Dead on Arrival

cover parts of Maryland and Pennsylvania too.’

‘Sorry, Mr Pugh,’ Danny said, sounding contrite and respectful, ‘but if you don’t have enough product to take care of some biker and his bitch, they’ll just wait a day. But we can’t take that chance.’ Before Pugh could protest, Danny said, ‘I’m not disrespecting you here. My boss told me before we make a deal, I gotta see your lab. We’re talkin’ a lotta money here, for you, five million a year, maybe more.’

Pugh looked at him for a second, then nodded.

‘Go put your shoes on,’ he said, ‘but nothing else. Randy, give him some overalls and loan him a jacket so he don’t freeze out there.’

Danny donned grease-stained overalls and a leather jacket that smelled of stale beer. His Gucci loafers looked pretty stupid with the overalls. When he returned to Pugh’s kitchen, there was another man with Pugh, a big guy with a beard and a huge gut. The fat guy looked a little friendlier than Randy, like maybe he smiled once a year.

‘You know what to do,’ Pugh said to Randy.

Randy just nodded, then said to Danny, ‘Let’s go.’

What the hell did that mean, You know what to do?

The three men left the house and walked over to a shed that contained five ATVs — all-terrain ve hicles that looked like four-wheeled motorcycles. ‘Roll two of them out, Harlan, and make sure they’ve got gas,’ Randy said.

‘You gotta be shittin’ me,’ Danny muttered.

‘You ride behind me,’ Randy said to Danny. That was good, Danny thought; the other guy’s ass was so big there wouldn’t be room for two of them on his machine. ‘And we’re gonna blindfold you,’ Randy said, and before Danny could say anything, Randy pulled a white rag out of his pocket, the remnants of a T-shirt, and tied it over Danny’s eyes. Then he put a ski mask over his head, the eye holes at the back.

This wasn’t good at all, Danny thought. This was just going to fuck up everything.

Danny didn’t like it on the back of the ATV, unable to see, unable to anticipate the bumps and turns. The ATV had little bars next to the passenger seat for holding on, and he gripped them as hard as he could. The main problem was his feet kept coming off the footrests, and every time they did it upset his balance and he thought he was going to fall. They stopped riding after half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes. Patsy Hall had told Danny that Pugh owned three or four hundred acres. Maybe that’s why it was taking so long to get to wherever they were going, or maybe Randy was driving in circles. Danny had no way to tell.

Randy helped him off the ATV and started walking him, holding on to his upper arm. ‘Can I take the blindfold off now?’ Danny said.

‘No,’ Randy said. ‘You don’t do a damn thing unless I tell you.’

They walked maybe fifty yards down what felt like a dirt trail. He tripped once over a tree root but Randy kept him from falling. Randy had a grip that could crush rocks. Finally they stopped and Randy said, ‘Stand still a minute.’

Danny heard something being moved, he didn’t know what, and maybe the sound of tree branches brushing against each other. Randy grabbed his arm again and said, ‘We’re goin’ down some steps. Slide your feet forward until you can feel ’em.’ Danny did, and with Randy still holding his arm they descended seven steps. Danny counted.

They stopped moving, and Randy said, ‘I’m gonna take off the blindfold now, but you look straight ahead. If you look up or behind you, I’ll break your neck.’

And as strong as the guy’s hands were, he could probably do it.

The hood was pulled off Danny’s head and the blindfold off his eyes. He was standing on the earthen floor of a room that was about the size of a one-car garage. Stacked against one wall was all kinds of crap, metal containers of denatured alcohol and acetone and stuff like that. There were also stainless steel tables, like the type you see in restaurant kitchens, and on the tables was a bunch of … well, lab shit, beakers and scales and rubber tubing and pots. God, the place just stank. He felt like he was standing inside a sweat sock that had been worn by Shaquille O’Neal for ten games in a row.

After a moment, Randy said, ‘Okay, slick. You satisfied?’

‘Not quite,’ Danny said. ‘I want to see how much ephedrine you have on hand.’

Randy led him over to a stack of two-gallon cardboard containers, like the type you saw behind the counter at Baskin-Robbins, containing ice cream. There must have been twenty containers. Randy popped the top off one of the containers and Danny looked inside. White powder.

‘Okay,’ Danny said. ‘That’s all I wanted to see.’

The fact was that Danny didn’t know anything about meth. He didn’t know if the equipment and chemicals he was looking at were really used for making meth, and he didn’t know how much meth the equipment could produce. Nor did he know if the white powder had been ephedrine; it could have been baking powder for all he knew.

But he didn’t need to know any of that stuff to do what he’d been asked to do.

53

Mahoney was at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but it hadn’t been easy to get there.

Since Broderick’s death, security for senior poli ticians had been ratcheted up to a degree not seen since 9/11 or maybe since World War II. Homeland Security’s color-coded threat level was now at red, the only time Mahoney could remember its being above orange since the system had been invented. He guessed that if they could’ve come up with a color more alarming than red, they would have used it.

The president was in the White House but the vice president was somewhere else, not in Washington, and the Secret Service wouldn’t divulge his location. The White House itself looked like it was under siege: armed men stationed every few feet, armored personnel carriers parked in the driveway and outside the gates, guys with sniper rifles and rocket launchers visible on the roof — and those were just the secu rity measures that could be seen.

Cabinet members were under guard too, as if they were actually more important than the figureheads that most of them really were, and senior leadership in the House and Senate were flanked by armed men whenever they left their offices and were driven to meetings in armored cars. Mahoney himself, being third in line for the presidency, was being smothered by his security, four guys so big they all looked like they could have played on the line for Notre Dame. And that was the problem. He felt smothered, and he needed to get away, to someplace where he could be alone and think.

He had them drive him to a restaurant on Capitol Hill and made two of them wait outside, saying four inside was just too many. Then, once in the restau rant, after he’d had a drink, he rose from the table. The two remaining security guys rose with him but he waved them back to their seats. ‘I’m just goin’ to the head,’ he said, ‘and I can’t pee when I’m being watched.’ This embarrassed them so much that Mahoney was gone before they could move.

But instead of going to the restroom, he ducked into the kitchen, borrowed a ski jacket and stocking cap from one of the cooks, and boogied out the back-door, the cap pulled down low on his forehead. Then, feeling momentarily gleeful, he sprinted down the alley — well, for a guy his age and size it was a sprint — and caught a cab to the memorial. The security guys were gonna be pissed when they caught up with him, but screw ’em; he needed some space.

So now he sat on a bench near the memorial, that stark black granite wall that lists the names of the fallen and mostly forgotten. There is no memorial in Washington that is more poignant than that simple wall. Mahoney, bundled in the cook’s stained jacket, the stocking cap on his head, looked like a broken-down old vet who had come on a dismal day to mourn those who had fought beside him.

And Mahoney was mourning, just not for the men on the wall — although he had known several of them. He was mourning Bill Broderick — not because he had liked the man but because Broderick’s death was having a horrible galvanizing effect on the passage of his damn bill.

An ordinary bill Mahoney could have kept in committee indefinitely. He could have bounced it from committee to committee until Congress recessed or until it died a quiet death. But not this bill. There