I hit the bathroom and undressed. Under the harsh lights, my knee looked pretty gruesome—black and blue and swollen like a bloated corpse. How was I going to explain it to Jill? The best thing would be to do what I always did: tell her the truth, and do a little old-fashioned Catholic groveling for forgiveness.
And if my knee was gruesome, my face was an absolute horror show. The circles under my eyes. The creases on my forehead. The weight of the world was on my shoulders, and finally I was starting to slump.
What was I doing? Barack might have been in his prime, but I was past mine. No matter how loudly I proclaimed onstage to anyone who would listen that I was in perfect health, I couldn’t ignore the effects of Father Time. I was starting to feel my age. It wasn’t something I would ever admit aloud to another human being, not even Jill. I wouldn’t even say a word of it to Champ. There was nothing embarrassing about getting older, but I wasn’t having it.
Had Finn been on his way to see me? Did he think I could offer him protection? What could I do that the police couldn’t? I hadn’t been able to prevent his death. I wasn’t the vice president anymore. I didn’t have any formal authority. I was just an old man. I couldn’t keep pace with the shady characters I’d encountered so far, either physically or mentally—and with my banged-up knee, I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in heck of running from them if they turned the tables and started pursuing us.
I wasn’t the same man Finn had known all those years ago. The man Finn had known was a decade younger. The man Finn had known hadn’t spent eight years fighting Tea Party maniacs hell-bent on obstructionism. Barack’s hair had gone gray; mine was already white when we started. It was madness to think I could help Finn…but I wasn’t sure I had much choice. Finn needed me. His family needed me.
But first, I needed sleep.
I flicked the light switch off and returned to the motel bedroom. I would shower in the morning.
“Everything come out okay, Joe?” Barack asked.
“Just fine,” I said. Barack liked to rib me about my age, mostly in the form of jokes. Are you getting enough fiber, Joe? How’s your prostate, Joe? That sort of thing. Barack did that to everyone, though. He liked to “joke” with his close friends and aides, when in reality he was putting all of us down. It had never really bothered me. I liked to think of myself as good-humored by nature. But today I wasn’t in the mood. I glared at Barack, warning him that he should back off or get socked.
I hadn’t socked someone in almost seventy years.
I was sort of looking forward to it.
I fell onto the bed without pulling back the bedspread. The mattress was hard and unforgiving; the pillow felt like it was filled with wet sand. While Barack showered, I picked up the TV remote and realized the room was missing a television; there were some wires and cables poking out of the wall where a TV had once been mounted.
When Barack returned, he was dressed in a T-shirt and gym shorts. Barack hadn’t let himself go to the birds—I’d already known this, having watched several of his little “adventure” videos. He was all muscle and bone. He gave new meaning to the phrase “dad bod.” I realized I was staring and quickly looked away.
“Are you going to make room for me?” Barack asked.
I inched over to one side, leaving him half the bed, which wasn’t much. My left arm dangled over the edge and touched the floor.
Barack slid in next to me. “I called the front desk, but they didn’t have a spare mattress. Unless you want to wait for another room, this is it.”
“Did they say what happened to the other one?”
“You don’t want to know,” Barack said. “You really don’t want to know.”
He turned off the bedside lamp.
We lay in the dark, side by side, each of us half off the bed, staring at the ceiling. We could hear the steady gentle thumping of a bedframe, knocking against the wall in the room next door. After a few minutes, the bedframe went silent. A woman cried out in ecstasy. Barack and I started giggling like a couple of kids.
When we caught our breath, I was too worked up to sleep.
“POTUS, SCOTUS, or FLOTUS,” I said.
Barack turned to me. “What’s that?”
“It’s a game we used to play in the Senate, while we were waiting out overnight filibusters. I name three women, and you say who you’d like as your—”
“—POTUS, SCOTUS, or FLOTUS.”
“You got it.”
“So give me the names.”
“Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, and Hillary Clinton.”
There was a long pause.
“Give me three different names,” Barack said.
“Sorry, I can’t change the rules.”
“It’s a little demeaning to women. Who came up with this game, Strom Thurmond?”
“Hey now, Strom may not have been Pope Francis, but he wasn’t sexist.”
“He was racist, Joe.”
“The correct term is ‘segregationist.’”
“Oh,” Barack said, staring at the ceiling. “That’s so much better.”
“You’re avoiding the question. POTUS, SCOTUS, or FLOTUS. Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth—”
“Hillary for POTUS. Elizabeth for SCOTUS. Nancy for FLOTUS.”
I stared at him, incredulous.
“Nancy for FLOTUS? Not Elizabeth Warren? You’re insane.”
“Elizabeth Warren is the youngest of the three. That’s why I’d seat her on the Supreme Court. You know age was the primary reason they tapped Gorsuch.”
“Fine. But Hillary as POTUS? You’re joking, right?”
“Are you still bitter about the whole election?”
“I could have beat that short-fingered clown in the general, Barack, I could have—”
“Goodnight, Joe.”
I sighed. “Goodnight, Barack.”
I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but couldn’t get Hillary’s face out of my head. I knew the direction the country had taken wasn’t her fault. I also knew that, if I’d run, I would be sleeping in the White House instead of the Heart of Wilmington hotel.
I cracked an eye and saw that Barack was still awake, staring at the ceiling. I finally looked up, too, and saw that he was watching a cockroach run back and forth, like a swimmer doing laps in a pool.
“You ever think about running again?” I asked him.
“For president?”
“For anything,” I said. “Senate.”
“Michelle would kill me in my sleep.”
“Be serious.”
“I am,” Barack said. “She said she’d smother me with a pillow. Even showed me which one she’d use.”
“Fine,” I said. “But you still didn’t answer me. You ever think about it? Forget if you’d actually do it. You have to think about it, sometimes.”
“I think about a lot of things,” Barack said. “I don’t like to talk about them.”
“Bad thoughts?”
“Bad thoughts, good thoughts.”
“You see a shrink?”
“You think I need to?”
I snorted.
“I’m a man, Joe,” Barack said. “Sometimes, a man has thoughts that he shouldn’t. Or, let me rephrase that: a lot of times, a man has thoughts that he shouldn’t. You can’t control your thoughts. You can only control your actions.” He paused. “You’re thinking about running, aren’t you?”
“I think about a lot of things, too. But, yeah. That’s one of them.”
“What does your heart tell you?”
“That I was put on this earth to serve, and by God that’s what I’ve done. The question is, when is it enough?”
Barack took a deep breath, then exhaled. “It’s never enough. I’d give away every dollar I have—and I practically do, some years—to fix what’s wrong with our country. To fix wha
t’s wrong with the world.”
“But like you said, it’s never enough,” I said. “So why do we keep doing it?”
“To make a difference,” Barack said.
“And have we?
“Made a difference?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Have we made a difference?”
He closed his eyes. “I don’t know, Joe. I just don’t know.”
20
The next morning, I woke from my deepest sleep in a long time. I felt like a much younger man. Reinvigorated. I stretched my arms wide and found the other side of the bed empty.
“Rise and shine, sleepyhead,” Barack said. He was buttoning his suit jacket in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. One button, then two. Then one again. His suit—the same one he’d worn yesterday, a Martin Greenfield—looked cleaned and pressed.
Barack must have noticed my shocked expression. “There’s a laundry service next door. Had them freshen my joint up. I wasn’t going to walk around with hash brown chunks on my lapels. Your clothes are on the chair.”
I wiped the cobwebs from my eyes and sat up. “Why didn’t you wake me? When’s checkout?”
Barack raised his palms. “Relax, Joe. We have plenty of time. It’s not even ten.”
I rolled out of bed. Immediately, my knee buckled under me, and Barack rushed to steady me.
“I’m okay,” I said, a lie if either of us had ever heard one. I held myself up with a hand on the chair. “We don’t have time to lollygag around. A man’s reputation—”
“—is on the line,” Barack said. His voice was cool, calm, collected. Vintage Barack Obama. Meanwhile, I was panicked and blustering—vintage Joe Biden.
I sighed. We were falling back into our old familiar ways.
“What’s the plan?” I asked, getting dressed.
Barack narrowed his eyes. “The plan?”
“For breakfast,” I said.
“There’s no continental breakfast, if that’s what you’re asking.”
I checked my phone. There was a missed call at two in the morning from a 302 area code. Esposito’s home number, possibly? I dialed it back. The phone rang and rang but never went to voicemail.
“Dammit.” It was a little early in the morning for curse words, but these were extraordinary circumstances. “I assume Steve called you. How’s he taking things?”
“Pretty well, all things considered. He did lose the forty-fourth president of the United States.”
“That reminds me. I need to call Jill and let her know I’m not lying dead in a ditch somewhere.”
“One presumes that would have made national news,” Barack said.
“Oh, don’t give me that. You’ve already talked to Michelle, haven’t you?”
“I texted her last night. I told her I was staying at your place. She thinks we’re having a sleepover. As long as she doesn’t talk to Jill, we’re okay.”
I groaned. “You want me to tell Jill I stayed the night at your place?”
“What the wives don’t know won’t hurt them. And as long as we keep our stories straight and don’t get caught, our wives won’t hurt us.”
My stomach growled. Either I was hungry again, or my body just couldn’t take any more stress. Jill and I had a fabulous relationship…but it was a relationship built on trust. I was about to break her trust. I knew it was for the greater good, but it still made me queasy.
I called her. At first I thought I’d gotten a reprieve, as the phone rang four times without an answer. But no. Just before it should have gone to voicemail, she picked up.
“I was out gardening,” she said. “What’d you want?”
She should have been frantic with worry, but her voice was surprisingly calm. If anything, she was maybe a little irritated—as if she thought she’d finally gotten me out of the house, and now I wasn’t willing to leave her alone.
“I stayed at Barack’s last night,” I said. “He was in town for the funeral, and we went back to DC for a nightcap. Stayed up late talking about old times. The usual stuff that guys do.”
“Oh!” she said. “What’s their guest room like?”
I had no idea what his guest room looked like. Not only that, but I had no idea what the inside of his kitchen, or living room, or any other part of his DC house looked like. I only had the vaguest notion, really, of what neighborhood the Obamas lived in.
“I stayed with Barack in the master bedroom,” I said. “Michelle was out of town, and Barack didn’t want to sleep alone.”
Jill laughed on the other end. “I’m sure you did.” She paused. “Did you need something?”
“I was worried that you’d be worried.”
“If you were lying dead in a ditch somewhere, I’m sure I’d have heard about it by now,” she said. “It’d be all over CNN.”
Barack was sitting on the edge of the bed with a smirk when I hung up.
“What?” I said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
I undid the chain lock on the door and looked over my shoulder. I had my wallet, I had my phone…whatever else I left behind, the maid could keep. If there was a maid.
“Where are we headed?” Barack asked.
“First, to the nearest fast-food joint for breakfast. And then…well, I haven’t thought that far in advance.”
“As long as they have green tea, I’m fine with wherever.”
I opened the door. The sunlight blinded me at first, and I covered my eyes with my hands. I’d forgotten my Ray-Bans—if I remembered right, they were on the bathroom sink. However, I didn’t need to see what was in front of me to know what was there. I heard it—the unmistakable, filling-rattling growl of a 1,500-horsepower engine. The Little Beast.
Barack handed me my sunglasses. With my eyes shielded, I could see the five-foot-eight figure standing beside the open back door, his mirrored shades reflecting as much sunlight as the metallic hood ornament. His face was as stoic as ever.
“Who’s hungry?” Steve asked.
21
We were sitting in the McDonald’s parking lot when my phone rang. It was the 302 number again.
“This is Joe. Who’s this?”
“It’s the Mayor. I’m at a pay phone, so I don’t have much time. I didn’t want to say too much yesterday, because you never know who’s listening. You dig me?”
“Yeah,” I said, stepping out of the car to take the call. I needed to walk off the two Egg McMuffins I’d obliterated.
“I told you about our card games, but what I didn’t tell you was that Finn had stopped coming to them. I think he knew that we knew he’d become mixed up in something bad.”
“Drugs?”
“I don’t know the specifics. He kept quiet about it. But we could all tell he was hiding something. At first we thought it might have something to do with his wife down at Baptist Manor, because he never said a word about her being sick, even though we all knew it. But it wasn’t that. Like I said, we didn’t have any idea of what exactly he’d become mixed up in. What we did know was that it was nothing good. The last time he was over for cards, we got a look at the inside of his wallet. We’re not high stakes. When he pulled a few bills out, though, we all saw the cash he was sitting on.”
“You’re saying he was loaded.”
“Like a mother,” the Mayor said.
“Maybe he just cashed out his savings…”
“Or something else. None of us said a word then, but later on we talked. Alvin swore he didn’t know nothing.”
“Alvin Harrison?”
“His engineer, yeah. Anyway, Finn had too much cash for somebody in his situation, with a sick wife and a daughter in school. Maybe if he worked in a cash business, like I do, it would make sense.”
“Maybe.”
“But later on, when I went to use one of
the tens I’d won that night, I noticed something about it. It was dirty.”
“All cash is dirty,” I said. In fact, I once read that ninety percent of all U.S. currency tested positive for cocaine. You don’t want to know how much tests positive for fecal matter.
“I don’t just mean dirty, I mean dirty. There was a tiny highlighter mark in the corner of the bill. It had been marked by a cop, or the FBI. I wouldn’t bet my life on it, but I’m pretty sure it was drug money.”
“You think he was on heroin?” I asked.
“If you’re getting high, the cash usually flows out of your wallet, not the other way around. Plus, I seen enough people doped up in my time to know what it looks like. You can’t hide that faraway look in your eyes.”
“Have you told the police any of this?”
The laugh at the other end was so loud and shrill I had to hold my phone away from my ear. “Stop by next time you’re in the station,” he said, “but don’t mention this conversation, because it never happened.”
It wasn’t until I’d hung up that something hit me. Something the Mayor said…Alvin Harrison. His engineer.
His engineer.
Of course. Alvin was the engineer Finn worked in tandem with on the 7:46 a.m. Acela Express. I knew he’d been driving the train that hit Finn, but hadn’t put two and two together. I should have realized earlier that he was also the same engineer who’d worked beside Finn every day. No wonder he was so shaken by the accident. Finn hadn’t just been a coworker. Finn had been Alvin’s closest coworker.
I returned to the backseat and told Barack what I’d learned from the Mayor. Barack listened from the front passenger seat, watching me in the rearview. He was on his third package of apple slices, which were the only things on the McDonald’s menu he’d found acceptable. Steve pretended not to listen to us, but I could tell he was interested. He’d been surprisingly nonchalant about our ditching him last night. We all agreed to let bygones be bygones. There was too much on the line for personal feelings to get in the way.
I didn’t have Alvin’s phone number but I didn’t need it. I knew where he lived because Grant and I had dropped him off at his apartment. “Start the car,” I told Steve. “We need to talk to the engineer.”
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