The Widow File (31 page)

She raised her head to look at Tom. It occurred to her that she knew a lot of very good-looking men and the absurdity of the realization made her smile. Tom smiled back. That knife looked unpleasant so she decided to
look at his face instead. He really did have beautiful eyes. They glistened with tears and she had to lean forward to hear what he said.

“If there was any other way, Dani, I would have saved you.”

She smiled and raised her right hand to his face. He kept repeating himself even when she pressed her thumb against his warm lips.

“Shh,” she said, sliding her left hand along the muscles in his chest, moving underneath the pouch strap, until her fingers played in the soft damp curls at his back of his head. “It’s okay.” His eyes widened in surprise and he leaned into her touch. She tucked the rough strap of the Rasmund pouch into the crook of her elbow and closed her eyes. “You are going to save me.”

She threw herself backwards into the darkness of the Tidal Basin.

If the pain in her leg had been an explosion, what happened in her shoulder was a supernova. She heard ripping and crunching as Tom’s head slammed into the railing, dragged down by the weight of her falling body caught in the unbreakable strap. The impact ripped her shoulder from its socket and she barely got her right hand up and onto the strap. Her body slammed into the stone wall of the basin, banging her head and scraping her skin.

Above it all, she felt the familiar sensation of her mind separating her thoughts into manageable compartments. She knew she felt pain even as she knew her brain would not allow her to experience it in its fullness. Cotton batting separated her from her howling shoulder and the waterfall of her leg. She spun from the strap by her weakening fingers and she noticed the strap had stopped moving. She couldn’t remember why but she knew that was a very good thing.

Thoughts came fast and moved through without sticking. Was the water cold? It was dirty. Her pinkie had slipped. Her boots were heavy. Were those geese? Bright light flooded the scene and the water below her became choppy. She was blind and a loud blender hovered over her head. Not a blender, a helicopter, and it shouted at her. It sounded like “Hitches for lease. Who’s got to poop?” but she was pretty sure that wasn’t what
they said. Her ring finger slipped and her middle finger ached, the strap rolling in her grip. She wondered how far down the water was. The white light moved and she could see the glowing yellow lights of the dome across the water.

“Jefferson,” she said. Jefferson was her favorite president.

She was unconscious before her head broke the water.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Three months later

Her leg ached. She knew she should have gotten out and stretched before this but it felt so good to be back behind the wheel.

Rain poured over the windshield. Without the wipers on she couldn’t see the white eagle on the emblem on the side of the building. Not the Central Intelligence Agency emblem. She hoped she’d never see that again. This was the post office. She watched the man in uniform unlock the door, opening the station for the day.

She rubbed the scar through her jeans. The wound had gotten infected badly and she’d gone through several rounds of antibiotics and painful injections. Her shoulder had required two operations. She still didn’t know where she’d been treated. It was a hospital of some sort but one with no windows, plenty of cameras, and numerous heavily armed guards. It was the type of hospital where interrogations interrupted sleep night after night until days and nights ran together in a wash of drugs and pain.

Tom had been right. Or whatever his name was. She would have sold him out. Even if she had felt some kind of loyalty to him, she never would have been able to hold out against the onslaught of intimidation and interrogation. Pain meds were withheld, sleep interrupted, and a bewildering barrage of faces and badges and weapons and rankings marched before her. She’d have told them anything they wanted to know. She had told them things they couldn’t possibly have been interested in. More than a few times, she wished she’d died at the Tidal Basin.

They didn’t tell her much. She still didn’t know which agency she had supposedly been working for or who had been behind the hit. She didn’t know who had hired Tom and she didn’t care. Through the haze of drugs and fear, she’d heard nothing but strings of letters and “chief director of this” and “deputy director of that.” At one point she’d overheard someone talking about the NEA. The National Endowment for the Arts? The National Education Association? She’d wondered if maybe that was where the woman whose laptop they’d borrowed had worked. It made more sense than thinking teachers and ballerinas were interrogating her. It didn’t matter. Nobody answered her anyway.

She’d been there at least a month when they’d let her know that Choo-Choo had survived. She’d begged a thousand times to see him and on a thousand and one they led her to his room. The bullet had shattered ribs, collapsed his lung, nicked a vertebra, and caused massive internal hemorrhaging. He’d barely pulled through. The marine guard stood over her as she sat on the edge of his bed and wrapped her good hand around his long fingers.

He blinked several times until he could focus on her and he smiled. “Hi.”

“Hi.” She nodded toward the IV bag. ““Good drugs?”

“I’ve had better.” He laughed and winced at the pain it caused.

She’d wanted to see him so badly and now she couldn’t think of anything to say. When she’d learned he had survived, she’d felt herself come back to life. He was the only other person who knew what she knew, who knew their innocence of the crimes committed under Rasmund’s roof. His hair lay greasy and lank against his skull and his once beautiful skin looked rough and broken. She didn’t imagine she looked much better.

He licked his dry lips. “It seems like the interrogations are slowing down.”

“Maybe they believe us. Maybe they’ll let us go soon.”

He squeezed her fingers. “Where will you go?”

“Probably back to Oklahoma. You?”

“They’re encouraging me to stick to the story that Mrs. O’Donnell told Grandfather. Once I’m fully recovered they want to help me perform the prodigal son’s return.”

“Are you going to?”

“They’re very persuasive.” He sighed and stared up at the ceiling. “I’ll do my penance. It certainly isn’t the first time I’ve done the walk of shame back into the bosom of my family. Maybe I’ll go to our place on Martha’s Vineyard. You know, buy some pants with whales on them and pretend to love to sail.” Dani watched him stare at nothing. She saw the hard line of his lips and the thought occurred to her that Choo-Choo might decide to kill himself.

They hadn’t been allowed to see each other much after that. Twice they’d passed on the way to physical therapy and once they’d stood outside the shower room together but there really wasn’t much they could say. Every word was recorded and not subtly. Guards watched every move they made. The nurses had even applied body monitors to read her reaction when they told her that Tom—Booker, they called him—had survived his injuries. They’d watched her eyes and listened to her pulse rate when they informed her he was being detained and treated in the same facility. She didn’t know what they wanted to see or if her lack of reaction worked in her favor or against it. She had told them she hoped they would keep him away from her but not much else. Maybe it was the drugs but Dani’s idea of “enemy” felt kind of blurry in that place.

She had no way to measure the time at the time, but six weeks later a trio of men with briefcases had come into her room and taken her statement. She’d told them everything she knew, which amounted to very little. One of the men had mentioned an investigation but nobody answered her questions regarding its progress. Two weeks after that the same men reappeared with a thick binder of pages covered in dense type. They told her to read it, understand it, and sign where marked. She’d started reading, wanting to be certain she wasn’t being pressured to sign a confession, but after sixty pages of impenetrable government doublespeak, she’d begun to sign. It took her two hours to sign and initial the three hundred-plus page document and all she really understood of it was that it guaranteed her silence on the matter of Rasmund until the world came to an end. She didn’t need to read what the consequences might be.

The next day she got a change of clothes, five thousand dollars cash, and a ride in a windowless van to her apartment. She also got her car keys. When they’d slid the door open beside her old maroon Honda, she’d cried
for the first time in weeks. The van had pulled away while she stood weeping in the street.

Whoever had searched her apartment had been more than thorough. Wall panels had been pulled down, floorboards pulled up, bedding and cushions shredded. They’d even dumped out her mustard, horseradish, and all of her cereal boxes. There were flies everywhere.

“Slovenly fuckers,” she muttered, and then said it louder in case the place was bugged.

She didn’t pack much. After all that time in a hospital gown, Dani could hardly remember what she used to wear. She’d grabbed a duffel and thrown in some jeans and shirts, underwear, bras and socks, and a couple pairs of shoes. She almost left the hideous shawl/poncho thing her Aunt Penny had made her, but relented, shoving it into the bag. They were going to wind up burying her in that monstrosity. She didn’t bother with toiletries. Everything felt tainted.

She had only one photo of her with her father and it still sat on her nightstand. She opened the frame and slipped the picture out. If they were going to bug anything, that frame would be it.

Finally she headed back to the kitchen. Every drawer had been upended; every pamphlet and note she’d had on her refrigerator taken down. All that remained was her collection of magnets.

Every summer when she’d ridden in the truck with her father, they’d picked up a magnet at each city they stopped in. There was a flat rubber magnet of an alligator from the Everglades, a slice of wood with a river cut into it from white-water country in West Virginia. The Las Vegas magnet had a big pair of dice and a poker chip, and a glittery pink cowboy boot danced on a banner for Houston. She’d collected dozens of magnets over the years and they were the only things she valued as much as her car. Holding the bag against the refrigerator, she swept the collection into the bag on top of her clothes. She tossed the apartment key onto the counter and didn’t bother to lock the door behind her.

They’d seized her bank account and canceled her credit cards. Even though she’d been in no position to complain, she’d had to work hard to keep her mouth shut. Typical government move. They didn’t know who exactly was guilty or what role she had played in it. They didn’t care that
their own people had put the plan in motion and that she’d been shot and injured by one of their own agents, however rogue. They told her that the money, her paycheck, had been obtained illegally and was therefore now the property of the United States government. They had made it clear that the five thousand dollars was purely a courtesy, and a generous one, and she wouldn’t be receiving another dime in compensation. It seemed the powers that be considered five thousand dollars the golden ticket to rebuild a life. Maybe they thought the cost of living was cheaper in Oklahoma. She certainly couldn’t stay in D.C. Maybe they figured she would be too busy fighting to make ends meet to think about whether justice had been served.

She didn’t know where she was going. She sure as hell wasn’t going back to Oklahoma. She’d said that for the agents bugging the rooms. Maybe she’d head to Florida. Dani liked warm weather and Florida was about as un-Oklahoma as she could think of. There was one stop she knew she had to make and she’d driven all night through West Virginia to get there, despite her injured leg and stiff shoulder begging for a break.

The rain let up enough to read the sign she’d parked in front of—the Lexington, Kentucky, Central Post Office. This was her third time in Lexington, her second at this location. Dani grabbed the duffel on the floor of the passenger side and hauled it up onto the seat. She fished around until she found the wide clay magnet painted green with a black horse running behind a white fence. In raised letters, chipped from banging around inside the bag, were the words
LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY—THE BLUEGRASS STATE.