Odd Partners

by Mystery Writers of America

  He glanced across the broad street, the lanes closed to handle the foot traffic. He noted his second in command, Don Ivers, close to the rope, surveying those present. Most of the men and women and a few youngsters had posters supporting the candidate, though there were plenty of protesters as well. Ivers and a half dozen local cops, trained in event security, would not be looking the protesters over very closely, though. The true threats came from the quiet ones, without placards or banners or hats decorated with the candidate’s name or slogans. These folks would have all passed through metal detectors, but given the long lead time for the event, it would have been possible for somebody to hide a weapon inside the security perimeter—under a planter or even within a wall—and to access it now.

  Tomson much preferred rallies to be announced at the last minute but, of course, that meant lower attendance. And for most candidates—and especially fiery Ebbett—that was not an option.

  “Agent Tomson.”

  He turned to see a woman in her thirties wearing the dark-blue uniform of the Pittstown Convention Center security staff. Kim Morton was slim but athletic. Her blond hair was pulled back in a tight bun, like that favored by policewomen and ballet dancers. Her face was pretty but severe. She wore no makeup or jewelry.

  Tomson was unique among his fellow Secret Service agents; he believed in “partnering up” with a local officer or security guard at the venue where those under his protection would be appearing. No matter how much research the Secret Service detail did, it was best to have somebody on board who knew the territory personally. When he’d briefed the local team about how the rally would go, he’d asked if there were any issues about the convention center they should know about. Most of the guards and municipal police hemmed and hawed. But Morton had raised her hand and, when he called on her, pointed out there were three doors with locks that might easily be breached—adding that she’d been after management for weeks to fix them.

  When he described the emergency escape route they would take in the event of an assassination attempt, she’d said to make sure that there hadn’t been a delivery of cleaning supplies because the workers tended to leave the cartons blocking that corridor, rather than put them away immediately.

  Then she’d furrowed her brow and said, “Come to think of it, those cartons—they’re pretty big. There might be a way somebody, you know, an assassin, could hide in one. Kinda far-fetched, but you asked.”

  “I did,” he’d said. “Anything else?”

  “Yes, sir. If you have to get out fast be careful on the curve on the back exit ramp that leads to the highway if it’s raining. Was an oil spill two years ago and nobody’s been able to clean it up proper.”

  Tomson had known then that he had his local partner, as curious as the pairing seemed.

  Morton now approached and said, “Everything’s secure at the west entrance. Your two men in place and three state police.”

  Tomson had known this, but the key word in personal protection is “redundancy.”

  He told her that the entourage would soon arrive. Her blue eyes scanned the crowd. Her hand absently dropped to her pepper spray, as if to make sure she knew where it was. That and walkie-talkies were the guards’ only equipment. No guns. That was an immutable rule for private security.

  Then, flashing lights, blue and red and white, and the black Suburban SUVs sped up to the front entrance.

  He and Morton, flanked by two city police officers, walked toward the vehicles, from which six Secret Service agents were disembarking, along with the candidate. Paul Ebbett was six feet tall but seemed larger, thanks to his broad shoulders. (He’d played football at Indiana.) His hair was an impressive mane of salt-and-pepper. His suit was typical of what he invariably wore: dark gray. His shirt was light blue and, in a nod to his individuality, it was open at the neck. He never wore a tie and swore he wouldn’t even don one at his inauguration.

  Emerging from the last car was a tall, distinguished-looking African American, Tyler Quonn, Ebbett’s chief of staff. Tomson knew he’d been the director of a powerful think tank in D.C. and was absolutely brilliant.

  The candidate turned to the crowd and waved, as Tomson and the other agents, cops, and security guards scanned the crowd, windows, and rooftops. Tomson would have preferred that he walk directly into the convention hall, but he knew that wasn’t the man’s way; he was a self-proclaimed “man of the American people” and he plunged into crowds whenever he could, shaking hands, kissing cheeks, and tousling babies’ hair.

  Tomson was looking east when he felt Morton’s firm hand on his elbow. He spun around. She said, “Man in front of the Subway. Tan raincoat. He was patting his pocket and just reached into it. Something about his eyes. He’s anticipating.”

  In an instant he transmitted the description to Don Ivers, who was working that side of the street. The tall, bulky agent, a former Marine and state patrol officer, hurried up to the man and, taking his arms, led him quietly to the back of the crowd.

  Tomson and Morton walked up to the candidate and the agent whispered, “May have an incident, sir. Could you go inside now?”

  Ebbett hesitated, then he gave a final wave to the crowd and—infuriatingly slowly—headed into the convention center lobby.

  A moment later Tomson heard in his headset: “Level four.”

  A nonlethal threat.

  Ivers explained, “Two ripe tomatoes. He claimed he’d been shopping but they were loose in his pocket—no bag. And a couple of people next to him said he’d been ranting against Searcher all morning. He’s clean. No record. We’re escorting him out of the area.”

  As they walked toward the elevator that would take them to the suites, Ebbett asked, “What was it?”

  Tomson told him what had happened.

  “You’ve got sharp eyes, Ms. Morton,” he said, reading her name badge.

  “Just thought something seemed funny about him.”

  He looked her over with a narrowed gaze. “Whatta you think, Artie? Should I appoint her head of the Justice Department after I’m elected?”

  Morton blinked and Ebbett held a straight face for a moment, then broke into laughter.

  It had taken Tomson a while to get used to the candidate’s humor.

  “Let’s go to the suite,” Ebbett said. He glanced at Tomson. “My tea upstairs?”

  “It is, sir.”

  “Good.”

  The entourage headed for the elevator, Tomson and Morton checking out every shadow, every door, every window.

  * * *

  —

  Ten miles from Pittstown, in a small suburb called Prescott, the skinny boy behind the counter of Anderson’s Hardware was lost in a fantasy about Jennie Mathers, a cheerleader for the Daniel Webster High Tigers.

  Jennie was thoughtfully wearing her tight-fitting uniform, orange and black, and was—

  “PVC. Where is it?” The gruff voice brought the daydream to a halt.

  The kid’s narrow face, from which some tufts of silky hair grew in curious places, turned to the customer. He hadn’t heard the man come in.

  He blinked, looking at the shaved head, weird moustache, eyes like black lasers—if lasers could be black, which maybe they couldn’t, but that was the thought that jumped into his head and wouldn’t leave.

  “PVC pipe?” the kid asked.

  The man just stared.

  Of course, he meant PVC pipe. What else would he mean?

  “Um, we don’t have such a great, you know, selection. Home Depot’s up the street.” He nodded out the window.

  The man continued staring, and the clerk took this to mean: If I’d wanted to go to Home Depot, I would’ve gone to Home Depot.

  The clerk pointed. “Over there.”

  The man turned and walked away. He strolled through the shelves for a whil
e and then returned to the counter with a half dozen six-foot-long pieces of three-quarter-inch pipe. He laid them on the counter.

  The clerk said, “You want fittings, too? And cement?”

  He’d need those to join the pipes together or mount them to existing ones.

  But the man didn’t answer. He squinted behind the clerk. “That, too.” Pointing at a toolbox.

  The kid handed it to him.

  “That’s a good one. It’s got two little tray thingies you can put screws and bolts in. Washers, too. Look inside.”

  The man didn’t look inside. He dug into his pocket and pulled out a debit card.

  Hitting the keys on the register, the boy said, “That’ll be thirty-two eighty.” He didn’t add, as he was supposed to, “Do you want to contribute a dollar to the Have a Heart children’s fund?”

  He had a feeling that’d be a waste of time.

  * * *

  —

  The hallway of the suite tower’s penthouse floor was pretty nice.

  During his advance work—to check out the security here—Art Tomson had learned that, in an effort to draw the best entertainers and corporate CEOs for events here, the owners of the convention center had added a tower of upscale suites, where the performers, celebrities, and top corporate players would be treated like royalty. Why go to Madison or Milwaukee and sit in a stodgy greenroom when you could go to Pittstown and kick back in serious luxury?

  Paul Ebbett was presently in the best of these, Suite A. (“When I’m back after November,” he’d exclaimed with a sparkle in his eyes, “let’s make sure they rename it the Presidential Suite.”) It was 1,300 square feet, with four bedrooms, three baths, a living room, a dining room, a fair-to-middling kitchen, and a separate room and bathroom actually labeled MAID’S QUARTERS. The view of the city was panoramic, but that was taken on faith; the shutters and curtains were all closed, as they were in the entire row of suites, so snipers couldn’t deduce which room Ebbett was in.

  In lieu of the view, however, one could indulge in channel surfing on four massive TVs, ultra-high-def. Tomson was especially partial to TVs because when he got home—every two weeks or so—he and the wife and kids would pile onto a sofa and binge on the latest Disney movies and eat popcorn and corndogs until they could eat no more.

  Special Agent Art Tomson was a very different man at home.

  Only the candidate was inside at the moment. Chief of Staff Quonn was on the convention center floor, testing microphones and sound boards and teleprompters, and Tomson and Morton now sat in the hallway outside the double doors to Suite A. Tomson looked up and down the corridor, whose walls were beige and whose carpet was rich gray. He noted that the agents at each of the stairway doors and the elevator looked attentive. They didn’t appear armed, but each had an FN P90 submachine gun under his or her jacket, in addition to a sidearm and plenty of magazines. Although armed assaults were extremely rare, in the personal protection business you always planned for a gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

  Kim Morton said, “Wanted to mention: Acoustic tile’s hung six inches below the concrete. Nobody can crawl through.”

  Tomson knew. He’d checked. He thanked her anyway and cocked his head once more as transmissions about security status at various locations came in.

  All was clear.

  He told this to Morton.

  She said, “Guess we can relax for a bit.” Eyeing him closely. “Except you don’t, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Never.”

  “No.”

  Silence eased in like an expected snow.

  Morton broke it by asking, “You want some gum?”

  Tomson didn’t believe he’d chewed gum since he was in college.

  She added, “Doublemint.”

  “No. Thank you.”

  “I stopped smoking four years and three months ago. I needed a habit. I’m like, ‘Gum or meth? Gum or meth?’ ”

  Tomson said nothing.

  She opened the gum, unwrapped a piece, and slipped it into her mouth. “You ever wonder what the double mints were? Are there really two? They might use just one and tell us it’s two. Who’d know?”

  “Hm.”

  “You don’t joke much in your line of work, do you?”

  “I suppose we don’t.”

  “Maybe I’ll get you to smile.”

  “I smile. I just don’t joke.”

  Morton said, “Haven’t seen you smile yet.”

  “Haven’t seen anything to smile about.”

  “The two-mint thing? That didn’t cut it?”

  “It was funny.”

  “You don’t really think so.”

  Tomson paused. “No. It wasn’t that funny.”

  “Almost got you to smile there.”

  Morton’s phone hummed with a call. She grimaced.

  Tomson was immediately attentive. Maybe one of the other security guards had seen something concerning.

  She said into the phone, “If Maria tells you to go to bed, you go to bed. She’s Mommy when Mommy’s not there. She’s a substitute Mommy. Like the time Ms. Wilson got arrested for protesting, remember? When they pulled down the Robert E. Lee statue? And you had that substitute teacher? Well, that’s Maria. Are we clear on that…? Good, and I do not want to find the lizard out when I get home….No, it was not an accident. Lizards do not climb into purses of their own accord. Okay? Love you, Pumpkie. Put Sam on….”

  Morton had a brief conversation with another son, presumably younger—her voice grew more sing-songy.

  She disconnected and noticed Tomson’s eyes on her. “Iguana. Small one. In the babysitter’s purse. I stopped them before they uploaded the video to YouTube. Maria’s scream was impressive, man, oh, man. The boys would’ve had ten thousand hits easy. But you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. You have children, Agent Tomson?”

  He hesitated. “Maybe we can go with first names at this point.”

  “Art. And I’m Kim. By the way, it meant a lot when I met you. You didn’t hit the ground running with my first name. Lotta people do.”

  “The world’s changing.”

  “Like molasses,” she said. “So, Art. I’m looking at that ring on your finger. You have children? Unless that is a terrible, terrible question to ask, because they all wasted away with bad diseases.”

  Finally a smile.

  “No diseases. Two. Boy and girl.”

  “They learned about lizard pranks yet?”

  “They’re a little young for that. And the only nonhuman in the household is a turtle.”

  “Don’t let your guard down. Turtles can raise hell, too. Just takes ’em a bit longer to do it.”

  More silence in the hall. But now, the sort of silence that’s a comfort.

  Inside the suite, he could hear Ebbett had turned on the news—every set, it seemed. The candidate was obsessed with the media and watched everything, right and left and in between. He took voluminous notes, often without looking down from the screen at his pad of paper.

  Morton nodded to the door and said, “He’s quite a story, isn’t he?”

  “Story?”

  “His road to the White House. Reinventing himself. He went through that bad patch, the drinking and the women. His wife leaving him. But then he turned it around.”

  Ebbett had indeed. He’d done rehab, gotten back together with his wife. He’d been frank and apologetic about his transgressions and he’d had successful campaigns for state representative and then governor. He’d burst onto the presidential scene last year.

  Morton said, “I heard he came up with that campaign slogan himself: ‘America. Making a Great Country Greater.’ I like that, don’t you? I know his positions’re a little different and he’s got kind of a mouth
on him. Blunt, you know what I’m saying? But I’ll tell you, I’m voting for him.”

  Tomson said nothing.

  “Hm, did I just cross a line?”

  “The thing is, in protection detail we don’t express any opinion about the people we look after. Good, bad, politics, personal lives. Democrats or Republicans, it’s irrelevant.”

  She was nodding. “I get it. Keeps you focused. Nothing ex—what’s the word? Extraneous?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Extraneous…I help the boys with their homework some. I’m the go-to girl for math, but for English and vocabulary? Forget it.”

  He asked, “You always been in security?”

  “No,” she answered. A smile blossomed, softening her face. She was really quite pretty, high cheekbones, upturned nose, clear complexion. “I always wanted to be a cop. Can’t tell you why. Maybe from a TV show I saw when I was a kid. Walker, Texas Ranger. Law & Order. NYPD Blue. But that didn’t work out. This’s the next best thing.”

  She sounded wistful.

  “You could still join up, go to the state police or city academy. You’re young.”

  Her eyes rolled. “And I thought you agents had to be sooooo observant.”

  Another smile appeared.

  “Anyway, can’t afford to take the time off. Single-mom thing.”

  Tomson saw Don Ivers approaching quickly. Tomson and the younger agent had worked together for about five years; he knew instantly there was a problem. Noting the man’s expression, Kim Morton tensed, too.

  “What?” Tomson asked.

  “We’ve got word from CAD. Possible threat triad.”

  Tomson explained to Morton, “Our Central Analytics Division. You know, data miners. Supercomputers analyze public and law enforcement information and algorithms to spot potential risks.”

  She nodded. “Computer game stuff.”