The President's Killers (5 page)

FIFTEEN

Meesh’s curt responses to his text messages puzzled Denny.

“Your day ok”

“So, so.”

“U ok”

“Guess so”

It was hard to believe Meesh was upset over Gus’ cruel murder. She barely knew him. She was probably ticked off at something that had happened at Korn-Ritter.

“Dinner out tomorrow”

“Ok”

“Pick someplace nice”

The fact he struck out in San Francisco didn’t seem to bother Lott.

“No luck again?” he said as Denny got into his car.

“No. I scoured that hotel. I was —.”

“Forget it. We’ve got something more important. We need you right away.”

Denny groaned. Not another mad dash across the country?

“Get on the first plane you can get out of Newark,” Lott said. “We want you to go to Fenton, Missouri. The Stardust motel. Check into the place and sit tight. Just stay there until you hear from me. I’ll meet you there.”

“What’s up?”

“It’s big. I can’t give you the full story until we’re out there.”

Denny looked at him. “Hey, this is crazy. My fiancée is starting to wonder what the hell —.”

“You rather be mixing margaritas in that two-bit bar? Bear with us, kid. Things are going to get a whole lot better.”

“Where the hell is Fenton?”

“Just outside St. Louis.”

The big, half-empty airliner shook and seemed to slide sideways through the hazy sky as it banked and descended through the bumpy air currents closer to the ground.

Denny looked up from his magazine just in time to catch a glimpse of the sickly brown Mississippi river. Beside it, St. Louis’ great, silver Gateway Arch glinted in the sun. It looked like a gigantic croquet hoop.

He used his phony driver’s license to check out a rental car. The Avis clerk gave him a map and showed him how to get to Fenton. It was ten miles west of St. Louis, on the outskirts of the metropolitan area.

Forty minutes later, he saw a sign marking the Fenton city limits. The town seemed to be little more than an outpost along Interstate 44.

On one side of the highway was a big white plant of some kind with a pale-blue water tower. On the other side was a cluster of gas stations, cut-rate restaurants, and economy motels. The Stardust motel was the oldest and seediest of the lot.

The woman in the office was shouting into the phone. Her hair looked like a battered bird nest. She slammed the phone down.

“I can hardly hear the man,” she said. “He’s got his TV so damned loud you can’t hear a thing.”

It wasn’t hard to figure out why. The room she gave Denny was warm and reeked of Lysol. When he turned on the battered air conditioning unit, it whined like a jet engine. The noise was so loud he had to turn the volume on the old TV set way up to hear even the commercials.

He groaned. Maybe mixing margaritas wasn’t the worse way to make a living.

SIXTEEN

It upset Meesh. Denny’s new job had turned their lives upside down.

What was it with all these sudden trips? Why wasn’t Denny supposed to talk about the things he was doing?

She lowered the front windows of her Volvo and let the cool breeze caress her arm. In the New Jersey dusk the colors of the buildings and trees were muted. There was little traffic. It was a lovely time to be outdoors.

When she got Denny’s text message that he was on his way to St. Louis, she’d decided to work late. By the time she left the Korn-Ritter Building, she and the cleaning woman were the only people left on the ninth floor.

Behind her, a siren suddenly wailed. She drew over to the side of the road and watched an ambulance speed past, multi-colored lights flashing. It quickly overtook a maroon mini-van a half block ahead of her.

Her dad had died in an ambulance after suffering a heart attack at the breakfast table.

“Your poor father suffered,” her mother always said, without ever elaborating. “They put that mask on him, to give him oxygen. But he was dead, poor thing, by the time we got to the hospital.”

He was only fifty-four. It had never even occurred to Meesh he would die one day. She felt cruelly cheated. He was the reason she’d worked so hard in school, the reason she got her MBA, the reason she was clawing her way up the corporate ladder at Korn-Ritter. She’d wanted to make her dad proud of her. She wanted to earn enough money to buy him a bigger home someday.

When he died, she felt as though she’d been stripped of her purpose in life. What was the point of it all now? In time, though, her despair gave way to a more hopeful notion. Although she wasn’t religious, she felt that even though he was gone, her dad was still aware of what she did. Her accomplishments still would impress him.

She stopped at a Shop Rite and picked up a couple of fried chicken parts, coleslaw, and dinner rolls at the deli counter. When she reached her apartment building, the parking lot was only half filled. It was the vacation season, and many of the building’s residents were at the shore.

The family portrait in her foyer caught her eye. Everyone looked so young in the photograph. Her mother and father were a handsome couple. Her dad still had a full head of hair when the picture was taken. She studied his smile, wishing life had been kinder to him.

He’d labored most of his years at a small specialty lumber firm, mastering the lathes and other wood-working equipment and rising over the years to the exalted position of supervisor, with responsibility for two other workers. He had never earned much money, never gone on a cruise, and never — until Meesh took him — eaten in a four-star restaurant. And then, even though she was picking up the tab, the prices upset him so much he couldn’t enjoy the meal.

Meesh examined her own face in the photograph, so young and innocent, and then looked at Beth. She shouldn’t resent her younger sister, but she did. While Meesh was getting A’s in high school, Beth was a cheerleader. While Meesh was getting her MBA, Beth was crisscrossing the country as a flight attendant. In both cases, her adventures always seem to command more attention at the dinner table than Meesh’s.

Her dad not only knew nothing about the business world, he detested large corporations, convinced they exploited their employees and were driven only by greed. She’d never been able to persuade him to come with her to the Korn-Ritter Building on a weekend to see her handsome office.

On the day she phoned home to tell her parents she’d been promoted to manager, her mother forgot to even mention it to her father. Not that it made a huge impression on him, anyway. He seemed to equate it with Beth being assigned to fly a new route.

She was munching on a dry, crusty drumstick, feeling lonely and sorry for herself, when Denny called.

“Sorry about our date, hon.”

“No problem,” Meesh said. “I got some extra work done at the office.”

“You wouldn’t believe this dump I’m staying at.” He gave her the highlights.

“Why are you staying there?”

“Oh… well, I guess it didn’t look that bad from the highway. It’s close to where my meeting is.”

“What is it with this company you’re working for? It’s bizarre. All these mad dashes from one part of the country to another.”

“It’ll settle down. Erickson is supposed to be very highly regarded. One of the top companies in business insurance.”

She remembered the ugly notes she found in his apartment.

“I saw some pretty weird notes when I was over at your place.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, ‘Say Goodbye, Congressman!’ I mean, ‘Guns Don’t Kill, But Pissed-Off Voters Do!’”

He didn’t say anything.

“I couldn’t believe what I was reading, Denny. What in God’s name is that all about?”

“I was just horsing around.”

“Horsing around? All that stuff about bullets? And Congressmen? For God’s sake!”

“I was just doodling, that’s all.”

She could tell he wasn’t leveling with her.

“Look,” he said, “one of our clients is a gun-control group, okay? I’m not supposed to talk about it. They’re concerned about gun nuts. Fanatics. They’ve been getting some threats, and, well, I was just playing around, writing down some of the stuff I heard.”

“Why is everything at Erickson such a big secret?”

“I don’t know. I’m just trying to do what they ask me to do, babe. Some of the things we do with business customers are very confidential… How are things at Korn-Ritter?”

She couldn’t sleep.

The bizarre notes Denny had written, the sudden trips — they weren’t Denny’s fault. He had no say in the matter. But it was troubling. So was his lack of candor. It just wasn’t like him to be so evasive.

When she arrived at the Korn-Ritter parking garage in the morning, she felt whipped. She bought an extra-large coffee from the vendor outside the building and hurried to her office.

Logging onto the web, she Googled “Erickson & Company,” then “Erickson.” There were listings for a floor and supply company, an industrial lighting company, a football coach, a baseball player, a singer, a scientist, but nothing, absolutely nothing that could be Denny’s employer.

She punched in “business insurance.” The results included a listing of the top one-hundred business insurance firms in the United States, based on revenues. She scrolled up and down the list twice. Denny’s firm wasn’t there.

SEVENTEEN

When the call finally came, it startled him.

Denny had spent the entire day in his room waiting to hear from Lott. He read the newspaper he’d bought at the airport, surfed the web on his laptop, read archived stories about the Mets, watched a Cardinals baseball game on the old TV, and dozed.

When the air-conditioner was running, the room was too cold. When he shut it off, the room was too warm. The control buttons were useless. He left his room only for quick meals at a nearby Shoney’s.

At midnight he gave up, turning the lights off and pulling the thin worn blanket up under his chin. Almost immediately, he sank into a deep sleep.

The jangling phone awoke him.

“We need to get together.” The voice was Lott’s.

Denny found the switch on the bed lamp and looked at his watch. It was 2:30 A.M.

“Sure. When?”

“Right now.”

“Now? What the hell is going on?”

“Tell you when I see you.”

“Are you here at the Stardust?”

“They were all booked.”

“Are you kidding? The last time this dump was fully booked, World War II was probably just heating up.”

Lott had probably taken one look at the place and stayed on the highway.

“I’m just down the road,” he said. “What kind of car you driving?”

“Hyundai.”

“What color?”

“White.”

Lott wanted to meet him in fifteen minutes at an all-night Steak ‘n Shake drive-in on Lindbergh Boulevard. It was just off the interstate, four miles east of the Stardust.

“Don’t put on your Sunday best,” he said. “We’re going to get our hands dirty.”

Denny cussed, pulled on khakis, a navy polo shirt, and his Reeboks, and was on his way.

When Lott stepped out of the shadows, he was wearing a dark suit without a tie and had a paper bag in his hand.

“Airline lost my bag,” he explained as he slid into the front seat. “This is all I’ve got to wear.”

There was liquor on his breath. Denny figured the paper bag probably contained a pint of bourbon.

Denny had pulled alongside a dark SUV at one end of the white-and-orange restaurant, away from the brightly lit entrance.

“Want to go inside for a cup of coffee?” Denny said.

Lott shook his head and glanced out the back window.

“We don’t have time. We’ve got a busy day ahead of us. Patrick’s in town here.”

“The President?”

“Yeah, he’s making a speech in St. Louis. Staying at one of the hotels on the riverfront. SIG got a tip someone’s going to try to pop him when he goes for his morning run.”

The cobwebs in Denny’s brain vanished.

“We’re going to give the Secret Service boys a hand,” Lott said. “McQueen must think a lot of you. He wanted you to see—.”

Two young men in denim jackets came out of the Steak ‘n Shake. Lott watched them until they climbed into a pickup truck across the lot.

“We do a lot of this sort of backup crap,” he finally said.

SIG, the FBI, and other law-enforcement agencies were constantly turning up information that required investigation by the Secret Service. It had to check out thousands of threats against the President every year.

“Ninety-nine times out of a hundred all the sweat and horse shit are for nothing.”

Lott handed him the paper bag.

“Here, take this. Just in case.”

Inside the bag was a 9 millimeter Glock.

EIGHTEEN

Under the black sky, the white broken center-line seemed to leap beneath the Hyundai as they barreled down Interstate 44.

Tall, goose-necked street lamps along the highway gave everything an eerie orange tinge.

“Nothing’s going to happen,” Lott said. “If anything does, I want you to haul ass back to your motel and wait there until you hear from me.”

“The Stardust?”

“Whatever the hell they call it. You’re still only a contract employee. You get hurt, the media would be all over us, wanting to know why the hell we had you on a presidential detail when the President was threatened.”

They passed a “ZOO-MUSEUMS” sign. At the next exit, a ramp for Hampton Avenue, Lott instructed Denny to turn off the interstate.

The only sign of life on Hampton was a car halted at a red light. A few blocks later, they crossed an overpass and were in Forest Park.

The dimly lit roads and walks in the park were deserted. They drove past dense black woods, shadowy ponds and lagoons, meadows dotted with dark clusters of trees. Here and there they passed a car parked beside the curb or left in an empty parking lot.

As they followed a road past golf greens and dark, forbidding-looking picnic grounds, Lott studied the dark shapes around them. Across a meadow, a pair of headlights cut through the park.

“Go back towards the Hampton Avenue entrance,” Lott said.

They crossed a concrete bridge and drove alongside thick woods. An empty car was parked beside the curb.

“Pull in up there, ahead of that car. Don’t get too close to it.”

When they got out, Lott led him along the edge of the woods until they came to a barely visible opening. They followed a narrow path into the interior. It was as black as a cave.

The incessant chirping of crickets filled the air. Through the trees, Denny caught glimpses of a bright yellow half-moon. It was a warm night, and his shirt was damp under his arms. His khakis clung to his legs. Under his belt, the handle of the pistol rubbed against his belly.

Lott veered to the right. He seemed to know exactly where he was going. He picked his way through the woods for another hundred yards, then left the path. The shrubbery was thicker, the grass taller, and the ground rose steeply. Ahead of them was a patch of orange light.

They were at the edge of the woods, only ten feet from a dimly lit sidewalk and road.

Lott dropped to the ground under the branches of a tree. Denny flopped down beside him. The road sloped gently downward to their left, then made a small, graceful arc to the right. At the base of the slope, just beyond the woods, it was joined by another road.

He stared at the large dark knoll across the road from them. At the bottom of the knoll, just above the road, was a row of white stakes.

Lott had briefed him as they drove through the park. The President’s party would jog along a bicycle path, coming directly toward them. It would include the President, the mayor of St. Louis, three or four White House aides, an influential local banker, and several Secret Service agents. The rest of the security detail, including SIG agents and counter-snipers, would be posted at strategic points along the jogging route.

Gradually the sky grew lighter. The half-moon became white. Lott grew even more watchful. The trees and bushes were still indistinct but the knoll was no longer black. It was taking on a greenish color.

Denny could read his watch now. Four-twenty. Still more than an hour until sunrise. He slapped at a fly on his wrist.

Lott looked up at the sky, then leaned towards him. “There should be security off to our left,” he whispered. “I’m going to check it out. Stay right here till I’m back.”