Ike and Ruth flew to Raleigh, North Carolina and returned the plane the Agency had leased for them. They rented a car and motored north and west to Picketsville. Before they left Idaho, Ruth managed to open her e-mail account.
“Okay, it happened, Ike. I told you it might and it did.”
“Told me what?”
“I said there would be a limit to how much my Board of Trustees would accept from a basically absentee president. I am commanded to appear before them. There is, this message says, not subtly, by the way, that my continued tenure as president is being questioned. They want to fire me.”
“Well, it would appear that attending my own funeral is not the only item on our agenda.”
“So it would seem. This is no good, Ike. So, while I figure out my speech for the Board, what do you plan to say to all the mourning folks when they show up all teary eyed at your memorial service and see you alive and kicking?”
“Good question. I could quote Mark Twain. You know the line, ‘The news of my death has been greatly exaggerated.’ Or I could just yell, ‘So sorry, big mistake, the drinks are on me.’ I don’t know. Should we send in an advance party?”
“Maybe. It depends on whether you can afford to buy that many drinks.”
“You think many people will plan to attend?”
“Oh, no more than a couple of hundred.”
“How about we skip it and take off for parts unknown? Being dead has its perks. Like no one will come after me anymore. I could get used to being dead and you wouldn’t have to be fired, you’d quit.”
“Life as a zombie? I don’t know. What’s in it for me?”
“No more budgets to finagle, no board meetings to drive you insane, forget the humiliation of begging for money at fundraisers with pushy alumnae, no federal guidelines to worry about, not to mention tenure decisions, weepy sophomores—”
“I think we had this conversation before, but I take your point. Tempting as that may be, and it is, no, not just yet.”
“You may never get a chance like this again.”
“Still taking a pass. I don’t run from problems any more than you do. Hey, this is a convertible. Let’s put the top down.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Because?”
“It’s dangerous. We’re exposed in an open car. Anyone who’s a decent shot and has the right equipment could blow us away in a heartbeat.”
“That’s it? You think there are still people who are gunning for us even now?”
“Maybe. Okay, probably not. Hey, it’s force of habit. I never put convertible tops down.”
“You are such a wuss. Listen, Ike, be serious a minute. We need to talk. All this daring-do and action hero stuff has got to stop. I can’t be looking over my shoulder the rest of my life. You said you knew a way for it to go away. I’m not talking about joining the zombie nation. So, can you make it all go away?”
“I don’t think I said ‘all.’ What I believe I said was, with some help from my friends, I might be able to reduce to near insignificance the instances when my past would rear its ugly head and bring down bad juju. That is, I could be erased from the Agency’s files and all connection with it to me would disappear. That would not keep a lunatic with bad memories from finding me, or some super hacker with issues. Perhaps we should ask to be put in the witness protection plan.”
“I just said, I’m not ready to give up fighting to keep my job, although, if I don’t put an end to this Murder Incorporated, I really will be fired, assuming I can quiet their jets when we get back. There has got to be a limit for what the Board of Trustees will put up with.”
“You do know that as long as I am sheriff, I am stuck with being a potential target for anyone ranging from the criminally insane felon who thinks I am the cause for all of his bad karma to the merely disgruntled who has had his driver’s license revoked because I served him with a DUI. Since I and you are now us, that means we will never be wholly safe.”
“You could retire from sheriffing.”
“I could. I do not need to run for reelection next time around. Frank is perfectly capable of running the department.”
“Yes he is. The difficulty with that is, can he get elected? Recall that our mayor harbors plans to return the town to the bad old days of cronyism and corruption.”
“True. Maybe I should run for mayor.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“You’re right, I don’t. We will have to revisit this problem later. There must be better options. We’re the good guys, right? But right now I need to figure out how to manage a church service set up to mourn my demise and you need to figure out how to explain your non-widowhood, not to mention your cavalier approach to presidenting.”
“For the second part, I do. As for the first, maybe I don’t. Knocking you off would solve both our problems.”
“Frank would arrest you.”
“For what? You’re already officially dead. How can I be arrested for your murder if you are already dead?”
“Interesting legal point. I’ll have to think about that.”
***
Jack Brattan had his “mull,” as Billy had put it. The public defender advised him to be quiet, plead not guilty, and take his chances. He said the case against him that the local police had him for murder hinged on connecting him as the person who leased the car seen in the video of the shooting to establishing him as the shooter. There was no image of the person in the car, much less one of him. Worst case, the lawyer said, would be as an unwitting accomplice. It was, he maintained, a weak thread at best. With allowances for reasonable doubt, Brattan would surely beat any murder one charge and probably any lesser ones. He thanked the lawyer and said he’d think it over. His problem was not what the local police and judiciary could or could not prove. The state would not have to establish the connection. Pangborn would do it for them. If he was in custody, as the hick deputy said, nothing could save Jack’s hide. Pangborn had a larger pile of chips in this game. That included stuff on Brattan that could send him to death row in at least three states. Then there was compromising information he could supply on dozens more in high places—really high places. He would be in position to cut an attractive deal. That deal would include chopping Jack off at the knees with a bushel of politicians and other influential people. Pangborn would see to it that he went down for the Frieze shooting and all those other things as well.
Jack’s best play, he thought, would be to make a preemptive strike. He would spill his guts to these local yokel cops and make his own deal before Pangborn got a chance to bury him. Hell, he knew enough to have the bastard put away for, like, a million years. He called his lawyer and sent him off to the county prosecutor. In return for giving them an airtight indictment incriminating Martin Pangborn, he only asked for a reduced charge and a minimum security prison. He hoped the cops wouldn’t figure out he had no real leverage. That what he knew about Pangborn could be shot down by any one of the attorneys Pangborn kept on retainer. With any luck, the rubes never would figure it out.
His luck held. He caught a busy prosecutor and a judge in a good mood. Pangborn’s attorneys, along with the majority of his powerful friends refused to acknowledge him publicly or privately. Jack would plea bargain and receive fifteen to twenty with a chance at parole and be shipped off to the nearest minimum security prison. A fistfight and a suspicious shakedown of his cell which produced a handmade blade would result in a transfer to the state prison and thence into its general population. He would be found dead, his head stuffed in a toilet bowl, a month after that.
***
His first shot nicked Pangborn’s ear. Jackson had choked and jerked the trigger. He knew better than to do that. Hell, he’d been trained by the best the Fifty-first Star had to offer. Too anxious, need to slow down, take the time. People screamed and scattered as the report echoed across the street. Pangborn seemed frozen in place. Stay that way, you bastard. He would not jerk the trigger this time, he told himself. He worked the rifle’s bolt and ejected one shell, locked in another, and settled the crosshairs on the man’s core. Breathe in, pause…he let his breath out. Slowly, slowly and…squeeze. An officer of some sort yanked Pangborn to one side at the precise moment the rifle discharged and his second shot caught Pangborn in the arm. Jackson cursed and yanked the bolt back again to put a third round in the chamber. He scanned the area through his telescopic sight, searching for Pangborn, but couldn’t find him. Where did he go? A volley of returning fire came from somewhere opposite. Bullets chipped the concrete around him. He didn’t notice or care. Where was Pangborn? Where was the pervert? He found him. Two cops were trying to stuff him into the backseat of a patrol car. He drew a bead on him and fired.
A state policeman, who took it on himself to stop the crazed gunman in the parking garage across the street from the courthouse raced up the staircase. He didn’t know how he’d managed to reach the third level so quickly. But he did and was able to drop Jackson Shreve with a single shot to the head at that precise moment his rifle recoiled from his third and final attempt to kill the one man whom he’d come to see as the devil incarnate.
Jackson Shreve, a member of the Fifty-first Star and patriot, would not see the green-tipped and probably illegal round smash into Pangborn’s fifth cervical vertebrae. In a way, he’d done him a favor. Pangborn would never experience the terror of being in a prison’s general population where his life would be at risk daily, hourly. He would, instead, be incarcerated in a moderately pleasant facility where he would share a room with only one other prisoner. The bad news: he would spend the remainder of his days as a quadriplegic, his continued existence dependent on the goodwill offered by people, most of whom despised him.
***
In another part of the country where things were comparatively less complicated, Ruth twisted in the car’s seat and studied Ike. “Tell me something, Sheriff. Before we face the music in Picketsville, why did you call in the State Police back there? The way you were talking, I expected that the minute you had the evidence you needed, you’d storm onto the ranch and splatter Pangborn across the Idaho countryside. What happened?”
“Maybe I heeded your very good advice.”
“Possible, but barely so.”
“Okay, you were right. And recall what I said to Pangborn at the time. You know, it is a funny thing about society in this quarter of the twenty-first century. You can abuse the system to the point where your greed is responsible for the economic collapse of the nation thereby bringing ruination to millions of people or, like Pangborn in his heyday, destroy people’s livelihoods and futures. You can be arrogant and bellicose enough to require the deployment of troops into combat or drone attacks on innocent villagers in parts of the world about which you know little or nothing. You can start a war, torture, maim, and destroy people willy-nilly and then retire with a golden parachute, a Nobel Peace Prize, or maybe even a Presidential Library. You may be vilified, but you will endure, equally praised and despised.”
“Ike…”
“However, if you are caught sexually abusing children, you are branded a monster to the end of your days. Your friends will not acknowledge your existence ever again. Your career, if you have one, will be trashed. You will be tracked, monitored, distrusted, and abused in turn for the rest of your hellish life. If Pangborn goes to jail, as I am now sure he will, he may not last a year. If he manages to avoid it, he will have a target on his back the size of Texas. One year or twenty, free or incarcerated, his end, when it comes, will be painful and mortifying.”
“Wow. So you didn’t shoot him because…?”
“Shooting him would be a mercy killing and mercy killing is only legal in four or five states and Idaho is definitely not one of them.”
“Right, and you are the sheriff, charged with upholding the law.”
“I am.”
“Okay, I get it. Pangborn gets a living hell before he lands there permanently. Wow, I like it. Now Ike, can we put the top down and live dangerously one last time?”
Ike pulled over. When the top had locked down, Ruth sat back and gazed up at the sky.
“Open sky. No more hiding. What a relief. You don’t realize what freedom to move about can be until you lose it.”
Ike’s phone buzzed. “It’s Charlie. What?…Crap…Okay.”
“What did he say?”
“Someone got to Pangborn. One of his own shot him.”
“He’s dead?”
“No, Charlie says he’s tetraplegic. What the hell is tetraplegic?”
“It means he’s paralyzed from the neck down, a quadriplegic. The wordsmiths in charge of important topics like how we classify things and then name them, in this case medical terminology, were uncomfortable with the American habit of mixing Greek and Latin prefixes and suffixes. Quadra is Latin for four and tetra is the Greek. Since plegia is Greek, it needed a Greek stem. So, substituting tetra for quadra harmonizes the languages, gives you tetraplegic. See? Simple.”
“Wow, I’m glad we cleared that up. Imagine the potential damage to our youth mixing our classic languages could have.”
“Now, now, no need to be snarky. We have survived near death. Some very bad people have been removed from general circulation, and a potential domestic terrorist organization has been dismantled. Be happy.”
“I am happy. On the one hand our villain has been spared a horrific death in jail, but on the other, he will receive far worse than that—a life in which he will be reminded daily that he is wholly dependent on the willingness of people he loathes to keep him alive.”
“Let’s call it a toss-up Look, there’s a big bird circling up there. Is that a big hawk?”
“It’s a buzzard.”
“Or a vulture. You don’t suppose…?”
“Suppose what?”
“I’m going with vulture.” Ruth twisted in her seat and waved at the bird.