Hope Never Dies

by Andrew Shaffer

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a biker inching behind one of his buddies. I couldn’t see his face, but I could see the tangle of long hair. Barack followed my eyes and strolled casually over to the man.

  “Turn around,” Barack ordered. I’d never seen the president quite like this. He’d had a life before I met him, though. Biographies had been written about him; he’d even penned a few books about himself. They left out more than they revealed. I wondered if anyone would ever truly know the complete Barack Obama. I wondered if even Barack Obama would ever know the real Barack Obama.

  When the biker didn’t comply, Barack dragged him out from behind his buddy and spun him around. Barack held the guy’s forearm out for me, showing off the tattoo. “This the guy?”

  I didn’t need to see the tattoo; I recognized his face.

  I nodded.

  Barack gave him a shove, and the faux minister stumbled into the middle of the clubhouse. “Does anyone know this clown’s name?”

  “T-Swizzle,” the speed demon said.

  Barack arched an eyebrow. “T-Swizzle?”

  “It’s Taylor Swift’s nickname.”

  “I know, I have daughters,” Barack said. He tossed a pair of handcuffs to T-Swizzle. “Put these on.”

  Barack had pilfered the silver bracelets from Steve before we dropped him off.

  The poor guy looked around at his friends expectantly, waiting for them to step in and prevent him from being hauled away. Nobody would meet his eyes. Loyalty extended only so far in the criminal world.

  37

  The man who’d given me the slip at Baptist Manor sat trembling in a folding chair. We were a couple of miles from the Lake House, in a storage unit I rented month-to-month. The rest of the facility was pretty empty—nobody wanted to dig around in their old forgotten boxes of memories on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Lucky break for us. Not so much for T-Swizzle. That meant there was no one besides me and Barack to hear his desperate pleas: “I don’t know any Finn Donnelly. You have me confused with some other guy. You have to let me go, because if I go to jail then I’ll never become a patch-wearing member—”

  I told him to shut up. He was only digging himself deeper.

  “Freedom of speech,” he spat back. “I got freedom of speech.”

  I said, “If you don’t shut up, that hole you’re digging is going to be your grave,” and I’m not sure who looked more surprised, T-Swizzle or Barack. I’d been thinking about that line for a while and was secretly thrilled I’d finally gotten to use it. I tried not to show my excitement. The time for fun and games had long passed.

  T-Swizzle’s full name was Taylor Brownsford, according to the driver’s license in his wallet. We’d also found something else in his jeans: a pocket watch. Finn’s pocket watch. There was no debating it. Even in a world where facts seemed to matter less and less, any idiot could tell whose watch it was from the inscription on the back: TO FINN — FORTY YEARS — LOVE, YOUR DARLENE.

  The watch was the first piece of physical evidence that directly tied the Marauders to Finn Donnelly. If there’d been any question about what we were going to do with Taylor—hand him over to Dan or Esposito for interrogation, or grill him ourselves—the pocket watch had sealed his fate. I wasn’t going to let him plead the fifth. I wasn’t going to let him slip through my fingers.

  Barack and I stepped outside. I kept one eye on our captive, but so far he hadn’t made any attempts to escape.

  “What’s that?” I asked Barack. He was grinning at a framed 8-by-10 he’d found inside the storage unit. He showed me the photo, an image of me and him jogging around the White House in dress shirts and ties. It was part of a promotion for one of Michelle’s get-off-your-fat-ass campaigns. “This was from your office in Washington,” Barack said.

  I snatched it from him. “Quit playing around. We need to lay some ground rules.”

  “Good cop, bad cop?”

  “I’m not playing, Barack. This is serious. Rule one: no torture.”

  He rolled his eyes, just as I’d known he would. “I can’t believe you’d think I would resort to enhanced interrogation techniques, Joe. The U.S. crossed the line after 9/11—that’s not a road I want to go down again.”

  “Just remember, you don’t judge a man’s character by what he does when things are easy. You judge him by what he does when they’re hard.”

  “Another of your mother’s famous sayings?”

  I shook my head. “That’s one of yours.”

  He thought I was being patronizing. What he didn’t realize was that I was trying to lay the ground rules for myself. I didn’t see how we were going to get out of this situation. We were beyond pretending that Barack wasn’t Barack, or playing silly games with ball caps hiding our faces.

  I didn’t care. I just needed Taylor to spill the baked beans.

  “That’s all you have? One rule?” Barack asked.

  “Unless you have any.”

  He shook his head, and we returned to our captive. Barack pulled the garage door shut behind us. We had cleared out a little space in the center of the unit by stacking boxes around us to the ceiling, and that’s where the biker was sitting. A single bulb lit the space, which was littered with mouse droppings and spiderwebs.

  “You’re looking at hard time,” I told him. He was slumped over in the chair. “You were in Darlene Donnelly’s room. There’s video evidence,” I fibbed. “You can’t deny it. Stop pretending like I’m some confused old man.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Why are we doing this?” I said, spitting his words back in his face. “Because you’re the scum of the earth! The lowest of the low!” I paused to catch my breath. “Finn was my friend. First I find you in his wife’s nursing home. And now we find this in your pocket.”

  I held up Finn’s pocket watch. It was enclosed in a pewter case decorated with a reproduction of the Saint Benedict medal. Taylor was silent.

  “The guy with the beard and the robes,” I said, pointing out the embossed figure in the center of the medal. The robed man was holding a cross in one hand and a book in the other—The Rule of Saint Benedict. “He’s a Catholic saint. See the words running around the circle?”

  I knew the inscription by heart, even if I couldn’t pronounce the words: Eius in obitu nostro praesentia muniamur.

  “It translates to, ‘May his presence protect us in the hour of our death.’ Do you know what time it is, Taylor?”

  He was on the verge of tears.

  “You’d better start beating your gums,” I said.

  And talk he did.

  38

  “I was returning the watch,” Taylor Brownsford said.

  “To Finn’s wife?”

  He nodded. “I found it down by the tracks. Where Finn was hit by the train.”

  “What were you doing down there? Looting the crime scene?”

  “If I tell you the truth, can you promise I won’t get in trouble?”

  “No,” Barack said.

  The biker sighed. “I was shooting smack, all right? I bought it from a street dealer down in the old warehouse district.”

  “What’s your dealer’s name?”

  “There’s not one guy. You just drive up—or ride up, in my case—and pull to a stop. Keep your car running. Don’t park. Somebody will come out. Hand them the money, and they spit out a balloon.”

  I recoiled at the image. A balloon full of dope, covered in someone’s spit. I didn’t want to hear any more, but I had to keep pressing him, no matter how disgusting the details. These hopheads had seen plenty worse. They shot dope with dirty needles. A little spit wouldn’t make them bat an eyelash.

  “Keep talking,” I said. “You decided, what, to shoot up by the tracks?”

  Taylor shook his head. “I don’t usually shoot by the tracks. But I needed a fix, so I rod
e for a couple of blocks until I found an empty lot. That’s where I found the pocket watch. At first I thought it was neat, but then I saw the inscription. I heard about what happened. I might be a junkie, but I’m no thief.”

  “And you knew Finn’s wife was in the nursing home.”

  “It was on the TV.”

  “Which channel?”

  “How should I know?”

  I looked at Barack to see if he was buying any of this. Darlene Donnelly hadn’t been mentioned by name in any of the newspaper reports that I’d read. I might have believed him if he said he’d read her name in the obituaries.

  “When’s the last time you had a fix?” Barack asked.

  “A couple hours.”

  “Where’s your rig?”

  “Why would I tell you? You think I’m stupid?”

  “No,” Barack said, “but I think you’re a liar.” He twisted the biker’s arm. Since Taylor’s hands were still cuffed, his elbow bent into a painful-looking position. Barack held it there.

  “You’re hurting me,” Taylor whined.

  “Where are your track marks?”

  “My track marks?”

  Barack let go of him.

  I got right down in the biker’s face. “Now I want you to go back to the beginning of your story, and tell us the truth this time. No baloney, mister.”

  “You can’t do this,” he protested. “I have rights.”

  “Not where we’ll take you if you don’t come clean,” Barack said. “I hear Gitmo’s nice this time of year.”

  The biker’s face went white. “What? You can’t be serious. I’m an American! I’m—”

  We were interrupted by a ringing phone. Barack and Taylor both looked in my direction, as if it was my phone making the racket. But I’d turned my phone on vibrate.

  It rang again.

  And again.

  And again.

  “Are you going to answer that, Joe?” Barack asked.

  I pulled my phone out. “It’s not—”

  It was my phone. Oops.

  UNKNOWN CALLER.

  The Mayor, calling from a pay phone again?

  “Hello,” I answered, using the deepest voice I could muster.

  “Hello, Mr. Biden,” said a distorted voice.

  “There’s no Mr. Biden here. This is Joe…Tingler.”

  “Tingler?” Barack whispered.

  I covered the mouthpiece and shooed him away. “Who’s this?”

  “The answers you seek are within reach,” the caller said. It was impossible to tell if it was a man or woman through the distortion. “There’s an ice cream stand on the Riverwalk. Be there in one hour. Alone.”

  “Who should I be looking for?”

  “You’ll recognize me. But leave the police and Secret Service out of this. If you try anything funny, you’ll never get what you want.”

  “And what do I want?”

  “Justice,” the voice said, and the caller hung up before I could ask what in the Sam Hill they were blabbing about. They hadn’t mentioned Finn Donnelly. They didn’t have to.

  My hands were shaking. I was angry—angry with the possibility of walking into a trap. Angry with the entire city, which was falling apart all around us. Angry with the world.

  “We need to go,” I told Barack.

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  We headed for the door.

  “Um, guys?” Taylor said. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  We turned around. The biker was still in the chair in the middle of the room, hands cuffed in his lap. Taylor was staring at us like a dog waiting for a treat.

  “You’re right,” Barack said. “We did forget something.”

  Taylor watched with eager eyes as Barack returned for him. Instead of freeing him, however, Barack clocked the side of his head with the butt of the shotgun. The biker sat there, dazed for a second or two. Then his eyes rolled back and he fell to the side off the chair, like a tree axed by a lumberjack.

  I was breathing heavy. If we’d been straddling the legal fence until this point, we were now completely on the other side.

  Barack slid into the passenger seat of my Challenger. “We’ll be back after we’re finished. Until then, he can sleep it off.”

  I pulled out of the lot, tugging my visor down to keep the glare of the setting sun out of my eyes. After a few minutes on the road, Barack turned to me. “Joe Tingler.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Are we using codenames now? Because if we are, you need a better one.”

  “Joe Tingler sounds cool.”

  “You’ve never been interested in being cool,” Barack said. “We’re a couple of politicians. We’re as square as it gets.”

  “Oh, cut it. You’re like the coolest guy I know. That’s no bullshit. It doesn’t even have anything to do with you being black.”

  Barack’s eyes grew wide. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”

  “The part about you being black or—”

  “Just keep your eyes on the road.”

  39

  Wilmington’s Riverfront district sat along the banks of the Christina River. The Christina was more of a flooded culvert than a river, but nobody could argue its serene beauty. The Riverfront dated to the 1990s and represented Wilmington’s last successful attempt at gentrification. There were a few con-dos and town homes for the young set. There was a smattering of hip bars and restaurants, meant to draw the suburbanites downtown. The multimillion-dollar revitalization project had been propped up by the city’s taxpayers, who were still paying for it.

  The crown jewel of the district was the Riverwalk, a brightly lit paved path that followed the riverbank. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone for a walk down here with Jill. Apart from some live acoustic music coming from one of the bars, the Riverwalk was quiet. Foot traffic was light. A few geese waddled on the water’s edge, squawking at Barack and me as we passed. They were probably used to getting fed by visitors. We had nothing to give them.

  A couple out for a late-night jog trotted past without another look. At my suggestion, we’d upgraded our undercover duds. I’d ducked into a mall for a change of clothes. Barack’s biceps stretched out the arm holes in his Tapout T-shirt. My zippered hoodie hung off my shoulders like a towel on a rack. We also had new caps, sneakers, and oversized shorts.

  Barack wasn’t too happy with what I’d picked out for him. “We’re crossing our fingers that Joe Q. Public doesn’t recognize us dressed up like idiots, but that our mystery caller does.”

  “We’re not dressed like idiots, we’re dressed like teenagers.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  The lights were on at the minor league baseball stadium to our right. “Want to watch a few pitches through the outfield fence?” I asked Barack. “We’ve got some time to kill.”

  “Come down to DC,” he said. “The Nationals are on a tear this year.”

  “I’m not sold on the Nats’ bullpen.”

  “Everybody’s got a weakness,” Barack said. “You just have to find it.”

  “You’ve got a weakness?” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  I glanced at my watch. Some forty minutes had passed since I’d spoken to the anonymous caller.

  “You should head back to the car,” I told Barack. “My phone says the ice cream stand is just ahead. I’m supposed to come alone.”

  “You don’t want me to hang back by the trees?”

  The trees were all new growth. They’d been planted twenty years ago. Barack may have been thin, but even he would have a hard time hiding out in the scrawny woods.

  “I can take care of myself,” I said. “I’ll be safe. Promise.”

  Barack eyed me suspiciously. “You have an idea of who
this is.”

  The caller said I’d recognize them, so I was assuming we’d met before. Of course, the distorted voice didn’t give me much to go on. Dan was on my short list, but we’d already met him once today. He’d said he wouldn’t be helping us again. Also on the short list was the insurance fraud investigator, Abbey Todd. But her identity had checked out, and I didn’t see what else she could do for me. My money was on either Lieutenant Esposito or one of the DEA agents.

  Regardless of the caller’s identity, I wasn’t armed. I was headed up shit creek without a paddle. If Barack had any backup plans, he hadn’t shared them. Which surprised me, if I’m being honest. Barack was a man of action, but he rarely did anything without thinking it over thoroughly first. The maddening part of his process was that he never shared what he was thinking with anyone, including those closest to him. That included me. I flew by the seat of my pants—when I dropped a new policy objective in one of my speeches, it wasn’t because I’d thought it over for days or weeks without telling anyone. It was because the idea just popped into my mind, and gosh darn it, I was going to say what was on my mind, even if it cost me votes.

  A thick cloud cover had moved in. I could tell just by the ozone in the air that a storm was on the way. The change in weather had also brought humidity so thick you could bottle it and sell it on the street corner. That was Delaware during the summer. If you didn’t like it, just do what everyone else did: Complain. Incessantly. It was a beloved pastime in the First State.

  I wasn’t sweating, though. I should have been. Maybe I was retaining water because of the heat. The scary thing was, I hadn’t hit the men’s room all day. That wasn’t a good sign for a fella whose prostate sends him to the restroom every hour most nights.