Wade?”
“It may have been longer than that,” he said.
“As much as an hour?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe forty-five minutes at the outside.”
“That would do it, then. I guess you didn’t see anything, then, Mr. Wade. Mrs. Wade.”
He turned to go. The troopers hesitated, as though they wanted to say something but hadn’t figured out the phrasing yet. Dave said, “Why was he killed?”
“We don’t know yet, Mr. Wade.”
“He was a very pleasant man. Quiet, friendly. We sat outside this afternoon and had a beer with him.”
The troopers didn’t say anything.
“Well,” Dave said, “I don’t want to keep you.”
The troopers nodded shortly. They turned, then, and followed the man from the Sheriff’s Office out of the cabin.
It was midnight when the last earful of police was gone. They sat quietly for five or ten minutes. He stood up then and said, “We’re getting out of here tonight. You’d better start packing.”
“We’re leaving tonight?”
“You don’t want to stay here, do you?”
“God, no.” She reached out a hand. He gave her a cigarette, lit it for her. She blew out smoke and said, “They won’t be suspicious?”
“Of what?”
“Of us, if we leave so quickly. Without staying the night.”
He shook his head. “We’re newlyweds,” he said. “Newlyweds wouldn’t want to spend their wedding night next door to a murder.”
“Newlyweds.”
“Yes.”
“Wedding night. God, Dave, how I planned this night. All of it.”
He took her hand.
“How I would be sexy for you and everything. How I wouldn’t mind if it hurt because I love you so much.
Oh, and little tricks I read in one of those marriage manuals, I was going to try those tricks. And surprise you with my ingenuity.”
“Stop it.”
He got the suitcases and spread them open on the bed. They packed their clothes in silence. He put the clothes she had worn earlier and his own dirty clothes in the trunk and loaded the two suitcases in the back seat. She got in the car, and he went to the cabin and closed the door and locked it.
As they drove past the lodge, she said, “We didn’t pay. The old woman would want to be paid, for the one night.”
“That’s too fucking bad,” he said.
He turned left at the main road and drove to Pomquit. He passed through the town and took a road heading north. “It’s late and I don’t know the roads,” he said. “We’ll stop at the first motel that looks decent.”
“All right.”
“We’ll get an early start in the morning,” he went on. He was looking straight ahead at the road and he did not glance over at her. “An early start in the morning, figure out which route to take, all of that. They’re from New York, aren’t they?”
“I think so. Carroll said he was from New York. And they all had New York accents.”
He slowed the car. There was a motel off to the left, but the “No Vacancy” sign was lit He speeded up again.
“We’ll go to New York,” he said. “Well be there by tomorrow afternoon, Monday. We’ll get a room in a hotel, and we’ll find out who they are, the two of them. One of them is named Lee. I didn’t catch the other one’s name.”
“Neither did I.”
“We’ll find out who they are, and then we’ll find them and we’ll kill them, both of them. Then we’ll go back to Binghamton. We have three weeks. I think we can find them and kill them in three weeks.”
Up ahead, on the right, there was a motel. He slowed the car. As he pulled off the road he glanced at her face, quickly. Her jaw was set and her eyes were dry and clear.
“Three weeks is plenty of time,” she said.
CHAPTER 3
I N THE DINER the waitress said, “Mondays, how I hate ’em. Give me any other day, but Monday, just never mind. Coffee?”
“One black, one regular,” he told her.
There were two men at the counter who looked like truckers and one who looked like a farmer. The waitress brought the coffee and he carried the two cups over to a