When I returned to the Escalade, it was locked. Barack probably stepped out for a coffin nail. He rarely smoked around me because he knew my views on tobacco. I’d always detested cigarettes, even before I launched the cancer moonshot.
“S!”
I whipped my head around at the sound of Barack’s voice. He hadn’t gotten very far. He was playing basketball with the three boys we’d seen earlier. Steve was watching from the edge of the court. Barack had removed his jacket, and his shirt sleeves were rolled up. Back in the White House, this always meant it was time for serious business. But right now, he was playing basketball with a group of third- and fourth-graders.
“Where’s your baseball cap?” I hissed.
“You don’t wear baseball caps when you’re shooting hoops,” he said.
One of the boys, a skinny kid with curly hair, shot a basket. It went through the hoop—actually the rim, because there wasn’t much left of the hoop—and bounced away. Another boy chased it down.
“E!” the curly-haired boy screamed.
Barack fist-bumped him. “Nice shooting, kid. Keep it up and you could be the next Michael Jordan.”
The boy scrunched up his face. “I don’t want to make shoes, I want to play basketball.”
“Look him up on the YouTubes.”
The other boy tossed the ball to Barack. “Another round?”
Barack told them he’d be back sometime to stump for Delaware’s Democratic candidates. “Your parents are all registered to vote, right?”
I tugged at his sleeve. “We’ve got a situation,” I whispered. “Alvin is D-E-A—”
“We’ll see you kids later!” Barack said, waving to them. Steve gave them one last glare for good measure and trailed us back to the SUV.
Barack unrolled his sleeves and buttoned his cuffs. “Those kids were like ten years old, Joe. They know how to spell.”
“Sorry, I’m a little out of sorts.” I told Barack the whole story. Steve sat up front, listening intently. Or maybe he was napping behind those sunglasses.
“And you’re sure Alvin was dead?” Barack said. “Sometimes, the pulse can be so faint that you can’t feel it on the wrist or neck.”
“He was blue as a Smurf.”
“Okay, okay,” Barack said. “We need to figure out what to do. Let me think…”
“It’s obvious what we do,” I said. “Call the cops.”
Barack was doing that pyramid thing with his fingers pressed up to his lips, which meant the wheels in his brain were spinning. As if they ever stopped spinning.
“Did you feed the cat?” Barack asked.
“You’re worried about the cat?”
“I’m just trying to cover all of our bases. If you fed the cat, your fingerprints might be on the cabinets or the food bowl.”
“I didn’t touch anything, not even to feed the cat. He’s big enough as it is. On my way out, I wiped my fingerprints off the door knob and got the H-E-double hockey sticks out of there.”
“Good,” Barack said. “Let’s find a pay phone and call it in.”
“That’s going to be a little difficult to do,” I said.
“Pay phones are kind of a rarity these days. We’ll find one, though.”
I crossed my arms. “That’s not what I’m talking about. You’ve been spotted here. Those kids are probably telling their parents right now, or Twittering to their friends.”
“Who’s going to believe them?”
“Who’s going to believe them?” I growled. “Esposito, for starters. She knows you’re in town. If she hears some kids bragging that they played ball with the ex-commander-in-chief a block away from a crime scene connected to Finn, she’ll put two and two together.”
“By the time Esposito realizes we were in the vicinity of the crime scene, we’ll be long gone. We’ve not broken any laws. I don’t think we’re going to be hauled off down to the local precinct and questioned. Can you imagine the negative press? Esposito will need time to build a case, and the city board isn’t going to let her drag us in without a very, very good reason. By that time, we should either know what’s going on or…”
Or we’ll be victims, I thought. I could tell Barack thought the same thing, but he wasn’t willing to say it. Neither of us was. We didn’t know what kind of a mess we were getting into, or how deep the roots of the conspiracy went. But make no mistake: there was a conspiracy, all right.
It wasn’t like we hadn’t found ourselves in strange waters and persevered before. Barack had battled the Clinton machine to capture the Democratic Party’s nomination in 2008. Together, we’d fought our way to the White House against a Republican Party that called Barack every bad name in the book. We were out in the middle of the sea right now, in uncharted waters, with no lifejackets. We were paddling with our hands and feet to stay alive. We didn’t know which direction to swim, because we didn’t know where land was. And yet it all felt very familiar. Still, I had to wonder: with this much chum in the water, how soon before we drew the attention of the sharks?