“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 you ever use the word ‘Negro’ outside this room, you can kiss the White House good-bye.”
* * *
—
SHE THOUGHT ABOUT IT for 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, a Vanity 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 bullshit that 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 DESK and 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?”
The muzzle was three feet from his nose, and he muttered, “That’d work fine, I guess. That’d be . . . Don’t do this . . .”
Grant’s finger was white on the trigger, and Parrish could plainly see that from thirty-six inches away, and he could hear her labored breathing . . . and then she stepped back, dropped her voice, and snarled, “Don’t ever fuck with me. I know your background. I know you’re a little crazy. Keep this in mind: I’m way, way crazier than you are.”
He hadn’t started to sweat until she backed away, but he was sweating now. “I see that,” he said. The gun was still pointed at his nose, her finger was still white on the trigger. She looked like she wanted to pull it, he could see it in her glittering blue eyes. “I’m okay with it. I won’t make a single fucking move without talking to you about it.”
“Better,” Grant said. She pointed the muzzle at the ceiling. “Now, is there anything we have to do about Smalls? I mean, right now?”
“Probably best to lay back in the weeds and not do anything,” Parrish said, his voice trembling. He tried to smooth it out. “If we decide to take another run at him, we have time. I’ll tell you what, though: he’s got his oppo people digging around through your investments back in Minnesota. If you want to be president, there better not be much back there.”
“There’s not. Nothing illegal. Not that he could get at anyway.” She stooped and dropped the gun in a desk drawer. Parrish noted which one it was in case he needed that information in the future. He would not be back down in this basement without a gun in his belt.
Though he probably wouldn’t need one. Before this confrontation, he’d thought of Grant as a Minnesota blonde, with everything that might suggest: nice, sweet, maybe a little above average. But not too much above average. And certainly not dumb.
That had changed in the last two minutes.
Two minutes later, when he went out the door, still alive, he realized that he’d suddenly come to respect her, as much as any sociopath could.
She’s crazier than I am . . .
* * *
—
WHEN HE WAS GONE, Grant remained in the basement, brooding about the mistake with Smalls and the possible consequences.
Would the cops figure out what had happened? Was there any way she could interfere without being tagged as responsible? Could Smalls somehow be blamed for the “accident”? If she got rid of Parrish—permanently, with a bullet—would that seal her off from any investigation? One other man knew about her arrangement with Parrish and had supplied the operators who went after Smalls. If she killed Parrish, he’d still be out there.
* * *