Then I drove over to Maryland to visit the lock shop I owned with my partner, Willie “the Wire” Varner. He was a black man about twenty years older than me, and had been up the river twice. Now reformed, he was my very best friend. Don’t ask me why a two-time loser should be the only guy in the world I really trust — besides Jake Grafton — but he is. Maybe because he’s so much like me. As I unlocked the front door and went into the shop, I realized that I couldn’t tell him about the bomb Molina dropped, but I did have news.
Willie was in the back room of the shop wiring up the motherboard of an alarm system for installation in an old house. The final innings of an Orioles game were on the radio. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey. Stopped by to tell you, I quit the agency this evening.”
He stared. “No shit?”
“Honest injun. I am not going back.”
“They give you any severance?”
“Uh, no.”
He turned back to the alarm system. “They goin’ to be lookin’ for you, Carmellini?”
“Naw. It’ll be days before they figure out that I’m gone. Maybe weeks.”
“Want to tell me about it?”
“Just did. All I can.”
He straightened up and gave me another look. “And I thought I had a monopoly on fuckin’ up my life. If you ain’t gonna tell me nothin’, just why the hell did you drive over here tonight?”
I was at a loss for words. Why did I? I knew the answer, of course — because I needed some company — but I wasn’t going to tell him that.
“Don’t think you’re gonna start workin’ here on salary,” Willie declared. “We ain’t got barely enough work for me. We divide it up and neither one of us will be eatin’.”
I nodded. Stood looking around. Maybe I should just give Willie a bill of sale for my half of the place and be done with it. He would never leave the metro area, and I wasn’t staying. I didn’t know where I was going, but I did know I wasn’t staying in Washington.
I decided that was a problem for another day. Said good night and left.
I wasn’t ready for my apartment. Hell, I had nothing better to do, so I headed for Jake Grafton’s condo in Rosslyn. I had certainly been there often enough these last few years, so I knew the way. I was going to try to find a parking place on the street, but instead decided to cruise by the building and see who was sitting outside in cars. Sure enough, a half block from the entrance there was a parked car with two men in it. They were of a type. FBI. After a while you get a feel for them. Trim, reasonably fit, wearing sports coats to hide a concealed carry, maybe a tie. Who, besides middle-level government employees, dresses like that at ten o’clock at night?
I decided I didn’t give a damn if they saw and photographed me. There were no parking places on the street, so I steered the Benz into the parking garage and found a spot on the third deck. Took the stairs down, crossed the street, and went into Grafton’s building.
Grafton buzzed the door open and I went up. Knocked and he opened the door. Callie was sitting in the kitchen. The admiral led me there and asked, “Want a drink?”
“Sure. Anything with alcohol.”
Callie Grafton was a tough lady, but she looked about the way I felt. Bad. “Tommy,” she said, trying to smile.
I realized then that coming over to Grafton’s was a really bad idea. But I couldn’t just walk out. The admiral opened the fridge and handed me a bottle of beer. I unscrewed the top and sipped it. “Car out front with two men in it. Maybe FBI.”
“A dirty gray sedan? They followed me home,” he said.
“So are you going in tomorrow?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said, scrutinizing my face.
“Not me. I’m done. Gonna hit the road tomorrow. I think the time has come for Mrs. Carmellini’s boy Tommy to go on to greener pastures.”
The admiral didn’t say anything to that. Mrs. Grafton hid her face behind her tea cup.
On the way over here I wondered if Grafton had told his wife about the conversation with Sal Molina. From the silence and the way she sat looking at the dark window, I knew that he had.
“I shouldn’t have come,” I said. “I’ll take this road pop with me to remember you by, Admiral. Good-bye.” I stuck out my hand. He shook it.
“Mrs. Grafton.” She rose from the table and hugged me. Fiercely.
Then I left. Pulled the door shut until the lock clicked. I took the elevator down, put the half-empty beer bottle in my side pocket, crossed the street, and climbed the stairs.
The next morning, Tuesday, August 23, I was wide awake at five in the morning. The sky was starting to get pink in the east. I hopped out of bed, showered, shaved, put on jeans and a golf shirt, and got busy packing. Everything had to go in my car, which was a 1975 Mercedes. Guns and ammo, of course, plus some of my clothes. No kitchen utensils, pots, pans, dishes, or coffee pot. No television or radio. I did decide to take my laptop and charger, but I left the printer.
When I had made my selections and the stuff was stacked in the middle of the little living area, I began shuttling stuff down to the car in the elevator.
When I got the car loaded, I stood in the middle of my apartment and took stock. Nothing else here I wanted.
I wrote a short letter to the landlord and enclosed my key and building pass. He could have everything left in the apartment. The stuff in the refrigerator I emptied into a garbage bag and carried down with me.
In light of what happened subsequently, perhaps I should have been worried about the country and martial law and what was to come, and perhaps I was on a subconscious level. I must have suspected the future might be grim or I wouldn’t have worried about the guns and ammo. Still, after I packed the car, I was thinking about what I was going to do with the rest of my life.
It was a nice problem. I had daydreamed about afterward for years, after the CIA, but that eventuality was always somewhere ahead in a distant, hazy future. Now, boom, the future was unexpectedly here, and it wasn’t hazy.
Of course I didn’t have to plot my next fifty or sixty years today. I decided that this day would be a good one to head west, following the sun. A few weeks of backpacking in Idaho or Montana would suit me right down to the ground.
Already I was late for work — at Langley — as if I were ditching school. Feeling rather bucked with life, I drove to a breakfast place in a shopping mall and ordered an omelet and coffee. I scanned a newspaper while I waited for my omelet. The journalists had dug up a lot more on the dead terrorists. They were from Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. The experts were speculating on where and how they acquired their weapons, all of which were legally for sale in many states in America. Two more of the Saturday gunshot victims had died, bringing the grand total of deaths to 173.
At 9:45 I was standing in line in the lobby of the suburban Virginia bank where I had my accounts. When I reached the window, I wrote a check for the amount in my checking account, leaving only a thousand bucks in the account to cover outstanding checks.
“And how would you like this, Mr. Carmellini?” The teller was a cute lady wearing an engagement and wedding ring. The best ones are always snagged early.
“Cash, please. Half fifties and half hundreds.”
She tittered. “Oh, good heavens. Since it’s over ten thousand, we must fill out a form. Are you sure you don’t want a cashier’s check?”
Titterers set my teeth on edge. On the other hand, she wasn’t still swimming around in the gene pool looking for a man. I silently wished her husband luck. “Pretty sure,” I replied. “Cash, please. And while you are at it, I want to close out my savings account. I’ll take that in cash too.”