“Promise you just one thing, Sara,” he said. “I don’t play Bennie’s game or anyone else’s but my own. We’re gonna get ourselves immortality, and we’re gonna keep our skins whole in the process—that’s the prime order of business. But if I get a chance to stomp Howards without losing any of my own flesh, I’ll do it. Bet your sweet ass I’ll do it! I hate that motherfucker more than you do—he’s trying to use me, and worse, he’s got the gall to try and use my woman against me. We’re gonna come out on top, you better believe it, and if we do in Bennie on the side, that’s gravy. But just gravy.”
“Jack…”
He felt warmth in her voice again, but behind it still the thin edge of that crazy Baby Bolshevik berserker determination, and for some reason he found himself digging it this time, digging his simple good-hearted chick, with her cuntfelt black and white silly-ass ideals should be protected, not stomped on, and in any decent world would be. But we’re all stuck in this world, and here, Sara, baby, there be tigers.
“Know something else?” he asked, feeling mind-circuit connections with his body begin to open, juices flowing into channels of think-feel integration, the skin-on-skin woman-warmth reality against him. “In about five minutes, I think I’ll ball you senseless like you never been fucked before. Whatever else you are or aren’t, you’re good inside, chick, and you deserve it.”
We all deserve it.
Gongingonging - gong! gong! gong!
“Ummph…” Jack Barron grunted, waking up in the disorienting darkness, a weight heavy against his chest. “What the…”
Gong! Gong! Gong!
Uuuh, he thought fuzzily, goddamned vidphone. He half-sat-up against the bedstead, Sara’s head sliding down his bare chest into his lap, made the connection, stopping the gonging that had been pounding behind his ears like a headache commercial. What the hell time is it? he wondered. What stupid bastard’s waking me up at this time of night?
Grumbling, still trying to shake the sleep out of his head, Barron saw that Sara was still asleep, fumbled the vidphone down on to the bed beside him, turned the custom volume-control knob down to the lowest setting, and squinted sourly at the face glowing up grayly at him from the vidphone screen, wanly phosphorescent in the darkness: long dark hair over a man’s thin-boned face. (Something familiar about this silly schmuck calling me up in the middle of the night, how the hell did he get my unlisted number…?)
“Hello, Jack,” a gravelly whisper from the vidphone said as Barron sleepily tried to place the face. (I know this cat, but who in hell is he?) “Brad Donner. Remember?” the vidphone image said.
Donner… Brad Donner… Barron thought. Berkeley or Los Angeles or someplace, old Baby Bolshevik type I haven’t seen in years… Yeah, LA, just before I got the show, friend of Harold Spence, some kind of brown-nosing brat-lawyer always talking about running for Congress or something… Jesus Christ, every prick I ever talked to in person thinks he can bug me any time he feels like it…
“You know what time it is, Donner?” Barron snarled, then lowered his voice, remembering Sara’s sleeping against his lap and, boy, what a night, am I sore! “ ’Cause I sure don’t. Must be four or five in the morning. Where’d you learn your manners, in the Gestapo?”
“Yeah, Jack,” Donner said. (Stop calling me Jack, you brown-nosed mother!) “I know it’s a bad hour, but I had to get to you right away. Got your number from Spence in LA, you remember, Harry was a big buddy of yours in those days?”
“Nobody’s my buddy at this hour,” Barron said. “If you’re asking me some favor you sure picked a stupid time to do it, Donner.”
“No favor, Jack,” Donner said. “I’ve been working here in Washington as public relations counselor to Ted Hennering these three years, anyway till he was killed…”
“Bully for you, Donner,” Barron grumbled. Figures that this putz with all his SJC bullshit would end up as flack for a lox like Hennering! Now with Hennering dead, I’m supposed to get him another job—at four a.m.? Jesus—
“I just got woke up myself,” Donner said, “by Ted’s widow Madge. She’s all shook, Jack, scared out of her head since Ted was killed. Came over to my place, woke me up, said she had to talk to you right away, and I think you’d better listen, after the hell you just gave Benedict Howards. Mrs Hennering?”
Donner’s face was replaced by what once must’ve been an old-fashioned “handsome matron” in her fifties, thick gray hair in semidisarray, prim little lips trembling, and wild frantic eyes staring up from the vidphone screen. What’s going on? Barron thought, coming full awake. Madge Hennering?
“Mr Barron…” Madge Hennering said in a voice that seemed accustomed to being snotty-patrician-calm but was now edged with shrill frenzy. “Thank God! Thank God! I didn’t know where to turn, what to do, who to go to, who I could possibly trust after they… after Ted… And then I saw your program, the things you said about Benedict Howards, and I knew you were one man I could trust, one man who couldn’t be involved with that murdering… You’ll believe me, won’t you, Mr Barron? You’ve got to believe me, you’ve got to tell the country how my husband died…”
“Take it easy, Mrs Hennering,” Barron said soothingly, slipping half-mechanically into Bug Jack Barron cool vidphone-circuit consciousness. “I know how you must feel, that terrible accident, but try to—”
“Accident!” Madge Hennering screamed, loud enough even at minimum vidphone audio to make Sara stir in his lap. “It was no accident. My husband was murdered. I’m sure he was murdered. There must’ve been a bomb on his plane. Benedict Howards had him killed.”
“What?” Barron grunted. She’s gibbering, he thought. Hennering was Bennie’s stooge all the way; nobody lost more when he died than Howards. This poor old bat’s gone round the bend, I gotta be a shrink too, at four in the a.m.?
“Don’t you think that’s a matter for the police?” he said. “Assuming, of course, that it’s true.” Get the hell off my aching back, lady!
“But I can’t go to the police,” she said. “There’s no evidence. Howards planned it that way. There’s nothing left of Ted or his plane… nothing…” She began to sob, then with an effort Barron could not help admiring, set her jaw, said, icy-calm: “I’m sorry. It’s just that I was the only witness, and I’ve got no evidence to back it up, and I just don’t know what to do.”
“Look,” Barron said wearily, “I realize it’s bad taste to talk politics at a time like this, but I guess I have to. Howards had no reason in the world to kill your husband, Mrs Hennering. Your husband was a cosponsor of the Foundation’s Freezer Bill, and it was an open secret that Howards was backing him for President. To be blunt, your husband was Howards’s too—er, ally. Howards had nothing to gain by killing him and everything to lose. Surely you know that.”