Dead Watch

That’s why he hates Goodman, and hates this administration, because he feels that they assassinated him. Though, the last couple of weeks before he disappeared, he finally seemed as if he was a little happier. I don’t know if something was going on, but it was as though he’d turned a corner.”

“Huh.”

They walked along for a while without talking, turning a corner and another one, finally ending back up at Jake’s house. They walked down the alley to the backyard, and at her car, she said, “I’ve got to go. But let me ask you one more thing. Or two things. Personal things, if you don’t mind. I talked to Johnnie Black about you . . .”

“Remember, he’s on the other side. An evil Republican.”

“Like me,” she said. He could see her upturned face in the light from his back window. “He said you were in Afghanistan. He said that’s where you got your disability. Is that right?”

“I was in the special forces for a few years,” Jake said. “What’s the second thing?”

“He said you were married to Nikki Lange.”

“Yes,” he said.

“The Queen of Push.”

“I try not to think about it. You know her?”

“I know her. We overlapped a year on the Smithsonian board. I heard a comment about sex and violence.” She sounded amused, peered at him in the dark. “That her husband provided the sex and she provided the violence.”

He tipped his head back and laughed. “I heard the same comment. It’s generally accurate. Looking back, I would have preferred an Afghani prison.”

“How could you have done that? Married her?”

“Well, she’s an attractive woman,” Jake said.

“Big tits, small ass . . .”

“Come on, be nice.” Jake said. “Anyway, our politics are generally the same, and like you and Lincoln, we got along pretty well in bed. I just didn’t understand that she was the queen and I was the equerry.”

“The what?”

“The equerry,” he said.

“My, you have a large vocabulary.”

“You ought to check out my conjunctions.”

“Some other time, maybe,” she said. “Do you ride? Johnnie said something about a ranch.”

“I probably rode every day of my life from the time I was three until I was fourteen. Until my grandpa died and the ranch got sold. I’ve still got friends out there, I go out and ride when I can.”

“You’ll have to come out to my farm sometime,” she said. “Of course, we ride the right way.”

“We don’t have that luxury. Our horses work for a living.”

She laughed quickly, quietly, popped open her car door, and looked at him across the window. “Stay in touch with me. Talk to Howard. Help me.”

“Mrs. Bowe, I work for Bill Danzig. I’ll help you if I can, but my loyalty runs to Bill. And the president.”

She nodded: “Then help me if you can.”

She got in the car, backed carefully out of the drive. He made sure the gate locked behind her, then went into the house, dropped into the living-room chair, and over a couple of hours, had a couple of beers.

He didn’t drink much, and he didn’t drink often, and the beer left him a bit loopy.

He thought, I could end it right now.

If he called CNN anonymously, or Fox, or any of the large newspaper chains, and simply said the word gay, they’d find out the truth in a matter of hours. And once that word was out there, the investigation would go in an entirely different direction. Politics would be out of it: the press would be hunting for a former lover, or a gay-hater, or somebody trying to cover up something else. . . .

But Madison wanted something “civilized,” if that was possible. He could feel the request twisting in him.

He owed a certain loyalty to Danzig, and through him to the president. But they wouldn’t care about civilized. If they found out that Lincoln Bowe was gay, their immediate instinct would be to get the word out, to create the greatest possible spectacle. The investigation of Lincoln Bowe’s death would lurch into a ditch—a gay thing, a sex killing—and both Goodman and the president would be off the hook.

It would no longer matter if Goodman or his friends were guilty of the killing, because nobody would be looking anymore . . .

He thought about Madison.

As they’d walked along through the evening, he’d felt the beginning of an intimacy. Not only had they told each other a few truths, he could remember the feel of her arm brushing along his, and the smell of her. He wished he’d kissed her good night; wished he had that kind of relationship with her.

Since his grandparents had died almost twenty years before, he’d been alone. Alone even in his marriage. He sensed a similar loneliness in Madison Bowe.

He was caught; torn. Decided that he didn’t have to release the information immediately, in either a civilized