Cape Disappointment (38 page)

She frowned.

“Listen to me. Somebody told me the plane was going down three days before it happened. Obviously I didn't believe him or I would have tried to stop the flight. Because somebody knew it was going down before it did, I have to think there was some sort of plan involved, that it was not an accident. Right now there are people in Seattle whose job it is to make sure none of this comes to light. They're murdering people.”

“You think they put that reporter in the hospital?”

“Yes. Her husband's dead.”

“Thomas, you're scaring me.” She put her drink on the table and came into my arms. After a bit, I realized she was crying. And then, before I could figure out how to put a halt to it, she was kissing me, her
lips as salty as Kathy's had been an hour earlier. My first thought was that she was a good kisser— excellent, in fact— but my second thought was that this wasn't a contact I wanted, and for a split second I tried to think of what the appropriate response would be if Kathy were still out of the picture, because any other response might give away too much. My hesitation was just enough that she took it as encouragement and began to slip off my sport coat.

“Whoa. Whoa,” I said, disentangling myself and standing beside the couch. “This is too soon. It's too soon.”

She smiled in a manner that was half lascivious and half calculating, looked at my trousers, and said, “Are you sure?”

“You're not going to tell me what you know, are you?”

“This isn't something I can just hand out like Halloween candy. I have to think about it.”

“People are dying.”

“All right. You've got me scared. But I need a day to think it over.”

“Do me a favor, will you? Don't tell Kalpesh we talked.”

“Of course not.”

IT WAS TEN-THIRTY
in the morning, and the doctors were considering whether to discharge me from the hospital. I wasn't ready for tackle football on the lawn, but the worst was over. I'd been up often enough to know I could do considerably more than people gave me credit for, and my brain was beginning to function normally, even if my stomach wasn't; funny how a flagpole through your intestines can disrupt digestion. Most of my memory from the night of the bombing had returned. Home care meant I could battle the aches with pain pills instead of the intravenous morphine drip.

Having later recognized me and made all the connections, Dorothy MacDonald, the nurse from Naselle, had gone to an Oregon newspaper with her story of caring for one of the supposed Sheffield crash victims after the accident. Clearly, nobody believed her or it would have made the national news.

In the days after finding Kathy, I spotted Snake on the street and, thinking he was Bert, followed him into a grocery store and demolished a good portion of two aisles in a demented endeavor to tear him to shreds. We fled before the cops arrived.

A lot of things had happened since Kathy's return. For two days I tailed Kalpesh. I slapped an illegal tap on his landline at his condo, but still wasn't able to track down his contact. I interviewed him, told him what I knew, and begged him to give me a name, but he resolutely denied
passing information to anybody. Maybe he was telling the truth. There were a lot of people working for Sheffield. I couldn't pick on him just because he was the only one I knew well. Snake and I speculated that it was possible the campaign offices had been bugged and the killers had gotten their timetables from that source— it wasn't like campaign headquarters hadn't been bugged before.

A few days after I brought Kathy back to Seattle, Kalpesh resigned from the Sheffield campaign and signed on with James Maddox. It was about the last thing I, or anybody else, had expected. After all, the Sheffield ticket was probably going to win the election. Kalpesh claimed that, although he had supported Jane Sheffield wholeheartedly, he had some major conflicts with Sheffield's husband. The defection was highlighted on the front page of both local papers, and Kalpesh gave several interviews designed to make the reshuffled Sheffield team look weak and the Maddox team robust. Still, the polls continued to favor Sheffield, albeit not by the landslide predictions of earlier days.

After spending a full day with Kathy, filling her in on the events subsequent to her death, getting reacquainted as one could do only with a wife who had come back from the grave, I went back to work for the Maddox campaign. Since Deborah Driscoll and Kalpesh were now working in the same office, it was the best way to keep an eye on both of them. People thought I was still in torment over the loss of my wife, so I couldn't go around looking as jubilant as I felt. Nor did anybody give me anything more challenging to do than licking stamps and running errands. They treated me almost as if I were retarded, which suited me fine. In my spare time, which I had a lot of, I kept notes on Deborah's contacts, Kalpesh's phone calls, tracked who they met, and monitored their day-to-day activities. I was hoping to catch Kalpesh contacting somebody outside the organization, not that the killers would necessarily still be in contact. He did make some secretive calls, but when I tracked them, they were to friends at the Sheffield headquarters, personal stuff.

Bert kept in touch using stolen cellphones, while I— at Bert's direction— rotated through various phones borrowed from friends or co-workers. Bert continued to insist all our communications be on the phone, claiming he had his hands full shadowing NTSB investigators
and trying to cultivate somebody else from the media as an ally. I knew Snake had warned him about the beating he'd taken in his stead. Neither the FBI nor the NTSB investigators had made any major announcements; the official plane crash investigation had not been completed. No matter how much I implored, Bert refused to divulge how he knew the plane was going to go down.

The week prior to the bombing saw multiple phone and email threats against James Maddox. Probably because they thought I was still in serious mourning, I was left out of the loop when it came to investigating the threats. A few days before the bombing at Garfield High School, Winston Seagram from the FBI began spending time with Maddox. It wouldn't do to have both senatorial candidates from Washington state offed, would it? Not that anybody important believed the Sheffield flight was murder. Even so, an assassination on top of an accident was going to pull down unwelcome attention.

The threats to Maddox put everybody on alert. We brought in new security grunts, several of whom had formerly worked either for the Secret Service or local police departments. Maddox even brought in people from his own security company, Protection Dot Com. The ex-Secret Service guys had all kinds of ideas for screening people and processing different venues, but underneath it all, what impressed me most about the commotion was that Maddox actually seemed scared. He hadn't shown much emotion over Sheffield's crash, but these threats to his own life? With more ardor in his voice than I'd heard in a while, he grumbled, “I don't mind serving in the goddamned Senate for six years, but I do mind getting my head shot off because I'm trying to do a public service.”

Because of our precautions, the explosion at the Garfield High School gymnasium came as a surprise, nobody more surprised than me.

It had been a long day. Meetings all morning. A five-hundred-dollar-a-plate luncheon in Bellevue. A talk at the University of Washington at three. A dinner with special donors and a few of the cognoscenti in downtown Seattle, and straight from there to the speaking engagement at Garfield. It wasn't until afterward when Maddox and his followers filed out to the foyer that Kalpesh approached me. “Thomas, we're having a hard time tracking down that briefcase James always carries. Have you seen it?”

“Nope.”

“I wonder if you might go back and check the podium?”

“Sure.”

I didn't appreciate the way Kalpesh had managed to weasel himself into Maddox's camp and become my boss, or the way he seemed to be treating me like a servant. I didn't much like anything about Kalpesh anymore. Just when they needed him most, he'd gone AWOL from the campaign Kathy had died for— or almost died for. He was one of those guys who, once you started hating him, you couldn't stop. Either that, or I was going a little nutso myself; maybe more of the latter than the former. Ruth Ponzi was out of the hospital but not back at work. Including the bombing, there would be fifteen dead in all, though how much of it was connected, I could not say.

When I went back into the gymnasium, the crowd had dispersed to the point where there were only about thirty people, many shuffling toward the exits. On the way into the gym, I received a call from Bert Slezak.

“Where are you?” Bert asked.

“Garfield High School. Maddox just made a speech.”

“We have to talk. You and me. But I don't want to meet you if you're going to beat the hell out of me.”

“I'm not making any promises one way or the other. Half the time, I don't know what I'm going to do anymore.”

“So now you know how my life is.”

“I'm not that twitter-pated yet.”

Because my phone reception was cutting in and out, I began heading for an outside door on the far side of the building. I would fetch the briefcase in a minute. It wasn't going anywhere. “Where do you want to meet?”

“How about in front of a police station?”

“Funny. Hey, listen. The phone reception is really crappy in here, so I'm—”

And then my ears were ringing, and it felt as if somebody had tried to rip my jacket off. My balls hurt, and when I tried to move, there was only blinding pain. It took a few minutes to orient myself. The phone was gone. One shoe was missing. So was most of my coherent thought. I was straining to figure out what had happened, watching the wounded
straggle out, the firefighters and other rescue personnel maintaining their distance because of the threat of a second bomb. I was standing with a rod through my torso; it had pinned me to the bleachers. Then the woman crawled over and gave me a list of messages for her family.

I was slowly bleeding to death and I knew it. But then, against orders, chased by two firefighters in full gear, James Maddox burst into the gym. Maddox had a look on his face I can still remember vividly, a look that said, “Hey, this can't go on. People are hurt. Time to do something.” Somewhere along the line I must have lost consciousness, because I woke up on the floor with Maddox hovering over me, the spike still protruding from my abdomen. It hurt like hell, and I let out a caterwauling I'm ashamed of to this day. The two firefighters who'd come in behind him brushed Maddox aside and picked me up. I heard one of them say, “Scoop and run.”

They carried me out so quickly Maddox was only able to get a hand on one of my legs, but that was how the news photographer captured it, and that was the photo that went around the world, no firefighters in sight, just a cropped photo of the senatorial candidate rushing out of the bombed-out building with my bloody torso and my upside-down head in the foreground. The thrust of the accompanying story was that Maddox was loyal to his people, not a man who brooked red tape or impractical regulations when lives were on the line.

Overnight Maddox's poll numbers climbed, putting him three points ahead of Sheffield instead of twelve behind. He was leading for the first time all autumn. That single gutsy action had revealed to the world what he was made of; it had brought all of Maddox's history as a police officer to the foreground and forged a new people's hero.

Earlier on the same day they released me, James Maddox stood with a film crew outside my hospital room discussing whether or not they would be allowed inside to film. I didn't want anything to do with it. I'd inadvertently become the symbol that restored Maddox's campaign hopes, but I didn't want to be the instrument that propelled Maddox into office, not if I could help it.

Outside my room, Snake and one of my doctors squabbled with Deborah Driscoll, Maddox, and Kalpesh, all of whom argued in favor of the photo op. Deborah kept peeking in, giving me a wink as if we were co-conspirators.

“Thomas?” Maddox said, striding into the room and touching my shoulder affectionately. I noticed Snake was keeping the cameraman out in the hall. “I'm glad you made it.”

“Me too.”

“I've been up to visit a couple of times, but you were asleep.”

“I must have thought you were here to give a speech,” I said, grinning.

He didn't find my comment amusing. Deborah stood beside him, chewing her lip, her weight on one leg, giving me the look she gave to men, the one that made each of us feel she had a special thing going for us. She had fixed on my ideology and realized I wasn't exactly thrilled with the thought of Maddox becoming our next senator.

“What we're going to try to do here is get some film of you and me greeting each other,” Maddox said. We'd already gone through this charade— he'd made the request, I'd said no, and Snake had taken them out into the corridor to say no again.

“I told you how I feel about that.”

“Christ, Thomas. I saved your life.”

“I know, and I'll figure out a way to repay you, but not like this.”

“It's little enough to ask.”