The next morning, I woke from my deepest sleep in a long time. I felt like a much younger man. Reinvigorated. I stretched my arms wide and found the other side of the bed empty.
“Rise and shine, sleepyhead,” Barack said. He was buttoning his suit jacket in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. One button, then two. Then one again. His suit—the same one he’d worn yesterday, a Martin Greenfield—looked cleaned and pressed.
Barack must have noticed my shocked expression. “There’s a laundry service next door. Had them freshen my joint up. I wasn’t going to walk around with hash brown chunks on my lapels. Your clothes are on the chair.”
I wiped the cobwebs from my eyes and sat up. “Why didn’t you wake me? When’s checkout?”
Barack raised his palms. “Relax, Joe. We have plenty of time. It’s not even ten.”
I rolled out of bed. Immediately, my knee buckled under me, and Barack rushed to steady me.
“I’m okay,” I said, a lie if either of us had ever heard one. I held myself up with a hand on the chair. “We don’t have time to lollygag around. A man’s reputation—”
“—is on the line,” Barack said. His voice was cool, calm, collected. Vintage Barack Obama. Meanwhile, I was panicked and blustering—vintage Joe Biden.
I sighed. We were falling back into our old familiar ways.
“What’s the plan?” I asked, getting dressed.
Barack narrowed his eyes. “The plan?”
“For breakfast,” I said.
“There’s no continental breakfast, if that’s what you’re asking.”
I checked my phone. There was a missed call at two in the morning from a 302 area code. Esposito’s home number, possibly? I dialed it back. The phone rang and rang but never went to voicemail.
“Dammit.” It was a little early in the morning for curse words, but these were extraordinary circumstances. “I assume Steve called you. How’s he taking things?”
“Pretty well, all things considered. He did lose the forty-fourth president of the United States.”
“That reminds me. I need to call Jill and let her know I’m not lying dead in a ditch somewhere.”
“One presumes that would have made national news,” Barack said.
“Oh, don’t give me that. You’ve already talked to Michelle, haven’t you?”
“I texted her last night. I told her I was staying at your place. She thinks we’re having a sleepover. As long as she doesn’t talk to Jill, we’re okay.”
I groaned. “You want me to tell Jill I stayed the night at your place?”
“What the wives don’t know won’t hurt them. And as long as we keep our stories straight and don’t get caught, our wives won’t hurt us.”
My stomach growled. Either I was hungry again, or my body just couldn’t take any more stress. Jill and I had a fabulous relationship…but it was a relationship built on trust. I was about to break her trust. I knew it was for the greater good, but it still made me queasy.
I called her. At first I thought I’d gotten a reprieve, as the phone rang four times without an answer. But no. Just before it should have gone to voicemail, she picked up.
“I was out gardening,” she said. “What’d you want?”
She should have been frantic with worry, but her voice was surprisingly calm. If anything, she was maybe a little irritated—as if she thought she’d finally gotten me out of the house, and now I wasn’t willing to leave her alone.
“I stayed at Barack’s last night,” I said. “He was in town for the funeral, and we went back to DC for a nightcap. Stayed up late talking about old times. The usual stuff that guys do.”
“Oh!” she said. “What’s their guest room like?”
I had no idea what his guest room looked like. Not only that, but I had no idea what the inside of his kitchen, or living room, or any other part of his DC house looked like. I only had the vaguest notion, really, of what neighborhood the Obamas lived in.
“I stayed with Barack in the master bedroom,” I said. “Michelle was out of town, and Barack didn’t want to sleep alone.”
Jill laughed on the other end. “I’m sure you did.” She paused. “Did you need something?”
“I was worried that you’d be worried.”
“If you were lying dead in a ditch somewhere, I’m sure I’d have heard about it by now,” she said. “It’d be all over CNN.”
Barack was sitting on the edge of the bed with a smirk when I hung up.
“What?” I said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
I undid the chain lock on the door and looked over my shoulder. I had my wallet, I had my phone…whatever else I left behind, the maid could keep. If there was a maid.
“Where are we headed?” Barack asked.
“First, to the nearest fast-food joint for breakfast. And then…well, I haven’t thought that far in advance.”
“As long as they have green tea, I’m fine with wherever.”
I opened the door. The sunlight blinded me at first, and I covered my eyes with my hands. I’d forgotten my Ray-Bans—if I remembered right, they were on the bathroom sink. However, I didn’t need to see what was in front of me to know what was there. I heard it—the unmistakable, filling-rattling growl of a 1,500-horsepower engine. The Little Beast.
Barack handed me my sunglasses. With my eyes shielded, I could see the five-foot-eight figure standing beside the open back door, his mirrored shades reflecting as much sunlight as the metallic hood ornament. His face was as stoic as ever.
“Who’s hungry?” Steve asked.