Deadly Welcome Read Free Page A

found you unsuitable. And it would be only human for them to wonder again when considering future assignments and promotions. On the other hand, yourefforts for us, regardless of success, will result in a … pleasant addition to your file.” He smiled thinly. “I am assuming you have your normal share of ambition. Colonel, did you mention his contacting us?”
    “I didn’t. Thank you for reminding me, Jerry. Mr. Doyle, I am afraid that you will be completely on your own. There are good reasons for that which I cannot go into. As far as official records are concerned, you will be on leave of absence from State. If you get into any sort of trouble, it will be up to you to get out of it. We will be unable to replenish your funds should you run out, but we will be able to reimburse you later for any monies you use out of your own savings. At some point you will either achieve success or become convinced that you cannot accomplish anything. You will then, without delay, telephone this office and talk to either Captain Derres or myself. Whoever answers will make an inquiry as to your health. If you are successful, say that you are feeling good. If not, complain of illness. After we receive the call we will inform State that you will be reporting back to them shortly for reassignment. In the event of failure, we will wish to question you after you have returned. If you succeed, it is unlikely you will see either of us again.”
    He took the heavy folder back to his hotel. By eight o’clock that evening he had absorbed all of it. He knew how Jenna had died. He knew what they wanted him to say to Crawford M’Gann. With the instinctive caution of long training, he left the folder in the hotel safe and went out into the April evening to walk the sultry streets during the first heat wave of the season.
    He had come back a long way, from autumn in Uruguay to spring in Washington. And further than that. Back to the pine and palmetto scrub lands, and the night sounds of that land. The whippoorwill and the mourning dove singing counterpoint to the dirge of the tree toads. Water lapping the pilings of the decaying dockand slapping the old hull of the net boat. The grinding whine of skeeters close to your ear. And, often, the muted grunting bray of a gator back in the slough.
    He walked steadily, unaware of direction. There had been all the years of painful accretion of the new identity. He had thought it all so sound. He had believed it to be the real Alex Doyle. But now it was all beginning to flake away. Bits falling from a plaster statue to reveal once again that scared, confused and indignant kid.
    He wondered what it had been like for Jenna to go back. What special torment it had been for her. Because she had been the first to leave. Six months before he left. They had been but one day apart in age, and he had been the elder. Left with a sailor, a Tampa boy on leave who kept driving all the way down to Ramona in a junk car to see her, and had finally driven away with her and never come back. A town scandal. That Larkin girl. The wild one. And old Spence Larkin had been nearly out of his mind because she had been the eldest child and his favorite. A mean and stingy old bastard. Treated the younger two like dirt and was always buying something for Jenna.
    The wild one. Talk of the county. They couldn’t control her. A little blonde with so much life in her, body turning to perfection at thirteen. All that recklessness and that high yell of silver laughter in the night. Up and down the county, carloads of them, at a hundred miles an hour, heaving the beer cans and the bottles into the ditch. Go way up to a dance in Venice and, the very same night, roar on down to the south, to a dance in Fort Myers.
    He remembered how he’d known her without knowing her. Daughter of Spence Larkin. Old bastard has more bucks squirreled away than you’ll see in your whole life, Doyle. She’d come in with a gang and sit at the counter at