The Library at Mount Char (23 page)

“Carolyn?
She
called
here
?”

They all looked at him again. “That's correct,” Hamann said.

“Nooooooo shit,” Erwin said softly. “Huh. What'd she want to talk about?”

“Steve Hodgson was the reason she called,” the president said.

“I ain't followin'.”

“She wanted me to arrange a pardon for him,” the president said.

“Oh?
” Erwin said, very interested now. “
You
talked to her? Yourself? Personal-like?”

“She had the access codes,” Hamann said. He and the president exchanged another glance.

Erwin waited, but neither of them said anything more.
He's holding something back
, Erwin thought.
Access codes will only get you so far. What did she say? What did she say to make that asshole put the president on the phone?
He suddenly thought of the tellers at the bank robbery, of Amrita Krishnamurti, that spotless employee of twelve years, tossing away dye packs, marked bills, her career. But someone was speaking to him. The question was a good one, though. He tucked it away for later examination. “Sorry,” Erwin said. “Say again?”

The president didn't seem too put out about Erwin zoning out. Erwin provisionally decided that he liked the guy. “I
said
,” the president said again, “what made you take an interest in her in the first place?”

“She did a bank robbery three, four weeks back, her and some other lady. Left prints all over the place, at the bank. Everywhere, like. Then, just one single print at the house where they found this Hodgson guy.”

“Just the one print?” the president asked. He sounded like he understood why this was weird, which surprised Erwin again.

Oh. Right. He was a prosecutor
. “Yeah. Just the one. Weird, huh? Usually you either get lots of 'em, or none at all, if they wear gloves. But this time, just one. It was perfect, too. They found it on the plate over the light switch in the dining room, like she rolled it out on a pad.”

“So she wanted us to find it,” the president said. “Why?”

“Don't know,” Erwin allowed. “Good question, though. Wanted us to connect her with this Hodgson guy, maybe?”

“We keep coming back to him. Who is he?”

“Nobody in particular, so far as I can tell. He's a plumber.”

The secretary of state, regal, studied him over the top of her glasses. “A plumber?”

“Yeah,” Erwin said. He spat in the president's trash can. “You know—them guys who make the toilets work? He seemed pretty normal,
though,” he said meditatively. “Not like them bank-robber ladies or the tutu guy.”

“Did anything strike you about him?” the president asked.

Erwin considered the question. “I didn't have a whole lot of time with him. But I don't think he had any more idea what was going on than I do. He seemed all guilty about
something
, though. I couldn't figure out what. He got busted selling a little weed when he was a kid, did two years when he wouldn't roll over on his supplier. No arrests after that, but he got mentioned in a lot of other guys' files.”

“And now?”

“These days he's clean, best I can tell. Other than the dead cop, I mean. And he denies that.”

“Do you believe him?” the president asked.

“Yeah,” Erwin said. “I do. I think she set him up.”

“Why?”

“Leverage, I 'spect. What'd you say when she asked about the pardon?” The president didn't answer. His eyes were like ice.
He said yes, then
. “Never mind. None-a my fucking business. Sorry.”

“You might be right,” the president said. “Leverage. Hmmm. What would she want from him?”

“Dunno. Seems like a lotta trouble to get him to fix a faucet. Does it matter?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, you got Thorpe over there. He ain't much of a negotiator. You gonna kill 'em?”

Everyone was very quiet. Then, after a moment, Hamann spoke. “Thank you, Erwin. That will be all.”

Erwin waited a second, but this time the president didn't override him. “Yeah. Sure.” He spat again. “I wouldn't.”

Now both Hamann and the secretary of state were glaring at him.

“Why not?” the president said.

“I think it's what they want,” Erwin said. “What
she
wants. Whoever she is, she's not dumb. She had to know you'd trace the call, right? And she had to know it would piss you off, getting your cage rattled.”

“She didn't rattle—” Hamann began.

“Yeah. Whatever. So, way I see it, you can either go skip-skip-skippin' down this merry trail she's blazed for you, or you can lay back in the tall grass for a while, see if maybe you can figure out what the fuck is going on.”

The president eyeballed him for a long moment. “Duly noted,” he said. “I'll think it over.”

“You do that. You done with me?”

“Yes.”

Everyone looked relieved.

“Erwin, can you wait for me in the lobby?” Thorpe said. “I'd like a chance to debrief you on a couple other details.”

“Yeah,” Erwin said. He sighed inside, thinking of the fall leaves. “Sure.” He walked out the funky curved door, pausing just a moment to run his fingers across the perfect wainscoting.

T
hey conspired for another hour or so. Erwin, irritated, amused himself by annoying the secretary. Eventually the door opened. The herd of assholes spilled out, most of them glaring at Erwin as they left.

Thorpe was one of the last ones to leave. He walked up to Erwin, eyes wide. “You know,” he said, “they talk about you, in the Unit. Yoshitaka and the others. I'd heard some of the stories. But before today, I never really believed—”

“Hey,” the president called through the open door. “Erwin? Got a second?”

Erwin and Thorpe exchanged a look. “He can't kill me,” Erwin said with a shrug. “I got the Distinguished Service Cross.”

“Two of them. And the Medal of Honor.”

“Yeah, well, that one got all blown out of proportion.” Erwin went back into the Oval Office. “Yes, sir?”

“I wanted to thank you for your help today,” the president said, “and your service to your country, of course.” He paused. “It's been very memorable, meeting you.”

“Yeah. Nice meetin' you, too.” He waved a hand dismissively. “Happy to help and shit.” Erwin paused. “Say, you mind if I ask you something?”

The president gave the question serious consideration before he answered. “Go ahead. I may take the fifth, though.”

Erwin didn't smile. “I didn't vote for you.” He waited for a reaction. There wasn't one. “Reason was, all the time you talked on TV, you always sounded like a dumbass. It was really convincing.”

“Erwin, we should probably—” Thorpe said, from out in the lobby.

“Years of practice,” the president said. “What's your question?”

“I was just wondering why you did that. Pretend to be a dipshit, I mean.”

The president grinned. “Prolly the same fuckin' reason you do.”

They looked at each other for a second, then both of them laughed, long and loud.

“Yeah,” Erwin said. “OK. I'm convinced. Good luck in November!”

“Thanks,” the president said. “I won't need it.”

They both laughed again. Erwin stepped back out into the bitchy secretary's lobby.

“Hey! Erwin?”

He turned around. “Yeah?”

“We do a card game, every other Tuesday. If you're in town, I'd love to have you sit in.”

Erwin considered this. “No ya wouldn't. I'll clean yer fuckin' clock.”

“I can print money,” the president said, grinning again.

“Hmm. Yeah. Good point. OK, I'm in. What time?”

“Around six, usually.”

“See you.”

“Phyllis?” The president's secretary looked up. “Add Erwin to the Tuesday list. If I'm tied up, have Harold take him over to the residence.”

She glowered, then jotted a note down on a legal pad. “Yes, sir.”

Thorpe was looking at Erwin with something like awe. “Be looking forward to it,” Erwin said.

He kinda was, too.

JACK

S
teve had been about twelve when he was orphaned. Even now, he remembered life with his birth parents fairly well. But the car accident that killed them and put him in a coma was a blank, his memory completely gone after breakfast cornflakes three days prior. They told him this was common with violent brain injury. He remembered waking up in a hospital room. It was night, and he had been alone, though his aunt Mary showed up an hour or so later, all tears and hugs. His parents were dead. Steve himself had been in a coma.

He'd gotten a bad concussion. That led to swelling of the brain, hence the coma. If there was permanent damage, no one could find it. Other than his long nap—a little over six weeks—and some minor burns, he was unhurt, remarkably so considering the ferocity of the crash. Years later, in his senior year of high school, Steve tracked down a newspaper photo of the wreckage. A tractor trailer had run a stop sign on a back road, speeding. It smacked into the front end of his mom's Cadillac, essentially flattening the front half. This made jelly of his parents and catapulted Steve into a new life, quite different from the one he was used to.

After an additional two-week hospital stay that ate up his father's life-insurance policy, Aunt Mary brought Steve home to her single-wide trailer. Steve, devastated, tripped over his grief with every thought: my-teeth-feel-fuzzy-better-brush-'em-because-
Mom-says
, I'm-hungry-wonder-if-
Dad
-will-get pizza. The loss throbbed in the core of him like a toothache.

Aunt Mary didn't let this ruin her plans. The night she brought Steve home she went out to a roadside bar called Lee's Stack and got very drunk.
Around two a.m. she rolled back in with a guy named Clem. Steve, done with crying, watched the moon through the window as he listened to Mary and Clem bang the headboard on the other side of the flimsy plastic wall.

The next day Clem drove Steve back to his old house in Mary's aging, rattletrap Dodge. The estate was in bankruptcy—apparently Steve's dad, a real-estate guy, had made some boo-boos. A trustee let them in with a key. Steve got to keep his Commodore 64 computer, his clothes, and a box full of comic books. There were other toys, but he had to pick and choose because space at Mary's place was limited. He wanted to get the television, but Clem snagged it for himself. The trustee hustled them out before the auction started.

Predictably enough, Steve became an angry kid. Commuting to his old school was out of the question, so along with his parents he lost the friends he had known since childhood. Steve was still growing, but clothes were listed well below vodka and cigarettes on Mary's shopping list. A kindly English teacher noticed this and took him out to the Salvation Army, and bought him clothes that fit with her own money. Steve hated her for it, more so when the other kids figured out what was going on.

There were some jokes about that, but they didn't last. When Steve nearly drowned a well-dressed eighth-grader with a smart mouth in an unflushed toilet bowl, he was suspended for two weeks. The kid's parents, red-faced and screaming, wanted him arrested. No one said anything about his clothes after that. Not to his face, anyway.

He started shoplifting almost immediately—books, cassettes, candy, whatever—but it wasn't until a year or so after his parents' death that he committed his first burglary. In his freshman year in high school, on the Friday night of the football team's homecoming, Steve put on his Salvation Army sneakers and jogged through the back woods to an expensive neighborhood eight miles away. That night there was a faint glow in the east, near the neighborhood where he lived when he was young.

He selected a dark house at random, came out of the woods, and hopped the privacy fence around the pool. He carried a hammer and screwdriver, but ended up not needing them. The back door was unlocked. When Steve stepped over the threshold the dry husk of his old life fell away and was abandoned. He moved through the empty house with the savage glee of a
marauding Hun. He'd brought a black pillowcase along with him to carry the loot. It fluttered from his hand as he moved, the flag of his new nation.

Steve, childlike, stole what his eye was drawn to. A box of Milky Ways. Some Atari cartridges. Cassette tapes. Then, in the master bedroom, he happened on the object that set the course of his life. It was a lacquered wood jewelry box. Steve remembered gasping when he opened it. What lay inside glittered like a dragon's hoard: silver chain, diamond earrings, golden rings. As he stole these things his hands trembled the way a newly frocked priest's might, pouring the chalice of his first communion.

Later, alone in his room in the single wide, Steve spread the gold out on his rickety bed and wept, smiling as he did so. In that moment he did not miss his parents at all.

Some months later, he was the veteran of a dozen burglaries, and no longer quite so poor. Mostly through luck he had found an actual fence. Quiet Lou, fat and diabetic, lurked in the very darkest corner of a downtown pawn shop, his face lit from below by closed-circuit television monitors. Lou smoked vile cigars, and his shop had a permanent blanket of smoke floating at eye level. Many pawn-shop owners were legitimate, or mostly so. Lou was not one of these. He and Steve never became friends, but they understood each other.

Not everything Steve stole went to Lou, though. Sometimes he kept things he particularly liked—not smart, but it never completely blew up in his face, either. One such was a leather jacket. It was quilted and heavy, very thick, and smelled of pipe tobacco. Steve kept it for himself.

A week later he met Jack. He was peeing in the boys' bathroom at school, later than usual for class that morning. One other kid was in there sneaking a smoke. Steve knew Jack slightly from a common gym class, but Jack was a junior, and rich. The gulf between them might as well have been the Grand Canyon…except for the fact that Jack, the clean-cut scion of two devout Mormons, also had a feral streak.

“Nice jacket,” Jack said, over the sound of urine on porcelain.

Steve didn't look around. “Thanks.”

“Where'd you get it, if you don't mind my asking?”

Steve shook off and zipped up. “The store.”

“Oh yeah? Which one?”

“I forget.” Steve could feel his pulse pounding in his neck, in his temples.

“It wouldn't be the ‘Maurley house' store would it? 'Cause I know a guy over at Kennedy whose dad had a jacket just like that. Same stain on the elbow and everything. Somebody robbed his house a couple weeks back. They got the jacket.”

Steve turned to Jack, looked at him.

Jack's grin faded. “Relax, man. I ain't gonna say nothing. The kid's an asshole anyway.”

“Thanks.”

“Tell you what—why don't you meet me after class? We can go hit the mall or something. You can tell me all about how you got that jacket. Maybe we'll burn one.”

A cautious smile flickered on Steve's face. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

As it turned out, they burned not one but two joints on the way to the mall, and wandered through the stores high as kings. They didn't come home with Jack's trunk bulging with loot that time, but they did the next day and a lot of days after that.

Jack was an easygoing, wry guy. His own amorality flowed from a different place than Steve's. Steve, by nature an introvert, had long since figured out the basics of his own psychology. Jack he never quite understood. Jack's parents were solid, churchgoing types. To all appearances they were happy, and Steve got a pretty close look. Jack's brother was a church youth-group type.

Jack could be raw, angry. His temper snapped at unpredictable times. Steve once saw him beat the shit out of a guy behind a movie theater for spilling popcorn—not on Jack himself, or even a person, just on the floor. He and Steve got into it more than a couple of times as well, blacking eyes, bloodying noses. Usually Jack started it, and he always came over to Steve's place afterward, shame-faced, and apologized. It got to where Steve would roll the joint in anticipation of his arrival and wave off the actual apology.

Within six months or so, Jack's family semi-adopted him. He spent three nights a week at their house, sleeping on the floor in Jack's room
or in the bedroom down the hall. Jack's parents never said anything, but Steve got the feeling that they knew his situation, perhaps pitied him. Steve resented that at first, but Martin and Celia were so old-fashioned nice that he just couldn't dislike them. They bought him presents on his birthday, for fuck's sake.

Steve had done dozens of burglaries by then, enough that it got written up in the paper. Jack was with him on seven of them. By the last two, Steve thought that Celia and Martin were beginning to suspect that something was up, but they never really probed. Steve figured they were afraid of what they might find out.

Perhaps they were wiser than they knew. On the most recent burglary Jack had suggested that they use gasoline from the garage to burn the place down. “We should torch the place, man! Cover our tracks!”

Steve, the acknowledged leader on the burglaries, vetoed this. That night he slept at Mary's trailer for the first time in several days. He lay awake in the moonlight until almost dawn, flopping around in the bed, wondering if his friend might be crazy. Two weeks later Jack shat on an old lady's bed and wiped his ass with her aging, yellowed wedding photo.

Jack funneled some of the pawn profits into a sideline business, buying small quantities of pot from a guy Steve knew, cutting it with oregano, selling it to other high school kids. It was a solid if unremarkable stream of spending money. Then one of their clients, a freshman girl, got caught with a baggie in her purse. In tears, she promptly confessed who she bought it from. The police showed up at Jack's house and searched his room. Jack left with them, in handcuffs.

The legal trouble ended up being not that big of a deal—juvenile court, record expunged, blah-blah—but from the standpoint of Jack's family it might as well have been Armageddon.

Naturally enough, Celia and Martin blamed Steve. Probably, he thought now, there was some justification for this. At the time, though, it seemed like the grossest injustice. They forbade Jack from hanging out with Steve. He was barred from the house, exiled back to Mary's trailer.

The two of them still hung out, of course, but now they had to be circumspect. No more trips to the mall, at least not in Jack's car. Steve started thinking about ways to get his own car, started scanning the
classifieds with a pen in his hand. But the numbers were oppressive. He could probably figure out a way to steal one—it wasn't his specialty, but he was becoming very good with locks. Registering it would be another matter, however. Something decent would probably cost around $2,000, five times as much money as he had on hand. Steve went to Quiet Lou. They talked numbers. Lou mentioned pharmacies.

A month later he and Jack climbed up the back of an independent pharmacy with a diamond-tipped circular saw normally used for cutting through concrete. Quiet Lou had sold them the saw at a good price, and promised to buy it back when they no longer needed it. It was noisy, but it got the job done. Three quick strokes cut a black triangle out of the roof. If that had tripped the alarm, there was no sign.

Steve had tied footholds into eighty feet of strong nylon rope. One at a time they climbed down between the shelves, silent as wraiths. In residential burglaries Steve made a habit of turning on the lights—flashlights bobbing through darkened houses would look odd to the neighbors—but here he didn't have that option. He never found out for sure, but he thought it was their flashlights that had betrayed them. A neighbor? A passing car? Who knew.

The layout was unfamiliar, and it took time to locate the bottles that Lou was interested in. They split up and scanned the shelves in parallel. Steve's heart thumped in his chest. Jack whistled. One at a time the prizes fell to their search—valium, Xanax, Vicodin, morphine sulfate, cough syrup, brand-name and generic, many doses, many bottles. Steve was still using the black pillowcase. Soon it bulged.