured it out?” she asked.
    “Some of it.”
    “I’m glad I didn’t have to tell you. That was no coincidence, the phone call coming at exactly the same time as those two goons. Maggie fingered us.”
    “There’s more to it than that,” I said.
    She thought for a minute, then nodded. “That rat-faced guy. He got here in an hour and a half.”
    “With the car,” I said. “The car was the one I saw in Washington. Dillon routed them right along with us. They must have driven up to Philadelphia, then waited for us to call. He told me to call in six hours, which would tell them about how far we’d get.”
    “But Jesus Christ, Kidd, what are they doing?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Maybe Anshiser cut a deal with the feds.”
    “I don’t think so. The feds wouldn’t be interested in knocking off the small guys and letting the big ones go. They’d do it the other way around, if anything. Net the big fish.”
    “Jesus,” she said. “Maggie. Remember her in the Japanese baths, kidding you about burning your balls off? I thought she’d never stop laughing. She was a friend. I thought you two guys were developing into something.”
    “I thought so too.”
    “And Dace is dead.”
    We drove into the Philadelphia airport and retrieved my car. Before we left, I called Bobby from a phone booth, using the portable.
    What?
     
    Need everything you can find on Hell wolf /Whitemark and Sunfire/Anshiser. Crash jobs, full-time. Flat fee $10,000. Need feeds every few hours.
     
    Leave terminal on answer.
    Leaving the airport, we turned back west. The appearance of the two hoods and the inevitable conclusion about Maggie kept me awake. I drove all the way through to Gettysburg, where we checked into the biggest motel we could find.
    I put LuEllen to bed, called Bobby, and took the first dump of information on Anshiser and Sunfire. LuEllen slept most of the day, woke up long enough to eat, and went back down for the night. I was beat-up but drove into town and bought another printer so I could dump incoming files to paper. Late in the day, Bobby was calling every hour, and the stuff was coming faster and faster. Most of it was useless: lightweight business-magazine stuff, public biographies. I’d seen some of it during the first run-through, before taking the job.
    On the second day, a rainstorm came through from the west. It killed a spell of late September heat and replaced it with autumn. The rain left the park grounds dark and somber. I walked LuEllen along Cemetery Ridge, pointing out the path of Pickett’s Charge.
    “It doesn’t look so hard; it’s not hardly a hill,” she said.
    “It didn’t have to be. The crest was just high enough to hide the federals and give them some cover during the preparatory barrage. The Southerners thought the cannonading had done a lot more damage than it had. But they came up the hill into a hornet’s nest. The high tide of the Confederacy. The South was defeated that week. Lee was turned around here, and out West, Grant was taking Vicksburg. What a time.”
    We’d gone out to the battlefield during a break in the rain, but now it was sweeping in again, a thin, gray wall coming down from