Cape Disappointment (12 page)

“What do you call an anorexic booger?” I said.

“What?”

“Slim Pickens.”

“Oh, you are a charmer.”

I buried my face in her chest, nuzzling her, an activity I'm sure Bert would have handed over his life savings to perform. Not that he had any life savings. She stroked the back of my neck.

“I'll try to find a replacement for this trip I'm supposed to take with Jane.”

“So we can scram out of town tonight?”

“I'll make a reservation. At this time of year they're bound to have openings in the middle of the week, but I'll call anyway. I'm glad you thought of this. See you tonight. We can have dinner on the road.”

“Sounds good.” When I reached the doorway, I turned around and said, “Don't you think Mr. Slezak was a little out of line?”

“He's harmless. Do you know what they've got him on now? The latest?”

“Lithium?”

“No. His brother bailed him out this morning. Friday night and Saturday morning he held off a sheriffs SWAT team. They went out to arrest him because he was back on his grandmother's property again. He was in the trailer watching TV when they asked his grandmother if he had any weapons. She admitted he had three shotguns, a couple of semiautomatic rifles, at least eight pistols, and five thousand rounds of ammunition. So the SWAT team surrounded the trailer and ordered him out. He looked out the window, sized up the situation, and told them to get lost. They ended up waiting eight hours until he drank himself to sleep. God only knows how I talked the judge into bail.”

“He fire any shots?”

“He didn't even talk to them. He just wouldn't come out. I wish there was some good mental health facility we could get him into, something that didn't cost an arm and a leg. And to answer your question, no. He claims he didn't touch any of the weapons. I'll have to wait for discovery and see what they're actually alleging.”

“Ought to be good.”

“Don't be gleeful about somebody else's misfortunes.”

“Me?”

“You're the one who always says we're all just one banana peel on the sidewalk away from being in the shoes of one of these crackpots.” “That was a wise man, said that.” “Yes, it was. And I love him, too.”

I WAS SLIDING BEHIND
the wheel of my Ford sedan in a quiet little parking spot under the Alaskan Way Viaduct near the ferry terminal when a man appeared at the side of the car, opened the door, and skidded into the passenger seat as if stealing third base. For a second I thought he was a panhandler hopped up on speed, but it was Bert Slezak, smirking as if we were best friends, his pale blue eyes entombed in his perpetually sunburned face.

As always, his features were capable of contorting through an infinite range of expressions. Snake was the same. I'd never figured out if the brothers did it in a calculated manner, or if it was some Marlon Brando acting gene they were born with. They both also wore a façade of toughness like a Kevlar vest, though underneath they were uncommonly brittle.

“Hey, man,” he said.

“What do you want?”

“I would never have propositioned your old lady if I'd known you were in the other room.”

“Of course not. You might get your neck broken. Best to do it while I'm out of town, or laid up with a bad gall bladder.”

“The government's still after me for things I did years ago. They'll frame me any time they get the chance.” He let the non sequitur hang in the air, as if he were well-known for thumbing his nose at the highest
echelons of power, world famous for his imbroglios with the U.S. government, spats with congressional leaders, and the president— instead of just being a common drunk who ended up in court for punching out waiters or cutting parking meters down with a Sawzall. “You want to knock my head off?” Bert continued. “Go ahead. Take your best shot. I won't do nothing. One free shot, right there.” His smile was disarming. His brother could smile disarmingly, too, though on a normal day neither smiled much. When they did, their contagious enthusiasm vacuumed you in. I knew they came from a family where their alcoholic father had beaten them regularly, where their mother was blotto most days, and that one day when they were fourteen their father vanished in the desert near their New Mexico home never to be seen again.

“What do you want, Bert?”

“This isn't a regular Taurus, is it? It's the sleeper with the big motor and the race-tuned suspension.”

“Spit it out, Bert. I've got someplace I need to be.”

“It's just Kathy is still working for Sheffield. I warned her, but she won't listen.”

“What's wrong with working for Sheffield?”

“Seriously, can you get her out of there?”

“Tell me why.”

“Can't you just trust me on this?”

“No.”

“Sheffield's got a black cloud hanging over her.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just tell Kathy she needs to be someplace else for the next few weeks.”

“Are you making a threat against Sheffield?”

“Don't put words in my mouth. I wouldn't hurt a flea on my dog's ass. This isn't about politics. They're all the same to me, politicians. They all come out of the same barrel. But Kathy's special, she can make shit smell like pineapple, and I don't want to see her hurt. Get her out of there.”

“Give me a reason.” I was fishing now, trying to see if I could get him to incriminate himself, for this sounded vaguely—or perhaps not so vaguely—like a threat against Senator Sheffield. Despite his protest to
the contrary, from some of the things his brother had said about him over the past months, I had a feeling Bert was a political nutcase, though the cast of his politics was unclear. His life had been lived in a blur of mismanagement and screwups: five marriages, an erratic employment record, and a sequence of petty crimes that never seemed to let up. I'd looked up his record when he first came to Kathy and learned that, although nearing fifty and having been exhibit A in more courtrooms than any of us could count, he had only one major conviction.

Most people had established some sort of order in their lives by the time they reached their fifties, yet Bert's life continued to soar out of control. People of his ilk camped under bridges or slept inside a cardboard box in three pairs of pants and four coats, and I had a notion he was only a few steps from that ignominy himself. That or the nuthouse. He knew it, too, and it must have terrified him.

“A reason? You need a reason? I can't give a reason. Can't you just get her out of there on my say-so?”

“No.”

He stared at the dashboard for a minute. “Okay. I get premonitions.”

“You have a premonition about Sheffield?”

“Right.”

“What does your premonition say?”

“She's not going to make it.”

“You talking about Sheffield falling down the stairs or—?”

“I'm not predicting … Maybe it'll be more like an asteroid hurtling through the skies and obliterating her building. Think along the lines of an asteroid. Would you want Kathy standing next to Sheffield if you knew an asteroid was going to squash Sheffield next week?”

“You got a hot tip on an asteroid?”

“You're making fun of me. Okay. I can buy that. I've been made fun of. But …”

“You can see into the future?”

“Sometimes, yeah.”

“Why didn't you see that you were going to get arrested last week?”

“I know you don't think much of me, but Kathy needs to quit Sheffield.”

“Tell her yourself.”

“I did. She told me to get lost.”

“You want my honest opinion?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

“Get lost.”

He gave me a sheepish look. “She says I need mental health counseling.”

“Something to think about.”

He gave me a bashful grin. “I was hoping you would see the light.”

Like his brother, Elmer, Bert was considerably more lethal than he appeared to be, like a horsefly with a stinger. Out of curiosity, I'd read his book on UFOs— proud of his brother's literary legacy, Snake kept a box of the books at his place. Reading
After the Abduction,
one had to admit Bert was an imaginative storyteller and that he believed in his product, which was undoubtedly why the book sold, and also why he was only a couple of ticks off walking around in a canvas sweater with the sleeves sewn behind his back.

Over the years I had collected some stories about Bert, including the one from his brother claiming Elmer was the most dangerous man he had ever known. Bert had once resisted arrest so violently it had taken twelve police officers to get him into cuffs. Soaking wet he didn't weigh a hundred and thirty-five pounds so, if true, the story was remarkable. Another tale had Bert getting pulled over for public drunkenness by a bullying deputy in some small town in the southern part of the state. Thinking Bert was drunk and defenseless, the deputy began pushing him around. The next morning a paper delivery woman found the deputy cuffed to a telephone pole with his own handcuffs. Bert had removed the deputy's trousers and hoisted them to the top of the flagpole over the town post office, his boxer shorts flying below them like a state flag.

“Why do you really want Kathy out of the Sheffield campaign?” I asked. “So she'll be around to babysit you?”

In exasperation, he threw his head into his hands and combed his fingers through his slicked-back hair. “There's a pattern. Don't you see it? Things have to be squeezed to fit into the pattern, and when they don't fit, there is a machine that does the squeezing. I've known some of the agents for that machine, and I know how they think.”

“So it's not an asteroid, it's some agents you know?”

“She's a defense attorney. Don't you think she should support the law-and-order candidate? Kathy should be backing Maddox.”

“Get out of the car.”

“You don't believe anything I've said, do you?”

“No.”

“Okay. Here are the facts. I'll lay them out so there's no mistake and you won't think I'm some fruitcake who shinnied over the fence at the funny farm. But you have to promise never to repeat a word to anyone, not even Kathy. I'm serious. You repeat any of this, I'll call you a liar. Sheffield is not going to make it through the campaign. She's not going to make it to the election. I don't know how or when or by whom, but she's not coming out of this alive.”

“And this is by design?”

“Oh yeah.”

“How do you know?”

“Careful analysis.”

“I thought you said it was a premonition.”

“I'm not sure exactly how they're going to do it, but I have a few ideas I'd rather keep to myself. It will be somebody from the government, though. I mean, they might not be working for the feds in any way you can trace, but it will lead to D.C. At least to Virginia.”

“CIA headquarters?”

“They have a whole repertoire when it comes to dirty tricks. Could be anything. A heart attack. Stroke. Car accident. I'm not sure how it's going to come down, but I know she's not going to make it through this campaign, and when she does go down there's a chance she'll take people with her. I don't want one of them to be Kathy. Trust me.”

“That's just it, Bert. I trust you about as far as horses can fly.”

“Remember when that senator had the brain problem? That brain problem was caused by a machine. They aim it at your head. You could be sitting in a movie theater and the guy with the machine is sitting behind you. You'd never even know.”

“Open the door and step out.”

“You think I'm crazy, don't you?”

“Yeah.”

As he climbed out, he said, “You're her old man. Put your foot down. Grow some hair on your ass.”

“Close the door.”

“Look,” he said, holding on to my car roof while leaning back inside the space he'd just vacated. “You saw building number seven go down, didn't you?”

“What?”

“At the World Trade Center on 9/11. Did you not see building number seven go down? Think back on what you saw. That was a controlled demolition. Just like the first two buildings. If they can do that right in front of your eyes and make it so you don't even know what you saw, they can do anything. Compared to bringing down a forty-seven-story building and convincing you it came down by itself, eliminating one pesky senator will be child's play.”

“Goodbye, Bert.”

“Promise you won't tell Kathy we had this conversation?”

“I'm not going to promise anything.”

WE WERE SITTING
across from each other in a Thai restaurant in Olympia. Maddox had been okay with the idea of my taking leave for two days. Kathy, on the other hand, had run into some choppy water with Sheffield. There was a flu bug making the rounds and Sheffield was shorthanded, so Kathy promised she'd check her cell messages every four hours. Kathy didn't have any problem with that. I did, but she didn't.

We were planning to stay on the Washington coast at a little motel north of Ocean Shores, a joint that had special memories for us. Assuming we didn't encounter the same tumultuous weather and traffic we'd plowed through tonight, we'd be only about a three-hour drive from Seattle.

Outside it was dark and the streets were wet from a continuous downpour we'd been fighting since leaving Seattle. Kathy's dark hair was pulled into one of those thick plaits that ran down the center of her back past her shoulder blades. I loved the look. I was in love with just about everything about Kathy. That was how it worked. I fell in love again every six months or so. Not that I ever fell out of love with her; it was just that the brain chemistry between us seemed to slacken from time to time and then, out of the blue, whether it was a look or a touch or something she said, it refreshed itself.