Jim McGill 04 The Last Ballot Cast, Part 2

by Joseph Flynn

  Keeping her voice down, despite their precautions, Galia told the president, “Howard Hurlbert is about to make a fool of himself on CSPAN.”

  “And why should we do anything but cheer?” Patti asked.

  “Because there are millions of fools who will take him at his word and swallow his lie whole.”

  “That lie being?”

  Galia told the president.

  Who frowned, drawing a look of concern from Devin. She waved it off. His sense of touch was perfect as always. The president pointed at Galia. All was well again.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Patti told Galia, “but most big lies are.”

  “Absurd or not, we have to knock it down and fast.”

  “All right, but we’ll do it with humor.”

  “What, mock people’s paranoia? That’s not nice,” Galia said.

  “Tough. If people want to act like dunces they should be seen for what they are.”

  The president had an idea on how to achieve their goal. She told Galia, who loved it.

  Then Patti asked, “You learned of this through one of your sources?”

  “Yes.” Galia’s answer held a note of anger.

  That wasn’t unusual; indignation was the chief of staff’s favored emotional response.

  Sensing something that went beyond her usual pique, though, Patti said, “I know better than to inquire about your sources, but is there anything you’d care to tell me?”

  Galia took a beat and then said, “The woman I heard the news from is a formerly battered spouse. She heard it from a currently battered spouse.”

  The president had never had a man lay a hand on her in anger, but she knew other women who had, and she’d despised the men who’d hurt her friends. In the past, she hadn’t been in a position to affect a legal remedy. Now, she was.

  “Galia, I’d like to help.”

  “So would I, but … first, I’d have to persuade two women to go public with their humiliation and then you would have to deal with the political backlash.”

  The chief of staff explained what she meant.

  Patti said, “I don’t give a damn about that. If any man on the other side tries to give me grief about it, I’ll destroy his career.”

  The president took a deep breath, exhaled slowly.

  Tried to clear her mind, let herself relax.

  Forget about all the bastards in the world for the next forty minutes.

  United States Senate — Washington, D.C.

  Senator Howard Hurlbert had the jitters as he waited his turn to enter the chamber and speak. His chief of staff, Bobby Beckley, waited with him, trying to keep the old man calm. In his third term as a senator, there was no reason for Hurlbert to have stage fright, Beckley thought. Especially, with only the presiding officer, Senator Grace Kalman (D-WA), and a few sleepy underlings nearby to watch him in person.

  There was, however, one spectator present who did matter — a lot.

  Up in the visitors gallery sat Tom T. Wright, chairman of the Do Right for America Foundation. He was one of the few people at that point who wanted to hear what Howard Hurlbert had to say. The rich old goat who’d ponied up the money for Hurlbert’s original Super-PAC, Royce Selby, had turned tail and run when the Department of Justice had gone after him for the anti-Patti Grant commercial that it had labeled fraudulent.

  The senator needed a new billionaire to bankroll his election efforts.

  Tom T. more than qualified and had come to Washington to see if he wanted to buy in.

  The Louisiana fat cat hadn’t always been rich. He had grown up swamping out his daddy’s bar in New Orleans every morning before school, after the local lowlifes had spilled their drinks, piss and blood in it the night before. Often as not, Tom T. would find teeth on the floor. A couple of times there were even glass eyes. He thought if he found enough glassies he could take them to school, get up a game of marbles with his friends that’d give the girls nightmares for years.

  That hadn’t worked out though. Most of Daddy’s booze hounds managed to keep their orbs, real or fake, in their heads. What turned out to be Tom’s greatest find was having his older sister, Marcella, run off and leave her six-year-old son, Jean Baptiste, behind. Tom’s mother, Earleen, had run off, too — leaving Daddy alone and Tom T.to clean up the bar.

  Tom T. hadn’t missed his mother particularly, was indifferent to his sister’s departure, but he praised Jesus she’d left J.B. behind. The kid, Tom T. guessed, was one-eighth black and a hundred and ten percent smart. Daddy liked the little guy, too, but it was Tom T. who raised him.

  Rather than hand off his dirty work to J.B., Tom T. set him to being the bar’s resident genius. The kind wagers got placed on. Things started simple, races to see who could recite the alphabet backward faster. Later in the night it would be who could say it forward faster. Bets were small at first, fifty cents, maybe a dollar. By the end of the night, though, there was usually about twenty-five dollars to split.

  Daddy got ten percent off the top. Tom T. and J.B. split the remainder fifty-fifty. J.B. made sure the arithmetic worked out right.

  Word of J.B.’s prowess spread from drinker to drinker, bar to bar.

  Soon there were imitators. Then there were competitors.

  For a period of four years, little smart guys matching wits got to be a bar sport in New Orleans. Drinkers would bring in their small fry, brag on them, tell everyone what their specialties were and turn ‘em loose on each other, wagering question by question and best out of five. People of more refined sensibilities, who drank in nicer neighborhoods, heard stories of what was going on from their auto mechanics and such and complained to the newspapers and the police.

  The chief of police investigated and concluded, “The kids ain’t drinking nothin’ but sody-pop, and they ain’t chawin’ on each other like dogs. Where the hell’s the harm?”

  The critics moved on to more tractable social problems.

  What killed the sport was nobody could beat J.B. People started bringing in their high school kids toward the end and J.B., ten by then, still beat them. Some promoters wanted to match J.B. against college students, ones who attended class not just played football, but Tom said no.

  Another group came to Tom offering to pay him a thousand dollars to have J.B. retire so the other kids would stand a chance. J.B. was tired of unequal competition by then and told Tom to take the money. He did and used it to buy saving bonds for J.B.

  Thing was, without J.B., the sport died from lack of interest. There were plenty of regular smart kids around to play, but there was no one like J.B. who made people’s jaws drop and say, “Sumbitch, no way in hell I coulda known that.”

  Watching kids whom they suspected — usually correctly — weren’t much smarter than them wasn’t any fun. The betting action dried up and that was that.

  By the time J.B. was a junior in high school, Daddy had died, Tom T. took over the bar and J.B. demanded that he be the one to do the clean up. But he asked Tom T. would it be all right if he applied to go to college at MIT. The question of J.B. leaving for Cambridge, Massa-damn-chusetts hit Tom T. like a Nolan Ryan fastball. It made his heart hurt.

  He still managed to say, “Anything you want, J.B.”

  J.B. was admitted to MIT, but even with a generous financial aid package the leftover expenses were more than Tom T. could meet. He said he’d take out a mortgage on the bar, but J.B. said no. He wrote a thank you letter to MIT and enrolled at L.S.U.

  He studied petroleum engineering, graduated first in his class and turned down Exxon and every other oil company that offered him a job. He set up his own company, got venture capital backing from folks out in San Francisco and showed people he could find recoverable oil in places everyone else had missed.

  He made Tom T. his partner and cut him in for half of every dollar that came his way.

  Having raised one fantastic kid and gotten rich, Tom T. thought he had wisdom to share with everyone. Some of his ideas had merit. Others suggested that
even starting out poor a man could be more than a little eccentric, and coming into money only made it obvious.

  Bobby Beckley joined Tom T. in the visitors gallery of the Senate.

  Senator Howard Hurlbert stood at the lectern below and looked into the CSPAN camera.

  “I am not a saintly man,” Hurlbert said. “The best I can hope for is to be a good man and do the right things for America.”

  Tom T. cut a sharp look at Beckley, plainly thinking the senator was making fun of him. The senator’s chief of staff held up a hand to counsel patience. All would be well.

  Hurlbert continued, “If it hadn’t been for my mother and father and the minister of the church we all went to every Sunday, I don’t know if I’d even be a good man. I might be someone who doesn’t even believe in God. I would never have known Jesus and my soul would be lost to eternal damnation. I wouldn’t even know what was in store for me until it was too late and eternal fires were consuming me with pain that would never be extinguished.”

  Beckley thought his boss had started off well.

  You didn’t know better, you’d think he’d meant every word he’d said.

  Hurlbert continued, “I reflect on how lucky I was, how lucky my family was, to have Preacher Curtiss show us the way to find heaven. We were lucky because he was the only man of God for thirty miles in any direction, and as hard as my father worked his farm, he didn’t have the time, the money or the energy to find us another church. I shudder to think what would have become of us without Preacher Curtiss.

  That was a lie. Hurlbert had grown up in a setting of minor wealth.

  “That fearful thought came to my mind when I heard about Reverend Burke Godfrey dying — after the federal government sent the army in to take him out of his church.”

  That was another lie, of course. Godfrey had been snatched from his office building.

  Had Godfrey claimed sanctuary in a house of worship, he would have presented Mather Wyman with a much stickier problem than he had by raising his own paramilitary force.

  Ignoring the facts was no problem for Bobby Beckley. His political strategy was simplicity itself: Lie to the gullible. If that didn’t work, lie some more. All you had to do to win an election was deceive more people than the other guy did, and it wasn’t like you were dealing with a crowd of critical thinkers.

  Ask the yahoos their opinion on any important issue and most of them would begin their responses with the same two words, “I feel.” Feel not think. Thinking was hard work. They’d put all that behind them the moment they got out of school, if they’d even bothered trying to think in the classroom.

  Hurlbert went on, “Where would I have been if the government had taken Preacher Curtiss from my mother, my father and me? I still might have done well in school. I might still have been the first person in my family lucky enough to graduate from college. But what sense of purpose would my life have had if I didn’t know God?”

  Hearing those words, not just reading them on a page, Bobby thought he might have laid it on a little thick there. The man was a politician after all. A lot of people would think a pest exterminator had a higher calling.

  Still, Hurlbert was delivering a far better performance than Beckley would have thought possible less than half an hour ago. Tom T. was watching the senator closely, too. He appeared to be hanging on his every word. For that matter — and not necessarily a good thing — so was Senator Kalman sitting in the presiding officer’s chair.

  She had taken a notepad and pen in hand and was making notes as her colleague spoke. Beckley didn’t doubt for a minute that she had copied down the lies he’d written and Hurlbert had voiced about the army grabbing Godfrey.

  Hurlbert continued, “Of course, I might have found God’s word in the Bible whether I stayed home or went off to college. In fact, I did take the Bible that Momma and Daddy gave me when I went off to school. I would read it in private moments, whenever I felt myself in danger of taking a wrong turn.”

  That was fiction, too, but who could refute what someone did in his private moments?

  “What has me worried now,” Hurlbert said, “is if we were to reelect Patricia Grant or elect Mather Wyman as president, how do we know either of them wouldn’t send the army after any minister, preacher or priest who got on the wrong side of them? If they can bring low a mighty figure like Reverend Burke Godfrey, how could any man of the cloth hold his ground and cleave to scripture?

  “That thought is terrifying in itself, but what might follow could be far worse. If the government comes for our ministers, preachers and priests, how long will it be before Washington tries to take our bibles from us?”

  That was where Bobby Beckley had stopped writing.

  Where Senator Howard Hurlbert should have left things.

  Even though he’d stuck priests in there with ministers and preachers when Bobby had left the Catholics out in the cold.

  But no, goddamnit. Howard fucking Hurlbert had to leave his mark on the speech.

  He said, “You might think all this is just the fear of a simple country boy, a cotton field Christian, but you mark my words, if the government comes for my bible, they’ll soon come for your Torah and your Koran, too.”

  Your Torah and your Koran? Jesus! Beckley felt like someone just set his hair on fire.

  Then Tom T. leaned over and told him. “I like your boy’s style but we’ve got to get him some new material.”

  As Tom T. Wright was their only hope of landing a billionaire underwriter — and because Bobby hated it when any dumbass politician fucked up one of his speeches — the chief of staff nodded and said, “Damn right we do.”

  White House Press Room

  In that afternoon’s briefing, Press Secretary Aggie Wu executed the president’s strategy to rebut Senator Hurlbert’s claim that the government would soon be confiscating people’s bibles.

  She told the newsies, “In a moment of apparent hysteria, the senior senator from Mississippi, Howard Hurlbert, suggested today that the federal government might seize bibles from every Christian home in America. The president kindly requests everyone here to check the nightstand drawer of the next hotel you visit. See if there’s a bible in it. If there is, all is well. Because even the federal government is smart enough to go after easy pickings first. If your favorite hotels still have their bibles, you can rest easy the one you have at home is safe, too.”

  The reporters, secular bastards that they were, laughed.

  Anticipating a possible trouble point, Aggie added, “If someone starts stealing hotel bibles, we ask that the FBI be contacted. The culprits will be found.”

  Fair warning to anyone with dirty tricks in mind.

  McGill Investigations, Inc. — Georgetown

  McGill asked Special Agent Elspeth Kendry to step into his office and close the door.

  He asked her to sit and offered her a soft drink.

  She sat but declined the drink, regarding McGill with some suspicion.

  Thinking she wasn’t going to like whatever came next.

  McGill said, “Would you mind if I ask you about the confrontation you were part of in Jordan?”

  McGill had taken the time to read the personnel file on his new bodyguard.

  She’d helped break up a counterfeiting ring in the Middle East.

  Elspeth relaxed and said, “You mean the gunfight?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t mind,” she said. “You want to know how it feels to get shot at or to kill someone?”

  “Margaret Sweeney and I have both been shot. Her wound was more serious than mine.”

  “So it’s killing someone you want to know about.”

  McGill said, “It was two someones, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, it was. Might have been three if I’d been faster reloading. So what do you want to know, the in-the-moment experience or what comes afterward?”

  McGill said, “I’ve been in some tense situations. I know you do what you have to, reflexively, if you want to wa
lk away. But I’ve never killed anyone. What thoughts are you left with?”

  “Don’t you mean what regrets or at least second thoughts?”

  “However you want to describe it.”

  Elspeth leaned forward. “My dad was a tough kid from Providence, Rhode Island. He caught a few breaks and got an appointment to West Point. The army showed him how to put all his energy to good use. My mother is Iranian by birth, Baha’i by faith. She had to be tougher than my dad just to survive.”

  Elspeth smiled.

  “All this is the long way of saying I was raised not to take crap off anyone. Except for Mom, Dad and superior officers. When it comes to bad guys with guns … may I speak freely?”

  McGill nodded.

  “Fuck them. I shot those bastards before they could shoot me. My only regret was not being quicker seating that second magazine. That’s what wakes me up shaking some nights. What if being too slow had cost me my life?”

  “So you practiced,” McGill said. “Now you can change clips no sweat.”

  Elspeth said, “In practice, sure. When people are shooting at me, who knows?”

  McGill persisted. “No qualms about the men you killed?”

  “None,” Elspeth said. “Better them than me. But then having been in tight spots you already know that.”

  McGill did.

  But he hadn’t had to take a life to save his own.

  Yet.

  After thanking Elspeth for her candor and letting her return to the outer office, McGill called FBI Deputy Director Byron DeWitt.

  McGill told him, “I’ve been thinking: If Damon Todd and his pals should decide not to seek shelter with one of Todd’s special friends, he’ll likely pay cash for a place to stay.”

  DeWitt agreed. “That or barter is the way the underground economy works.”

  “Would it be possible for the FBI to check with real estate agents around the country, the ones who rent houses, to see how many cash deals they’ve made? And were any of those deals made with guys matching the descriptions of the people we want?”

  The deputy director considered the dimensions of the task. “I think we have the people and processing power to handle that. What if the bad guys bought a house or rented an apartment?”