“We don’t care about tomorrow until tomorrow gets here. Now call and have Charles released and brought here. Immediately.”
“What makes you think I have the power to do that?”
Barry lowered the .22 Ruger LR semi-automatic, fitted with a suppressor, and shot Kaden James in the knee. The senator crumpled like a heavy bag dropped from a great height. He let out one scream, but Barry stepped over and placed the bore of the gun in James’s open mouth. That mouth filled with silence and sudden fear.
Taking the phone with him, Barry returned to the bathroom, rummaged for the first-aid kit he knew was under the sink counter, and returned with it. He kneeled down and dropped the kit into James’s lap. “Here, bandage that before you bleed out, you moron.”
James was weeping. Big fat tears rolled down his plump cheeks. “You’ve crippled me!”
“I’ve done no such thing. They can fit you with a plate there to replace the kneecap. Of course, they’re going to have to replace both of them if you give me any more of your lies and obstructions.”
“God, man, what’s wrong with you, have you lost your mind?”
“Frankly, I’ve always wanted to ask you the same question. You helped frame the Homeland Security Act? Really? And that makes you sane? You’re kidding me, right? As for my own mind, I assure you my mind is clear as a bell and rings with clarity. Nothing wrong with me but a distaste for how things have been handled in Washington by people like you.”
Bandages were wound tight around the knee wound and now James taped it. He grimaced every few seconds when pain hit him, traveling up his knee to his groin.
Barry handed him the cell phone. “I am going to repeat this one more time. Call whoever you have to and make it happen. I want Charles here. And I want him here before morning.”
James took the phone and began dialing. It took two hours and a half-dozen lengthy conversations, but he was assured Charles Haver was going to be on the next charter flight to New Hampshire.
While they waited, Barry closely questioned the senator about everything that had ever bothered him. Not just the Homeland Security Act and those behind it, their thinking, but about the reason Kaden James had become such a powerful force within the Senate. And why he thought he could have men waltz into June Haver’s living room and handcuff her husband on just the word of one U.S. senator. When James didn’t want to answer or when he began to stutter out a partial lie, Barry raised the Ruger and pointed to his healthy knee. It was a difficult way to hold a conversation, but Barry found himself enjoying it.
He discovered James was the head of a group—really more a cult than a group it seemed to his mind—that felt people were about to get out of hand and something had to be erected in the law statues to prevent them from inciting a national crisis. Barry just laughed at that, then waved the gun for James to continue.
After the sun had set and the wind had picked up outside, after Barry closed all the curtains and drapes, he turned on a single lamp near the sofa. There was a knock at the door. Barry glanced through a slit in the curtains. He saw Charles at the door and two men walking back to a waiting, idling car. Once the car was gone, Barry opened the door, ushering his friend inside.
He locked the door and turned to take a frightened, confused Charles into a brief hug. When he stepped back he saw Charles’ gaze locked on the gun in his hand. He shrugged and said, “Only way I could get you out, buddy, I’m sorry.”
Charles turned to see the senator on the sofa, one leg of his slacks torn open and a bloody bandage around his kneecap. “What’s happening, Barry?”
“I had to convince Kaden here to do as I asked. For a little while he wasn’t listening. I think he is now, right, senator?”
James kept silent. His sullen face made him look like a wronged child.
“We’ll be leaving soon,” Barry said. Only then did he see that his old friend looked changed—haunted. His eyes were sunk in their sockets, and blue moons rode beneath. There was a short scar on his right cheek, still red and swollen from stitches. He had lost at least thirty pounds and the clothes he wore hung on him as if he were a scarecrow with all the stuffing leaked out.
“What did they do to you, Charles?” Barry’s voice was harsh. He sounded angry enough to slap someone around a while and relish doing it.
Charles said, “What didn’t the bastards do. I thought I was in a gulag.” He licked his lips, looked over at the senator. “And this prick had his hand in the whole dirty thing. He even visited me on Sundays, just to laugh at my torment.”
Barry walked over to the sofa and shot James in the other knee. As James opened his mouth to scream, Barry leaned down and covered his mouth with his hand. He moved in close. “I ought to kill you right now. It might take three shots in the brain to do it with this small caliber, but I think I can get the job done.”
James shook his head, his pupils showing whites all around. He grunted behind Barry’s hand. Barry sat next to him, slowly removing his hand from the senator’s mouth. “What’s all this about, senator? Are you just power hungry or are you mad with paranoia or do you just hate your own country? I’d really like to know why you’d target the two of us and torture a good man here—” he waved at Charles with his free hand “—for no reason whatsoever. You broke your own laws, senator. You broke the laws of the land. You let some kind of vendetta against people you don’t even know get out of hand, didn’t you?”
Barry twisted and, picking up the first aid kit, lobbed it at James, who caught it. He rolled out the bandage, trying to wrap it around his shot knee that was bleeding all down his pants leg. As he worked he said, “Charles took June from me.”
“What?!” both Barry and Charles said in unison. Charles circled the sofa and stood before them in his loose-fitting suit and haggard face. “What did you say about June?”
James had the knee wrapped. He tore the bandage, grabbed the tape, and wrapped that all around the bandage to hold it. “I knew June in college, same as you did. Neither of you know it, but I went to UT, too. She was in my political science class. I asked her out. We went on one date and I fell hard. But when I called to ask her out again, she said she had a boyfriend. I was shot down.” He giggled nervously. “I followed her a while and found out it was you. I know the day you proposed and saw the engagement ring the next day. I called her again and protested. I tried to make up some stories about you and your newspaper articles and how her future was going to be abysmal if she stuck with you. I told her my father was a senator and I was going to be one, too. I told her I loved her ...” His voice trailed off.
Charles stood with his mouth hanging open. He hadn’t even remembered this man back in college at the University of Texas. June had never mentioned she’d dated him.
“Why didn’t she recognize your name?” he asked. “Even with just one date, she wouldn’t forget such a distinctive name as Kaden.”
The senator closed his eyes as if bone weary. “Kaden’s my middle name and June never heard it. Back in school I was Marshall. She called me Marsh.”
Now it all made sense, but a warped sense, the sense that crazy people made when they told stories about the reasons behind their actions.
“He’s crazy as a loon,” Charles said finally.
“Crazier,” Barry said. “Marshall Kaden James is one obsessed man, aren’t you?”
“All this over a lost love from years ago. Crazy.” Charles sat down in a chair across from them. “And now you’ve ruined my life, Kaden. My career is over. I’ll end up a man on the run. All because of you and this insane jealousy you’ve carried for more than twenty years.”
“Dolly never loved me.” Kaden lifted his chin as if his statement cleared it all up for the other two men.
“Dolly? Your wife, Margaret?” Barry asked.
“Yes, Margaret. I’ve always called her Dolly. She looks a little like June, but she really never cared for me at all. Nothing I’ve done in our marriage to please her ever does. She gave me two children only
because I pleaded. She’s a cold bitch and I’m stuck with her. I should have had ... someone better ... I wanted ...”
“We have to get the hell out of here,” Charles said, standing quickly and looking around in a panic. “God, I don’t know what’s happened or how we’re going to get out of this.”
Barry ignored him. He turned on the sofa until he was facing James. “You’re going to come after us, aren’t you? You’re going to press charges for assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, kidnapping, and probably a dozen other charges before you get through with us. We can run, but you’re going to make sure we never come back, aren’t you? You’re one conniving, vengeful son of a bitch, aren’t you, senator?”
“Stop calling me that!”
“Come on, Barry, we have to leave. What are we going to do about the Secret Service guys?”
Barry turned his head to look at his friend. “They’re probably in bed by now. We’ll go out the front. I have a car parked for us not far away under cover. Don’t worry. Go on out and wait for me. I’ll be right there.”
Charles looked from Barry to Kaden James and back again. “You’re not going to do anything ... bad ... are you?”
“Not unless I have to. Now get outside.”
Once the front door had closed, James tried to pull to his feet. There was a wildness in his eyes that proved he knew how much trouble he was in. Barry pushed him in the chest, back against the sofa. “You’ll hunt relentlessly until you find the three of us, won’t you? You’ll make it your life’s goal, the way you made a way, finally, to get hold of Charles to punish him for taking your girl. You’re about a buggy cart shy of a load of bricks, you know that? You certainly shouldn’t be a senator. It’s you who needs locking up.”
“Fuck you, Barry. I’ll do anything I have to do to make your life hell. And, yeah, I’ll hound you, I’ll find June and I’ll ...”
“Stop right there.”
“Fuck you.”
“Say that again.”
“Fuh ...”
The first shot took James in the center of his startled eyes. The second shot entered his right forehead, and the third went in just above his earlobe.
James slumped onto the sofa sideways. Barry checked his wrist for a pulse, found none, and sighed deeply. He hadn’t really wanted to kill anyone. He had come here to force this man to release his innocent friend he had loved as a brother since childhood. He always knew it might end this way, but he hadn’t really believed it. James was a coward, and it could have ended with his kneecaps had it not been for his bald confession about June. Any man who wielded the kind of power that Senator James enjoyed and who used it to imprison and torture an enemy who didn’t even know he was an enemy, was a man surely out of his mind.
Barry looked down at the gun in his hands. He wore latex gloves. He’d take them off once he was outside, not that it really mattered. They knew Charles had been brought here and there was no way Charles had a gun on him. They knew from the copious notes and folders that James kept that Barry was his closest friend. One plus one, and then there were two of them. No one would probably ever know that the whole thing involved June, too.
June. She was waiting for them in the car in the woods. He hadn’t told Charles that. He wanted to surprise him. In the car pocket of the rental, he had three tickets for the Bahamas. From the Bahamas he would buy three tickets for Brazil. From Brazil he would buy three more tickets for Lithuania. They needed to disappear, and take new identities. He just hated leaving his family ranch behind. It had been a nice, quiet place for an old bachelor.
Outside he found Charles shivering in the cold night air. He took him by the arm after stripping off the gloves, and bending over in the shadows, they made their way into a copse.
Twenty minutes later they came out on a lumber service road and saw the car. June opened the door and stepped out into a circle of light thrown by the car’s interior lights.
Charles hurried toward her, and their embrace and June’s happy cry of joy was all that Barry had to see to know what he had done was necessary.
After all, these were his friends. For his friends, he was ready to employ the Second Amendment Solution any day. He would do it again if he had to. He believed in the law and the law gave him that right. It was the one right they hadn’t taken away from him yet. Too bad he was going to leave his country with only a faint hope there were no other maniacs running it like Senator James. But a faint hope was better than no hope at all.
“Get in the car, we have to boogie,” he said to the couple when he neared them. “We’ve got some traveling to do.”
A hoot owl called after the car as it left the wilderness. It was otherwise a quiet, uneventful night in New Hampshire and Thanksgiving was only a day away.
KILLER
BY KEN BRUEN
He’d written
Fail
Fail better
Fail happiest.
So ...
So they sent him to the school’s social worker.
A very earnest twenty and change young lady.
Gung ho and ready to save the world.
Especially its youth.
She had a photo of Bono on her desk.
Tells you all you need to know, really.
She felt she had buckets of empathy.
Buckets of something.
The young man standing before her was dressed in a long black coat.
She knew
“Duster”
They called them.
She’d read her Columbine stuff.
And he had the requisite scowl.
She checked all her notes.
Combat pants—yes.
Attitude—oh Lord, yes.
Anger—he exuded it.
And she just knew, intuitively she supposed, that he listened to that death metal music.
Wrong.
He loved country and western.
But what the hell, she was way ahead already, knew exactly how to handle him, said,
“John, please be seated.”
See?
No chastisement. In fact, a friendly overture, and the use of his first name. She’d learned the value of that in her first year.
He sat, still scowling.
She was thrilled.
Just like her lecturers had promised.
She took a moment to read his essay, the above three lines on failure he’d submitted.
Said,
“John, I’ve amended your essay.”
Paused.
Let that hover for a moment, let him know who was the boss, and then moved the paper across the desk.
Asked,
“How does it read now?”
She’d written
Feel
Feel better
Feel happiest.
She’s shown it to her roommate, perhaps breaking protocol a tad, but she was so pleased with it, she had to ...
To share.
Loved it.
John read it slowly, and then in a very quiet voice, asked,
“May I borrow your pen?”
Took her a little off guard. But she knew, roll with the flow, feel the bonding.
She took out her prized Cross fountain pen, a graduation present from her proud dad.
Handed it over.
John looked at the pen and then he smiled.
It unnerved her a little, but she regrouped. Possibly she should have kept it less personal.
But he was writing, so all was good.
She wasn’t entirely sure, her short-range vision had been giving her some trouble, but it looked like he was wearing ...
Latex gloves?
Maybe it was a new fashion trend, and she did try to keep right up there with the young uns.
He finished, pushed the paper back to her.
She thought, if he has dotted his I’s with little hearts, she would just die!
She picked up the paper, read
Kill
Kill better
&n
bsp; Kill happiest.
She looked up.
Into the barrel of a small-caliber handgun.
He said,
“You’re right, I do feel better.”
Shot her precisely between her two astonished eyes.
Debated on a second shot—but, no, she was done.
He thought,
“That’s all she wrote.”
He stood up, debated only briefly if he should return the pen, thought,
“Naw, what would they do? Bury it with her?”
He knew they’d never buy this as a suicide. But, what the hell, worth a shot.
Nearly laughed at his outrageous pun.
Took her right hand, folded the fingers around the still-smoking gun, pushed her head back, and then ruffled her hair, said,
“Good talking with yah.”
Any cop worth his badge would see it as a staged scene. But, c’mon, it was Irish cops, get real.
He carefully cut the note to leave her writing, and left that on her desk.
Nice ambiguous note.
He put the remainder in his coat. He didn’t need to worry about prints, the gloves took care of that.
He moved round her appointment book and there he was, scheduled to meet her at noon.
High noon for her, as it turned out. He took his razor, the old-style model, and expertly removed the whole page.
He’d been very careful not to be seen entering her office or even the school.
Now, he put on the baseball cap, the dark shades, and took a deep breath.
It was a rush all in itself.
He closed her door gently and put the
DO NOT DISTURB sign
On the glass front, which was about as deep and transparent as she thought she’d been.
She probably needed some down time.
He moved unhurriedly down the corridor and his timing was ace—everyone in class and not a soul around.
Out on the street, he moved briskly toward center town, maybe pick up some sounds.
He could, of course, download any shit he liked, but shoplifting was a minor riff and he liked to keep his
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