Shining City

by Tom Rosenstiel

  In a few hundred feet, the man in front of him turns off the path into the bush toward the river. The bush is thick and Rena can see only a few feet ahead. But he can hear the brush of the legs of the cotton overalls chafing against each other as Johnson runs.

  He is bashing through the thicket to the river.

  Fifty-three

  Rena stopped loving guns a long time ago. There is only one reason to have one. And he had left that part of his life behind.

  Something in the man’s motion makes him wish he had one now. A slowing, then a reaching into the pocket of his overalls. A handgun comes out. A Glock 22. The kind of gun Jobe owns. The man is changing from pursued to pursuer.

  Before the motion is complete, Rena dives into him and they tumble into the river.

  The Potomac here is only two or three feet deep but frigid, even in June.

  They thrash at each other from their knees, slowed by the wet and the cold and made clumsy by the mud. They grope for control of the dark metal in Johnson’s hand.

  Then they pull each other down. They are on their sides, facing each other, their noses and mouths submerged, their legs tangled, a cold, stinging, slow-motion wrestling. They are drowning each other.

  Johnson has hold of the gun, but Rena has both the man’s wrists in his grip. He extends his leg and finds Johnson’s foot and pushes, splaying Johnson’s legs. He lifts himself and pins Johnson under him beneath the water.

  Johnson bends his head up for the air, and when he cannot hold it there he begins to thrash, shaking his head back and forth.

  Rena stares into his eyes, and the two men exchange a moment of strange, frightful intimacy: one man watching another decide his mortality.

  Then Rena thinks a terrible thought. If Johnson is alive, so is his story. He isn’t just a killer. He is also in his own mind at least an avenger of injustice, or so he could claim.

  Rena begins to push Johnson beneath the water. His mouth. Then his nose. Then his face disappears into the dark.

  No one would know.

  Beneath him, Johnson begins to buck, kicking, twisting, panicking. And finally weakening.

  Rena watches. And then slowly loosens the pressure on Johnson’s wrists and releases him.

  Johnson pushes himself up just enough to breathe. He begins to cough. He lifts himself onto his elbows.

  The mud droplets on his face look like tears.

  Then he lifts Jobe’s Glock 22 from the dark water and points it at Rena’s head.

  Fifty-four

  The door of the apartment is open, the doorjamb broken.

  He doesn’t yell out. But in the hall, after checking the small living room, Roland Madison sees Hallie Jobe’s legs sticking out of the bathroom.

  Oh, God. Victoria?

  Halfway down the hall he sees her body behind Jobe’s on the bathroom floor, lying next to the tub.

  Oh, my God. No. No!

  What have I done?

  There is blood coming from a wound on the back of Jobe’s head.

  Madison steps past the still figure of Jobe to check his daughter. She isn’t moving.

  Please, he thinks, please.

  He will need to check now for signs of life. This is the first question they will ask when he calls 911.

  He kneels, his knees on the cold porcelain tile, and leans over to feel for a pulse. Whatever he finds, he must do it for Jobe as well.

  Brooks wonders why Rena hasn’t called. What did Madison have to say? She is sitting in a conference room in the Old EOB listening to the metallic voices of worried White House staffers. Eleven people in suits trying to create a strategy for events they cannot control. They are grateful the hearings were delayed this morning. The White House is under the impression the postponement was at Chairman Morgan’s request.

  No one on the White House team seems to be giving up on Rollie, she is relieved to hear. But the White House thinks he is wounded. “He needs to have a good second day,” the White House counsel, George Rawls, warns. “We need to pick up where Senator Stevens left off.”

  What Morgan did was a cheap trick. “But what matters is what happens today,” Rawls says.

  Where is Judge Madison? Why isn’t he here?

  If unarmed and facing a gun in close combat, Rena had been trained, always charge. Toward the weapon, not away from it. The shooter’s reflex will be to pull the weapon back and turn the barrel slightly to the outside.

  Rena propels himself, angling his arm at the gun hand, almost reaching it when the shot goes off.

  He feels his flesh tear and his shoulder burn. But his momentum carries him into Johnson’s body and knocks the man backward into the river.

  The fatal, ironic reflex in drowning is panic. When a person submerged underwater begins to experience it, they gasp for air. The gasp allows water to begin to fill the lungs. A drowning person loses consciousness prior to death. Unless a heart attack occurs first.

  When Johnson begins to lose consciousness, Rena thinks, he will submit, and Rena can subdue him.

  Not this, not dark, not like this.

  Johnson wants to scream; he needs to breathe. His mind careers across faces—Navatsky, Smith, Martell, Victoria Madison—then Peanut, so young, and he wonders whether he is grateful it is ending, whether it was worth it.

  Then his right arm is free.

  And the tip of the Glock emerges again from the water.

  Rena sees it and once more they go under.

  Rena feels the explosion

  And slowly, one limb and then another, Johnson’s body goes limp.

  From the boathouses, people have come running up the path and through the bush, a man and a group of teenagers. They keep their distance, unsure whether he is a threat or needs their help.

  “Call 911,” Rena says hoarsely. “Tell them, a man police are looking for has been killed. And there is a second man with a gunshot wound.”

  Fifty-five

  Rena sits nearby on the riverbank waiting for the ambulance. He is soaked in mud, river water, and blood, mostly his own. It takes him several minutes to catch his breath. The shoulder where he has been shot burns.

  A Good Samaritan from the gathering crowd helped him drag the body to shore to keep it from drifting downriver. They tried resuscitation but it was too late. The corpse’s mouth and eyes were open, as if in a permanent scream. Then the man covered it with a bandanna.

  Rena can hear sirens in the distance.

  He digs his phone out of his pocket, but it’s soaked and dead. “Does anyone have a phone?” Faces turn his way, and the expressions tell him his request is viewed as macabre. The crowd is made up mostly of teenage girls from the women’s crew team and their coach, who called 911. The crew coach hands him a phone.

  Rena dials the private number he memorized six weeks ago and leaves a message to call back, adding that the situation is an emergency.

  The second call is to Spencer Carr. Rena tries to keep it simple: The man who killed a Justice Department attorney named Alan Martell had also stalked Madison; he may have attacked Madison’s daughter, too, and Rena’s colleague Hallie Jobe; the killer is the deranged relative of a man whose murder trial Madison had presided over; he had shot Rena; Rena in turn has killed him. “I understand,” Carr keeps saying, prodding Rena to finish.

  “How are you?” Carr asks.

  “All right. I’m probably in shock.”

  Rena sees a man and woman in matching blue T-shirts moving through the crowd, carrying red equipment bags and pulling a gurney. EMS, arriving before the police.

  “I have to go.”

  “Who can I call for you?” asks Carr.

  Randi. He hasn’t called Randi.

  “She’s here at the White House,” Carr says. “I’ll take care of it. What hospital are they taking you to?”

  Rena asks one of the two paramedics, a man in his twenties, a weight lifter bursting from his EMS shirt.

  “Put the phone down, sir.”

  “Just tell me where yo
u are going to take me.”

  The muscular paramedic glances at his female partner.

  “Georgetown University Hospital,” she answers.

  “Georgetown.”

  Another call is coming in. Rena recognizes the number.

  “I’ve got to go,” he says, trying to manipulate the phone buttons without losing the incoming call.

  “Peter?” President James Nash says on the other end of the line.

  Nash is returning the call Rena had left a moment earlier.

  The paramedic grabs the phone out of his hand. “Buddy,” the guy says into the phone, “your friend has been shot. He has to hang up now.”

  Whatever the president of the United States says on the other end of the line apparently isn’t persuasive.

  “Yeah, right, and I’m George Clooney.”

  The president’s next words must be more convincing. The EMS guy looks unsteady, says, “Yes, sir,” and returns the phone to Rena.

  “Peter, we’re taking over from here,” Nash says. “Our doctors will meet you at the hospital. You’re going to get the best care there is.”

  “Find out about Vic and Jobe,” Rena hears himself say.

  Everything is beginning to sound farther away.

  At some point in the ambulance Rena loses consciousness.

  Everyone seems to have arrived at once.

  The small apartment is filled with uniforms. EMS technicians have turned the hallway into a triage space. It doesn’t all quite seem real. Madison can’t get the picture out of his mind of Vic lying there on the bathroom floor.

  He is standing in the living room and a patrolman who looks about twenty years old is asking him questions. The kid, the name tag says Schmidt, has a flat top and a thin blond mustache that fails to make him look older. He seems confused.

  “You escaped?”

  “No,” Madison says. “I got here afterward. But I think we saw him leaving, or at least we saw a man who we think is responsible.”

  “‘We’? Sir, you are alone. There is no we. Are you sure you’re all right? Were you attacked?”

  “I already told you, I arrived with a friend, who went off in pursuit of the man who we think might have done this.”

  “So there were two of you? Did he come into the apartment?”

  The paramedics are beginning to move Jobe out of the apartment on a gurney. They must be ready to take Vic, too.

  “I have to go,” Madison tells the officer. “I have to go with my daughter.”

  All Madison knows is that Vic was breathing, barely. Jobe, too.

  The patrolman gets a hard look on his face.

  “You aren’t going anywhere until I am done with you, sir,” Patrolman Schmidt says with practiced menace.

  “Gotta move her,” Madison hears one of the paramedics call out.

  “I have to go,” Madison insists.

  “Sir.”

  “Officer Schmidt, if you persist in this, I should tell you I am a federal judge. You can arrest me, for no reason, a decision you will spend weeks trying to untangle, or you can let me go to the hospital. I will be happy to answer any questions you have there.”

  More people are arriving, not all of them uniforms, too many people. It’s obvious that there is something about this situation that is out of the ordinary. Even Patrolman Schmidt senses it. Madison slips behind Schmidt to follow the second EMS unit that is now carrying Vic out of the apartment.

  “I’m going, Patrolman.”

  Schmidt looks at him in silence, an uncertain expression on his face. As Madison heads out, a man with close-cropped hair and a dark suit moves in step with him. “Judge Madison? I’m Alan Gentry, FBI. May I ride with you in the ambulance to the hospital?”

  The first thing Rena sees when he wakes is Randi Brooks.

  He is in a bed, in a room, with a curtain.

  “Hey,” she says with a relieved grin.

  “I just told Spencer Carr to call you. How did you get here so fast?” He realizes he doesn’t know where he is. Brooks laughs.

  “Peter, I’ve been here for hours. You’ve had surgery. You’re in recovery in the hospital.”

  Rena tries to process what she has said.

  “It’s three in the afternoon.”

  He feels great. He wishes he could sleep like this all the time. Brooks strokes his head. Suddenly Rena is aware of everything. He feels overwhelmingly grateful to see her. “Thanks for being here.”

  “Where else would I be, you idiot?”

  She could be all kinds of places, Rena thinks.

  “I’m not the only one. There is a whole team in the waiting room. Matt Alabama, Wiley, Lupsa, O’Brien.”

  His mouth is crusty. “Can I get some water?”

  She hands him a cup with ice chips. He isn’t sure he has ever had anything so tremendously refreshing.

  “Vic? Hallie?”

  “They’re alive.” Her voice is grave.

  “Hallie had surgery. They’re sleeping.”

  “I want to see them.”

  “Peter, you just got out of surgery yourself.”

  “I need to see them. Call the president if you have to. Call Spencer Carr.”

  Brooks laughs. “I don’t think we need to go that far, Peter. We have FBI crawling all over the place. You guys are VIPs. I think we can arrange almost anything.”

  “Do it.”

  “Do you want to know if you’re going to die first?”

  “Am I?”

  “Apparently not. The bullet has been taken out. A shoulder wound. You won’t be lifting anything for a while.”

  “Then you’ll have to serve me.”

  “But no more of this cowboy bullshit, okay?”

  “I want to see Vic and Hallie.”

  “Hold your horses, Deputy Dawg. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Brooks disappears. He would like another cup of ice chips; yes, that would be really nice; he really needs them; he is beginning to feel a little desperate about it.

  The drugs have made him stupid.

  A nurse enters. Rena pretends to sleep. Brooks returns. “They’re ready to move him to a room, as soon as he’s awake,” the nurse tells her.

  “I’m up,” he says, opening his eyes.

  “Good,” the nurse says. “How are you feeling?”

  He persuades her that he feels better than he does and in a minute she leaves.

  “It’s all arranged, Peter. As soon as you’re out of recovery in your own room, we can get you into a wheelchair and you can pay a visit.”

  “Then let’s do it,” Rena says.

  Ten minutes later, Brooks is rolling him and all his tubes out of his new room to Vic’s, a few doors down the hall. His left arm is in a sling to immobilize his shoulder. The three conditions are he cannot push himself in the wheelchair, get in the wheelchair by himself, or walk anywhere.

  Vic is asleep. Roland Madison is sitting by her bedside. Vic’s face is bruised and swollen. Rena feels guilt and remorse wash over him. Madison stands, walks over, and takes Rena’s one good hand in both of his.

  “Peter.”

  “How is she?”

  “We hope okay. Facial bruising. A severe concussion. That’s the diagnosis for now.”

  Rena foggily tries to process what that means.

  “She was unconscious for more than a half hour. They did a CT brain scan, but they found nothing abnormal. Her vision was fine. No serious amnesia. But she remembers nothing from today.”

  “What happens now?”

  “We just observe and hope nothing shows up.”

  Rena’s feelings come in great waves. Relief. Worry. Self-reproach. He is struggling to not be upended by them. The drugs again.

  “It’s okay for her to sleep?”

  “Apparently it’s good. The only concern would be if she began to sleep for prolonged periods and had difficulty waking up.”

  “The gang’s all here,” the voice from the bed says with a thin smile. Vic is awake.

 
Rena forgets his shoulder and tries to wheel himself to the bed and winces.

  “You are the shittiest patient in this hospital,” Brooks tells him.

  Rena is relieved to see Vic laugh.

  “I’m so sorry,” he says to her.

  “Don’t,” Vic says.

  Rena feels overwhelmed by all he wants to say.

  “I heard you got him,” Vic says.

  It’s the first time anyone’s mentioned Johnson; the thought of him jumbles Rena’s feelings even more.

  Vic takes his hand weakly. She smiles and closes her eyes.

  “Have you seen Hallie?” she asks without opening her eyes.

  She has more presence of mind than he does, Rena thinks, even now, half-asleep with a concussion. He realizes how she has gently managed things well all along.

  “Not yet,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”

  Vic is asleep suddenly.

  They aren’t allowed to enter Jobe’s room in intensive care, but outside they find her mother and sister keeping vigil; the two women explain what they’ve been told about her condition. Jobe has suffered a skull fracture and an intracranial hemorrhage, or bleeding in the brain. She’s had surgery to relieve the bleeding and to check for clots. They won’t know much for a while. Problems might not show up for months, perhaps a year. All this is his fault, Rena thinks. A nurse finally shoos Brooks to take Rena back to his room. “Now. And get some sleep,” she commands.

  Rena spends the next hours in a state of dozy incompetence. At one point two FBI agents interview him, assuring him it’s simply protocol.

  The night is endless. Nurses enter at all hours to poke and prod him and fiddle with his IV; the hallways are full of light and noise. The next day goes on and on, full of visitors and boredom.

  In the afternoon, Rollie Madison comes down the hall to visit.

  “How is Vic?”

  Madison hesitates before answering. “Tired. Scared. Vulnerable. But more herself than before.”

  The judge looks pale and drawn, as if he had been locked indoors for months. “Peter, I intend to withdraw.”