Or fire your ass, I thought unkindly.
‘Yeah, shit.’
This time he took the stairs fast, swearing all the way.
‘We’d better get moving,’ I said.
I tried seizing the refrigerator by placing my hands on either side of it. It was heavier than it looked. The problem was that I couldn’t angle it sideways even a few inches to help move it out of its slot. At best there was a half-inch on either side. Useless.
I assumed Pierce Rollins would be back soon.
Jenny came in. She’d been listening at the front door.
‘I’m going to get in the sink and see if I can get enough leverage to push it out a ways. You go back to the door.’
I crawled up into the sink. Three inches separated the back of the refrigerator from the wall. I stood up and shoved my right arm to the center of the thrumming machine. I pushed. It moved maybe an inch. But it moved. I wondered why it would move with relative ease from this end but not from the other.
I hopped down and then got on my hands and knees so I could see underneath the front of the refrigerator. The big machine had been set on small wheels for easy moving. The trouble was that somebody had put small wooden blocks in front of the wheels at midpoint, I guessed as some kind of precaution. Nobody wanted a runaway refrigerator, the stuff of a sci-fi movie. So I reached back through a century of dust and grime and probably rat shit to dislodge the small encumbrances that had made my job so difficult.
I washed my hands in the sink before I went back to work.
No problem this time. I extracted the Kelvinator and left it standing in the center of the kitchenette. It nearly filled the place. I had to slide around it to find room enough to kneel down and search for the trapdoor.
And there it was. Ancient brittle linoleum covered the three-by-three outline of it. A small rusted handle sat in the center of it. It was like lifting a lid to check on a pot roast.
A rat toilet was what I found inside. The dried kernels of fecal matter formed an inch-thick bed on the wooden floor of the hidey-hole. And lying on top of this bed was a manila envelope that had been folded in half and wrapped tight with gray duct tape. I would have been more excited if the rat droppings hadn’t suffused my senses and made me want to throw up.
I reached in and grabbed the package and crammed it into my suit coat pocket and then I did myself the favor of shutting the trapdoor again. This time I had no trouble getting the refrigerator back in place.
Then I heard the footsteps. The one and only Pierce was paying Jenny another love visit. The dear.
This time he’d brought his anger with him.
‘You let me in right now, babe. I’m not stupid. I know somethin’s goin’ on in there.’
‘I was just going to the bathroom, Pierce. God. I’m about done here anyway. I’ll be out in a minute.’
‘No. I wanna come in and get this thing over with. Ya know what I’m sayin’?’
She was frantic, gaping around as if she was lost and the roof was about to collapse on her in a second or two. There was only one way out and if we were seen, so be it.
I waved to her.
‘Just a minute, Pierce. Just let me put my lipstick on.’
‘No sense in that, babe. I’ll be takin’ it right off anyway.’ I imagined he was winking to himself as he said that.
I pointed to the bedroom and she nodded.
Many of these older windows have been painted shut. Fortunately, this wasn’t one of them. I got it about halfway up which was good enough. I helped Jenny through first and then I climbed through myself. I slid the window shut behind me and we began clanking our way down on a fire escape so old it swayed like an amusement ride.
When we were in the rental and driving away, I said, ‘Pierce is going to be pissed.’
‘“Pierce.”’ I heard his wife call him Lou one night.’
‘Figures.’
‘You find anything?’
‘Something. I don’t know what it is yet.’
‘Poor Jimmy. The last time I saw him, he was wearing that stupid Captain America jacket I bought him.’ She sounded as if she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. She made a sound that was a mixture of both.
We drove back to the hotel in silence. She found a radio station that was apparently all rap all the time. I had my Glock in the glove compartment. I wanted to kill that station real, real good.
After I pulled into the hotel parking lot, I said, ‘You’ve been a big help.’
‘Will you let me know what you found?’
‘I will.’ But I didn’t say when.
‘By the way, I saw his aunt or whatever she was at the press conference. She’s hilarious.’
‘That seems to be the consensus.’
She started to slide out the door. ‘My mother said that my father wrote Burkhart a thousand-dollar check last night and so did most of the people at the country club. I hope you can nail his ass. He’s even creepier than Pierce.’
I smiled. ‘You mean Lou?’
‘Yeah,’ she said and was gone.
As I was driving back to campaign headquarters I passed a billboard that came to me with the force of a religious revelation.
There she was in living black and white. Burkhart had his arm around her and it was only appropriate. The copy read: ‘Help me and my wife take our country back.’ BURKHART FOR CONGRESS.
It was the woman I’d seen snapping photos of Jim Waters.
ELEVEN
I got a cup of coffee at a Starbucks’ drive-through and then sat in the parking lot taking the duct tape off the package with my pocket knife. Was this what Jim Waters had died for? Had he been given the chance to tell his killer where it was? Or had the killer simply meant to kill him and wasn’t concerned with this small taped package? Then again — long shot — there was the possibility of a random killing.
I got it open. Inside the package was another package. This was wrapped in plain brown paper. But from the edges of the merchandise I had a pretty good guess what was waiting for me. One of two things.
The brown paper required only my fingers. I set it on the pile of duct tape and exterior paper. And there it was. I’d guessed a CD or a DVD. Turned out to be the latter. Nothing was written on the clear plastic container or on the DVD itself.
What had Waters gotten involved in? There are ops on both sides who break the law whenever they feel it’s necessary. Had Waters been spying for one of them on the other side?
I started thinking about the dinner I’d planned to have with Waters. Had he been going to tell me something about spying or this DVD? For most amateurs involved in crime there comes a point where panic sets in. Second thoughts, doubts, terror. For the career criminal and the professional political op, the game has rewards that are both monetary and psychological. It’s pretty cool pulling off stuff and getting away with it. A few years back an op from the other side had been charged in federal court for numerous violations of law. He was a past master at brochures that gave his clients deniability. They just magically appeared. Mostly they were sexual innuendo. He went in for quotes from people who claimed to have known the opponent at various times in his life. Both the quotes and the names were bullshit. But they kept the drumbeat of sleazy whispers going strong.
In a sleepy little town in Georgia he hired two white men gussied up in some kind of uniforms to misdirect the battered buses from a local black church. They told the drivers that there was a detour between the church and the polling places in town. They were directed to a dirt road that was laced with nails and broken glass and sharpened pieces of metal. The buses never made it to the polling places for the people to vote.
His greatest hit was phone jamming one of our candidate’s lines for a day and a half so our man couldn’t get
