by Bower Lewis
“Pardon me, Mason?”
He looked back again and winked at the treasure. “My niece made that for me when I was appointed Second. As far as attaching that picture you requested is concerned, though, you two are on your own. I’m sorry, Zane, but a man’s got to know where to draw the line.”
Zane just shrugged and switched on the bug’s receiver. He smiled as the red light illuminated in his hand.
“Fair enough. Did you have any trouble with my other request?”
“Right, sorry.” Mason reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a couple of shiny new iPhones. “They’re untraceable and untrackable. Try not to let them out of your possession, okay? Ed’s not eager to share our toys with the world.”
Patience dove at him and tore one of the phones from the startled agent’s hand. Then she dropped to the carpet and burst into tears. Mason pointed to the list of symptoms he’d written out, but Zane just shook his head.
“She’s been stranded all day with a phone that’s got Joey stuck as the ringtone,” he explained. “It’s been kind of an emotional time for her.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Zane straightened his Celtics cap and dropped the whistle around his neck.
“What do you think?”
Patience looked him over carefully. To her, he looked just like an heir to the Ellison Empire dressed in an inexpensive track suit and nonregulation ball cap, but they’d been through a lot together over the past few days, so she figured that was just her. Anyway, she wasn’t in the best of moods, so her judgment was likely clouded. The lump on her head throbbed like bad house music, and The Biz had remained silent since their argument on the highway. Communications from Him were maddening enough; His desertion was damn near destabilizing.
She pulled on a smile and lifted Zane’s cap to smooth down his Brylcreemed hair. Then she handed him the tray of pancakes they’d picked up from the diner around the corner and plopped the jug of maple syrup on top.
“You’re perfect.”
She pulled the necklace from her pocket and placed it carefully in his hand, adjusting the medallion so the picture of a younger Forsyth they’d glued to the front faced outward.
“Go easy on it, if you can. I’m not convinced that epoxy is completely dry, and even the senator would probably realize that something’s amiss if his necklace broke open over breakfast and a bug popped out into his juice.”
Zane winked and she traded her new phone for his. “In case He notices something and decides it’s worth ending His silent treatment over.”
He smiled back with maddening unconcern. She watched as he disappeared around the corner of the building, on his way toward the tour bus idling next to Rockwell’s Porsche at the far end of the playground, before she slipped back through the yard’s rear gate. She crossed the street to a stretch of curb sheltered by an abandoned RV and pulled the receiver from her pocket. Then she raised her binoculars to watch for signs of trouble as the Styrofoam squeaked in time with Zane’s footsteps.
He called out a greeting and it came through, loud and clear.
“I’m sorry, Sir.” The responding voice had the authoritative tone of a seasoned security professional. “The senator isn’t seeing anyone before the assembly.”
“Oh no,” Zane replied. “We don’t want to disturb him. The kids are sure looking forward to his talk this morning, though, and they wanted to welcome him. A group of the middle-schoolers came in early to cook him up a batch of their special pancakes. They won second place in a pancake cooking contest last year, and the recipe even made it into a charity cookbook. They’re pretty proud of that. They thought the senator might appreciate a taste.”
“That was very thoughtful of them, Sir.”
“They’re a good group. One of the younger girls spent most of yesterday afternoon stringing up this necklace for him as well. We were hoping that maybe you could pass it on to one of his staff with the breakfast, and see that he gets it?”
“May I see your employee ID, please?”
The microphone thumped and crackled against the trays as Zane pulled the badge from his neck. The silence that followed seemed interminable. Patience’s imaginings of what might happen if the guard detected the forgery—or if he called inside for Rockwell—grew more creative the longer she waited, and none of them were good. She lowered the binoculars and touched her fingers to her coat pocket over her gun. This separation felt even worse than Zane’s agonizing test drive with the troopers, somehow, and she was beginning to question whether she had it in her to give a damn at this level. The worrying was too stressful. It made her ribs ache.
“Thank you,” the guard said, and she exhaled at last. “Driver’s license, please?”
Zane whistled and juggled the containers as he reached into his pocket. “You folks sure are serious about security. I had no idea how much went into guarding a state senator.”
“This senator is special, Sir. His campaign demands more than most.”
“Oh sure! Because of his music career, I’ll bet. Well, that makes sense.”
The guard didn’t respond. Patience pursed her lips as he ruffled through his list of approved personnel, then startled for her gun again as the clipboard struck the security podium with a bang.
“Thank you, Coach Byrd. I’ll have an aide take the breakfast in to Senator Forsyth, but why don’t you have the little girl give him the necklace at the assembly? The senator likes that sort of thing.”
“We’ve tried.” Zane laughed. “She’s developed a serious case of the shies this morning, and nothing will break her of them. I think some of the boys may have given her a bit of guff about the purple flower, and it probably hasn’t helped that a few of the women on staff were big time Boi II Boi fans, back in the day. They’ve kind of got the kids all worked up about his visit. It was all I could to do to convince her to let me pass it on, after all her hard work. I suppose this sort of thing happens to him a lot.”
There was a trace of a smile in the guard’s voice. “Hazard of the job. All right, Coach Byrd, you can hand me the necklace. Please pass the senator’s thanks along to the little girl.”
Patience turned her eyes to the sky as Zane’s sneakers squeaked on the blacktop and faded into the distance. The guard radioed inside for an aide and then Zane appeared in the flesh at the corner of the building. He flashed her a thumbs-up, but she just looked away.
“Are you sure you couldn’t have dragged that out any longer? Christ, Zane, I was waiting every second for that guard to pull out his .44 Magnum and write us an unhappy ending to this drama.”
He smiled and stepped up onto the curb beside her. “I’d say it was a .38, judging by the bulge. Relax, Patience, the man could not have been more hospitable.”
“Laugh all you want, but don’t expect me to join in. I get my fill of quips from the Home Office.” He reached for her arm and she pulled away. “Look, I don’t know a better way to do this than to just be straight with you, so I’m sorry if it seems abrupt. I think it’s a bad idea for us to have our attention divided right now. We need to stay focused on Forsyth and SolarTech.”
The grin slid from his face as he considered her seriously for the first time since his pilgrimage to the bus. “Stopping Joey has had me pretty thoroughly engrossed since we met, Patience. What else were you looking to clear off our plates?”
“I think we need to break up.”
His confusion dissolved at that and he laughed aloud. “Well, I can honestly report that this is the first time I’ve ever found out I had a girlfriend by getting kicked to the curb. I get that you don’t typically go about things in the traditional fashion, though, so I don’t mind. You’re a really hard girl to read, Patience; this information is useful. It’s good to know where we stand.”
She raised the binoculars and turned away, as irritated by the glint in his eye as she was by his refusal to understand her. “We don’t stand anywhere, Zane. As impossible as it may be for you to comprehend, you did just get dumped. It�
�s nice to see you’re having fun, though.”
He grabbed her hand and the glasses fell back against her chest. “I’m doing something real here, Patience, something I could build an entire religion around. What happens today could help save the world, or I could wind up causing more harm than good and just praying for someone like your crazy uncle to charge in and clean up my mess. But, no matter what, I know some things about myself now that I didn’t know before, and they’re game changing. I’m not giving up until we’re done or I’m dead—not on this, and not on you. I’m overtired, under-caffeinated, and I’m in love with a girl who’s got such a crazy perspective about life that everything I’ve just said sounds reasonable by comparison. So, yes, Patience, you bet your ass I’m having fun.”
She pushed him away and tried to focus on the club, but it quaked inside the glasses and made her head throb. She gave up and thrust them back at him.
“Don’t talk like that.”
“I’m just telling you what I know. I’m not trying to freak you out.”
“You’ve been freaking me out since the moment we met, Wayne. This isn’t about that. I can’t do what I need to while I’m preoccupied by what’s happening with you or by the secrets you and The Biz are keeping from me. Forsyth and Rockwell are just a rec center away, and God only knows where my uncle is. This isn’t a game we’re playing. This is serious.”
“You bet your ass it is.”
Something in the tone of his voice made the hairs on her arms stand on end. He turned away and raised the binoculars. She did her best to ignore him, but her heart was carrying on in her chest like she’d stolen its wallet or something.
“What was it The Biz said to you by the side of the road last night?”
“I told you, it was nothing. It was personal, Patience, that’s all.”
She looked down again, listening to the muffled crackles through the receiver. “You could build an entire religion around this?”
“Yes.”
“But, you wouldn’t, right?”
“Right.”
He smiled again with his focus steady on his surveillance, and she pulled her hair back from her face. He lowered the binoculars and brushed a stray lock of pink behind her ear. He seemed about to say something when they were interrupted by a click from behind.
“Make another move, son, and it’ll be your last.”
Zane spun back and Patience kicked her boot heel into the curb behind her.
“Damn it, Uncle John!”
The soldier kept his rifle trained on Zane, ignoring their guns as he stepped into the street with a dismayed look on his face. “I could have been the whole of Forsyth’s security force, for all either one of you would have noticed. Hell, kid, I could have been that Rockwell corpse who knocked your lights out last night. Am I the only one still itching for his gizzards over that? You have to stay vigilant at all times. Don’t ever let me sneak up on you again!”
“Oh, for crying out loud.”
“We’re at war, Pax!”
“We are not at war, Uncle John. We are provoking peace.”
He lowered his rifle with a menacing stare at Zane, then dropped to sit on the curb before Patience and nudged her revolver aside. “I don’t doubt for a second that you believe that, kid. You’ve always insisted upon good will and harmony, even when you had to battle every last person in the house to get it. I’ve always loved that about you, but it’s not a sound foundation to build a world view on—not when everybody else is firing bullets at it. I’m sorry, I know that’s a hard truth, but it’s the truth, nonetheless.” He lifted his rifle and poked Zane in the shoulder. “We called her our little pit bull of peace when she was just a tyke.”
“Is that right?”
Zane was moving subtly behind the soldier, searching for his best angle. He lunged and John slapped a hand around his arm. He pulled the syringe from his fist and glanced down at the label. He just shook his head and released Zane with a sigh.
“I understand, kid.” He turned back to Patience. “You’ve got a mission of your own. You had to try.” He snapped the needle off the syringe and squirted a few ccs into his mouth. “Phenobarb’s not a bad way to come down a notch during a hectic stint, if you want to know the truth.”
Patience’s eyes remained fixed on the transmitter. “Hush.”
“I’m really not angry with you, Pax. There are some lessons they don’t teach you in—”
“Hush!”
She held the transmitter up as Forsyth’s voice crackled through, loud and nasally and demanding pancakes. Rockwell had confiscated them, it seemed, on the grounds that their strongest polling demographic was with women, ages thirty-five to fifty, and he’d detected a slight thickening at the senator’s waistline since the start of the campaign.
“That bastard!” Patience was offended in some tangled solidarity with Forsyth. “Where does he get off?”
“The children made that breakfast especially for me,” the senator persisted. “I can’t disappoint them. Give me those fucking pancakes, Alex. I have to eat them for the sake of the children!”
Rockwell sent the aides scurrying and returned his attention to his candidate and lifelong friend. “The children will not be disappointed in the slightest, Joey, because you will lie to them.”
The conversation felt like the dawning of crow’s feet in Patience’s anguished face and Zane pressed his palms to his eyes. Not a word was mentioned about the events at Rockwell’s house the previous evening or about Forsyth’s sudden change of heart about becoming a U. S. senator. His only real concern that morning seemed to hinge upon his breakfast.
Zane rubbed the back of his neck and paced the length of the RV, listening as Rockwell cursed Forsyth for hurling his yogurt to the floor. “He has to eat those pancakes,” he pleaded to no one in particular. “Come on, Alex, you sadistic fuck. Don’t screw this up for everyone.”
“Why are we all fired up about what the senator eats?”
Patience looked up to her uncle, her brow nearly as tense as Zane’s.
“Ipecac.” She nodded. “It’s in the maple syrup.”
John stared back at them for a moment, his expression an even mix of surprise and horror. Then a smile slid onto his face and he laughed out loud.
“And you two don’t approve of the way I do business? Jeez, Pax, I just want to kill the man, but you kids play dirty! Hell, I might even let him live through the assembly now, just to see how this turns out.”
• • •
The clock ticked on toward show time and a compromise was reached at last—one pancake for the senator. Disapproval dripped from Rockwell’s voice as he warned him, in the most hypercritical terms imaginable, to go easy on the butter and syrup.
“Control freak,” Patience muttered.
“Plan wrecker,” Zane added.
“Do you think it’ll be enough?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I really just don’t know.”
The racket clamoring through the receiver devolved into something resembling the backseat of a family station wagon about eight hours into a drive to the grandparents’ house. The current squabble seemed centered around the senator’s intransigence about wearing his new “trophy” onto the stage. Rockwell was strenuously opposed, and he delivered the nastiest blows of each round, denigrating the necklace and the senator himself. He even went so far as to insinuate that such a juvenile indulgence might pose a threat to Forsyth’s physical welfare should their SolarTech benefactors catch wind of his foolishness and be displeased. Forsyth was entrenched, however, and he took the match in the end through stubborn, scrappy endurance. He doggedly remained in a snit until it was past time for him to take the stage before one-hundred-fifty rapt, school-aged children, their former-Boi II Boi-groupie mentors, and the gathering throng of media and Rockwell was left with no choice but to relent. He thrust the necklace at his sulking candidate, accompanied by a stern warning that he shouldn’t form any ideas about wearing it to Milton later that m
orning—at which point Forsyth inquired whether Rockwell thought he was an idiot, and Rockwell declined to answer.
John nodded back at them and started toward the building. Patience glanced to the sky and then shook her head at Zane.
“What the hell am I supposed to do?” she whispered. “I can’t shoot my uncle, and God only knows what would happen if we tried to tackle him here, with Rockwell and all those children nearby. I will never understand what The Biz was hoping to accomplish by sending him here.”
Zane checked his gun and stepped into the street. “I think we just have to stay with him. I don’t like the idea of taking him inside any more than you do, but incapacitating him obviously didn’t work. Keeping an eye on him seems our only option now.”
They started after him and Patience looked down at the phone again. The screen was as empty as it had been since His last message on the highway. She’d been telling The Biz to get lost for weeks, but He’d waited until they actually had some need of Him before He’d turned His tail and run.
John pointed up to a second-floor window as they approached. “I checked the perimeter when I arrived, and our best bet is to shimmy up that downspout and push in through the administration office. That’s the point of entry with the most tree cover, and the locks up there are a snap to force. It’s a bit of a climb, but I’ll help you, Pax. I do need you two to be prepared for something, though, on account of your particular sensitivities. There were a couple of folks working up there when I arrived. It may be necessary to subdue some stragglers, so I need you both to stay cool and trust that I’ll always do everything possible to avoid causing undue harm to a non-target.”
He stopped talking as he realized they were no longer with him. He turned to discover them ten feet back, glaring from a door beside the loading dock.