Reginald Cook - Veil

Charlie didn’t so much as cough their way. Until now.

Twenty miles from his estate, Edward opened his eyes. He stretched and picked up the large brown envelope Vernon gave him. Reading it increased his anxiety. I can’t leave this to Vernon to handle alone. If things go wrong, everything will come tumbling down.

He slid the wooden panel on the car door aside and pulled out a hidden satellite phone. An accessory Vernon suggested. He dialed, examining his blue blood soaked hand. I’m not about to let a dead President sully what I’ve worked so hard to build.

The phone clicked several times, routing the call through Paris, Johannesburg, or some other part of the world, then rang. Someone on the other end picked up.

“Hello, this is Edward,” he said. “I have a problem.”

Daybreak crested the fringe of Washington’s skyline and hung on the horizon like a luminous vapor. Charlie stooped low in the brush and waited. Another fifteen minutes and Tim Billingsly, the cemetery’s nightshift guard, would finish his rounds and not return for an hour. It would give him just enough time.

Tim disappeared down an endless black road. Charlie picked up his baggage and trotted toward the mausoleum. The icy wind made his bones ache, his knees creak.

Except for three small wooden pews, the mausoleum lay empty.

Charlie crept across the white marble floor as though he might wake the dead. Names on the crypts read like a guest list of old friends he’d come to know well. Martha Parker 1933-1986, Loving Mother; Percy Wintergreen 1913-1991, Husband and Father. So many lives, so many secrets. He wondered who would mourn for him. First, unfinished business.

Each wall of the monument held row upon row of tombs, stacked six high and numbered at the bottom for easy identification. Dim sunlight swelled through the skylights providing just enough illumination for him to find his way. He stopped at row 61D-66D.

Charlie put the duffle bag and blanket wrapped rifle on the floor next to crypt 61D, pulled a pair of pliers and a screwdriver from his urine stained overcoat, and loosened four screws that held the tomb’s marble panel in place. A decorative brass ball no bigger than a marble covered each bolt. Careful not to damage them, he removed each one and pulled a long steel rod from each corner of the slab.

The marble square came easily loose and he gently lowered it to the floor, exposing a dark wooden casket with tarnished gold fittings. He pulled it out halfway and leaned it down to the floor.

An uncontrollable ache hit his lungs. Charlie coughed violently, covering his mouth with a blood-soaked handkerchief. He clutched his chest and hacked, careful not to stain the floor. A rancid odor filled the air. His chest rattled, his eyes watered. He leaned on one of the tombs for balance. It took a few moments for him to regain his strength. Death whispered. Come. “Not today,” Charlie answered, and quickly went back to work.

Charlie opened the casket, put the duffle bag and rifle inside, locked it, then quickly slid it back into place. The last bolt fastened the slab tight. The door cracked open. Tim.

A thousand needles pierced Charlie’s lungs and he struggled to suppress the bloody burst. Tim turned down his row, Charlie dipped down the next, and headed for the back door.

“Hey you! Stop!”

Charlie hit the door holding his chest, blood running from his nose.

He disappeared into the brush on the south side of the cemetery, just behind the mausoleum.

He struggled over a short metal fence and vanished down a path he’d traveled for four decades. Charlie looked back. Nothing. He fell to his knees and coughed so hard he almost passed out in the grass. Tears filled his eyes. He shut them tight, and saw President Kennedy’s head explode, over and over.

The attack passed. He went on his way. The evidence safe once again.

Robert and Thorne searched their building and the immediate area around it. Nothing. They fanned out separately covering a half-mile radius, but Charlie was a ghost. Robert grabbed a couple of winks on the couch in his office then headed for Skid Row and the homeless area across town. Thorne opted to look for the Bear.

By noon, most of Washington shook off the Monday morning blues and charged full steam into another week of the important and unimportant. Only a trace of the previous night’s cold remained, and a clear cloudless sky teased the first hint of spring.

Robert’s shark gray Mustang muscled in and out of the traffic. At Constitution Avenue he waited for ten minutes as two busloads of British children crossed the street to the Capitol Building, cameras flashing, fingers pointing. Ten minutes later, the pristine buildings, Hugo Boss suits, leather briefcases, and Rolex watches, disappeared; giving way to the bastard child half of the city’s strange dichotomy.

Homeless men, women, and children lined the streets less than a few miles from the White House. Robert pulled past the aftermath of failed lives and empty promises, unconcerned. Sad, but not my problem .

He parked in a narrow alley between two dingy brick buildings and negotiated with six grime-covered, half toothless men eager to insure his car’s safety. Minutes later, he methodically navigated through an endless maze of cardboard condos and rusted-out shopping carts, carefully searching each weathered face, describing Charlie to anyone lucid enough to understand.

“Help me get something to eat?”

“Brother, can you spare a quarter?”

“Mister, I’m hungry and can’t find my mommy.”

“My wallet was stolen and I need carfare to get home.”

“I ain’t gonna lie. I need some money for beer. Will you help?” Panhandlers, drug addicts, the mentally ill. Some slept under staircases, between garbage dumpsters, and in open fields, their bodies wrapped in large sheets of plastic or copies of the Washington Post.

Soup and bread lines stretched for blocks, like concert-goers waiting for tickets to see Springsteen or Madonna. Kids “dumpster dived” for food or things they could trade, and an elderly black man in dark glasses played a plastic flute for spare change.

“No, I ain’t never seen nobody like that,” a bag lady stammered, swigging beer from a can in a brown paper sack. “If ya gots a few dollars I’ll be careful to watch out tho.” Robert smiled, declined her offer, and moved through a small park in the middle of the area. Crowded with destitute men, prostitutes, johns, drug dealers, addicts, and a few neglected children, used needles and crack vials peppered the grass like common pieces of trash, picked up, examined, and reused at random. Urine and decay fermented the air.

Sirens competed for attention with rap music pounding from a boom box.

At picnic tables, some played chess and dominos, while onlookers drank wine, stared blankly into space, or just talked to themselves.

Ninety minutes later, Robert got the feeling even if they did know, no one here would tell him where to find Charlie. An outsider, he could expect little more than silence. He finished up in the park and headed back for his car.

“Hey you, Mister,” a cement mixer voice shouted.

A haggard man in a wheelchair waved to him from a half a block away, rolling in his direction. Legless from the knees down, his clothing looked so worn, it was not readily obvious he wore Marine dress blues.

Three tarnished medals dangled from his chest.

“Popeye Michaels at your service,” he said, pushing long salt-and-pepper hair out of his eyes. “People around here call me Popeye.” Robert introduced himself and shook Popeye’s hand. He recognized one of the ornaments clinging to the old vet’s chest. The Congressional Medal of Honor.