“Goddamn it. Were you in Atlanta? Is that why I had to go into hiding?”
“Why are you asking me this?”
“Because a man came to my door tonight asking about Benjamin Lombard and Atlanta.”
No doubt the same man who had questioned Toby at the diner. But coming around where his daughter lived? Gibson thought he’d like to have a conversation with this man.
“Are you going to tell me?” she asked.
“I can’t. I’m sorry.”
Nicole stood in the doorway a long time, studying him.
“You can’t? Were you always this person?” she asked rhetorically. “God, I’m such a cliché.”
“Nicole . . .” His voice a pleading teardrop.
“No. I have wasted so much of my life on you. There’s something not right about you.”
For a moment, in the white-hot vacuum that followed, the only sound Gibson heard was the martial pounding of the blood in his ears. He felt a finger graze an unforgivable switch, and whatever crossed his face shook his ex-wife. Her hand went to the doorknob, a tremulous fear in her eyes. It broke him. Is this what you are now? He stumbled back from the door, down the walk to his car. He didn’t dare look back to the house.
When he’d driven several blocks away, he pulled to the curb and screamed. His hands, bloodless on the steering wheel, tried and failed to rip it free.
Gibson slipped into his apartment sometime after one a.m. He’d driven around until he felt under control of himself, steering clear of the Nighthawk and Toby’s disapproving glances. In a corner of the living room, Swonger snored quietly from the floor, a jean jacket draped over him for warmth. Gibson lifted a blanket from his bed and draped it over him. Then he took his laptop into the bedroom and shut the door—there was something he needed to check.
The drive had given him time to think about who had been nosing around asking questions, and something that Birk had said back at the farm nagged at him. Something about the “other stuff” that Gibson had done. Birk had winked at him when he’d said it. Gibson had been preoccupied at the time, but now it felt like he’d swallowed a red-hot cigarette lighter. He opened his laptop and did something that he hadn’t done in years—he typed his name into a search engine.
Pages of results unfurled. Most of which fell into the ancient-history category: stories about the Benjamin Lombard hack, his arrest, and the subsequent trial. A few articles dated after Lombard’s death mentioned Gibson in cursory fashion. He didn’t care about any of these. He scanned down the list looking for something else . . . something out of the ordinary.
He found it on the third page of results.
A website called AmericanJudas.com listed Gibson’s name in its citation. Gibson clicked on the link. The site, which was run by someone who called himself Tom Pain, trafficked in most of the stock modern-day conspiracy theories about 9/11, climate change, vaccines, autism, the origin of AIDS, and so on. The list went on and on, but only one topic stuck out to Gibson: The Assassination of Vice President Benjamin Lombard Gibson sucked in a breath and clicked through to that tab. Inside, Gibson found a rambling treatise speculating that Lombard’s cause of death in Atlanta was anything but natural. Ironically, Gibson shared the same sentiment. However, the author’s theories were hilariously off-target. Or would have been hilarious, if they didn’t feature Gibson so prominently.
Exhibit A was a photograph of a page from a Secret Service logbook. As the website took pains to point out, the log bore the same date as Benjamin Lombard’s death. And there was Gibson’s signature halfway down the page, signed in to meet the vice president’s wife, Grace Lombard. Why, Tom Pain demanded, would the man tried for hacking Benjamin Lombard have a private meeting with Grace Lombard? Why were there reports from staffers that Benjamin Lombard had assaulted Gibson Vaughn outside a conference room hours before the vice president rejected his party’s nomination, hours before he died mysteriously alone in his hotel suite?
The site asked all the right questions, even if it had none of the right answers. Yet. He thought about reaching out to Grace Lombard; she should be warned. No. He’d promised to stay away, and she had people watching out for her. Most likely, they already knew more about American Judas than Gibson did. He shut his laptop and pushed it away.
His father had been right—there were some lines that you couldn’t uncross.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
You knew that the Toproll had crossed the tipping point from controlled chaos to plain old anarchy when there were more dirty glasses than clean ones. Nothing threatened a bar’s delicate equilibrium like running out of clean pint glasses. It wasn’t her shift, but Lea jumped up multiple times to collect empties and run the old Lamber glasswasher when Margo and her staff got too far into the weeds. It looked to be a long night.
Any regular celebrating a birthday was treated to round after round. The first by Margo, then the responsibility fell to an ever-widening circle of revelers. It was common courtesy. A birthday was a birthday, and that meant it got celebrated on the day of birth. None of this waiting for the weekend nonsense. That was weak-kneed hippie talk. Everyone has a job to get to, now take your damn shot. Lea had seen more than one fight over someone trying to duck out before closing time.
Lea threw her hip into the Lamber to shut the door, and the glasswasher rumbled to life. Someone passed her a shot over the bar. She tapped it on the bar before belting it back and got busy before someone handed her another. She had to get out of here before getting sucked into this mess. Where the hell was Parker? Niobe Prison was only a mile up the road. There better have been a damn riot to keep him.
“Remind me to start putting birthdays on the calendar,” Margo huffed as she hurried past up the bar. She’d been saying that for as long as Lea had worked there, but it would never happen. That kind of planning was antithetical to the roiling mayhem that was the Toproll.
Lea finished restocking the glasses and turned around to find Parker standing at the bar. He was still in uniform; she’d never seen him out of it. Like most guards at the prison, he had a thing about wearing it around. The prison was one of the few steady employers left in the area, so the uniform carried some cachet. He gave her a nod and headed for the back room, where the pool tables were. He didn’t play, but it was nominally quieter. He passed a table of four more guards, also in uniform. A lot of prison guards did their drinking at Toproll, gossiping and trading war stories. It was the main reason that Lea had taken the job.
Parker was sitting at a table, picking the pretzels out of a bowl of bar mix, when she joined him.
“Parker,” she said by way of a greeting.