by Rick Dakan
"I don't know."
"If there is, well, that'd be a problem."
"But if there's not?"
"Then we might be ok in the short term. Of course he's going to call the cops as soon as they find him."
"Fuck!" said Paul. "Fuck! Jesus Raff, I really screwed up, didn't I?"
"It's not your fault, man," said Raff. "No way you could've expected that he'd show up. No way." He patted CHAPTER 27
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Paul's back. "This was a great little scam you put together man. A great plan. And you ran it well. Shit like this just happens sometimes is all. You gotta learn to roll with the punches."
"I just froze up. When I saw him. When I saw him I just froze up and didn't know what to say. I shouldn't have brought him into the kitchen. I should've taken care of it out there."
"Don't fret that shit now, Paul. Just get yourself together. We need to see this through the next hour or so and then we're home free."
"Will we get the money?"
"I don't know," said Raff. "With the cops involved. And the congressman. I don't know. We'll have to see how it all pans out."
"But honestly Raff. We're totally fucked aren't we?"
Raff looked at him and then sighed in resignation. "Yeah. Probably."
Out in the dining room, the Congressman was finishing up his speech by encouraging everyone to bid on the silent auction items and to vote for him next election. The room erupted in enthusiastic clapping. Paul and Raff sat in silence and listened as the hum of conversation rose. As agreed, the Congressman would meet and greet for only five minutes before heading off to his next engagement. It ended up taking seven and a half minutes, but they heard Chloe on the mic again, thanking the Congressman and announcing his departure.
Thirty-eight seconds later she came bursting through the kitchen door and grabbed Paul by the arm, hauling him towards the rear exit. "We need to leave," she snapped. Paul couldn't have agreed more.
"Where are you going?" said Raff in surprise, as Paul followed Chloe towards the rear exit.
"I'm getting him out of here. Have Popper do the wrap up. And don't forget to make sure Frank can breathe in that closet. The only thing that would make this worse is somebody dying on us. I'll call you from the road."
"Hey!" shouted Raff to their fleeing backs, "What about..."
But it was too late. They were out the door and gone.
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CHAPTER 28
"We're not going back to the house?" Paul asked, as Chloe turned the car south onto the 17, heading up into the hills instead of back down into the valley. She maneuvered her way into traffic, staring straight ahead for a few long moments before answering him.
"Nope."
Paul stared at her, hoping to get some sort of reaction besides stoic calm in the face of crisis. "I'm really sorry I fucked up back there."
"It's ok," she said. "Just a bad break is all. If stealing was easy, everyone would be doing it. As the bumper stickers say, Shit Happens."
"Ok."
Silence. Paul had assumed they were going to Santa Cruz and points south, but only a few miles down the road she got off the highway and headed up a winding road that climbed into the mountains. "Where are we going?"
"Boulder Creek."
"Where the hell is that?" Paul, even though he'd lived in the valley for several years now, still had a very limited geographical grasp on all the little towns and communities in the area. Generally speaking, if he couldn't get to it via a freeway exit, he didn't know where it was.
"This way," she said.
"Oh."
Not wanting to talk right at that moment, Paul shut up and just watched as they made their way up the increasingly twisted and steep road. Although he seldom got car sick, his stomach began to churn with the endless series of curves and bends. Chloe seemed to know the road well though, as she was driving at speeds Paul wouldn't have dared on these dangerous mountain roads. There was little in the way of street signs.
Mostly just dirt driveways and side roads leading off towards lights in the dense trees that he assumed marked houses.
He tried closing his eyes, but that only made things worse. He felt bile as it tried to creep up his throat, and he swallowed it down. He took a deep breath. Then another. "Fuck" he sighed softly. Breathe in. Breathe out. His discomfort became obvious enough that Chloe finally had to take notice.
"You ok?" she asked.
"Feeling a little car sick is all," he replied. "We almost there?"
"Almost. Ten minutes, maybe. There's a bottle of water in the glove compartment, I think."
"Thanks." He found the water and took a few small sips. It seemed to help.
Finally they arrived, although Paul would never have been able to find his way back here on his own. It was a small, A-frame house tucked away amongst the trees. It was dark, but an outdoor light came on as they pulled into the steep dirt driveway. Chloe parked and got out and said, "Wait here." She disappeared behind the back CHAPTER 28
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of the house.
Paul levered himself out of the car and onto shaky legs. He bent over and successfully fought the urge to vomit. The air up here was markedly colder than it had been even in Los Gatos, but at least the rain had stopped. He'd sweated pretty heavily in the car, and now the damp spots on his shirt were turning uncomfortably cold. At least he had the padded suit jacket on.
The house in front of him lit up from within and a few moments later Chloe stepped out the door.
"Jesus," she said. "You look like shit." She opened her arms and enveloped him in a hug. "Come inside and let's get you a fucking drink."
The house consisted of a great room that included kitchen, dining and living areas and a single bathroom and bedroom in the back. The furniture was a mishmash of styles and states of repair, a dumping ground for hand-me-downs and trash picks. Chloe and Paul sat on a low, blanket-covered couch that had lost its spring a long time ago. He gripped a glass of Jim Beam in his hands and sipped at it. Chloe had just hung up her cell phone after her third failed attempt to get a connection.
"Once in a while you can get a signal up here, especially at night. But not today, apparently," she said. "I'll have to get online to check in."
"Where are we?"
"The Santa Cruz Mountains," she teased.
"Yeah, yeah, I know that. I mean what's with this house? We're not going to have to be fighting off maids tomorrow morning are we?"
She laughed. "Do you honestly think someone could get away with charging rent for this place?"
He looked around at the frayed curtains and water stained ceiling. "No, probably not. So what is it then?"
"It's a safe house. One of the places we rent around the area. I kind of hate it because it's so far away from everything, but it is pretty peaceful. At night the deer come right up to the house. They ate the flowers Bee planted."
"Huh," said Paul, mostly because he didn't know what else to say.
"Your stomach feeling any better?" she asked, as she gave his midsection a playful pat.
"Yeah, it's mostly better. Those mountain roads are a bitch."
"You get used to them, I guess."
"If you say so," he took another sip of whiskey. He thought for a moment. No reason not to ask the big question again. "Um, why are we here again?"
"Well, Frank's going to call the police and I didn't want you to be anywhere where they could find you."
"What makes you think they would've been able to find me at your place?"
"Nothing for sure. But I know they won't be able to find you here. And we needed a place to talk in total CHAPTER 28
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security."
"And that's here?"
"That's here."
Paul thought about the last couple hours. How did things manage to go so bad so fast? "Ok, well, let's talk."
"Great," she said and grabbed a pen and pad of paper from the coffee table. "Let's get started."
"Morbidity and Mortality."
"What?" asked Paul, not understanding the reference.
"It's what hospitals do when something goes wrong. In their case, when someone dies on the operating table or gets fucked up. We're going to go over the details of tonight, now, while they're still fresh, so we can figure out what went wrong."
"To find out where we screwed up you mean."
"If we screwed up, then yeah. But there might've been something else that fucked us, or someone else. So we gotta go over it."
"Ok, I'm game."
Chloe straightened her back and put on all the airs of a prim and proper psychiatrist talking with a patient.
"Tell me about the procedure, Doctor. When did you first start to notice a complication with your patient?"
Over the next half hour they went over the day's events in detail. Everything had gone almost exactly as planned. The restaurant staff had been a little resistant to turning the kitchen over to them, but Chloe had handled that with a skillful combination of intimidation and bribery (her favorite one-two punch). They'd had a little trouble getting the wireless credit card network up, but that'd been fixed before the guests arrived.
Otherwise, everything had gone smooth as silk until Frank had confronted Paul.
"Let's talk about Frank," said Chloe. "Tell me more about him. About him and you."
"We never really got along all that well. We fought or yelled at each other from time to time, but we'd actually sometimes get into interesting debates - especially about stuff not related to the game. Whenever we talked politics or philosophy or movies the conversation was pretty interesting. He's a smart guy, more libertarian than Republican, really. Fundamentally he's a realist. He makes a lot of money and he wants to give as little of that money to the government as he can. With the Republicans he gets what he wants. And he doesn't much care about the social issues."
"So he probably wouldn't have cared about our little prank in the park then?" asked Chloe.
"No. If anything I would've thought he would find it kind of funny."
"Do you know if he was generally politically active? Did he give money to the Republican Party or volunteer in campaigns?"
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"I never even saw him put a bumper sticker on his car. We didn't talk specifics about that kind of thing, but I never got the impression that he cared much about politics at all. And like I said, he's pretty tight with his money."
"So, taking everything into account, him showing up there tonight didn't seem like much of a possibility?"
"Just my dumb fucking luck," said Paul. "Of all the times. Although who knows, maybe he does this shit all the time and just never mentioned it to me."
"But you would've bet not?"
"Yeah, I would've bet no way in a million years."
Chloe sat, tapping her pad of paper with her pen, looking over her notes. "Hmmmm," she said.
"What?"
"I've had this nagging feeling at the back of my head since Frank said something in the kitchen. Now it's starting to really worry me. And piss me off."
"What is it? I assume you mean something besides threatening to go to the Congressman."
"Yeah, besides that. He said something about how when he got the invitation in the mail, he wasn't going to go, but then he changed his mind."
"And you're wondering why he changed his mind?"
"No, I'm wondering why the fuck he got an invitation in the mail in the first place," said Chloe. "If we're the ones who sent him one, that's a pretty big screw up."
"Oh shit," said Paul. "That would be fucked up."
"It doesn't seem likely though, does it?" said Chloe. "I mean, we got the invitee list from the RNC database.
They were all big time donors, people who give tens of thousands of dollars to the party every year. Even if Frank did do this kind of thing on occasion, it doesn't sound very likely that he was that generous with his money, does it?"
"No. I mean he made a good living, but not that good. I'd be really fucking surprised if he was giving away tens of thousands every year."
"Something's fucked here. Rotten-in-the-State-of-Denmark style fucked. I need to see our list."
"What do you think happened?" asked Paul.
"I don't know. I need to check into it first," she got up from the couch and headed for the kitchen counter where her laptop was plugged into the phone line.
"But you have an idea, right?"
"Yeah," she said as she clicked on the connect icon and the modem started dialing. "Fucking dial-up," she said under her breath.
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"Well, what is it then? What do you think happened?"
"I think someone sold us out," she said. "I think there's a fucking traitor in our midst."
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CHAPTER 29
Chloe stayed online for the next few hours. It took her all of three minutes to get fed up with Paul looking over her shoulder, so he decided to retreat to the bedroom and change out of his costume. He stripped off the fat suit and took what he'd hoped would be a long, hot shower. Unfortunately the mildew stained bathroom seemed to have only a few gallons of hot water at its beck and call, and Paul had to rinse with cold water instead of hot. Shivering, he quickly toweled himself dry (towel courtesy of some Hampton Inn somewhere in the world) and started to get dressed. His sweat-stained suit lay crumpled on the floor, cold and clammy and stinking of fear. A little poking around the bedroom's sole chest of drawers yielded a pair of UC Santa Cruz sweat pants and a faded Batman t-shirt. They smelled a little musty, but not too bad, so he decided to go with them.
In the great room, Chloe hadn't moved. She still stood hunched over the computer and was now typing away with furious intent. Paul thought about asking if there'd been any progress, but from the look on her face, she had no interest in answering questions right now.
"Would it bother you if I turned on the TV?" he asked. "Maybe there's some news or something." No reply.
"Chloe? TV?"
"Sure, knock yourself out," she said, without looking up.
The TV looked to be one of the newer, or at least less used pieces of equipment in the room. He found the remote and switched it on, filling the room with annoying static. He quickly muted it and started flipping channels. Nothing. No reception. No satellite. No cable.
"Crud," said Paul. "No reception."
"Hmm," said Chloe.
"How 'bout you? Any news?" he asked. Her only reply was to keep typing. "Chloe? Any news?"
"Why don't you play a game? Put it on channel 3. There's cartridges in that basket over there."
Paul got up and went over towards the table the TV was sitting on. "Cartridges?" he asked.
"Mm hmm," she replied.
Paul couldn't believe his eyes. There, in a large basket next to the TV, was an Atari 2600, the original home video game system from the early '80's. In elementary school he'd spent hours upon hours playing these groundbreaking games. Digging through the haphazard pile of video-game cartridges he saw all his old favorites. It was third grade all over again - Space Invaders, Pac Man, Adventure, Missile Command, Wizard of Wor. And there it was, his all time favorite: Combat.
"Sweet," he said. It took him a few minutes to hook the ancient game system to the relatively modern TV, but everything he needed was right there. The short cord on the simple joystick controller forced him to pull a ratty beanbag out from the corner in order to have somewhere to sit. He plopped down and started blowing the shit out of things old school. Today these games would look primitive if you played them on a three year old cell phone, but the fundamentals were all there. Of course, the games all kind of sucked, but it didn't matter.
Right now, the third grade seemed like a much better
time to be than the present.
After about an hour Paul heard Chloe shut down the laptop. As he maneuvered Pitfall Harry over yet another in an endless series of crocodiles, he heard her grunt and moan as she stretched her back out. She twisted and CHAPTER 29
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cracked her spine with a series of snaps he heard from across the room.
She pulled another beanbag from the corner and tossed it down next to Paul. Plopping down, she proclaimed,
"I got next."
"Are you even old enough to remember these games?" asked Paul.
"Of course I am," said Chloe. "I just played them six months ago."
"You know what I meant." Jump, grab the vine, swing over the crocodile. Repeat. "Did you have this when you were a kid?"
"Nope. But we never had any video games growing up. Or TV for that matter."
Paul knew from experience he'd get no more out of her on this subject. He concentrated on the game at hand, but somehow managed to miss the next crucial jump - probably because Chloe had rammed him in the side with her shoulder.
"Ooops!" she said. "My turn!"
"No way, I've still got two lives left."
"We'll see how long those last," she said with mock menace.
"Or we could play Combat."
"Oooh, you challenging me, little boy? You challenging the master?"
"You bet your sweet ass I am," he said.
"We'll get to my sweet ass later," she said as she got up to change out Pitfall for Combat. "Tanks or biplanes?"
she asked.
"Ladies choice."
"Tanks it is!"
Combat offered a half dozen or so different tank duel variations, and they decided to play each of them in turn, best three out of five for each game. Chloe really must've been playing six months ago, because her tank commander skills far outstripped Paul's own in the first three rounds. By the end he was out of the competition and just playing for pride.
"You're mine, boy. Bow to my armor clad might!" shouted Chloe.
"We'll see." He moved his tank into an exposed position, taking a risk. As Chloe went to fire, he shoved his shoulder to the side, jostling her and causing her to miss the shot. He'd pushed harder than he intended, tipping Chloe over the side of her beanbag and sending her laughing onto the floor. He took the opportunity to fire a winning shot before turning to taunt her.