Access to Power

by Robert Ellis

  Frank had meant to go back to the office for his gun, just in case. But Linda had canceled her edit for unknown reasons, and he didn’t want to be alone with her. Beyond Olson, he didn’t want to hear about her trip to Colorado. Details fueled the imagination and he didn’t want to go down that road right now.

  He got rid of his cigarette and focused on Olson again. Making a left at the light, he found himself driving through a run-down part of town, passing a factory and office building, gutted and all burned out. He was looking for 322 Speeker Street, the address the operator had given him over his cell phone. He saw it on the corner, one block ahead, a small red-brick building. He parked and got out. As he crossed the street, he noticed a liquor store, a bail bondsman and a life insurance company all conveniently located in the same low-rent building. Then he spotted the steps leading down to a basement office. A cheap sign read METRO LEGAL, OZZIE OLSON, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW. As the sun went behind a cloud and the building suddenly darkened, Frank wondered if he shouldn’t put aside his rage, get back in the car, and drive home.

  Chapter 38

  Frank noticed a trash can set beside the door to Olson’s basement office. The top was off, the garbage inside attracting a swarm of flies. Moving down the steps, he waved them away and carefully opened the door. The lights were off. No one appeared to be home. As he entered and closed the door behind him, he let his eyes adjust to the darkness and listened to the stillness.

  Dim light feeding in from the street through small windows along the right wall revealed the clutter of a life that had hit bottom. He could smell mildew mixed with sweat and cheap whisky in the air. He stood in a makeshift lobby staring at a narrow passageway that ran to a rear entrance somewhere in the darkness beyond. The passageway split the space in half and there appeared to be an office on each side enclosed by panels of frosted glass.

  Frank wiped the empty receptionist’s desk, noting the dust, then started down the passageway. At the first door on the left he stopped and looked inside. Olson had turned the space into a darkroom. The red light remained on, the sink running. As Frank moved into the room, he noticed an enlarger projecting an image of a fleshy woman onto the Formica counter. He checked the sink, finding prints of the same woman rinsing in the water. The woman was nude with hideous blisters and burns all over her body. It looked like a personal injury case and Frank guessed that Olson was making a living any way he could.

  Frank stepped back into the darkness, moving further down the passageway until he reached the door on the right. It was Olson’s office. As he entered, he passed a foldout couch with bedding and stopped before a computer set up on a card table by the desk. Picking up a DVD, he found a box of ten more, all unlabeled, all blanks. When he spotted Olson’s business cards, he moved a liquor bottle aside and pocketed one.

  The place was a dump.

  Frank knew that Olson had been a partner at a major law firm just a few short years ago. He had been successful, an opponent Frank had feared as he prepared Helen Pryor for the election. Now, as he sat down at the man’s desk, he couldn’t help feeling mesmerized by the plunge Olson had taken.

  On the wall were the markers pointing to Olson’s former life: Attorney of the Year, Person of the Year, more than one Great Dad Award. Losing an election was part of the business no one liked to think about. The fear of what a client went through if he or she was the candidate left holding the short end of the stick. The quality of darkness that followed them after election night, weighing them down for months, years, sometimes even a lifetime. It was the label of a loser. The brand of someone who didn’t have the right stuff and had let everyone around them down. Frank had lived through it with his own clients and knew with certainty that he would face it again. But experience didn’t make it any easier.

  The back door opened and Frank heard footsteps.

  He jumped out of the chair, his heart racing. They were moving toward him slowly and Frank wondered if he should stick it out or make a run for it to his car. But it wasn’t Olson who appeared in the doorway. Instead, a spooky old man poked his head inside the office and gave him a long look.

  “You fellas still here?” the old man said in an irritated voice. “I was just coming down to lock up. That other cop said you’d be done by noon.”

  Switching on the overhead light, the old man shuffled into the room and sat down on the arm of the couch. He let out a groan, jingling the ring of keys in his hand. He was thin and frail and had the weightless body of someone who had been ravaged by too many cigarettes and too much booze. Frank realized that the old man had mistaken him for a cop. And playing along with him seemed like the easiest way out of the office, the quickest way back to his car.

  “Almost,” he said awkwardly. “What do you know about Olson?”

  “What do I know about him?” the old man quipped. “I’ve already been through that with the other fella. Randolph, Rudolph—I forget his name.”

  Frank moved back to the desk chair, eyeing the computer as he sat down. “Does Olson do much work?”

  “Depends on how the ambulances are running, I guess.”

  Frank glanced at the liquor bottles on the desk, then back at the old man. “You ever have a drink with him?”

  The old man shrugged, hiding a guilty smile.

  “What’s he talk about mostly?” Frank asked.

  “The election,” the old man said. “How the guy who beat him cheated and lied. Ozzie got fired after that. He lost his job. He lost his wife and family and everyone of his friends. That’s all he ever talks about.”

  “I thought he ran against a woman?”

  “He did. But it was the guy running her campaign. Some big shot. He’s the one who did this to him.”

  Frank heard the sound of a fly buzzing around the room and wondered if he had left the front door open. He looked at the overhead light and watched the insect crash into the globe, take a few steps and begin circling in the musty air again.

  “Then Olson’s divorced,” Frank said evenly.

  The old man shook his head. “Not yet. He’s hoping that she’ll take him back.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He had to meet somebody. Then he said he wanted to visit his kids.”

  The old man gave Frank another long look, then stood up on his shaky legs. As he moved to the door, he stopped a moment, gazing at the plaques on the wall.

  “Politics sure is a dirty business, ain’t it? Two years ago Ozzie was at the top. Sweet Jesus, now he lives down here!”

  The old man’s words hit Frank like a slap in the face.

  He watched the old man shuffle through the doorway and vanish around the corner. When he heard the back door close and the sound of the old man starting up the steps, he swiveled the chair around until he faced the desk. He noticed his hand trembling slightly as his eyes came to rest on the speaker phone. When he saw the redial button, he pushed it and the phone came to life. Frank listened to it dial a number, his mind drifting over the details of the election. Olson had managed to leave a few points out as he recounted his story to the old man over whisky. Frank remembered Olson’s media consultant running a negative campaign from the very beginning. Olson signed off on it and they were tearing Helen Pryor apart. It was a dirty campaign bordering on vicious and designed to appeal to the religious right. The fanatics were eating it up like Olson had the only direct line to God. In their hit pieces sent through the mail, Helen was labeled a baby killer. On TV, the insinuations were just as subtle. It had been hardball politics until the end and Olson had lost everything. But the old man only confirmed what Randolph and Grimes had said. Olson blamed Frank for the loss. He’d snapped and now three people were dead.

  The phone began to ring, then connect—the voice at the other end jogging Frank’s mind back to the surface slowly at first, then with a violent snap. He knew the voice and felt a sudden pain in his chest as everything inside him cut to black.

  It was Linda.

  The voice said it was as her answering
machine picked up from home. “This is Linda Reynolds. I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave a message, I’ll call you back. Thanks for calling.”

  The phone beeped. Frank sat there staring at it, listening to the silence at the other end of the line. He could hear his heart pounding beneath his shirt and watched as a bead of sweat dropped from his forehead splattering onto the desk.

  Ozzie Olson had engineered Woody’s murder and was speaking with Linda. They were in touch.

  The phone clicked, followed by dial tone. Frank looked away, spotting a photograph of Olson with his wife and two kids. They were standing in front of their country home, smiling, happy, everything in their lives just right. Frank recognized the photo from the campaign. It had appeared in a brochure after Olson was endorsed by every newspaper in the state. At the time, no one thought Olson could lose.

  Frank picked up the photo and looked at it more closely, the dial tone echoing off the walls and into his head. There was no easy way out of Olson’s office now. No fast way of getting back to his car. Linda was holding him down and he couldn’t move.

  Chapter 39

  The photograph of Olson’s country house came to life as Frank drove over a two-lane bridge, crossed a small river and saw the idyllic home in the distance. Pulling off the road, he cut the engine and dropped the photo into his glove box.

  The house was set on a hill just above the river. A big white stucco job with a rear terrace overlooking the valley which was still free of asphalt roads and other houses. Frank had passed the end of the makeshift suburban nightmare about ten miles back and figured the view from Olson’s house would last another two or three years before progress chopped it down.

  A kite flapped in the sky overhead.

  Frank followed the line down to the ground until he saw Olson’s wife and two young children move into the backyard from the other side of the house. Olson’s wife wore a man’s leather flight jacket over a long purple dress. At first glance, she looked a little round. But when she turned, he could see the breeze filling out her dress. The woman appeared wholesome, even pretty.

  The kite rose a hundred yards in the air and would take time to reel in. Frank guessed the boy to be six or seven, the girl a few years younger than that. Even from a distance he could hear them giggling as they gazed at their mother and struggled to hold onto the thin line with unpracticed hands. The entire scene had a storybook feel to it. A long way from where Ozzie Olson lived now.

  Bright light flashed through the car and then vanished. Frank turned to the river and squinted as the sunlight kicked off the wet rocks. Tall reeds stood ten feet off the ground and lined the slow-moving water on both sides. The strong breeze shook the grassy plants in waves, filling the clean afternoon air with a rustling sound.

  The thought of Linda somehow being involved with Olson began to surface again and Frank fought to keep it down. He knew people experienced grief in different ways and that he was letting Woody’s death get to him. He hadn’t noticed it before. The frequent headaches over the past few days, his burning stomach. He had been fighting the grief, thinking he could work through it or put it off until after the election. Now his mind seemed like it was turning on him.

  Linda and the money.

  He remembered their meeting with the accountant. The glow on her face as she got the news. With Woody gone, they’d split the money not by three but by only two. Each would receive an additional $1.7 million because of Woody’s death.

  Frank took a deep breath and went over it again. While murders had been committed for much less, the idea of Linda being involved in this was delusional. He could trust her with his life. There had to be a reasonable explanation for why she and Olson were talking to each other.

  The light in the car brightened again. Frank noticed that it wasn’t coming from the water. Instead, the sun was spiking off something in the reeds that had the reflective feel of a small mirror. Frank kept his eyes on the spot, studying the tall grass. After several minutes, the wind picked up and he spotted the form of a man hiding on the other side of the river.

  Frank got out of the car and crossed the bridge. A dirt road followed the river, bordering a field that had already lost its color and turned gray. The ground was still wet from the weekend rain. Sidestepping the mud, Frank slipped into the reeds, heard a metallic click and froze.

  It was a camera with a motor drive attached. That white-hot reflection he’d seen had come from a lens.

  Frank inched toward the sound. When he heard it again, he stopped and waited, trying to get a bearing on the location and distance. The wind picked up. As the reeds began to swirl, he saw the man leaning against an old pickup truck just ahead. Frank lowered himself into the grass. There could be no doubt. It was Ozzie Olson, spying on his own family with a long lens.

  Frank had only met Olson the few times he agreed to debate Helen Pryor. He looked bigger than Frank remembered, older and more menacing. His face had turned pale, his eyes darker than a raccoon’s. Standing this close, Frank could see what the man’s thirst for revenge had done to him. Revenge had its own way of growing, not in the light, but in the dark. And Olson had every appearance of being a man who’d spent a lot of time in the dark.

  Frank watched Olson frame his camera, the motor drive bursting through another series of rapid-fire shots. When he pulled the camera away, he looked dazed. Lost in thought, Frank guessed. Lost in the vision of what he once had and wanted to get back.

  The wind let up, the tall grass rising all around him until it obscured his view. Frank didn’t move. He looked into the sky, but could no longer find the kite. After a moment, he heard a rustling sound. He thought that Olson might be moving toward him and searched the ground for a rock. But then the sound stopped. A car door opened and closed and an engine started. When he heard Olson drive off, he parted the tall grass and watched the pickup heading further down the dirt road.

  Frank legged it over the bridge to his Lexus, made a U-turn and started down the muddy dirt road after Olson. He could see the pickup in the distance. The road followed the course of the sleepy river, cutting a winding path to the horizon. Frank assumed that it was an access road for farmers further down the way, but had no real idea where the road was leading him. Curiosity seemed to be pulling him forward and he lit a cigarette, wondering where a man went after spying on his wife and children with a long-lens camera.

  The sun was nesting in the trees. He caught a glimpse of the pickup through the grass, watching it disappear around a bend. He took it slow and easy. He passed landmarks, two log cabins from the Revolution and a battery of artillery marking a small hill from the Civil War. Then the road broke from the river bed and made a slow turn into the woods.

  His cell phone rang. Frank flipped it open, ready to hear Tracy asking him where he’d been for the last two hours.

  “Is this Frank Miles?” the voice started.

  It was a familiar voice, a man’s voice, but Frank couldn’t place it.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Who’s this?”

  “Your conscience,” the voice snarled back at him. “Fuck you.”

  He heard the line click. The rear end of his car took a sudden hit and shuddered. When he checked the rearview mirror, he saw Olson in his pickup behind him. Olson had known Frank was there all along. The drive into the woods had been deliberate. The word premeditated came to mind.

  Frank tightened his grip on the wheel and hit the gas. The Lexus thrust forward as his foot touched the floor and backed off. He could see Olson picking up speed, trying to catch up. Frank couldn’t believe his mistake. He’d walked right into it on a lonely dirt road in the middle of nowhere. If the hole was deep enough, he imagined, his body might never be found.

  The road was slick with mud and wet leaves. He hit what looked like a puddle, but it was deep. The car bottomed out and then fishtailed, the rear end catching a tree and smashing into a bolder. Frank looked through the windshield at Olson approaching and turned the key. T
he car restarted. He threw the shift back into drive, glanced at Olson again and floored it. The car began to shake. He could feel the tires churning up mud and gravel. Turning the wheel into the road, he let the tires dig their way through the debris. When they found something hard enough to grip, the car began moving again—the vibration fading as he picked up speed and headed deeper into the woods.

  Frank guessed that Olson’s truck was ten to fifteen years old. It was heavy, built high off the ground. And Olson probably had a good feel for the road—knew where the thing went and how it got there. Frank checked the rearview mirror again. Olson was taking the curves short, plowing over the brush and knocking small trees down.

  When he looked away from the mirror, Frank saw an oak tree charging toward him. He wrenched the wheel to the right. The car skipped off the road and nearly rolled. Frank grit his teeth and kept his foot on the accelerator, trying to work through it. Shaving two small evergreens away from their roots, he hit a rock and bounced back onto the road.

  He’d survived, but lost his distance. Olson hit him hard, the weight of the truck pushing him forward. His bumper broke loose, and he saw Olson roll over it, gain speed and plow into him again.

  Frank gunned it, the Lexus rocking faster and faster as he pushed seventy, seventy-five and then eighty on the muddy road. He was pulling away, beginning to make distance now. And the surface of the road was changing. There was more gravel in it, his wheels digging the stones up and beating them into the underside of the car. Frank took it as a sign that he wasn’t headed into the woods, but on his way out. Once he reached asphalt, the Lexus could easily outrun Olson’s pickup.

  He spotted the curve ahead and leaned into it as he turned the wheel to the left. The curve sharpened. The road rushing at him from behind the corner seemed almost endless. Then without warning, the car shot up a sudden rise and lifted into the air. Frank felt his stomach drop. Three or four seconds passed in slow-motion before the car pitched forward, fell thirty feet and hit the ground below. He could see the end of the road rushing toward him, a small boat launch at the river’s edge. As he jammed his foot on the brake, the car began twisting and skidding out of control.