“Bottle of Jim Beam and a Dixie cup,” reminded Fitz.
“Hey. Check it out.” The cashier ignored him, turning up the volume. On the screen, a reporter was already conducting the man-on-the-street-style interviews. The subject? The debate that ended in assault. The microphone was stuck in the face of an older gentleman wearing a white Stetson.
“I dunno. I think he had it comin’. Maybe that Dutton guy had just had enough. Sometimes, I know, I’ve had enough.”
The interviewer cued a tape with more interviews, edited into snippets. A random sampling of South County sexes and colors.
“Didn’t see it. What happened?”
“Candidate for Congress Mitch Dutton ended a televised debate by hitting the other candidate, Shakespeare McCann.”
“Did he deserve it?”
Then another snippet Fitz found himself riveted.
“I saw it. Best debate ever. That Dutton boy’s got a temper. But if it was me in that spot. Hot lights. Some fellah pointin’ fingers. Who knows?”
And another.
“I was definitely on the fence until tonight. And I must admit, I thought Dutton was just your regular weak-kneed politician. But he showed me something of himself. He’s a fighter. And I liked it. Gotta say, I liked it a lot. Maybe he’ll go back to Washington and kick some congressional tail.”
“But how would you feel if McCann pressed charges?”
“What for? Looked to me like he had it coming.”
One interview after the next. Fitz couldn’t believe what he was hearing, seeing. Where was the negative? Dutton had clearly assaulted McCann. Yet the viewing audience, at least those interviewed, were seeing something completely different. They were seeing Mitch as a fighter. Mitch Dutton?
“Change the channel,” barked Fitz.
“But this is good,” returned the cashier.
“Just the other news. Channel Nine!” Fitz didn’t wait for an answer, he simply reached across and switched channels himself.
On Channel 9 was more of the same. Anchors and political pundits remarking on the surprise ending to the debate in mostly positives. None quite so frank as to endorse Mitch or his actions, but all finding it difficult to hide their glee at the outcome of the event. Words and phrases were used like “surprised” and “I didn’t think he had it in him.”
The focus group! thought Fitz. If there were positives, Murray would’ve called. He dove into his coat pocket for his cell phone, only to find the battery dead. “Where’s a pay phone?”
“Just around the corner.” The cashier pointed.
Fitz headed for the door in a hurry, leaving the bottle of Beam, the Dixie cup, and the twenty-dollar bill on the counter. He was around the corner, feeding the pay phone with a quick quarter and dialing Murray’s cell phone. At the other end, Fitz didn’t hear the phone even ring. He just heard Murray’s voice saying, “Fitz!”
“Sorry. My phone died.”
“I’ve been dialing for over an hour now.”
“Just gimme the grislies,” said Fitz in his usual low timbre.
“I can’t explain it,” said Murray. “I mean, it sparked a discussion like I’d never seen.”
“Bottom line?”
“Bottom line? They’re hooked. I mean, I thought we were dead. When Mitch hit him. Hell if I didn’t think I’d be typing my resume tomorrow.”
“They liked him?”
“Loved him!” said Murray. “I mean, it wasn’t a hundred percent. I had one lady who turned in her cards and left the hotel. But most, I’d say, they thought Mitch showed some real chutzpah,” finished Murray, breathless and relieved to pass on the news.
“Did you remind the focus group that Mitch had just committed a crime? That he’d assaulted McCann?”
“This is Texas, Fitz. It’s all about whether a fellah had it comin’ or not. And I guess they thought McCann was out of line pressing the Shoop de Jarnot thing.”
“They thought it was about Shoop?”
“Wasn’t it? Looked to me that he was pushing Mitch right to the edge with it.”
“What were the scores?”
“Well, it’s pretty unscientific. But we started with fifteen undecided voters and scored it eleven to three, Dutton.”
“It’s not too late,” figured Fitz in wonder. “We could start a new track tonight Finish by morning. Who knows? We might have a whole new ball game.”
A whole new ball game?
Shakespeare McCann never played sports. As a boy, he was always small, always the new kid in the school, and rarely picked for the team. Sports was for bullies and buttholes. And hustling was for off the court.
“I know. I should see the other guy, am I right?” said the young resident, already expert in the art of repairing faces after fisticuffs. “Now, I want you to hold still. Just a little prick of lidocaine.”
After Mitch had vanished from the debate scene and before Rene took on the pressing media, Shakespeare was whisked away by one of his volunteers to a county emergency room, dropped at the entrance, and left to walk in under the assumed name of Alan Funt.
“Mr. Funt,” asked the Nicaraguan-born nurse, “I jus’ need a signature. This say you are indigent and uninsured. And initial here, please?”
Underneath Shakespeare’s silence and pain, his mind was clicking through the options. To press charges? To feign greater injury for the sympathy vote?
No!
And though he knew the police would be looking for him to see if he wished to file a complaint…
Tit for tat, considering the Jennifer O’Detts arrest!
…placing the shoe on the other man’s foot might work as a ball and chain, leaving Dutton stuck somewhere between the final stretch and the finish line. Something, though, made Shakespeare think otherwise. A boiling in his gut that told him that Mitch Dutton had, with one flash of a fist, clutched his campaign into overdrive and would see nothing but blue skies between himself and November third.
“Okay, Mr. Funt. Nod when it’s numb,” said the resident.
Shakespeare nodded. And silently, without so much as a whimper, he endured the hook stitches that sewed his split lower lip back in place. The doctor worked, paying no mind to anything other than his task. The swelling in Shakespeare’s face was so bruised and awful that the young emergency room doctor didn’t even recognize the dark-horse candidate who had become so popular, let alone the satirical alias.
“Funt,” said the resident. “Have I heard that name before?”
Shakespeare mumbled, “Not ‘less you hang out at soup kitchens.”
“Your nose is busted. But looks like it wasn’t the first time.”
Shakespeare nodded and waited for the procedure to end. Leaving the sympathy option open, he agreed to be admitted overnight for observation. An orderly wheeled him into a seven-bed ward room. Three beds were occupied. The curtains were drawn. Away from the office and his home phone, it would give him time to think. To plot. To plan his next move. For the moment, it would serve him to be anonymous.
But instead of helping him look forward, the smell of the room reeled him backward.
Taylor State Prison near Eugeneville, North Carolina. Day three. Inmate number TSP18360G, Campbell Delacourt—a.k.a. Steven Bidwell, Lester McCann, or Franklin C. Harmon—assigned to duties in the prison infirmary, known amongst the other cons as the No Tell Motel. This was where those perceived as the inmate population’s small and weak were first assigned. Where doctors were few and the nurses, trustees. This was where bitches were born, initiated, and later assigned to cellblocks and passed around as whores for the studs who ran things. Once he was a bitch, even cigarette cartons, the currency of prisons worldwide, couldn’t buy a man a new name or ID. A bitch would always be a bitch, forever incarcerated to receive the worst side of man’s sexual impulses. Rape.
Campbell Delacourt, a man who could con old ladies out of their Social Security checks and husbands out of their Friday gambling dough, didn’t know the angles. Didn’t under
stand that con was short for convict. And negotiations took place only after the violation.
To that very day, Shakespeare remembered the bloodied sheets of the infirmary bed where he lay long after he’d been tied up and penetrated by the hardware of Taylor State’s three most trusted inmates. Trustees. Another code word. And trust had nothin’ to do with it.
And then it came to him. With no place to run, no new state to escape to with a new name and a new scam, he had to turn it around. Make them understand they’d fucked the wrong man. That he was nobody’s bitch. Options, he thought. Count ‘em. Slim and none. Action? Soon. And if he failed? Well, he’d rather die trying.
Remembering a formula from some high school chemistry pranksters, he lifted some isopropyl alcohol and ammonia crystals from the infirmary. Then, shortly thereafter, extended an invitation to a trustee who was all too quick to drop his drawers at the promise of some good head. Pretending the chemical solution was a mouthwash, he took a mouthful and dropped to his knees. A match was quickly lit and brought near his lips. From there, Delacourt blew fire onto the trustee’s genitals, igniting them in a wet spew of flame, but burning his own face in the process. The screaming of the trustee. An involuntary action brought his knee up to smash Delacourt’s jaw in six places.
Talk of the depraved act was quickly passed along through the penitentiary, and by the time he emerged from twenty-seven hours of plastic reconstruction and six months’ recovery in the prison hospital, a certain respect had been cultivated simply through word of mouth. Prisoner to prisoner. Guard to guard. Campbell Delacourt had entered the hospital a bitch, but had returned a man worth reckoning.
Prisons are like hospitals, thought Shakespeare. They all smell the same. He rose from his hospital bed and crossed to the mirror, finding a stool to lean on. Even with the lousy light, the darkened man could see enough of his features to accurately assess the damage. Of course, he’d seen worse. He’d been burned over sixty percent of his face. And that was nothing compared to the afteraffects of orthopedic surgery.
It took eight external steel screws to set the new jaw. For five and a half months Campbell Delacourt drank meals through a straw, passed time with a TV, and spent hours upon hours with the state-appointed psychologist.
Dutton had used the word tonight.
Sociopath. The shrink wasn’t dumb enough to use it in the presence of the patient. She just wasn’t smart enough—didn’t know that Campbell Delacourt could read upside down.
The patient calculated the time upon his face. Two days to lose the swelling. Another four for the bruises to subside enough that makeup would, once again, render him camera-ready. The lower lip, though. It would be weeks until it was fully healed. The stitches hideously started at his chin and traversed the thick part of his lower lip like train tracks.
It was no longer a public face for a public figure. The shelling he’d given Dutton in the alley had at least left his opponent with time to recover. Now there was no time left. Shakespeare had already flipped through the newscasts while alone in his infirm state. All with their own frame-by-frame replays of the assault, followed by commentary ad infinitum.
Smile. You ‘re on “Candid Camera.”
Just as his stomach had tried to tell him earlier, Patient Funt saw the coming consensus. Dutton was back on top with that all-important momentum on his side.
You must turn the tide back. Turn it back now!
Gathering his clothes and losing the hospital johnny in the nearest waste bin, Shakespeare checked Alan Funt out of the hospital by traveling the three floors down to the A-side emergency exit and calling a cab.
Connie rolled over in bed to find the clock reading 8:44 A.M. “Shit!”
She bolted from bed, afraid of the expected. Mitch was usually out the door by eight-thirty and on the way to the campaign office. She was drawing her robe around her as she rushed down the stairs, tying it when she hit the bottom step and rounding the corner into the kitchen, where much to her surprise, Mitch sat in his running clothes at the table.
“You didn’t run?” she said, noting he was dry as a desert breeze.
He lifted his hand up onto the table. It was even more swollen than the night before, dripping wet from a bucket of ice water he held between his legs. “Thought I could, but it hurts too damn much.”
“You should get it X-rayed.”
“I’ll go see old Doc Dominguez. Even though he’ll probably want to talk about my old man.”
She poured a cup of coffee and sat down across from him. “Did you sleep at all?”
“Some,” he said, his voice lowering with his eyes to the newspaper in front of him. “And just when I’d decided to hang it all up…” He twisted the front page around so she could read it. “Looks like I’m back in it.”
Connie scanned the front page. Above a grainy, videotransferred image from the debate capturing Mitch frozen in the act of throwing that first punch, the headline read:
DUTTON FIGHTS BACK!
“I talked to Fitz. He says the numbers are crazy,” he continued. “Says the overnight tracking puts me back ahead by eight points. That in one swift swing I’ve removed the wimp factor from my public persona.” He tried not to seem insulted. “I didn’t even know I had a wimp factor.”
She looked glum at the news. The fact was, she didn’t know what to think. “Does this mean you’re going to win?”
“If I stay in the race, I’d say the probability is up there. But I’d have to be a candidate.”
“But you are a candidate.”
“Not if I withdraw. I mean, it’s too late to take my name off the ballot, but—”
“But is it what you want?” Connie was genuine. She didn’t want him to give up because of her.
Mitch stood and stepped over to the sink, where he emptied the ice bucket and wrapped his nearly numbed hand in a dish towel. “I had a long time to think last night,” he started, searching for the right words. “At this point, the only reason to stay in it—other than pride—is because I don’t want to see that sonofabitch in office.” Then he heaved and leaned against the kitchen counter in a slump-shouldered, defeated posture. “There’s also a strong voice. And it sounds like my father’s.”
“What’s it say?”
“That the public gets the government that they deserve.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“They want to be lied to. They want only for me to tell them what they want to hear. That everything’s just hunky-dory. Nothing’s wrong with the country. Nothing needs fixing.” He was shaking his head.
“But a lot of them want you.” She pushed the paper toward him. “Says right here, in black and white.”
“Correction. Black and blue.”
“You’re ahead. The majority will probably vote for you.”
“Not for me. Just the bullshit I’ve told them,” said Mitch. “Politics is simply about whose bullshit sells the most tickets.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I didn’t. But I do now.”
“I think you should think about it.”
He shook his head. He didn’t want to think about it anymore. He wanted off the ride. That’s when Connie got up from the table and walked over to him, undoing her robe so that when she put her arms around him, her naked skin would press against him. She knew he liked that. “You want to go back to bed? Fool around? Afterward, maybe, you can get up on the right side of the bed.”
But Mitch was still shaking his head. “You don’t get it, do you?” He kneeled to the floor, pressing his face into her not-yet-protruding stomach. “I’ve found new hope. In you. In the baby.”
“Mitch!”
He rose up to look her in the eye and press an index finger gently to her lips. “I’m going upstairs. I’m going to shower. Then, carefully, I’m going to drive to the doctor and have my hand X-rayed.”
“Don’t make any rash—”
“I promise you. Today I’ll only think about it. I won’t do a thing w
ithout talking to you first.” He removed his finger. “Happy?”
“Only if you are.” Connie was emphatic. He was trying to get away with making a snap decision, something about him that always galled her. He’d gotten into the race in the same way.
“Are you sure?” she would ask. “Is this what you want?”
And he would say, “What’s it matter, sweetie? I’m never going to win against Hammond. This is just my way of stirring the pot. Getting folks to do some thinking.”
While he showered, she quickly tired of the newspaper and her coffee. Morning sickness hadn’t quite turned her into a porcelain goddess, but she found that eating was playing second fiddle to mindless chores. Connie decided to do Mitch a favor and clear the telephone machine of messages from the night before. A couple of calls were perfunctory. And even more were congratulatory. Then there were the two calls from Fitz. One at nine and another closer to ten, urging him to call at the soonest possible moment.
Second to last on the answering machine was another call from Gina. That jack rabbit voice of hers eating tape with one contrite sound bite after the other. Apologizing for not calling. Apologizing for not being around. Apologizing for being afraid to call. But then begging for Connie to meet her. They had to talk. Lunch. Anywhere. Just please, call back!
“Okay, Gina. Enough!” It had been too long since the best friends had spoken, and the last time had ended so poorly. There was plenty to talk about.
Connie made a mental note to call back and then played the last message. The electronic voice stamp began with the time. “One forty-six a.m.” Afterward, a muddied voice crept out, as if mumbling a tune through swollen lips:
“Rock-a-bye-baby, on the treetop. When the wind blows, the cradle will rock. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall. And down will come baby, cradle and all.”
When the tape ended, she sat and clutched her stomach. How did he know? she wondered. How could he? Or was it just coincidence? A wild guess? She rocked herself in the chair, praying silently. Yes. She knew the child was hers. But whose seed had worked its way into the egg? She prayed it was Mitch’s. If God loved her, it was Mitch’s. If he was a compassionate, caring God…
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