“No, but if somebody did assassinate him, I probably wouldn’t march on Washington in protest,” Weather said.
“Shame on you,” Lucas said. “I gotta tell you, not being a big political brain like some of the women I’m married to, I kinda like the guy, even if I don’t care for his politics.”
She let that go, and after a while said, “Great night.”
“Yes, it is,” Lucas agreed, looking up at the stars.
“Just try not to get killed, okay?”
3
When U.S. senator Taryn Grant heard that Smalls had survived, she got Jack Parrish in her basement SCIF and screamed at him for a while. SCIF, short for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, was where you went to discuss classified information, which this sure as hell was.
“You said it was a done deal,” she shouted. “You said it was a perfect setup.”
“It was,” Parrish said, settling on a sofa. “I didn’t tell you it was a done deal—I told you it was ninety-nine percent. Even a hundred-to-one shot comes in every once in a while, and that’s what happened.”
“Now we’ve got a murder on our hands,” she shrieked. She was trembling with rage. “Instead of an accident, we’ve got a murder. You’ll have the FBI on me. Smalls will tell the FBI that I was behind it, and he’ll be right, won’t he? You silly shithead...”
She went on for a while, and Parrish, still sitting on the sofa, looked at his watch. He had a meeting with the three guys who’d screwed this particular pooch and couldn’t be more than fifteen minutes late. More than fifteen minutes and they’d be gone, as a routine precaution.
“Don’t look at your fuckin’ watch,” Grant shouted, saliva flying across the room. “Don’t look at your fuckin’ watch!”
“Can’t be late for a meeting,” Parrish said. He yawned, then asked, “Are you done yet?”
“Am I done yet? No, but you might be.”
“I don’t think so,” Parrish said, staying cool. He’d been screamed at before, and by senators with a lot more seniority than Grant. “We have way too many reasons to hang together, because, like the man said, if we don’t, we’ll hang separately. The fact is, the accident should have worked. If it had, we’d have taken a load off our backs and gotten rid of a major roadblock between you and the White House. Sometimes, things just don’t work—but you wouldn’t have gotten better odds—anywhere, anytime—on this one. And there’s no evidence that it was a hit. There’s nothing. The West Virginia cops think Smalls is a head case.”
Grant’s face was purple, but she struggled to calm herself. Parrish was right: even the best-laid plans failed sometimes. But he was wrong about the odds. She was extremely good at figuring odds, and there would have been a better way to do this. Example number one: find out where Smalls was going out for dinner and then shoot him in the back and take his money. That was simple enough, and nobody would be able to prove that it wasn’t a robbery. Parrish’s plan had had too many moving parts, and neither one of them had recognized that.
And she said so.
Parrish shrugged. “You could be right. On the other hand, if we’d shot him, the FBI would be all over the place and they’d never let go. The Senate wouldn’t let them. They’d have had the director up on the Hill every goddamn week until he came up with the perp.”
“You supply the perpetrator, dumbass,” Grant shouted. “You don’t have to supply a mountain of evidence! All you have to do is find some broken-ass Negro and put the gun in his backpack. That’s all anybody wants.”
“All right, I’ll talk to the guys about what happened and get them thinking about some other possibilities. Smalls is a real problem. You saw what the Republicans did with Obama and that birth certificate. No evidence of anything, but they kept talking, and that bullshit stuck with some people. If Smalls keeps talking about what happened during your election campaign, I don’t think you’ll go all the way. He’s got to be shut up,” Parrish said. And, “By the way, if youeveruse the word ‘Negro’ outside this room, you can kiss the White House good-bye.”
—
SHE THOUGHT ABOUT ITfor a couple of seconds—couldn’t argue with that, Parrish was right. She had a stack of magazines on her desk. After she squared them, she picked up the top one, aVanity Fair, and dropped it in the wastebasket. “All right. We went off half-cocked on this. You came up with an idea, you had the guys, and I bought it. If we try again, it’s going to have to be something a little more subtle. Can’t shoot him; not now. I need ideas.”
“We’ll work on it,” Parrish said. Now that she’d calmed down, he realized that he could smell her, a smoky perfume that hung in the air like a Valentine’s invitation. “Maybe... I don’t know. Another scandal? I like that whole child porn thing that came up in your election run: that was cool. We’ll think about it.”
“Well, we can’t do child porn, that’s for sure. And this isn’t the Middle East; we can’t cut him down on some trumped-up bullshitthat people will believe because they belong to some religious cult,” she said. “Next time, it better work or you and I are going to have a major problem. A real serious major problem.”
He may have sneered at her when he responded, “You know, you have to realize your limitations, Senator. Exactly what are you going to do? Report me to the police? You’ll go right down with me. We’re welded together. You go to the White House, I go with you. Get used to it.”
—
GRANT MOVED BEHIND HER DESKand gave it a kick. Parrish thought for a second that she’d done it out of anger, or had stumbled, but she stooped, and when she came up, she had a gun in her hand. Parrish knew all about guns and recognized it: a Beretta. A big one, a military-style 92. Loaded with 9mm man-killers, it’d produce internal cavitation that you could fit a football in.
She was moving toward him, and he was pressing back in the couch. He heard the safety click off, and if he tried to get up, she might pull the trigger.
“Don’t do that,” he blurted. “I don’t...”
“What am I gonna do? Who will I get to do it? Is that what you want to know?” She was shouting again, and there was a fleck of saliva at the corner of her mouth. “What if I get me? How’d that work?”
