Steven Gore - Power Blind

Just then, the girl walked up behind Hawkins carrying a hammered aluminum tray bearing two Cokes. She looked down at the photo, wild-eyed, mouth gaping open. The tray fell from her hands. The bottles exploded on the marble floor.

The photo showed her on top of Hawkins. Legs spread over his face, his penis in her mouth. She darted toward the front door. Babu leaped up, grabbed her by the arms, and swung her down on the couch in one motion.

Hawkins stared at the image, not bothering to wipe the soda spray off his face and arms. He finally looked up at Gage, forcing a smile.

“When in Rome…”

Gage reached down and yanked Hawkins up by his T-shirt, stretching it to its limits. Hawkins hung backward, suspended, gasping, flailing. Gage dropped him in his chair, then backed away, and locked his hands on his hips.

“You know how much time you could get for child molesting?” Gage said.

Hawkins looked past Gage toward the front door. “The police here won’t do anything.” Hawkins returned his eyes to Gage. His voice strengthened. “They don’t care. I pay them not to care. Hell, girls around here get married at nine.”

Gage shook his head. “Not here. In the States.”

Hawkins straightened himself in the chair.

“There’s no way India’s gonna extradite me to the U.S. for coming over here to screw these girls. Brings in too much money. Bombay is the new Bangkok. Just check the Internet. The worst they’ll do is tell me to lay off.” Hawkins shrugged. “So maybe I got to pay off some prosecutor. So what?”

“Not child molesting here, you idiot. In Richmond. Your kids.”

Hawkins’s jaws clenched.

Gage walked over to his briefcase and pulled out a criminal complaint charging Wilbert Hawkins with molesting John Doe and Jane Doe, forged by Alex Z a couple of hours after Gage had left Jeannette’s house.

Hawkins’s eighteen-year-old son awaiting trial for fondling little girls. His teenage daughter screwing thirty-year-old men. It wasn’t hard to figure out how it all started.

Gage tossed the complaint at Hawkins. He grabbed at it too late.

Hawkins picked the Coke-soaked pages from the floor. Shaking hands jerked them around in front of his face, making it hard to focus his eyes.

He got the point anyway.

“Relax,” Gage said. “Nobody knows where you are… except me.” Gage pointed at Babu. “And him.”

Gage reached into his pocket and pulled out a tape recorder.

“You’re going to tell me what happened at TIMCO, who ordered it, and who sent you out of the country.” Gage paused, then scanned the furniture, the marble floor, and the half-dozen girl servants now gathered at the kitchen door. “And how you’re paying for all this.”

A s they were driving away from Gannapalli two hours later, Babu let out a sigh.

“I only was kidnapping a wife, but you…” He glanced over at Gage, then shook his head. “You crushed that man.”

Of course there’s a litmus test. Only fools think there isn’t.”

Senator Landon Meyer pulled the phone away from his ear, then glared at it as if it were the idiot, not the Republican National Committee member on the other end of the line. He spoke into it again: “There are a half-dozen litmus tests this time around: abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, terrorism, assisted suicide, prayer in schools-you think I chose Starsky and Hutch for their good looks?”

Landon slammed down the phone.

Screw these people. I was elected senator in a Democratic state because of a litmus test.

It was called the death penalty, and he never let thoughts of that election drift too far from his consciousness for fear he’d begin to take the gifts of chance for granted.

As soon as Senator Doris Wagner called for a moratorium on executions, the election was over. Maybe not that day, but no later than the following one when a maniac murdered six students and two teachers at a Compton elementary school. The Democratic base began to collapse when African-American political leaders prayed for the revenge they called justice on the schoolhouse steps-that and a last-minute revelation that fifty thousand dollars wired into Wagner’s campaign bank account early in the year had originated with Arab charities under FBI investigation for supporting jihadists.

Landon picked up the telephone again. His brother answered on the first ring.

T he next morning Senator Landon Meyer, federal judge Brandon Meyer, and Senator Blanche Zweck, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, sat on facing couches in Landon’s office. Half-empty china cups of now cold coffee lay on the low table along with an oversized spreadsheet. Only forty-six senators were committed to vote for Starsky and Hutch, five short of confirmation. Forty-four against. Ten undecided, and seven of those up for reelection.

“I don’t see it,” Zweck said. “It’s political suicide for at least four of the seven on abortion and the Patriot Act alone. Women and liberals in those states will gang up, and hard-line don’t-trust-the-government conservatives will stay away from the polls. The cost of getting our own voters to show up would be astronomical.”

“That’s why Brandon is here,” Landon said.

“We’re talking maybe an extra twenty million dollars.” Zweck shook her head. “There’s no way we’ll get it, not with a presidential election coming up. Too many of us are chasing the same money. Contributors are already feeling like punching bags.”

“As I said, that’s why Brandon is here.”

Brandon leaned in toward the table. His crowlike eyes peered up at Zweck.

“If you can come up with five million,” Brandon said, “I’ll find the rest.”

Zweck shook her head again. “The president needs this vote in a matter of weeks. He wants to push it through like a tsunami before the opposition gets organized. The swing senators aren’t going to carry IOUs out on a limb that skinny. They’ll want money in the bank. No way you’re going to raise fifteen million dollars that fast.”

L andon dropped into the high-backed black leather chair behind his desk after Zweck left the office, then looked over Brandon.

“Will you need to dip into our own money?”

“I don’t think so.” Brandon stood and stretched. He hadn’t slept on the red-eye from San Francisco. “But so what if we do? You get Starsky and Hutch onto the Supreme Court and Duncan will bless you as the next presidential nominee. That’ll save us fifty million in primary costs alone. Maybe more.” Brandon smiled. “Call it an investment of real political capital.”

“How long is it going to take to come up with what you promised Zweck?”

“A week, maybe. A little money committed to us slipped away a couple of months ago.”

“How?”

“It’s not important. We’ll get it back in time.”

“Fifteen million isn’t small change.”

Brandon gazed down through the office window toward the Supreme Court.

“Don’t worry. We’ll get it. We have no choice.”

I t was only after Brandon was halfway back to California that Landon remembered he’d wanted to ask him if he ever got his wallet back.

This time John Porzolkiewski opened his front door wide. He surveyed Gage, then shook his head and smiled.

“You look like hell.”

“A little jet lag is all.”

Porzolkiewski’s smile faded.

“You got something new,” Porzolkiewski said, “or are we just going to be like hamsters chasing each other around in one of those wire wheels.”

“Something new.”

Porzolkiewski shrugged, then stepped back. “Suit yourself.”

Gage walked inside and found a living room reminding him of his grandmother’s in Nogales in the 1970s, except for the cats rubbing their sides against his legs. Not a sofa, but a huge flowered davenport covered in plastic. Not wing chairs, but two brown leather recliners facing an old-style television in a console. He had the feeling that Porzolkiewski had preserved the room just the way it was on the day his wife died.