for the flight back home.
He sat down on the edge of the hotel bed and reached for the phone. Right now, all he could think about was talking to Daisy. Hearing that sweet voice on the phone. A song where the music was more important than the lyrics.
“Hello?”
“Hey. It’s me.”
“Oh, my lord! Franklin! Where are you, baby? Still in Washington? June and I got the TV on. They showed your picture this morning! I can’t believe what all they’re saying.”
“You never should.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’ll tell you later. You got my messages about staying away from those trucks? I left three or four there for you on the machine.”
“I got them, Franklin.”
“Tell me you and June stayed away from that one in San Antone. I’ve been so worried about that.”
“We found that sucker, honey. Big Orange.”
“I was afraid of that. Is everybody okay? June? What happened?”
“Franklin, we found that damn Big Orange truck! Can you believe it, the thing was parked right outside of the Alamo. Isn’t that perfect? The Mexicans blowing up the Alamo? June said, ‘Shoot, why didn’t we think of that?’ ”
“You didn’t go near it?”
“After what you said? Heck, no! June called the San Antone PD on her cell. They told us to go straight inside to warn all the tourists to get out of there. And you’ll never guess what happened.”
“Tell me,” Dixon said, lying back on the bed, cradling the phone to his ear. Now that he knew she was all right, he just wanted to listen to the words.
“We went straight to the souvenir shop, of course, because that’s where all the tourists head first anyway, right? So, we go over to the counter and there’s this really beautiful cashier girl, a dead-ringer for that June Carter actress, Reese Witherspoon, and you will never believe who she was talking to!”
“Davy Crockett?”
“No! She was talking to the Big Orange himself! A really cute blond guy with a Big Orange logo on his shirt! He was the Big Orange driver himself, all the way from Lakeland, Florida!”
“What was he doing in Texas?”
“Took a detour to see his best girl who worked at the Alamo Gift Shoppe! Isn’t that the funniest thing you ever heard in your life?”
“What about his truck?”
“Regular old truck. Blacked-out windows, but not the mirrored kind. My mistake, Franklin.”
“I love you, Daisy.”
“Well, I love you, too! When are you coming home?”
“I’ve been invited by this nice lady at the State Department to attend the Inauguration. She’s swinging by here to pick me up in a few minutes. Then I’m headed to the airport.”
“How exciting! June and I’ll be looking for you on the television. We heard they might call it off and then it was back on again. All right, I can tell you want to get off the phone. One more thing, did you hear what they found in that underground garage down in Gunbarrel?”
“Nope.”
“Homer opened a can of worms. It was an old Chevy dealership. Owned and operated by Mr. J. T. Rawls. Selling SUVs to the Federales last couple of years. Had a tunnel. Had a shop, too, and he was customizing those SUVs to make them look like official cars. He was in cahoots with the Mexicans the whole time! Isn’t that something?”
“Homer would have been a fine lawman.”
“He already was, Franklin. You know that.”
FRANKLIN got picked up out front of the Doubletree ten minutes later. It was a State Department sedan with a driver who looked like she just got out of college. Her name was Holly Rattigan and she was from Seattle. Said she worked in the Secretary’s office but had the day off for the Inaugural Parade and had volunteered to drive the sheriff around.
“I’m honored to meet you, Sheriff Dixon,” she said, checking traffic and then pulling out into it. “Everybody’s talking about you. Call me Holly.”
“’Preciate that, Holly.”
They drove in silence, headed for the Capitol Building. Downtown Washington was fortresslike. Ten-foot-high barriers lined the park in front of the White House. Security and bomb removal vehicles were everywhere. A hundred city blocks were closed. Franklin imagined there was a lot more security you could not see. He knew surveillance cameras were everywhere, sending pictures to a joint command center at a secret location in Virginia. Forty agencies there were monitoring sensors testing for chemical, nuclear, or biological agents.
Holly’s official sedan and credentials got them through the checkpoints and roadblocks easily enough. A DC Metro policeman waved them into a special lane on Constitution Avenue. They drove toward 1st Street to a lot where they had special parking for Government employees.
“Isn’t it exciting? Holly said, “They’re expecting 11,000 people to march in the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.”
“It’s exciting, all right,” Franklin said as Holly pulled into an empty parking space. He checked his watch climbing out of the car. The president would be sworn in in twenty minutes.
Their seats were in a roped-off section in a small park near the U.S. Grant Memorial. Seemed like all of Washington had showed up. Security on the west side of the Capitol was everywhere you looked. All the roads were blocked off with huge concrete barricades. Everyone approaching the site of the president’s speech was subjected to metal detector screening and inspection by security personnel.
It was January 20. The weather forecast for the president’s Inaugural speech was thirty degrees, cloudy, and light snow flurries. Franklin stood there beside Holly, listening to the beautiful music and admiring the beauty of the west steps of the Capitol, hung with red, white, and blue bunting. The State Department folks had provided pretty good seats. Still, you couldn’t see much from this distance. Holly and Franklin excused themselves, and started moving through the crowd, trying to get closer to the podium.
Franklin was glad he’d come. It was festive and grand, and he liked seeing the mounted Park Police and their beautiful horses, moving slowly through the crowds keeping an eye on everything. One mounted patrolman had paused under a tree where Franklin was standing.
“Is that the president?” Franklin asked the officer, when he heard someone speaking solemnly over the public address.
“No, sir, that’s the vice president. He goes first.”
Franklin looked at his watch. It was a quarter to twelve. At noon, the president would take the oath.
“Oh my God,” Holly said, grabbing his arm. “What’s going on back there?”
Franklin turned to see. The crowd was surging forward around him. You could hear cries of panic coming from the direction of the Grant Memorial, a few hundred yards behind where he and Holly were now standing. There was a small reflecting pool behind the monument, and parked alongside the pool were four black Suburbans belonging to the Secret Service.
A fifth Suburban had pulled away from the curb and was moving slowly across 1st Street at a weird angle. It wasn’t speeding, but people were shouting warnings and jumping out of its path. The black truck plowed ahead, gaining a little speed. It appeared to be headed right toward the wooded park area directly in front of the West Steps. People were running, panic-stricken, scattering in all directions now.
The police and security people Dixon could see seemed to be momentarily frozen in place.
He instantly understood their reaction. Maybe it was a truckload of agents racing toward the podium on orders from the Secret Service com center. Maybe someone had spotted a bomb or an armed man in the crowd. It was an impossible situation. No one knew what was going on. How could they?
