“Here must all distrust be left behind;  all cowardice ...

Brighter than he appeared, as Dizzy had said. “Yes.”

They stopped at a garage in Union and Gus went inside. A minute later, the door opened, he drove inside, and the door closed. “Come on,” he said. Jenny got out and followed him through the back door, where they both got into the capped back of a rusty old pickup. It roared to life and went rocking off down the road. A few bumpy miles later, they emerged in a farmyard. Gus thanked the driver, then the two of them, Gus’s rifle, and Jenny’s shotgun, got into a dark Subaru and drove away.

She didn’t ask about his rifle. “I feel like someone from a spy novel,” she said. She didn’t add that it was a bad spy novel with a frighteningly young and inept heroine. Nor did she use the time to rehearse what she would say when she finally met with the reporter. When she got there, whatever came out was what she’d say.

“Me, too.”

Jenny was troubled about dragging him along. Even though he’d given some thought of his own to planning, she wondered if he had any idea what she might be getting him into. But she had no space for guilt today. She reached down and ran a hand along the stock of the shotgun. She’d use it in a breath if she had to.

She settled into impatient waiting until Gus stopped beside the cinder-block building housing the butcher and storage facility where her grandfather and uncles had brought sheep, steers, and the deer they shot to be butchered, wrapped, and stored. “Wait out here, please,” she said. “And keep an eye on things.”

Gus nodded. She got out of the car, fear lying in her stomach like a big lead weight, and went inside. This was too important. If she didn’t find the tape here, she had no plan B. The walk from car to the door seemed endless. Any second, she expected something to strike her between the shoulder blades. A voice in her head cried, “don’t make me do this.”

By the time she reached the door, she felt like she’d done a marathon. She turned the knob and entered, the door closing behind her with a whomp. As she looked around for someone to direct her, she let her breath slowly out, hoping this was what Uncle Billy meant when he said he’d “iced” the tape.

When she came out, the wrapped, frost-rimed video tape in her pocket cold against her side, a police car was parked beside the Saab. A man in uniform leaned in the window, talking to Gus. She would have retreated back inside, but the man straightened and looked right at her, one hand on his gun, the other giving what looked like a friendly wave.

She’d had too much experience with the friendliness of the police. She struggled to quell rising panic as she considered her options. There might be a back door, another way out, a chance to run. There also might be another police car on the other side of the building. She was in Buxton’s territory now, just as she’d been in Alfonso’s before. No way of knowing how much these people stuck together.

She hadn’t come this far to quit without a fight.

She took another step backward, fumbling for the doorknob as the officer took a few steps toward her. She found the knob and stepped backward. In an instant, she’d slipped through. The man behind the counter who’d led her to Billy’s locker was staring curiously.

“Forgot something,” she said. “If I could just have the key again.”

Impatiently, she held out her hand, feeling the weight of the seconds as he fumbled for the key. As he slipped it off the hook, she heard the crunch of feet on the steps. “Here you go, honey. You know where—”

She snatched it from his hand and dashed through the door, but it was too late. No sooner had the door closed behind her than it opened again, and Gus and the officer were there, looking for her through the frosty haze. There was no other way out. She looked around for something to use as a weapon. In one corner, a man was stacking wrapped packages into a freezer. A slab of frozen meat would be good, but this meat wasn’t frozen. Slowly she backed away from them, deeper into the haze. Step by step they kept advancing.

Something clanged by her feet. She bent down and picked up a rusted crowbar. Not much against a gun, but it was something. “Don’t come any closer,” she called.

“Jennifer.” It was Gus’s voice. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I only wanted you to meet my Uncle Stephen. He is loaning us some bulletproof vests.”

“How do I know I can trust him?” she asked.

“Please, Miss Cates,” the second voice said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’m just helping Gus out.”

They sounded so innocent, so sincere. But she’d trusted people before and it had gotten her beaten and battered. Now she was standing in the haze of a gigantic freezer wielding a crowbar she could barely lift against two big men, one with a gun. Her own gun outside in the car. Their feet crunched slowly toward her.

“Look, Jenny,” Gus said. “Honestly, no one’s trying to hurt you. Anything happens to you and Uncle Dizzy’ll kill me, you know that. Why would I go to so much trouble, switching the cars, the whole thing, just to hand you over to the cops?”

The answer involved handsome cops and their even handsomer brothers. It involved generous women who took in strays and sold them out. It involved chatty artisans who lied. It was written in their Braille on her body and singed by pain and fear into her mind.

They were off to her left now, moving not separately to trap her but together. Not smart, unless they were telling the truth. She wasn’t sure she even knew what truth was any more. She threw the crowbar behind them, knowing they’d turn to follow the clang, and when they did, she rushed for the door and let herself out, throwing the key at the astonished man behind the desk as she raced for the car. She wrenched the door open, staring in disappointment at the empty ignition.

She grabbed the shotgun, quickly jacking two shells in. She raised the gun to her shoulder and trained it on the steps, watching as Gus and the man he claimed was his uncle came to an astonished halt.

“Young lady,” the officer called. “So far, there isn’t any trouble between us. So far, it’s fine with me if you and Augustine just get back in that car and go on your merry way. But pointing a loaded gun at a police officer can get you into serious trouble.”

He waited to let her process, though to Jenny’s mind, her trouble was no more serious than it had been before he made the speech.

He was a short, round man with thick, dark eyebrows and a small, dapper mustache, except for the mustache the physical opposite of Dizzy. She was shaking from nervousness and being in the freezer, but he seemed perfectly calm. “Here’s what we’ll do,” he said, “so you’ll know you can trust me. I’ll put down my gun. Then you put down your gun. How’s that?”

He didn’t wait for her to answer. Before she could react, he flipped his gun out of the holster, laid it on the ground, and stepped away. If she’d truly been as crazy and trigger happy as she wanted him to believe, she would have shot him the instant he went for his gun. He had taken that risk. With shaking hands, she set her own gun on the ground at her feet and turned away, sick to her soul at how close she’d come to violence.

She sensed rather than saw Gus come and pick up the gun, eject the shells, and put them in his pocket. “My uncle, Stephen Pelletier. Jennifer Cates.” Introducing them as though nothing had taken place.

Jenny, still caught up in the enormity of what had just happened, couldn’t meet the officer’s eyes. She rested her head on her arms. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

He lowered the outstretched hand but didn’t back away. “How I know you’re what Augustine says, and not some gun-crazed nut, is that you’re feeling bad about what you did, aren’t you?”

She nodded, still not meeting his eyes. Some tough cookie she was, marching boldly forth with a shotgun and then afraid to use it. No. That wasn’t true. She’d used her judgment, like people are supposed to. She hadn’t shot an innocent man just because she was scared and had a gun in her hands. They hadn’t entirely succeeded in turning her into a monster.

She pushed herself away from the car and turned. “Yes, Mr. Pelletier. Officer. You’re right. I’m feeling terrible. If I were to explain. If I had the time and you believed the crazy story I have to tell, you’d understand.”

He patted her shoulder in a fatherly way. “You two better get going, if you’re going to be in Augusta by eleven-thirty. Threatening a peace officer with a loaded gun is bad enough. I wouldn’t want you speeding, too.”

He was letting them go? She couldn’t believe it. Gus opened the door, put the gun in the car, and waited for her to get in. He pointed to the back seat. “Bulletproof vests. Uncle Stephen loaned them to us.”

“And don’t make me be having second thoughts about it, either,” the officer said. “I want ’em back unharmed and I don’t want to be reading in the papers about some gun-happy college girl home on spring break going around shooting any cops, either, you hear?”

She swallowed. “I’ll do my best, sir.” She shook his hand and climbed into the car. Gus waved good-bye to his uncle and they rolled out onto the highway.

“Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in.
Free from all meaning, whether good or bad,
And in one word, heroically mad.”

—Dryden, “Absalom and Achitophel”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“Find what you were looking for?” Gus asked, as though nothing had just taken place.

“I think so.” She leaned back against the seat. Closed her eyes. It could be weeks before she stopped shaking and her mind cleared, and in a little over half an hour she was meeting a reporter who’d expect her to be coherent. “I can’t believe I did that. I could have shot him.”

“You wouldn’t have.” Gus shrugged. “Uncle Stephen’s cool, isn’t he?”

“Yes. This restaurant. The Brewery. Do you know it?” she asked.

“Been there,” he said.

“What’s the set-up?”

He frowned, then said, “Oh, right,” and considered. “It’s in kind of like a strip mall. Just a couple stores. There’s this semi-circular drive that comes in, with parking around the sides and a little patch of green lawn, well, green in the summer, between the drive and the street.”

“No parking or entrance in the rear?”

He shook his head. “I’ve never actually looked, but I don’t think so. Don’t see how there could be. There’s buildings off another street right behind.”

“So if we drive right up to the door and you let me out, there could already be other people there in the parking lot, waiting for us, knowing it’s the only way in?”

He shrugged. “I guess so.”

“I don’t like it,” she said. “It doesn’t sound safe. You didn’t happen to bring binoculars, did you?”

“No. Sorry.”

“Cell phone?”

“Sure.”

“It’s just I have this feeling that unless I change the course of events, this is going to be a very bad day. That it’s already a very bad day.”

“Premonition?” he asked.

“Educated guess based on past experience.”

“So what do you want to do?” he asked, holding out his phone.

“Call the restaurant, find this woman I’m supposed to meet, and arrange to meet somewhere else.”

“Like where?”

“Someplace public where there will be people around, where there’s more than one way in. The TV station or the State House or the State Library. I’d like to lower my chances of getting shot.”

“Sounds like a plan.” He checked his watch. “So when do you want to do this? You’re supposed to meet her in what? Ten minutes? And we’re about five minutes away. You want me to pull over?”

“Guess you’d better.”

She tried not to let on how tension was winding her up. She felt like the cowboy in an old western beginning that long, lonely walk down Main Street, hand hanging by the holster on her hip, heading for a showdown. The daylight, things they passed, impressions, sensations, had all taken on a strobe-light quality, coming to her in bits and pieces, intense flashes that briefly penetrated the density of her fear.

He pulled off at a Dunkin’ Donuts—there was no way he could know how that spooked her—and she made the call. Her movements also had a strobe quality. Tense and jerky. She had to think about how to use the phone. The fingers punching in the number seeming not to belong to her. The world felt distant and black and white; the air had an electric charge. People in cars passed, going about their normal lives.

The girl who answered at The Brewery seemed to consider it a huge imposition to find a patron who was waiting for someone. “Look,” Jenny said harshly. “I wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t important. Tell her it’s a matter of life and death.” She thought if someone called, sounding upset and said something was a matter of life and death, she’d hop to it, but the girl’s bored response was she’d go see.

Good thing Jenny, a madwoman on spring break with a shotgun, wasn’t actually at the restaurant. Morality or no morality, she was no longer responsible for her actions. This whole thing had been set in motion by others, but she had a major role to play and soon it would be her turn to go on stage.

She sat in the borrowed car in the middle of her disjointed reality, listing to distant voices and clattering bar sounds, fear roiling inside her, until finally a voice on the other end said, brisk and businesslike, “Marcia Shelton.”

“Ms. Shelton, it’s Jennifer Cates.”

“Yes?” Cautious. Reserved.

“I’m sorry about this but we need to meet somewhere else.”

“I’ve already rearranged my day so that I could meet you here. I wouldn’t have bothered except I was asked as a favor to your mother. What’s the problem?”

“The problem is that there is a man, maybe more than one, outside the restaurant waiting to kill me, Ms. Shelton.”

“That’s a bit dramatic isn’t it, Ms. Cates?”

“Does that mean you don’t believe me?”

“I only said—”

“Someone attacked my mother and tried to kill her, didn’t they?” Jenny interrupted.

“Well, yes, but—”

“That was dramatic, but it was real, wasn’t it?”

“Uh. Yes.” Hesitant, as if Ms. Shelton didn’t get it and didn’t want to.

“But if I say the same people are trying to kill me, that’s too dramatic?”

“I only meant that it seems highly unlikely that someone would attempt to attack you right here, in broad daylight, in front of many witnesses. What’s this all about, anyway?”

“I’ll explain all that when we meet. I’m just saying we need to meet somewhere else, Ms. Shelton.”

The reporter wouldn’t budge. “I’ll wait fifteen minutes. You can meet me here or not. I don’t have time to meet you someplace else.” All snooty and dismissive. This woman was no friend of Lila Friedman. Lila Friedman’s friends cared.

“Do you have a camera person with you?” Jenny asked.

“No. Why?”

“Because I’d hate to get shot down in the street without someone there to record it. How long will it take you to get one?”

“Is this some kind of a joke?”

“Depends on your sense of humor. I haven’t found very much funny lately. I doubt if I’ll find this amusing either. But if I were you, I’d call a camera crew. It isn’t every day that you get a political assassination on the streets of Augusta. It might make your career.”

“I’m sorry but I don’t understand,” the reporter said. “Explain what the hell’s going on or I’m leaving.”

“I’m only doing it once. Face to face,” Jenny said. She hung up before she lost it completely. She was patient, but there was a time and place for everything. She’d had such high hopes that this woman would put her on the air and give her a chance to make everything right. She’s ready to deliver her soul and she’s delivering it to a clueless idiot? This was complicated enough to explain to someone with a brain. She flashed back to trying to explain things to Araby. Jenny had sounded totally demented. Today, though, she had no choice. She’d have to try. If she made it that far.

She disconnected and looked around. The world hadn’t righted itself. It was black and white with splotches of color, like an old hand-tinted photograph. The passing traffic seemed part of a different reality, moving in a different plane and at a different speed. She couldn’t lose it now. She scrambled to pull herself together.

She was Lila Friedman’s daughter, the maker of plans. But how can you plan for death and disaster? How can you organize the way you walk into a blood bath? How can anyone, even your mother, expect you to be coherent when dealing with a completely incoherent experience?

She would be late, but there was something she had to do. She called all the newspapers she could find, as well as Shelton’s TV station and the local cable station, telling them there had been a shooting in The Brewery parking lot, hanging up when they asked for details. If something happened, she hoped to have an audience.

Gus turned on the engine. “All set?”

“She won’t change her plans.”

“So don’t meet her.”

In her mind’s eye, the cowboy hero—always cowboy, never cowgirl—striding slowly and deliberately down Main Street, hand poised above the butt of his gun, suddenly turned to the on-lookers and said, “I’ve changed my mind.” It wouldn’t go down that way. The other guy would shoot him out of sheer frustration.

“No,” she said. “It’s now or never.”

“You’re crazy,” he said.

“I think you’re right.”

“Better put on your vest, then. And load up the old blunderbuss.”

They helped each other into the uncomfortable garments. Even over her clothes, Jenny was so small she couldn’t pull the vest tight. It curved far out over her breasts, leaving several inches on either side exposed. Still better than nothing. She hoped policewomen got their vests custom-made.

“Aren’t you scared?” she asked as she pulled her coat back on.

“Shitless,” he said. “Doesn’t it show? You?”

“Likewise.”

“And I’m turning you loose with a shotgun?”

“Think of it…” Her throat was closing. “…as an adventure.”

“Here, let me do that.” He took the gun from her fumbling hands and loaded it. Good old Remington semi-automatic 12-gauge. Noisy as hell. She watched him load five rounds of #4 buck. Twenty-seven pellets of venom in each round. “Just don’t shoot yourself in the foot,” he said, handing it back.

Not the first person to tell her that. “I’ll do my best.”

Right now, she couldn’t marshal enough coherent thought to tell someone her name, much less explain her complicated story to a hostile TV reporter. Maybe she should put this off another day. Stride back down Main Street, unload the gun, crawl under Dizzy’s bed, and try again tomorrow.

She checked her pockets. Video tape. Butane stove lighter. Shotgun shells. She patted the gun. “Attack when ready, Commander.”

The Alfonso Campaign

On the campaign trail

Morrissey wasn’t easily shaken, and he wasn’t shaken now, as he looked from Joe Trask, lying on the floor bleeding, to Andy Mason, curled up in a quivering ball. He stared for a moment at the retreating truck, eager to give chase, but his job was here, taking care of his partner and Jenny Cates’ battered champion. With a sigh, he holstered his gun and bent to inspect the damage.

Trask had an ugly shoulder wound and he was sorry. Just because you were pissed off at someone didn’t mean you wanted them shot. Mason was pretty badly beaten but barring severe internal injuries, would survive. He only wished he weren’t hundreds of yards from the car, so he couldn’t call in the rest of the surveillance team and leave this situation in their hands while he went after the bad guys.

It wasn’t the first time he’d been up against pros. Probably wouldn’t be the last. But he felt stupid for not having managed things better. He’d given Trask the back door because he thought it would be safer. No one could have predicted a shooter like the Neanderthal. A wind-up killing machine who didn’t stop even when he’d taken several bullets. He’d gotten away but Morrissey didn’t think much of his chances.

Morrissey had come here to find Jenny Cates. Now he was stuck working clean-up, with the hours of explaining surely involved, while a cold-hearted killer had gotten away and Jenny’s life was still at risk.

He murmured some comforting words to Mason and loped back to the van, hoping in their rushed departure Buxton’s men hadn’t disabled his communications equipment. They hadn’t. He got on the radio, and gave the others the information he’d overheard Andy Mason give Alfonso’s thugs: the place and time of Jenny Cates’ rendezvous. Then he called the local police and requested cops and an ambulance. He did what he could to make them comfortable, told Trask and Mason help was on the way, and left them in the dingy office, bloody and hurting.

As he rumbled off down the road, his head pounding, he regretted that he hadn’t sent Buxton’s killers to hell. He believed in hell. Not sure about heaven but he was sure of hell. If there was anything in the world like justice there had to be a place for scumbags who got off too easily up here. One of them, the Neanderthal, was on his way. By now, his partner would have put him out of his misery. Purely a business matter. With a job still to do, he couldn’t afford to have the other vulnerable. Watching blood gush from the man’s chest, he’d never been more glad he’d taken the time to put on his vest.

He passed a police car, an emergency response team and an ambulance heading the other way. He checked his watch. Ten forty-five. Plenty of time to get into place and wait for Jenny Cates. His eyes slid down to his hands, gripping the steering wheel, the creases limned with blood. He’d have to stop somewhere and wash.