Act of Betrayal by Shirley Kennett Page A

went out to finish her lunch and somehow not blurt everything out to Howard Wall.
    Schultz hung up the pay phone and sat in the booth for a couple of minutes, immobilized with grief and anger. It hadn’t occurred to him that the strike would be a triple whammy, even though the voice on the phone had warned of more to come. His son dead, an innocent girl’s life taken, and he himself framed for a cold-blooded murder. Rick’s horrible death was bad enough by itself.
    If I was meant to be devastated, all right, you can stop already.
    And he’d lied to PJ, probably just the first of many lies before this was over, one way or another. He had been in St. Louis at the time the girl was killed, not three hundred miles away in Chicago, as he had claimed. He’d been at the St. Louis airport, waiting for his flight to Dallas. He couldn’t tell PJ that, because he was afraid that doing so might put her life in danger from the asshole who was after him. The less she knew about his whereabouts the better.
    It had been a busy night. From home he had driven to a place called Secure Archives, where he kept a rental box. Secure Archives offered private storage, like safe-deposit boxes for those who wanted access outside banking hours. The company offered a range of sizes, from something the right size to hold a few canceled checks or letters from a lover to room-size storage for businesses that wanted to keep their old records, or backups of critical computer files, off-site.
    There was no night attendant at Secure Archives, but that didn’t matter. They had an elaborate security system that required a retinal scan plus an actual key. It wasn’t a cheap service.
    Schultz carried the key in his wallet at all times.
    Inside his rental box there were a hundred gold coins, shiny mint condition American Eagles. He loaded the coins into a small carry-on bag that he kept in the trunk of the Pacer. It had taken him years, with his limited financial resources, to accumulate the coins. Another reason for the length of time was so that the funds were never missed by his wife, Julia. She probably would have gotten the wrong impression. When a man saves up money and hides it from his wife, it usually means hanky-panky.
    Fanny Obermeier, a first-class fence for gold and gems, didn’t even grouse too much when she was awakened at midnight by a phone call from Schultz. Late-night phone calls were not unheard of in her business. In consideration of their long-term friendship, she gave him seventy-five cents on the dollar for the coins, on the condition that he not spread that outrageous fact around or her other clients would want the same deal. Fat chance of that.
    Getting three sets of false identification wasn’t quite as easy. It took him five hours and used up not only ten thousand dollars of his cash fund (he got the bulk discount for purchasing more than two) but a couple of favors called in as well.
    He had dropped his car off in front of his house, resisting the temptation to go inside and pack a few things, even personal mementos, all the little things that defined his home life. What was the point? If he made it back, they’d be there waiting for him. If he didn’t, well, it wasn’t as if he had anybody to inherit them. It dawned on him that he was a dead branch on the family tree now, with no one to carry on to the next generation.
    Schultz walked a couple of blocks and got on a bus. He rode from place to place, transferring often and checking for a tail. As he rode, he began the process of compacting his grief and anger and fear into a tight little ball that took up residence in his gut. There would be time for all that later, assuming there was a later. When he was sure he wasn’t being followed, he took the public rail system, the MetroLink, to the airport. He chose his first destination by looking at the monitors that listed departure times. It turned out to be Dallas.
    What had started out last night as a random thought when he sat