Dead Watch

by John Sandford

  Jake nodded. “If the package exists. If it’s not part of some scheme by Bowe, including his disappearance, to mess with us.”

  “He had himself killed to mess with us?”

  “I haven’t worked out that part,” Jake said.

  Danzig smiled, a rueful smile, said, “Ah, God,” twirled again in his chair, came back around, said about the vice president, “Landers is a crooked sonofabitch and we’ve known it from Day One. But he gave us Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa, and we needed them.”

  Jake said nothing.

  Danzig said, “He’ll deny everything. He’ll ride it right to the end. There’s no way we could go to him and say, ‘Is there anything in your past?’ because we all know there is, and we all know he’ll deny it. Deny, deny, deny.”

  “Want me to jack up Patterson?”

  Danzig rubbed his face, suddenly looking old and tired. “Wait overnight. Let me sleep on it,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  Danzig leaned forward. “The problem is this: the RNC may be feeding you this rumor, knowing it will get to me. I talk to the president, we ask around. Even if we keep it secret, the RNC feeds it through the back door to some conservative sheet or cable station. The L.A. Times, maybe. Tells them that we know about it. Then we’re in trouble, whether or not it’s true. We can’t even deny that we asked around. Landers gets investigated all summer, into the campaign.”

  Jake nodded. That’s what would happen.

  “If we have to dump Landers, we’ve got to do it before summer,” Danzig said. He was talking to himself as much as to Jake. “We can’t carry him into the convention. But if the accusation is bullshit, then Landers pees on us.”

  “We need some specifics,” Jake said.

  “Just like with Bowe,” Danzig said. “If we could only get the specifics, we could move. Without them, we could be screwed no matter what we do.”

  “But if we don’t look into it . . . we could get into pretty deep trouble ourselves,” Jake said. “I mean us, personally. Obstruction of justice and all that.”

  Danzig nodded: “Of course. But everybody would give us a day or two. Working through the bureaucracy.”

  Jake stood up: “I’ll be on the phone. Call anytime.”

  “What about Schmidt?”

  “Nothing new. Can’t find him,” Jake said.

  “But we’re looking.”

  “Novatny’s tearing up the countryside. He’s pretty competent.”

  Danzig picked up a pencil, drummed it, stuck it behind an ear, rubbed his face with both hands. Tired. Finally he said, “Best thing that could happen is, we find Schmidt and pin the killing on him. Or on the Watchmen,” Danzig said. “Then we find the package and get rid of Landers, and never let anybody even hint that there might have been a connection.”

  “Gonna be tough,” Jake said. “The media’s running around like a herd of weasels, putting every rumor they can find on the air. Looking for somebody to hang, somebody to blame.”

  “When the going gets tough, the tough blame the CIA,” Danzig said. He paused, then said, “But I don’t think that applies here.”

  “Not yet, anyway,” Jake said.

  “Goddamnit. Goddamnit.” Danzig flipped a desk calendar: “Four months to the convention.” He stared at the calendar, then said, “Listen: I’m going to talk to the president. We’ll want you to see Patterson in the morning. Get some sleep. I’ll call you early, one way or the other.”

  9

  Jake left the White House, tapping along in the night with his cane, looking for a cab. Lots of traffic, not many taxis. He’d walked three blocks before he finally spotted a ride, flagged it. “Daily News, in Georgetown.”

  The driver grunted, and they drove wordlessly down M across the bridge, six blocks down. The driver grunted again, Jake passed him a couple of bills, and got out. The Daily News was a surf-and-turf joint, with enough light to read by, and an Amsterdam-style newsstand in the front entry, like a brown bar. He chose a battered copy of New York, ordered the mangrove snapper and the house white, and settled into a quiet booth to read some gossip and enjoy the fish.

  Was nagged by the thought that he should have told Danzig about Bowe being gay. The issue was one of loyalty: he was taking Danzig’s money, and he even generally agreed with the president’s program, versus that pushed by the Republicans. Bringing up the gay issue would advance the cause. Yet . . . whether or not Madison Bowe knew it, she’d be trashed. And she’d blame him, and he didn’t want that. Actually, he thought, he wanted Madison Bowe: honor versus testicles. The thought made him smile at his own foolishness . . .

  He had a second glass of wine at the end of the meal, something with an edge to cut the sweetness from a crème brûlée, then gathered his case and stick and went outside. Nice night. He decided to walk, a little more than a mile. He ate at the Daily News twice a week, and the walk was just right for his leg.

  The light was dying as he strolled along the uneven sidewalks, puzzling out the problem of what to do. He took twenty-five minutes to get home.

  The front walkway to the house was still torn up, so he automatically continued around to the back, to the alley entry.

  He heard the car doors open. Paid no attention to it until he got his key in the gate lock, realized that he hadn’t heard them close again. Not that it was odd, exactly . . . then he saw the man coming, too fast, way too fast, too close, something raised above his head. And a second man, coming in a rush, a step behind the first. They were big, rangy, fast, one black and one white, he thought, and then they were on him . . .

  Somebody shouted and Jake raised his cane and flinched away from a movement and took the first stroke of what might have been an axe handle—or maybe just a stick, but he had axe handle in his mind’s eye—on the side of his cane and his arm, and he shouted, heard himself shout, more like a scream, then the second man swung at him, another ax handle or stick and Jake caught the blow with a push of the flat of his left hand, and then the first man caught him on the back of the neck, then on the head, and dazed, he went down, flailing, rolling, rolling, rolling, trying to make them miss, trying to get back in the fight, off the defensive. The two men were flailing at him, one of them saying, “Git him, git that mother, git him,” a kind of chant, and he tried to stay faceup so he could see the blows coming, fending with his cane and hands, and he heard a man scream, Hey you sonsofbitches and he was hit again and again and then there was a powerful, shattering blast and a flash of light and the man closest to him froze for just an instant and Jake slashed his knee with the steel handle of his cane and felt it crunch home, saw the man stagger, then a woman was screaming and another flash of light and another blast, a gun, he thought, and then he was hit one last time and he was gone . . .

  Jake woke up in an ambulance, rolling hard downtown. “What happened?”

  He struggled to sit up, but couldn’t. A phlegmatic black man looked down at him and said, “You rest easy. You got mugged.”

  “Mugged?”

  A few minutes later, he woke up in the ambulance, struggled to sit up, couldn’t, and asked a phlegmatic black man, “What happened?”

  “You got mugged.”

  “Mugged?”

  The doc told him later that he asked the question twenty-five times over the next hour, both in the ambulance and in the OR. Then he woke up in an intensive care unit, still in his street clothes, minus his shoes, and looked at a young Indian doc and asked, “What happened?”

  “You got mugged.”

  “Mugged? Where? My house?”

  Now the doctor smiled: “Ah. You’re awake. Yes. As I understand it, you got mugged at your house. You have a concussion, of course, but not too bad, I don’t believe, and a whole bunch of bruises. Good bump on your head, and a cut. It’s going to hurt in a while. Your skull is in one piece—we took a picture—but we had to cut some hair away from the head wound. After it stops hurting, it’s going to itch like fire. You have five stitches there. A couple of your neighbor
s are outside, by the way. Would you like to see them? They witnessed the event, I believe.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Mugged? I can’t believe I was mugged.”

  A woman came in and said, “Mr. Winter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Winter, do you have health insurance?”

  “Sure.”

  She seemed to step back. “Really?”

  “Why wouldn’t I have?”

  “Well, that’s nice.” She seemed skeptical. “Rami, the doctor, said you had good shoes and I should check. Would you have the card?”

  She went away, clutching the card; seemed amazed at the turn of events.

  A moment later, Harley Cunningham, his across-the-alley neighbor, pushed through the door, trailed by his wife, Maeve. Cunningham sold home bars and pool tables for a living. He did a double take, said, “Man. They beat the hell out of you, Jake.”

  “What happened?”

  “My back window was open, I heard you come tapping up the alley, I looked out, and I saw these assholes get out of a truck and I could tell they were coming after you. They had these clubs—they might have been pool cues—but I had my shotgun in the bedroom closet and I yelled and Maeve yelled and they were beating the shit out of you and I ran and got the shotgun and let off a couple of shots up in the air and they run off.”

  “Who were they?”

  “Fuck if I know,” Cunningham said.

  Maeve gave her husband an elbow and said, “Watch the language, he’s all beat up.”

  “He’s not gonna hurt any worse because I said ‘fuck,’ ” Cunningham said.

  “Didn’t hit you in the face,” Maeve said to Jake. She patted him on the arm. “That’s a blessing.”

  “The doc said I was mugged,” Jake said. Now that he was awake, he was beginning to feel the ache in his back, arms, legs, and one hip. “Just a couple of guys . . . ?”

  Cunningham shrugged. “They were layin’ for you, man. That truck was parked there, and they jumped out when they saw you comin’. You been playin’ around with somebody’s wife?”

  Maeve: “Harley, my God.”

  “You see the car?” Jake asked.

  “Yeah. It was an SUV. I think, like, a Toyota maybe. Dark in color. I told the cops. They’re gonna come see you. I think one guy was black and one guy was white. Salt ’n’ pepper.”

  “Harley, that’s bigoted,” Maeve said.

  “That’s what they call them, black and white guys together,” Cunningham said.

  “Maybe in nineteen fifty-five,” Maeve said.

  Cunningham to Jake: “I liked firing that twelve-gauge, man. It made a wicked flash in the night. Scared the hell out of ’em.”

  “You say they were laying for me?”

  “Oh, yeah. That truck was there for a while, I noticed it earlier on. Didn’t know anybody was inside. When I heard you in the alley, I was going to yell something down about those jackhammers on your sidewalk, and I saw them coming after you. I’ll tell you something else—that wasn’t no cheap SUV. It was brand-new, from the looks of it. They weren’t looking for a quick fifty bucks.”

  “Did you tell the cops that?”

  “Sure. But they didn’t pay too much attention to me. They were too busy typing stuff in their computers.”

  The Cunninghams left after a while—they’d picked up Jake’s briefcase and cane, and left them with him—and the cops did come. Jake had nothing to tell them, partly because he couldn’t believe that anything he was doing would get him beaten up, and partly because talking to the cops wouldn’t help track down the guys who’d jumped him. They had nothing to go on, except that the men were driving a dark SUV, maybe a Toyota.

  “Ten percent of the trucks on the street meet that description,” one of the cops said. “At least you managed to hang on to your wallet and your briefcase.”

  “Maybe they picked you out because you’re disabled, homed in on that cane,” the second cop said. “Believe me, some of these assholes like nothing more than seeing a well-dressed disabled person.”

  They went away, leaving the strong impression that they would file a report but that nothing would be done.

  The headache arrived a few minutes later. The doc came in, said they would keep him overnight, and, “I can give you a little something for that head. When you get home, you can take a Tylenol when you need it, but no aspirin or ibuprofen. You want to stay away from any blood thinners for at least a couple of days . . .”

  When he woke up, at five in the morning, he was embarrassed. Embarrassed that he’d gotten beaten up, hadn’t managed to defend himself better. He enjoyed a decent fight, but what happened the night before, he told himself, hadn’t been a fight. It had been a mugging, cold and calculated. He thought about Cathy Ann Dorn. Not a coincidence?

  But why would Goodman want to slow him down? He’d been cooperating with Goodman . . .

  Another thought popped into his head. They’d known he used the back door, because of the sidewalk. Howard Barber had had trouble with the front door . . . if he remembered right, he’d said something to Barber about using the back.

  Barber? But why?

  Overnight, in the back of his bruised brain, he’d filtered out a few more conclusions.

  The attackers had been large, tough, and in good condition. One of them had a hill accent, Kentucky or eastern Tennessee, like that. They were good at what they did. They hadn’t meant to kill him—they could have done that with a single gunshot, or even a couple of axe-handle or pool-cue strokes to the back of the head.

  Instead, he’d taken two glancing blows to the head, another on his neck, and a dozen on his back, legs, and one hip. They’d meant to do what they had—to put him in the hospital. If Harley hadn’t been there with his shotgun, and if they’d had another minute, Jake might have been in bed for a week, or a month, or a year. They’d hit him hard enough that if they’d hit bone, squarely, instead of meat, they would have broken the bones . . .

  He’d never had a chance: and he was still embarrassed.

  And he thought that if he encountered the two men again, in a place where he could do it, he’d kill them. The thought made him smile, and he drifted away on a new shot of drugs, not to wake until eight.

  At eight o’clock, he rose back to the surface, thrashed for a moment, and a nurse came in and asked, “How are we feeling?”

  “We’re feeling a little creaky,” Jake said. He could feel the bruises, like burns. “Could you hand me my briefcase?”

  “The doctor will be here in a minute.”

  “Yeah, but my wife is probably going crazy, wondering where I am,” he lied. “I just want to call her.”

  He got the phone. When he switched it on, he found four messages from Gina, starting at six-thirty, all pretty much the same: “Jake, where are you? We’re calling, we can’t get you. Call in . . .”

  He called. Gina picked up and he said, “You won’t believe what happened, where I am . . .”

  Danzig came on a moment later, his voice hushed: “Jesus Christ, Jake, how bad are you hurt?”

  “Ah. Not bad. I’m bruised up. I got a few stitches in my scalp, got a headache. They say I’m fine.”

  The doc came in to hear the last part of it, pulled on his lip, and shook his head. Jake said to Danzig, “The doctor just got here. I’ll call you from the house. I’m still working.”

  “You think, I mean—the Watchmen? Or just muggers? Or what? I mean, it’s a pretty big coincidence.”

  “Yeah, I’m thinking about that. Give me an hour or two.”

  “What about this Patterson? We wanted you to go see him, but maybe Novatny . . .”

  “No, no. Keep Novatny out of this part, or you’re gonna see it all over the papers.” He glanced at the doc. “Listen, I can’t talk right now, they’re about to do something unpleasant to me.”

  “Okay. Okay. Well, Jesus, take care of yourself. Call me.” Danzig sounded like his father.

  “I’ll call.”

  He punched off and
the doc said, “Not that unpleasant. Get a light shined in your eye, pee in a bottle, give up a little blood. Is it true that you have health insurance?”

  He was on the street at ten o’clock, a vague ache in his brain, a hotter, harsher pain where the stitches were holding his scalp together. Sunlight hurt his eyes; he needed sunglasses. And he was really beginning to hurt now. He got a cab, had it drop him at the alley. Cunningham came out on his back balcony and shouted, “That was quick.”

  Jake called back, “I owe you, Harley. Big-time.”

  “Ah, bullshit, man, glad you’re okay.”

  “Couple bottles of single malt, anyway.”

  Cunningham threw up his hands. “Now that you mention it,” he said, “you do owe me . . .”

  Inside, Jake did a quick check of the house, then went into the bathroom and looked at himself. They’d cut a bit of hair away from the scalp gash and put a piece of tape over the stitches. That didn’t look so good. He peeled off his clothes, turned to look at his back. He had a row of cue-width bruises on his shoulder blades, back, butt, and legs, already in the deep-purple stage, with streaks of red. They’d be a sickly yellow-black in a week.

  If Cunningham hadn’t been there with his shotgun, if they’d had time to really work on him, he would have needed all the insurance that he had . . . or none at all.

  Despite the headache and the bruises, he got Patterson’s home phone number and called. He got an out-of-office phone message that said he was in Atlanta and would be back in the office in four days. The message gave his e-mail address and said that it would be checked daily.

  Uh-uh. No waiting in modern times. He went online, got a list of Atlanta hotels, and started calling, beginning with those he thought a political consultant might patronize.

  He hit on the third try: Patterson was at the Four Seasons.