by Ninie Hammon
1985
Oliver Marshal could barely get it into his head that what he’d seen was real, that he wasn’t hallucinating or having some crazy reaction to the pills they were always shoving down his throat. Six boys—just boys—had come into the building less than twenty minutes ago, and Ollie would bet his Social Security check there wasn’t a nursing home employee still alive anywhere in the building.
He’d heard pandemonium break out on the upper floors after the boys disappeared up the stairs. Yelling, screams and shrieking, furniture crashing, shouts and running feet. Along with whoops of excitement mingled with laughter, maniacal laughter, an ugly, vicious animal sound that put Ollie in mind of mad dogs. All of it on a background of the tortured sounds coming from the box on the floor, the throbbing rhythm jarring his bones and making his teeth ache.
He’d watched, without moving his head, of course, as one boy chased Mrs. Booth out to the balcony, then picked her up and tossed her over the railing, like she was no heavier than a doll. She lay on the tile floor now, about twenty feet from Ollie, with her head facing the wrong way on her neck. One of those clickety-clacking high heels had come off when she fell and landed right in front of his chair. Hard not to look at it, but he’d been practicing his blank stare for going on fifteen years now, and he had the thing down.
He’d seen the big orderly, Joe, put up a fight on the second-floor balcony where the kid had tossed Mrs. Booth to her death. He’d swung a roundhouse punch at one of the other boys that would have dropped a mule if it had connected. But it hadn’t. The kid was as fast as a rattlesnake—faster than it was humanly possible to be. He dodged the blow and grabbed Joe’s arm and…broke it, snapped like it was a potato chip. The kid slammed a punch into Joe’s belly, bending him double, and then the boy grabbed Joe’s collar and rammed him head-first into the slab of white marble wall beside the elevator. From where he sat, Ollie could see the gory trail of blood and brains Joe had left as he slid down the wall to the floor.
One boy dragged Agatha Willingham out to the railing of the third floor balcony. Ollie could see her talking to him like she knew him, crying and pleading, calling him "Roggie." Then he grabbed her by the throat and tossed her over the rail and as she fell, he called out, “So long, Grandma.”
Her body crashed down on the boombox and the music died in mid-shriek. Ollie let out a sigh of relief, figured Aggie gave her life for a good cause.
Now he could hear voices--weak, terrified voices from the upper floors, pleading for help and mercy. The monsters had likely killed anybody strong enough to put up a fight. Those left were bedridden, in wheelchairs, knocked off walkers. Easy prey.
So far, the boys had expended no attention or energy on either him or Maude Franklin, who sat on the other side of the atrium beside the window. Her dowager’s hump had so bent her back that she couldn’t lift her head up at all, could only look at her own lap. And she was almost completely blind, so she didn’t see much there.
The two of them were just furniture. Even a gang of ruthless murderers looked right through both of them as if they didn’t exist.
The boys gathered in the atrium, their clothes torn, and blood smeared on their hands and arms and faces, so keyed up they couldn’t stand still. The one who'd brought in the boombox shoved Agatha's broken body off it and punched ineffectually at the buttons. When nothing happened, he stood and gave Agatha a vicious kick. One sucked blood off his fingers like it was the last of the cake batter out of the mixing bowl, another unconsciously crimped his hands into claws. That one accidentally bumped into another one, and they were at each other so fast you couldn’t even follow the action. Snarling and growling—growling!—ripping at each other’s eyes and faces. For a moment it looked like they were all going to join in the fray, until the redheaded kid pulled them apart.
“Kill each other when we’re finished,” he barked at them.
They glared at him with unmasked hatred, a glint of madness—or something worse—in their eyes that left no doubt they’d turn on anybody, or each other, at the slightest provocation and literally rip them to pieces.
Then Ollie smelled gasoline. It was all he could do to keep his head down, to look like a blithering idiot who didn’t see or hear anything, certainly wasn’t sitting there watching as the redheaded kid distributed cans of gasoline and sent the remaining boys off in different directions in the building.
They’re going to burn the place down.
Yes, sir, they intended to burn it to the ground with everybody in it! Ollie gasped, couldn’t help it, but nobody noticed.
Why?
What would possess six preadolescents to do a thing like that? Were they drugged? Hypnotized? And how could they possibly expect to get away with it? Somebody would see them leave the building. And speaking of leaving the building, how did they intend to pull that off after they’d locked, chained and nailed shut every exit? All the windows had that fancy wrought iron grillwork that essentially served as prison bars to keep the inmates in the asylum. The two fire escapes were on the ends of the north and south wings—right out by the road. There was a balcony on the third floor on the back, overlooking the river, but it wasn’t like they could all do swan dives off it into the water. The riverbank was a good sixty feet from the building. It’d be another fifteen feet to the deep part in the middle. What were they going to do—fly? Maybe they didn’t intend to get away with it, maybe this was some monstrous murder-suicide pact. But what kid commits suicide by setting himself on fire?
Still, it was what it was. Maybe those boys had a way out, but Oliver Marshal did not. It had finally come to it. He really was going to die today. That was fine with him, of course, but he’d be danged if he’d let a pack of slobbering jackals send him on his last ride without putting up a fight! He’d been in the Great War, had marched off to battle at eighteen—not much older than these boys—and had fought all the way across Europe. These monsters in human being suits thought they had this all planned out perfect—that nothing could possibly go wrong. Well, he—Oliver Marshal—intended to find some way to plunk a turd into their punchbowl. Just as a parting shot going out.
CHAPTER 37
2011
The only indication that Chapman Whitworth was surprised to see Daniel in Senator LaHayne’s office was a slight widening of his eyes and a tightening around his mouth. He didn’t offer to shake Daniel’s hand, for which Daniel was profoundly grateful, merely acknowledged his presence with a slight nod of his head and addressed the senator.
“You didn’t tell me we’d have company for our little tea party,” he said.
The senator smiled pleasantly and offered a seat on the yellow sofa to Whitworth.
“He’s small,” the senator said. “He doesn’t eat much.”
Whitworth sat. Daniel sank back into the wingback chair, and the senator busied himself pouring tea into three cups.
“Sugar?” he asked Whitworth. “Or do you take it with milk like the Brits?”
“Just black.”
“Daniel?”
Daniel shook his head. “I don’t care for any, thank you.” In truth, he couldn’t possibly take a cup. The way his hands were shaking, the cup would rattle on the saucer like a bucket next to a jackhammer.
The senator settled himself into the wingback next to Daniel’s, took a long sip and sighed audibly. “God created tea on the fourth day, you know,” he said. “Right after the sun, the moon and the stars and before the birds and fish. Says so right there in the book of Reservations.”
If the senator was trying to make Whitworth uncomfortable, it didn’t appear to be working. The man only smiled affably.
“Last time I looked, blasphemy was still a sin, senator,” he said. “I’d be watching the ceiling for any sign of a crack if I were you.”
Daniel was aware of the voice then. Like the hum of a transformer under Whitworth’s words. Energy restrained. But there, definitely there.
“I shall take your warning in the spirit in which i
t was intended,” the senator said. The smile never left his face. There was nothing special about his voice at all, but Daniel was acutely aware of his “presence.” The man had a power of his own.
He took another sip from his cup and then set it back in its saucer on the table.
“I see no reason to beat around the bush here,” he said. “I invited you to see me today before the hearings this afternoon to avoid certain...unpleasantness. No need to share dirty laundry with the world when the right purpose can be served without doing so.”
“I’m not sure whose laundry you might be talking about, senator,” Whitworth said. The hum turned up a notch. “The press has been digging around in my clothes basket for months and hasn’t found so much as a single stinky sock.”
“That’s because they only looked in the basket set out for them to see,” the senator said. “But you and I both know you have other baskets.” The senator’s demeanor never changed. His voice remained level, his manner almost offhanded. Yet somehow he managed to convey a clear threat with his words.
“Oh?” Whitworth took a sip of his tea and said nothing more.
The senator turned toward Daniel.
Showtime.
Daniel found his mind remarkably still, a glassy pond in the mountains. Without a word, he withdrew the cellphone from his pocket, punched a couple of buttons, and when the video began to play, he handed the phone to Whitworth.
“It won’t win an Academy Award for cinematography, but it’s clear enough. Scenes of the ‘hired help’ doing what you paid them to do.”
Whitworth stared at the screen for a moment, then snapped. “I don’t know these people.” The voice was a growl. A leopard before it pounced.
“Really? Then I guess you must have been hitchhiking the night Minnie and Gerald Cohen were murdered, and Mr. Edgar Wallace Boskowitz just happened to stop and give you a lift.”
Whitworth shot Daniel a glance, then turned his eyes back to the tape.
“Right before he went to the Centurion Hotel and punched out Lily Saunders, the woman I supposedly raped.”
Daniel reached into the manilla folder and took out a still-frame shot of Whitworth in the backseat of Bosko’s car, his face unmistakable. He placed it on the coffee table beside the teapot, then slid it toward Whitworth.
“I’m not sure you’re to that part yet, but at the end, your face is caught in very good light.”
Whitworth looked from the video on the phone to the still-frame shot of his face and back to the video.
“Or maybe you weren’t hitchhiking that night at all. Maybe you paid for a ride.” Daniel slid a second photograph out of the folder, a picture of the envelope stuffed with money, and placed it on the table. “You could go a long way on a twenty-thousand-dollar fare.”
Daniel pointed to the black smudges on the envelope forensics had left when they lifted fingerprints off it. “Your prints,” he said. “Next to Bosko’s.”
Whitworth stared at both photographs, but didn’t touch them. Obviously, the tape had played to the end, but he made no effort to hand the phone back to Daniel. Merely clutched it tight in his hands. Were they…shaking?
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking—”
“Save it, Chapman,” The senator’s voice was forceful, but not loud. “Mr. Boskowitz is cooling his heels in a jail cell, started singing like a songbird in a cage as soon as we offered immunity in exchange for his testimony.”
The senator had taken the handoff and would handle it from here on out. That’s how they’d planned it. LaHayne was the poker player, not Daniel. He was the man who could run a bluff if anybody could. Daniel was merely ‘a useful idiot.’ He could state the facts, tell the truth, but he was an absolutely terrible liar.
“Who’d believe—?”
“Show that tape and the envelope to a jury and then try to convince them you were only paying your friend Bosko for some Girl Scout cookies. Good luck with that.”
Whitworth said nothing.
“And then there’s the gun in Bosko’s murder case that must have fallen down behind a filing cabinet somewhere.”
Whitworth’s head snapped up. Another gut punch he hadn’t counted on. He looked at the phone in his hand, and in a sudden fit of rage, hurled it across the room, where it hit the wall and bounced down next to a bookshelf. He grabbed hold of his emotions immediately, slid back into the sincere-public-servant persona he wore like a thousand-dollar Armani suit, and smiled a tight smile. He hadn’t meant to let the temper show. He understood that this was a game for people with ice in their veins, and he’d lost points there.
“Why are you doing this? Showing this to me?”
“Because I want to make a trade. I give you that,” the senator gestured toward the bookcase the phone was beside, “and all the rest of the evidence slips down behind a couch cushion and is never seen again. You know how that works, don’t you.”
Whitworth flinched.
“It’ll be like nothing ever happened.”
“What do you want from me?”
“You withdraw your name, respectfully decline the president’s nomination. You tell the committee this afternoon that you’ve decided to step down for ‘‘personal reasons.”
Whitworth was incredulous. “What? You think I’d walk away from this based on the testimony of a known druggie? Are you serious? The rest of it’s circumstantial evidence, all smoke and mirrors. I can beat this with one eye tied behind my back. Why on earth would I give up without a fight?”
“Because a fight will get ugly,” the senator said, with a razor edge to his voice. “You lose and you go to prison for a long, long time—worst case scenario, they slide a needle into your arm. You win and…even then, with the accusations, all the bad publicity, the president will run from you like a rabbit from a pack of hounds.”
“No, he won’t,” Whitworth snapped. “The president and I have…an agreement. He will support me no matter what.”
If Daniel hadn’t been looking directly at the senator, he wouldn’t have seen the rapid blink that showed he had not expected that card. Had not expected it at all.
“You’ll have no such support from the next president.”
“And let’s say that is you. Even the president can’t touch a hair on the head of a Supreme Court justice.”
“No, but if you don’t manage to grab this Supreme Court brass ring to protect you, you’re done.” The senator leaned forward and focused the full force of his persona on Whitworth. “As President of the United States, I will bury you.”
Whitworth was shocked by the force in the senator’s words.
“And if I back down, withdraw—what then? When you’re president, what then?”
“Then…I will leave you alone. I will neither help you nor hinder you. You’ll be free to carve out your destiny on your own.”
“How do I know you’ll keep your word?”
“Because I am an honorable man, Mr. Whitworth. Honor is something your kind can’t begin to understand, but it matters to those of us who don’t walk in darkness.”
Whitworth just stared at him. Then, without a word, he rose and strode out of the room.
Daniel said nothing. The senator slumped back in the chair, and Daniel realized for the first time how much strength and energy it had required to defy Whitworth as he had done.
“Do you think he’ll do it? Withdraw?” Daniel asked.
LaHayne looked at him with tired eyes. “Son, I have absolutely no idea.”
******
Out of uniform, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, Jack stepped into the air-conditioned interior of the BetterBuy “super store” in Florence and looked down the rows of grocery carts parked inside. Two boys were jockeying the carts into position. One had a blond ponytail.
“Excuse me, son,” Jack said, “Are you the young man who told some friends of mine you saw a car with New Mexico plates in the parking lot yesterday?”
The boy noticed Jack’s service revolver holstered a
t his side with his badge clipped to his belt. That got his attention. Jack had put the badge there for effect, where you could see it but probably couldn’t make out the words on it——that it was an Ohio badge, which granted it the same level of authority in Kentucky as a badge out of a Crackerjack box.
“I never should have said anything,” the boy said.
“Why not?” Jack asked.
“I don’t want to get fired.”
“Why would talking about what you saw get you fired?”
“Because the manager’s pulling his hair out.”
The boy nodded to the checkout lane nearest the door where a woman with no groceries in sight stood talking to the checker—while a line of customers waited.
“It’s been like this all morning, a constant stream of people asking questions.” He looked at the other boy. “A couple dozen, maybe?”
“More than that,” the other boy said.
And Jack had been worried nobody would respond to Daniel’s request.
“I’ll talk to the manager, son, and apologize for any inconvenience the questions have caused. I’m the one who started all this, and I’m sorry. But if I don’t find this man, a little girl will die.”
“That part’s true then, that there’s a little girl with a rare blood type who needs a transfusion, and this guy you’re looking for is like one of only three people in the whole country who has the same blood type?”
“It’s…something like that, too complicated to explain. But please believe me, this really is a life-and-death situation.”
“There’s not a whole lot I can tell you,” the young man said. “Like I told those other people, I always notice license plates. It’s a game I play”—he grinned sheepishly at the other boy—“to have something to do. And I saw a car in the lot yesterday with New Mexico plates.”
“What color was the car?”
“Blue or maybe gray. It was old, rusted out around the wheel wells. There was mud over the words on the license plate. 'Land of Enchan--' was all I could see, but I knew it was Land of Enchangment, New Mexico."