The Running Mate (A Jack Houston St. Clair Thriller)

by Andrew Delaplaine

  “Then there was Nancy Reagan.”

  “Will you stop it right now? Nancy Reagan?”

  “Well, I like red,” said Bill.

  “I’ll give you Barbara Bush—she was normal. But not Nancy. That woman was too much.”

  “Maybe after you’re elected we could do a drag show in the East Room—you know, all the first ladies in drag.”

  “Who’d play Bianca?” asked Tim.

  There was a saucy pause as they looked at each other and smiled, then both said at once:

  “Bianca!”

  They both broke down laughing. After a minute, they began walking down the beach again.

  “You know, there’s been something on my mind—it’s about Bianca.”

  “What?”

  “She’s sleeping with Phil Thuris.”

  Bill stopped in his tracks. His jaw fell open.

  “Nah!”

  “I think so. I’m pretty sure.”

  “How do you know?”

  “A couple times in the wrong hall or the wrong elevator at the wrong time of night—things like that.”

  “That’s it?”

  “You know that special rum Phil’s always badgering the staff to have in his hotel room wherever we are?”

  “Yeah, it’s the Appleton 21—a pretty rare rum. I give it to him for Christmas every year, a case of it.”

  “Well, it’s not available except in the biggest cities.”

  “So?”

  “I noticed whenever I’m in Bianca’s room she always keeps a bottle of it on the bar they set up for her.”

  “And this proves what exactly?”

  “I started dropping off routine paperwork at Bianca’s before she’s got some private time supposedly alone, and then I check back as soon as she’s out and about, and after too many of these occasions, there’s been a noticeable dent in the Appleton’s.”

  “No kidding.”

  “More than once, I’ve been able to get into her room right after she left. Nobody’s there, the maid lets me in, I tell ’em I’ve got some paperwork in there, whatever. I get in.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Every sign of sex in the bed. And the Appleton’s down a few inches.”

  “Do they know you know?”

  “No.”

  “They wouldn’t have a clue about us, would they?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “We’re supposed to be together odd hours—they’re not.”

  Bill nodded, put his arm around Tim’s shoulder and they continued walking down the windswept beach as gulls dipped and swooped upward all around them, squawk-squawk-squawking incessantly.

  “What should we do about it?”

  “I dunno,” said Tim.

  “What can we do about it?”

  “I dunno.”

  “God,” said Bill, “if the media ever—”

  Tim stopped walking and looked at Bill.

  “Don’t go there.”

  Bill nodded.

  “Yeah. Jesus. This is all fucked up.”

  Tim didn’t say anything, but his look told Bill that Tim agreed with him completely.

  This is all fucked up.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 12

  Dumaine’s high ranking as second behind Mowbray triggered the assignment of a Secret Service detail to his entire campaign. The day Agent Rodriguez arrived with his first unit didn’t seem to bother Dumaine at all.

  The full effect of the change in his life only became apparent when he and Tim suited up for their morning run and six heavily armed agents were there (in running shorts) to accompany them, three in front and three bringing up the rear.

  “Agent Rodriguez?”

  “Yes, Senator?”

  “I really appreciate what you’re here doing for me, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to get used to it.”

  “I understand, Senator,” smiled Rodriguez. “It takes a little getting used to.”

  “I just want you guys to give me as much space as you can, okay?”

  “Of course, Senator. We’re just here to help.”

  And off they went.

  * * *

  A couple of weeks later, after making love late in the afternoon, Bianca and Phil were getting dressed in a suite in the Ritz Carlton Hotel on New York’s Central Park South.

  “You really think there’s something going on there?”

  “It’s my gut feeling, Bianca,” said Phil, tightening his belt.

  “They’re not being too obvious, are they?”

  “Well, not so much that you noticed,” he said with a raised eyebrow.

  “Thanks,” she said dismissively.

  “Well, something’s going on, but I’m not sure what, exactly,” said Phil.

  “If we aren’t sure, then nobody else will be either.”

  Phil looked at her, again with the raised eyebrow.

  “Yet.”

  After a slight pause while Bianca absorbed all this, she said:

  “Make me a drink, will you?”

  Thuris went to the bar set up on a writing table in the corner and poured her a Ketel One on the rocks. He saw a little bowl of lime wedges and ignored them (she didn’t like lime in her vodka). He looked out the window at a rainstorm barreling down Central Park from the north, making its way into Midtown.

  He poured himself a stiff Appleton 21 on the rocks and walked over and handed the glass of vodka to Bianca.

  “What should we do?” she asked, a little more hesitant than Phil was used to seeing her.

  “Nothing. Yet.”

  “What’s that mean?” she said, downing half the drink in one swallow.

  “I don’t know, God damn it! It means I haven’t had time to work my way through it. I don’t have a plan. I need time.”

  She took another long swallow of the Ketel One and then reached over to him, rubbing his back, her features softening.

  “At least we’re still together.” A pause. Then: “You don’t think they’re actually sleeping together, do you?”

  He turned on her, a little viciously.

  “How the fuck do I know?”

  “Sorry,” she said, recoiling slightly, now taking just a dainty little sip from her drink.

  “Let’s just say we know they’re very close.”

  “How close?”

  He gave her a hard stare.

  “Too close. That’s all—too close.”

  “Then that’s too close for comfort.”

  Phil chuckled.

  “That was witty.”

  She shrugged.

  “I don’t know what to say. I’m just—surprised—after all I’ve been through, you’d think I wouldn’t have that ability—to be surprised. But this—this—surprises me. Bill was always so masculine and—”

  “Well—”

  “I must say, it drives me a little crazy to think of them, you know? Together.”

  “Bill’s only forty-two. It’s only natural he’d be sleeping with someone. When was the last time you went to bed with him?”

  “A couple of years. Ever since—”

  “I know,” he waved her away from him, thinking of that first night they’d fallen into each other’s arms.

  “You’d think he’d be scared, worried about everybody looking over his shoulder.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m sure he is scared.”

  “I mean,” she went on, “a man in his position, with the eyes of the world on him.” She shook her head sadly. “There’s so little time alone.”

  “We manage,” he said with a smile, coming over to kiss her on the cheek.

  “Yeah, we manage,” Bianca nodded with a smile, turning away from him to drain the glass of Ketel One.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 13

  Jack Houston St. Clair, followed by his golfing partner, Anthony Verges, had just slipped through the French doors on the patio giving onto the private golf course on St. Clair Island in Miami when his
housekeeper, gave him a yell.

  “Es usted, Mr. Jack?” she called out.

  “No. It’s Fidel Castro and I’m here to take you back to face justice in your country.”

  Jack took a deep breath of the cool air inside his house as he closed the French doors behind him and wiped the sweat from his brow with a short towel slung over his shoulder. He went from the patio directly to a wet bar set up in the corner of his huge Game Room and grabbed two bottles of spring water, tossing one to Verges and then immediately emptying the other 12 ounce bottle in one gulp. In high summer in Miami, it got pretty damn muggy out there on the links.

  His golfing partner was a former Director of the CIA in the Obama Administration and considered to be the odds-on favorite to join the new Cabinet after the next election, assuming the Democrats (either Mowbray or Dumaine, whoever got the nomination) were able to unseat Jack’s father in the fall elections.

  And though he and his dad loved each other very much, the reality was that they seldom agreed on policy matters since Jack was such a staunch Democrat.

  “What is it, Emilia,” Jack yelled back.

  Emilia Acevedo came waddling—she was so fat she waddled, she didn’t walk—into the Game Room carrying a sterling salver bearing two large mojitos in sweating silver cups.

  “Here is your mojito, Mr. Jack. I know you need a nice cold mojito after playing golf in that awful sun.” Emilia was a large woman, all big butt and enormous pendulous breasts that sagged down to her waistline. Her hair (pitch black, the unfortunate victim of a cheap dye job) was pulled back in an austere bun, tied with a red ribbon. She wore a large one-piece light blue muumuu type dress, but it wasn’t Hawaiian in any sense of the word. The concept of “tent” seemed more appropriate, Jack had often thought when describing Emilia’s wardrobe.

  “It won’t be sunny for long, Emilia,” said Verges, looking over his shoulder at an approaching thunderhead.

  Emilia waddled over to Verges and offered him a mojito, and then brought the salver over to Jack, who took his with a nod. “I make a pretty good mojito, Tony, but nobody makes ’em like Emilia.”

  “El Señor Verges, he make me blush.”

  Just then Jack’s butler, Gargrave, came into the room.

  “Ah, Gargrave,” said Jack. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Upstairs securing the windows in your bedroom, sir,” he said in a slightly pained, clipped manner he affected. “You left two of them ajar last night… again.”

  “I love to sleep with the windows open, Tony. Even in this heat. Can’t stand air conditioning day in and day out. Never could.”

  “Third time this week,” Gargrave mumbled, moving behind the bar. “Just like his mother.”

  “I think, Emilia, that you ought to make two more of these. You up for another, Tony?”

  “Damn straight I am,” said Verges, smacking his lips. “These are good!”

  “I’ll be happy to prepare the cocktails, Mr. St. Clair,” offered Gargrave, a little put out. “No need to bother Señora Aceveda.”

  “But she does a very good job of it, Gargrave. Mojitos are in her blood, aren’t they, Emilia?”

  Emilia tittered.

  “Si, I grow up making mojitos for my father, my brothers.”

  “A lot of drunken Latin lushes,” Gargrave muttered so low you couldn’t make out what he was saying.

  “What was that, Gargrave?”

  “Oh, nothing, sir. Very good. Señora Aceveda will make the mojitos… at the service bar in the kitchen,” Gargrave commanded.

  “I always make my drinks in the service bar in the kitchen, Mr. Garrrr-grave. I would not want to ruin the perfect order you have at the bar here in the Game Room,” she said in a huff. She wagged her hand at Gargrave. “You can go back to cleaning your big guns, mister,” she sniffed.

  Jack and Verges exchanged amused glances as Emilia turned around and began the arduous process of waddling back to the kitchen when she suddenly remembered something and turned around, or hove to, as Jack’s dad would have said in nautical terms.

  “Ay, Dios mio, I forget everything. Mr. Jack, you remember that sweet young man, Carlos Rodriguez, the one you help so much when his family was in trouble?”

  “Of course I remember Carlos.”

  She turned to Verges.

  “Carlito, he’s a muy importante Secret Service agent now. Muy importante.”

  “What about Carlos, Emma?”

  “Ay, Dios mio, I forget, I think I have the Alzheimer’s. He called you. Asked you to call him back when you have a chance.”

  “He’s the agent in charge of the unit detailed to the Dumaine campaign,” Jack explained to Verges. “An old family friend.”

  “Si, he said he was down for the big convention, and that he need to talk to you,” said Emilia, her voice fading as she disappeared down a corridor on the far side of the room that led to the cavernous kitchen on the other side of the house.

  “I’m sure there’s a message on my cell.”

  Verges had turned to look outside through the French doors. Far beyond the patio, across Biscayne Bay, you could see a high thunderhead forming, a strong wind bearing it east across the Everglades toward St. Clair Island, a small island community of thirty-eight houses and an eighteen-hole golf course, connected to Miami Beach by a narrow bridge.

  Jack and Verges gravitated to the large mahogany bar along the south wall where Gargrave was cleaning a long rocket launcher.

  “And what’s this weapon, Gargrave?” asked Verges. “Looks like an old rocket launcher.”

  “It’s exactly that, Mr. Verges.”

  “This is the RPG-7D3,” said Jack. “An older model.”

  “Used by the Russians,” added Gargrave.

  “Launches rocket propelled grenades.”

  Verges shook his head.

  “When I first moved onto the island, Jack, I couldn’t believe the weaponry you showed me in your Gun Room,” he said.

  “I might be an ex-SEAL, Tony, but I still have my fascination with weapons.”

  “And about three hundred of them in the back of this house. You have to have permits for all of them?”

  “Everything in there’s legal. Right, Gargrave?”

  Gargrave merely smiled a cryptic smile and kept wiping the oil off the RPG-7D3.

  “Looks like we’re in for a little storm,” said Verges, walking toward the doors and opening them. He went out sat in a Nantucket chair under the wide hunter green awning that faced the golf course side of Jack’s house. Verges didn’t quite sit in the chair; he reclined in, lowering his flat ass and big belly back into the chair as if he were easing himself into the back seat of a London cab. His big belly protruded, making him look a little like Sidney Greenstreet in Casablanca, without the fez. But make no mistake about it, Tony Verges could drive a golf ball three-quarters down the fairway once he got all that poundage behind his swing. And he was as tough as a prizefighter when it came to political battles fought and won.

  Jack followed him out and closed the door behind him, sitting in the chair next to Verges. The oncoming thunderstorm had pushed the air ahead of itself, cooling everything down dramatically. The wind was up. There was a sense of dread, violence and excitement in the air that always preceded a Florida thunderstorm. This one was no different.

  The rain started out with heavy pitter-pats on the awning that increased in frequency every thirty seconds. Emilia brought out the second round of mojitos, took one look at the fearsome sky, said “Oh, Dios mio!” and disappeared back into the bowels of the house.

  “How did you ever meet Gargrave?”

  “He was with the SBS.”

  “Ah,” Verges said. He knew SBS meant Special Boat Service, the UK version of the Navy SEALs.

  “The Black Group, to be precise,” Jack added.

  “Whoa,” Verges said quietly. “Impressive.”

  The Black Group was an elite section of M Squadron in the SBS, responsible for anti-terrorism and ship-boarding operat
ions.

  Verges and Jack looked out across the golf course where they could see the Bay and Jack’s dad’s estate, Flagler Hall, just a couple of hundred feet away, across the 16th Hole.

  “That’s quite some house your dad has, Jack,” said

  Verges.

  “Yeah. But it’s not a house. It’s a palace. A museum.”