the Plan (1995) (32 page)

"Yeah, let's go," A
. J
. said while the engines started and the plane taxied onto the runway.

In minutes, they were thundering past the tower and climbing up, out of the low morning fog and breaking into the sunlight, heading east with the orange ball riding low off the starboard wing.

"We delay her. . . . Why? What good does that do?" "I called Mickey," A
. J
. said, flatly.

Haze looked at him, not sure what the ramifications of that call might be.

"He said if we couldn't take care of it, he would." Haze was looking at the man he'd grown up with, wondering if it was possible they were talking about the same thing.

"What the fuck does that mean?"

"He said he'd take care of it. That's what he said. I can't stop him from doing whatever he wants."

"And I said, what does that mean?" Haze's voice was rising. *

"Keep your voice down, will you?" A
. J
. said, glancing around, but they were alone in the empty cabin.

"You telling me he's gonna kill her?" Haze was whispering.

"I don't know what he's gonna do. . . Put the fear of God into her, make her do what we want, shake some sense into her. How do I know?"

They sat in silence for a long time.

"Haze . ."

Haze was looking out the window at the rising sun. "Look at me, will ya . . . ?"

Haze finally turned, but there was no expression on his handsome face.

"This is what we dreamed of, man. This is what it's been about since grade school. You and me . . . getting where we want to go . . . in the White House, Haze, the Oval Office."

Haze said nothing, his expression hard to read in the orange light coming through the window.

" 'Member what we said when we were kids?" A
. J
. went on. 'Me higher the monkey climbs, the more his ass is exposed. Our ass is exposed. We gotta do whatever it takes. The White House . . . that's the prize. Maybe a man can't win a prize like that unless he's willing to step up and take it."

"How does Mickey take care of it, huh?"

"I don't know, Haze, but if you want to be President, we have to stop her. These guys are spending heavy bread. They won't stand around while your wife flushes it dow
n t
he toilet."

Haze knew A
. J
. was right. And after the initial shoc
k h
ad worn off, he wasn't sure how upset he felt about it.

The plane touched down in Providence at nine-fifteen and taxied to the executive terminal. Haze and A
. J
. had not spoken in almost an hour. They got in A
. J
.'s Land Rover and drove to the governor's mansion. The streets of Providence were still clogged with morning traffic. When they parked in the garage under the mansion, it was almost ten.

"Anita's car isn't here," Haze said as they moved toward the elevator.

Upstairs, the Providence mansion was quiet. Anita's press secretary wasn't in yet. They moved down the hall and into Anita's suite. As soon as they entered, it was obvious Anita had left. Clothes were strewn everywhere, discards from a furious packing session. A . J
. went into the bathroom to check the cosmetics counter.

"Gone," he said flatly, as he walked out of the dressing room.

"Whatta we do now?"

"I'll go to the pay phone downstairs and call Mickey. He's gotta stop her." He started digging in his pocket for a quarter. "You got change?" he asked.

"Use this," Haze said, taking his AT&T card out of his wallet.

"You really stink in a crisis, you know that?" "What?" Haze said, angry and confused.

"You wanna call the head of the Alo Mafia family and log it on your AT and T account? I'm never gonna pull a bank job with you, homey."

A
. J
. dialed Mickey's private number on the pay phone in the lobby.

"This is AJ., lemme talk to Mickey," he said to an unfamiliar voice on the phone. After a moment, he heard the slightly mechanical sound of Mickey's voice. The tinny quality, he assumed, was caused by the scrambler.

"Yeah?"

"She's not here," A
. J
. said.

"She's in good hands," Mickey said.

"It wouldn't be wise if she were hurt. I don't think it would look good for the man to win the nomination today and then lose his wife, all in twenty-four hours."

"You and I must be having the same thoughts. We might still need her."

"Exactly," A
. J
. said.

"Tell your friend, I'll take care of everything." And the line went dead before A
. J
. could say anything more. As he hung up, a strange revelation hit him. He had somehow become involved in a conspiracy to commit a kidnapping. In his wildest dreams, he could never have conceived of a set of circumstances that would lead him to such a venture.

A
. J
. had always thought of himself in a certain way--gentle and funny, a good friend who always looked for the best in people. His keen mind was his secret weapon. Albert James Teagarden, the little boy who grew up at 2341/2 Beeker Street, would never hurt anyone. That just wasn't part of the plan. Yet here he was, standing in the lobby of the governor's mansion, having just called the head of the Jersey mob to discuss the kidnapping of Anita Farrington Richards, a woman he liked and respected.

A
. J
. moved to the elevator and pushed the button. He stared at his distorted reflection in the polished brass door. He looked wider--wider and shorter, with shiny, yellow skin. The reflection made him look a lot like Mickey Alo.

"Talk about your defining moments," he said to himself.

The door opened and A
. J
. stepped into the elevator. It swallowed him like Jonah, into its mahogany, brass-railed stomach, where he wondered, for the first time in years, what had happened to that little boy from Beeker Street.

Chapter
47.

THE ROOM WAS SMALL AND DARK, WITH NO WINDOWS
,
and the air was pungent with the smell of mildew and urine.

She was sitting with her hands tied behind her back. Her shoulders ached and she was thirsty. Something like a napkin or dish towel had been wedged into her mouth and her jaws were taped shut. At first she had cried, but her nose became filled with mucus, restricting her breathing, and she almost suffocated. Fortunately, she realized the danger before it was too late and had willed herself, as an act of survival, to stop crying. Relax, she had told herself. Breathe slowly. After a few agonizing moments, she cleared her air passage.

Anita Farrington Richards was terrified, but she had decided that her only chance to survive was to keep her wits, stay calm, and hope to find a way to communicate with her captors, men she had barely seen.

She had left the governor's mansion at eight-thirty, put her suitcase in the trunk of her car, and driven across Providence to River Street where she intended to meet a divorce attorney named Susan Salter. Anita had set up a nine A . M
. appointment, without telling anyone. She had bee n o n her way to Susan's office when a brown Camaro rear-ended her at a stop sign. She pulled over to exchange licenses when a dark shape suddenly filled the window on the passenger side. Before she could even call out, the driver's door had been yanked open and, in an instant, two men were in the front seat with her. She had started to scream, but the man on the passenger side had pushed her down, and jammed a gag into her mouth. He leaned down and whispered into her ear.

"Shut up or you're dead."

And then, with her head held down against the driver's thigh, they pulled out. She could hear the traffic and, occasionally, the man on the passenger side gave instructions to the driver.

"Right up there. . . . Halfway down the block. . . . They'll open the gate."

She had tried once to straighten her legs.

"You move, you're gonna get conked," the man had said. Then the car came to a stop. She could smell something dense and rich, perhaps oil in an open tank. A hood of some kind was put over her head before she was allowed to sit up; then her hands were taped behind her and she was led across uneven pavement. She heard a metal door open; she was pulled up some stairs and, finally, put into this room. The hood had been snapped off her head and the door closed, leaving her in darkness.

Anita tried desperately to hold on, to maintain her reason. Icy fear consumed her, periodically pushing her to the edge of sanity. Each time she struggled back. Her mind wouldn't hold still; it pinwheeled across a landscape of thoughts, sticking on meaningless details of her life, then racing off in search of nothing.

Oh, God . . . oh, God . . . oh, God . . . she chanted in her mind. What will they do to me? How can this be happening?

A
. J
. had sent the plane back to Memphis to pick up the rest of the press and campaign staff. He left Haze at th
e g
overnor's mansion and walked across the mall to his office. He sat down in his old leather chair and tried to recapture some of the excitement he had felt only a few hours ago when they'd swept Super Tuesday. It was useless. The excitement was replaced by a terrible listlessness.

The call from Henny Henderson came in at ten past twelve. He heard his secretary giving out the usual "Mr. Teagarden is not in right now." But he perked up when she said, "Would you say that number again, Mr. Henderson?"

"I'll take that, Jill," he called out.

"Oh, he just walked in. I can connect you now." And in a moment, Fudge Anderson's campaign chairman was on the phone.

"Well, I guess you're a happy guy this morning," the Republican wonk said cautiously.

"How you doin', Henny. . . . You call to set up a handball game or did you just miss me?" A
. J
. said to the man whom he hadn't spoken to for ten years, since Henny had called him a loose cannon in the Democratic party.

"Haze really came out of nowhere. Guess it's us against you guys now," Henny said. "I'll bet you've got the DNC spitting tacks into your picture."

"Haze is an astounding candidate. He's got a great vision for America, Henny. He's tapping into a lot of discontent."

"That's not all he's been tapping into.''

"What does that mean?"

"Does Haze know a woman named Bonita Money?" Al's stomach flipped. "Is that `money' --like, 'We're in the money'?"

"Actually, now that you mention it, 'in' is the right word, 'cause she says Haze has been screwin' her. She runs a travel agency in Florida. Apparently, Haze set up some vacations down there where he did more than lie on the beach. Want the vitals?"

"Yeah, let's hear," A
. J
. said, his spirits plummeting. "She's five-five, thirty-six, with platinum-blond hai
r a
nd abdominals you could scrub laundry on. She says they spent two consecutive weekends together last June . . . the seventh through the ninth and the thirteenth through the fifteenth."

"Jesus, Homy, calm down. You sound so happy." "Before we let go of this, I just thought I'd call and give Haze a chance to say it ain't so."

"That's pretty damn nice of you. Why didn't you just run right to the press with it?"

"I would have, but Fudge wouldn't let me. He said he wanted to give Haze a chance to deny it first. That's why I called. We could fit in some handball, too, if you want, but I think you're gonna be too busy trying to bury this turd before it stinks up your campaign. However, you should know, behind Ms. Money, we have a line of bimbos queueing up."

"You're a real prick!"

"I didn't fuck those girls, A
. J
. I'm just the poor messenger. If it wasn't for Fudge's sense of fair play, you would have been reading this blind in the papers tomorrow."

"I'll have to talk to Haze. I'm sure this is just a publicity seeker."

"Right. Well, we're gonna take it to the news guys at nine A
. M
. tomorrow, unless you can give us a reason not to. That's 'reason,' spelled A-L-I-B-I."

"Gimme a number."

They exchanged phone and beeper numbers, then hung up. A
. J
. leaned back and looked out across the mall at the governor's mansion.

"Shit," he finally said, then lunged out of his chair and headed over to find out what he already knew was true.

Haze didn't deny it. He sat in his office in the statehouse and looked glumly out the window.

"Were you there? those two weekends in June?" "yeah. ... Anita was having the hysterectomy in New York. I flew down to Florida."

"Great. Your wife is getting her uterus ripped out while you're playing tonsil hockey with this platinum-blond travel agent. Jesus!"

"Look, AJ., it happened. Okay?"

A
. J
. sat down and looked at Haze for a long moment. "I can't believe this. Yesterday, we were sweeping twenty states on our way to the White House, and today, my life is caving in on me."