need to cut him down first chance.”
Pushing these thoughts aside, I made my way down the street and stepped into a Korean grocery . . . a place as dark and dirty as a gopher’s hole. The shelves had a caked-on layer of dust that hadn’t felt the underside of a wet cloth in months. I picked up a box of Saran Wrap and then dropped the box on to the ground, like it had slipped from my fingers. As quick as lightning, I snatched the gun from its holster and slipped it into the crack between the lowest shelf and the floor. Same with the serrated knife. They might need a strong cleaning when I retrieved them later, but I wasn’t worried that the Korean woman in the back was going to find them while sweeping. I didn’t think that floor had seen a broom in ages. With the knife and gun tucked out of sight, I picked up the box like nothing had happened, took it to the front, paid for it so as not to raise suspicion, and headed back into the sunlight.
The entrance to the courthouse funneled into a metal detector, marked by three security guards and a red rope cordon. I put my recently purchased Saran Wrap and keys into a tray and then walked through the detector, eyes cast low. I didn’t look the security guard in the eye as he handed back my belongings, just took them perfunctorily and headed toward a cluster of elevators where a small crowd had congregated. From my file, I knew Judge Janet Stephens’s courtroom was on the sixth floor. I also knew Judge Janet Stephens never took the elevator; she always climbed the stairs, part of her exercise regimen.
Just then, a curt voice from near the elevators shook the lobby: “Jury duty, report to the sixth floor. End of the hall on the right. Jury duty, sixth floor, end of the hall on the right.”
I scanned the crowd, a varied group of vapid stares, people who looked like they’d rather be anywhere else. The kind of crowd you could sit with all day and no one would remember you.
The jury room was huge, and there were easily five hundred people inside. We were supposed to fill out cards and hand them in to the female administrator up near the front of the room, and then she would draw names for each pool. I took a seat in the back of the room without filling out a card. The only thing that concerned me was remaining anonymous and keeping an eye on the clock. Eleven thirty. I knew from the file that on most days, Janet Stephens called recess at eleven thirty.
The courtroom emptied at three minutes past the hour. I had been loitering for thirty minutes, trying not to look out of place, but it wasn’t difficult to blend into the surroundings. There were three courtrooms on the sixth floor and people scurried to and from each like rodents trying to stay out of the light. Nobody wanted to be seen and nobody wanted to make eye contact with anyone else. The hall remained as quiet as a museum; the only sounds were the occasional clicking of a woman’s heels, some defendant’s wife or girlfriend trying to look her best for her man and the jury. Everyone spoke in whispers, like somehow, if they showed deference to this place, they might find themselves treated fairly.
The occupants of the courtroom—the jurors, attorneys, stenographers, bailiffs—all made their way to the elevator bank soon after the doors to the courtroom thrust open, heading out for their designated one-hour lunch. I moved over to the stairwell and disappeared i nside.
Quickly, I moved to the fifth-floor landing and waited. I would need a little luck, just a little.
After a few minutes, I heard the stairwell door open above me. From Janet Stephens’s file, I knew she liked to eat each day at the deli down on the northwest corner of the courthouse building. She always ordered steamed vegetables and brown rice, and ate quietly as she read over her morning paperwork. I also knew she never failed to avoid the elevators in favor of the stairs. It is routines like this—the mundane, the boring, the normal, people caught in a rut—that make it easy for an assassin to do his job.
I heard the door creak closed followed by the soft shuffle of white tennis shoes on the concrete stairs. My heart was pounding in my ears, loud percussive blasts like an Indian’s tom-tom, TUM, TUM, TUM, TUM, TUM, as I blew out a deep breath, doing my best to regulate my breathing, then I headed up toward the sixth floor.
We both turned the corner on the short flight of twelve steps between the fifth and sixth floor. She directed a dismissive smile toward me, averting her eyes like she really didn’t want to talk to a juror or some poor lost bloke in the stairwell while she was on her way to lunch. I didn’t say anything, just looked past her, up at the next landing, my footsteps soft, my face friendly, nothing to alert her, nothing for her to worry about, just Joe Citizen pounding up the courthouse stairwell.
On the third step, she passed me, mumbling an insincere “good day.” In the half-second when I moved past her field of vision, I had the Saran Wrap roll out of the box, pulling out a sheet in the same motion, and then with the speed of a lion, I pounced from behind, wrapping the plastic sheet around her face and pulling back with enough force to jerk her off her feet.
She was so surprised, so disoriented that she couldn’t find her feet. In the next few seconds, I had wrapped the roll five times around her head as I continued to pull her backward, up the stairwell, where she would have a hard time gaining any sense of balance. Standing over her shoulder, I could see her eyes roll back, back, back, trying to find my face, trying desperately to make sense of this situation, but she couldn’t see who was doing this to her. She flailed with her hands, trying to beat my shoulders, when she should have been trying to dislodge the plastic from her mouth and nose, but I couldn’t blame her for putting up a fight, for trying to come to grips with the fact she was being suffocated by a stranger on the dingy steps of the courthouse stairwell, less than fifty feet from the courtroom over which she had presided these last eight years. When she finally stopped struggling and her eyes clouded over, I calmly left the stairwell and headed to the elevator bank. Not a soul stood in the hallway to mark my exit.
CHAPTER 6
I am a fraud and a liar. I tell myself I am conditioned, I have discipline, my mind is my possession, an object over which I have control. I tell myself I have the ability to remain in the present, that what separates me from the civilians populating God’s green earth is that I, and I alone, can shut off the past like turning off a faucet.
But the damn prostitute in the diner and then this woman who didn’t even look like Jake, not really, maybe a little in the eyes, sitting at the table next to me at Augustine’s had exposed me for the fraud I am. The faucet had sprung a leak and the leak had caused a flood of memories, but I’ll be damned if I wasn’t going to plug the miserable thing, right here, right now. I had too much else to worry about.
I am on the road again, heading south now, toward Indianapolis and then Lexington. I am heading out of the blue states toward the red ones, and I know presidential candidate Abe Mann will spend very little time on this part of his whistle-stop tour. He will want to head west quickly, for the key electoral votes represented by Iowa, New Mexico, Nevada, Washington, Oregon, and finally California. But he won’t get votes from these states, not a single one from any state, because he will be dead.
I drive like I walk in crowds . . . drawing as little attention to myself as possible: beige rental car, cruise control one-mile-per-hour above the speed limit, blinker whenever I change lanes. I am starting to relax, to wind down, to let my mind drift into a pleasant nothingness, when I spy Pooley out of the corner of my eye, driving a black SUV, a Navigator. He has the passenger window down and is easing alongside me. He signals with one finger, pointed toward the next exit. I immediately slow and allow him to pull in front of me, then follow him to a Shell station just off the Interstate.
“I’ve got strange news,” he says as we get out and stand next to our cars. He looks tired, like he hasn’t slept in days, and his eyelids droop at half-mast.
“You tracked me down, it must be something big.”
“Archibald Grant . . . your middleman who went missing . . .”
“Yeah?”
“I caught up with him at a jailhouse outside of Providence.”
“Jail?”
“Yep. That’s what took me so long to locate him. He got pinched on an aiding and abetting racket. Gonna have to serve a few in Federal . . . maybe Lompoc.”
“Shit.”
“Don’t worry, he didn’t roll on you.”
“You sure?”
“Positive. He knows beyond a shadow of a doubt you can get to him.”
“What about . . . ?”
