“What about the Senator’s car?”
“In the shop, and in this storm, no way can we get a taxi. If you don’t come get us, we’ll lose the chance to get the Sudan bill on TV and spin the PR we need to win.”
Rain drummed the roof of Joel’s car. Flooded his wind-shield.
“Yeah,” he said into the cell phone, “Ness’s got to take this ride.”
Joel double-parked in front of the Senator’s town house.
Two men hurried through the rain to his car. The Senator wore a trenchcoat, jumped in the front seat. Dick tumbled into the back.
“Where’s your umbrella?” said Joel.
“Somebody else always has one,” said the Senator.
“Go!” said Dick. “We’re going to be late.”
Joel stepped on the gas.
Ca-lump.
Dick said: “What was that?”
The rearview mirror showed Dick turning to look toward the car’s trunk.
“D.C. streets,” blurted Joel. “Roughest roads around.”
Joel steered his car into a right-turn-on-red. Water wooshed under his tires. Potholes slammed the wheels. The wipers went whump whump.
“Turn on the defrost,” ordered the Senator. “You can barely see.”
The engine fan whirred an invisible wind up the fogged windshield.
“Look out!” yelled Dick.
A yellow smear slid past their surging car.
“You almost hit that cop!” said Dick.
A neon red starburst filled Joel’s windshield.
“What the hell?” said Dick as Joel slammed on the brakes.
Three Capitol Hill cops in yellow rain slickers blocked the road. One cop stabbed a popped flare into the wet mirror blacktop. Two others stalked toward the halted vehicle.
Joel lowered his window. Spray from the storm wet his face.
“Sir, shut off your vehicle!” yelled the older cop, while the younger one kept his right hand thrust inside his yellow slicker. “Now!”
A laser dot of red light refracted through the windshield to kiss Joel’s chest.
Joel shifted to park and killed his engine. The red dot danced on Joel’s chest as two cops moved to his side of the
“Sir!” yelled the lead cop. “The officer back there ordered you to halt.”
“I didn’t see him. I’m driving Senator Ness.”
The older cop snapped a flashlight beam on the Senator’s face.
Gonna be all right, thought Joel. Gonna make it now
“He’s him,” said the cop’s younger partner.
“Sorry Senator,” said the ranking officer, “I didn’t see you, but… Doesn’t matter. Homeland Security just bumped us up to ORANGE Alert.”
“Fuck Homeland Security!” yelled the Senator. “This is Capitol Hill, I’m a Senator, we’re in charge, let us pass.”
“Sir…our scenarios include a Senator being snatched in a terrorist attack.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“So is four jetliners being hijacked into flying bombs. I’m sorry, but you entered our secured zone so now you all have to step out of the vehicle before you proceed.”
Joel yelled: “In this damn storm?”
“Come on,” said Dick. “We can still make it.”
The black Senate staffer stepped out of the car, kept his hands in plain sight.
“Fuck me.” The Senator stepped into the rain.
Through the water-blurred windshield, Joel saw three more yellow-slickered cops march toward the car. One carried an umbrella. One carried a pole with a mirror for examining the underside of vehicles.
The senior cop told the driver: “Everyone must exit the vehicle.”
Joel Rudd stood on the road, arms out like Jesus, face turned up to the falling rain.
Senator Carl Ness stood under an umbrella held by a yellow-slickered cop and, like his law-writing aide Dick Harvie, stared at the Capitol Hill wizard they worked with who suddenly seemed to have gone insane.
“Sir, we need to pop the trunk. Check it. Then you can go.”
“No,” said Joel. “I’m going nowhere. I’m already there.”
The older cop said: “We’re just following the rules.”
Joel turned his flooded face toward that guardian of law and order. “Rules. I know about them. In my trunk you’ll find a body.”
What?” chorused the cop, the U.S. Senator, and the legislative director.
“A lobbyist named Frank Greene. Shot dead.”
Rain beat down on them. Flares sputtered. Police radios crackled routine reports.
Until a cop opened Joel’s trunk, announced: “He’s right.”
The younger cop slid his hand back inside his yellow slicker.
An officer lifted his radio, but his sergeant ordered: “Keep this off the air.”
Senator Ness yelled at Joeclass="underline" “What have you done?”
Joel stared at the man he knew so well, had served so long. A thousand calculations churned behind the Senator’s frantic expression. Through the raging storm, Joel saw the spirit inside that man as clearly as he saw the spirit in himself.
Carl Ness reached inside his suit and pulled out a white sack.
“Do you see what you’ve done?” said the politician. “Do you see what you’ve put at risk? Ten thousand lives and you stand there flushing them down the drain.”
A cop exchanged his radio for a cell phone.
The Senator shook the white sack. “Now it’ll take all I’ve got to make this happen.”
Suddenly Joel saw it all through the pouring rain. Cell phone. Fingerprints. The cell phone in the cop’s hand as he reported in. The third cell phone on the Senator’s desk when there should have been only two. A sequence where a bulldog and a politician set up a “shaky” crusader with a desperate dream girl who they’d schooled. Joel positioned to structure the corrupt deal over the Senator’s “opposition” in front of witnesses Trudy and Dick. If anyone ever cried corruption, the guilty fingerprints would belong to fall guy Joel. The Senator’s “independent” campaign committee set up to reap a windfall from the contract winners. The payoff to Joel and Lena was chump change to distract him, keep him quiet, drive more nails into his frame.
The white sack waited in the Senator’s fist for what Joel would say.
The whole, unprovable, public truth wouldn’t save Joel. Would cut the balls off a Senator so that he kept his job but had no power. Would thus sentence 10,000 people to starvation. Destroy a woman desperate to be free.
Capitol Hill’s bottom line: It’s what you can get done.
Thunder boomed. Joel never saw the flash. His words tasted like smoke. “The creep got shot because he welched on paying me for fixing the warplane vote.”
“Wait,” said the youngest cop. “Shouldn’t we read him his rights?”
No one can prove me wrong, thought Joel. Or will want to.
Clarity shimmered through the hissing red glow of the flares, the spinning blue-and-blood lights on arriving police cars, the storm-slick skull-white glow off the Capitol dome. Joel envisioned Lena grimly marching through a D.C. airport. He wondered where she’d go. The color of her hair.
“My fall!” cried Joel.
“What’d he say?” yelled the older cop.
Whose partner yelled back: “He said it was his fault!”
But Senator Ness’s face said he’d heard Joel’s offer. A look of pure understanding passed between them.
Like the noble boss of a doomed sinner, the Senator told Joeclass="underline" “I’ll do all I can.”
Joel’s nod sealed their redemptive bargain.
“Cuff him,” ordered the older cop.
Bare steel clamped around Joel’s wrists.
Dick Harvie lunged toward the prisoner who’d taught him how democracy works.