Dead Even by Mariah Stewart Page B

contacted you?”
    “Don’t remember, offhand.” Unger turned to her. “Got his card at home someplace, though.”
    “When you find it, or if he calls you again, will you let me know?”
    “Sure, sure.” The old man nodded. “Be glad to give you a call.”
    “Collect,” she called over her shoulder. “Call collect . . .”
    “Will do.” He went back to sweeping the floor.
             
    “Kind of a sad old guy, isn’t he?” Miranda said as they left the theater.
    “He’s had a sad life.” Will held the door for her, and together they stepped out into the night air. “Falls in love with a woman who has a young son and addictions to drugs and alcohol. Robs a store to keep her in what she needs, gets caught, and goes to prison. Meanwhile, she still needs.”
    “So she pimps out her little boy to feed her addictions,” she said as they reached the car.
    “And when Al gets out of prison and finds out what she’s done, he kills her.” Will unlocked the car doors. “Spends the next thirty years of his life behind bars.”
    “During which time the little boy grows into a man with very terrible needs of his own.” Miranda summed it up as she slid into her seat. “End of story.”
    “Not quite.” Will started the car. “There’s still that little epilogue that Archer Lowell might be thinking about writing.”
    “That’s our job, to keep him from doing just that.”
    “Think he took us seriously?” Will asked. “Unger?”
    “I think so. I expect to hear from him, if anything odd is going on. He spent thirty years behind bars. He’s just getting his life back again. I’d think he’d want to hang on to it for a while.”
    “Well, then, we’re just going to have to be smart enough to make sure he does just that.”
             
    Two days later, Archer rested his head against the window of the bus and stared into the dark beyond. Several hours had passed since he’d boarded the Greyhound and taken a seat all the way in the back, where he could sit alone and think about what he should do.
    He knew Burt had been watching him. Knew if he hadn’t gotten on the bus there’d have been hell to pay. He bit a straggly fingernail and wondered how Burt would know whether he killed this old man in Ohio.
    Of course, he’d know. He’s Burt . He knows everything.
    For a moment it crossed Archer’s mind to wonder if perhaps Burt was really not of this world, like some of the movies he’d seen. Maybe he wasn’t really a flesh-and-blood man; maybe he was from another dimension. Like in the comic books or video games. It could explain how Burt seemed to know so much about what Archer was thinking.
    Like this morning, when the phone rang, even before Archer was out of bed.
    “Are you packed?” the voice had asked. Archer knew, of course, whose voice it was.
    “Um, yeah. Yeah, I’m packed.” Archer sat up and ran a hand over his face. “I’m ready.”
    “You wouldn’t be thinking about not making this trip, would you?”
    “No, no. I told you I would . . . do it.”
    “You want to be on that bus when it leaves this afternoon, Archie. You don’t want to know what will happen if you miss it.”
    The phone had gone dead before Archer could reply.
    “Shit,” he muttered aloud in the dim corner of the bus. “Shit.”
    He leaned back in the seat and wrapped his arms over his chest, pondering his options. And, of course, when Burt had called back later in the morning, he’d given him options. Archer could go ahead and kill this old man, this Unger guy, or Burt would take Archer’s sister.
    It had crossed his mind to ask where Burt would take her, since getting her out of his life, as far as Archer was concerned, would be no big loss. As miserable as she was, Archer had been sorely tempted, but it would kill his mother if anything happened to the bitch, so it really wasn’t much of a choice. Besides, there’d been something in the way Burt had said his sister’s name— Angelina —that