Cape Disappointment (26 page)

As I began to edge closer, we found ourselves on the skirt of a country road, speeding along like two men in a footrace. When he felt me converging on him, he began to duck and weave, but I grabbed his collar and, still running, slung him around and slammed him into the ground. As it happened there were no motorists to observe my shenanigans. He hadn't been hurt too badly, so as he began to get back up, I slammed him into the embankment alongside the road. This time he came up fumbling for the pistol in his belt. I knocked it out of his hands and hit him across the jaw with my left fist. He went down like a sack of sand while I picked up the gun.

Somewhere along the way, probably at the beginning, we'd outrun Snake.

“Why'd you bail out like that?” I asked.

“Why'd you chase me?” Bert was still trying to catch his breath.

“You're the one who set off the bomb.”

“Because you were chasing me.”

“All I did was step into the trailer.”

When he stood up, I pushed him a couple of feet backward, watched him stumble and fall. After putting the cartridges into my trousers pocket, I slipped the empty pistol into my waistband. Bert was bleeding from the nose. His cheek had a laceration.

“Why did you warn me not to let Kathy travel with Sheffield?”

“I didn't.” When I started toward him, he added, “I just wanted to stop you two from squabbling, you know? You were working for one candidate, and she was working for the other. I was trying to put things right.”

“You knew something was going to happen.”

“Maybe I had a
feeling.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It's going to sound certifiable.”

I stepped closer.

“I know six ways to kill you without moving from this spot,” he added, forming his upper limbs into a martial arts pose I didn't recognize. Before he could finish the pose, I knocked him on his ass with a right cross. He was light, and the blow lifted him off his feet. From the ground, he tried to do a leg sweep, but all he did was kick me in the knee. He might have been a martial artist at one time, but years of bad living had eroded his skills. A pickup truck down the road screeched to a halt and reversed until both the passenger and the driver were looking me in the eyes, the passenger leaning out with his bulging biceps on the truck windowsill.

“You okay, buddy?” the passenger said, addressing Bert. They were good old boys, tattooed and beefy and, despite the weather, in sleeveless shirts and straw cowboy hats.

“I'm fine, yeah,” Bert said, bounding to his feet and dancing like a fighter coming up to beat the count. “I bet him he couldn't knock me off my feet, and now would you look at this? I owe him ten bucks.” Bert smirked, his teeth outlined with blood. “Okay, Thomas. Your turn. I get a free whack at you.”

They must have known from the look in my eyes I wasn't going to let Bert swing. As they drove away, I had a feeling they were planning to call the cops.

“What do you know about the plane crash?”

“Listen, we gotta get outa here. I don't need to see the cops right now.”

“What about jail? I thought you were in jail.”

“That didn't last but a few hours. They were just harassing me.”

Taking a different route than the circuitous zigzagging trail we'd used earlier, Bert led me back to his grandmother's property. “I would have talked to you,” Bert said. “You didn't have to go Arnold Schwarzenegger on me.”

“You're the one who set off the ordnance.”

WHEN WE REACHED THE TRAILER,
Bert tried to step inside the half-open door. “We'll just talk out here away from the ammunition dump,” I said, grabbing his arm. The music was still playing, though not as loud as it had been. I could smell the odor of gunpowder lingering inside the small space.

“I'm cold. Besides, it was only a percussion cap. Nothing to get jacked up about. And it was an accident.”

“I suppose running was an accident? And taking shots at me was an accident?”

“You may have noticed, I didn't hit you. I'm not likely to miss if I want to kill someone. You're welcome. Can I go in now?”

“No.”

Snake appeared at the door with a titty magazine in his hands and, without looking at either of us, sat on the stoop thumbing through it, addressing me as if I hadn't been gone, and as if we hadn't both been blown out of the trailer ten minutes earlier. “I told you not to turn wild man on me,” Snake said.

“You're bleeding from your ear.”

“Hey, you found yourself a gun. I thought you didn't carry.”

“It was a gift.”

“Okay,” Bert said, settling on the stoop below his brother. “I'll just sit here and freeze my balls off.” Again, I was amazed at how identical
twins could present so dissimilarly, the feat accounted for mostly in their disparate grooming and body language. In his cowboy hat, boots, and jeans, Snake sat with his shoulders hunched and his posture sloppy. Bert, clad in baggy old suit trousers, suspenders, and a dingy, food-spattered V-neck T-shirt, made a habit of sitting, standing, and walking in the manner of a guard at Buckingham Palace, even though he dressed like a homeless man from Bulgaria. I had a fleeting thought of how unfair it was that these two semidegenerate brothers were still walking the planet while Kathy was not.

“Your brother told me you predicted 9/11,” I said.

“The attorney general of the United States was publicly saying he wasn't going to fly on a commercial airliner. Cheney was running military air exercises. When was the last time a vice president personally ran war games? Of
course
something was going to happen. Any idiot could have foreseen it.”

“This idiot didn't.”

“All of this stuff is related. You need to get with the new paradigm.”

“I've been reading about 9/11. I'll agree the official explanation has plenty of holes in it.”

“Thinking it stinks and knowing what really went on are worlds apart. Do you know anything about all the microbiologists who went dead or missing since then? You know what they were working on? Do you know why there was so much dust when those towers went down? Why there was no furniture and so few bodies? Why the rubble pile was not higher? Do you know about the death ray from space theory and how it might have brought those towers down? Did you know the military told their planes to land just before the first tower crumbled?”

“Why would they do that?”

“Did you know Bush's brother and cousin were on the board of directors of the company running the security for the trade towers? Also, when was the last time a U.S. airliner went off course and was
not
intercepted by an air force fighter within minutes? Remember when Payne Stewart's Learjet went off course? They were on that like stink on shit. On 9/11 we had four airliners go off course, and over an hour later not one had been intercepted. Did you know the Pentagon was protected by a missile defense system? Or that none of the bodies from the flight that hit the Pentagon were ever returned to the relatives? Or
seen by anyone? Do you know what an EMI weapon is? Do you know what caused TWA flight eight hundred to go down in ninety-six?”

“You're jabbering. Tell me why you thought Sheffield was under a black cloud.”

“Hey,” Bert said, turning to Snake. “There's a brunette in there who looks kind of like Gina. Get to her yet?” Somehow, Bert thought because his brother was sitting next to us pawing through a dirty magazine and that I had arrived with his brother, that we were all buddies. Turning to me, he said, “Gina was my third wife. Temper like a firecracker.”

Without knowing I was going to do it, I doubled up my left fist and knocked him off the stoop. He landed in the weeds and lay staring up at me, nursing his jaw. As he got up, he said, “You're not going to hit me again, are you?”

“I didn't know I was going to hit you that time.”

“What's wrong with you?” Snake asked.

“He's jacking me around.”

“I'm not jacking you around,” Bert said. “You have to understand the new paradigm, or none of it will make sense. Addition and subtraction before algebra.”

“You sure hit him hard,” Snake said.

“Not as hard as I wanted to.”

Without getting off the stoop, Snake examined his brother's face. “Jesus, Thomas. Leave him alone, would you? We're twins. Every time you hit him, I feel it.”

I felt bad for losing my temper. It wasn't anything I would have done a week ago, but then, I wasn't the man I'd been a week ago. “Saturday before the crash you told me something was going to happen. How did you know?”

“If you're thinking I knew that plane was going down, I didn't.”

“You warned me not to let Kathy travel with Sheffield.”

“I didn't have any specific information. I just knew she was due. Sheffield was. I mean, look at her career. If you woulda let me go through the facts with you, you could have figured it out on your own. Since day one Sheffield's been a thorn in the administration's side. The powers that be had justification to off her long ago.”

“Are you saying the plane crash was planned by our government?”

“All I'm saying is, if you've got your head screwed on straight, it's the first thing you suspect when something like a small plane crash happens to a major political rival of the administration.” Bert looked at me as if
he
thought
I
was the crazy one, as if reasonable people always blamed major catastrophes involving political foes on political operatives, as if we were living in some third-world country where secret backdoor vendettas were taken for granted.

“Let me provide you with a little background,” he said. He was back on the stoop now, and on the soapbox. I'd stepped away so he could know I wouldn't hit him again. “Right after the towers collapsed, the White House wanted to expand their powers. They declared war on terrorists, who of course could be anybody they didn't like, and asked for more power to track down and punish them. They came up with some shaky legislation that was debatably unconstitutional. There were two Democratic senators in a position to put the kibosh on it, Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Tom Daschle of South Dakota. In the middle of all that, somebody decides to use germ warfare; letters are sent through the U.S. Postal Service with anthrax spores in them. Guess who got the anthrax? Of all the senators and judges and so forth in Washington, two guys are singled out, the two guys who together formed the biggest stumbling block to passage of the Patriot Act. Go look it up. Now, who stood to benefit if those men got killed or, even better, scared out of their wits? That's what you want to look at with a crime. Who stands to benefit.”

“What did you know about the plane?”

“Absolutely nothing. When I found out Kathy was working for Sheffield, I started digging. Sheffield has been antagonizing this administration for as long as she was in the Senate. And everybody knew she has a solid base here in Washington State, so she wasn't going to be easy to remove. There was an attempt a year or so ago to implicate her in a scheme involving cash for votes. Remember?”

“Vaguely.”

“The FBI didn't spend more than four hours on it before they told the papers it was a frame-up. Then the machine coughed up a ton of money to get rid of her by democratic process, except that wasn't panning out, either. Turns out a democracy doesn't always do what you tell
it. Every time Sheffield turns around she's laying down a nail strip in the path of the machine.”

“So they replace her with Maddox?”

“It didn't matter who. They get somebody they can work with, and they make an example. Whether that example comes because they crush her in the elections or because she's dead, it makes no difference.”

“It makes a difference to me. One's an election. The other's murder.”

“You and I know that, but these folks only care about coming out on top.”

“You're saying the crash was done on purpose for political motivations?”

“Hey, I'm not the only one thinking along these lines. D.C. is rife with jokes about not flying in small planes until after the elections. Of course, you'd never in a million years hear any of those guys say anything in public. But don't listen to the jokes. And don't listen to me. There's a team of investigators working on it. They'll file a tidy little report. They'll come up with a crossed wire. Pilot error. Ice on the flight attendant's ass. Whatever. Back east they'll still be making jokes. Are you listening? You get on the wrong side of the machine and have enough clout to make a difference, and eventually you're toast. Not always, but enough times for the majority to keep their heads down.

“You think the CIA and the DIA and the other alphabet agencies are there to protect you? They exist to do the bidding of the machine. Why have so many directors of the Agency been multimillionaires and one was even the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission? Because the CIA's job is protecting big business. Take William Casey. Remember when he was about to testify before Congress in the Iran-contra hearings, and there were hints he might be planning to talk out of school— in fact, afterward his attorney said he'd been planning to spill it all, Reagan and the contras. Suddenly he has brain cancer? What happened during the surgery? Is any of this ringing a bell? The part of his brain that controls speech was damaged so he could no longer talk. That's as close to the Mafia cutting out your tongue as you can get. I've talked to specialists about the surgery and they can't understand it. They could have killed him, but what they did was so much scarier. He died a little later anyway.”