The Nomination

by William G. Tapply

  She’d notice the missing envelope, too. Maybe not right away, though. She might not even connect it to the missing photo. Either way, she and the blonde would be baffled. They’d look everywhere. They’d blame the cleaning lady or poltergeists. Each would suspect the other of misplacing it.

  It would end up being a mystery.

  The last thing that would occur to them would be that they’d been burglarized. Especially when the burglar was as neat and efficient as Eddie Moran. And nothing of any value was missing.

  He looked at his watch. His time was up. He moved quickly into the living room and peeked out the window. The Wagoneer was nowhere in sight.

  He slipped out the front door and was back under his hemlocks in two minutes.

  Twelve minutes later he heard the now familiar rumble of the old Wagoneer coming down the driveway in low gear. He didn’t bother watching through the binoculars or recording the time in his notebook this time.

  Eddie Moran was done here.

  And so, waiting for night to fall, he settled back against the trunk of the hemlock and allowed himself to think about how good the blonde looked in her cropped T-shirt and snug, low-slung jeans. Maybe some day . . .

  AFTER DINNER, SIMONE Sat out on the sunporch to watch the darkness arrive. Almost immediately her eyelids grew heavy. She fought against sleep. She feared sleep—or, more accurately, she feared waking up. She was sleeping more and more. Her daytime naps came more frequently, and they lasted longer, sometimes two or three hours. She was going to bed barely after sundown now that the longest days of the year had arrived. She tended to awaken early, and in those vulnerable early moments of consciousness, in the gray half-light of the day’s first hour, she invariably felt in her heart an overpowering weight of dread and despair, and behind her eyes lingered the images and emotions of awful dreams.

  Some days, the bleakness never went away. It was not fear of death. Simone had reconciled herself to death. It was . . . emptiness. Her life, she believed, had no meaning. She had contributed nothing. She would be remembered, if at all, for being one of the first actresses to reveal a glimpse of her pubic hair in a movie.

  What a legacy.

  But now there was Mac’s book. Her book. And now there was Jessie Church. Her own daughter. Simone had much to live for, she told herself. She had goals and purposes. She had things to do and events to anticipate.

  So why did that overpowering weight of dread and doom continue to press on her heart?

  Well, the irony was not lost on her. Now, after an aimless, useless life, she’d finally found hope and purpose, a reason to want to live. And now she was dying.

  “You better take me to my room,” she said to Jill. “I can’t seem to keep my eyes open.”

  Jill wheeled Simone into her bedroom and, with an arm around her shoulders, helped her move from the wheelchair into her bed. She fussed with the blankets and Simone’s pillow, then bent and kissed her forehead.

  Simone lifted her hand and touched Jill’s face. “I love you,” she said.

  Jill nodded. “I love you, too.” She kissed Simone softly on the lips, smiled, then turned and left the room.

  Simone lay there staring up at the ceiling, trying not to cry. After a few minutes, she rolled onto her side to turn off the lamp on the table beside her bed.

  It took her a moment to realize that something was missing. The photo, the one she’d taken from the batch that Bunny sent her, that she’d been keeping propped up against the base of the lamp—it was gone.

  Probably fell off the table, she thought. The movement of air from pushing back the blankets and fluffing the pillows and getting into bed would do it. It got blown onto the floor, maybe under the bed. She’d have to remember to ask Jill to look for it in the morning.

  Simone lay awake longer than usual, worrying about her photo, knowing it was irrational but feeling in her stomach that awful dread, the feeling that something terrible had happened. Or maybe it was a premonition that something terrible was going to happen.

  MORAN WAITED UNTIL dark to slip out of his hemlock cave and head back to his Explorer. This would be his last night on this particular job. Actually, the job was over. He decided to treat himself to a nice dinner.

  He deserved it. It was a job well done. True, he hadn’t recovered all the photos that Bunny had sent to Li An. But he’d verified that they weren’t there to be found. He’d found one of them, and he’d found the note that Bunny had written. He had the tape that might or might not mean something, and in his camera he had digital pictures of the man who’d visited on Saturday along with his license plate numbers.

  Larrigan would not be thrilled that the photos were still out there somewhere. But Moran figured that as long as Li An didn’t have them, the judge was in pretty good shape. The photos without Li An’s explanation of them wouldn’t prove anything, and Li An’s story without the photos for evidence wouldn’t be worth much, either.

  Moran remembered seeing a steak house in the town of Beaverkill amid all the fishing shops. Normally he didn’t like to eat in restaurants. A single man by himself blended in at a diner but was more likely to be noticed in a restaurant. But tonight, the hell with it. He’d be long gone and hard to find in the morning, and there would be no reason why anybody would want to try to remember him.

  He even thought about picking up a woman and bringing her back to his room, now that the job was done. But finding such a woman in the little hamlet of Beaverkill, New York, would not be simple, if such a woman even lived in the town. A couple drinks, a thick steak, medium-rare, a good night’s sleep. That’s all he needed.

  He ended up eating at a booth in the lounge, where his presence didn’t seem to be noticed by anybody except the waitress. Eddie flirted with her halfheartedly. She wasn’t very attractive, and she didn’t even smile at his mildly suggestive comments. He figured she heard them all the time. She’d instantly forget him, just as he’d forget her.

  He had a couple of Old-Fashioneds followed by a medium-rare ribeye, baked potato with extra butter, big green salad, house dressing, then coffee and lemon meringue pie.

  A big TV sat on a shelf over the bar. It was showing a baseball game. While he sipped his coffee, Eddie watched. He liked the symmetry of baseball, the geometry of it, the precision of the distances, the importance of numbers and percentages, the complicated rules. He really liked how there were long stretches of time when nothing happened, and then sudden moments of quick, intense, important action. He didn’t have a favorite team. He didn’t know the players. He just liked to watch.

  He left the waitress a big tip to make up for his comments. He was glad she hadn’t responded to them. She didn’t appeal to him at all. He was tired, and now he was pleasantly full and a little buzzed from the Old-Fashioneds, and all he wanted to do was go to sleep knowing he didn’t have to wake up before he was ready to.

  By the time he got back to his motel, he was yawning. He grabbed his backpack from the backseat and slung it over his shoulder. He patted his jacket pocket where he’d put the photo and the envelope and the cassette he’d taken from Li An’s house. They represented the fruits of his three-day labor.

  Then he fished out his key, unlocked the door, and stepped into his dark motel room.

  As he reached for the light switch, a deep male voice said, “Please don’t, Eddie. Don’t turn on the lights.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Eddie Moran pulled his hand away from the light switch. He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to be gained from speaking.

  “Please drop your backpack on the floor, Eddie,” the voice said.

  Moran slid the pack off his shoulder, bent down, and placed it carefully on the floor. His camera was in the backpack. That camera had cost a lot of money.

  “Thank you,” said the voice. “Please don’t try anything foolish, Eddie. That would be regrettable. Your silhouette is outlined against the doorway. I’m holding in my hands a twelve-gauge shotgun. It’s a semiautomatic with five shells
in it, and it will fire as fast as I can pull the trigger. It’s loaded with double-ought buckshot. This shotgun has a twelve-inch barrel and an open choke and it’s aimed at the doorway. You understand why I’m telling you this?”

  Moran stood there, waiting.

  “Answer me, please,” said the voice.

  “Sure,” said Moran. “I understand.”

  “Good,” said the voice. “Now, Eddie, take one step forward, please.”

  Moran did as he was told, and that’s when he sensed the other presence in the room. This one was behind him.

  “Meet Mr. White,” said the voice. “You can call me Mr. Black.”

  Moran nodded but said nothing.

  “Hold still for Mr. White, now, Eddie,” said Mr. Black. “He wants to bind your eyes with duct tape. I know you appreciate the significance of this.”

  Moran understood, and he did indeed appreciate it. If they blindfolded him with duct tape, it meant they didn’t want him to see them. If they cared about his seeing them, it meant they didn’t intend to kill him.

  Or at least it meant that they hadn’t decided whether to kill him or to let him live. Either way was a plus under the circumstances. It was more than he deserved for being so sloppy. He should never have had those two Old-Fashioneds.

  The second man, Mr. White, moved up behind him. “Close your eyes,” he said.

  Moran closed his eyes, and Mr. White wrapped duct tape over them. He continued the tape all the way around his head, four turns, bound tight. He’d lose his eyebrows and some hair when he tore the tape off. He didn’t want to think about what would happen to his eyelids and lashes.

  Mr. White smelled faintly of cigar smoke. Anybody with Moran’s training should’ve noticed that smell before he entered the room. He was trained to notice things like old cigar smoke. He was obviously losing it. Getting old and sloppy.

  He sensed that the man taping his eyes shut was a big man. But light on his feet. He moved so quietly that Eddie Moran, who was trained to notice subtle sounds, had not sensed that anybody was inside the door when he opened it. A man that stealthy was a dangerous man.

  He heard the door behind him close and the lock click. Then there was a second click, which Moran recognized as the light being switched on. Even with his eyes shut under four layers of duct tape, he detected a subtle difference in the darkness.

  “Put your hands behind your back,” said Mr. White, standing behind him and speaking quietly into his ear. Moran listened for an accent or a regional twang of some kind. He heard none from either Mr. Black or Mr. White. Their speech was utterly generic and bland. This meant that the natural individuality that all people carry in their voices and speech patterns, the distinctive articulations that enable a trained ear to identify their country or region of origin, in many cases right down to the city or even the neighborhood, had been eradicated from these two.

  CIA, maybe. Or FBI. Probably former agents. Mavericks, maybe. Rogue agents for hire. Or maybe not. Maybe they’d been recruited, or just borrowed, from one of those organizations to execute special operations for another agency.

  It was all about Larrigan. Moran had a pretty good idea who these two worked for.

  “Put your hands behind your back and press your wrists together, please,” said Mr. White.

  Moran did as he was told, and his wrists and forearms were quickly bound together behind his back with duct tape.

  Mr. White patted him down. He took the envelope and the photograph and the cassette tape from his jacket pocket.

  A hand gripped Moran’s shoulder, steered him across the room, turned him around, and pushed him backward. He fell into the fake leather reclining chair beside the TV.

  A minute later he felt Mr. White wrapping duct tape around his ankles.

  “Now, Eddie,” said Mr. Black, who seemed to do most of the talking, “it would be helpful to know if you’re going to cooperate with us.”

  “I don’t seem to have much choice,” said Moran.

  “You could lie,” he said. “You could be a hero. You could refuse to talk.”

  Eddie laughed. “I won’t lie, don’t worry about that. I’m no hero.”

  “Okay. Good. I’m going to ask you a number of questions. Mr. White is quite skilled at persuading people to tell the truth, but we can forgo that if you provide full and truthful answers. How does that sound to you?”

  “Fine,” said Moran. “Ask away.”

  “I already know the answers to many of the questions I’m going to ask you,” said Mr. Black. “It’s sort of like a lie detector test, see? How you answer the questions will tell me if I can trust you. If I can’t trust you, Eddie, then I have no use for you.”

  “I get the picture,” said Moran. “Don’t worry. I’m not big on loyalty. On the other hand, I’m totally committed to saving my own skin. I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

  “Excellent,” said Mr. Black. “That’s what I hoped. We have big plans for you, Eddie, assuming we can trust you.”

  “What kind of plans? What do you want me to do?”

  Mr. Black chuckled. “Nothing you haven’t done before.”

  MORAN WAITED UNTIL he was certain that they had driven away. Then he waited some more, just to be on the safe side. In the disorientation of not being able to see, it was hard to keep track of the passage of time.

  Before they left, they’d removed all the tape except what they’d wrapped over his eyes. Mr. Black said: “Give us ten minutes, Eddie. You wouldn’t want to see our faces or our vehicle.”

  He figured he’d waited fifteen or twenty minutes. Then he peeled the tape off his eyes. A lot of hair came off with the tape. It hurt like hell.

  He had answered all their questions. He didn’t lie about anything. This was about saving his own skin, not Larrigan’s or anybody else’s.

  They already knew that he was working for Larrigan. And they knew he’d been spying on Li An.

  They didn’t know about Saigon. That’s what they were after.

  So Eddie Moran told them all about it.

  They’d emptied his backpack onto the floor, and they took his camera and his notebook. He wouldn’t miss the notebook, and they wouldn’t find anything useful in it anyway. It just had the notes he’d been making in preparation for entering Li An’s house. But taking his camera, that was really unnecessary. They could’ve just removed the memory card and left the camera. It was practically brand-new, state-of-the-art, very expensive. He loved that camera.

  About the only interesting things they’d get out of the camera were the pictures of the guy who’d visited Li An on Saturday, along with his license plate numbers.

  And they took the tape that Eddie had taken from the recorder at Li An’s house. He hadn’t had a chance to listen to it, so he had no idea if it would help these guys.

  After they’d looked at all his stuff and asked him all their questions, they told him what they wanted him to do.

  The last thing Mr. Black said to him was: “Do a good job, Eddie. Everything depends on it.”

  SIMONE OPENED HER eyes. Her room was dark. She lay still. Something had awakened her. There was a presence here. Someone was in her room. The sensation was powerful.

  She listened. Was that breathing? She wasn’t sure. The sound was soft, barely audible.

  She darted her eyes around, trying to see without moving her head. She saw nothing. Just the still darkness.

  Then she realized what it was. It hadn’t been a sound. It was an odd mingling of smells—Jill’s familiar soapy scent that lingered in the room long after she’d left, mixed with a faint, but sharp and acrid odor. This was an odor foreign to her room but not to her memory. Testosterone mingled with male sweat.

  “Who’s there?” she said. She was startled by how loud her voice sounded. “Jill?”

  She heard the rustle of clothing, just the smallest sound such as would be made by the flexing of an arm or the bending of a leg.

  “Who is it?” she said again.

&
nbsp; Without warning, the ceiling light went on. Simone squeezed her eyes shut against the sudden glare.

  When she opened them again, she saw that Jill was sitting on the chair beside her bed with a man standing close behind her. The man was holding a gun against the side of Jill’s head. It looked like the little gun she and Jill kept in the desk drawer. Jill’s eyes were very wide, and Simone realized that her beloved friend was crying silent tears.

  Simone stared at the man. “Who are you? What do you want?”

  He smiled. He was somewhat older than she was, Simone thought, but he had a boyish smile. “You don’t recognize me, Li An?” he said.

  She hadn’t been called Li An for over thirty years. She looked at the man again, and then, behind his leathery, creased, time-worn skin she saw the face of that devilish boy.

  “Eddie?” she whispered. “Eddie Moran? Is that you?”

  “It’s been a long time,” he said.

  “What do you want? Why are you here?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “There’s something I have to do.”

  “What? You have to do what?”

  “I’m really sorry about this,” he said.

  Simone thought she could actually see regret in his eyes.

  “Sorry about what?” she whispered. “What are you doing here, anyway? Why—”

  There was a muffled cracking noise, and Jill’s head suddenly slumped down on her chest. She was very still. Her eyes were half open. After a moment, blood began streaming down her face and dripping off her chin.

  It took a moment to register in Simone’s brain. Then she whispered, “Oh my God. Oh God. Oh.” She felt the panic of slow realization rising up in her throat and filling her head, a great pounding pressure behind her eyes and in her ears. She looked up at Eddie Moran. “What have you done? What did you do? You killed her?”