by Joseph Flynn
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Crosby had instructed Todd earlier that they shouldn’t pay more than casual attention to any aspect of the theatre. There might be people watching for them on campus. They had to be ready to run or fight. If they stopped and gawked, they’d deserve to get caught.
They kept walking and no one tried to stop them. They got into the BMW and drove south to San Bruno. Crosby said he was in the mood for Italian food because that was harder to fuck up than any other cuisine and if someone served him a bad meal he was going to start shooting. They stopped at a place called Toto’s.
The pasta was terrific, the beer was cold, the service was excellent.
Crosby didn’t shoot anyone and after Todd said he’d drive the next leg and Crosby could drink all he wanted the mood mellowed. Sure, they were both still sore that McGill, that bastard, had to be behind getting them to drive all the way across the country for nothing.
Until Anderson had been caught, Crosby hadn’t had any personal animosity against McGill.
Now, all that had changed.
He not only wanted to kill the guy, he wanted to make him suffer.
Todd, no less emotional, sat nibbling his pizza and sipping a Coke.
He’d been surfing the web on his iPad since the food had been served. Crosby thought Todd was probably hoping to find some paparazzi photo looking up Chana Lochlan’s skirt. He’d been leching after her ever since they left the East Coast. Todd could fool you, though, and that was what he did to Crosby after the waitress had brought him his fourth beer.
He handed the tablet to Crosby.
McGill’s face was right goddamn there, looking at him.
Crosby stuck Todd’s earbuds into his auditory canals. Didn’t worry about hygiene.
A tap on the screen started the video.
McGill told him, “The first thing Olin Anderson said after he woke up in custody was to call me a pussy.”
That made Crosby smile.
McGill continued, “Kind of ironic, I thought, because that was my opinion of him. Same way I feel about you and Todd. Couple of ex-CIA hotshots and a mad scientist sneaking around, hiding out, taking your own sweet time to work out your master plan. Can’t even make a simple run at a retired cop who’s working on a private license just to fill his time.”
Much as he hated to do so, Crosby thought the guy had a point.
If you forgot about all the Secret Service agents the prick had watching him.
McGill hadn’t. He brought that up, too.
“Most of the time, I’ve got one special agent looking out for me. Lately, that agent has been a woman. She and my friend, another retired cop, another woman, were all I needed to take down your pal Olin. He’s been singing like a canary, by the way. Must’ve held out for all of fifteen minutes.”
Crosby grimaced. He was going to make this fucker pay.
“So the way I figure it, if you’ve got any stones at all, you should just come for me. I suppose you could try a long-range shot. I hear you’ve got — or had — that skill. But if that’s the way you go, you really are a pussy. Just come get me. We can do hand to hand, edged weapons, blunt objects. Something up close and satisfying. Blood and muscle. You know, the way a man would do it.
“Todd tried that once. Didn’t work out at all for him. But maybe he’s grown a pair since then. So here’s how you can find me. I’ll be providing personal bodyguard service for Chana Lochlan. How’s that for motivation for you two dimwits? You don’t have to call back. Just show up.
“If you’re not too busy mailing in applications for your AARP cards.”
Crosby removed the earbuds and looked at Todd.
“Tell me he’s not as good as he thinks he is.”
Todd said, “You know he’s baiting us.”
“Of course, he is, but how good is he?”
“Good enough he can tell two women to shoot Anderson and not let it bother him.”
Crosby thought about McGill’s challenge as he finished his pasta and beer.
“He’s right about both of us being motivated, isn’t he?”
Todd nodded. “The bastard knows his enemies.”
Cheltenham Drive — Bethesda, Maryland
With the death of Sir Edbert Bickford — How the hell had the old bastard managed to fall off his yacht and drown? — Reynard Dix was down to one job. The way he was doing it, it looked like he was working for Patti Grant, for God’s sake. No matter whom he picked for the celebrity debates with the damn liberals, his people came off looking like stuffed shirts and gasbags.
The richer-than-Midas liberals always managed to act like regular people who just happened to have Aaron Sorkin, if not Will Shakespeare, feeding them lines. They knew just how to dress, too. Wore designer casual clothes with price tags that would be a stretch, but not completely out of reach, for the average voter. The overall effect was aspirational. These were the people the viewers wanted to be, and when you saw them on your computer or replays on TV, that seemed like a reasonable ambition.
When voters saw Dix’s panelists, what’d they think?
Banker looking to foreclose on my house.
Shit. The real problem, Dix had come to realize, was he was playing out of his league. Patti Grant had an army of Hollywood pros backing her side. His side had … him. It was like sending a T-ball team out to play the Yankees.
Goddamn job didn’t even pay a salary. The only reason he kept it was in the hope he could parlay it into something better. But even that possibility was looking remote. He was having a hard time finding anybody on the right willing to go up against the president’s shills.
It was pathetic. Conservatives were supposed to be the badasses. Liberals were supposed to be the pansies. Couldn’t any-damn-body remember their parts anymore? People were watching these days just to see how bloody the Republican roadkill would be.
It was morbid but funny, if you weren’t Reynard Dix.
Things got any worse, he was going to change his name.
In that frame of mind, he took a phone call from a guy calling himself Rick Tuck.
Being a political junkie since birth, Dix picked up on the familiar sounding name.
“Any relation to Dick Tuck?” he asked.
Dick Tuck had been a political consultant and a practical joker who had loved nothing better than driving Richard Nixon crazy. In 1968, Nixon’s campaign slogan was Nixon’s the One. So one day when Nixon was speaking to a white bread audience, Tuck hired a very pregnant African-American woman to wander through the crowd.
She wore a T-shirt that said: Nixon’s the One.
“Only as a kindred spirit,” Tuck said. “He was the godfather of dirty tricks, I’m the future. I’ve got a proposition for you.”
“You know my politics, don’t you? I liked Nixon, from what I read about him.”
“Sure, I know. I feel about Patti Grant the way Dick Tuck felt about Nixon.”
Dix told him to come right over.
Rick Tuck looked geeky enough but barely old enough to be an Eagle Scout.
“How old are you?” Reynard Dix asked, letting the kid into his house.
“Old enough to make serious money and cause serious problems for people I don’t like.”
“Are you threatening me?” Dix asked.
Tuck laughed. “Don’t get your tighty-whities spun around.”
The kid handed Dix a certified check for twenty thousand dollars.
Manna from heaven, Dix thought. Well, breathing room anyway.
He’d no sooner slipped the check into his sport coat than he thought of the quo that had to go with the quid pro. “What do I have to do for this money?”
Tuck handed him a manila envelope. “There’s a photograph in there. What you need to do is get it into the hands of whatever mainstream media goon you trust most to make the biggest splash with it. Time it so the photo goes public around mid-October.”
Dix asked, “May I —”
“Look at it? Go right ahead.”
The former RNC chairman did. He saw a young Jean Morrissey in bed with another young woman, lying together spoon fashion. Morrissey, raised up on one arm, was kissing the other woman’s cheek. Their faces and shoulders showed, but no other bare skin. Even so, it was clear they were in love.
Dix had to sit down.
Revealing that Patti Grant’s new vice president, her running mate, was a lesbian would be an October surprise that would blow the president out of the water. But who would the election go to, Mather Wyman or Howard Hurlbert? And … oh, shit. He was going to be the cutout.
He’d be the one holding the bag, if things went wrong.
Dix looked at the kid. He was wearing horn rim glasses and a blonde wig. His buck teeth didn’t look real either.
“Your name’s not really Rick Tuck, is it?” he asked.
“Nom de guerre,” the kid admitted.
“Is the check real?”
“Good as gold.”
“So I do this, I’m stuck with whatever happens.”
“You do it right, someone gives you a big job.”
That was a possibility, Dix thought. On the other hand, “If I screw up?”
“If it’s an honest screwup, no comeback from me. If you try to do a fakeout, I’ll know, and I already have access to your bank accounts, credit cards, computers and BlackBerry so you’d probably be better off killing yourself. Of course, you could just give me that check back and forget I was ever here.”
Dix kept the check.
A plain white van with mud-smeared plates picked up Rick Tuck. In ten seconds the vehicle was out of Reynard Dix’s sight. Tuck was happy Dix hadn’t asked where he’d gotten the picture. So many dopes wanted to know. Like he’d give away a trade secret.
It was pretty simple, really.
Millions of Americans loved to put together photo albums online. As long as the images didn’t appear to be of someone getting laid or killed, the software said okey-dokey and slapped the album together. It got shipped to a mailing address and everyone was happy.
Thing was, more than a few famous people used the online album services. They didn’t try to sneak anything pornographic or incriminating into their albums but they revealed plenty of dumb stuff. The pictures they thought fit to put between two covers had started divorce proceedings and ended business deals.
Rick Tuck’s old man, the guy behind the wheel of the van, had been your classic low-rent gumshoe. His specialty had been cheating spouses. He’d photographed a thousand of them. Then his son Rick had come along, tech savvy as hell, and said, “Hey, Pop, let’s see if these dopes take their own pictures, ones that’ll cook ‘em good.”
He started hacking the servers of online photo album sites.
Hit paydirt first time out.
Jean Morrissey was just one big name they had on file.
Tuck et Pere had been paid a lot more than twenty grand for Morrissey’s picture.
Funny thing was, they didn’t know the identity of the guy who hired them.
12
October, 2012
Hillside Drive — Bloomington, Indiana
On a beautiful early October weekend, Kenny McGill and his mother Carolyn Enquist drove from Evanston, Illinois to Bloomington, Indiana. Kenny and Cassidy Kimbrough had been Skyping and e-mailing each other since their meeting at the White House. A mutual interest had developed that was clear to both their mothers and met with both mothers’ approval.
The field was also cleared when Kenny and Liesl Eberhardt decided to be just friends.
A cordon of Secret Service special agents traveled with Kenny and Carolyn.
They kept a measured distance.
Close enough to be effective, not so close as to be oppressive.
Carolyn had told Sheryl ahead of time the Secret Service would be on hand.
She hoped the Kimbroughs wouldn’t mind.
“We’ll just pretend we’re special enough to need them,” Sheryl said with a laugh.
Cassidy had shared with Sheryl the story Kenny had told her about almost dying and being visited in his hospital room by Congressman Zachary Garner at a time when all the nurses and doctors said that would have been impossible. Kenny told her that Garner had been one of the people who gave him the strength to go on living.
“You think that story’s true, Mom? I know Kenny thinks it is, but could it really be?”
Sheryl had to shrug. “I’d like to think so, but I don’t know. I’ve never really been religious. I like to work out my own sense of morality. Maybe that’s a drawback of being agnostic. Things are always a bit uncertain, a little scary.”
Cassidy nodded. “I’m the same way. So I think, maybe, it’d be comforting to have someone around who has a different way of seeing things.”
“Could be,” Sheryl said, thinking how some young man would soon displace her as the most indispensable person in her daughter’s life.
That happened and she’d have to reexamine her own life.
When Kenny and Carolyn arrived, Sheryl served lunch.
Kenny said everything was great. “There was a time,” he added, “when I’d be glad to finish anything somebody else couldn’t eat.”
Cassidy told him, “You look pretty slim now.”
“Yeah. After I got out of the hospital, I kept reading how keeping a normal weight is a great way not to go back into the hospital. There’s motivation for you.”
“The scare-the-hell-out-of-you diet?” Cassidy asked.
Sheryl scolded her daughter, but Kenny said it was true.
Cassidy said, “Sounds like your diet is closely related to my waiting-for-early-college-admission-decision diet. I can hardly eat a thing lately.”
“Fasting becomes you,” Kenny said.
Cassidy blushed.
“Snacking probably would, too,” he added.
Cassidy laughed.
“He’s just like his father,” Carolyn told the Kimbroughs.
After the lunch dishes were washed, a chore handled by the younger people, a tour of the IU campus was next on the schedule, to be followed later by dinner and a movie.
Sheryl suggested Cassidy show Kenny the campus without any helicopter moms hovering nearby. Carolyn agreed. Kenny took Cassidy’s hand and said, “Quick before they change their minds.” The two young people trotted off together.
The Secret Service detail, given advance notice this might happen, smoothly divided itself in two and with fewer agents to protect each package moved in closer.
Ten seconds later, Carolyn sighed.
“Something wrong?” Sheryl asked.
“Their timing probably.”
Carolyn gestured. Kenny and Cassidy were walking now but still held hands.
Carolyn said, “Kenny tells me Cassidy is going to Stanford.”
“She hopes to. She has wonderful grades, top test scores and one hell of a college essay. But who knows with selective schools? She might wind up right here. Where’s Kenny thinking of going to college?”
“Georgetown. He’d like to be on campus with his sister and near his father, assuming there’s a second term for the Grant administration.”
The two women came to a shaded bench and took a load off their feet.
Sheryl asked, “Would you mind if I asked you a personal question?”
Carolyn smiled. “You mean, how do I feel about having been married to the man who’s married to Patti Grant?”
Sheryl laughed. “Okay, we can start with that.”
“I fell in love with Jim McGill the day I met him in grade school. I love him still. But when we were married, his being a cop worried me sick. I couldn’t take it. I’m a much better fit with my husband, Lars, whom I love even more than Jim.”
“That’s good.”
“Now, what question did you want to ask?”
“How well do you know Patti Grant and what do you think of her?”
Carolyn had no idea Sheryl Kimbrough was an Indiana elector.
She said, “Patti is th
e kind of woman another woman might look at and ask, ‘Where does she get off being so rich and so beautiful? And by the way, what is my ex-husband telling me by marrying someone like her?’”
Both women laughed. Then Carolyn turned serious.
“Patti also saved Kenny’s life and almost lost her own in the effort. You know how they say Secret Service agents will take a bullet for the president?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I would, too. For this one.”
www.pattigrantwins.com— World Wide Web
The craggy, world-weary face of global movie star John Marsden stared at the camera as he sat at a bar with a beer sign in the background. A click on the arrow superimposed over his image started the video. Marsden got right to the point.
“I am one lucky sonofabitch. I was feeling thirsty when I got off of work at a construction site one day. I was just a kid. So I went into a bar for a beer. Some silly bastard tried to grab the bottle the bartender had just set in front of me. A short right to his jaw told him that was the wrong move.”
The memory brought a smile to the actor’s face.
“Turned out the guy I clocked was the cinematographer for a movie shooting down the road. Right about then, the movie’s director stepped into the bar and saw his right-hand man sprawled on the floor. He shouted, ‘Who the hell laid that man out?’
“I raised my hand. Oh, yeah, I also caught the bottle of beer the guy had tried to swipe. Hadn’t lost a drop. The director shouted at me, ‘You know how much money you just cost me?’
“I replied, ‘You know how little I care?’
“The director kinda liked that. He was a fan of attitude and ad-libbing. Never did worry too much about the health of his employee. I started to feel a little sorry for the guy I’d hit, having to work for a prick like that. So I took a drink of my beer and poured what was left on the face of the guy I’d decked to see if he’d wake up.
“He not only regained consciousness, the last few ounces went right into his open mouth. He looked up at me and said, ‘Hell, that was all I wanted. You didn’t have to slug me.’
“What I had to do was love a guy like that. Bob Purdy went on to shoot ninety percent of my movies. I even made four films with the director, Conrad Tucker, who I never did like. And buying rounds with those two guys in a blue collar bar was how I got into the movies.