Adrian McKinty - Hidden River

So maybe she had picked up the phone. Knew that he would trade it for future favors, but even so. Dad I need your help….

So it was another fuckup on my part, I’d arranged the meeting in the graveyard a day in advance, plenty of time for Doonan to fly a hit team to Denver, to drive to Fort Morgan, to scout the territory, to lay the trap. What a fool I’d been. And perhaps Charles had bullied her, frightened her. If I was right, it must have taken some persuading to get her to talk to her da, especially after all she had gone through to be rid of the past. But she had agreed. The future, too important. A politician’s wife. A rising star. Yes, Charles, I’ll call Da, he’ll take care of it, he’ll kill Alex.

Thanks, Amber. I am not one to hold a grudge. But, my dear, prepare your screams. Your Jackie Kennedy face. In three days Charles is going to be lying beside you with a bullet in his skull.

I needed a weapon, so I went to see my old dealer, the Mexican kid who worked behind the Salvation Army shelter on Colfax. Entire books have been written about the relationship between a user and his dealer. Burroughs, De Quincey. Lou Reed has written songs about it. Mine was uncomplicated. I liked Manuelito. I had quit now and no one was interested in ketch in Denver, so I didn’t blame him when he gave me a bit of the old cold shoulder at first when I went to see him.

“Manuelito,” I said with a big grin.

“Manuel to you,” he said sourly. His baby face trying to force a frown.

“Listen, I quit smack, don’t bring me down.”

He shook his head.

“Man, you know, heroin isn’t even worth the risks anymore.”

“I know,” I said, and we chatted about the dreadful state of affairs the world was in when kids wanted to do crack and then go out and rob some old lady, rather than taking honest-to-God Afghani horse, which was so pure these days you could smoke it, mellow out, chill, harm nobody but yourself. On the subject of the dangerous world we lived in, I told him I needed a piece and he told me about an unlikely place to buy one.

“There’s a guy called Tricky, lives a couple of blocks away from the police headquarters on Federal Plaza, I’ll take you over.”

We went to see Tricky. A wiry, high-strung Guatemalan kid who had so much energy he made me nervous. Also a bit tense to be looking at shotguns, Armalites, pistols, and a machine gun and thinking about committing a political murder a hundred yards from the police HQ and a divisional office of the FBI. Tricky wanted me to take the machine gun off his hands, but in the end I settled for a long-nosed.38 revolver similar to a gun I’d had in the peelers. Stolen from a gun dealer’s in Mexico, Tricky said. As good as untraceable. Pistol in hand, I thanked the two boys and went back home.

Pat wasn’t doing so well these days. He told me not to worry, saying that some weeks you were good and some weeks you were bad. His doc told him to expect that. It would be a sine curve of health, up, down, up, until the final cataclysmic plunge.

He coughed most of the time now and as I got stronger and put on weight, he balanced me out, getting paler and losing weight. Most nights now I fed him soup and did my best to keep his apartment clean.

Pat and I were really getting on and I felt a bit guilty about leaving him. But leave him I must. Either for jail or the afterlife or maybe even for Ireland. In case of the latter, I had changed my airline ticket once again, deciding that if I survived the assassination, I’d fly to Dublin that night on my real passport.

And I might shoot Charles and get out, but more likely I’d be killed at the scene or arrested. Congressman Wegener would be there and a senator from one of the logging states and they were bound to have protection. Peelers and FBI and maybe a few private security guards.

“Hey, Pat, does Colorado have the death penalty?”

“No,” Pat said, with a little cough. “But you won’t get that far,” he added with an ironic grin.

He was wrapped in his blankets. He had a cold. A cold can kill an AIDS patient. He’d given me the list of numbers to call if we had to run him up to Saint Joseph’s.

“Do you want some tea?” I asked. Pat shook his head.

“Did you take your AZT?”

“Everybody I know on AZT is dead,” he said.

“Pat, do us all a favor and take your prescription. I don’t need you dying on me.”

“I’ll take it, don’t freak. I’ll be fine, I’m a survivor,” he said, his eyes lighting up to convince me….

Two days before the fund-raiser.

Pat was very sick in the morning and I didn’t get out to inspect the Eastman Ballroom until the afternoon. Six blocks north of Colfax on Comanche Street. A large, boxy building with grille-covered, high-arched windows. Plain all the way around, but at the front a lovely art deco facade: marble columns that held up a statue of two seminaked figures who were either ballerinas or angels or prisoners on a starvation diet. It was a beautiful structure, though, elegant in its simplicity.

The ballroom sat on its own block, opposite an empty ball-bearing factory and an old warehouse. The closest apartment building was four blocks south and derelict. I couldn’t quite understand how the neighborhood had worked; the sidewalks were large, the streets wide. No traffic, no people, no apartment buildings. Perhaps this had been the equivalent of a factory town and when the factory had closed, it had killed the neighborhood completely. Definitely an area waiting for redevelopers to swoop in and convert everything into condominiums.

The CAW “white attire” ball was by ticket only, but I felt I couldn’t take the risk of attempting to buy a ticket, even under a fake name, since I’d have to have it sent to my Colfax address. Someone would put two and two together.

I’d have to find another way in.

I stared at the Eastman Ballroom entrance. A dozen steps led up to a set of double doors under the columns. There’d be ticket takers up there, and if I tried to bluff my way past, I knew it would all go wrong from the start. If I tried to shoot my way in, that would give Charles plenty of time to get to cover. I walked all the way around the building again and leaned against the wall of the old ball-bearing plant.

A dry, sunny Denver day and the factory made big, bold shadows on the road and sidewalk. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to actually go inside the ballroom, have a check and see what the layout was. But then, what if there was a guard or a cleaner or even someone from CAW making preparations? Why show my face to a security guard when I didn’t have to?

I took a final look and walked away, in case people started taking an interest in me. I hadn’t come up with anything. Maybe I’d try and bluff my way in regardless, I’d say I’d lost my ticket. We’d see. The one thing I now definitely decided that I wasn’t going to do was to wait for him on the sidewalk while his limo or taxi pulled up. Since there were absolutely no pedestrians in this weird part of town, I’d be totally suspicious.

The getaway was another problem. Car could get roadblocked in the nasty Denver traffic, so I went to Kmart and bought a hundred-dollar mountain bike and a fifty-dollar lock and chain. If I could get out of the ballroom somehow, I’d bike quickly to Colfax, and once on Colfax, I’d be safe.

If I could get the fuck out.

We didn’t talk the whole day. Pat tried to make me eggs for dinner, but I took over the cooking. He couldn’t eat, I couldn’t eat. When night fell, I dressed in the white suit I had bought from the Arc Thrift Shop for five dollars. A third of the price of the dry cleaning bill. I grabbed the bike from the hall. Pat looked up from the Rocky Mountain News with a face full of tears and said: