John Sandford - The Fool's Run

I grabbed her arm and stopped her. She pivoted to face me.

"What are you telling me? That he's out of control?"

"No. He still has control, but sometimes the pain. affects him." We started walking again, and I held onto her arm. "He gets angry, out of all proportion to whatever set him off. And when it goes away, the relief is so strong that he gets almost maniacally happy. Overconfident. The swings are hard to deal with."

"How is he now?"

"He's in pretty good shape. He had a bad headache yesterday, but it was gone this morning."

"Are you still planning to come to Washington?"

"Yes. He insists on it. The worse the headaches get, the more determined he is to follow this through."

We passed all the usual exits to the parking ramps and approached an unmarked desk manned by an elderly guard. He saw us coming and nodded at Maggie. She walked past him to a door labeled fire and bumped it open with her hip. We were in a reserved section of the parking ramp, separated from the rest of it by a concrete wall. It was the kind of place whose existence I never would have suspected, though it made sense. The average car was probably worth sixty or seventy thousand. There were a half dozen Rolls-Royces and a few sleek Italian jobs that made Maggie's Porsche look Puritan-plain. She dropped neatly into the driver's seat, opened the passenger door, and I climbed inside.

During the ride to Anshiser's she was friendlier than she had been in the past. LuEllen fascinated her, and she asked a dozen questions about the burglaries as we loafed along. When I mentioned that LuEllen and Dace were sleeping together, she half turned toward me in the dark.

"Isn't that a major change?"

"Um."

"You're not distraught?"

"LuEllen and I like to roll around together. Our relationship is important, but not serious. If you know what I mean."

"This Dace. From what you've told me, he seems very. likeable."

"LuEllen says he's a nice guy. She says I'm not. She wants to try nice for a while."

She thought about that, and it occurred to me that I was feeling some electricity. I wrote it off as fantasy, a product of unrequited hormones. In any case, she stopped talking about LuEllen, and I brought her up-to-date on the Whitemark project.

"So you're ready," she said when I finished.

"Yeah. If Anshiser says go."

"He will," she said. She glanced at me. "Dillon was doing more research, you know, just because he's Dillon. Anyway, he found a reference to a paper you wrote about the tarot. He went out and bought a deck."

I grinned in the dark. "Where did he find it? The paper?"

"That was the strange thing. It was at the War College."

"Yeah. I knew they were using it."

She wanted more, but we were in the twisting streets, and a moment later she turned in at Anshiser's wrought-iron gate. It rolled smoothly out of the way and she gunned the car up to the house.

Anshiser was a shock. He'd been thin when I last saw him, and he'd lost another ten pounds. The lines in his face had deepened and his short hair seemed to stand on end. His nose appeared redder and larger.

"Mr. Kidd," he said hoarsely, as Maggie ushered me into the office. Dillon was nowhere to be seen. "I understand we're ready to go."

I gave him the report I'd given Maggie on the way in. He was pleased. When I told him what we planned to do with the child pornographers, he said, "Goddamned right," and laughed. "That ought to open up some sinuses over there." He whacked the top of his desk with sudden energy.

"You don't look so good," I said. "Maggie said you're having migraines."

"Something like it. Not quite, but close," he said somberly. "To tell you the truth, I think I'm dying."

"My God, Rudy," Maggie protested. "The doctors say it's tension. It could be Kidd's project doing this. Who knows? You're not dying."

Anshiser laughed again, the laugh trailing off to a cough. "The doctors are full of horseshit," he said. "I know what I feel like." He looked at me and held his hand to his head. "I can't explain it, but when I have one of these headaches, my whole body feels empty. I don't know what it is; I've never had it before. And it's bad."

"Look," I said, "you're making me nervous. If you're about to lose it, either mentally or physically, we could have serious problems. You're our backup, if anything goes wrong."

He hacked again, covering his mouth with his fist, his eyes never leaving mine. "I'll last," he said. "I'm too damn mean to die before that's done." He reached under his desk and produced a nylon handbag and pushed it toward me.

"Half of the remaining money," he said. "A half million dollars. I'm extremely pleased with your progress."

I looked at the bag for a minute and then back up at Anshiser.

"The real thing starts the day after tomorrow," I said. "Maggie and I will get out of here tomorrow, we'll show her where we're at, and then we do it. I need you to say right now to go ahead."

"Do it. I wish you luck, I do," Anshiser said. He pushed himself slowly out of the chair, and I picked up the bag and leaned forward to shake his hand.

"You take good care of Maggie," he said. "She's the daughter I should have had. Or the wife." He grinned, and for another instant, the vitality was back.

Maggie led the way to the door, and just outside, put a hand on my arm. "I wasn't expecting this," I said, holding up the money bag.

"That's Rudy's way of telling you he's happy," she said. "Do you have reservations in town?"

"No. I thought it would be better to show up somewhere and pay in cash. I sure as hell have enough of it."

"Why don't you stay at my place? I have an extra room, and you're welcome to it. It would be untraceable."

"That's nice of you. Thanks."

"I have to talk to Rudy privately for a moment. I'll be right back." I waited in the hallway, heard the sound of their voices, then Anshiser laughed again, and a moment later she came out.

"His sense of humor seems to be intact," I said as we headed down the stairs.

"You seem. not exactly to amuse him, but to make him laugh," she said. "It's good for him."

"What'd I say?"

She glanced back at me, the smile extending to her eyes this time.

"I told him I'd offered to let you stay at my place, in the spare bedroom. And how you said, 'That's nice of you.' And he said, 'God Almighty, Maggie, why don't you take that boy home and let him screw your brains loose?'"

"That's when he laughed?"

"No, he laughed on my line. He never laughs on his own." She was ahead of me going down the stairs, so all I could see was that tantalizing neck, and not her face.

"What was your line?"

She'd reached the bottom of the stairs and crossed the short hall to the outside door. She turned at just the right moment, with one hand on the knob. "I said I planned to do exactly that."

I said "Oh" to an empty doorway.

As a top-level manager, and a large, athletic woman, she was surprisingly soft and yielding in the bedroom. While LuEllen went after sex with the enthusiasm of a beer-drinking cowgirl, Maggie was slower and looser and almost submissive. When we broke apart after making love the first time, she rolled onto her back. The skin of her stomach and breasts was shiny-damp in the dim bedside light, and she said, sounding satisfied with herself, "There."

"There, what?"

She propped herself on one elbow and looked down at me. "There are some men. getting them in bed is a challenge, you know? You were such an arrogant asshole the first time we met, out on the sandbar, with your brushes and your paintings and your torn shirt and your tan. I was sweating like a pig, my nylons were full of holes, my hair was a mess, and when I try to make conversation about the hole you cut in your painting, you cut me off at the knees. What a jerk."