Too Young to Die

by Michael Anderle

  The only slight problem with the allegation was that he had never had an affair. He was a good-looking man and he’d had offers, but Mary was the love of his life. She still made his heart race the way she had when they were sixteen.

  That said, the absolute, blatant threat of the photos made him flush hot and cold. He pushed them across the desk so hard that they fluttered to the floor.

  “This never happened,” he said tightly.

  The man smiled at him, almost pitying. “And we both know that doesn’t matter,” he said simply.

  “What?”

  “Senator Williams…” Metcalfe picked the papers up and put them in his briefcase. “Let us be honest with one another. What do voters like more than anything?”

  “To see their interests represented,” Tad snapped.

  “Scandal,” the man corrected him simply. He shook his head. “What do you think will happen if we put those photos out?”

  “I’ll make a statement to the press explaining what’s going on,” he told him. Mary wouldn’t believe it. Surely she wouldn’t believe it—

  “You might even prove it,” his visitor agreed.

  Tad hesitated.

  “But by the time you do that,” the lobbyist told him, “your career will already be over. Have you ever seen a town hall meeting with voters who hate their representative? Yelling, throwing things? Can you imagine it, Senator? Can you imagine the speeches your opponents will give? It’s too perfect, isn’t it? The senator who couldn’t be bought paying off his mistress.”

  He saw red. “Why even pretend to play nice?” He almost growled the words. “Why the phone calls and why the fake concern for Justin?” The fact that Metcalfe had opened the door by pretending to care made him want to punch the man in the face.

  “I am concerned for Justin,” the lobbyist said. “As is Mr. White. We’re not monsters, Senator Williams.” He shook his head. “And as for why we began with a pleasant phone call—I much prefer it when things are pleasant. Don’t you?”

  Tad could hardly see straight he was so angry. The doubletalk was beyond infuriating. “If you like things to be pleasant, why did you have those photos in your briefcase?”

  Metcalfe stood and buttoned his suit jacket. Now he did look pitying, and Tad hated him for that. “You’re not the first senator to promise they wouldn’t take bribes,” he said. “Didn’t you ever wonder why the others all left their morals behind in the end?” He went to the door and looked back. “Think about it, Senator,” he said, and in the next moment, he was gone.

  He stood and began to pace. All the urges he had right now—to drag Metcalfe into the back alley and teach him a lesson, to hold a press conference, to flip his desk over—were the opposite of productive. If he intended to do this, if he wanted to stay the course, he needed to be as cold and calculating as they were.

  It was imperative that he be as smart as they were. Because, like an idiot, he’d expected that not taking bribes would be as simple as saying no to them. He hadn’t expected blackmail, much less blackmail over something he’d never done.

  Before all this began, he would have said that to cave now would be senseless. If he caved, it would be to betray everything he stood for.

  But when he’d promised that, Justin’s life and his career hadn’t hung in the balance. If Metcalfe made good on his threats—and he had no doubt that he would—he could lose everything and his blackmailer would never suffer any consequences. Too late, he realized he should have held onto the forged images and perhaps approached law enforcement. Unfortunately, he’d been too surprised and perhaps naïve to think of that.

  There had to be an answer. But what in the name of God was it?

  Chapter Eight

  Dru Metcalfe made sure to keep moving as he hurried out into the sunlight and got into his car. For one thing, he had a busy schedule. Senator Williams might be the only US senator in the city right now, but there were dozens more California senators taking vacations and visiting their home districts nearby. It was going to be a busy day.

  That wasn’t why he kept moving, though. He’d learned long ago that after a meeting like this, after turning the screws that would bring someone around to his side, he preferred to not think about it.

  Dwelling on it all usually meant he didn’t like the tone of his thoughts. He remembered things like his law school days and the pro bono clinics he served in before he graduated. It brought back the times when he’d held out for his first job, shared a studio apartment, and waited tables to make ends meet.

  He also remembered the dinner where he’d told his friends about his new job—the one with the big salary and the annual bonus. A vivid recollection always surfaced of how he’d told them that he would take them all out for dinner at Christmas, how they would take the big corporations down from the outside and he would help them from the inside.

  Inevitably, he remembered the first case he hadn’t helped on.

  A couple of years later, he’d moved away from New York. It was easy to not move in the same circles when one group watched for sales on toilet paper and the other drank a thousand-dollar bottle of champagne. Still, he hadn’t liked the possibility of running into them all again.

  It had been ten years since then, and he’d learned very well how to quiet the little voice in his head that told him this wasn’t what he’d wanted to do with his life.

  The thing was that it didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Dru had told himself he would change the world, but that wasn’t something anyone could do. The world was too big. You could make a ripple but the ripple died away soon after. Even if you thrashed around with all your strength, you would still go under and leave no trace. People like Raymond White and IterNext always won in the end.

  So why not get some of the profits for himself?

  He didn’t even blame them. People went stupid when money was involved. Ethics went out of the window. It was simply human nature. There was no point in trying to rise above it when so many people didn’t care. In the end, someone’s personal interest would always trump a vague idea of doing the right thing.

  No, the people he blamed—the ones he hated—were the ones like Tad Williams who told him to go to hell. Dru hated them for yelling at him as if he didn’t know what went through their heads. He hated them for being stupid and not seeing the world as it really was, hated them when they refused his offers, and hated them even more when they broke.

  But at least once they broke he never had to see them again.

  He didn’t think about Tad Williams any more while he drove. There was no point, after all. Dru had been the one to bring the news of Justin Williams’s car crash to Raymond White. He’d known what that meant and he hadn’t lied when he told Tad that it didn’t matter which company he backed.

  Nothing mattered, not in the end. What mattered was getting what you could while you were here.

  Amber and Nick had gone out to get dinner. Well, get dinner and find DuBois, who wandered around outside like a lunatic.

  And they’d whisper about him. Jacob knew that. He knew they thought he was too caught up in this and was disregarding the risks. That was the problem with being reasonably intelligent—you knew what other people thought and you knew they were right.

  You merely couldn’t stop yourself.

  His grandmother had looked peaceful in the ICU. She hadn’t been in pain and he knew that was a blessing. He shouldn’t be angry about it.

  But she looked like she was asleep—like she was already dead, and she shouldn’t be. She should be alive and at home while they all tried to make her apple pie and she scolded them for adding too much cinnamon and stealing morsels of the dough. She’d slipped away because there was nothing to call her back and no way to get through to her.

  Jacob whirled away from the pod. He wanted to punch something and it couldn’t be this. This was the pod Amber had spent all day tinkering with. It didn’t matter that she doubted it would work or that she was afraid they would be offed by
Big Pharma. She was doing this because it was important to all of them that their work meant something—and because it was important to him.

  In the same way, Nick had given Tad Williams the real facts rather than the inflated ones. They would do this so that PIVOT could succeed and Jacob could see a family get someone back.

  He went to his desk, hesitated, and typed JUSTIN WILLIAMS TAD WILLIAMS into the search bar. It wasn’t long before he’d found a trail through social media. The Facebook page had been locked down and scrubbed carefully—Tad Williams had clearly found a PR firm while running for congress—a LinkedIn page looked like someone else had set it up for him, but a YouTube channel might provide insight.

  Jacob hesitated before he opened the page. The autoplay had a run-through of a game he hadn’t seen in ages and before he knew it, he leaned back in his chair, laughed at some of the jokes, and even groaned in mock-horror when the character ran afoul of a cleverly-placed trap.

  Movement behind him drew his attention and someone placed an open container of lo mein in his hand. Chopsticks already protruded from it. Amber and Nick drew stools up behind him, watched, and laughed with him. They ate as they watched princesses get saved, Master Chief dodge a particularly worrisome section of the final level in Halo 3, and some of the funnier bloopers from Portal.

  When the food was gone and the videos were finished, Jacob leaned back in his chair and smiled at his friends.

  “It’s good to unwind,” Nick told him. “None of us have done that enough lately.”

  “Honestly, if it had to be something, I thought we’d have found you watching Starcraft tournaments.” Amber popped the last piece of chicken into her mouth and handed her takeout container to Nick, who was collecting them to throw away. “What made you decide to watch vintage game play-throughs?”

  “First of all,” Jacob told her, “if Halo 3 is vintage, we’re ancient.”

  She laughed and smoothed the hair along the side of her head. “See these grays, friend? We’re ancient. Next?”

  “Don’t remind me,” he grumbled. “Second…” He looked at the screen. Justin’s face was frozen in an exaggerated expression and inclined to point to where the subscribe button was. “Do you know who that is?”

  “No.” Nick shook his head and peered at the screen. “Ah, yes, MorePylons3000. I’d know that name anywhere.”

  Jacob lobbed a wadded-up napkin at him. “This is Justin Williams.”

  His friends stopped dead.

  He looked at the screen again. While he had listened to the jokes and the awkward attempts at gaining subscribers, flashes of something had continually nagged at his consciousness.

  Flashes of Tad Williams, he realized. Justin could be just as direct and to the point when he had a focus.

  “This is why we’re doing what we’re doing,” he said quietly.

  No one argued with him this time. Amber squeezed his shoulder. “Nick told me what you said to the senator,” she said. “I think you helped him see this was more than a sales pitch. I think you helped him see that his son would be in good hands with you—because you care. You freaking care. And that’s more than those fuckers in the lobbyist firms can say.”

  Mary listened to the story of Dru Metcalfe and the forged papers in silence before she stretched her hand out to wrap her fingers around Tad’s. When he looked at her, there was nothing in her face but concern.

  “Well?” He laughed but it didn’t quite sound like a laugh.

  “Well, what?” She tilted her head to the side. It was the same gesture Justin used sometimes, and his heart constricted.

  “Well…” He closed his eyes and exhaled slowly. “What do I do?”

  “The same thing you planned to do,” she said without missing a beat. Behind her, Justin’s heart rate monitor beeped regularly. The bruises on his face had turned all different colors now. He wished he could joke with his son about that.

  “How can I fight this?” he asked hopelessly. “How can I fight someone who can turn anything I do—anything I don’t even do—into a scandal?”

  Mary laughed then. It was a sound he hadn’t heard since the night they came to the hospital. “If you can’t win, why worry about losing?”

  Tad stared at her.

  “If you’d been born a woman,” she told him, “you’d have known much earlier in life that there’s no winning some fights. It doesn’t matter what you do sometimes, you’ll still somehow lose. Either you’re loose, or you’re a prude, or you’re a bitch…” She squeezed his hand and shrugged. “When there’s no winning, it hurts. It isn’t fair. But it’s freedom, too. It means you can do whatever you want to do. Look at it this way, Tad—one way, you give up everything that makes you respect yourself but the other way, someone lobs a scandal at you.”

  “I won’t get to do anything I wanted to do in Congress if I am tossed out after one term,” he murmured.

  “You won’t get to if you’re a bought and paid-for puppet, either,” Mary said sharply. “Anything else?”

  “Justin,” Tad whispered. “Justin needs us.”

  “Exactly.” She leaned closer, her gaze locked on his. “Justin needs us. If we can’t win, then we do what keeps Justin safest—and you know what I think? I think that means keeping him away from the people who are trying to blackmail you.”

  Tad leaned his head against hers for a moment. “What did I ever do to deserve you?”

  Mary tilted her face up for a kiss. “Like I’ve never leaned on you?”

  He smiled and kissed her again. Calm now, he held her close for a moment before he pulled his phone out. “Okay. I’ll make the call.”

  Chapter Nine

  Mary stood to the side and clutched Tad’s hand while the nursing team worked.

  Dr. Goli had been called in and had appeared with dark circles under her eyes but the same air of quiet competence. She was in constant, calm motion and stopped occasionally to touch a nurse on the shoulder and murmur a quiet suggestion before she moved on to the next.

  Dr. DuBois, the doctor the PIVOT team had brought, couldn’t be more different. His lab coat, although clean, looked as if it had been shoved in the bottom of his suitcase without being folded. He rocked rhythmically from his heels to the balls of his feet as he read Justin’s file. Periodically, he would look vaguely at all the monitors before he refocused on the records again.

  He didn’t look nervous at all.

  Mary couldn’t decide which she preferred—nervousness or a lack of it. Dr. Goli and her team were clearly worried about this transfer. They took extra care as they replaced each monitor with one of those the PIVOT team had brought and made sure the power sources for each was sufficient. They ran a series of final checks that seemed interminable.

  Part of her wondered if they took so long to give her and Tad time to call it all off.

  After a final flurry of activity, Dr. Goli stepped back and took Dr. DuBois’ arm to draw him gently out of the way. He complied without looking up from the charts as if he were used to people moving him around this way.

  He murmured questions to his counterpart as the nursing team swung the hospital bed into motion. Dr. Goli had flatly refused to transfer Justin from one bed to another, which had necessitated a few tense calls while Tad had attempted to find a private ambulance service that would allow a full-sized hospital bed inside it.

  Mary squeezed his hand as they began to walk behind the bed. While she knew how heavily this had weighed on him, she also knew how much he had borne alone for her sake. She could still remember him as he’d been at eighteen—as brilliant and handsome as he was now but with a wild streak, still more concerned with day to day happiness than with the long term or anyone else.

  While she still wasn’t sure what had changed in him that year, he had truly become the man she had only seen glimpses of up until then. It was why she didn’t worry about Justin. Each person needed their purpose. Tad had found his in leadership and she had found hers in teaching. Both had found new depths of t
hemselves in parenthood.

  Justin simply needed to find what in him could change the world.

  Which meant he had to survive this. Mary knew that Tad had leaned on her as much as she had leaned on him during this time, but the truth was that her confidence was built on nothing more than necessity. Justin had to survive. The alternative was unthinkable. The applicable rules and theories of science and medicine didn’t matter.

  He had to survive. If he didn’t…she didn’t want to think of what would happen so she didn’t think of it.

  They traveled down the hallways in silence. The team was always careful to take corners extremely slowly to make sure that no lateral pressure shifted Justin’s head. They had added foam blocks to stabilize him but from their extreme care, it was clear how fragile his condition still was.

  As if that wasn’t enough, the lights in the hallway showed all too clearly how bad the crash had been. There was little of him that wasn’t bruised at this point, from brilliant reds and purples to a sickly yellow-green at the edges. His lips were dry and a small split was visible, no longer bleeding, thank goodness.

  Mary thought of the girl who’d driven him and who was already home with her parents and the anger rose again until she thought she would choke on it. She set it aside but did not forget it. She couldn’t.

  The private ambulance waiting outside was so nondescript that she might have taken it for an armored car if she didn’t know better. The team of privately contracted paramedics inside exited and changed places with the hospital nursing staff. They worked efficiently as well but she saw their eyes linger on Justin and knew from their subdued demeanor that they rarely saw anything this bad.

  When the bed was loaded—with more jerks and bangs than she had hoped for—she realized that the hospital team was gone. She looked around and shivered in the night air as she and Tad grasped each other’s hands so hard that they ached.