Брэд Мельтцер - The Fifth Assassin

“Sir, you need to stop moving,” the employee added, getting ready to lift again.

“Here we go,” Marshall insisted, his voice cracking. “Last one. On C…!”

“Marsh, I’m sorry… I can’t.”

“You can, Dad! On C…! ” Marshall pleaded.

His father shook his head, his eyes welling with tears. As he clutched the armrests of his chair, his hands were shaking, like he was trying to claw his way out of his skin… out of the chair… Like he was trying to run from his own body.

“A… B…”

With one final krunk , the wheelchair slammed and bounced over the store’s threshold, a wave of warmth embracing them as they rolled inside.

In front of them, Marshall saw a crush of customers, almost all of them moms with kids, weaving between the rows of clothes racks, all closing in on them.

It was all okay.

“Hold on, I think something spilled,” the employee announced.

The sound was unmistakable. A steady patter that drummed against the wood floor. When he heard it, Marshall didn’t look down. He couldn’t.

“Oh God,” the employee blurted. “Is that—?”

“Pee-pee…” A five-year-old girl began to giggle, pointing at the small puddle growing beneath Marshall’s father’s chair.

From where he was standing, behind the wheelchair as he clutched the pushbars to keep standing, Marshall could see only the back of his father. For years, he had wondered how tall his dad actually was. But at this exact moment, as his father shrank down into his seat, urine still running down and dripping off the stump of his leg, Marshall knew that his father would never look smaller.

“Here…” a quick-thinking customer called out, pulling tissues from her purse. Marshall knew her. She worked with his mom at the church. The wife of Pastor Riis; everyone called her Cricket. “Here, Marshall, let us help you…”

In a blur of guilt and kindness, every employee and customer in the shop was doing the same, throwing paper towels on the mess, making small talk, and pretending this kind of thing happened all the time. Sagamore was still a small town. A church town. A town that, ever since the Lusks’ accident, always looked out for Marshall… and his mom… and especially for his poor dad in that wheelchair.

But as the swell of women closed in around him, Marshall wasn’t looking at his father, or the puddle of urine. The only thing he saw was the blond boy with the messy mop of hair staring at him from the corner of the store, back by one of the sale racks.

It was one thing to be mortified in front of a roomful of strangers. It was quite another to be mortified in front of someone you know.

“Marshall, we called your mom. She’s on her way,” the pastor’s wife leaned in and told him.

Marshall nodded, pretending all was okay. But he never took his eyes off the blond boy in the corner—his fellow fifth grader named Beecher, who wouldn’t look away.

There was concern and sadness in Beecher’s eyes. There was empathy too. But all Marshall saw was the pity.

4

Today

Washington, D.C.

Wait, you know him?” Tot asks as I stand in his cubicle, staring down at Marshall’s mugshot. My legs are stiff, my body’s numb, and my skin feels like all the blood in my veins suddenly went solid.

“Beecher—”

“His name’s not Ozzie. It’s Marsh. Marshall. In seventh grade, we used to call him Marshmallow.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Not since junior high.”

“And did he know her ?” Tot asks.

I look up from the phone. I thought this was a trap by the President. But from Tot’s question, he’s also worried it’s a trap by her —the other person who happens to come from our small town.

Clementine.

My childhood crush, my first kiss, and the girl who, two months ago, was the one who uncovered the President’s ruthless attack and tried to blackmail him with it.

I know. I need better taste in women.

“You think Clementine—?”

The door to our office opens behind us. The other archivists are starting to arrive. I scratch the back of my blond hair and hold up a finger. Time to take this outside. As we head back into the hallway, it’s now swirling with the morning crowds. The Secret Service agents are long gone, but we both stay silent, beelining for the metal door that takes us into the dark library stacks at the heart of the National Archives. Motion sensor lights pop on, following us as we pass row after row of book-filled shelves.

“You think Clementine had something to do with this murder?” I ask, still keeping my voice down as I make a sharp left, following behind Tot as he stops at our usual hiding spot, a rusty metal table at the end of the row.

“She had something to do with the last one, didn’t she?” Tot asks. “Last time she showed up, she used your access at the Archives to blackmail President Wallace. Then she shot and killed Palmiotti, disappeared with the proof of the President’s attack, and nearly destroyed your life in the process. You really want to see what she does for an encore?”

“You don’t know there’s an encore.”

“Beecher, her father is Nico Hadrian,” he says, referring to the assassin who once tried to put a bullet in a President and now has a permanent room at St. Elizabeths mental institution. “You know Clementine’s coming back. She knows about the Culper Ring. So if she’s still going after the President—”

“She didn’t go after him. She was blackmailing him for information about her dad.”

“And you believe that? Didn’t she also say she was dying of some newly discovered cancer, and that your own dead father is actually alive?”

“She was lying about my father!”

“I know she was, and I also know how much that one hurt. Clementine isn’t just a manipulator, Beecher—she’s a hunter, no different than her dad. She went after the President, she killed Palmiotti, and she’ll happily do it again. The only reason she reached out to you is because she needed a fall guy. Just like now,” Tot says, his gray beard glowing in the darkness of the stacks. “C’mon, you knew it was just a matter of time. Clementine wasn’t blackmailing the President for money. She wanted information about her own dad, which you know she’s still craving. So if she’s trying to offer something to the President, or simply to take a crack at you for stopping her last time, wouldn’t this be the perfect way to do it: help the President get you caught up in a murder that you can’t get out of? All she has to do is connect with her old friend Marshall—”

“They’re not old friends,” I say.

“They didn’t know each other?”

“If they did, they weren’t close.”

Tot thinks on this, digesting the information. “You do realize that your hometown is full of crazy people, right?”

I nod, still holding Tot’s phone and staring down at Marshall’s mugshot. From the puttylike texture that makes his face droop, to the way his right eye sags, Marsh looks at least ten years older than me. And the victim of ten times the suffering.

“So if Clementine doesn’t have a hand in it, you think the President put Marshall up to this?” Tot asks.

“I have no idea. All I know is, two minutes after you tell me the President’s about to kick me in the face, I’m suddenly being accused of a crime that should be handled by the D.C. Police, but is magically in the hands of the Secret Service. And did you hear what those agents said? The cops arrested Marshall for murder, but he’s somehow already out on the street? Doesn’t that seem a little smelly to you?”

“Maybe he posted bail?” Tot offers.

“He didn’t post bail,” a robotic voice says through Tot’s phone. Immaculate Deception.