by Mike Lawson
‘Oh my God, Joe! Turn on your television. Broderick’s dead!’
Randy was waiting outside Pugh’s house when Danny arrived. He was wearing a black sweatshirt, and his pants and baseball cap were that brown and green mottled camouflage color. On his feet were black combat boots. These peckerheads who wore camo pants and combat boots scared the shit out of him; it was like they could hardly wait for World War III to start.
Randy patted Danny down and they entered the house. It was 9 A.M. and Pugh was in a white bathrobe bearing the name of a Hilton Head resort and wearing the same fluffy blue slippers he’d had on the last time Danny had seen him. He was at his kitchen table, squinting at a newspaper, reading glasses perched on the end of his long nose. There was something odd about Pugh in reading glasses. He reminded Danny of a drawing you might see in a children’s book: a rat dressed like a person, wearing glasses.
Danny started to sit down at the table, but Pugh said, ‘No. Go with Randy. He’s gonna make sure you’re clean and you’re gonna change clothes before we talk.’
Danny started to protest, realized it would be futile, and said, ‘Hey, whatever floats your boat.’
Randy led him to a bedroom and told him to strip, all the way. Danny resisted the urge to make some comment about Randy getting his thrills by looking at his ass. He resisted the urge because Randy looked like he might beat the shit out of him if he said something like that.
He undressed and handed Randy his clothes, and Randy ran his hands over the garments looking for electronics. When he was naked, Randy had him turn around once to make sure there wasn’t anything taped to his back, then tossed him a pair of swimming trunks and a white T-shirt. Danny put them on, and Randy turned to leave the room.
‘Hey,’ Danny said, ‘I gotta go barefoot here? You don’t have shower thongs or something?’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ Randy said.
Back in Pugh’s kitchen, Jubal pointed Danny to a chair and said, ‘Okay, I checked you and your boss out. You’re a punk, but your boss is the real thing. I’m interested. So let’s talk details. How much product do you expect to get for a million and how will we arrange delivery and make the exchange?’
Danny shook his head. ‘Not yet,’ he said.
‘What?’ Pugh said.
‘I need to see your lab first. I told you, we have to make sure you have a big enough operation to deliver the quantities we need. If we have an inventory problem, we’ll lose the market.’
Patsy Hall had told him to say that too, because Pugh would like it to sound as if he was supplying brake linings to General Motors, not some hillbilly dealing meth.
‘My operation’s big enough, sonny. Don’t you worry about that. I supply half the tweakers in Virginia and cover parts of Maryland and Pennsylvania too.’
‘Sorry, Mr Pugh,’ Danny said, sounding contrite and respectful, ‘but if you don’t have enough product to take care of some biker and his bitch, they’ll just wait a day. But we can’t take that chance.’ Before Pugh could protest, Danny said, ‘I’m not disrespecting you here. My boss told me before we make a deal, I gotta see your lab. We’re talkin’ a lotta money here, for you, five million a year, maybe more.’
Pugh looked at him for a second, then nodded.
‘Go put your shoes on,’ he said, ‘but nothing else. Randy, give him some overalls and loan him a jacket so he don’t freeze out there.’
Danny donned grease-stained overalls and a leather jacket that smelled of stale beer. His Gucci loafers looked pretty stupid with the overalls. When he returned to Pugh’s kitchen, there was another man with Pugh, a big guy with a beard and a huge gut. The fat guy looked a little friendlier than Randy, like maybe he smiled once a year.
‘You know what to do,’ Pugh said to Randy.
Randy just nodded, then said to Danny, ‘Let’s go.’
What the hell did that mean, You know what to do?
The three men left the house and walked over to a shed that contained five ATVs – all-terrain ve hicles that looked like four-wheeled motorcycles. ‘Roll two of them out, Harlan, and make sure they’ve got gas,’ Randy said.
‘You gotta be shittin’ me,’ Danny muttered.
‘You ride behind me,’ Randy said to Danny. That was good, Danny thought; the other guy’s ass was so big there wouldn’t be room for two of them on his machine. ‘And we’re gonna blindfold you,’ Randy said, and before Danny could say anything, Randy pulled a white rag out of his pocket, the remnants of a T-shirt, and tied it over Danny’s eyes. Then he put a ski mask over his head, the eye holes at the back.
This wasn’t good at all, Danny thought. This was just going to fuck up everything.
Danny didn’t like it on the back of the ATV, unable to see, unable to anticipate the bumps and turns. The ATV had little bars next to the passenger seat for holding on, and he gripped them as hard as he could. The main problem was his feet kept coming off the footrests, and every time they did it upset his balance and he thought he was going to fall. They stopped riding after half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes. Patsy Hall had told Danny that Pugh owned three or four hundred acres. Maybe that’s why it was taking so long to get to wherever they were going, or maybe Randy was driving in circles. Danny had no way to tell.
Randy helped him off the ATV and started walking him, holding on to his upper arm. ‘Can I take the blindfold off now?’ Danny said.
‘No,’ Randy said. ‘You don’t do a damn thing unless I tell you.’
They walked maybe fifty yards down what felt like a dirt trail. He tripped once over a tree root but Randy kept him from falling. Randy had a grip that could crush rocks. Finally they stopped and Randy said, ‘Stand still a minute.’
Danny heard something being moved, he didn’t know what, and maybe the sound of tree branches brushing against each other. Randy grabbed his arm again and said, ‘We’re goin’ down some steps. Slide your feet forward until you can feel ’em.’ Danny did, and with Randy still holding his arm they descended seven steps. Danny counted.
They stopped moving, and Randy said, ‘I’m gonna take off the blindfold now, but you look straight ahead. If you look up or behind you, I’ll break your neck.’
And as strong as the guy’s hands were, he could probably do it.
The hood was pulled off Danny’s head and the blindfold off his eyes. He was standing on the earthen floor of a room that was about the size of a one-car garage. Stacked against one wall was all kinds of crap, metal containers of denatured alcohol and acetone and stuff like that. There were also stainless steel tables, like the type you see in restaurant kitchens, and on the tables was a bunch of … well, lab shit, beakers and scales and rubber tubing and pots. God, the place just stank. He felt like he was standing inside a sweat sock that had been worn by Shaquille O’Neal for ten games in a row.
After a moment, Randy said, ‘Okay, slick. You satisfied?’
‘Not quite,’ Danny said. ‘I want to see how much ephedrine you have on hand.’
Randy led him over to a stack of two-gallon cardboard containers, like the type you saw behind the counter at Baskin-Robbins, containing ice cream. There must have been twenty containers. Randy popped the top off one of the containers and Danny looked inside. White powder.
‘Okay,’ Danny said. ‘That’s all I wanted to see.’
The fact was that Danny didn’t know anything about meth. He didn’t know if the equipment and chemicals he was looking at were really used for making meth, and he didn’t know how much meth the equipment could produce. Nor did he know if the white powder had been ephedrine; it could have been baking powder for all he knew.
But he didn’t need to know any of that stuff to do what he’d been asked to do.
53
Mahoney was at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but it hadn’t been easy to get there.
Since Broderick’s death, security for senior poli ticians had been ratcheted up to a degree not seen since 9/11 or maybe since World War II. Homeland Security’s color-
coded threat level was now at red, the only time Mahoney could remember its being above orange since the system had been invented. He guessed that if they could’ve come up with a color more alarming than red, they would have used it.
The president was in the White House but the vice president was somewhere else, not in Washington, and the Secret Service wouldn’t divulge his location. The White House itself looked like it was under siege: armed men stationed every few feet, armored personnel carriers parked in the driveway and outside the gates, guys with sniper rifles and rocket launchers visible on the roof – and those were just the secu rity measures that could be seen.
Cabinet members were under guard too, as if they were actually more important than the figureheads that most of them really were, and senior leadership in the House and Senate were flanked by armed men whenever they left their offices and were driven to meetings in armored cars. Mahoney himself, being third in line for the presidency, was being smothered by his security, four guys so big they all looked like they could have played on the line for Notre Dame. And that was the problem. He felt smothered, and he needed to get away, to someplace where he could be alone and think.
He had them drive him to a restaurant on Capitol Hill and made two of them wait outside, saying four inside was just too many. Then, once in the restau rant, after he’d had a drink, he rose from the table. The two remaining security guys rose with him but he waved them back to their seats. ‘I’m just goin’ to the head,’ he said, ‘and I can’t pee when I’m being watched.’ This embarrassed them so much that Mahoney was gone before they could move.
But instead of going to the restroom, he ducked into the kitchen, borrowed a ski jacket and stocking cap from one of the cooks, and boogied out the back-door, the cap pulled down low on his forehead. Then, feeling momentarily gleeful, he sprinted down the alley – well, for a guy his age and size it was a sprint – and caught a cab to the memorial. The security guys were gonna be pissed when they caught up with him, but screw ’em; he needed some space.
So now he sat on a bench near the memorial, that stark black granite wall that lists the names of the fallen and mostly forgotten. There is no memorial in Washington that is more poignant than that simple wall. Mahoney, bundled in the cook’s stained jacket, the stocking cap on his head, looked like a broken-down old vet who had come on a dismal day to mourn those who had fought beside him.
And Mahoney was mourning, just not for the men on the wall – although he had known several of them. He was mourning Bill Broderick – not because he had liked the man but because Broderick’s death was having a horrible galvanizing effect on the passage of his damn bill.
An ordinary bill Mahoney could have kept in committee indefinitely. He could have bounced it from committee to committee until Congress recessed or until it died a quiet death. But not this bill. There was just too much media heat and too many congressmen feeling the heat. Two days ago, it had reported out of the committee, two Democrats voting for it. Mahoney then began to do what he could to delay a floor vote, hoping – though without optimism – that something would happen to give him what he needed to get folks turned around. But then Broderick had to go and get himself killed, burnt to a crisp while screwing his secretary. The idiot.
Now practically every member of the House was screaming for Mahoney to bring Broderick’s bill to the floor for a vote. They didn’t scream directly at Mahoney, of course – they screamed via the press. And the press, at least the conservative press, was starting to make John Mahoney sound as patriotic as Benedict Arnold.
There was something else that irritated Mahoney. Before his death, Broderick had tried and failed to come up with a clever name for his bill, something like the ‘Patriot Act,’ a name that would make it sound as if the bill were really in the country’s best interest. He had tried to get the media to latch on to a couple of different names, such as the Domestic Security Act or the Muslim American Validation Act, but these names were neither particularly euphonic nor sufficiently misleading. And no matter what name Broderick tried to give his proposal, the liberals insisted on calling it the Muslim American Registry Act, a name Broderick had hated because it focused attention on the most controversial aspect of his bill. But now the bill had a name. It was being called the Broderick Act.
Jesus.
Nor could any advantage be taken of the fact that Broderick had been diddling his receptionist the night he died. A tidbit like that might have been useful if the man was still alive, but to bring it up now would be considered by one and all as a despicable thing to rub into the face of Broderick’s widow. So the press, in a rare act of decency, was pretending to accept the story given by Senator Broderick’s aide Nicholas Fine.
Fine had said that the senator had attended a meeting with some constituents the night of his death – this story matched the lie that Broderick had told his wife – and Fine assumed that the senator had stopped by Ms Talbot’s apartment afterward to give her some urgent task related to the meeting. Maybe, Fine said, Broderick had given her something he wanted typed up that very night or possibly something that he wanted her to get into the mail first thing in the morning. Yeah, he was giving her something, all right, the reporters thought, but they didn’t print what they were thinking.
Then the last straw floated down and landed on the camel’s back, prompting Mahoney to ditch his security so he could be alone. The FBI had discovered a note in Broderick’s car, a note that had apparently been left there by the bomber. The previous night when the cop had opened the car to find out who the car belonged to, he hadn’t seen the note. In fact, the cop had planted a knee right on it when he reached over to open the glove compartment to get Broderick’s registration. But after the FBI arrived and began to examine the scene in an organized manner, the note was discovered. The note was typed and unsigned but appeared to have been written by a Muslim American, one not particularly well educated. There were references to Allah, the Koran, and the worldwide Muslim brother hood, and there was the implication that al-Qaeda had helped the bomber, a statement to the effect that wise men across the sea had aided his efforts but al-Qaeda was not mentioned specifically. In the note Broderick was thoroughly denounced as a godless infidel whose bill was proof that America had declared an unholy crusade against all Muslims.
So even though the FBI could not prove it – even though the FBI said repeatedly that they could not prove it – the public was convinced that an American Muslim was responsible for the death of a United States senator, a man whose character had already improved tenfold in the hours since his passing.
Mahoney thought about calling DeMarco but decided not to bother. Unless DeMarco could find something in the next forty-eight hours, the Broderick Act was going to become law.
‘Mr Speaker.’
Mahoney turned his head. Aw, shit. His four secu rity guys were jogging across the grass toward him, the Notre Dame offensive line for sure.
They’d found him fast. These guys were good.
54
‘They blindfolded me,’ Danny said.
‘Son of a bitch!’ DeMarco said, glaring at his cousin.
‘Hey! It wasn’t my fault. I did what you wanted. I got ’em to show me the lab.’
Patsy Hall said, ‘Yeah, but for all you know, it wasn’t even on Pugh’s property.’ She thought for a minute. ‘Was the lab in a cave?’ Looking at DeMarco she said, ‘There’re a couple small caves on Pugh’s land. I snuck in there one night to check ’em out, but at the time they were empty.’
‘You went onto Pugh’s property by yourself, at night, and explored these caves?’ DeMarco said.
‘Yeah. I didn’t have a warrant and I wasn’t going to get any of my guys in trouble.’
Wow, DeMarco thought. Patsy Hall was something else.
Danny said, ‘This place I was in, it didn’t look like a cave. It was man-made. But it was underground. I could tell because we walked down these stairs to get in and the floor was dirt. But the walls weren’t made of ro
ck, like a cave. They were built out of railroad ties, like they dug the space out and reinforced the walls with the ties so they wouldn’t collapse.’
They were in a conference room in Winchester where the DEA had a small field office. They all sat in silence, Danny worrying about his future, DeMarco annoyed at his cousin, and Patsy Hall thinking about Pugh, her lips set in a stubborn line. Hall got up after a moment and opened a file cabinet and pulled out a topographical map that included Pugh’s land. She spread the map out on the table.
‘How long were you driving around?’ she asked Danny.
‘Half hour, maybe forty-five minutes.’
‘Well, which was it? Half an hour or forty-five minutes?’
‘I don’t know! They took my watch when they made me strip.’
‘Shit. And how fast do you think you were driving?’
‘Wherever we were going, it was pretty rough. I’d say less than fifteen miles an hour most of the time, but a couple of times Randy, that asshole, really opened the thing up. Scared the crap out of me.’ Then he added, ‘I mean, being blindfolded like I was.’
‘But most of the time you were going less than twenty?’
‘Yeah, I guess.’
Patsy scratched some numbers on the edge of the map. ‘If it took you forty-five minutes at an average speed of twenty miles an hour, you would have gone fifteen miles. She looked down at the map and said, ‘Shit, if you were traveling in anywhere near a straight line, you’d be off Pugh’s property.’
Danny said, ‘But we weren’t traveling in a straight line. We made a lot of turns. I could feel them.’
‘I know,’ Patsy Hall said, shaking her head, ‘but if you drove that long I can’t establish that you were on his property.’ She stood there a moment, studying the map, tracing a slim forefinger over the heavy black line that outlined Pugh’s land. ‘Could you feel anything or hear anything while you were driving?’
‘Like what?’ Danny said.
