Jim McGill 04 The Last Ballot Cast, Part 2

by Joseph Flynn

  “I don’t know that I’ll be of much help before the election,” the governor told Wyman. “One sorrow begets another now, and we all need comforting.”

  “Don’t think about politics for a minute,” Wyman told her. “Please accept my condolences and extend them to everyone who loved your mother. Family comes first, always.”

  “Thank you. I’ll call back when I can.”

  Wyman sat alone in his house. The place was way too big for one old man. He’d have put it on the market already if he hadn’t thought Kira and Welborn and their two darling girls might come to visit a few times a year. He’d need to have room for them.

  He had made the time to stop in Washington and meet Aria and Callista. It almost broke his heart to see them; he knew how much his beloved Elvie would have adored these beautiful children.

  Then Kira had introduced him to the infants and he couldn’t hold back his tears.

  “This is your Grandpa Mattie, girls. You’re so very lucky to have him in your lives. He’ll do all sorts of fun stuff with you. Give you your first pony rides like he did with me.”

  Thinking about it now, he wanted to take his own advice.

  Put family first. Be a presence in his grandchildren’s lives from the start.

  Who the hell needed to be president anyway? Look at the outrages a person holding that office had to endure. Like the rest of the country, he’d seen the reports of the accusation that Patti Grant and Jean Morrissey were lovers, and James J. McGill was a philandering front man. The whole thing was despicable.

  The official response had come from Press Secretary Aggie Wu.

  She’d told the world, “The president and Mr. McGill will say no more about their marriage than they’ve already said. However, both the president and Mr. McGill condemn the idea that to say a person is a lesbian or gay should in any way be thought of as an insult. The measure of any person should be his or her character, and how it is expressed both publicly and privately.

  “I’ll make no mention of Vice President Morrissey’s reaction, and take no questions concerning her, because she will be making her own statement later today.

  “Mr. McGill also asked me to inform the people behind these malicious lies that he is a former police officer and currently holds a private investigator’s license. He intends, after the election, to find the people responsible for spreading lies about the president and see that they are brought to answer before the appropriate court.”

  Wyman thought about what he’d heard. The president had condemned the idea that calling someone gay was an insult. There was a statement that was long overdue.

  Would that he’d have the nerve to say the same thing, if by some chance he won the election.

  But how could he, if he was still keeping his secret.

  Losing the White House didn’t scare him, but the chance that he might lose Kira, Aria and Callista terrified him. He had deceived Kira her whole life. There was no way he could bring himself to do the same with Aria and Callista. But what if Kira rejected him?

  Well … Patti Grant had it right. If you wanted to be president or even a decent human being, it took courage.

  Mather Wyman called Kira and said, “I’ll be coming to Washington today. Would you mind if I stopped in for a brief visit?”

  The National Mall — Washington, D.C.

  “The president isn’t mad at me, is she?” Chana Lochlan asked.

  Like everyone else in the country, she’d heard the rumors about McGill and her.

  McGill said, “No. How about Graham? Is he going to come looking for me?”

  “No, he said after all you’ve done for me, I owe you a good time or two.”

  McGill grinned. “That’s pretty California of him.”

  “He is a native, and we’ve been married more than three years now.”

  “Maybe we’ve taken this line of discussion as far as it should go,” McGill said.

  He looked around, saw the security cordon was hanging loose. There was a nip in the air of the late October morning. Tourists and locals were sparse on the ground. Kids, on a school day, were nowhere to be seen. The few people on the footpath coming their way filtered through the line of Secret Service special agents without challenge.

  A harmless lot. Harmless looking anyway.

  Disregarding Satchel Paige’s advice, McGill looked back. More special agents. A few more middle-aged to elderly types out for a stroll despite the chill. The only person who stood out was a monk with a tonsure and a beard. His face was sun-browned from years of exposure. McGill thought he remembered hearing of a nearby monastery in Virginia … Holy Cross, he thought it was.

  The guy might have seemed suspicious if he’d had his cowl up, but his face was exposed and the expression on it seemed almost beatific as he worked his way through the beads of the rosary in his right hand.

  McGill turned his head forward. He and Chana were heading to the Lincoln Memorial. Chana’s camera operator and sound man were already there, waiting for the talent to show up. Even on a less than perfect weather day, Mr. Lincoln was always a big draw on the Mall. Chana was sure she’d find people to interview there.

  Chana asked McGill, “You see anybody to shoot while you were looking around?”

  Metropolitan Police Headquarters — Washington, D.C.

  Sweetie spotted the monk behind McGill at the same moment he did. She saw something he didn’t. The guy looked right, but he didn’t walk right. There was no sense of humility to the way he moved. His pace certainly didn’t fit with someone saying the rosary. Moving in cadence with prayer, his step should have been relatively slow and constant. You didn’t rush the rosary.

  This guy wasn’t jogging exactly, certainly wasn’t running, but he was closing the gap between himself and Jim and Chana. Hadn’t the Secret Service people noticed? Or did they think the monk simply wasn’t a threat?

  Sweetie saw a patch over the heart of the monk’s vestment.

  It looked familiar but she couldn’t quite make it out.

  She nudged a tech. “Can you zoom in on that monk?”

  She pointed to the monitor that interested her.

  “Sure. How far in you want me to go?”

  “Waist up. I want to see that insignia on his chest.”

  “No problem.” Then the tech said something that gave Sweetie a chill. “That old boy’s got some big sleeves on that rig of his. You could hide a country ham in there.”

  The patch was clear now. A black rectangle above a white rectangle. A red cross with flared ends smack in the middle. The flag of the Knights Templar. A Christian society of knights formed to fight the Crusades and to drive the Muslims from Spain. The guy on the Mall wasn’t a monk.

  He was a killer.

  Sweetie yelled into her mike, “Jim!”

  The National Mall — Washington, D.C.

  One word was enough. McGill recognized both Sweetie’s voice and its tone of alarm. He turned to look behind him, bringing up his shillelagh as he did. He saw a spinning object flying straight at his face. Flicking the fighting stick in an arc, he batted it aside.

  McGill didn’t try to see what he’d deflected because the monk he’d noticed before was sprinting toward him holding a weapon in his right hand. It looked like a hatchet with a blade on one side of the haft and a spike on the other. McGill turned sideways to present a smaller target. Blocking another throw, from a shorter distance, wouldn’t be easy.

  He shouted to Chana, “Run! Zigzag!”

  McGill didn’t want the sonofabitch to nail her with a thrown weapon.

  He needn’t have worried. The monk came for him. His present intent was to chop or impale McGill with his weapon. He raised his right arm high, as if hoping to bring the edged side of his weapon down through the middle of McGill’s skull. The same type of strike Ciro Vasquez had attempted with his pugil stick.

  This weapon, though, was more versatile. It had two ways to kill; Vasquez’s note had told him about it. The thing was called a Vietnam to
mahawk, and one of the favorite ploys of the men who fought with it was to get an opponent to bite on a feint from one side of the weapon, pull it back and strike backhand with the opposite side.

  Forewarned was forearmed, McGill opened with a feint, too. He pretended to raise a roof over his head to stave off the attack from above, but as the monk pulled his weapon back, McGill stepped back and to his right, pulling the shillelagh to his shoulders and parallel to the ground.

  When the monk’s backhand swipe with the spiked end of the tomahawk came, McGill hollowed out his midsection, sucked in his gut and arched his back to make a sideways U. The spike missed by millimeters. Meeting no resistance from flesh or bone, the weapon continued onward, the momentum of the stroke turning the monk’s back to McGill.

  A skilled fighter could often recover from a missed blow in one fluid movement, but not if his opponent was as quick or quicker. McGill swung a backhand of his own and the knobbed end of his shillelagh connected solidly with the back of the monk’s shaved head.

  He dropped like he’d been shot.

  Then Chana Lochlan, no retreat for her, stepped up and shot him for real.

  Eyes wide she asked McGill, “Everyone told me shoot to kill, right?”

  They had … and there had been no corny speech.

  Peninsula Hotel — Chicago, Illinois

  The sense of revelation Damon Todd felt was stupefying. Chana Lochlan — his Chana — had just executed Crosby. He’d seen the whole thing on his iPad. McGill, acting as if he’d just heard a warning from God, had whirled a moment before the tomahawk Crosby threw would have cleaved his skull. He knocked it aside. As if he’d practiced the trick a hundred times a day.

  Crosby charged and attacked. Todd saw the opening move. Crosby looked as if he hoped to bring his blade down on the crown of McGill’s head. McGill seemed as if he would parry with the stick he held and then … Todd could not reconstruct what happened next.

  It all happened too fast.

  It seemed as if Crosby went from targeting McGill’s head to going for his gut, but somehow Crosby missed and the next thing he knew Crosby’s face was in the dirt.

  And then Chana appeared and delivered the coup de grace with a handgun.

  How could she have been so cold blooded?

  It chilled him just to think about it. He wanted to see a replay, sure it wouldn’t show the same scene. He’d only thought he saw Chana kill Crosby. But the CCTV feed didn’t offer replays.

  He tried to find coverage on commercial television. Surely some bystander with a cell phone must have shot —

  No, the pictures came from a video cam operator said to be part of the news team with which Chana had been working. The cameraman had been coming across the mall looking for Chana and had captured the whole event. But it was not all to be seen. The thrown tomahawk and the execution were left out. All the public was allowed to see, in slow motion, was McGill whacking Crosby on the head with his stick.

  Even slowed down the movement was hard to follow.

  Todd took two lessons away from that morning’s reality television.

  Chana Lochlan would never be his; she’d kill him at the first opportunity.

  And he’d never best McGill at anything approaching a fair fight.

  Picking up his rental car minutes later, he planned accordingly.

  Indiana University — Bloomington, Indiana

  Sheryl Kimbrough had been sitting alone in her classroom, thinking about how much she was going to miss Cassidy, newly admitted to Stanford, when one of her students ran in and clicked on the television.

  “Ms. Kimbrough,” the student said, her voice trembling, “you’ve got to see this.”

  MSNBC was playing the video of McGill whacking Crosby on a video loop.

  It showed neither the beginning nor the end of the fight on the Mall.

  A political commentator speaking in voice over supplied those details. It also said the dead man was a monk from Bulgaria who’d entered the country on a tourist visa. After attacking James J. McGill and being knocked to the ground by him, he’d been shot by well known television journalist Chana Lochlan.

  Why the man had attacked the president’s husband and why Ms. Lochlan had been carrying a gun had not yet been explained. Mr. McGill had been using a cane recently and a walking stick the past several weeks because of a sore knee.

  As the rest of the class filled in around the television, Sheryl fielded a call from an excited Cassidy, speaking a mile a minute, “Mom, did you see what just happened with Kenny’s dad? I got permission from school to call Kenny, but his cell phone was off. Then I realized he must be in school, too, but what if he was home with the flu or something? I called there and got Mrs. Enquist. She said Kenny’s fine and his dad is, too. She said Mr. McGill knows how to protect himself like nobody’s business. What she didn’t understand was why Ms. Lochlan shot that guy. What she saw, Mr. McGill had already knocked him out.”

  Now, that’s interesting, Sheryl thought.

  For the moment, though, she contented herself with calming her daughter.

  Getting Cassidy back into class. Getting back to her own class. The events on the Mall, though, caused the vice president to push back her announcement, and then the hour was up and Sheryl’s students had to move on to their next classes.

  She told them she’d record Jean Morrissey’s statement and they’d discuss it next week.

  A moment later, the vice president of the United States addressed the nation.

  She spoke from the Vice President’s Ceremonial Office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, located opposite the West Wing of the White House. She sat behind the desk that was first used by former Rough Rider Theodore Roosevelt in 1902. The Stars and Stripes flanked her to the right and the left. A photographic portrait of Patricia Darden Grant hung on the wall behind her right shoulder. The choice of location and furnishings was no accident.

  Jean Morrissey looked formidable, and she got straight to the point.

  “As I’m sure most of you have heard, some no good skunk has accused me of being the president’s lover. That is a lie. The president and her husband, James J. McGill, love each other. I’ve seen them together and it’s obvious. Anyone who knows them will tell you that’s true.

  “The same no good skunk also called me a lesbian. I do not consider that to be an insult, but it is also untrue. If I were a lesbian everyone would have known it long ago. People in Minnesota can tell you, I’m not one to hide my light under a bushel.

  “Now, here’s something I’ve never spoken of before because it wasn’t my place to do so, but I asked for permission to say what I’m about to tell you, and I received it. My brother, Frank, my chief of staff and the finest human being I know, is gay. That isn’t a secret to anyone who knows him. Frank just reached the conclusion at an early age that if straight people didn’t have to take out a newspaper ad announcing their gender orientation, he didn’t have to do so either.

  “So allow me to recapitulate. I like men and so does my brother. That’s the long and short of it. Except for one other thing. Mr. McGill said he’s going to find the dirty skunk behind these lies and bring him into court. Well, you better hope he finds you first, Skunk. Because if I do, I’m going to bust your nose for you.

  “Thank you and good day.”

  Sheryl Kimbrough smiled and applauded.

  “That ought to put Minnesota in the president’s column,” she said to herself.

  13

  November, 2012

  Cornell University — Ithaca, New York

  McGill and Patti waited backstage at Bailey Hall. It was five minutes until curtain time. In truth, the curtain was already up. The moderator was onstage chatting with the audience. The room had once been described as having “acoustics by God and seats by Torquemada,” but it had been beautifully renovated and none of those seated appeared to be squirming.

  Mather Wyman would appear from the opposite wing, wave to the audience and shake the moderator�
��s hand. Then the president would be introduced. Everyone would shake hands, wave to the audience some more and get down to business.

  “Tell me again,” Patti told McGill.

  McGill had told her several times already, and there’d been no slippage in the president’s power of recall, but when you were about to speak before the country and the world, you wanted to be sure you had everything exactly right.

  McGill told Patti once more, “Chana said she thought she saw Crosby trying to get up. He still had the Vietnam tomahawk in his hand.”

  DNA testing had determined the Bulgarian monk was Arn Crosby. His fake passport and visa, it was supposed, were to be used to get out of the country if he’d somehow managed to kill McGill and elude the Secret Service. As Crosby had brought no cloak of invisibility with him, his chances of escape were nil to less than. Still, a guy could hope.

  Crosby’s true identity would be revealed … sometime after the election.

  “Did you see Crosby try to get up?”

  “No,” McGill said.

  “How hard did you hit him?”

  “Very.”

  “Is it possible you killed him?”

  “Possible, yes. Will we ever know, no.”

  Chana’s shot entered Crosby’s skull, near enough as made no difference, at the same point McGill had clubbed it. Quite the pickle for any medical examiner.

  “Is it possible, Ms. Lochlan saw a movement you missed?”

  “Possible, yes. Did I miss something? I honestly don’t know. I was a bit keyed up, too.”

  “Is Ms. Lochlan suffering from PTSD?”

  “Nobody’s made that call yet. I think she was helped by the fact that nobody put any cuffs on her and Elspeth looked her straight in the eye and told her she’d done exactly the right thing. I called California earlier today, and Graham Keough told me she’s doing well. Hopes to get back to work after the first of next year.”