A broad smile crosses his face. “Really? Well, nice to meet you . . .”
“Jack . . .”
“Nice to meet you, Jack. Evan should be here any minute.”
My heart leaps up into my throat. He’s coming
here?
I haven’t just found the father; I’ve got the son, right here, right now. The gift box just got shinier. The bow a little bigger.
But I need the element of surprise and if Hap or Evan or whatever the fuck his name is drives up now, the tables could turn in a matter of seconds. I manage to say, “Excellent! He’ll be so happy to see me.”
His dad pulls out a cell phone. “He probably stopped off to load up on groceries. Let me call him and tell him you’re here, Jack. Hurry him on his way.”
I keep my voice even, keep the smile on my face. “That’d be great.” I pause, like I’m thinking more about it. “You know what, though? He has no idea I’m coming to see him and I’d love to surprise him.”
His dad laughs. “Sure. He hasn’t kept up with any of his old friends, so this’ll be a nice treat for him.”
I look down the street, my ears straining to pick up the sound of an approaching engine. I need to get out of the front yard, be inside the house when Hap comes through the door with grocery bags in his hands.
“Can I use your bathroom?”
“Of course.”
He leads the way up his front steps. “How do you know Evan?”
“We used to run trucks together in Boston. Ten years ago.”
“You’re kidding me. Well, I’ll be.”
He approaches the front door, and my instincts fail me, I don’t see it coming, I am so sure fate is smiling on me that I don’t notice the warning signs. The father asking to use his cell phone. The quick way he warmed to me.
We reach the front door and the old man opens it in a flourish and screams “Evan! There’s a killer here . . .” and then I bash him in the side of the head before he can say any more but it’s already too late.
I counted on a lot of things but one thing I never imagined is Hap telling his old man exactly what he did for a living. I didn’t count on Hap being home and I didn’t count on his father covering for him, and I didn’t count on that old bastard bellowing out like a wailing siren.
I barely see a flash of feet bounding up a nearby staircase before I have a chance to get my bearings, have my eyes adjust to the light. If he had cared about his father before, enough to throttle a kid who had stolen his old man’s wallet, he certainly doesn’t care any more. The years of being a bag man have forced the survival instinct into him, and he is fleeing. If I kill his father, so be it.
I sprint into the house and dart for the stairwell when a volley of bullets cascade down at me like a dozen wasps defending the nest. As soon as the avalanche recedes and I hear his feet clomping away, I fire through the ceiling and then hurry up the steps two at a time.
I peek around the corner quickly, just enough to catch a glimpse, fully expecting another shot, but instead, I see Hap smash through a second-story window and I am moving to the end of the hallway and looking down and he is already rolling up off the grass like a cat and running away. I don’t hesitate and fling myself out the window, bracing my knees to absorb the fall, and then roll with it and up at the same time.
He should have been waiting for me to jump and then shot me as soon as I hit the ground but he didn’t and I’m up and running after him without missing a step. I’m faster than he is, and he’s going to have to make a move as we sprint across lawn after lawn, but I can tell something is wrong with him, something’s amiss. He hasn’t tried to pop a shot off at me since the spray of bullets down the stairwell, hasn’t tried to distract me or keep me at bay so he can duck between houses, and I realize I’m in luck after all; I caught Hap unprepared. He had to scramble off his father’s couch when the old man signaled him and he only had time to sprint up the stairs and grab his gun but he had been lazy and hadn’t scooped up a second clip and he’s out of bullets now.
He makes his move, and just as a young couple down the street steps out of their front door, Hap lowers his shoulder and barrels into the house. I am twenty steps behind him and the husband just looks at me and yells “Hey!” but he sees my gun out and grabs his wife and backs away and I am past him and through the front door and I am hoping the layout of this house is different from Hap’s father’s house, different than the house he grew up in, but it looks familiar, and I hear a clinking coming from a nearby doorway, a drawer overturning in the kitchen and I scramble to the sound and smash through the swinging door but he is on me before I can get into the room and he buries a knife into my shoulder.
“Hiya, Columbus!” he says with eyes filled to the brim with fire.
I fall and my gun clatters across the tile floor in the kitchen and Hap scrambles for it, but I trip him up with my good arm and he topples and I am smashing him in the ribs with my fist as hard as I can.
Ten minutes is all we have to kill each other. Ten minutes from when that young husband whipped out his cell phone and dialed 9-1-1 as soon as we blitzed by him into his house, so if we’re gonna do this, we need to do it now and get it finished and get the fuck out of here. Hap knows it and I know it and we’re going to fight right here to the death in this middle-class suburban kitchen because there’s no time and no other way to do it and it is and might as well be. He drives his fist into the kitchen knife handle buried in my shoulder, and fuck if I’m not blacking out but this is a goddamn hand-to-hand fight to the death and I cannot afford to go dark. Not now. Not after all I’ve done, not after I traveled from East to West, from spring to winter, from present to past to present and saw so much and gave up so much. Not now when the finish line is so close I can smell it like the salt in the air.
I open my jaws as wide as I can and bite into his side like a rabid dog and his arm that was reaching for my gun on the tile floor is forced back involuntarily by the pain and that’s all I need. I get my knees under me and leap for the gun past his retreating arm and I snatch it up in my good hand, my left hand, and flip over and point it at Hap’s head with my finger on the trigger, and I see it in his eyes. The life goes out of them like the electricity has been cut. He is defeated.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“Vespucci fingered me?”
“No. He stayed true blue.”
“Then how?”
“You told me a story once. The first time I loaded truck for you.”
“What?”
“You told me you killed a kid who stole your father’s wallet. You told me you did time at Skyline Hall in Sacramento.”
He nods now, resigned. “I did?”
“Yeah.”
“I was still pretty new at this then.”
“Yeah.”
“Look, I’m sorry I killed your man. I was just doing what you would have done.”
“Yeah.”
He tries to sit up straighter, but the pain from my bite makes him wince a bit. “Then I guess you gotta do what you gotta . . .”
I shoot Hap in the head at close range and his face disappears before he can finish the sentence.
Five minutes now. With a bloody arm, with a knife stuck in my shoulder, but with something else, too: resolve. I climb to my feet, open the kitchen door that leads directly to the backyard and I am moving through it, into the sunlight, blinking my eyes.
CHAPTER 16
I am the son.
The same side, the same shoulder, the same fucking arm. First a bullet, then a knife, and now my arm is virtually useless. It has turned an ugly shade of black—even against my skin it is prominent—and I’m not sure if it will ever function properly. I have it cleaned and bandaged and I hit myself with a cocktail of medications but I’m not a triage doctor and if I tried to seek professional help now I’d be out of the game.
There’s a dead man named Evan Feldman in his neighbor’s kitchen and there’s my blood splashed on that floor and they’ll be looking for a wounded man with blood type B positive trying to get stitched up at emergency rooms all over the city. I’m stuck with one worthless arm and the convention is now two days away and I have seventeen hours until Congressman Abe Mann will be alone on the twenty-second floor of the Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
I am the son.
Pooley is dead and the man who killed him is dead and Mr. Cox is dead and so many others are dead and Vespucci is alive and full of regrets. I am alive, but I’m not whole.
I have seventeen hours and I’ll be damned if I am defeated now. Not after all this, not after I let the past back in and it forced me to my knees and goddammit, GOD DAMN IT, I’m losing my grip on the slippery ball of sanity floating somewhere in my head. There’s a mirror in this cheap hotel room where the clerk didn’t even look up when he took my cash and handed me a key, and my face is gaunt and pained and stretched as tight as a guitar string. I look into my own eyes and I force them to stare back at me, force them to fill up with that same resolve I’ve always relied upon, that same resolve that improbably got me out of that bedroom in Italy, that same resolve that kicked Jake Owens in the stomach in her apartment in Boston. I am Columbus, a Silver Bear, and whoever hired three assassins to kill Abe Mann the week of his nomination will not be disappointed because I am the son.
So how to get close to a man who has more security surrounding him than almost any man on Earth? How to get close to him even though I’m out of time and wounded and I have no resources at my fingertips?
And then it comes to me. The only solution, the only way to finish this. It was in front of me the whole time; it was in Vespucci’s words and in my own mantra and it is as clear to me as the sky after a storm.
I fashion a sling out of a white T-shirt and shower and make myself as presentable as possible. In the dust-caked mirror, I shave my face and check my reflection and nod, pleased. I look plain and unassuming. The injury is unfortunate, a red flag, but nevertheless I no longer look like an escaped mental patient.
I drive from the decrepit hotel on the outskirts of East Los Angeles to Interstate 10 and then off a few side streets to Grant and the front of the Standard. The hotel is modern and angular and stark in that West Coast style that emphasizes design flair over comfort. A valet parker exchanges a ticket for my keys and I enter the white lobby and get my bearings.
It doesn’t take me long to find what I’m seeking. A coterie of secret service agents huddle near a bank of elevators, stern expressions on their faces, eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses. A blond female whom I recognize from standing on the sides of daises in Indianapolis and Seattle is dressed differently from the security officers but shares their grave expressions. She is holding a clipboard.
I approach her and feel every eye shift toward me, sizing up my arm in the makeshift sling.
“Excuse me.”
“Yes?” She studies me with a smile that looks as though it were forced on to her face under duress.
“How would I go about seeing Congressman Mann?”
She snorts and I see two of the Secret Service officers move their hands inside their jackets.
“I’m sorry. The congressman is unavailable at the moment.”
“He’ll see me.”
She looks at the agents and they nod as if to tell her they are ready for any move I might make.
“And you are?”
“I’m his son . . .” And immediately they have me under the arm and are leading me forcefully away.
“Tell him LaWanda Dickerson’s son! Tell him that!” She looks at me queerly as I am jerked into an empty conference room off the lobby. Ten secret service officers materialize like magic and follow me into the room.
The senior officer is a man of forty or so with a bald head and hard eyes. He speaks with a higher voice than I would have guessed, like air blowing through an organ pipe, but he also speaks calmly, soothingly.
“Okay, friend. Let’s start by seeing some identification. Can you hand me your wallet?”
I shake my head. “I don’t have one.”
“No identification?”
“No.”
“What’s your name?”
“John Smith.”
He smiles, showing me I’m not going to get under his skin. “Okay, John. I’m going to have the man behind you pat you down while I keep a gun pointed at your head. Is that okay?”
“Yes.”
This tells him two things. One, I’m not carrying a gun or a knife because he knows a man who is about to be patted down would gain nothing by lying about it. And two, I don’t fear having a gun on me, which means I’ve undoubtedly had experience with it before. I can see this work itself out in his mind, but he keeps his face even. He pulls out his pistol and does as he said he’d do, points it a mere foot from my forehead.
“Are you carrying a bomb?”
All the eyes in the room are riveted on me.
“No.”
“What’s wrong with your arm, John?”
“I was shot and then I was stabbed.”
“You sound like a busy man.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, John. Stand up and Larry will frisk you now.”
“Go easy on the arm.”
“Okay, John.”
I rise to my feet and the large man behind me pats me down as thoroughly as if he’s taking my measurements. I wince as he searches up my bandaged arm and under it, not going easy at all. I regret saying anything; naturally that’s where he’d search the hardest for anything untoward.
Larry nods at the senior officer and he lowers his gun. “Okay, John. You are unarmed. You may sit.”
“Thank you.”
“What is your business with Congressman Mann?”
“That’s between Congressman Mann and myself.”
“Okay, John. Would you mind if we took your fingerprints?”
“I don’t mind.”
“Great.”
A pad of ink is produced and I get my fingers ready but before they are pressed onto the moist purple pad a door opens and a female voice speaks up to a room as silent as a graveyard. “Abe wants to see him.”