The Digger locks the motel door and the first thing he does is walk to the couch and look at Tye. The boy is still asleep. The blanket has slipped off him and the Digger replaces it.
The Digger turns the TV on and sees pictures of the
Ritzy Lady
boat. Once again he sees that man he recognizes—the . . .
click
. . . the mayor. Mayor Kennedy. He’s standing in front of the boat. He’s wearing a nice suit and a nice tie and it looks odd to see him wearing such a fancy suit with all the yellow bags of bodies behind him. He’s speaking into a microphone but the Digger can’t hear what he’s saying because he doesn’t have the TV volume on because he doesn’t want to wake up Tye.
He continues to watch for a while but no commercials come on and he’s disappointed so he shuts off the TV, thinking, “Good night, Mayor.”
He begins to pack his belongings, taking his time.
Motels are nice, motels are fun.
They come and clean up the room every day. Even Pamela didn’t do that. She was good with flowers and good with that stuff you did in bed. That . . .
click, click . . . that
stuff.
Mind jumping, bullets rattling around the cra . . . crane . . . cranium.
Thinking, for some reason, about Ruth.
“Oh, God, no,” Ruth said. “Don’t do it!”
But he’d been told to do it—to put the long piece of glass in her throat—and so he did. She shivered as she died. He remembers that. Ruth, shivering.
Shivering like on Christmas day, twelve twenty-five, one two two five, when he made soup for Pamela and then gave her her present.
He looks at Tye. He’ll take the boy out . . .
click . . .
West with him. The man who tells him things told him he’d call after they finished in Washington, D.C., and tell him where they’d go next.
“Where will that be?” the Digger asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe out West.”
“Where’s the West?” he asked.
“California. Maybe Oregon.”
“Oh,” responded the Digger, who had no idea where those places were.
But sometimes, late at night, full of soup and smiling at the funny commercials, he thinks about going out West and imagines what he’ll do out there.
Now, as he packs, he decides he’ll definitely take the boy with him. Out West out . . .
click.
Out West.
Yes, that would be good. That would be nice. That would be fun.
They could eat soup and chili and they could watch TV. He could tell the boy about TV commercials.
Pamela, the Digger’s wife, with a flower in her hand and a gold cross in between her breasts, used to watch commercials with him.
But they never had a child like Tye to watch commercials with.
“Me?” Pamela asked. “Have a baby with
you?
Are you mad crazy nuts fucked . . .”
Click
. “. . . fucked up? Why don’t you go
away?
Why are you still here? Take your fucking present and get out. Go away. Do you . . .”
Click . . .
But I love you all the . . .
“Do you need me to spell it out for you? I’ve been fucking William for a year. Is this
news
to you? Everybody in town knows except you. If I were going to have a baby I’d have
his
baby.”
But I love you all the more.
“What are you doing? Oh Je—
Click.
—sus. Put it down!”
The memories are running like lemmings through the Digger’s cranium.
“No, don’t!” she screamed, staring at the knife in his hand. “Don’t!”
But he did.
He put the knife into her chest, just below the gold cross he’d given her that morning, Christmas morning. What a beautiful red rose blossoms on her blouse! He
put the knife in her chest once more and the rose got bigger.
And bleeding bleeding bleeding, Pamela ran for . . . where? Where? The closet, yes, the closet upstairs. Bleeding and screaming, “Oh Jesus Jesus Jesus. . . ”
Pamela screaming, lifting the gun, pointing it at his head, her hand blossoming into a beautiful yellow flower as he felt a thud on his temple.
I love you all the . . .
The Digger woke up sometime later.
The first thing he saw was the kind face of the man who would tell him things.
Click, click
. . .
He now calls his voice mail. No messages.
Where
is he, the man who tells him things?
But there’s no time to think about it, about being happy or sad, whatever they are. There’s only time to get ready for the last attack.
The Digger unlocks the closet. He takes out a second machine pistol, also an Uzi. He puts on the smelly latex gloves and starts to load the clips.
Two guns this time. And no shopping bags. Two guns and lots and lots of bullets. The man who tells him things told him that this time he has to shoot more people than he’s ever shot before.
Because this will be the last minute of the last hour of the last night of the year.
A sweating Parker Kincaid
ran into the FBI Document Division lab.
Lukas walked up to him. Her face was paler than he’d remembered it. “I got your message,” she said. “That reporter—Phillips—he got to one of the mailroom people. Somehow he found out your real name.”
“You
promised,
” he raged.
“I’m sorry, Parker,” she responded. “I’m sorry. It didn’t come from here. I don’t know what happened.”
Dr. Evans and Tobe Geller were quiet. They knew what was going on but, perhaps seeing the look in Parker’s eyes, they wanted no part of it. Cage was not in the room.
Parker had called them on his cell phone as he sped—with a red dashboard flasher borrowed from the agents stationed in front of his house—from Fairfax to downtown. His mind had been racing. How could he control the disaster? All he’d wanted to do was help save some lives. That was his only motive, save some children. And look what had happened . . .
Now his own children would be taken away from him.
The end of the world . . .
He pictured the nightmare if Joan had even partial custody. She’d soon lose interest in mothering. If she couldn’t get a baby-sitter she’d drop them off, alone, at the mall. She’d lose her temper at them. They’d have to fix their own meals, wash their own clothes. He was in despair.
Why the hell had he even
considered
Cage’s request for help tonight?
A small TV sat on a table nearby. Parker turned it on to the news. It was just nine. A commercial ended and smiling pictures of the WPLT “news team” flipped onto the screen.
“Where’s Cage?” he asked angrily.
“I don’t know,” Lukas answered. “Upstairs somewhere.”
Could they move out of the state? he wondered manically. But, no, Joan would fight that and the Virginia courts would still have jurisdiction.
On the screen, that son of a bitch Phillips looked up from a stack of papers and gazed at the camera with a grotesquely sincere expression.
“Good evening. I’m Slade Phillips. . . . Eleven people were killed and twenty-nine were wounded an hour ago in the third of the mass shootings that have terrorized Washington tonight. In this special report we’ll have exclusive interviews with victims and with police on the scene. In addition, WPLT has obtained exclusive videotape of the scene of the most recent killings—on a yacht anchored in the Potomac River.”
Parker, hands clenched, watched silently.
“WPLT has also learned that police and FBI agents were sent to a hotel where it was mistakenly believed
that the killer would strike next, leaving too few officers and agents to respond to the shooting on the boat. It’s not known for certain who is reponsible for this mix-up but informed sources have . . . have reported . . .”
Phillips’s voice faded. The anchor cocked his head, probably listening to someone through the flesh-colored earphone stuck in his ear. He glanced camera right and a shadow of a frown crossed his face. There was a brief pause and his mouth registered defeat as he recited, “Informed sources have reported that District of Columbia Mayor Gerald D. Kennedy is being detained by federal authorities, possibly in connection with this unsuccessful operation. . . . Now, standing by at the site of the most recent shooting, is Cheryl Vandover. Cheryl, could you tell us—”
Cage walked into the lab, wearing an overcoat. He clicked the TV set off. Parker closed his eyes and exhaled. “Jesus.”
“Sorry, Parker,” Cage said. “Things fall through the cracks sometimes. But I made a deal with you and we’re keeping our end of the bargain. Oh, one thing—don’t ever ask me how I did
this
one. You
definitely
don’t wanna know. Now, we got one more chance. Let’s nail this prick. And this time, no foolin’.”
* * *
The limo eased up to the curb in front of City Hall like a yacht docking.
Mayor Jerry Kennedy didn’t like the simile but he couldn’t help it. He’d just been at the Potomac riverside, comforting survivors and surveying the devastation that the Digger had caused. His tall, thin wife, Claire, at his side, they’d been astonished at how the bullets had torn
the decks and cabins and tables to pieces. He could only imagine what the bullets had done to the bodies of the victims.
He leaned forward and clicked the TV off.
“How could he?” Claire whispered, referring to Slade Phillips’s suggestion that Kennedy had in some mysterious way been responsible for the deaths on the boat.
Wendell Jefferies leaned forward, resting his glossy head in his hands. “Phillips . . . I already paid him. I—”
Kennedy waved him silent. Apparently the aide had forgotten about the huge, bald federal agent in the front seat. Bribing media was undoubtedly a federal offense of some kind.
Yeah, Jefferies had paid Slade Phillips his twenty-five thousand. And, no, they’d never get it back.
“Whatever happens,” Kennedy said to Jefferies and Claire solemnly, “I don’t want to hire Slade Phillips as my press secretary.”
His delivery was, as always, deadpan and it took them a minute before they realized it was a joke. Claire laughed. Jefferies still seemed shell-shocked.
The irony was that Kennedy would never have a press secretary again.
Former
politicians don’t need one. He wanted to scream, he wanted to cry.
“What do we do now?” Claire asked.
“We’ll have a drink and then go to the African-American Teachers’ Association party. Who knows? The Digger might still come forward and want the money. I still may have a chance to meet him face-to-face.”
Claire shook her head. “After what happened on the boat? You couldn’t trust him. He’d kill you.”
Couldn’t kill me any deader than the press has done tonight, Kennedy thought.
Claire tacked down her wispy hair with a burst from a small container of perfumed spray. Kennedy loved the smell. It comforted him. The vibrant fifty-nine-year-old woman with keen eyes had been his main advisor since his first days of public office, years ago. To hell with nepotism; it was only that she was white that kept her from being his primary assistant as mayor: a characteristic that she too insisted would put him at a disadvantage in the 60-percent-black District of Columbia.
“How bad is all this?” she asked.
“As bad as it gets.”
Claire Kennedy nodded and put her hand on her husband’s substantial leg.
Neither spoke for a moment.
“Is there any champagne in there?” he asked suddenly, nodding toward the minibar.
“Champagne?”
“Sure. Let’s start celebrating my ignominious defeat early.”
“You wanted to teach,” she pointed out. Then with a wink she added, “Professor Kennedy.”
“And you did too, Professor Kennedy. We’ll tell William and Mary we want adjoining lecture halls.”
She smiled at him and opened the minibar of the limo.
But Jerry Kennedy wasn’t smiling. Teaching would be a failure. A successful job at a Dupont Circle law firm would be a failure. Kennedy knew in his heart that his life’s purpose was to make this struggling, oddly shaped chunk of swampy land a better place for the youngsters who happened to be born here and that his Project 2000 was the only thing faintly within his grasp that would allow that to happen. And now those hopes had been destroyed.
He glanced at his wife. She was laughing.
She pointed to the bar. “Gallo and Budweiser.”
What else in the District of Columbia?
Kennedy lifted up on the door handle and stepped out into the cooling night.
* * *
The guns are finally loaded.
The silencer he’s been using has been repacked and the new one is mounted on the second gun.
The Digger, in his comfy room, checks his pocket. Let’s see . . . He has one pistol with him and two more in the glove compartment of his car. And lots and lots of ammunition.
The Digger takes his suitcase out to the car. The man who tells him things told him that the room was paid for. When it was time to go all he had to do was leave.
He packs his cans of soup and dishes and glasses and takes them in a box to the Everyday People Toyota.
The Digger returns to the room and looks at thin Tye for a few minutes, wonders again where . . .
click
. . . where Out West is then wraps the blanket around him. And carries the boy, light as a puppy, down to the car and puts him in the back seat.
The Digger sits behind the wheel but doesn’t start the car right away. He turns around and looks at the boy some more. Tucks the blanket around his feet. He’s wearing tattered running shoes.
A memory of someone speaking. Who? Pamela? William? The man who tells him things?
“Sleep . . .”
Click, click.
Wait, wait, wait.
“I want you to . . .”
Click, click.
Suddenly there is no Pamela, no Ruth with the glass in her neck, no man who tells him things. There is only Tye.
“I want you to sleep well,” the Digger says to the boy’s still form.
These
are the words he wanted to say to him. He isn’t exactly sure what they mean. But he says them anyway.