Read Online Deadline by John Dunning - Free Book Online Page B

got to promise me that.”
    Donovan smiled. “Of course.”
    “That’s the kid’s mother.”
    “Well, well, well,” Donovan said. He picked up the pictures again, and looked for a long time into the eyes of Melinda Baker.
    “No use asking,” Walker said. “I don’t know any of the answers yet. That’s why I need some help now. I need to know as much as I can before I confront them.”
    “Just remember, I’ve got to answer to people too,” Donovan said. “For you this is a great story. For me it’s just another interesting case for somebody else. It’s strictly state, pal.”
    “Call it a favor then,” Walker said. “Say it’s one I really owe you. Or can I extract payment for all these goddamn lunches I’ve been buying you?”
    Donovan seemed to be pondering it.
    “You still coming over Friday night?”
    “Wouldn’t miss it. I might have somebody to bring, too.”
    “I’ll tell Kim to set another place, just in case.”
    Several minutes passed.
    “Al?”
    “Yeah, Walker?”
    “How about the pictures? Will you check ’em out?”
    “Sure,” Donovan said, smiling. His hands closed over the pictures and again he locked eyes with Melinda Baker, for the longest time. “I’ll check ’em out.”

Six
    I T WAS TAKING A while, but sometimes these things did. Even the FBI, with all its resources and manpower, often came up a day late and a dollar short. Donovan knew from long experience that you never got anywhere in the Bureau by being pushy. Push always had to come from above; then all manner of good things would happen. Cracks would open where there had been only a solid wall before. The bowels of bureaucracy would begin to move, as one of Donovan’s younger colleagues liked to say, and the case would get off the pot. With the matter of Walker’s pictures, that hadn’t happened and wasn’t likely to happen. Donovan had sent the pictures on to the main New York office. He didn’t give them much thought, except for the few minutes each day when Walker called to check on possible progress. With each passing day, Walker sounded more and more uptight, as if sitting on the big story was taking its toll. It probably was. Donovan had never met a reporter who could stay calm after giving up some of his unwritten story to someone else. Even if that someone were a blood brother, or a trusted best friend, the nervousness persisted until the story got in print, at which point it was promptly wrapped around a fish and forgotten. Long ago Donovan had decided that journalism, despite the strange lure it had for young men starting out in life, was just no place for a civilized human to work. It was like that old saying: there are two things a civilized man should never watch being made, sausage and war. Donovan would add a third: a reporter making his big story.
    He liked reporters, and he especially liked Walker, but Donovan wouldn’t trade places with him even for the more than twenty years that separated them. Donovan liked his job. It had as much glamour as Walker’s, if that was what you wanted. Yes, there was a routine; yes, things sometimes got tedious and boring; and yes, his superiors were probably as insufferable as Walker’s. But you never really knew what might happen in the next five minutes. If uncertainty was his cup of tea, the Bureau gave a man that. Not to mention the amenities: a salary that was better than most (certainly better than anything Walker could make); security (you really had to screw up to get fired); a sense of accomplishment (Donovan felt like a vital cog in the American wheel, no matter what had been said to discredit the Bureau in recent years); and yes, goddammit, dignity. People still respected the FBI. They might tell George Gallup or Louis Harris they didn’t, but Donovan didn’t believe the polls. He knew that a man might tell a pollster one thing, and tell his wife something else.
    Still, he understood Walker’s impatience, but by Friday even Donovan wondered what