At all costs

by John Gilstrap

  Wiggins kept coming; amazingly fast, frighteningly strong.

  Up on all fours now, and fighting for balance, Jake found himself back at the post that minutes before had been Wiggins’s personal torture rack. He felt the next blow coming through the air, dodging without looking. The barn shook as the ax handle splintered against the twelve-by-twelve post.

  But Wiggins held on, his club transformed into a ragged spear. He lunged, but Jake was on his feet again and able to maneuver around it. Grabbing a claw hammer from a nearby shelf, he heaved it in Wiggins’s direction, buying himself an extra second as a glancing blow off the man’s shoulder spun him in an awkward pirouette. Jake opened the distance by two steps and spotted a pitchfork resting in the corner. In one fluid motion, he brought it round and faced his attacker.

  For an instant, Jake thought Wiggins’s momentum would impale his guts on the tines, but the man reacted quickly, skidding to a stop with barely an inch to spare.

  He locked onto Jake’s gaze and smiled. The blood on his face and in his mouth wasn’t shiny anymore; it had turned a crusty brown.

  “Guess you win, Donovan,” he said, looking warily at the tines. At this point, even the slightest twitch on his part might bring them surging forward. “Looks like I’m your prisoner, after all.”

  Jake knew his attacker was playing for time. He stared at the killer’s heart and wondered how hard he’d have to push to split it open. He locked his jaw, tensed his muscles. Decision time.

  “Want to tie me up again?” Wiggins asked.

  “No thanks,” came a voice from behind. In a long-drawnout moment that Jake would later look back on as impossibly distended, Thorne, who’d materialized out of nowhere, fired a kick to the base of Wiggins’s spine, plunging the killer belly-first into the pitchfork.

  Jake held on against the impact and stared, mesmerized, as Wiggins’s eyes widened, and his mouth opened and closed uselessly. The killer struggled to find a breath as the rusted steel tore through his gut, but the best he could do was cough up a torrent of blood. Fixing Jake with one last amazed look, he collapsed.

  “Son of a bitch almost split my head in half,” Thorne declared as Jake struggled to support the dead man’s weight on the tines. His arms and shoulders screamed at the effort, but they seemed somehow separate from his body. Seconds passed. Finally, he released his grip and slumped with the corpse onto the earthen floor.

  Jake followed Thorne in the plumbing van as they drove hours into the night. Paved roads gave way to dirt roads, which finally became fire trails. When they stopped, Jake had no idea where they were exactly, but civilization was far away.

  Once parked, Thorne strolled up to Jake’s window. “How’d your passenger behave himself?”

  Jake just glared. If there was humor in any of this, he didn’t see it.

  Thorne gestured with his hands. “Well, this place is as good as any. Help me dig the hole.”

  They’d wrapped the body in a threadbare wool blanket to carry it out of the woods surrounding Nick’s house and laid it in the back of the plumbing van. Now, as they hauled it out into the crisp night air, the Army-green fabric had transformed to a dark copper color, and the smell of death was overpowering.

  They worked silently to dig the hole, using tools taken from Nick’s barn. They dug it just deep enough to shelter the remains from hikers and hungry animals. The body made a wet sound as they dropped it into the earthen scar, and for the millionth time that night, Jake successfully fought off the urge to vomit.

  The next order of business was the van itself. Smeared with blood, and no doubt covered with fingerprints, it had to be destroyed. They drove it a mile or so back down the trail, primed it with whatever was left in the bottom of a twogallon gas can, then ignited it with a road flare.

  None of it was as gratifying as Jake had hoped. As recently as that morning, he’d fantasized about killing the man who’d attacked his wife and child, but now that he was watching the last of this nightmare being consumed by flames, he just felt… guilty.

  He walked back to the rental and slid into the shotgun seat, slamming the door behind him. Thorne dropped the transmission into drive and started back down the mountain. Neither of them spoke as they watched the billowing black smoke cloud envelop the trail.

  “He blew away your friends, Jake,” Thorne said at last. “Tried to kill your family. Nearly killed me. Almost killed you. All we did was balance the account.”

  Jake stared straight ahead, still silent, only now comprehending that-at least to some extent-he’d become what everyone thought he’d been all along.

  He checked his watch and sighed. Two-fifteen. Finally, it was a new day, and come hell or high water, it would all be over before the calendar turned another page. He leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes.

  Sleep came instantly.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  The doctors were allowing Carolyn to sit up now, her spine forced into alignment by a corsetlike back brace and a hard plastic collar. The severe spasms hadn’t started until late last night, but when they arrived, they came in waves, racking her body with sheets of agony. The doctors wanted to give her something to ease the pain, but she’d refused. With a killer on the prowl targeting Travis and her, she wanted to be as alert as she could be.

  Her resolve weakened, however, beginning around three in the morning, when a series of shattering muscle spasms drove her to the edge of lunacy. She approved a dose of muscle relaxant, and since then, she’d been fairly comfortable, if not entirely lucid.

  The neck pains were worst, predictably enough, and the doctors weren’t ready to say for sure whether or not she’d done irreparable damage up there. At least they weren’t talking paralysis anymore. She’d officially dodged that bullet. And if she were going to stroke out as a result of increased cranial pressure, she’d have done it by now.

  All kinds of good news this morning. Best of all Travis was going to be okay. The lung damage had not been as devastating as they’d feared. A lot of fluid remained in his chest, but time and respiratory therapy would take care of that. In another month, he’d be feeling normal. Three more after that, and he’d be normal.

  Thank you, God, for sparing him. She didn’t bother to pray for herself or even for Jake. But for them, none of this misery would have happened in the first place.

  She found herself crying, her emotional defenses weakened by the Flexeril. Why wouldn’t they let her visit her son? Couldn’t they see that by punishing her they were punishing an innocent child? Travis needed his mother. All children need their mother, for God’s sake! Why couldn’t that Rivers lady see the damage she was inflicting? Why couldn’t she see for herself that by keeping them apart, she was retarding Travis’s recovery.

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Donovan?” a voice said. “Are you awake?”

  Carolyn wasn’t sure herself until she opened her eyes. In the dim light of the darkened hallways, she saw a tall young nurse standing in her doorway, with a uniformed cop by her side. “Mm-hmm,” she croaked, her throat thick from disuse. “I’m here.”

  The two forms approached together, and for just an instant, she wondered if she should be frightened.

  “My name’s Jan, Mrs. Donovan, from the pediatric ICU. I’ve come to take you to see Travis.”

  As the sun rose in McLean, Virginia, news crews began to stir from their uneventful all-night vigil outside Senator Albricht’s home. The morning on-air talent was arriving now, in time for the pre-network morning news shows. Red-eyed second-stringers could go home now, relieved from their fruitless wait for some dramatic overnight development.

  It took a special breed to find status in the act of being awake at such an ungodly hour, but in the prestigious Washington, D.C., news market, face time meant everything. It didn’t matter that the average viewer was too comatose ever to remember what the face looked like. It was all about paying your dues.

  Clayton just didn’t get it. He’d held a lot of jobs in his lifetime, from buck
private in the Army to summertime tar slinger for a roofing contractor. He respected any job that earned an honest wage, but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out the allure of the news business. Reporters never built anything, never contributed to the greater good. Instead, they made their living by fanning the flames, doing whatever they could to tear down the hard work and reputations of others.

  He left the window shaking his head. Under the weight of his exhaustion, his cynical streak had begun to show. Maybe Alba was right. Maybe it was time to leave legislation to the young bucks and mend the fabric of his soul.

  First, though, he had a reputation to mend and a debt of his own to call. When he’d last spoken to Chris MacDonald, around eleven last night, his chief of staff reported that he was ready to launch on Frankel the minute Clayton gave the go-ahead. With only a little exaggeration, Chris said, they could fill a football stadium with people who would pay their own expenses to get a shot at nailing Frankel to a tree. They’d accumulated countless examples of Frankel’s ruthlessness and could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the man was a flaming asshole.

  Unfortunately, they’d yet to find anyone willing to testify that they’d seen him break a law.

  “It’s not that they haven’t seen him do it,” Chris was quick to clarify. “They just won’t say it under oath.”

  “Suppose we subpoena them?” Clayton had asked.

  Chris laughed. “Does the expression ‘I can’t recall’ ring any bells?”

  Indeed it did. He’d even used it a few times himself over the years.

  So here it was, morning again. The horrid rumors were a day older, yet the good guys weren’t a single step closer to ruining the man who started it all. It was a difficult time, Clayton told himself-one that called for patience. And another cup of coffee.

  He walked carefully as he passed his sleeping bride. In hopes of inducing a full night’s sleep, Alba had finally resorted to taking an antihistamine, which seemed to be doing the trick. Clayton was pleased. She’d been looking way too tired. This morning he wanted her to sleep until she was slept out. He’d actually turned off the ringers on all the telephones upstairs, just to keep the place quiet. He figured that whatever crises might have arisen during the night could wait till morning.

  Padding down the hall to his converted bedroom office, he lifted the stack of faxes that had accumulated during the night. Much of the pile were letters of support from fellow senators, and as he read each of them, he jotted a handwritten note on his personal stationery for hand-delivery later in the day. Once read and responded to, he sacrificed the originals to the shredder, reducing the pages to so much confetti.

  For the most part, the rest was unremarkable bullshit from constituents. A few nervous supporters demanded clarification of his real role in all of this controversy. These he saved. By the end of the day, Chris would take care of it all.

  The rubber tires of the wheelchair rolled silently across the polished linoleum as Jan eased Carolyn to Travis’s bedside. “He’s just sleeping,” the nurse whispered. “We’ve given him something to help him rest. He’s going to be just fine.” She lowered the bed rail and moved Carolyn in as close as the chair would allow. “Stay as long as you like.”

  He looked so- young. Barely a lump under the stark white sheet. “Look at you,” Carolyn whispered, the words barely audible even to herself. “You’re just a baby.” And to her, at that moment, her son looked just as he once was-as he looked, in fact, the last time she just sat and watched him sleep. In her mind, the strong, lean features were chubby again, the disheveled mop of hair a mere sheen of corn silk. Those were the happiest days-the days full of promise. Now there was only the reality of atrocities committed against his youth.

  The muscles of her neck rebelled as she reached out to brush a greasy tendril of hair off Travis’s forehead. There really was no baby left in him at all, she realized. He still had those eyelashes, though-Bambi lashes, she called them, just to get a rise out of him. He’d get so mad…

  The lashes fluttered, and then his eyes opened; unfocused, and heavy with sleep.

  “Hello, sweetie,” she whispered. “It’s only me. Go back to sleep.”

  The eyes closed again, and right away, she knew he hadn’t heard a thing. She wanted him to be awake, though; she wanted to tell him so many things. But he needed his sleep and the rest that came with it. Leaning back again, to ease the growing spasm in her neck, she lifted Travis’s hand from where it lay on top of the sheet, and kissed it, careful not to disturb the IV lines. In the yellow darkness, she studied his long, slender fingers. The nails needed trimming, as they always did, and they were dirty. Amid all the sterility and all the technology clustered around his helpless form, those dirty fingernails seemed like a final remnant of boyhood.

  “I love you, Travis,” she whispered.

  The fingers flexed in her grasp. A sleepy attempt to let her know he was there with her, after all. His eyes fluttered open again, and it looked for all the world as if he was trying to smile; but in the end, he just couldn’t make it happen. His lips faltered, then started to tremble around the ugly white-tipped tube that continued to rob him of his voice. He looked at his mom for a long moment, and through his gaze, she could feel his fear and his anger.

  “Travis, honey, I’m so sorry. I’m so-” Suddenly, her voice stopped working.

  He fought hard for control, shutting his eyes tight and folding deep lines into his forehead. But it was a losing battle. Tears bubbled up from behind his eyelids and tracked lazily over the pale, taut flesh of his cheekbones. He squeezed his mother’s hand tightly now, as his body began to tremble, and his mask of bravery folded in on itself. Filtered through the respirator, his sobs were merely whispers against the silence of his room, rendered even more pitiful by the rhythmic hum of machinery that a child should never have to see.

  She kissed his hand again and rested her forehead on his bed rail, ignoring the darts of pain from her neck. Her baby needed her now. And she’d stay right by his side for as long as it took for him to smile again.

  It was nearly eight o’clock when the senator reluctantly turned the phone back on, and within two minutes, it rang. Here we go again. He considered ignoring it but took a deep breath instead. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Clayton,” the familiar voice said from the other end. “This is Harry Sinclair. I think we’ve got a breakthrough on that matter we discussed the other day.”

  The senator’s heart skipped a beat. He’d discussed only one issue with his longtime friend and contributor, and for him to announce a breakthrough, it had to be momentous. “Good morning, Harry. Sounds interesting.”

  “What are you doing for lunch this afternoon?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Thorne hadn’t driven much through D.C. and had trouble finding the address he needed on Connecticut Avenue. He had to circle the block a few times before he finally hit his signal and turned into a narrow alley between two commercial buildings. The one on the left advertised itself as an appliance store, while the one on the right-the one that proved to be their destination-had no writing on it at all.

  “We’re here,” he announced.

  Jake seemed unaware that they’d even stopped. Without a word, he refocused his eyes from the spot he’d been watching on the dashboard, to take in their immediate surroundings. Seemingly satisfied, he pulled on the door handle to let himself out.

  “Hey,” Thorne said.

  Jake paused. “What?”

  “Relax. You’re about to win. You can smile now.”

  Jake looked at him for a long moment, wondering if he should even bother to respond. Wiggins’s death, the disposal of the body-it still weighed heavily on him. Smiling was the last thing he felt like doing.

  “He was an insect, Jake. A parasite. And we squashed him. Let it go.”

  Jake nodded, not out of agreement but out of resignation, and emerged slowly from the car. He stood up straight, as if to walk away, then turned back again t
o lean into the driver’s-side window.

  “Thanks, Thorne,” he said. “And thank Harry for me when you see him.”

  The big man picked up the money bags from the floor of the front seat. “Here, don’t forget these.”

  Jake waved his hand. “No, you keep it. One way or another, I won’t be needing it anymore.”

  “You nuts?” Thorne scoffed. “Mr. Sinclair doesn’t need this back.”

  “Tell him to give it to charity then,” Jake said. “I don’t want it.”

  Thorne eyed him for a long moment, then shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said. He threw the shift lever into drive. “Say, when you catch up with Sunshine, you tell her to give us a call, okay?” he said.

  “Sure,” Jake replied, and watched as the Grand Marquis pulled away from the curb.

  He climbed the front stairs to the door, where he took a deep breath before ringing the bell. Instinctively, he avoided looking into the security camera, pretending instead to inspect his shoes. After a few seconds, the door buzzed, and he stepped inside.

  As he crossed the threshold and waited uneasily for his eyes to adjust to the darkness of the room, he began to see just how wonderful a place he’d entered: a restaurant where the aroma of fine foods was every bit as opulent as the furnishings. Typical of Washington town houses of the Federal era, this one seemed to extend forever, from front to back, with a wide stairway interrupting the center hall about halfway down, on the right-hand side. Off to either side, in what would have been the living room, dining room, parlor, and library, he could just glimpse the white linen and exquisite crystal.

  He stood in the entryway, his back to the wall, waiting for someone to greet him. “Anybody here?” he called softly.

  A second later a tuxedoed maitre d’ appeared from behind the stairway and strode down the hallway. “Good afternoon, sir,” he said cheerily. “Mr. Donovan, I presume.”

  Jake accepted the man’s firm and vigorous handshake. “And you must be Eddie Bartholomew.”