A Thousand Years of Darkness: a Thriller (4 page)

The barmaid with the droopy ribbon returned with his drink. “Here you go, honey.”

“Do you have a table available?” he asked, looking around.

“There’s an empty one in the corner,” replied the barmaid, whose name tag introduced her as
Brandi
. “You folks going to eat?”

Trout picked up his whiskey and Judy’s martini. “Do you have a menu?”

Brandi pointed. “It’s up on the wall.”

“Of course it is.”

Judy followed as Trout wended his way through the noisy patrons to a round, bare table in a dim corner. He moved his chair across from Judy’s and tossed off a long draught from his glass and waited for the liquor to hit his stomach and spread its relaxing warmth through the rest of his body. Judy waited, watching him. She knew his routine by now.

“Damn!” he exclaimed, shaking his head. He finished off the drink and lifted a finger at Brandi for another one.

“You drinking on an empty stomach,” Judy pointed out.

“I have to be at least half-drunk before I go home. Marilyn has something planned for us tonight with her society friends.”

“Politicians?”

“Everything in Washington is about politics. We’re all mad. Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped in a Lewis Carroll novel.”

Judy was lighting a cigarette. She looked puzzled.

“Lewis Carroll,” Trout snapped. “
Alice in Wonderland.”

“I ain’t stupid,” Judy protested.

“Put out that damned cigarette. That’s one vice I can’t stand.”

She stamped the cigarette out on the edge of the table and flipped the butt on the floor. “What vice
can
you stand?” she asked.

He took her hand. “Sorry, baby,” he said. “If you only knew what it’s like in that pit of professional parsers, bullshitters and liars. They can’t get through a single day without bending or breaking the truth. God forbid anyone calls them on it. They rally around each other like a pack of wild dogs, howling and snapping while they try to hide from the people that they’re robbing the people of everything they have.”

“Why do you stay then?” Judy asked.

He finished off his second drink and couldn’t lift his eyes to meet hers. Truth was, Washington politics and the power that accompanied them could be the most potent addiction on the planet. Being close to the seats of power was like living above all the petty limitations that curbed the appetites of ordinary citizens. Even teenage interns expected to be seated at the best tables and deferred to by their mentors’ chauffeurs.

Although Trout kept promising himself he would make the break someday, he doubted he ever would. Marilyn’s father had been a senior congressman from Illinois until he died last year after forty years in the House. Marilyn and her brother Joe both stumped for President Anastos’ election, Wiedersham as campaign advisor. Trout had met Marilyn and Joe through his own father, who served two terms in Congress before he got disgusted and moved back home to Iowa. Trout’s old man was an anomaly in the Beltway—an honest man with principle. Thinking of his father sometimes embarrassed the son at what he had allowed himself to become.

“Dennis,” Senate Majority Leader Wiedersham preached, “you watch yourself, play ball with the right people and don’t do anything stupid like screwing a senator’s wife and you’re on the fast track. Things are not going well in Illinois’ Ninth District. The DNC has mentioned you as a possible candidate.”

With that promise looming in his future, Trout was honest enough to confess he wasn’t about to run off to Bugfuck, Oklahoma, with a bleach-blonde he had picked up in a bar one night. Things were good enough for him just like they were. Judy was his pressure valve. A roll in the rack, a good Lewinsky, and he was ready to charge back into the ring with the big boys.

She was also the only person he could really open up to, who would listen and then, most conveniently, forget; she wasn’t the sharpest knife in the chef’s drawer.

He ordered a third drink, straight whiskey this time.

“Hittin’ it a little heavy, ain’t you, honey?” Brandi observed.

“Just keep ’em coming until I say enough,” Trout retorted.

He sat there seething, elbows on the table, glaring into his glass of amber liquid. He was accustomed to using Judy as his sounding board following a few drinks. After relieving his conscience with talk, he would further reduce stress by escorting her to the studio apartment he rented for her over by George Washington University and banging her brains out. If she thought she was being used, she never complained.

Suddenly, he opened up in a single blast: “They killed those people in cold blood. They were nothing but a bunch of ordinary people. They manufactured the incident. The newspapers and cable are going along to show the Tea Party Movement plotting to overthrow the U.S. Government—”

Shock immobilized Judy’s over-painted face. Trout caught himself. He might have gone too far this time in revealing to an outsider that his own government was guilty of outright murder. There was a big difference between telling a bimbo
that
and complaining to her over being slighted or insulted by a senator’s aide or bitching about a bill introduced by some congressman to redistribute pork money.

“Who’re
they
?” Judy asked.

He had said enough. “They. Them. What the fuck’s the difference?” He tossed off his drink and moved the subject around to Judy’s pending trip to Oklahoma.

“When will you be returning to Washington?” he asked.

“After the funeral. My kinfolk is all gonna be in Tulsa for it.”

Ron Sparks, the census official found hung in the cemetery, had been Judy’s cousin.

Chapter Seven

Tulsa

James Nail drove past the giant Praying Hands at Oral Roberts University and parked his pickup truck in the service lot across the road from the massive stadium. He got out, belted on his holster with the Glock in it, drew on a blue vest with POLICE stenciled in gold lettering on the back, flipped a ball cap marked TPD onto his head and he was ready. He stuffed a few extra quick-tie plastic cuffs into his vest pocket. Radicals like those expected to protest the appearance of conservative TV talk show personality Jerry Baer had a bad habit of throwing things at police and forcing confrontations.

The long driveway to the stadium had been cordoned off for Baer’s arrival. People were already starting to gather. Task Force Lieutenant Jack Ross, supervisor for the event, stood in full uniform at the top of the broad granite stairway that led into the convention center, looking straight down the corridor where other uniformed cops were stationed at intervals to keep the crowds pushed back and the drive clear. Lieutenant Ross was taller than Nail, a few years older, rather thin and solemn, with his bill cap pulled low to shade his eyes from the late afternoon sun. He gave Nail a friendly nod. Ross had been Nail’s first supervisor years before in Patrol Division.

“I hated to call you in on your day off,” Ross apologized. “But I needed every available cop, uniformed or not. If you have a hot babe on the string, I’m sure she’ll wait.”

“I wish.”

Lieutenant Ross tipped his head toward a grassy knoll that lay behind and to the right of the swelling crowds that lined the corridor. Several hundred noisy activists wearing either ACOA (Association of Community Organization Activists) red T-shirts or PEIU (Public Employees International Union) blue Tees were creating a ruckus and thrusting signs about as though they were weapons.

BAER THE BIGOT

STOP THE HATE!

DESTROY NAZIS!

“The clans are gathering,” Ross observed.

“More like the venal herd,” Nail replied.

“I didn’t realize you knew big words.”

“My ex-wife is a school teacher.”

A teacher on the near edge of the grassy knoll lined up her fifth graders in choir formation and led them in a chant to the tune of
Jesus Loves Us:

Umm-Umm-Umm,

Patrick Wayne Anastos.

He said we must be fair today.

Equal work means equal pay.

Umm-Umm-Umm,

Patrick Wayne Anastos.

He said that black, yellow, red or white,

All are equal in his sight.

Ross grimaced. “All we need is a granite Anastos statue where the faithful can fall down and worship the messiah.”

Nail scanned the demonstrators for his daughter. He quickly picked out Rupert Madison, community organizer and Jamie’s boyfriend. Red ACOA T-shirt, red do-rag tied around long, scraggly hair, red placard bearing a yellow hammer and sickle with President Anastos’ picture underneath it and the inscription
HOPE ’N CHANGE
. Nail could never understand what Jamie saw in this piece of garbage.

He was starting to feel relieved that he didn’t see Jamie when he spotted her in the middle of the protestors. He turned his head away. Her mother Connie had been a “progressive” rabble rouser in college. Jamie had taken after Connie in politics as well as in good looks.

* * *

Lieutenant Ross ducked into the ORU Center to check on inside security, leaving Nail to man the supervisory post outside the big double doors. Since the auditorium was already filled to capacity, the overflow waited merely to catch a glimpse of “the Thomas Paine of this generation” when he arrived. Police had stretched rope barricades the entire length of the drive to the stadium door.

The fifth graders and their teacher continued to chant “
Umm-Umm-Umm Patrick Wayne Anastos
.” Rupert and his bunch grew louder and more obnoxious. Jamie, though somewhat more subdued than her fellow demonstrators, still seemed to be having a serious good time shouting and stamping her feet.

The sudden surge and roar of the crowds at the turnoff onto the campus from Lewis Avenue announced the arrival of Baer’s cavalcade. A pair of black Suburbans with tinted windows appeared, moving slowly along the opened corridor toward the stadium’s back doors. People cheered and waved every time a smiling Jerry Baer stuck his head out the back window of the lead vehicle and waved.

Nail had never watched the guy on TV. He was therefore surprised to discover that the hero of America’s Tea Party Movement was a rather round-faced doughboy in his forties with unruly hair sticking out like bristles all over his pale scalp. He more resembled a baker or a used car salesman than the phenomenon that had the political community’s underwear caught in the cracks of their asses.

Things seemed to be under control so far. The demonstrators were louder than ever, but appeared content to play to the Six O’clock news channels. The twin Suburbans stopped at the bottom of the broad granite stairway. Nail’s narrowed eyes scanned the crowd for trouble. Anything could happen these crazy days in America.

A brace of tough-looking bodyguards with pistols on their hips jumped out of the trail car and stationed themselves fore and aft of Baer’s vehicle. A cheer went up from Baer supporters while protesters went into a frenzy, yelling obscenities and threats and jabbing their placards and signs in Baer’s direction. Baer alighted from his car wearing blue jeans, a white dress shirt, gray sports jacket and his trademark white sneakers. Waving and laughing with
his
people.

A well-built young woman who appeared to be in her early thirties got out of the car behind Baer. She wore navy blue form-fitting slacks, a white blouse, and a blue ribbon that set off her curly black hair and olive complexion. Pretty girl. Nail assumed she was Baer’s wife.

Cops expected any threat to Baer would most likely originate from the protestors. Nail noticed Baer’s head suddenly tilting toward the sky. A look of horror traced his smile into a death rictus. The detective snapped his eyes skyward in time to see a medium-sized Bell helicopter sweep in low above the domed roof of the ORU Convention Center. It bore the Channel 6 News bird on its fuselage. Nail hadn’t heard it because of the constant roar of the crowd.

The chopper came in at full throttle and air-skidded to a halt above Baer’s stopped vehicles. Two men wearing ski masks, sleeveless bullet-proof vests, and harnesses to keep them from falling out were crouched in the chopper’s open doorway. Both were armed with squad automatic weapons instead of TV cameras, SAWs like those carried by troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The jailhouse tat of a dragon on a bare arm from shoulder to wrist seared itself into Nail’s memory.

Oh, God! Jamie!

Nail charged down the granite steps, his hand darting for the Glock at his belt, ignoring the helicopter as his eyes searched for his daughter. Let the bodyguards protect Baer.

The scumbags in the chopper opened fire, the sound of their weapons like the magnified ripping of sailcloth. Stunned silence in the crowd for two or three heartbeats, people trying to digest what was happening. Then panic set in. Hellish screams of terror and tramping feet as people ran over each other in sudden blind flight.

Nail raced downrange past the hood of Baer’s suburban, toward where he had last seen Jamie. Bullets clanged into the vehicle, gouged a line across the pavement ahead of him, and ricocheted in all directions. He heard a shout of pain and surprise as Baer slammed to the ground, his writhing body spewing blood, painting a pinkish stain in the air.

Nail dodged to one side and emptied a full clip from his Glock at the helicopter as it darted around the sky like a dragonfly. At least it gave the assholes in it something to think about.

Salvos from the helicopter cut a swath through the massed protesters. Nail glimpsed Jamie’s yellow shirt. A long-hair next to her went down hard, leaving another little pink cloud where he had been. Nail lost sight of Jamie when she dropped to her knees to help the wounded man.

So desperate was he to reach his daughter that nothing else mattered. He sailed over Baer’s convulsing body and dodged around one of the bodyguards. A gunman in the chopper opened up again in his direction.