The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear

by Stuart Stevens

  “I’m glad he didn’t,” Gomez said, and Hilda Smith’s husband smiled. So did I. He was right. “Look, J.D., you know this is a tough one for everybody. But there’s only one thing to do. We’re going to have to ask you to step aside as campaign manager.”

  I stared at him. “Step aside,” I said flatly. “Who would run the campaign?”

  “Eddie Basha has agreed,” the vice president said, and then it all made sense. It was Eddie who had told them about Tyler. It was Eddie who had made his move by trying to fuck me. Not trying, actually. He’d done it very nicely. I had to hand it to the guy, I’d taught him well. “We’re hoping you would help him in any way you could that wasn’t public.”

  Gomez looked at the VP sharply. It was the sort of thing he should have asked me privately, not in her presence, and she certainly shouldn’t have said it. “I suppose you have a statement ready,” I said.

  “Yes, we do,” Gomez said, and pulled out a piece of plain paper with a couple of sentences typed on it. The VP winced. Gomez’s bedside manner needed some help. When you showed the patient the X-ray foretelling their death, better not to present it with, “See, those really dark spots are cancer. You can see how huge they are and how close they are to the heart. This is really incredible imaging, isn’t it?”

  Gomez started reading. It was a standard “For personal reasons, J. D. Callahan is taking a leave from the campaign” announcement.

  “You can’t do that,” I said, before he was even finished.

  Gomez stiffened. “Now J.D., I know this isn’t easy but—”

  I cut him off. “That ‘personal reasons’ will just create a feeding frenzy of people trying to find out the real story. It will consume the campaign. The vice president”—I nodded toward her, as if making it clear I was referring to that vice president—“won’t be able to get any kind of message through that noise. It will kill the campaign.”

  “Maybe you should have thought of that before you went crazy with that brother of yours,” Gomez exploded, then immediately pulled back, in that robotic, apologetic way lawyers can get when they have let slip a human moment by mistake.

  “The decision’s been made, J.D.,” Hilda Smith said. “I’m sorry.”

  I nodded, then got up. “You’ll put out the statement?”

  “We will,” Gomez said. Hilda looked a little pained when he said that, and I gave her credit for a bit of shame. “Just put it out. I won’t take any press calls.”

  There was a long, painful silence in the room, like when the doctor has pronounced the patient dead and the family is quietly looking at the corpse. Then I turned and left the room. I knew two things I had to do: find Tyler, and destroy Eddie Basha.

  Chapter Nine

  JOEY FRANCIS WAS WAITING FOR ME outside the VP’s suite. I walked right past him, which was a dumb way to play it, but I wasn’t at my best. He laughed, which really pissed me off and made me turn and face him. I was doing this all wrong but didn’t seem able to stop.

  “What?” I barked. Francis walked over to me and put his hand on my shoulder.

  “It sucks, I know,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Getting fired.” He leaned in close to me. “You know who fucked you, right?” When I didn’t say anything he whispered, “Your best boy. Eddie B. fucked you bad.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “No?” He pulled out his iPhone and showed me an email from Eddie to Lisa, all about Tyler. I had no idea how he knew, but I’d always said it was Eddie’s job to know everything.

  “You hacked into his email?” Francis laughed again at this, which really annoyed me. “Oh, right. Not just his. All of us. Great. How about the vice president?” He backed up, holding up his hands in mock protest.

  “That would be seriously illegal.”

  “And hacking into other private emails isn’t?”

  “You ever read the fine print of the Patriot Act? When we have a terrorist threat against the safety of a vice president, I can do pretty much the fuck what I want to whomever I want. It’s a beautiful thing.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Somewhere in my head I was hearing the instructions I’d given scores of candidates: When you don’t know what to say, don’t say anything. I turned around and walked toward the elevator.

  “We can play this two ways, J.D.,” Francis said to my back. “You help us find him and all is good and glorious in the world and you might be a hero. Or you don’t and I find a way to charge you as an accessory to terrorism. Maybe your brother Paul too. And your reporter friend you are way too friendly with.”

  I kept walking.

  —

  Jessie opened the door in a robe, holding her Glock to the side. “There’s a lingerie store on Magazine that sells the gun and the robe together as a Valentine’s gift for the little lady,” she said, dropping the robe and putting the gun next to the bed. “It was a hot item last year. But don’t worry, I bought it for myself, not gifts from a suitor. I was a virgin before I met you. Promise.”

  Then she pulled me down into bed.

  I woke two hours later, bolting up. Jessie reached for her gun and sat up. “What?” she whispered, like we were a couple of homesteaders in old Apache territory who had heard the dog barking at the corral. I shook my head and grabbed my phone. It had come to me when I was asleep, my brain turning over something that I couldn’t quite grasp but wouldn’t let go. It was two a.m., but she was awake. I knew she would be.

  “What the fuck, J.D., it takes twenty-three calls for you to call me back?” Ginny was whispering but her voice still cut like a saw. “Hold on.” I could hear people talking in the background and figured she was in one of our trailers at the Superdome. In a few seconds those voices grew dim and Ginny came back, louder. “I am so fucking mad at you. What the fuck? I’m supposed to work for Eddie fucking Basha?”

  I had to laugh. Jessie gave me a strange look, but then maybe any look from a half-asleep nude woman holding a Glock like her favorite teddy bear might be strange. “Ginny, you are wonderful.”

  “Of course I’m fucking wonderful. Everybody knows that. Now where the hell are you?”

  “I’ve got something I need you to do. Get one of the propeller heads on it.” Propeller heads is what we called the brilliant kids—and they were all under twenty-five—in the research department.

  “What?” She sighed. “So are you with that chick? Jesus Christ.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I know, but you would have told me where you were if you weren’t with her. Just for the record, J.D., nobody in the whole goddamn universe has worse luck when it comes to banging reporters. Now what do you want me to do?”

  “Find a boat.”

  When I finished explaining to Ginny and hung up, Jessie said in that half-asleep voice that was incredibly sexy, “Just for the record, you’re not banging me, I’m banging you. That was smart about the boat. But I don’t want to talk about it.” She slid the Glock aside and pulled me closer. We were asleep in a few seconds.

  Ginny called back ninety minutes later. “We’ve got it. I’m looking at it on Google Earth. You sure you want to go out there alone? I can go with you.”

  “Stay there. I’ll call you. And Ginny, you’re the best.”

  She hung up without saying anything. It was four a.m. and she was still working. She was the best.

  “I guess I should make some coffee,” Jessie said, swinging her long legs off to the side.

  I didn’t even try to talk Jessie into not going with me. We drank her coffee with chicory and got dressed without saying much at all. She poured the rest of the French press canister into a beat-up camouflage thermos that looked like it had spent years at deer camps. Then she dug around in a closet and came out with a short-barreled shotgun with a pistol grip. It scared the crap out of me just looking at it. Before I could ask, she said, “My mother gave it to me right after Katrina.”

  “Your mother?”

  “She has two. One
for her house and one for her car. I think it’s one of the great disappointments of her life that nobody has ever tried to break into the house or jack her car. She’s dying to use it.” She slid the pump back and forth for emphasis, the sound as unique and chilling as a rattler.

  The sun was coming up as we drove over the Causeway. “You have left the Magic Kingdom,” Jessie announced when we reached the other side. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I didn’t work the radio to suck down every bit of news possible. It just didn’t seem important when it could all change in the next few hours, depending on what we discovered at the boat.

  We found the old shrimp boat just where Ginny had said, moored at the little marina on Bayou Castine. Not fancy, but not decrepit. It looked a lot better than it had in the photo I’d seen on Renee’s wall. That picture had been taken when Renee was still babysitting for me. The boat wasn’t much to look at and my father hadn’t paid much for it, but he had loved it. I could remember going out on it as a kid and the great pleasure my father took in docking at the fancy yacht club in New Orleans just to make fun of all his rich friends with beautiful sailboats or the big twin-engine deepwater fish killers that they kept so immaculately clean. Powell Callahan didn’t have the nicest boat, but he threw the best parties, and everybody loved that old shrimp boat. After Renee “left”—it wasn’t until years later that I found out what had really happened—the boat rides had ended. I hadn’t thought about the boat for twenty years, until I saw that photo on the wall in Renee’s house. I’d asked her about it, and she said that it had been given to her as part of the “settlement.” A cousin had actually used it as a shrimp boat, not a party boat, and she and Tyler used to go out on it some. Beyond that, I’d had no idea what had happened to it.

  But it was here now, refurbished and looking like the kind of place that a guy who was making a lot of money in the stripper and security business would enjoy as a weekend getaway. Yes, indeed. It still had the distinctive twin masts for holding nets, but it was freshly painted. The glimpses we could see of the cockpit showed gleaming, varnished wood that had been grayed with age and salt the last time I’d seen it, a million years ago. But it still had the same name, which was how Ginny was able to track it: Burton’s Landing. My father had worshipped All the King’s Men, memorizing long passages and reciting them at random, usually embarrassing moments, when the drink and his mood blended, a not infrequent occurrence. His favorite passage:

  The law is like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain’t ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shank bone’s to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind.

  I knew Tyler drove an old Dodge Charger he had restored, but I didn’t see it anywhere. “What do you think we should do?” I asked Jessie as we sat in her Mustang, looking at the boat bobbing gently at the dock.

  “Simple,” she said. “We see if he’s here.” She got out with the shotgun but stuffed it under the front seat when she saw a group of fishermen carrying ice from the little marina office to their boats. Dressed in jeans, black cowboy boots, and a white silk blouse, she already looked out of place without adding an assault weapon as an accessory. She reached inside the glove compartment and took out the Glock, jamming it in the small of her back, covered by her blouse.

  I had to smile. “You look…fantastic,” I said. She did a sort of curtsy.

  When we got to the plank connecting Burton’s Landing to the dock, I yelled, “Hey, Tyler, it’s J.D.” And when Jessie jabbed me in the ribs, I added, “And Jessie.”

  “Good to give him warning so he can set the fuse on the bomb,” Jessie mumbled. “More sporting that way.” Then she walked onto the boat.

  It was cool and dark inside the boat’s cabin, the air conditioning humming softly. It was decorated like something out of Yachting magazine, copies of which I’d seen lying around the private aviation terminals we used for Air Force Two (a piece-of-shit old plane, by the way, louder than a cheap tractor)—that is, except for the Confederate flag hanging on the wall. Confederate flags never made it into Yachting. There was a built-in flat-screen TV set into a wall of polished mahogany. A bar held expensive liquor. And framed on the wall was the same photo I’d seen at Renee’s: Tyler and his army buddies, including Somerfield George. Jessie stared, transfixed.

  “He was so pretty,” she said, reaching out to touch him.

  By the DVD player we found a stack of Confederate Dead CDs, each produced with nihilistic Hieronymus Bosch graphics. That was it: a weekend hideaway for stressed executives looking to kick back with a bit of funky luxury. Jessie pulled up the cushions in the built-in couch. “Oh boy,” she said, staring down.

  “What?” I figured she must have found a cache of explosives of some sort. I looked over her shoulder. A tiny woman’s thong in bright red lay under the cushion. “Trophy?” Jessie asked. “Or just something the cleaning lady missed?” She started to reach for it and I slammed the cushion back down.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “Just no.”

  We walked back out into the bright sun. It was peaceful and brought me back to the time I’d spent on bayous and Lake Pontchartrain. Gulls swooped overhead and pelicans dove for fish. It was hard to imagine the madness of the Superdome. The entire political world, my world, would be talking about what had happened to poor J. D. Callahan and how J.D. screwed the pooch again. Everybody would be shaking their head and laughing at me, even those I’d hired and who owed me everything. How many would stand up for me? Ginny would. How many others?

  “What?” Jessie asked me.

  “What?”

  “What are you thinking about? You had a death stare.”

  I shook my head, trying to clear the thoughts.

  “Don’t do that male asshole thing of saying everything is okay. You’re not that good at it. I’ve had boyfriends who were total pros.”

  Boyfriends? Did that mean I was a boyfriend? We got into her car. “Jesus, it’s hot in here,” I said. And then I saw Tyler rise up from the backseat holding Jessie’s shotgun.

  “Jesus fuck!” Jessie yelled, turning to face Tyler. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Quit yelling,” Tyler said, then he laughed. “Where’d you get this bad boy, J.D.? This is some serious shit.”

  “It’s mine,” Jessie said.

  “Nice,” Tyler said, then handed it to Jessie. She grabbed it and then swiveled around and tried to angle the shotgun toward Tyler.

  “You stupid motherfucker! You scared the shit out of me!” she shouted.

  Tyler shrugged, pushing the barrel aside. “You tell anybody else about the boat?” he asked.

  “That’s it?” Jessie yelled. “No apology?”

  I could see Tyler looking at me through the rearview mirror. “Is she always like this?” he asked.

  Jessie pumped the shotgun and aimed it at him. It didn’t seem to bother him. “Tyler, what are you doing?” I asked.

  He didn’t say anything but got out of the car and walked toward his boat. “Is he crazy?” Jessie asked. Tyler turned and motioned for us to follow him. “He is fucking crazy,” Jessie said. We got out of the car and followed him. I didn’t try to convince Jessie not to bring the shotgun.

  Tyler had Fox News playing silently in the background and was making coffee. One of the Fox blondes was interviewing Eddie Basha. “You’re Jessie, that newspaper chick,” Tyler said when we walked into the cabin. “I read your stuff. I like it. You want some coffee?”

  The total normalcy of the moment was completely abnormal. Jessie looked at me. “Sure,” she said. “Black.”

  Tyler handed her a mug of coffee. “You’re hot. You ever think of dancing?”

  For a second I was afraid she would throw her coffe
e at Tyler, but she shook her head. “I’m too shy.”

  He collapsed back on the bench couch, and suddenly he looked very, very tired. “I heard you got shit-canned,” he said to me. I nodded.

  “Oh, fuck,” Jessie said softly. “Oh, fuck.” She was staring at the television. They had cut from inside the Superdome to a confused scene that felt terribly familiar. It was outside a Hampton Inn in Metairie. I knew it because the Alabama delegation was staying there and had complained that the out-of-the-way location was payback for supporting Armstrong George. Which was true. Behind it was a desolate parking lot that had once been a used-car dealership. In the middle of it sat what had once been a car, burning.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Tyler said from the couch. “I’ll be damned.”

  Jessie and I looked at him. “It’s that George kid, right?” I asked. “He got you to do this.”

  “Somerfield?” Tyler said. “He’s hopeless. Worse than hopeless.” He sighed. “It’s Tommy. Crazy fucking Tommy.” He got up and picked up the photo from his army days. “Crazy fucking Tommy.”

  Tyler had a look on his face that I’d never seen before. His usual ironic smirk faded and he suddenly looked very young, scared, and sad. While the scene at the newest bombing played out silently on the television, Tyler began to talk. And he kept on talking until he had told us everything.

  There had been a group of them who became pals at Fort Benning basic training. They had this skinhead thing in common, liked the same music, and loved the army for all its toys: cool guns, high explosives. They even liked some of the discipline. Somerfield George was sort of a big deal since his dad was governor of Colorado. They talked a lot about becoming mercenaries when they got out: make a big score, knock off some island, like those South African mercs. Tommy Mayfield was the craziest. It wasn’t like he was some kind of southern racist, he was just an Irish Catholic mutt from Erie, Pennsylvania. But he was the only one who had a problem with blacks or Puerto Ricans. They loved the idea of the Confederacy and watched every Civil War video they could download. Tommy was always trying to egg Somerfield on about how he bet his father really didn’t like those lazy scumbag minorities either, he just couldn’t come out and say it, right? Somerfield would tell him he was crazy. More than anything, they loved to get high and blow up cool stuff, like old cars. That’s what they were doing when Tyler got himself scorched and blown half to hell. Just high and messing around blowing up an abandoned bus out in the woods. It had been Somerfield’s fault, actually. He was the one who had screwed up the detonation.