F Paul Wilson - Novel 04 (2 page)

Which was how it should be. Snake
wouldn’t put up with any heroics or ad-libbing from this guy. Because
this was already one weird piece of business, what with the cash payoff coming
from a third party instead of the package’s family. The family—the
doc—would have to buy back his little package another way.

Get ready, doc, he thought as he
left Vanduyne behind and continued in the wake of the school bus. Your
routine’s in for a big change. Real soon.

Back in the house, John found his
mother standing before the kitchen TV, watching a replay of key moments from
last night’s Presidential address.

“… can break the backs
of these criminal empires. We can pull the economic rug out from under them by
denying them the tens of billions of dollars—not tens of millions, tens
of billions of dollars—they rake in annually from their illegal
activities. And we don’t need to mobilize our military, we don’t
need to mount an armed assault on them. All we need to do is change a few laws…”

She glanced up at him. “Has
that Tommy Winston gone crazy? Was he sipping at the schnapps before he went on
TV last night?” John could tell by the rhythm of her speech that she was
upset. His Dutch-American father, raised all his life in the south, had married
a girl from the old country. When she was upset her voice jumped half an octave
and a Dutch accent began to creep into her otherwise perfect English.

“No, Mom. He was
sober.”

“Then I am thinking he has
gone mad. It is the only explanation.”

John shrugged. “You
won’t have to go far in this town to find someone to agree with you. His
staff has been trying to talk him out of it, but you know Tom when he gets his
mind set.”

“You knew? Why didn’t
you tell your mother?”

“It was a secret. I got wind
of it last time I was at the White House but I never thought he’d go
through with it. Besides, they made me promise not to tell anyone.”

“Even your mother?”

“Even my mother.”

She had the remote in her hand and
started hitting the button, stopping on each channel just long enough to catch
the topic, then moving on.

“Look at this. On every
channel it is the same. That is all they are talking about. In Holland this
would not create such a fuss. But here…” She walked to the other
side of the island and freshened her cup of coffee. She held up the pot for
John but he shook his head.

“Tom expected this,” he
told her. “He’s figuring— hoping—the initial ruckus
will die down and people will stop emoting and begin thinking.”

“Let me tell you what
I
am thinking, John
Vanduyne,” she said—and using his first and last name meant she was
really annoyed. “I am thinking it is a good thing you are only renting
this house. Because your old friend Tommy Winston is going to be chased back to
Georgia
very
soon, along with everyone he brought with him.”

“I am thinking you could be
right,” John said.

The inbound traffic along
Massachusetts
Avenue
seemed heavier than usual, giving John
extra time to check out what the wonderful world of talk radio had to say about
Tom’s address to the nation last night. He hit scan and let his tuner
skip up the dial. Almost immediately he heard Tom’s voice.

“… so we’ve been
attacking the problem with the full force of all the federal government’s
law enforcement agencies and all the local police departments for a quarter of
a century now, and where has it gotten us? We’ve spent three-quarters of
a trillion dollars, jailed hundreds of thousands of people, but have we solved
the problem? No. It’s worse. Are the streets any safer now after all these
hundreds of billions of dollars? No. They are not. So what’s the
solution? More of the same… ?” He moved on, stopping whenever he
heard an angry voice.

Which was often.

Everyone was shocked, but not
everyone was enraged. Howard Stern seemed to think it was a great idea, long
overdue; Imus didn’t seem to know what to think.

But the call-in shows presented a
chorus of condemnation from everywhere on the political spectrum: right, left,
and center.

“Tommy, Tommy,” he said
softly. “What have you done?” As he crawled downtown, John’s
mind tuned out the radio. His thoughts drifted back to his boyhood and all the
years he had spent with the kid from the neighboring farm. From grammar school
in Freemantle through
Georgia
State
,
Tommy and he had been inseparable.

The things they did… God,
they were lucky to have survived.

Both were reckless, assuming like
most kids that they were immortal and serious harm happened to other
kids—ones who weren’t quite as smart and agile as they—but
Tommy had always had more of the daredevil in him. Always Tommy who thought up
the most outrageous stunts.

John remembered the time he
discovered he could drive his car down the wall of the sand pit outside town.
The pit’s walls looked steep and sheer, but one night when he was seeing
how close he could get to the edge with his old wreck of a Chevy—a junker
that was ready for the scrap heap—he got too close and the car began
sliding down the incline. To his relief, the walls were soft and slowed his
progress. He made it to the bottom in one piece and was able to drive out the
other side. He picked up Tom and damn near scared the crap out of him by
driving up to and over the edge.

Which gave Tom a wonderful idea.
The next night they got Eddie Hennessy, one tough s.o.b., in the back seat and
went cruising through the woods, supposedly looking for parkers to spook. While
they were driving, Tom bemoaned the fact that Bonnie Littlefield had left him
for another, and how miserable he was, and how he didn’t see much point
in going on living. He timed his despair so that it reached its deepest point
as they approached the sand pit. With a shout of “Shit! I can’t go
on without her!” he wrenched the wheel to the right and went over the
edge of the pit.

Well, Eddie Hennessy went into a
bug-eyed panic in the back of the car. He lunged forward, reached over the
front seat, and wrapped his arms around Tom’s face and neck, shouting
that he didn’t want to die and screaming, “Mama! Mama!” John
was laughing so hard he nearly wet himself, not realizing that Tom
couldn’t see a damn thing with Eddie’s arms wrapped around his
face. He lost control of the car; it slewed sideways and toppled over. Rolled
three times before it came to a stop at the bottom of the pit. No seat belts on
any of them, but somehow they came out with only a few scratches.

John shook his head. Yeah…
lucky to be alive.

They drifted apart after college:
Tom to Duke Law, John to Tufts School of Medicine. He’d finished his
residency and was just starting as an internist when he got a call from Tom:
“I’m thinking of running for Congress. Want to help?”
Starting then, John had played a part in every one of Tom’s campaigns.
The disintegration of John’s marriage coincided with the beginning of the
Winston presidency. When Tom offered him a post in the Health and Human
Services Agency, John jumped at the chance.

So here he was, inching through the
traffic around
Dupont Circle
.
It finally loosened up on Connecticut Avenue, but instead of heading for HHS,
John continued downtown. He was due at the White House.

“You don’t have to be
here Mac,” Paulie said as the barber fastened the plastic drape around
his neck.

“I mean, I know how to get a
haircut on my own.” Snake stiffened at Paulie calling him
“Mac”—he should know better than to use any sort of name when
there was a third party in the room. He forced himself to relax. Mac was such a
common term. Could mean anything.

Probably what Ronald
McDonald’s friends called him. He didn’t like it, but he guessed it
was okay… just so long as Paulie didn’t call him Snake. But how
could he? Only packages’ families and friends ever heard that name. To
Paulie he was simply Mac. Not Mike, not MacLaglen… just plain Mac.

Snake leaned his chair back against
the wall of the private cubicle and stared at Paulie Dicastro—a stocky
guy of average height, thirtyish with long red hair and beard, blue eyes, and
fair skin. The least Italian-looking Italian he’d ever met. Snake had booked
him with one of these upscale men’s hair stylists on Connecticut Avenue
because he wanted a quality job. Who the hell knew where Paulie would have
ended up if the choice had been left to him?

Snake had hired him for jobs
through the years. For all his whining, Paulie was a stand-up guy. He followed
instructions, and that was the number-one priority. Even when things had got a
little dicey with the last package, Paulie had hung in there. Poppy had been a
little freaked, but it all worked out. Usually Paulie and Poppy just baby-sat
the packages until the buyer came through with the ransom, but this time Paulie
was going to do the actual snatch.

Thus the beard. Snake had told him
two months ago to stop dyeing his hair and start letting his face grow. It
looked pretty shaggy now, but the guy with the scissors would trim it up nice
and neat. And tonight, after the package was safely tucked away, Paulie would
shave it off. Anybody looking for a guy with a beard wouldn’t give him a
second look.

Next step after the haircut was to
get him into normal looking clothes. Paulie and that girl of his both had this
thing for black. Look at Paulie now: black T-shirt, black leather pants, black
fingerless gloves, black boots, long black coat—Paulie even dyed his hair
jet black most of the time. And Poppy… she had these straight, severe
bangs and shoulder-length pink-burgundy hair that looked like it had been cut
with a laser; she dressed in slinky, low-cut black dresses with spider-web lace
down the arms and fishnet stockings. Even had black lipstick and fingernails.
Looked like a vampire hooker. A couple of tattoos high up on her arms that
Snake had never got a close look at and loads of earrings. Christ, she must
have had ten in her left ear alone last time he saw her.

And if that wasn’t enough,
she had a nostril ring and an eyebrow ring. Who knew where else she had a ring.
Between the two of them the only thing that wasn’t black was their skin
and Poppy’s hair—which probably was genuinely black when it
wasn’t dyed that weird color.

Snake didn’t get it. He
wouldn’t be caught dead in Paulie’s get-up. Like carrying a
flashing neon sign that said Look at me! Hell with that.

“I’m footing the bill,
Paulie. Just watching over my investment.”

“Yeah, but I feel like a
little kid. I mean, what next? A booster seat?” Snake permitted himself a
smile. Paulie was never completely happy unless he had something to whine about.

“I’m just making sure
that—What’s your name again?” Snake said to the
barber—oops, sorry: hair stylist.

“Raynoldo,” said the
stylist. He had a delicate build and a delicate mustache and dark hair slicked
back tight against his scalp.

“Yeah. Raynoldo. I just want
to make sure Raynoldo here does it right. And that means off with the
ponytail.”

“Aw, Christ!” Paulie
said. “Do we really have to do that? I mean, isn’t that like
goin‘ kinda far?” Snake ignored the question. The ponytail
wasn’t up for discussion.

“And I want to make sure the
beard looks good too,” he said. “Neat is the word. Hear that,
Raynoldo? Neat.”

“Yes sir,” Raynoldo
said. He gave Snake a quick, delicate smile. “Neat it will be.”
Probably thinks me and Paulie’ve got a thing going, Snake thought.

“The beard I don’t care
about,” Paulie said, still whining. “I mean, I only grew it for the
gig. But the tail, man. Plenty of chauffeurs got ponytails. I can—”
Sudden fury overcame Snake.

The goddamn jerk! He said
chauffeur!

He catapulted out of his seat and
pulled the scissors from Raynoldo’s fingers. He grabbed Paulie’s
ponytail, yanked it taut, and snipped it off about two inches from his head.

“You talk too much,
Paulie,” he said through his teeth, handing the scissors back to Raynoldo
and tossing Paulie’s hair into his lap. “End of discussion.”
Paulie glared at him but said nothing.

Good, Snake thought. Just so long
as we know who’s boss here.

He felt the rage cool as quickly as
it had flared, the way it always did. One second he was ready to kill; another
second and it was as if nothing had happened.

He didn’t like the outbursts,
but sometimes they served multiple purposes. Like now: He wouldn’t have
to listen to any complaints from Paulie about the change of clothes waiting for
him. He was going to be dressed right for the pickup this morning.
Chauffeur’s livery all the way.

He glanced at his watch. Time was
a-wasting.

“All right,” he said to
Raynoldo. “Let’s get going. Make him nice and respectable looking,
and make it quick. We’re on a schedule here.”

“… so let’s
remove the outlaw glamour from drugs. Let’s make drugs dull, and
let’s portray people who use them as dumb. One of the definitions of
stupidity is the inability to learn from experience. Nothing we’ve tried
has worked. It’s long past time for a change of tactics…”
John twisted the knob and cut off Tom’s voice as he hit another major
snag near Pennsylvania Avenue. Cars were backed up on 17th Street. When he
reached
Lafayette Square
he
saw why.

Hundreds of people were gathered on
the grass, setting up tables and tents wherever they found an open patch, one
even holding an impromptu prayer meeting on a nearby corner. Across the park,
on the far side of the section of
Pennsylvania Avenue
in front of the White House that had been blocked off and turned into a
pedestrian mall in 1995, he could see chanting, sign-carrying protesters
marching in front of the wrought-iron fence.