What confronted me was little more than a trail. If you drove faster than ten miles per hour your car turned into a carnival ride. You could crack your skull on the roof.
About a quarter mile past this in a shallow valley a forlorn mutt of impressive size crouched next to a large boulder. He chose to run away when he saw me. Maybe twenty yards from him stood one of those venerable aluminum Airstream trailers that might well date back six or seven decades. The damned things lasted.
Just as I was leaving my car and making my way to the Airstream I heard a motor come to a stop on the road behind me. There was a windbreak about a city block from the gate making it difficult to see the road.
I always packed a utility flashlight in any vehicle I was driving. I wished I’d brought a more powerful one for tonight. I swung the light back and forth over the brown dead grass that had been used as a dumping ground for everything from beer cans to a white pair of women’s panties.
Another noise from somewhere on the road jostled me. I gaped behind to see a sedan of some kind driving faster than it should have eastward.
I’d gotten spooked because I was afraid I’d find Dave in the trailer. I’d been around my share of dead people before. It’s never exactly your preferred source of entertainment but you become accustomed to the look and various shapes and stenches of corpses.
No, my worry was that if I found him I’d have to call Cindy and tell her. And that I wasn’t up to.
Before going into the Airstream I took a paranoid look in all directions. There was a farmhouse but it was a good quarter mile away. There was a silo and another farmhouse in the opposite direction at about the same distance. Behind the Airstream was a line of pines and the sound of the river. Then I spent a few minutes studying the road.
There was wind and a hint of cold rain and somewhere in the gathering clouds was the sound of a passenger jet.
Isolation.
Or maybe not.
He could be anywhere, the driver of the van.
He could have field glasses on me right now. Or, if he was familiar with the property, he could have swung wide and hidden himself in the pines behind the Airstream.
The Glock was stuffed into my belt. But not even the Glock comforted me when I realized that the trailer wasn’t locked. Not a good sign. There was a small window on the right side of the door. I went up to it and shone my light inside.
My first impression was that the small interior had been tossed. Somebody had been looking frantically for something. But as I followed the beam I realized that, no, this was just the way some men lived. No mom, no wifey around, what the hell.
I saw a crusted pizza box with a sock resting on it. A men’s magazine open to a page of a young woman pleasuring herself with a vibrator. A tiny table overflowing with beer cans and bottles. A rusty basin on another tiny table with dirty scabbed dishes mounted high in it. Clothes strewn everywhere. More beer cans and bottles forming minefields for anybody moving around in the dark, especially if they were drunk. Sections of newspaper had been flung across a ripped mini-couch and there were numerous sacks from Hardee’s, McDonald’s, Burger King and others.
Paradise.
I probably wouldn’t have to call Cindy tonight unless it was to tell her that her husband was on track to be in the Slob Hall of Fame, but she probably already knew that.
I went inside, still wondering why Dave would have left the trailer unlocked.
No need to mention that the place stank.
No need to mention that I had to be careful not to lodge my foot on a beer bottle and go sailing away.
No need to mention that in this diminutive garbage can there was no body. My flashlight check through the window had pretty much guaranteed me of that.
The most important thing I hadn’t seen through the window was a stack of reprinted articles on the floor that mostly concerned overthrowing the government. Several of them were illustrated with photographs of various kinds of automated weaponry.
But... nothing.
I looked for evidence that he’d been here recently but I didn’t find it. All the dead cigarette butts told me that he was a heavy smoker but not even the smoke smelled fresh.
A wasted trip.
Fatigue set in, as if a switch had been flipped.
I went outside, greeting the night air and the mournful moon.
I started walking back to my car and, as I did so, I saw somebody just clear the sizable boulder and start running away in the direction of the road.
She was definitely fast. She.
I knew I couldn’t catch her but I started running anyway. And there, in the moonlight, she made the mistake of looking over her shoulder.
Black jeans, black crew-neck sweater.
Running.
In that moment when she turned so I could glimpse her face, I saw who she was. Showalter’s eye candy. Karen Foster.
Not long after I heard the van engine start and she was gone.
Twenty-One
I had breakfast in my office, my usual bagel with cream cheese and black coffee.
I’d gotten there early so I could spend an hour catching up on my shop’s other campaigns. No surprises, which was good news for some and bad news for others. Nationally, my party was looking bad in four key states. There was a danger we could lose the Senate.
I tried not to think about that particular piece of bad news. But that was just a prelude. The real bad news came when I stumbled across a bulletin on the local newspaper’s website. Police Chief Aaron Showalter will hold a televised press conference at 10.30 this morning.
Abby also got in early, as usual. She said, ‘I can see by your frown that you’ve heard what Showalter’s up to.’
‘We need to stay calm. I have cyanide capsules for both of us if he turns on us.’
‘Well, just give me mine now.’
I had one large bite of my bagel left. She picked it up and ate it. ‘My buddy at Channel 3 says two different reporters want to pick up on the “staged” thing but that the news director won’t let them until there’s some kind of proof.’
I then told her about Cindy Fletcher and Grimes.
‘Line two, Dev. It’s Ted Bradshaw and he sounds upset.’
‘Gosh,’ I said to Abby. ‘Ted Bradshaw upset? Life is just full of surprises.’
He bellered into the phone, ‘Have you heard about this fucking press conference?’
The blue suit looked new, the hair had been cut and the body language was somewhat more studied and dramatic. TV can control you or you can control it. Somewhere along the line Showalter had learned that immortal truth.
He stood in front of a podium covered with media microphones. The setting was the large marble central floor of the county courthouse. Then the press conference started.
Showalter: ‘I apologize for not holding this press conference sooner, but as you can imagine, the task force has been busy. We worked till nearly one o’clock this morning.’
Reporter One: ‘The big question we all want to ask is why you think the assassin’s — or would-be assassin’s — bullets went so wild? He wasn’t that far away, and from the ballistics report the task force put out, he used a powerful rifle. Do you think he just got scared?’
Showalter: ‘We can’t know why they went wild. There’s certainly the possibility that at the last minute he got spooked by what he was going to do. There’s also the possibility that he was an amateur and that he had a lot of anger but not a lot of skill.’
Reporter Two: ‘How about the possibility that he just wanted to scare her?’
Showalter: ‘That’s certainly a possibility, too.’