By Order of the President by Kilian Michael;

Author:Kilian, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road

13

Dresden needed to rest his travel-weary body and too slowly healing injuries, and also to take a careful look around him. If he was correct that Charlene’s killers were not pursuing him, a great many police agencies surely were. He was extremely lucky to have gotten as far as he had.

He was in St. Louis, at a downtown hotel where he hoped to find a working television set, and a reasonable expectation of not getting rolled or murdered during the night, but one cheap and nondescript enough to avoid credit card routines and eyebrows raised at the roustabout clothing he had acquired on the road. His only request was for a room with a view of the street, and it was granted without comment. The hostelry was not one to attract conventions, and the mailboxes behind the elderly desk clerk were filled with keys. Dresden’s room proved to be small and dank, but the television did function and the window overlooked the hotel’s entrance, dismal vista as that was.

He dropped his bag in the closet, leaving the Magnum in it. His other pistol he carried in his belt at his back. His money was in his boots and the videotapes and voice prints in the deep pockets of the army surplus field jacket he had bought in Amarillo. He had also bought some army-issue gloves. The cold was probably normal for the Midwest, but he found it numbing.

An hour’s limping amble about downtown St. Louis’s scruffier streets produced no sign of anyone who seemed interested in him except for a couple of shivering prostitutes and a slowly moving police car that hesitated only briefly before continuing on. He paid it no apparent attention, though it made his back turn wet with sweat. Finally, he made his way to a more respectable district, took a decent meal in a coffee shop, and bought some newspapers. He also, without much guilt, bought a fifth of Early Times.

The newspapers were full of stories about the bombing in Washington that had killed the vice president’s wife. The Chicago Tribune had pages and pages of them, including a short but very gracefully written biography of Mrs. Atherton. She was near Dresden’s age, had grown up in Carmel, and was a graduate student at Stanford at about the time Charley had been dating a girl there. He wondered if he had ever met Mrs. Atherton when she was young. The accompanying photograph was of a beautiful woman, but it did not jar his memory.

He turned back to the front page again, and the three-column photograph of the wreckage of the vice president’s limousine. The bodies had been removed by the time the picture had been taken, but it was wrenchingly apparent what must have happened to the victims.

He now had a bond with the vice president of the United States of America, a bond of the most intimate and terrible sort. Two women, dead, by the same hand.

There was nothing about himself in any of the Midwest papers.

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