C
ole called home as soon as he was clear of the city and was sure no cops were trailing behind. Jesse had gone to town and Marlys had put Caralee to bed early, but the kid was restless and heard Marlys talking to Cole on the phone and started calling out for her.
“Got a problem,” Cole said. “A couple of Bowden’s security people spotted me. I managed to outrun them, but—I don’t know how—they recognized me. This one big-looking dude seemed to know who I was.”
Marlys was shocked, nearly into silence. “But that, but that . . .”
“Don’t know how, but that’s the case,” Cole said. He glanced down at the speedometer: he was doing almost ninety, purely from the stress; had to rein it in. He took his foot off the gas.
Marlys said, “That’s crazy.” Caralee had been asleep on an air mattress in the parlor, and now she toddled into the kitchen, towing her blankie, a child’s quilt that Marlys had made for her, and caught hold of Marlys’s pant leg. Marlys patted her on the head
and said into the phone: “You don’t think we’ve been under surveillance?”
Cole shook his head; that wasn’t right. “I’ve been thinking about it ever since it happened and I can only come up with one thing. You know how I thought that chick took my picture at the Henderson rally? I wonder if they passed that around?”
“They’d only know what you
look
like?” Marlys chewed on her lower lip for a moment, then said, “That’s gotta be it. Nobody’s come around here, so they don’t know who you
are.
You had mud on your license plates?”
“Yeah, nobody read those . . . I’m gonna stop and clean them off when I get a chance, in case they’re looking for a white pickup with muddy plates. I haven’t seen a cop at all. Not even one. Anyway, I’ll be home in an hour or so.”
Marlys shook her head as Caralee started crying. Like being nibbled to death by ducks. “Something else has come up. It’s bad.”
“What?”
She told him about the call from Joseph Likely. “He said this guy Davenport used to be a cop up in Minnesota and he’s supposedly working for Henderson. That’s where the connection to you comes in. He saw the picture that woman took.”
“But this guy was with Bowden tonight, not Henderson—”
“Joe said that he was talking to Bowden, too. Anyway, I looked him up on the Internet. I’m sending you a picture of him . . .
now
. If Joe talks to him again, we’re in trouble.”
“Why?”
“Because Joe’s gonna sleep on this tonight and then tomorrow,
sometime, he’s going to talk to some other party people about us, and they’re gonna panic, and then they’re going to give us up,” Marlys said.
“Goddamnit. You think . . .” His phone beeped, and he said, “Hang on, your message just came in.” Cole thumbed up the message, tapped the photo, and squinted at it. The big guy at the hotel looked back at him.
“I’m looking at your picture and that’s the guy from the hotel,” Cole said. “Shit, it’s him.”
Marlys said, “I was afraid of that. There’s all kinds of stuff about him online. He’s really rough and he’s smart—he made a lot of money from the Internet when it was first getting started and he’s been involved in a whole bunch of shootings. One of the articles from the Minneapolis newspaper says he was the guy they sent after the worst criminals.”
Cole said, “Well, we haven’t really done anything yet. Nothing they could get us for. There’s no connection to us from the National Guard break-in. We could back off, Bowden will be around all fall and winter . . . We could start all over again.”
“No! No! The closer we get to the elections, the harder it’ll be to get to her,” Marlys said.
“Well, what are we gonna do?”
After a moment of silence, Marlys asked, “How heavy was her security? Still the same? Or has it gotten heavier?”
“From what I could tell, it was the same. She has six guys covering her and maybe a couple of women. I can’t tell about the women, whether they’re security or assistants, but I’m pretty sure
one of them has a gun. Then, there were cops all over the place, from both the city and the county. There were twenty-two cops in uniform that I could count, but it could be more than that. It was confusing, with people coming and going. There were cops all around the building, at every door, and more inside. They made everybody who was going into the hotel go through the front door, and through a metal detector.”
“Never gonna get her in a building,” Marlys said.
“I told you that a hundred times,” Cole said. He had seen various military and civilian big shots visiting in Iraq and the kind of security they’d had. He’d made the point with Marlys that not even the crazy jihadists had gotten close enough to make a run at them. Professional security was good.
“Gonna have to be the fair,” Marlys said.
“We could change directions and I could do her with a rifle,” Cole said. “If we could ever find a place to shoot from.”
“Impossible to figure that out, at this late date,” Marlys said. “And you’d get caught. We’ve got a good plan, let’s stick to the plan.”
“What about Joe Likely?” Cole asked.
“I told him I needed to talk to him, face-to-face. Tonight,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Then Marlys asked, “Did you take your pistol with you?”
“Couple of them.”
“Meet me in Mount Pleasant. You’ll get there first, call me and tell me where to hook up.”
—
ANOTHER STORM FRONT
had come through, but it was a thin one, a hundred miles long and ten wide. Marlys tried calling Jesse but got no answer. He’d said he’d be late, and might not make it home at all: he was going drinking with friends. With Caralee trailing behind, Marlys collected the baby bag from the parlor, and noticed that a misty rain was whispering off the windows.
She went out on the Internet to the National Weather Service in Des Moines and checked the radar. The storm would be short-lived and would probably miss Joe Likely’s home completely.
She tried Jesse one last time, got no answer, and headed out to her truck, carrying her granddaughter and the baby bag. The girl was wearing footsie pajamas and Marlys left her in them. The night was chilly and dark and her headlights didn’t seem to go anywhere, so she took it slow: this was no time to hit a deer. The windshield wipers seemed to sync with her heartbeat. Somebody was going to die tonight, and he was an old friend.
—
COLE ROLLED ON
through the night, thinking about killing Joe Likely. He’d met Likely a few times, at the party meetings, but had quit going when it became obvious that the party was useless. Cole had never killed anyone, but the prospect didn’t bother him. He would have killed some Iraqis, given the chance, but he’d never had the opportunity. The fact is, he’d never had much of a life, and he didn’t know why. He simply knew that was a fact, and he saw people all around who did have interesting lives, who did seem to
cruise through the world with women and money and friends, and he’d never had that.
He’d thought that might change when he joined the Guard; it hadn’t. He was a truck driver, and truck drivers in the Guard had about the same status as truck drivers in civilian life: that is, not much. Infantrymen get dinged up, and the Army couldn’t do enough for them: choppers would come in and fly them off to a hospital, the congressmen come through and shake their hands and give them medals and all. A truck driver gets hurt, and nobody gives a rat’s ass; they even bitch at you about being lazy, and in the meantime, your brain feels like it’s been turned to Jell-O.
And it wasn’t going to get any better, not in this life, not with the way the system worked against people like his mom and himself. They’d be out peddling corn and cutting golf-course grass for the rest of their lives; couldn’t even afford to
play
golf on the grass he cut every day . . .
Things had to change, some way, somehow. Killing Likely might be necessary . . . though he was unsure of that. There was more to it than pulling a trigger.
—
MARLYS AND CARALEE
made it to Mount Pleasant, driving slow through the rain, in an hour and a half. Cole was waiting for her in the white pickup, parked outside a closed café. Marlys stopped behind him, left Caralee alone in the back, noted the clean license plates as she walked past Cole’s truck to the passenger side and got in.
“Here’s the thing,” Cole said, when she’d shut the door. “Maybe we shouldn’t do anything until we do
everything
. If Likely turns us
in, we’re just farmers and it’s all bullshit and lies. If he doesn’t, then we go ahead—hit Bowden without any warning. If we kill Likely now, after he’s talked to this Davenport dude, the cops will be all over the place.”
“If they were chasing you in the streets tonight, they’ve already been warned,” Marlys said. “They’ll already be all over the place.”
“Yeah, but if we kill somebody, then they’ll know for sure how serious we are,” Cole said. “Right now, we might be a bunch of goofballs like Joe and his friends.”
“I’m one of them,” Marlys snapped.
“No, you’re not, and you know it,” Cole said. “We’re serious, they’re not. They’re a bunch of bullshitters and that’s all they ever were.”
“Doesn’t do us any good to kill Bowden and have Joe pick up the phone one minute later and tell Davenport who we are,” Marlys said.
Cole thought about that for a moment, then said, “That’s true . . . I wish we had a plan for this.”
“We don’t need a plan. Joe called me from a pay phone. I told him I wanted to come by and talk to him late tonight after I got Jesse back home and the baby to bed,” Marlys said. “We go in, find out what Davenport knows, what he told him, do it, and get out. If you
can
do it.”
“Oh, I can do it,” Cole said. He fished around between his feet, brought out a plastic box, popped it, and took out a pistol. “Loaded with CCI Long Rifle Quiets. No louder than clapping your hands and plenty of penetration. I get behind him and bang! One in the head, no muss, no fuss.”
“You sure? You never done it before,” Marlys said.
“No, but I read all about it and I got no problem doing it,” Cole said. He rolled his eyes up, and checked his heart and his gut. Yes. He could do it. Sniper. Could have been a sniper, instead of a truck driver.
“Then let’s go,” Marlys said.
—
THEY DECIDED AGAINST
taking Cole’s truck because it had been seen by Davenport earlier in the evening. If anybody saw it around Likely’s place, and then Likely was found dead, that would only confirm what they thought about Cole and the truck.
They took Marlys’s dark blue SuperCrew Ford. Caralee had slept between Pella and Mount Pleasant, and now was stirring around as Marlys and Cole talked sporadically and nervously about how they’d do this and that.
“I brought some kitchen gloves so we won’t have to worry about fingerprints, but I don’t know about this DNA stuff. Didn’t have time to research it,” Marlys said.
“We won’t touch anything, won’t leave anything behind. I’ll be ejecting some brass, but we’ll pick it up—and anyway, all my guns are loaded with clean rounds. I clean them off with Windex before I load them, just in case.”
“So . . . not touch anything.”
“Might want to take his wallet so it’ll look like a robbery,” Cole suggested.
“That’s good, but we gotta be sure to be using the kitchen gloves,” Marlys said. They were making it up as they went along. She added, “He’s a cheap old man and he hates the banks and he’s
always had some money—I bet if we looked around his house for a few minutes, we could find some cash.”
“We can always use the cash,” Cole said.
Three blocks from Likely’s house, a familiar stench filled the truck cab and Marlys said, “Oh, boy, I think Caralee just pooped.”
“I
know
she did,” Cole said.
“We better find a place to turn off and clean her up,” Marlys said. “We might not get another chance.”
They backtracked and wound up all the way out on the edge of town, on the side of the road, Marlys working on the tailgate, out of the baby bag; and Cole walked up and down the road, arranging and rearranging the pistol under his shirt, practicing his move, pulling the gun without hanging it up.
As Marlys was finishing with Caralee, the girl said, “Star,” and pointed up, and sure enough, the clouds were moving off to the north, and the stars were lighting up. Marlys threw the disposable dirty diaper in the ditch, and they got back on the road, the windows open for the first few miles, and then Marlys said, “We might need another diaper.”
“Already?” Cole asked.
“For me,” Marlys said. “I’m about to pee my pants.”
—
LIKELY’S STREET WAS DARK
and quiet, but his house showed lights behind the drapes. They parked in his side yard and looked around and then got out, and Cole said, “What about Caralee?”
Marlys hesitated and then said, “I guess we better take her.”
They bundled Caralee out of her seat and trooped up to the porch; they could smell rain and sidewalk worms as they knocked on the door, and a fresh baby-powder odor from the girl.
Likely let them in, said, “Hello . . . Cole? You’re Cole, right? Where’s Jesse? Isn’t that Jesse’s baby?”
“Jesse’s off on a toot,” Marlys said.
—
INSIDE THE HOUSE,
Marlys, with Caralee in her arms, dropped onto a couch. She sighed and said, “I’m tired. Long day,” while Cole prowled around, looking at the old prints and photographs on the wall around the fireplace.
“’Cause we’re old. When we first met up, you could go two days and a night and not think anything of it,” Likely said.
“Thirty years ago,” Marlys said. Then with honest anxiety, “What did this guy want, Joe? This Davenport. I mean, did you tell them you thought it was us?”
“Of course not,” Likely said. “I put him off, but then I got to thinking—it better
not
be you. Sounded like you, though. They’re looking for an older woman with curly white hair and rimless glasses and a young man with distinctive gray eyes who might be her son, and they’ve got a political line that sounds like the party’s. I thought of you and your boys, first thing. A few other people might do that, too, if anybody asks.”