Cape Disappointment (32 page)

I lowered the window just as the police loudspeaker announced, “You in there. Stay where you are. Don't move!” Approaching from the opposite direction, a second police car came ripping up the narrow street. Police radios squawked in the night. I hoped Kalpesh and Deborah didn't look out their window, because I was less than forty-five feet away from where they were making love.

“Driver's license, registration, and proof of insurance?” asked one of the officers at my window.

“What are you doing? You living in your car?”

There were two cops: a pretty African American female with a Taser strapped to her leg in addition to the Glock they all carried, and a large Caucasian guy who kept looking at the blanket on the passenger seat. I kept my hands in plain sight while the female cop shined her flashlight in my eyes and the male, first on the scene, went back to his cruiser and tapped into the computer. “We heard you do this every night,” said the pretty cop when we were alone.

“I don't.”

“We heard you were snooping in windows.”

“That's not true.”

“What
have
you been doing?”

“I'm a private investigator. I'm working for James Maddox. With his security.”

“The
James Maddox?”

“Yes. He worked for SPD once. So did I.”

“As a civilian?”

“In uniform.”

The two of us waited while she digested what I'd told her. When her partner came back with my driver's license, he said, “You live around here, Black?”

“In the University District.”

“So you don't live around here.”

The woman spoke without taking her eyes or light off me. “Claims he works for James Maddox. Used to be in the department.”

“Is that right, Black?”

“East Precinct. I was on the pistol team with Phil Sherman.”

“We heard you were peeping in windows.”

“I haven't left my car.”

“What are you doing in your car?”

“I'm on a case.”

“He's a private investigator,” said the woman.

“He's got a concealed weapons permit. Black, are you carrying a weapon now or do you have one in the car?”

“No, sir.”

“If we searched your car, we wouldn't find a weapon?”

“That's right.”

“What's under that blanket?”

“A shotgun microphone.”

“And what do you use that for?”

“Recording bird calls.”

“Would you care to show it to us?”

“They're not illegal.”

“I asked if you'd be willing to show it to us.”

I reached over and flipped the blanket onto the floor, revealing the shotgun mike and the headphones I'd been wearing. The woman angled her flashlight until the beam illuminated the passenger seat. “A caller said there was a pervert spying in the windows of that building over there.”

“I haven't seen anybody.”

“You haven't left your car?”

“No.”

“Would it surprise you to find out we've heard your name before?”

“No.”

After a long pause, the male said, “All right, Black. You can go. I would advise you not to hang around this neighborhood again.”

“Thank you.”

I fired up my Ford. Now that the officers were no longer blocking the building, I angled my sun visor off to the side so that anybody in the condos would have a hard time identifying my face.

When I got home I sat in the car in the dark, ostensibly to listen to the end of a segment on National Public Radio about AIDS in Africa.

I was so depressed I could hardly move. Rubbernecking outside the condo while Kalpesh and Deborah were making love only reminded me how much I missed Kathy. All I could think of was all the times I'd failed her. How I'd forgotten her birthday once. How I'd neglected to explain my attachment to the Maddox campaign to her satisfaction. How I'd embarrassed her in front of Maddox.

Snake had been worried about me, but not so worried he was going to roll off the couch when I came back into the house. “What's going on, buddy?” he asked.

“I think I was tailed tonight.”

He sat up and went to the window. “They still out there?”

“I don't know. I got questioned by two cops. Somebody called me in.”

“You didn't see anybody?”

“Nope.”

Snake flopped back onto the couch. I sat down at the computer. In a few moments I had her work phone number. Letha Fontaine. I knew she would remember me from the governor's engagement party two weeks earlier.

“Letha? This is Thomas Black.”

“Thomas? Gosh, it was good to see you the other night at that shindig. I'm so sorry about your wife.”

“Thanks. Letha, could you do me a favor?”

“You name it.”

“A call came in about an hour ago for an address near Eighteenth and East Howell. Probably came in as a one-sixty or a two-eighty.”

“You still remember the codes?”

“Oh, yeah. I'm wondering if you could tell me who called it in.”

“I suppose I could mosey over and look through the logs.”

“Will you do that for me?”

“This isn't going to come back on me, is it?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Let me call you right back.”

She called ten minutes later. “Thomas? It came in as a stranger-in-the-neighborhood call. On Eighteenth on the block north of Madison heading toward Howell. It was a cellphone routed through the state patrol.”

“Yeah.”

“The phone is registered to a man named Dean Huffington.”

“Is that all you have?”

“He said there was a man parked on that block and he was looking into people's bedroom windows.”

“Thanks, Letha.”

I looked up Dean Huffington on the Net, and while I was going through the various possibilities, I remembered that Huffington was a fictitious name the Maddox security people used for some of their extra equipment, including at least one cellphone that I knew Jim Maddox carried. I was still trying to absorb this development when Snake said, “Hey. You mind if I sleep in the spare bedroom tonight? This sofa's kinda getting to my neck.”

The spare bedroom was where I kept my weights in the winter and where Kathy stored her clothes year-round, so it was basically Kathy's dressing room. I hadn't cleaned it out yet. In fact, I had only been in there twice since she died. “Yeah. Sure.”

“What's wrong?”

“Maddox turned me in to the cops.”

“You see him on the street?”

“Nope.”

I wasn't even sure how I'd been tailed. I didn't like it, but then, I'd been doing the same thing, so I guess you could say I more or less deserved it. The pity was I didn't dare confront Maddox with the fact that he or one of his people had been following me, because to do so would imply I'd gotten confidential information from SPD, which could trigger an internal investigation, which could cost Letha Fontaine a lot of grief. The only reason Letha had done me the favor at all was because she'd had a crush on me practically forever.

SWEAT TRICKLED
down my scalp and stung my eyes, but I was helpless to stop it. I was in the school gymnasium standing against the bleachers. It seemed as if every time I took my hands off the rod that had pinned me to the wall, the pain became even more excruciating. Initially I hadn't felt much of anything. I'd been walking across the gym with my cellphone in hand, and the next thing I knew I was against the bleachers.

I hadn't heard an explosion. Instead, it felt as if I'd been gang-tackled by six huge linemen. Now all I could do was grip the rod with both hands and hold on for dear life. I'd noticed something in the past few minutes. The end of the rod had a small American flag on it. Dust motes wafted through the air. Most of the walking wounded were gone now, having been urged to leave the building by a fire chief with a megaphone.

There were no rescue teams coming in to fetch the rest of us. As they had explained earlier, there were suspicions of a secondary explosive device.

In the far doorway I could see fire department officials, police officers, and from time to time James Maddox. A couple of times I caught a glimpse of red hair and a green blouse, which meant Deborah Driscoll was there, too. They were less than a hundred feet away, but it wasn't doing me a bit of good. I was bleeding to death. I could feel it. A
jagged piece of glass was imbedded in my arm, torrents of blood snaking down my sleeve, oozing into my pants, dripping into my left shoe. Oddly, the shoe filling with blood seemed to be what bothered me most. My other fear was that I would faint and end up hanging limp on the rod.

Maddox should have been near death, not me. But he was safe and sound, gawking from the doorway alongside Deborah like a visitor at the zoo. The others in the doorway had fled. Or were getting organized. Whatever safety personnel did when they were supposed to be rescuing and weren't. I'd read about the hazard they were trying to avoid. When terrorists planted a bomb, they were likely to plant two, the first to take out their primary target, and the second a well-concealed device to go off later and catch rescue workers at the scene. The second bomb would create even more havoc than the first and slow rescue efforts, thus making the likelihood of fatalities and chaos even greater. It was a one-two shot that had been employed successfully all around the world: Ireland, Baghdad, the Philippines.

Maddox took in the carnage, the dead bodies that lay in plain sight, the wounded, but most of all, the obliterated wooden stage where he'd been standing only minutes earlier. Deborah was crying. Twice I'd seen her start into the gym, only to be dragged back by Maddox or one of the firefighters. After a while I realized she was crying for me. She had good reason to believe she was witnessing my last minutes. The notion was a cute one, I thought, until it occurred to me that she was probably right, that I would soon be dead.

The gym looked as if an airplane had dropped a load of laundry through the roof and detonated a bomb in the center of it. Most of the laundry had dead people in it, three that I could see. An older woman had been patiently crawling across the floor in my general direction. I hadn't been paying her much mind, but now that she was inching closer, I said, “Why don't you head over to the doorway? You get close enough, they'll pull you out.”

She said something I couldn't understand over the ringing in my ears and continued toward me, pushing herself through the detritus like a wounded crab. She wore a drab yellow dress under a woolen sweater. The side of her head had taken an impact from flying debris, and she was bleeding even more heavily than I was. I strained to understand
her, but the explosion had compromised most of my hearing, my ears ringing like high-pitched chimes. She seemed to think what she had to tell me was important. From her vantage point on the floor, it must have appeared she and I were the only two people left alive.

Earlier in the day there were speaker introductions, and then while Maddox speechified, Deborah and I listened from behind the stage, a driver and two more security people waiting outside the hall. Five SPD plainclothes cops were helping out. Over the past week there had been threats received at the Maddox headquarters, phone calls that were being checked out by the FBI. The calls, Maddox's incessant importuning, and a desire to investigate Deborah Driscoll had propelled me into coming back to work for the campaign. After the speech numerous people from the audience wanted to shake Maddox's hand or chat with him, all of which he indulged.

As I slowly regained my reasoning powers, I wondered why the bomb had gone off after Maddox was out of the hall and not while he was giving the speech. Had somebody been clever enough to build a bomb but not clever enough to tell time? If they'd been meaning to take out a lot of people, or even to take out Maddox, they'd screwed up. As near as I could tell, the device had been directly under the podium, close to where the janitor had been. Had it gone off with our candidate on the podium, it would have sent him through the roof like a rocket.

Surrounded by a knot of people, he had made his way out of the Garfield High School gymnasium while Deborah and I followed, each keeping a wary eye out for suspicious-looking persons, even though I'd suspected Maddox was grandstanding when he talked about bomb threats.

The gabfest continued as the gym slowly emptied, Maddox and his followers standing out in the foyer in front of the trophy cases, starry-eyed women making up a good portion of the crowd. It was easy to see why some politicians came to think of themselves as irresistible to the opposite sex.

Somewhere along the line, I'd been asked to help locate the small leather satchel in which Maddox carried his speeches and other paperwork. I was headed back toward the podium to search when I got a call and detoured away from my planned route in an effort to improve the crappy cellphone reception inside the building. It was while I was
on the far side of the gym near the bleachers that the bomb went off. Now I was impaled by Old Glory.

The woman crawling toward me was close enough to grab hold of my trousers at the knee, which she did with surprising strength. I wanted to lean down and comfort her, to stanch the bleeding in her scalp, but I couldn't move. “Mister,” she gasped.