But the light was back.
Someone was moving around.
“Harrison. Can you hear me?”
He tried to speak but his mouth was dry, like sandpaper. He licked his lips, then nodded a tiny bit. “Yeah,” he whispered.
“It’s me, Freddy. How you doing in there?”
“Where am I?”
“Hospital. You had a bullet in your back. You lost a lot of blood. They operated and got the slug and plugged up all the places you were leaking.”
He nodded again, which was difficult. He was having trouble moving. He had no place to go anyway.
“Harrison, can you tell me what happened?”
He thought about it, trying to remember. It was difficult. The warehouse, driving around, all jumbled out of order. After a while he thought he had it straight. He said, “They came for me.”
“Anselmo?”
“And the other one. White guy. Pi … Pioche.”
That was right. He saw it clearly now. The stairwell, Fat Tony falling in the darkness, Freeman McNally screaming, the television shattering…. No. Something was mixed up some….
That scream. It had been almost in his ear, painfully loud, the man in mortal agony. And Harrison Ronald had enjoyed it. He lay here now immobile, his eyes closed, remembering. Savoring that scream.
“What else can you tell me?”
Why was Freddy so insistent? “He screamed,” Harrison said.
“Who?”
Who indeed! “Freeman.”
“Why did you kill him?”
Why? Well, hell, you idiot, because … “Because.”
“Hooper is gonna be over here in a few minutes to question you, Harrison. You killed eight guys. That’s real heavy shit. Real heavy. I think you should think through what you’re gonna say to Hooper very carefully. You dig me?”
Harrison sorted through it one more time. He felt like dog shit and he was getting sleepy again. “Nine guys.”
“Nine?”
“Think so. It’s pretty confusing.”
He was drifting again, back toward the porch and the swing and the bright, hot days when he heard Freddy say, “You sleep now. We’ll talk later.”
“Yeah,” he said, and tackled the problem of why his grandmother had white hair even back then. She was small and wiry and her hair was white as snow. It had been that way as long as he could remember.
“Senator Hiram Duquesne to see you, Mr. Hooper.”
The secretary rolled her eyes heavenward and stepped clear so that Senator Duquesne could enter. He was fat—not plump, not overweight, but fat—in his middle sixties. His double chin swung as he walked. Embedded in the fleshy face were two of the hardest eyes that Tom Hooper had ever stared at. They swept him now.
The senator dropped into a chair and waited until the door was closed behind him. “I’ve just come from a conference with the director,” he announced.
“Yessir. He called me.”
“I want to report an incident. I want a report made and an investigation done. I want it all in writing and dated and signed and I want a copy.”
Hooper grunted noncommittally. If FBI reports were going to be handed out the director would do the handing, not Hooper.
Just as Duquesne opened his mouth, the telephone rang. “Excuse me a second, Senator.” He picked up the instrument. “Yes.”
“Freddy is on the other line. Harrison is awake.”
“Tell him I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
As he cradled the phone Duquesne said, “You could ask her to hold your calls.”
“I don’t have that luxury, Senator. Tell me about this incident.”
Duquesne told him. From the first approach by T. Jefferson Brody several years ago to the incident last night in the parking garage of the Senate office building, he gave Hooper every incident and the details on every check. Hooper made notes and asked questions to clarify points. It took fifteen minutes.
Finally Duquesne announced, “There it is,” and Hooper leaned back in his chair and reviewed his notes.
“I want this pimp Brody arrested,” Senator Duquesne said. “I’ll take the heat.”
Hooper laid the legal pad back on the table. “What do I arrest him for?”
“Attempted bribery, extortion, I don’t know.”
“I don’t know either. Assuming that all the contributions to the PACs he controlled were made according to law, and you have given me no information to suggest otherwise, there’s nothing illegal about a notorious criminal making a political contribution. And people ask you to take positions on public issues twenty times a day.”
“Brody didn’t ask. He threatened me. I’m sure you can grasp the distinction between a request and a threat.”
“Threatened you with what? You said he said he would call a matter of public record to the attention of the media if you didn’t do what he wanted. I don’t think that qualifies as a threat.”
Duquesne’s face was turning a deep brick hue. “Listen to me, you little badge toter. Don’t give me one of those pissy nothing-can-be-done hog-crap sandwiches! I’m not going to listen to that!”
The expression on Hooper’s face didn’t change. “Senator, you have been had by a pro. Now listen carefully to what I’m going to say. By your own admission the man has done nothing illegal. He was the only other witness to this conversation, and believe me, he will deny everything that even throws a shadow on him.”
Duquesne was taking it hard. His throat worked as he sat and stared at the desk between them.
“Now, here is what we can do. We can look into the accounting and see if he obeyed all the rules on his PACs and his contributions. That will take time but might turn up something. Brody sounds cute, but the law in this area is a minefield.”
“That asshole wouldn’t slip up like that,” Duquesne said softly.
“The other thing we can do is put a wire on you and let you have another conversation with Brody. Maybe he’ll say something this time that does compromise him.”
“And me!”
“Perhaps. That’s a risk you’ll have to take.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Who else has this man approached? How many other members of Congress has he tried to influence?”
“I don’t know. But I seem to recall that somebody said he was giving money to Bob Cherry and three or four others.”
“That’ll be in their financial statements, right? We’ll look and see if we can find these names.”
“Where does that get us?”
“I’ll be frank, Senator. It may take someone someplace they don’t want to go. Freeman McNally is dead. He was killed last night.”
Duquesne was speechless. “Who did it?”
“We’re investigating. This information is confidential. We have not released the news of McNally’s death and would like to hold on to it for a while.”
Duquesne’s color faded to a ghastly white. Out of the clear blue sky he had just supplied the FBI with a motive for the murder of a man who had just been killed.
Hooper watched the senator with an expressionless face. He well knew what Duquesne was thinking and it didn’t bother Hooper a bit that he was thinking it.
“The good news,” the agent said after he had let Duquesne twist a while in the wind, “is that Freeman has made his last political contribution. In the fullness of time, probably fairly soon, T. Jefferson Brody will hear of Mr. McNally’s unfortunate demise. Of course he will still have a hold on you, but I doubt that he’ll be foolish enough to try to use it. He impresses me as a very careful fellow.”
“Cute. The bastard thinks he’s cute.”
“Ah, yes, don’t they all?”
Freddy was standing beside the nurses’ station listening to a man sitting in a wheelchair with his head swathed in bandages tell the cop all about his recent hair transplant. “You don’t know how demoralizing it is to lose your hair. It’s like you’re visibly deteriorating, aging, you know?”
Hoo
per came through the door, took the scene in at a glance and led Freddy toward the waiting area, which was empty. Behind him the man was explaining, “It was male pattern baldness all the way. My God, I felt so—”
“How is he?” Hooper asked as he pulled the door to the lounge closed.
“Sleeping again. The nurse said he’ll probably wake up in a little bit and we can talk to him then. She’ll come get me.”
“We found a body over at McNally’s house. Vinnie Pioche, I think. And the place had been shot apart. Someone just stood inside the door of each room and sprayed lead everywhere. It’s a real mess.”
“Probably Harrison. He said Pioche came with Anselmo to get him. And he said he thinks he killed nine men, but it’s real confusing.”
Hooper fell into one of the chairs.
“Did he say why?”
“Because. He said he did it because.”
“That’s real helpful. Just what I need to feed to the sharks in the U.S. attorney’s office.”
“He’s still under the anesthetic, Tom. He doesn’t know what the hell he’s saying.”
Hooper grunted and stared at his toes. Then he took off his shoes and massaged his feet. “We should have wrapped this one up in September.”
“We didn’t have enough in September,” Freddy said.
Hooper eyed him without humor, then put his shoes back on.
Fifteen minutes later the nurse opened the door and stuck her head in. “He’s awake. Don’t stay more than five minutes.”
Harrison Ronald had his eyes closed when the FBI agents stepped up to his bed, but the nurse nodded and left them. Freddy said, “Harrison, it’s me, Freddy. Tom Hooper is with me. How you feeling?”
Ford’s eyes came open and slowly moved around until they found Freddy. After a moment they went to Hooper.
“Hey, Tom.”
“Hey, Harrison. Sorry about this.”
“It’s over.”
“Yeah.”
Ford’s eyes closed again. Hooper looked at Freddy, who shrugged.
“Harrison,” Hooper said, “I need to ask you some questions, find out what happened. Why did you go to that warehouse anyway?”
The eyes focused on Hooper’s face. They stayed there a while, went to Freddy, then back to Hooper. Harrison Ronald licked his lips, then said, “I want a lawyer.”
“What?”
“A lawyer. I ain’t saying anything without my lawyer’s approval.”
“Aww, wait a goddamn minute! I’m not charging you with anything. You’re the sole witness to a serious—”
The word “crime” was right there on the tip of his tongue but he bit it off. He swallowed once. “All this has to be investigated. You know that. You’re a cop, for Chrissake!”
“I want a lawyer. That’s all I have to say.”
Hooper opened his mouth and closed it again. He glanced at Freddy, who was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the man in the bed.
“Okay. We’ll get you a lawyer. I’ll stop by tomorrow and see how you’re doing.”
“Fine. See you then.”
“Come on, Freddy. We have work to do.”
Harrison Ronald Ford went back to sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE first man the soldiers killed was Larry Ticono. At the age of sixteen he had dropped out of the seventh grade after failing it three times. In spite of the nine years he spent in the public school system, he was illiterate. On those rare occasions when he was asked to sign his name he used an illegible scrawl.
Larry Ticono had been arrested three times in his short life—twice for possession of illegal drugs and once for burglary—but he had spent a grand total of only five days in jail. After each arrest he was released on his own recognizance. He returned to court only when the police picked him up again. One of his possession arrests had apparently fallen completely through the cracks and been forgotten. He had pleaded guilty to the other two charges and had received probation.
The wonder was that he had lived so long. He had a two-hundred-dollar-a-day crack habit and his welfare check was only $436 a month. The shortfall he made up by stealing anything that wasn’t welded in place. Cameras, radios, televisions, and car stereos were his favorite targets. He sold his loot to fences for fifteen to twenty percent of their market value—not retail value when new, but market value used. He tried to avoid muggings, which were dangerous, but did them when nothing else readily presented itself.
Larry Ticono’s life defined the term “hand to mouth.” He slept under bridges in good weather and in abandoned buildings in bad. He rarely had more than twenty dollars in his pocket and was never more than three hours away from withdrawal.
This afternoon Larry Ticono’s three-hour margin had melted to zero. He was on the edge with only $17.34 in his pocket. The corner where he usually purchased crack was empty. Although Ticono didn’t know it, his suppliers were the retail end of the distribution network of Willie Teal, who had been forcibly and permanently retired from the crack business the previous night. So the street-corner salesmen had no product and were not there.
Frustrated and desperate, Ticono walked a half mile to another neighborhood that he knew about and tried to make a deal with a fifteen-year-old in a pair of hundred-dollar Nike running shoes. That worthy had not received his morning delivery from his supplier, an employee of Freeman McNally. The streetwise dealers sensed that something was wrong although they had no hard information. They had seen the troops coming and going and had heard the news on television, and they were worried. Many of them were drifting away, back to the welfare apartments and ramshackle row houses they called home.
When Larry Ticono approached the fifteen-year-old, that youngster had only four crack bags left and no prospect of readily obtaining more. So that young capitalist demanded forty dollars a hit.
The thought occurred to Larry Ticono that he should just mug the kid, but it vaporized after one look at the corner boss, a heavyset man standing by a garbage can watching. Larry knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the guard had a weapon within easy reach and would cheerfully kill him if he so much as touched the youngster.
After trying futilely to bargain, he reluctantly turned away.
Two blocks later Larry Ticono threw a brick through a window of an electronics store and grabbed a ghetto blaster. He was promptly shot by a convenience-store salesclerk wearing a National Guard uniform. The blaster was just too large and heavy to run with at any speed.
The fifty-five-grain .223 bullet from the M-16 hit Larry high up in the center of the back, a perfect shot, which was pure luck because the clerk was wearing a pair of fogged-up glasses and had barely qualified with the M-16 in training. Before he threw the rifle to his shoulder and pulled the trigger the clerk had never killed any creature larger than a cockroach.
Still traveling at over three thousand feet per second when it pierced Larry Ticono’s skin, the jacketed bullet expended a major portion of its eleven hundred foot-pounds of energy shattering his backbone and driving the fragments through his heart, exploding it. The slug then exited his chest and buried itself in a parked car sixty yards away.
Larry Ticono, age nineteen, was dead before his body hit the pavement.
The convenience-store clerk vomited beside the body.
Jack Yocke took in the scene at a glance a half hour later when he arrived. He busied himself taking names and trying to think of something to say to the clerk-private, who was sitting on the tailgate of an olive-drab pickup staring at his hands.
“I shouted for him to stop, but he didn’t,” the private said so softly Yocke had to strain to hear. “He didn’t stop,” he repeated wonderingly, amazed at the perverse ways of fate.
“No. He didn’t.”
“He should have stopped.”
“Yes.”
“He really should have stopped.”
The reporter wandered over to a sergeant standing near the body smoking a cigarette. Some fifteen feet away a group of ar
my or National Guard officers were conferring with a uniformed policeman. Yocke had yet to learn the nuances of the shoulder patches on the uniforms, which as far as he could see, were the only way to tell which service was which. The sergeant glanced at Yocke and continued to puff leisurely on his cigarette. He was thoughtfully surveying the faces of the watchers on the sidewalk across the street.
“I thought,” Jack Yocke said, “that your people were supposed to fire their weapons only in self-defense.”
The sergeant appraised him carefully. “That’s right,” he said, then went back to scanning the crowd.
“Yet as I understand it, the victim was running away when the private shot him?”
“Something like that, I suppose.”
“So why’d he shoot?”
A look of disgust registered on the sergeant’s face. “Who are you, anyway?”
“Jack Yocke, Washington Post. I didn’t mean—”
“Shove off, pencil pilot. Before I lose my temper and ram that notebook up your ass.”
“I’m sorry. No offense,” Yocke said, then turned away. He shouldn’t have asked that question. Why had he done it? Now he felt guilty. It was a new experience.
Disgusted with himself, he looked again at the private slumped on the tailgate and the body covered with a sheet, then walked to his car.
He had always been so confident, so sure of himself and his perceptions. And now …
Six blocks away a group of people outside a closed liquor store—the military authorities had ordered them all closed—were throwing rocks at passing cars. One of them thudded into the side of the Post’s little sedan.
It’s started, Jake Yocke decided. The supply of crack has dried up and the addicts are getting restless. He pointed the car toward the National Guard armory adjacent to RFK Stadium.
He didn’t get very far into the building, of course. He showed his credentials and the soldier on duty let him into the press room, the first door on the right. There he found a half dozen government-issue steel desks, some folding chairs, and one telephone. And over a dozen of his colleagues, two of them from the Post. They were waiting for the press briefing scheduled for five p.m., fifteen minutes from now.
05.Under Siege v5 Page 42
