Courier (24 page)

"Wait a minute. That could have been me!" Rick tried to sound indignant, but couldn't quite pull it off.

"Nah, we had a bunch of mirrors set up and a string to a friction fuse. You were safe. When the guys with the guns came in, we gave them a chance, but they shot at us without even checking to see who we were."

Eps's voice was filled with pride. "I should say they shot at the mirrors we'd set on the stairs to the basement. After that, we figured we'd given them enough of an opportunity to act civilized, so we set off the focused explosives we'd mounted on the wall behind them and took off. We didn't really want to hurt anyone, so we didn't put anything in the mix – you know, no BBs or nails or anything."

"Hate to tell you, but someone bled all over the place."

"Really?" Eps talked away from the receiver. "Hey, guys, we may have a problem with the cleaning deposit on the house."

Rick couldn't help but laugh, and Eve smiled.

"I wouldn't worry about it. Corey and I were just there, and someone has cleaned it all up."

"Cool. Here's Steve."

Steve's dry voice came back on the line. "So, that's our story. You OK?"

"So far. Although people keep trying to change that. Where are you guys?"

"We're in one of our better hidey-holes. We've got a room at the Evangeline."

Rick's eyes widened. "The Evangeline? On 14th and K? That's a hotel for women only."

"Well, technically, yes, it is, but the night manager is one of the best Dungeon Masters in the city – lots of spare time on the night shift." Steve laughed. "It does mean we can't use the pool or the dining room – actually, it means we can't come out of our room at all except in the middle of the night. But otherwise, it's a very nice place."

"I'll just bet it is."

Steve's voice turned serious. "OK, we should cut this call off. We're bouncing through three exchanges, but better to be safe than sorry. We've all taken vacations from work, and we're just going to keep our heads low for a while. We're good at amusing ourselves, so that won't be a problem."

"You do that. This number going to work later?"

"Yeah, or you can call the desk at night and ask for Edna Ponds-Simons."

"E-P-S. Right."

"Keep your head down."

The phone went silent, and he hung up. For a moment, he just stood there, hugging Eve and taking deep breaths.

Then they headed back to the bike. He said, "Well, we'd better find a place to eat and somewhere to stay. I don't think we'd better go back to…
.
Well, we'd better not go back to anywhere we've ever been, now that I think about it."

Eve smoothed down her braid and pulled on her helmet again. "I know a place we can stay so long as you don't mind a little breaking and entering."

"I don't know. I'm a clean-living, law-abiding citizen."

She gave him a look. "I've ridden with you, Trooper. You don't get traffic tickets for the kind of shit you pull on that machine. You get felony charges. Anyway, the place I'm thinking of is run by anarchists. The last thing they'd do is call the cops."

"My kind of people." Rick got on the bike and brought up the kickstand. "Lead the way,
kemo sabe
."

"First of all, that's a stupid phrase that either means ‘sneaky Apache' or ‘I don't know'. Second, it's culturally ignorant and insulting. And third…" She swung up on the backseat. "I'm completely lost after our beautiful tour of the ghetto, so you get to be the native guide."

"Sorry. Didn't mean to be insulting."

"Shut up and get me something to eat, and then head for 12th and K." She put her arms around his waist and tucked herself as close as possible to his back, shielded from the chill wind. "Let's go,
kemo sabe
."

 

People usually came to Washington from somewhere else and, on holidays, everyone headed back to what they thought of as their real homes. Downtown was just empty streets under gray skies, the rumbling of the BMW's exhaust the only sound. The usual crowd of hookers was working along 13th Street – their pimps would never let them take a holiday off, especially with all those suburban husbands driving in to watch the Redskins. They looked cold, smoking Kools and shivering in their skimpy outfits.

"Those poor women," Eve said, shaking her head. "What a life."

Rick glanced over, but returned his attention to the other cars, scanning methodically for anything suspicious. "This is nothing. Most days, there are hundreds out here."

"Three blocks from the White House. It's just wrong."

Rick smiled. "It'd be acceptable if they were further away?"

He grunted as her fist slammed into his side.

"OK, you've made your point, but please make it on the other side next time. That's a bit tender."

She punched him in the other side. "Better?"

He grunted again. "Much."

They swung into a parking lot at the corner of Vermont and L. The sign proclaimed it the Dee Cee Diner.

Rick said, "This is one of the few twenty-four/seven places around. Usually caters to the printers getting off work from the
Post
."

"Anything warm would work for me."

Parking the bike in the back behind a pickup truck, they left the helmets in the courier bag and headed inside the narrow green-and-white-striped diner.

Rick's glasses steamed up the moment they walked into the brightly lit interior. He pulled them off and squinted as he searched for two open seats.

"Down here, high pockets." Eve had swung into the empty booth right next to them. "We'd starve if I left everything to you."

"Probably," he agreed.

They gave the harried waitress an order for coffee and bacon, eggs, and toast. Breakfast was always the best bet at a diner. Rick took off his jacket.

"Unzip as much as you can," he advised, "or you'll get acclimated to the heat and freeze when we get back on the bike."

"Thanks for reminding me. I was trying to forget about getting back on that infernal device." She unzipped her denim jacket and pulled it down so it puddled around her on the vinyl seat. "Why not a car? Don't you ever get tired of being wet and cold?"

"Not really." Their coffee came, and he cupped his hands around the white mug. "I spent enough time in Vietnam being hot and miserable. Anyway, a bike means…" He thought for a second. "A bike is freedom. You can always leave, always park, always get through traffic, and always go where you want to go."

"Have you ever crashed?"

"Yeah, it wasn't so bad."

She stared at his face. "Not so bad? Are you nuts?"

"Bad accidents are always about cars." He grinned. "You only have to remember one thing if you drop a bike all by yourself, and you'll be fine."

"What's the secret?"

"Get off the bike."

"That's insane."

"Not really." He took another sip of coffee. "If you're rolling down a street at sixty miles per hour all by yourself, you'll lose some skin. If you've got a couple hundred pounds of motorcycle on top of you, you'll lose muscle."

"Wonderful. I can't wait."

Their breakfasts arrived, and they ate with the hunger of people who had been burning lots of calories just keeping warm.

When they finished and were enjoying cigarettes and a second cup of coffee, Rick spoke thoughtfully. "I think I may have worked out a way to get out of all this."

"Run like hell?"

He grinned. "Well, I did consider that option, but there are two problems with it."

She nodded. "These guys are government. There aren't too many places they can't find us, and now we know way too much for them to just let us get lost."

"Yeah, that was the first problem."

"And the second?"

Rick felt his jaw muscles clench with anger. "That bastard in the White House sold the lives of American soldiers to win a political campaign. I'm just not going to let that go. He's going down."

He crushed his cigarette out in the ashtray.

"That ‘bastard' just took the White House in a historic landslide. Politically, he's bulletproof, and if you're thinking of taking more direct action…" Eve shook her head. "You can count me out. Custer liked suicide charges. My people preferred staying alive."

Rick shook his head. "I'm not going to walk up and frag the guy. It wouldn't be nearly enough payback for what he did. No, I want people to know what a sick, lying bastard he really is. I want him to be remembered as a traitor for hundreds of years." He did his up-down trick with the Zippo and lit another cigarette.

"That's sort of what happened to Custer," Eve said thoughtfully.

"Really?"

"Most of the other tribes who were there at the Battle of Greasy Grass talked and boasted about it afterward. The Northern Cheyenne got together and agreed to keep silent for one hundred summers." She looked at him closely. "That's not until 1976 – can you keep this secret?"

Rick nodded.

"Your white history books say that a bunch of crazy Indians just massacred Custer and his men for no reason at all." She had an intense inward look. "It's the other way around. The army was murdering us on the High Plains for years. One of the worst massacres was at a place called Sand Creek. They killed hundreds – women, children, and old men under a white flag – and then paraded through Denver holding up their hearts."

She took a deep breath. "That was Chivington's command. When Custer attacked three years later, he also expected to fight women and old men, but he didn't. His men fought warriors, but the warriors didn't kill him. They didn't kill Yellowhair."

"They didn't? But he died there, didn't he?"

"He was unclean – cursed because he'd dishonored himself when he broke his word not to attack." Her voice was low, almost a whisper. "None of the men would even touch him because they were afraid his spirit would make them sick as well. A Cheyenne woman knocked him off his horse, and another stabbed him to death."

She looked up. "The woman who knocked him down was my ancestor Buffalo Calf Trail Woman. He was an evil man and he died a coward's death. You whites may honor him, but you're really just remembering the lies they printed in the newspapers."

"You're saying I should be satisfied with getting him run out of office?" Rick was silent for a moment. "I'd like more. I don't want this President to have any glory in anyone's history books, even if it's just a mistake. And one more thing." He paused. "Remind me never to cross one of you sweet-looking Northern Cheyenne girls."

"Bastard." She reached across the table to punch him, but he pulled back, so she kicked him under the table. "Now, what's your big plan?"

"Well, I think that Watergate is going to prove bigger than anyone thinks." Rick took a drag on his cigarette. "But so long as it's just politics, it won't be enough. What we've got is dynamite, and it's going to have to be handled just as carefully. I'm not talking about newspaper reporters. None of them really understand how finance works, so they can't follow the money. It's going to have to be given to people who are familiar with the ways big money moves and have the power to dig the records out of the banks."

"The League of Super Accountants?"

"Sort of." Rick smiled. "I don't know if I mentioned it in all the quiet times we've had lately, but Corey works on the Banking Committee."

She looked doubtful. "Are you sure? He doesn't seem like the type to play rough."

"Because he's gay?" Rick laughed. "You didn't see him wipe out that shooter today. Anyway, I've heard all that crap about pansies and faggots, but trust me: the gay guys I knew in the army were as tough as anyone. And Dina…"

"Yeah, Dina would face down the FBI, the CIA, and the New York City police one at a time or all together." She made a beckoning motion with her fingers. "OK, it's all decided. Let me smoke another of your cigarettes and we'll head for a place to crash."

Rick handed her the pack and then did the trick with the Zippo.

She lit it and inhaled. "Why do you do that?"

"It was a dumb trick I learned in high school." He studied the battered steel case inscribed with "Seventh Cavalry" and "Ia Drang" for a long moment.

"And then, in the middle of the battle, after I'd already been wounded and had seen most of my friends killed, I did one of those little things I guess you just do in the middle of complete insanity. I wanted a smoke, so I pulled out my pack of cigarettes. Most of them already had blood on them – mine or someone else's – but one was still half clean, and I tore off the bloody part and…"

He made the move again, striking down with the lighter to flip the lid open and then back up to spin the wheel. He stared at the flame.

"And then I did my Zippo trick and the whole other side of the river just exploded. Gooks and all. The blast wave flattened me, but I held on to that damn cigarette. Grinning like a complete fool, I sat there and smoked and watched the flames."

He looked up at her. "It was an Arc Light raid. B-52s about a mile up dropping hundreds of bombs and just shredding the jungle and making the splinters bounce. I've never seen anything so beautiful before or since."

"That didn't have anything to do with your lighter."

"Probably not. Why take the chance? I've been doing this little trick ever since, and I'm still alive." He started to get up from the booth. "Now, you said we could find a place to sleep for the low price of committing a crime against people who don't believe in the rule of law. Let's get moving."

CHAPTER 28

 

Revolution Printers was on the fifth floor of a small office building on the corner of 11th and K. Rick had noticed the sign in the window months ago and idly wondered who they were. They pulled down the driveway and into the back alley. After Eve got off and they'd unwound their bags, he backed the BMW carefully into the small space between a dumpster and the brick alley wall. He put it up on the center stand and then got out by climbing onto the seat and over the top of the trash bin. Four empty cardboard boxes scrounged from the back door of a nearby liquor store served to shield the bike from anything but a determined search.