The Nomination (34 page)

This morning, though, he hadn't gotten anything done. He kept looking at those five disturbing photos that he'd laid out on his desk. Photos of his grandchildren. Howie Cohen had seven grandchildren.

One shot was of Hannah, Cohen's oldest grandchild, David's firstborn. You love them all, of course, but Hannah was Grampa's favorite. She was almost twelve now. In the photo, she was sitting cross-legged on the ground in her maroon soccer uniform. She was sucking on a lollipop with a thoughtful expression on her pretty face. Such a smart little girl. Looking quite grown-up in the photo. You couldn't help noticing that she was becoming a young woman. Soon she'd be having her bat mitzvah, which Grampa wouldn't be allowed to attend. Cohen used to read Winnie-the-Pooh stories to little Hannah when she was just learning to read. He remembered the warmth of the little girl sitting in his lap, how she seemed to radiate heat and energy. She called him Pap-Pap. He would point to the words on the page, and she'd repeat them and giggle, and he'd give her a big hug.

In another photo were David's twins, Joshua and Jacob, almost eight now, wearing fielders' mitts, playing catch on a ball field. This shot had been taken with a wide-angle lens so that you could see there were no other children nearby. Just the two boys, all by themselves.

There was a shot of his daughter Ruthie's first baby, Rosanne, just two, wearing nothing but a diaper and toddling around in what Howie Cohen recognized as Ruthie's fenced-in backyard in Bethesda.

Then there was a picture of Kimee, Ellie's youngest, just four, squatting beside a weedy pond, poking at something in the water with a stick.

And finally there was a shot of Ellie's boys, Aaron, nine, and Lester, six, seated on a park bench. A man, a stranger to Howie Cohen, was sitting between them. The man had an arm around the shoulders of each of the boys. He was staring directly into the lens of the camera, and both boys were looking up at the guy in the photo. Clearly, this photo had been posed for Howie Cohen's benefit. The message wasn't very subtle.

Ordinarily a grandfather would treasure these recent photos of his beloved grandchildren—if, for example, his wife or one of his kids had taken them and sent them to Grampa.

But these photos had been shot by a stranger. They had arrived in a manila envelope with no return address. It had been mailed from Washington, D. C. In the envelope along with the photos had been a folded-up newspaper clipping with a headline reading “Muir Woods Body Identified.”

Any dummy would get this message, and it made Howie Cohen tremble with fear and outrage.

The envelope had arrived three days ago. Cohen hadn't slept a wink since then, waiting for the next move.

He put the photos and the clipping back in the envelope and stared at his computer monitor.

An hour or so later one of the guards came into the library and walked over to Howie Cohen's desk. “Come with me,” he said.

Cohen stood up. “What is it?”

“You got a phone call.”

“From who?”

The guard shrugged.

“They're letting me take a phone call now?”

“Looks like it.”

The guard led him down the hall to an empty, windowless room. It wasn't much bigger than a closet. It contained a small wooden table and a straight-backed wooden chair. A telephone sat on the table. The guard pointed at the phone. The receiver was off the cradle. The guard gestured Cohen into the room, then closed the door.

Cohen sat on the chair, picked up the phone, and said, “Yes?”

“Mr. Cohen?” It was a man's voice. He didn't recognize it.

“Who's this?”

“Call me Mr. White. Did you get the envelope I sent you?”

“Who are you?”

“Oh, I'm just an amateur photographer. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Have you heard that?”

“What do you want?”

“Your grandchildren are adorable, Mr. Cohen. They're precious to you. You like to have them visit you, yes?”

Cohen said nothing.

“You like knowing they are safe, living in nice houses in pretty suburbs, attending fancy private schools, supported by the fruits of Grampa's career in crime, am I right?”

Cohen was clenching his jaw.

“Answer me, Howie.”

“I cherish my grandchildren, yes. What do you want?”

“Does the name Leonard P. Lesneski ring a bell?”

“I saw that clipping.”

“You're a smart man,” said Mr. White. “You tell me what I want.”

“You're threatening the lives of my grandchildren?”

“So what do I want, Howie?”

“This is about Jessie, isn't it?”

“What's my message?”

Cohen hesitated. Then he said, “I understand. Her safety for my grandchildren's safety.”

“Exactly. And how will that work?”

Cohen said nothing.

“Do you know how it works, Mr. Cohen?” said Mr. White.

“Of course,” he said. “If anything happens to Jessie . . .”

“What? Say it, Howie.”

Cohen blew out a long breath. “I don't want to say it. It's too awful to say.”

“I've got to hear you say it.”

Howie Cohen's throat felt tight. He swallowed several times. “You want me to say that if anything happens to Jessie Church, something will happen to one of my grandchildren.”

“Or maybe to more than one of them,” said Mr. White.

“Jesus.”

“You are responsible for Jessie Church's safety. Do you understand that, Howie?”

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“I am responsible for Jessie Church's safety.”

“Good.”

Howie Cohen heard the click at the other end as Mr. White disconnected. He sighed, pushed himself up from the chair, and knocked on the office door.

The guard, standing out in the hallway, opened it. “What?”

“I need to make a phone call,” Cohen said.

The guard nodded. “They thought you might. Go ahead. Dial nine, then the number.”

Cohen went back into the office. He closed the door, sat at the desk, and dialed Bernie's cell phone number. They'd probably trace it. Didn't matter. They already knew all about Bernie.

He assumed they were listening in. He hoped so.

It rang just once before Bernie picked up. “Yeah?”

“It's Howie.”

“Hey. How you doin'? Everything okay?”

“Call it off.”

“Huh?”

“Jessie Church. I changed my mind.”

“You wanna explain?”

“No. Just do it.”

“Call it off?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. You're the boss.”

“Right. And don't ever forget it.”

B
y the second week in September, six inches of snow had fallen on the dirt road that climbed through the woods to Eddie Moran's cabin in the foothills of the Maligne Mountains in western Alberta. But even with the bed mounded with another load of firewood, Eddie's big four-wheel-drive Ford pickup had no problem with the snow and the mud.

Somebody had told him that Maligne meant “bad luck” in French. Eddie didn't buy it. He'd been having nothing but good luck lately. Things were working out. He'd finally found a life that felt right. He liked cooking and heating with firewood. He liked reading at night with a Coleman lantern. He liked pumping water by hand. He even liked shitting in his outhouse.

He liked driving the back roads in his truck with his dog, a black mutt, predominantly Labrador, riding shotgun. Eddie had named the dog Sniper. Sniper liked to fetch chunks of wood from the river, and he growled at strangers. He was good company.

Eddie liked the rugged Canadian weather. It tested a man. He was looking forward to winter. He liked the thick woods and the rough mountains and the big dangerous sky. He liked the elbow room and the solitude.

He'd spent the afternoon with his chainsaw at Emil LaBouche's woodlot, felling and limbing dead trees, cutting them into four-foot lengths, and loading them into his truck. Back home he'd dump them in the side yard where he'd cut them into stove lengths and split them at his leisure. He already had six cut-and-split cords of two-year-old Canadian maple stacked in his woodshed, enough to keep his tight little two-room cabin comfortable all winter.

But Eddie planned to keep cutting, lugging, splitting, and stacking wood as long as he could get around in his truck. You could never have too much firewood. Besides, working with wood was excellent exercise. Since he'd come to the Canadian Rockies three months ago, Eddie had become as sinewy and leathery and lean as he'd been when he was in the Marines. He'd never felt better, and that was the truth. He went to sleep when it got dark and woke up with the sun. He cut wood, he patched his roof, he ate fresh cutthroat trout and aged Alberta beef, he read novels.

Eddie even had a girlfriend. Her name was Stella Wilson. Stella was a waitress at the Wolf Creek Cafe in Hinton, out on the Yellowhead Highway. The cafe was over forty miles from Eddie's cabin in the woods. But in that part of Alberta, people drove forty miles each way for a pack of cigarettes.

Stella was divorced—or she was getting divorced, or maybe she'd never been married in the first place, it wasn't quite clear. She was about twenty-five years younger than Eddie, but that didn't seem to bother her, and it sure didn't bother him. She was a tiger in the sack, she liked to cook for him, and all she asked was that he bring her a bottle of Early Times or a carton of Marlboro Reds once in a while.

Life was good. He hardly ever thought about Thomas Larrigan anymore. All that seemed long ago and far away. Eddie Moran had a new life, and it suited him.

There were still a couple hours of daylight left, so he pulled off the road, let Sniper out of the truck, and grabbed his spinning rod from behind the seat. Sniper ran ahead of him as he skidded down the embankment to the creek where the water came curving out of the woods. Here it funneled between some big boulders and then spread out into a long flat pool. Eddie chucked the little gold spinner into the current at the head of the pool. He gave the reel a couple of turns and felt the tug. He lifted his rod to vertical, cranked on the reel, and a minute later a foot-long cutthroat trout was splashing at his feet.

Eddie backed the treble hook out of its mouth, stuck his finger in its gills, snapped its neck, and dropped the fish on the muddy bank behind him. Sniper lay down beside the fish and lapped the slime off it.

Three casts later he caught another trout.

Two was enough. He took out his folding knife and quickly slit the two trout from anus to gills. Sniper sat there and watched. He pried out the fishes' innards with his forefinger and dropped them on the bank for the minks and porcupines and crows, then rinsed the trout and his hands in the stream. He'd fry up some potatoes and onions and bacon to go with the fish. Heat up a can of beans. Wash it all down with a couple glasses of red wine. Let Sniper lick the plate. Find some rock and roll on his battery-powered boom box. Get started on that Tim O'Brien paperback.

Maybe tomorrow night he'd go see Stella.

Life was excellent.

He cut a stick, left the crotch of a branch on it, and strung his two trout on it, in through the gills, out through the mouth. He rinsed his knife off in the river, dried it against his pants, and put it in his pocket.

When he turned to head back to his truck, there was a redheaded woman standing there. She looked about thirty. Olive complexion, dark Asian eyes.

Sniper, standing beside him, was wagging his tail at the woman.

Moran smiled at her. “Hey. How you doin'?”

“Good, Eddie,” she said. “I'm doing very good.”

He frowned. “Do I know you?”

“I'm Jessie Church,” she said. “Tell your dog to sit down.”

“Sniper won't hurt you,” he said, but he said, “Sit,” to Sniper, and the dog sat.

The woman was standing at the end of the pathway that wound down the slope to the bank of the stream. She was wearing tight jeans and a hip-length sheepskin jacket. Her hands were tucked into her jacket pockets.

She was a pretty, sexy woman. Moran had always been partial to redheads.

He frowned. “Jessie Church?” He shrugged and shook his head. “Sorry. If we met sometime, I guess I forget.” He took a step toward her, wiped his hand on his pants, and extended it to her. He smiled. “Good to see you.”

She took her hands from her pockets. One hand was holding an automatic handgun. Looked like a nine. A Sig Sauer, if he wasn't mistaken. She held it at her side, pointing at the ground. She did not offer to shake Eddie's hand.

“Hey,” he said. “What's that for?”

“My parents,” she said.

“What'd you say your name was?”

“Church,” she said. “Jessie Church.”

“I don't know anybody named Church.”

“Look at me,” she said.

He shrugged. “Yeah, you're sexy, all right. So?”

“You killed both of my parents. Figure it out.”

He narrowed his eyes for a minute. And then he got it. “Li An,” he said. “And Tommy Larrigan. Christ. I knew you when you were a baby. Baby May. I'll be damned.”

“Good,” she said. “I wanted to be sure you understood.” She raised her hand, the one holding the gun, and pointed it at his face. He was pretty sure it was a nine, now that he was looking down the muzzle.

“Don't do this,” said Moran. “Nothing I did was personal. You know that, right?”

“It's personal for me,” said Jessie.

“Christ,” he said. “I held you in my arms when you were about a month old.”

Jessie moved the Sig so that it was pointed at Sniper.

“Hey, come on,” said Eddie. “Not my dog.”

Jessie gave Eddie a hard look, then aimed the gun at Sniper's forehead, squinted down the barrel, and said, “Bang, bang,” in a conversational tone.

She lowered the gun to her side, gave Eddie Moran a long, steady look, then turned and walked back up the path with the big Sig nine dangling from her hand.

After a minute, over the muffled roar of the river, Moran heard the sound of an automobile engine starting up, and he stood there and listened until it faded into the distance.

He knelt down beside Sniper and put an arm around him. “It's okay,” he said. “She's gone.”

For now, anyway
, he was thinking.

TWO O'CLOCK IN the afternoon; Columbus Day, the national holiday. Bankers and mailmen and Wall Street brokers and schoolteachers all got the day off.

Mac Cassidy didn't resent them. But he was working. Writers never got holidays, although if you asked most people, they'd probably say that the writer's life was one big happy holiday of book tours and
Oprah
interviews.

Mac was doing what he did every day—sitting in his office chair, sipping coffee, and staring bleakly at his computer monitor.

Some days, all too rare lately, the words came flowing.

Most days, like today, he had to pry them loose with a mental crowbar.

No matter what kind of day it happened to be, though, Mac Cassidy planted his ass in his chair and forced words to appear on his screen. Eight hundred words a day, through sleet and snow and flu-like symptoms. That's how books got written. Not in great bursts of inspiration. You wrote a book one painful sentence at a time. Eight hundred words a day, which was a lot of sentences, whether it took an hour or ten hours. Either way, it was exhausting.

But after 125 days—four months, a third of a year—if you did it every day, you had 100,000 words. That, more or less, was the first draft of a book.

When Jane died, Mac had quit writing.

Now he poked the keys that instructed his computer to count the words he'd composed in the five hours since he sat down in the morning.

Still 478. Less than one hundred words an hour. Pitiful.

He had to come up with another 322. He knew what he wanted to say. He had his outline and his notes. But the words themselves had dug in their heels.

He'd been wrestling with this book for a year now, and he still hadn't found his rhythm. He didn't know whether it was this particular book, or it was him. Maybe he'd lost it. Maybe he'd never write anything publishable again.

The phone rang.

Mac grabbed it the way he'd grab somebody's hand if he were falling into a bottomless crevasse. Any excuse not to write.

“Mac Cassidy,” he said.

“It's Ted,” said Ted Austin. “You're not working, are you?”

“Of course I'm working,” said Mac. “And since you're calling me, I assume you are too. Or is this a social call?”

“Have I ever made a social call?”

“Not to me,” said Mac. “Not yet. So what's up?”

“I got good news and bad news. The bad news is worse than the good news is good. Let's get it out of the way.”

Mac swiveled around in his desk chair so that he could look out the window. The autumn sun was streaking through the crimson maples. “I have acquired a certain perspective on bad news,” he said. “You don't need to soften it for me.”

Austin cleared his throat. “Beckman's pulling the plug on the Simone project.”

Mac found himself nodding. “Did he say why?”

“No. But we can surmise.”

“I'm on schedule. We've abided by the contract.”

“Sure we have. It's not your fault, Mac. He's not blaming you. What you've shown him is good stuff.”

“The Larrigan material is dynamite,” Mac said.

“Yes.” Austin hesitated. “Exactly.”

“Oh.” Mac laughed quietly. “I get it.”

“Somebody got to them.”

“Threatened them, you think?”

“Who knows,” said Austin.

“Look,” said Mac after a minute. “If you want the truth, it's a relief. I don't like this book. With Simone dead, it's not right. I've been struggling to get a handle on it.”

“Then it's not such bad news after all.”

“Not that bad.” Mac hesitated. “So what's the good news?”

“You can keep your advance.”

“That's it?”

“It was a generous advance.”

“Yes,” said Mac, “it was.”

“There's a kicker,” said Austin. “It's this. If you publish this book with somebody else, you've got to return your advance to Beckman.”

“So I can
not
write it for a nice advance,” Mac said, “or I
can
write it and forfeit the advance.”

“Yes,” said Austin. “Well, you'd probably get some kind of advance, assuming we could place the book. Doubtful it'd be as generous as Beckman's.”