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“I’m sure you’ve already considered that wasn’t very smart of you,” Cohen said.
“That occurred to me, sir, as I crawled under the Horch.”
“And then what, Cronley?” Henderson asked.
“We loaded the man, and the body of the driver, which we now knew was a girl, into the Horch, pushed the Audi off the road, which fucked up the fender of the Horch, and came here. I left Tom with the wounded guy and came in here and called Colonel Cohen.”
“Not Captain Dunwiddie?”
Max Ostrowski and two Poles came into the bar.
“Hail, hail, the gang’s all here. So who’s minding the store?” Cronley said, as he reached for the bottle of Johnnie Walker.
“If I were you, I’d think about going easy on that, Jim,” Henderson said.
“But you didn’t just shoot a teenaged girl in the forehead, did you?” Cronley replied, as he filled his glass.
“A teenaged girl?” Ostrowski asked.
“Yeah, Max, a teenaged girl. I got her right here.” He put his index finger on his forehead. “It made a large exit wound in the rear of her cranium.”
“What the hell happened?”
“My current scenario, Mr. Ostrowski,” Cohen said, “is that parties unknown—most likely Odessa, but we cannot exclude other possible parties—attempted to assassinate Super Spook. They did so by intercepting him and Lieutenant Winters as they took a shortcut back road from Soldier’s Field airfield.”
“Did you take that shortcut road to the airfield, Winters?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you notice anyone following you?”
“No, sir.”
“That suggests to me that the malefactors knew that Cronley had gone off somewhere in his airplane, and that he inevitably would return. When Winters got in Cronley’s Horch . . . which was here, right?”
“Yes, sir,” Winters said.
“Whoever Odessa—or whoever—has here in Farber Castle assumed he was headed for Soldier’s Field, and would take the shortcut road back here once he picked up Cronley. And he—or maybe she—got on the telephone and told them to put their in-place assassination scenario into play.”
“Yeah,” Henderson said softly.
“May I ask questions?” the MP colonel asked.
“What I want you to do for us, Bruce—”
“In other words, Morty, I don’t get to ask questions?”
“I may not answer your questions, but go ahead.”
“Why does whoever did this want to kill Mr. Cronley?”
“A lot of people, with good reason, would like to see Super Spook sent to Fiddler’s Green. Now what I want you to do, Bruce, is see if you can find out who owns the Audi, and see if you can find out who the man in the 385th Station Hospital is. And who the young woman is.”
“I’ll get right on it,” the MP colonel said.
“Mr. Ziegler is ex-CID,” Cronley said. “Can I send him with you?”
“Why not?” the MP colonel said.
