“Hi, Mr. Ray,” the kid said.
Ray sighed for about the billionth time and said, for about the billionth time, “I told you not to call me mister.”
“Okay, Billy.” Ray knew that wouldn’t last long. It never did. If the kid was anything, he was respectful. Alejandro Jesus y Maria C de Baca looked like he was about fourteen years old. Slight, slim, dark haired, dark eyed, always smiling, always cheerful, fresh out of spook school and so goddamned respectful that he sirred waiters. It was clear to Ray that Nephi Callendar, their boss at the Secret Service, had teamed them up specifically to annoy Ray.
“Say, mi—uh, Billy, President Barnett wants to see you, right away.”
Ray sighed. God, he hoped that it wasn’t for another prayer session. “Did he say why?”
The kid shook his head. “Nope. I was with him when he saw something in the paper that got him real excited, and he wanted to speak to you right away.”
Ray sighed again. He caught himself, realizing that he was doing entirely too much of that lately. He looked down at his lunch. He wasn’t hungry now, anyway.
“You want some lunch, kid?” Ray asked his colleague.
“I already ate, sir, uh, Billy. But it’d be a shame to waste all that food. I can box it up and drop it down at the homeless shelter after our shift.”
Ray nodded.
“You do that,” he said. He left Loaves and Fishes and strolled through Barnett’s vision of Heaven on Earth to his headquarters centrally located on the top floor of The Angels’ Bower hotel. He had to cut through the part of the park called New Jerusalem to reach it. As always, the Via Dolorosa was crowded with tourists, so Ray took the back way that looped around the rides, exhibits, and concessions. He went by the twenty-foot high statues of the Twelve, wondering, not for the first time, how they’d decided which apostle was bald, which one had a big honker, and where in the Hell Judas was. He could hear the faint screams of the faithful as the Rapture took them to Heaven and then dropped down to the Pit with a stomach-flipping hundred and eighty degree turn that piled on over three gees of acceleration as it fell forty stories straight down to Hell.
Roller coasters, Ray thought disgruntledly. Maybe he should take a ride. Put some excitement into his life.
It was, he had to admit, his own fault. He’d smart-assed his way here, calling his boss “Nehi” one time too many. Before the ink had dried on his orders he’d found himself, accompanied by the kid, exiled to the suburbs of Branson-fucking-Missouri to wet nurse an ex-President as he whiled away the years running his crazy-ass theme park in the middle of redneck Heaven. Of course, by law every ex-President was accorded Secret Service protection, but the odds of Barnett being stalked by an assassin in the Peaceable Kingdom were about as great as him running a Pagans Get-In-Free weekend special.
It was a Hell of a way to wrap up his career, but not entirely unexpected. Ray had ruffled too many feathers along the way, and not just by being a smart ass. He’d played a major role in breaking the Card Shark conspiracy and saving Jerusalem—the real one, not Barnett’s Disneyfied version—from getting a-bombed to Hell, but it had cost him not only April Harvest, the only woman he’d ever come close to loving, but also a meaningful career in the government. As it turned out, the government had been riddled with Card Sharks, and no one was exactly pleased that Ray helped expose that little fact. Sometimes Ray wondered if they’d rooted them all out. Probably not. Probably some unexposed Sharks were still pulling strings. And that had been the problem. Ray had embarrassed the string-pullers and decision-makers, the powers behind the throne and the voices in charge. Publicly he was a hero. Privately he was just another wild carder who knew too much. A wild carder with a reputation for flying off the handle and running his mouth when peeved.
That explained the next seven years spent in the shit holes of the world, but at least the tedium of those years had been broken up by episodes of real excitement. Among other things, he’d helped the Muhajadeen against the Soviets, and when the Soviet Union went to pieces he helped the people of Afghanistan against the Muhajadeen. He served a tour in Peru, teaching the Shining Path the real meaning of fear. He was on the team of international aces who went into Baghdad and snatched the tin-plated dictator Saddam Hussein, catching him cowering in his gold-fixtured bathtub, after Saddam had kicked the U.N. weapon inspectors out of his crappy excuse for a country.
Ray hadn’t minded the lack of recognition or applause. He’d spent seven years doing what he did best, kicking ass if occasionally forgetting to take down names. But now, he was rotting in paradise.
He breezed into Barnett’s office. Sally Lou, Barnett’s blonde receptionist, looked up from her magazine. She was sleek and sexy looking, and Ray suspected that Barnett had hired her for something other than her typing skills. She could have put some of that long-sought excitement back into his life, but it seemed to Ray that as far as she was concerned, he was just another one of the hired help.
“The President—”
“Yeah, I know.” He waved as he strode by. He paused at Barnett’s door, nodding at the Secret Service guys standing to either side of it, nats in dark suits and sunglasses, for Christ’s sake, knocked once and went on in before its occupant could reply. What more could they do to him for being a smart ass? Send him to Antarctica? Even that would be an improvement over his current situation.
“You wanted to see me?” Ray asked, stopping before the big desk and the man behind it, who was reading a newspaper spread out on its teak surface.
Barnett smiled. “Yes, I did,” he said.
Leo Barnett was still a handsome man, even after serving eight years as President of the United States. He was tall and still slim even though he was pushing sixty, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and dimpled as a baby’s butt. Ray couldn’t help but wonder how he did it. Ray had been with the Justice Department for almost twenty-five years. He’d spent a good portion of that time body-guarding presidents and presidential candidates, and he’d noticed early on that the presidency, even just running for the office, tended to wear a man down. It put bags under his eyes, creases in his face, and dye in his hair. Not Barnett, though. He looked as wrinkle-free today as he did the day he ascended to the office. Ray wondered what his secret was.
“Have you seen the papers today, Billy?” Barnett asked, slapping the open newspaper with an immaculately manicured hand.
Ray shook his head. He didn’t bother reading the news. He was more used to making it.
“It seems as if a new ace has joined our constellation of heroes.”
“Is that so?” Ray asked with a modicum of interest.
“Indeed it is,” Barnett said, and looked down at the paper spread out in front of him and began to read. “...‘Ralph Holstedt, partner and star performer in the famous Siegfried and Ralph magic act featuring white tigers and other dangerous beasts was severely mauled during yesterday’s matinee performance when a half-grown male tiger playfully grabbed him by the throat and dragged him from the stage. Fortunately for the performer, John Fortune, son of the beauteous ace Peregrine and the mysterious Fortunato, who has spent the last sixteen years in seclusion in Japan, was in attendance and for the first time publicly revealed his own ace. Fortune, who to all accounts was glowing a mysterious but pleasing shade of orange-yellow, took the performer in his arms and almost instantly healed the wound threatening the magician’s life. The newly-revealed ace, a good-looking boy in his mid-teens, politely refused all requests for interviews and was seen leaving in the company of a man who witnesses said bore an uncanny resemblance to 1940’s actor Alan Ladd.’” Barnett looked up at Ray. “What do you think of that?”