Cape Disappointment (33 page)

“Yes?”

“Nobody's coming to help.”

“Not for a while.”

“We need help. Can't they see that?”

“They think there's a second bomb.”

“That was a bomb? I thought we had an earthquake.”

“A bomb.”

“It doesn't matter. I'm not going to make it.”

“Of course you are. We'll make sure—”

“No, no, no. I
know
it's not my time, just like it wasn't
his
time,” she said, gesturing at a piece of the janitor, “but that's not going to stop it from happening. Just listen.”

“Go ahead,” I said, softly, knowing she was probably right, that she was dying.

“I want you to tell my husband, Peter, I love him and I'm sorry. He'll know what I mean. Tell my son, Steve, to live his life on his own terms and never let anybody tell him otherwise, not even his father. My daughter, Jane … tell her I love her and I'm so proud of her. Can you remember?”

“I think so.” I was getting woozy and light-headed and wasn't entirely sure I wouldn't be dead before this woman, but right now reassuring her was the thing to do, so I did it.

“And tell Peter the key to the safety deposit box is in my jewelry drawer. I already paid the cable bill. Don't let him pay it again. They've been double-billing us.”

“Got it.”

“I should reward you for this. Would you like to take one of our dogs?”

“I need a dog, but no thanks.”

She pushed one bony hand toward me. I reached down with my
own hand and clasped it, and she gripped me as if I were going to haul her into a boat, her hand cold and as stiff as a branch from a dead tree. As she clutched my hand, I thought for a few moments the woman at my feet had passed out, but then I realized she was dead. I held her cold, bony hand for a good while longer. I'm not sure how much longer, because somewhere in there I began to black out.

TWO DAYS AFTER MY MEETING
with Bert at Cafe Flora, Snake and I headed to Cape Disappointment. During the drive it began raining with the determination you only saw in the Pacific Northwest, and even here, only near the coast. The radio had been predicting foul weather, but this was beastly. Everywhere we looked the landscape was gray and puddled. Plumes of water shot up behind vehicles on the road. An eighteen-wheeler covered us in road spray as if we were inside a car wash. Snake, who was driving, popped in one of his Willie Nelson CDs and began singing off-key.

I wanted to check out the Coast Guard logbooks at Cape Disappointment for myself and then poke around to see if we couldn't find other electrical devices that had lost power around the time of the crash. Perhaps I could find others who'd lost their cellphone service. Bert had speculated that some automobiles might even have lost electricity. It seemed like we were squandering time, but I had to get out of the house and, more than that, out of the city. Everywhere I went I was reminded of Kathy.

“Total waste of gasoline,” said Snake when I told him my plan.

“You can go home. I'm doing fine on my own.”

“Like hell you're doing fine. You're bluer than a Labrador with a dog cone on during bird season. No way I'm leaving you alone. Especially not in those regions.”

“Afraid I'll do myself in?”

“Bert said to watch for it.”

“Bert thinks a secret government cabal will fake my suicide. He thinks people have been slipping me pills to make me more depressed.”

“Don't worry. I been on the lookout for government cabals all morning.”

“I don't need any of your sarcasm.”

“I know you don't. You got enough for both of us.”

I'd awakened that morning to discover my picture on the front page of both Seattle papers, the color photo of the Cape Disappointment lighthouse, myself in the foreground, the Beechcraft King Air, a tiny dot in the distance but still airborne. I hadn't been expecting them to print the photo with
me
in it. There had been two good shots of the plane alone as it spiraled into the ocean. Dumbfounded, I stared and then sat down at the kitchen table and stared awhile longer. Not until the fifth page of the
Post-Intelligencer
had they published the photo of the plane actually striking the water. What made the photo of me on page 1 so odious was that at the time it was taken I hadn't realized the plane was about to go down. It had been a joke photo, my face molded into a lopsided smirk that some people might— and many later did— call moronic. I was joking around while eleven people were about to die. I looked like a total ass. The accompanying article was penned by Ruth Ponzi, which didn't make me any happier. I had the feeling she was punishing me for refusing to grant the interview she wanted.

Around eight-thirty that morning the phone calls began to trickle in, each confirming in one way or another that the papers had made me look like a champion jerk-off. Most of the callers seemed to have forgotten I'd recently lost my wife. Everybody had an opinion about the photo and about me. “It kind of makes you look like a dork, doesn't it?” asked my father. “How could you?” asked Kathy's sister, a question for which there was no reply. You only had to think for a moment to know I couldn't have known the plane was beginning its descent behind me, but everyone wanted to blame me for clowning while people were about to die. Eventually, I got sick of being chastised and let the answering machine collect the rest of the insults. Of course I'd shown poor taste. Anybody who knew me knew poor taste was my middle name. But I didn't know the plane was going down!

When we went to buy Snake breakfast at the local Safeway, the checkout clerk hailed me. “Dude. I saw you in the paper. Famous. Yo.” I received what seemed like false pity from the woman who cut my hair and was grilled extensively when we visited Sheffield headquarters. It turned into a pretty lousy day. People either unthinkingly treated my appearance in the photo as a positive accomplishment or as a venal act.

When I spoke with Kalpesh at the Sheffield headquarters I didn't bring up my knowledge of his ongoing affair with Deborah. Bert conjectured that the alleged inside man in the Sheffield camp had ties, concealed or otherwise, to whoever had taken the plane down, and it might well be Kalpesh. Still, I had no proof.

The heavy rain was beating against the car windows when my cellphone chimed. “Bert?”

“Thomas, where are you?”

We were maybe thirty minutes out from the Cape, but I didn't necessarily want him to know that. Lately he'd been a little too curious about my whereabouts. “I'm with your brother.”

“And where the hell is that?”

“Someplace where it's raining cats and dogs.”

“It's raining everywhere. Have you heard the news?”

“I've had my fill of news for a while.”

“About Ruth Ponzi?”

“What about her?”

“Her husband's dead.”

“What?”

“She's in the hospital. I tried to see her, but they're only letting in relatives and close friends.”

“What happened?”

“Last night while they were going to dinner, some butthole crossed the center line and smashed into their car head-on. It was one of those dual-axle pickup trucks jacked up to about four feet off the ground. Ran all the way up and over the driver's side of the car. Her husband didn't have a chance. They had to pry her out. Witnesses said the other driver kept gunning it even after he was on top of them. Then he got out and ran into the woods. Caucasian. Medium height. Dark glasses. Ponytail. Turned out the truck had been stolen from a Krispy Kreme Doughnuts parking lot in Puyallup the day before. It was just luck Ponzi's kids weren't with them.”

“Jesus, Bert.”

“This has all the trademarks of a hit set up to look like an accident. Right down to the baseball cap with the built-in ponytail. The machine got to her.”

“What do you mean, right down to the built-in ponytail?”

“We
all
used to wear those. A baseball cap with a ponytail hanging down the back. Perfect disguise. You see a guy in a ponytail, you don't look at much else. Happened in the arboretum not far from that café where you tried to starve me to death. And it don't matter that they didn't kill her. They nailed her husband. When she comes to her senses, she'll be afraid. She'll stop looking into the plane crash. And so will anybody else. It's called messaging.”

“Bert, I'm feeling pretty paranoid myself, but let's not go overboard.”

“They count on you not wanting to go overboard. That's why they can be this bold and get away with it. Ruth was asking questions. They said she gave Hoagland hell at the press conference yesterday morning. Asked out loud if he had worked for the CIA.”

“You're serious? You think somebody tried to kill her? Why not us? We're the ones instigating it.”

“For starters, she was going to be a soft target, which wouldn't necessarily be the case for you or me. And she wasn't so far into her investigation that it was going to look suspicious the way it would if you or I were taken out. Besides, with her nobody's really sure it was murder.”

“It has to be a coincidence.”

“Keep thinking that. That way your friends won't think you're completely insane the way everyone, including you, thinks I'm completely insane. That way the fragile egg you've been calling reality doesn't crack open.”

“I still don't—”

“They won't catch the guy.”

“Is Ponzi going to live?”

“I don't know. Nobody at the hospital will tell me for sure.”

IT WAS STILL RAINING.
We were beside the lighthouse. I was sitting on top of a fence facing the ocean, Snake begging me to get off because he thought I might fall or get blown into the water, which was a few stories
below. We could see the squalls blowing in from the south, the waves dancing in front of them, and even in all this, California gulls cruised nonchalantly up and down the bluffs. There were no boats, no fishermen, and no recovery craft. They'd concluded their salvage work. It was time to reassemble the pieces and see the picture they presented. It all seemed reasonable, a task performed by meticulous men who were proud and careful in their profession. It didn't seem possible any of them would purposely botch the process.

Ruth Ponzi's husband was dead. Ruth was in the hospital. Somebody had tailed me two nights ago. The Maddox campaign had been in possession of information it could only have obtained from an informer in the Sheffield camp. Deborah and Kalpesh were sleeping together. My cellphone had been on the blink at the moment the plane began its descent. Timothy Hoagland was heading up the inquiry. He'd been on the Wellstone crash team, another tragedy that ended up benefiting a key Republican candidate for the Senate. I'd been called in the middle of the night from a cellphone that may or may not have been Kathy's, an incident I still wasn't sure hadn't been the result of a weird electronic glitch.

Bert had me half convinced the accident was actually murder, but another part of me shrank from that conclusion. I liked feeling sane, and believing Sheffield had had a secret government group conspiring against her was a theory that put me on the wrong side of the sanity equation. If somebody had tried to murder Ponzi, then likely everything Bert had been saying was true. There
was
a cabal. We
were
living in a nightmare where government agents murdered U.S. senators and their friends and later followed, discredited, or destroyed inquisitive citizens who asked questions. I couldn't tell if I was disbelieving, frightened, or mad, or a little of each.

Perched atop the fence on the bluff, buffeted by a driving rain, I thought about what a tempting target I would make for a rifleman. With all the wind, nobody would even hear the shot. I would simply collect the lead and fall into the sea. Above me the rotating beam from the lighthouse brightened the afternoon periodically. My jeans were soaked from the blowing rain, and my legs were freezing, but everything above my waist was dry under a hooded rain cape. Peering down at the beach, I could see the tide flowing out, a flock of plover chasing
it. Not far up the coast on this same beach, they'd found two of the bodies. The thought brought to life the possibility of Kathy's corpse washing ashore in front of me. I kept seeing dark spots in the waves that might be her long hair. I could almost see her.

“Come on, man,” Snake said. “Let's get out of here.”

“Just a few minutes.”

“You been saying that all afternoon. It's getting dark. We're going to catch pneumonia.”

We'd already accomplished our mission. We'd talked to the guardsman on duty in the lighthouse and learned that none of the lighthouse electronics had gone out on the day of the crash, and that the question had already been asked by both the FBI and the NTSB people, which I found curious. We'd located my friend at the Coast Guard station, Hutchins, the lanky twentysomething guardsman, who was able to show me the logs of the FBI checking in on the afternoon of the crash. They had arrived a mere fifty-eight minutes after the plane went down. Hutchins said he'd asked around after my first phone call, and nobody had an explanation for their sudden arrival. He also said a memo had been distributed admonishing guardsmen not to talk to the press or anybody else not related to the official investigation.