Broken Piano for President (20 page)

A male voiceover, deep and carved from authority, breaks open the ad: “Winters Olde-Tyme Hamburgers and Bust-A-Gut want you dead.”

The voice pauses for a breath. The strong
skree
holds steady throughout. “Find out more about their plot to kill you at www.healthwatchinternational.com. Sign up for the newsletter and receive a free tote bag.”

Another sitcom begins.

“Big surprise, you look like the black plague,” Roland Winters says, stomping into his office, ripping off a coat.

“We’re not black,” his son says.

Pandemic—born Timothy James Winters—sits in a heavy leather chair. He picks at the moon-surface of fleshy sores on his scalp. He wears a pair of clean slacks and a blue button-up shirt three sizes too large. A bony sternum pops through the gap in the collar. A man with long gray hair and a black hat forced Pandemic to slip into this outfit before setting foot in the corporate headquarters.

The CEO’s office is an oven. It’s huge and dark and constantly kept at body temperature. Pandemic doesn’t know whether to curl up and go to bed or sprinkle garlic powder on his ribs and keep baking.

“I couldn’t have made this up if I wanted to,” the walrusian CEO says, summoning the same frightening, near-Hitler-capturing intensity Christopher used back when Roland was in trouble. “My father dies and Bust-A-Gut beats us to the punch in honoring him with a commercial. Then my drug addict son wins the big contest for everyone to see. And to top it off, he’s about as thin as his crackpipe.”

“Dad, I don’t want to be the winner,” he says, pinching eyes shut. “And I don’t smoke crack.”

“I’m sure fame and fortune is killing you, Tim,” the father says, sitting across the desk, pulling a mustard tie completely loose. “That’s why you played the game. That’s why you are sabotaging Grandpa’s—” He frowns and lowers the finger pointed toward heaven. “My company.” He pulls the tie completely out from the collar.

“Look, it was an accident. I was just trying to do something nice. I was trying to help someone. You wouldn’t know anything about that kind of shit.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter what I know, now. You’ve got a television date with some cosmonauts. Let’s make the best of this.”

“Cross me off that list,” he says, scanning for the exit. All the doors look the same and there’s about five of them. “Find someone else. Some other clown.”

“Your uncle Jimmy was a clown. Elephant killed him, you know that. Have a heart.”

The man with long gray hair and a black hat stands to the side, motionless. Winters shoots him a look, but that garbage bag wrinkled face doesn’t budge.

“Tim, I’ve let you suck your thumb long enough. Your mother and I let you play in this rock group and we…I…turn the other cheek with the drugs. God, it would kill her.
I
look the other way, son.”

“I’d classify Beth as a step-mother.” Pandemic smacks gums and runs his tongue along the mouth’s border, daydreaming about going home and smoking. “Speaking of elephants, how is Beth?”

“Damn it, Tim,” he says, counting the ceiling beams and wheezing a tired breath until his blood pressure mellows. Roland’s mustache flutters when the eruption begins again. “Pay attention to me. You either do this or you never come home again. I’m asking a favor here. I need you now, son. This is important.” Roland Winters’ imitation of his father crumbles and his mind scurries into a corner labeled:
Public Relations
. That fatherly growl softens to something smooth. “You won fair and square and you’re gonna go through with this. Maybe not
you
, exactly.”

Pandemic picks some rocky yellow crust from an eye. He slouches deeper into the chair. “No.”

“You’re in or you’re out of the family. No more trust fund. Got it?”

The hands of an ancient grandfather clock chop away. Its gears fill the room with mechanical chunks.

Pandemic looks older, maybe more so than his father. A face beaten with too much of everything. “I suppose, I mean…I…” He has never been able to stand up to Dad and feels weak remembering past battles.

“Good enough,” Roland snaps, rising and moving to the opposite side of the desk. “No drugs, got it? You’ll say what we tell you to. You’ll be the perfect spokesman, because you have to be. When this fiasco is over, you can run away to Timbuktu and I’ll keep you afloat. I don’t give a damn what you do, then. But I need you this time, kiddo. The company is at war.”

“Uhm…wait…um…”

“Jesus, you’re falling apart. Look at your head. Double Harry is going to get on the phone right now and find someone to patch you up.” He rests a hand on his son’s shoulder. “And find someone to keep an eye on you.”

The father’s hand pinches Pandemic’s flesh. The son slouches deeper.

“Isn’t that right, Harry?”

Deshler opens the mail. There’s a letter from his zip code. It’s a Halloween card with Snoopy doing something cute. It’s too late for Halloween. Plus, who sends a card for Halloween in the first place?

I’ve got the time. You’ve got the trouble. We should talk. Malinta’s skull would agree, don’t you think?

The morning sun cracks through blinds as the apartment whistles from steam heat registers. Henry washes his face at the bathroom sink. The cool water burns like Aqua Velva. He takes time shaving and makes sure nothing dribbles on his shirt or tie.
It’s important to look perfect on your last day
, he thinks, dreaming of Martin and that thing he does with his tongue.

Henry carefully twists on cufflinks and adjusts the holster around his ankle. “By the end of the day,” his boss, Tony, told him, “Malinta Redding—Bust-A-Gut’s vice president of marketing—must be dead. Period.”

The cufflinks uncoil into metal wire strong enough to choke a yeti.

“I know what her job title is. You don’t have to be so dramatic.”

“I don’t have time for smart asses.”

“At least tell me, does our budget go beyond cufflinks?” Henry, still feisty with love, snapped at headquarters.

Tony, scalp glimmering beneath a sad lattice of hair, sneered, “Here, smart ass.” He passed the young spy a small green water pistol. “Get her with this and the autopsy will look like a poisonous spider bit her. No joke.”

The gun is heavier than Hamler anticipated. The holster slips around his sock and pokes its grassy colored snout below the pant leg.

An all-too-familiar seasickness swirls Henry’s stomach. The same weightless paranoia that preceded the Christopher Winters interview pounds on his conscience’s entrance. He doesn’t know how he’ll kill another human being. Henry prays, in the back of his brain, that Malinta’s odds of dying from a ladder fall finally pay off.

When the apartment door shakes and bangs, Henry’s peaceful despair blasts away. Hamler nicks his chin with the razor. Instantly, a spittle of blood rivers down the porcelain. The door gives a wooden cough and squeaks open.

Henry’s so tense his blood pressure could power a windmill. He inches toward the living room and estimates the seconds it will take to remove the spider-bite gun and stop this burglar.

There is a rustling near the couch, empty cereal bowls clattering, newspapers tossing against the wall. Tony warned his protégé about the
other company’s
spies, how they are blood-thirsty thugs and, yes, it’s not impossible Henry could be an assassination target.

Hamler is convinced just such evil is flipping through the magazines, making a mess.

Before poking a head around the corner, he wonders how he’ll explain to the police that a complete stranger died from a black widow attack in the living room. There is no chapter in the Olde-Tyme Espionage Handbook about that.

Wounded goat moans rumble from the room. Henry is a flash-second from storming in and filling this monster with venom. The newspapers stir again and the assassin roars as if a devil’s pitchfork digs into its back.

Henry bounces around the corner in a police takedown stance, ready for anything.

“Oh, shit, there you are,” Deshler says, sounding like Louis Armstrong with strep throat. “You getting ready for wrestling practice or something?”

Hamler’s teeth tense, fists tight. They hurt a little. “I almost killed you, Dean.”

Deshler wobbles, holding a clump of business section over his face. “Sure, dude,” Dean slurs with a laugh, voice muffled by newspaper. “Kill me with kindness.” The paper soaks up a wet red stain around his mouth.

“No, I was.” Hamler loosens the fingernails from his palms and flattens his fists out. “Never mind. What happened to you? It’s like seven o’clock, are you aware of this?”

“Well, Henry, yes and no,” he says peeling sticky newsprint from his face, revealing a bulging right eye and a smear of blood across his chin. The white work uniform speckled dry brown. “I assume, since the sun is out, that it’s early. But no, I didn’t catch the time when I woke up to three people
beating the shit out of me
in an alley.”

“Dude,” Hamler says with a cardiologist’s seriousness, “I’m so sorry.” Hamler assumes Bust-A-Gut’s thugs have targeted his best friend.

Deshler has a gash in the shape of a seven on his chin. It is carved typewriter-perfect.

“Yeah, me too. Shit, the last thing I remember was having a drink with this girl at a club. Gorgeous, tall girl.” He holds out hands in measurement. A sharp whistle jets through the gap in his teeth. “She kind of got pissed at me, so I think I had some more drinks.”

“You think?”

“Real funny. Next thing I know, I’m waking up in the alley behind the hotel getting my ribs and face worked over.”

“Who? I mean, what did they look like?”

“One was this skinny-ass son-of-a-bitch with long gray hair and a black bowler. I think I’ve seen him before.” Dean decides to leave out the part about sharing a limo. “One guy was this Mexican dude with a soul patch, I think. I mean, look, time flies when you’re getting beaten.”

A cluster of Henry’s belly muscles clench. Shock? Love? Anger? More like disappointment. “What did you do to him?”

“What did I do?”

“Sorry. Why were they doing this?”

“Man, I don’t know. I don’t remember. I didn’t even get a look at the third one. I managed to kick one guy in the face, though. I mean I landed my foot square, heard his nose crunch and everything. Then they all just walked away. Left me to die.”