Second Honeymoon

Chapter 110

SARAH ALMOST CHANGED her mind during the cab ride out to LaGuardia. She almost changed it again while we were waiting to board the plane.

“I can’t believe you talked me into this,” she said at thirty-five thousand feet, somewhere over Pennsylvania.

“You’ve got nothing to worry about,” I said. “You can always tell Driesen you were taking your vacation.”

“To Birdwood, Nebraska?”

Okay, maybe not. But despite what Birdwood lacked in tourist appeal, the two of us couldn’t get there fast enough. Not only was it home to the only John O’Hara within a hundred miles, but on the heels of Candle Lake, New Mexico, and Casper, Wyoming, it was also in a perfect spot to round out the O in Nora.

Question was, had Ned Sinclair gotten there faster than we would? Apparently not.

“So how do you propose we work this?” asked Burt Melvin.

He was Birdwood’s chief of police and the recipient of the one phone call we made in advance of our trip. After renting a Jeep Grand Cherokee at North Platte Regional Airport, we made the ten-mile drive to Birdwood and met him at his station.

As soon as Melvin had heard the news of the latest victim in Casper, he assigned around-the-clock protection to Hara, as he called him. Birdwood’s John O’Hara was Melvin’s longtime friend and the owner of the town’s hardware store. He was also a Vietnam vet and an avid hunter, which might explain why the guy was adamant about not fleeing his home to hide from some, quote, “deranged bastard looking to meet his maker.”

“Where do you have your guys?” Sarah asked Melvin.

“One outside the front of his house, one inside covering the only other way in—a sliding glass door to a patio,” he said.

“The one stationed out front, is he in a patrol car or an unmarked?” asked Sarah.

“Patrol car,” he answered. “Why?”

I knew why. I also knew Sarah wanted to tread very carefully with her answer. We couldn’t come blowing into town, asking an officer to be a guinea pig.

“We can’t catch this killer by scaring him away,” she said.

Melvin nodded, scratching the edge of his thick mustache. He sort of looked like the great catcher and former captain of the Yankees Thurman Munson.

“What are you suggesting?” he asked warily.

“That Agent O’Hara and I take the front in an unmarked car, and you keep one of your guys inside, like you’ve been doing.”

He chuckled, only to immediately apologize. “I’m sorry,” he said, turning to me. “I still can’t get over the fact that your name is also John O’Hara. Kinda like running into a tornado instead of away from it, no?”

If you only knew, my friend. If you only knew.

Melvin had no qualms about Sarah’s suggestion, if for no other reason than it meant he now had to dedicate only one of his men to this stakeout instead of two. “You’re saving me a nice chunk of overtime pay from a budget that’s already stretched too thin,” he said. He smiled. “How long can you stay in town?”

“As long as it takes,” said Sarah.

But we both knew that wasn’t true. You can only go AWOL from the Bureau for so long. We’d bought ourselves twenty-four hours—thirty-six tops.

One way or the other we were headed for some kind of reckoning.