Boldt Read Free Page B

before Draper opened the file, I knew what was laying in there. Apart from anything else, it was typical, typical of my fucking brother that he should be the one that sets something off that somebody else has to take care of, on his fucking behalf.”
    â€œYou make it sound like it’s his fault.”
    â€œYeah, I know. It’s not his fault. But nothing ever was, and that knowledge makes me see things the way I do, in respect of him.”
    Murdock shrugs. “Well,” he says, “we get it, whichever way you look at it. We got the deal and all we can do is what Draper asked. Am I right?”
    â€œYeah, you’re right.”
    â€œSo have you any ideas where we go from here? Because I’m as sure as the devil’s in hell I haven’t.”
    I make a face and roll the window down, looking across the city at the thickening midday haze.
    â€œThe letter is from a political nut or just a plain nut. Now the guys we usually deal with aren’t political and not many of them are nuts They’re too interested in their ways of turning a buck to have time for either of those luxuries. We could try a few people, in particular places, but later, because only luck would give us anything from them.”
    â€œYou mean everything else is sheer deduction?”
    For the first time since leaving Draper’s office I grin. “No, but we can start at the beginning. If somebody’s going to try and whack him, then he’s got to find himself a place to do it from. Now my brother is arriving in the afternoon and leaving the next morning. He arrives by train and leaves from Blyth Field. He appears on Travers’s Early Show and again on Beth Cusack’s Breakfast Hour. That night he’s guest of honor at a fundraising dinner at the Norton and oh yeah, in the afternoon, before Travers’s show, he’s talking at the university; in fact he goes there before he goes to his hotel. So we have routes, and the big one is from the railroad station to the campus because that’ll have the placards and the motorcade and all the other crap. So first off we go along the route and we check it out and if nothing shows we pass on all the likely vantage points to Bolan.”
    â€œSurely Bolan will check that route himself?”
    â€œHe will. All the hotels, all the frontages, he won’t leave anything out. But you’re forgetting Draper. We’ll be on our bellies. The guy we’re after might trip over us.”
    â€œYeah, we might get trampled on, too; which end of the route do we start?”
    â€œThe end he does. The railroad station.”
    Murdock switches on the ignition and backs out, sliding out of the department lot.
    The railroad station is out of keeping with the rest of the area of the city where it lies; it’s nice and neat and clean. But apart from the stockyards, the station is ringed by an industrial complex taking in everything from the manufacture of toilet bowls to the destruction of old automobiles. The only commercial area, apart from the station itself, is a block exactly opposite the station built in exactly the same style and at exactly the same time, presumably intended to balance the crisp oasis the station makes in the middle of the sunlit sprawl but instead underlining the incongruity of planning against a tide of runaway development.
    â€œStation Whiz,” Murdock remarks as he pulls into the station parking lot.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œAlways reminds me of Station Whiz,” he says. “Remember in Captain Marvel? Billy Batson? The radio station he peddled his papers outside of? Station Whiz.”
    â€œOh, yeah,” I say. “Station Whiz.”
    We get out of the car and walk around to the main entrance, through the automatic glass doors and into the cool church-like atmosphere of the lobby where the floor is conveniently swept by a four-wheeled vacuum tractor driven by a miserable-looking spade, defiantly whistling