Flashpoint (28 page)

I started to walk back to my car. I'd known she wouldn't let me in the house where I suspected Mark was hiding. Now I'd pretend to leave, park down the road and then sneak back here. There was a chance that he would do me the favor of packing a bag, tossing it in his trunk and trying to flee. And I'd be waiting for him.

As I began to open my door, I heard, ‘Put your hands up in the air. I've got a rifle pointed right at you.'

Movies and TV have taught us that when you say things like that you're supposed to snarl the words if you want to keep working in La La Land. But Mark had probably never taken any acting classes so when he said it, it was pierced with the same weariness I'd heard on my previous visit. And I knew the eyes would be the same, too. The ineluctable sorrow and frenzy of men and women who'd died psychically and spiritually on the battlefield who came home to trudge through their nightmare days.

‘You won't shoot me, Mark.'

‘I don't have much to lose.'

‘You'd just make things a lot worse for yourself. And this would be first-degree. I imagine the Cabot woman was on impulse. She say something ugly to you?'

My back was still to him but I hadn't put my hands up.

‘I know I'm a freak. I could see it in her face. I was stupid enough to go in the cabin in the first place. I couldn't help it. She was so beautiful. I thought that was all finished for me after my wife left, that I wouldn't ever want another woman again. I wasn't going to rape her or anything. I just wanted to look at her, was all. Not even touch her.'

‘I believe you, Mark.' And I did.

‘She wasn't scared or anything when she saw me. She thought I was some kind of handyman or something. At first, anyway. But she figured it out pretty fast I guess because she started making her remarks. I didn't blame her. I shouldn't have been there. I apologized and went to go out the back way – same way I'd come in – and I don't know why she did it. She kept saying things about me and I guess because I was walking away she came over and grabbed my sleeve and that was when she said it, that one thing.'

He paused a long time.

‘What did she say?'

‘That's the funny thing. I can't remember what it was now. Maybe it was somethin' about the way I walk now. My ex-wife said somethin' like that when we argued one time. I could see she was sorry right away – my ex, I mean. She even started crying and asked me to forgive her. But when the Cabot woman said it … She doesn't know a thing about the war, what we went through, and there she was, laughing about it – laughing at me . . . That was when I picked up that statue and … I remember thinking that I really wasn't going to hit her with it, that I was just going to scare her. And I did scare her and she started to turn away and – and then she was on the floor and I was terrified—'

I faced him now. He stood near the edge of the house with his rifle. The stars were vast and alien and couldn't give a shit about this little drama of ours, the way we couldn't give a shit about the ferocity and sadness of animal life. He'd go to prison or maybe a mental hospital and I'd go on with my life, or maybe not. Maybe an eighteen-wheeler would flatten my Jeep on my drive back to Chicago. Or the headaches I got more frequently would turn out to be brain cancer. Or maybe in prison he'd figure out how to slash his wrists or his throat. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

‘I want to do everything I can for you, Mark. I'm going to hire Ben Zuckerman to be your lawyer.'

‘It's not me I'm worried about. It's my mom.'

‘I'll see that she goes to a very good nursing home.'

‘They're really shit. They're always in the news.'

‘I know a few good ones.'

‘She doesn't have that kind of money.'

‘I'm sure she has Medicare and Medicaid.'

A risky line but by God it worked. I can't say it was a fulsome laugh. It kind of spluttered out of him but it was an honest laugh and he said, ‘She's going to say this is all a Communist conspiracy to take her son from her; she might even say that the president himself killed the Cabot woman.'

‘I wouldn't put it past him. He's a sneaky bastard.'

‘Well, I suppose wherever she goes they'll let her plug in her radio.'

I had the sense he was already in prison and locked away and thinking about his mother.

‘Yeah,' I said, ‘it's quite a country, isn't it?'

Then we allowed each other silence for a time. There was just the swarming night and those stars and that blaring, insane, hateful radio.

‘I really didn't mean to kill her. I just lost it for a couple of seconds there.'

‘I know.'

‘I never got violent with a woman in my life before then.'

‘I'm sorry, Mark. I really am.'

God damn it. God damn it anyway.

Then I walked over to him and gently removed the rifle from his trembling hands.

S
omeday somebody will write a book about all the politicians who got involved with their babysitters. Politicians of all stripes will make an appearance. For instance, there was the pol who paid for the entire college education of the babysitter he seduced just to keep her quiet; the pol who dumped his wife and children for his babysitter; and the pol who set his babysitter up as a staffer in his Washington office as soon as she turned twenty-one. A fetching lass, she went on to become a highly paid and quite creative lobbyist.

The press did a great deal of backtracking, of course, after Tracy Cabot's real murderer was named. The exception being
Empire,
which clung to the adultery angle. Since that was all they had against Robert they pressed on.

Our own polling showed that we'd dropped eighteen points following the story first breaking. Two days after being cleared and after appearing on
Today, NBC Nightly News
and
60 Minutes
we came within two points of tying our old pal and worthy opponent Charlie Shay. Still not enough.

I mentioned babysitters. The last time I'd spoken with Lee Sullivan, private investigator, he'd told me that his son Jason, opposition research wizard, just might have a surprise for us.

Surprise indeed. And babysitter indeed.

Seems there was a twenty-six-year-old young woman that our strapping Irisher Charlie had impregnated when she was seventeen. Jason had told Lee about her and Lee had flown to Madison to interview her. She said that she'd never planned to talk about the incident – she admitted to enjoying her affair with Charlie – but that seeing him on TV ranting about how abortion should be outlawed and abortion docs sent to prison for life … well, she'd talked it over with her husband and her parents and was willing to cut a thirty-second spot revealing what a hypocrite Charlie was. We shot the spot immediately and found enough national money to run it relentlessly.

The press did the heavy lifting for us. Charlie had been married at the time – still was, though to a different woman – so his adultery canceled out our adultery. And his hypocrisy sank him with a good part of his base; they stayed home.

We won by seven hundred and nine votes. There were challenges, of course. There was an official recount. Robert was declared the winner and planned his return to Washington where all the good, dear true friends who'd sold him out when he was under suspicion would throw him a party and say they knew he was innocent all along. Robert would have to accept their largesse because he would have done the same damned thing in their position. There are no heroes in the US Congress on either side of the aisle – some decent people, but no heroes. The test for heroics is simple – would you give up your seat for an issue you believe in? I don't have to answer that for you, do I?

Jane spent two weekends with me and though we had a good time she decided she'd best stop seeing me, because if we got serious she'd have to consider moving to Chicago and she could never do it – unless, she smiled sadly, I would consider moving to her nice little hometown.

As for Hawkins … he enjoyed a month or so of national media coverage. He was good at playing the reluctant hero, I'll give him that. His
Aw, shucks, me a hero?
routine made everybody in the United States of Media Hokum stand up and salute. Hell, he even came up with an explanation as to who had fired the shots at Howie in the park the night before his death. Playing on Ruskin's gambling problems, Hawkins claimed that Howie had been into a big-time gambler for a couple hundred thou and that said gambler was furious that Howie insisted the games had been rigged and refused to play. So the gambler sent him a message. He ordered that Howie be wounded but not killed. Hence the shots in the college park. He couldn't say more until his intrepid investigation was finished. The press not only understood, they swooned like a maiden taken for the very first time.

Me? I tested my conspiracy theory on a few of my colleagues and was offered looks of bemusement and pity. The only time I got any kind of direct response was the night I got hammered in a posh Loop club and was met with wild laughter by an old newspaper friend of mine who drunkenly a) brought up the subject of Bigfoot and b) suggested that ole Dev boy needed some time away from the grind.

But I still have the nightmares that started the night Howie Ruskin was gunned down … I am in the epilogue of the original
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
… on that rainy highway running up to cars and shouting that they have to believe me. That there will soon be an attempt to seize control of the government by … it's really happening. Can't you see it?

So there you have it. Hawkins was a hero, a Vegas gambler hired the shooter who worked on Howie, and no conspiracy whatsoever.

But sometimes I still think about that first plot to overthrow the government led by the billionaires and that general named Smedley Butler.

If I ever meet anybody named Smedley, I'm reachin' for my gun, partner.