The Fool's Run

don’t know.”
    “Where are you?”
    “I don’t want to tell you that. Not yet. I’ve got to talk to LuEllen. I’ll call you back.”
    “When?” she asked.
    “Half an hour.”
    “I’ll wait,” she said. “I’m terribly sorry about Dace. It’s awful. But I had nothing to do with it. Goddamn it, Kidd, you’ve got to believe me.” Her voice cracked. I could see her standing over the desk, one hand on it for support, her head bowed, talking into the phone, pleading.
    “I’ll get back,” I said, and hung up.
     
    “WHY NOT TELL her now?” LuEllen asked.
    “So she’ll think we’re talking about it. She’s going to be suspicious anyway. If we hold out for a while, she may be less suspicious.”
    “She was awful good,” LuEllen said after a while. “Would you have believed her? If we hadn’t left your car at the airport?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. I’d kind of believe her. But I’d still be careful.”
     
    DURING MOST OF the attack on Whitemark, I’d gone to bed late at night, after three o’clock. One night Maggie woke up and rolled onto her back as I sat on the edge of the bed, pulling off my socks.
    “You wouldn’t ever hurt me, would you?” she asked.
    The question was a stopper. I turned and looked toward her in the dark. “Hurt you? You mean beat you up?”
    “No, you dope. I mean dump me for a sixteen-year-old with up-pointy tits.”
    “Your tits are up-pointy.”
    “You know what I mean.”
    “We’re not going to come to that,” I said. “I do what I do, and you do what you do. They don’t mix. Neither one of us will change. We’re too old. Too committed. When you get back to Chicago, I’ll come and see you. You’ll come to St. Paul a time or two. Then it’ll start to take up too much time, there’ll be other people, and eventually we’ll fizzle away.”
    “You’re really the great romantic, aren’t you?”
    “I’m trying not to bullshit you,” I said. “You’re not stupid. You know all this. But I wouldn’t be surprised if you came through St. Paul every once in a while and got laid. In between the other-people relationships, I mean. We could be friends for a long time.”
    She might have agreed, or she might have demurred, or might have said something about the abstract nature of the analysis. She might have laughed. She didn’t. What she said was, “You’d never beat me up, would you?”
     
    WE GAVE IT a half hour, sitting in a greasy spoon in a nondescript West Virginia hill town, idling over coffee and cheeseburgers. It was the afternoon coffee hour, and the local merchants drifted in, said hello to each other, casually looked us over and drank coffee and ate lemon meringue pie. The pie was listed on the menu as the pie du jour. The joke was, the city folks would wonder whether it was a joke. . . .
     
    “I WANT TO talk,” I told Maggie. “LuEllen doesn’t but she’ll go along. She’s afraid of you and the Anshiser people. And we have a gun. We bought a gun. We’re at Dace’s cabin in West Virginia, and there’s only one way in, and we’ll be watching it. You fly into Washington, rent a car, and come up alone.”
    “You don’t believe me,” she said.
    “We kind of believe you. We’re not sure about Dillon,” I said. “We’re not going to take any chances, after what happened to Dace. We want to talk. Bring the money.”
    I told her how to get to the cabin. “When you turn off that road, follow the electric wire. There’s only one, and it ends at Dace’s place.”
    “I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon,” she said. “I’ll bring the money. You’ve got to believe me.”

Chapter 18
    B EFORE WE LEFT town we bought a seventy-dollar boom box from an appliance dealer. Crossing the street to a hardware store, we picked up two light timers, the kind used in greenhouses, and two hand-held CB radios. As we were checking out, I went back and got a shovel. At a discount chain store we bought insulated coveralls in a camouflage pattern, day-packs, cheap rectangular sleeping bags, plastic air mattresses, and two pairs of binoculars. At a convenience store we bought bread, lunch meat, mustard, cupcakes and cookies, and a twelve-pack of Coke.
    “Even if the shooters were in Washington, they couldn’t get here before dark,” I told LuEllen on the way back. “And I don’t think they’ll come in the dark, in unfamiliar territory. Dillon will research it for them, find a map, and see that the road goes through. The