Dead Watch (2 page)

She was back at Oak Walk at one o’clock, sent Sandi to get Lon and Carl. When the three were assembled in the kitchen, she told them that she was going to Washington and didn’t know when she’d be back.

“With the controversy about Lincoln and with the Watchmen visiting this morning, I think I’d better move into town for a while. So you three will be running this place. Deborah Benson will deliver your paychecks on Fridays. If you need to buy anything big, call me, we’ll talk, and I’ll have Deborah issue a check. I’m going to leave three thousand in cash with Lon. If you need to buy small stuff, use that, and put the receipts in the Ball jar on the kitchen counter. I’ll leave the keys for the truck and the car with Lon.”

They had questions, but they’d done this before.

“Any idea when you’ll be back?” Lon asked.

“I’ll check back every once in a while, just to ride, if nothing else. But it could be a while before I’m back full-time—probably not until we find Linc,” she said.

When she was satisfied that the farm would be handled, she ate the cold schnitzel sandwich, opened the safe and removed and packed her jewelry, packed a small suitcase with clothes she wanted to take to the city, went to the security room, took the tape out of the security cameras, and put in a new one.

She spent another hour on Rochambeau—Rocky—an aging gelding that had always been one of her favorites, then cleaned up, put on her traveling clothes, and wandered around the house at loose ends, until four o’clock, when she heard the gate-buzzer chirp. She looked out the front window down the lawn where the driveway snaked up from the road. Two cars were coming up the hill, a gunmetal gray Mercedes-Benz sedan and a black Lincoln Town Car.

She went out on the porch when the cars stopped in the driveway circle. A chauffeur got out of the Benz and waited. Another chauffeur got out of the Town Car and held the back door. A young woman got out, followed by a slightly older man, both carrying briefcases. Madison met them at the top of the porch stairs.

“Hello,” the woman said. “I’m Janice Rogers, this is Lane Parks, Johnnie said to say hello for him. He will see you tonight.”

“Two cars?” she asked.

“Johnnie thought a convoy would be better,” Rogers said. “If you’re really worried . . . it would make it more complicated for anyone to interfere with us.”

“Good. Let me get my things,” she said.

The trip into D.C. took a little more than three hours. Her attorney, Johnson Black, was waiting on the porch when the Benz pulled up to the town house, alerted by the two junior attorneys in the Town Car. Black was dressed like his name, in shades of black, under a black raincoat, but with a brilliant jungle-birds necktie.

She got out, the chauffeur popped the trunk to get her luggage, and she walked up the sidewalk and Black kissed her on the cheek and said, “Quite an adventure.”

“The kind I don’t need.”

“Randall James is coming over tonight, if you don’t mind. He wants to talk about those tapes—he wants you on his show tomorrow.”

She was fumbling for the keys to the front door, found them. “You think that’d be the thing to do?”

“Well, I’ll have to look at the tapes, but so far, the press is acting like we’re just bullshitting about Linc and Goodman. This could change things. Depends on the tapes . . .”

Randall James had a noon gig as the Washington Insider on the local ABC outlet. The show got to the right demographic.

James showed up at nine o’clock, an unctuous man with careful black hair, a sharp nose, and a dimple on his chin. He would, she thought, lie for the pure pleasure of it; but he had the demographics.

He sat in the chair, watching the tapes, checking her profile from time to time. When they were done, he said, “I’ll put you on right at the top, at noon. Live. This is great shit, Mrs. Bowe.” He picked up a remote and ran back to the point where Sheenan had shuffled toward her. The threat seemed more explicit on the tape than it had in person. James froze the scene, said, “Look at the face on that fucker . . .”

Her name was Madison Bowe. Her husband was an ex–U.S. senator from Virginia, who, two weeks earlier, had vanished after a speech in Charlottesville. Vanished like a wisp of smoke.

Next day.

The governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia stood in the living room of the private quarters on the second floor of the governor’s mansion, watching the television. He was flushed, angry, but silent.

His brother was not. His brother screamed at the television: “Look at the bitch, Arlo.
Look at that bitch.
She’s ruinin’ you, and she knows it. Goddamn her eyes . . .”

“She’s good at it,” Arlo Goodman said after a moment, a small smile on his face. “That silly ass Randall James is wearing a toupee, huh? He looks like a circumcised cock being attacked by a rat.”

Darrell Goodman wasn’t amused. He sat on the couch behind the governor, wearing a tan raincoat, his hands in the pockets, a tennis hat shading his eyes, making them invisible in the already dimly lit room. His body was canted toward the TV, trembling with tension. “You want me to . . .”

The governor turned and pointed a finger at him: “Nothing. Nobody goes near her, not for any reason. I’ll make a statement, sweetness and light, apologize, kick the Watchman’s ass. What’s his name? Sheenan. We kick his ass. But if anything happened to her, I’d be cooked. Done. Finished. Stay the fuck away from her.”

“What about Sheenan? Maybe he’s working with her. Maybe it was a setup.”

The governor grunted: “If that was a setup, he oughta get the Oscar. But it wasn’t a setup, Darrell. That was a real, honest-to-God barefaced threat. He thought he was doing the right thing.”

“Dumb fuck, getting on tape.”

“Let it go. I’ll have Patricia deal with him. But I’ll tell you what, this is no way to get to be president.”

Darrell Goodman studied his brother, his calm face, the smile as he watched the televised assassination. Sooner or later, the governor would realize that they were in a war. Then he’d do more than rave. Then he’d get angry, then he’d move. Darrell looked forward to the day.

The hunter knew Madison Bowe’s name. He’d seen her picture, had never met her, had no idea where she lived, had no thought that she might be in his future. As she spoke to a half million people on Randall James’s show, he knelt on a rubber tarp, not forty miles from her farm, waiting. Above him, the sun was a dull nickel hidden in the clouds.

The rain had come every night for the past three, courtesy of a low-pressure system stalled over the Appalachians. The night before, the rain began just after 3
A
.
M
.
He’d woken in his guest room, upstairs in the cabin, snug under the slanting tin roof. He’d listened for a few moments, the water whispering down a drainpipe, the cotton smell of the quilt around him, and then he’d rolled over and slept soundly until four-thirty.

He woke at four-thirty every morning. When he opened his eyes, he lay quietly for a moment, surfacing, then looked at the bedside clock, stretched, and got out of bed. He did fifty push-ups and fifty sit-ups on the colonial-style hooked rug from China, then a series of stretches, working hard on his bad leg. As he was finishing his routine, he heard an alarm go off down the hall.

He grabbed his jeans and a pair of fresh underpants from his bag, and padded barefoot down the hall to the bathroom. Better first than at the end of the line . . .

He brushed his teeth, skipped shaving, showered quickly. Out of the shower, he dried himself with his designated towel, pulled on the shorts and jeans, and opened the door. Peyson Carter was leaning against the opposite wall, green eyes, sleepy, wrapped in a bathrobe, holding a hair dryer.

“Morning, Jake,” she said, not looking at his bare chest. His name was Jake Winter. “Billy’s just getting up.”

“Yeah, let me get out of your way.”

He slid past her in the hallway, careful not to brush against her. Peyson was his best friend’s wife. Since Billy Carter first brought her around, fifteen years ago in college, he’d been a little in love with her. Some of the feeling, he suspected, was returned. They were always careful not to touch, because there might be a question of exactly when the touching would stop. And she loved Billy . . .

The guys downstairs were slower getting up, but by the time he’d gotten dressed and into his boots, and gathered his coveralls and gear, they were moving around. He could hear the downstairs shower going, and the plop-gurgle of the coffeemaker, the smell of hot coffee on a cool, rainy morning.

As he left the room, Peyson came out of the bathroom, steamy and pink, wrapped in the robe, and he said, “Scrambled?” and she said, “Yes,” and shouted, “Billy, get up,” and he followed her down the hall, watching her ass, and God help him, if Billy his best friend ever died in a car wreck, he would be knocking on this woman’s door the next week.

Peyson went on to the other bedroom and he turned down the stairs.

In the kitchen, he started breaking eggs into a bowl, got some muffin-premix poured into pan-molds, fired up the oven, took a package of bacon out of the refrigerator. Bob Wilson came out of the downstairs bathroom, hair wet from the shower, and said, “Rain.”

“Mist.”

“Gonna make the woods quiet, anyway. Hope the birds don’t hunker down.”

Sam Barger walked sleepy-eyed from the bedroom and asked Wilson, “You all done in the shower?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“Rainin’,” Barger said. “TV says it should be outa here by noon.”

They took a little time over breakfast: the smell of muffins rising in the oven, bacon and eggs, coffee, the pine-wood walls of the cabin. Peyson Carter across from him, curly blond hair, catching his eyes. Did all attractive women keep a spare tire?