The Next President (26 page)

“I mean, I haven’t been with anyone new in a long, long time. Should I have let you carry me off to bed?”

Jenny pulled J. D.‘s face down to meet hers. She kissed him and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll let you know just what I like and what I don’t.”

As she proceeded to show him what she meant, a small wedge of J. D.‘s consciousness detached itself and looked on self-contemptuously, a voyeur from within. It was not concerned with passion, only calculation, and when their physical energies were spent and Jenny lay asleep amidst the rumpled sheets, it drove J. D. to slip out of bed without a sound. He picked up the tiny camera fitted into the remote for his car alarm. Then he silently photographed a nude Jenny Crenshaw.

The bitter irony of what he was doing was not lost on him.

He was falling in love with the woman whose life he intended to ruin.

Roth and Danby were in a room at the hotel two floors below the one where J. D. was taking his pictures. They were getting ready to go out and take care of a problem that had cropped up. Then Roth stopped what he was doing and looked at his friend.

“I can’t tell you how much I want to kill that bastard,” he said to Danby.

Danby snapped shut the case they would carry with them.

“You have been telling me ever since he almost killed us.”

The horrifying experience of nearly being crushed to death had left Roth in a rage; it had made Danby reflective and wary. If Cade could pull off that rock slide stunt so neatly, who knew what other gruesome yet blameless fate he might plan for them?

Despite their predicament, Danby had to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Roth demanded.

“I was just thinking: That Cade is one dangerous fucker. We better watch out.”

“He’s the one who better watch out,” Roth snarled. He grabbed the case from Danby.

“Come on, let’s go.”

Danby followed. He’d been following his friend Roth for a long time now. but he thought, one way or another, this was going to be the last time.

J. D. Cade pushed through the revolving door of the Century Plaza Hotel.

Dante DeVito watched him from across the street. He sat in a lights-out sedan parked at the head of a ramp leading to an underground garage. He brought his wrist mike to his mouth.

“Does he look like a man who just got laid to you?” DeVito asked.

The figure of another agent appeared in the glassed-in entrance to the hotel lobby.

“Me, I’ve always got a shit-eating grin when I get laid. This guy looks like his dog just died.”

“Huh,” DeVito grunted. He was sure that Jenny Crenshaw was backing Cade because she was sleeping with him. If he was wrong about that… shit, maybe Cade’s gripe against Roth and Danby was legitimate.

“Valet’s bringing Cade’s car up,” the agent told DeVito

“What do you want us to do?”

“Follow him home,” DeVito responded.

“Make sure he’s tucked in for the night.”

DeVito could have used some sleep himself. He was groggy. But he decided to go back to the campaign offices and look at his file on J. D. Cade one more time. Now that he knew there had been a serious rift between Cade and his old man, maybe something would jump out at him. If nothing did, though, he’d better just close the file and find something else to worry about.

He watched as first Cade’s Lexus and then the tail car passed by. When they were out of sight, he switched on his engine and his lights. He told himself he was just following through on this Cade thing now. Even when things looked pointless, DeVito always followed through.

As he pulled out, he didn’t notice that he was being followed.

J. D. didn’t notice DeVito men on his tail, either.

Dinner with Del Rawley, sex and betrayal with Jenny Crenshaw, and the second-assassin message had left him badly distracted, his thoughts maddeningly jumbled. He’d taken the first step of his plan to force Del Rawley out of the race without killing him… but what if that

wasn’t enough? What if there was an element of spite in the blackmailer’s plan that required the candidate’s death? Required that his blood be spilled by J. D.‘s hand?

If so, what the blackmailer had also done was ratchet up the pressure on him to kill Roth and Danby, too. Because his only hope of getting away clean was if those two were out of the way.

He even asked himself whether he should take out Donnel. Who else could the second assassin be? But that thought made him recoil. Donnel had been his friend. His comrade. They shared the same sins.

With a growing sense of shame, he knew that he couldn’t kill Donnel before he learned the truth, whether he was the second assassin. If there was a goddamn second assassin.

He was also sure that the more he came to know Del Rawley the harder it would be to take his life. He had to look for a way out until he had absolutely no choice.

But what about Evan? a voice in his head shrieked. You’re taking too big a risk. Kill Rawley and be done with it. Sacrifice yourself if you have to, but save Evan!

As he pulled into the garage at the Refuge, he wondered if he was cracking up.

Yeah, he thought grimly, that could be the way to go.

Get to a place in his head where he wouldn’t be responsible for his own actions.

Wouldn’t matter then who he killed.

Evan Cade was drifting off to sleep, spending one more night in the hospital for observation, when there was a soft knock at his door. He looked up and saw Cousin Ben step into the room. It was well after visiting hours.

“Were you asleep?” Ben asked quietly, closing the door behind him.

“Just about.”

“You feeling better?”

“I still get a little dizzy. It comes and goes.”

Ben sat down in the visitor’s chair next to the bed.

“Evan, there’s something important I think you have a right to know.”

Evan rubbed his eyes, coming alert now. He raised the bed to a sitting position.

“What is it, Ben?”

“Well, I heard from your grandma you’re planning to go home to California.”

“Yeah, but I intend to say goodbye to everyone first.”

Ben nodded.

“I figured as much… but I didn’t know if we’d have the chance to speak privately.”

“What is it?” Evan asked again.

Ben drew a deep breath and slowly let it out.

“You remember how we were talking at my house? When that McCray showed up?”

“Yeah.” Evan remembered thinking Ben had been about to confide in him.

“Well, I think what I have to say has something to do with your current troubles.”

Evan recalled the point at which their previous conversation had been interrupted.

“This is about Dad and Alvy McCray, isn’t it?”

Ben nodded.

“I figured out how J. D. took care of Alvy. I think I even know who helped him do it. And my gut tells me that somehow your daddy’s past just won’t stay buried.”

Then Ben told Evan his story.

Deena Nokes and her sister biker mama, LuAnne, were seated on the late Ivar McCray’s Harley at a red light on the outskirts ofCarbondale when a car passed by on the cross street.

“Hey, that’s him!” Deena yelped.

“Who?” LuAnne asked.

“The bastard we’ve been looking for. The guy who said he’d make Ivar rich.”

“You sure?” LuAnne asked nervously.

“All I saw was an old man driving and a girl.”

“There was a guy in the backseat. The bastard who conned Ivar. So hold on.”

Deena turned off her headlight, gunned the engine, and made a sharp left, running the red light. She followed the car to the entrance of Giant City State Park. Giant City was named for its huge formations of sandstone, which were piled up higgledy-piggledy as if a race of gargantuan toddlers had left their building blocks scattered across the landscape. It was filled with cliffs, ravines, streams, and caves. Hiking on many of its paths could be risky even in daylight, and after 11 p.m. the park was closed to all visitors except those staying at its lodge or cabins.

The car pulled into an empty parking lot. Deena cut the hog’s engine

and coasted to a stop in the shadow of a huge gum tree. By the light of a full moon, the two women watched. The car’s driver and the young woman emerged. Then a man with a gun got out of the backseat.

The man Deena had been trying to find. He marched the other two off along a trail.

Deena snapped the Harley’s kickstand down and dismounted. She reached around to the small of her back and grabbed her revolver.

She instructed LuAnne, “You count to a hundred. Not too fast, not too slow. Then ride on down to the lodge and call the cops. Tell them come quick, somebody’s getting killed. Don’t give your name, just get the hell out of there. Go to my place. If I get killed, you can have the Harley, the trailer, anything you want. Just don’t rip me off if I’m only laid up in the hospital, okay?”

Terrified, LuAnne could only nod.

“Start countin’,” Deena told her.

When she heard LuAnne begin, she ran off toward the path the others took.

Deena had been a country girl, raised rural. Had to use an outdoor privy until she was ten. She’d learned how to hike and climb and stalk at the same time she’d learned how to stand upright. But that had been a long time ago, and back then she’d had the advantage of being able to steal up on her prey barefoot, the soles of her feet toughened to the consistency of rawhide.

Now, at twenty-eight, she hadn’t done any serious physical exercise since the eighth grade, and after all those years in shoes her feet had gone as soft as her conditioning. She was hard put not to wheeze as she followed her quarry, and no way was she going to take off her motorcycle boots.

But Deena had three things going for her: surprise, moonlight, and the whimpering of both the man and the girl. It wasn’t loud, wasn’t hysterical, but it carried a banshee note of death foretold. And it covered the grunts of her own exertions. Half a mile along the path, on a ledge overlooking a fast running stream, the man with the gun called a halt to the forced march. He compelled his captives to get down on their knees. They leaned against each other, their bodies shaking, their sobs growing louder and more disconsolate.

As the man raised his gun, Deena lifted hers. She was at least a hundred feet away. Well outside of accurate range for a short-barreled revolver. But the moonlight was bright and her target was stationary. And she could imagine this same murderous sonofabitch holding his gun on Ivar, and then at the last second throwing the soldering iron in the puddle to electrocute him.

Deena fired her first shot.

She was too late to save the man because she missed. The man who’d

been on his knees fell to his side, the blood pouring from his skull gleaming oily black in the moonglow.

Deena fired again and hit the bastard this time. Winged him on his left shoulder. She thought her shot might also have struck the girl because she started to crumple just before her executioner fired at her. Only after he saw that his two victims had been disposed of did the bastard even turn to see who was shooting at him.

Just as he did, Deena fired her third shot. Another hit. It looked to Deena like she took off the top half of the fucker’s left ear.

The man flinched in pain, but that didn’t stop him from locating Deena’s position in a nest of rocks and returning fire. She ducked behind the cover of her sandstone barrier as bullets struck nearby. She scuttled to her left. She had only three shots left and knew she must use them to at least drive that sonofabitch off. She didn’t want him coming after her.

She poked her head up and took a quick sighting. Sure enough, he’d just started her way. Deena fired again. She missed this time but the shot came close enough to make her adversary retreat. He was back on the ledge.

Nowhere to hide there. Deena had to risk her last two shots. She wouldn’t have a better chance than this.

Her next shot also missed, but the way the bastard’s head snapped around, she could tell he’d felt it pass by, and this shot, too, drove him back. The bodies of his victims lay sprawled just behind him. He popped off two quick shots in Deena’s direction, but they were aimed at the place she’d been before; he hadn’t found her new spot.

Holding her breath, squinting her eyes, praying she didn’t miss, Deena fired her last round. Again it was close, but again she missed her target. But she had the bastard back on his heels. He took yet another step in retreat.

As he did, the girl lying on the ground stuck her foot out.

Taken by surprise, the killer pitched backward, arms windmilling, and he went over the ledge, falling into the coursing water fifty feet below.

Sunday, September 19, 2004

DeVito had decided to make himself comfortable. He was using Jenny Crenshaw’s office at campaign headquarters. It beat the hell out of sitting behind the cramped desk he’d been given at the back of the bullpen. He pored over his file on Crenshaw’s squeeze, J. D. Cade.

He’d been at it for hours and was so tired that the words on the page in front of him started to swim. He shook his head. He dipped his fingers into the glass of drinking water that sat on the desk and rubbed his eyes. His vision cleared, but not very much and not for very long.

With damn near blind determination, DeVito pushed on. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t come up with anything incriminating on J. D. Cade. On paper, as far as he’d been able to determine, the man was just who he said he was: an honest, successful businessman…

Honorably discharged veteran…

Father of a son in college…

Ex-husband who was decent enough to get along with his ex-wife. The prick.

Fucker had no known vices whatsoever.

Which made him just too good to be true. What did the bastard do for fun? Sit at home, count his money, and diddle himself? There had to be something.

He got involved in presidential politics, that’s what he did for fun. He appeared out of the blue—right after the man DeVito had sworn to

protect with his life was almost assassinated—and before you knew it, he was having dinner with the man who might well be the next president of the United States.