J. Black - The Shop

“After months of playing hide-and-seek at Washington’s toniest gay underground love nests, Vice President Owen Pintek has moved operations to a private Florida island more suitable to hedonistic fun and games, insiders say. ‘He can’t get out and about the way he used to since he became vice president,’ says one staffer close to the VP. ‘Too many people know about him—and his unusual appetites.’”

Jolie had never paid attention to the National Enquirer . It wasn’t on her radar at all. She’d walk right past it in the supermarket, never even register its existence. So she had no idea that the vice president of the United States would be on the cover. She opened up the cached webpage and scanned the article from over two months before. It was mostly innuendo with no real facts—enough journalistic leeway to drive a truck through.

The whole case hinged on the word of an unnamed staffer, as well as “sources close to the vice president.” According to the staffer and the sources, Pintek not only liked boys, but he liked rough sex. He liked sex games, he liked bondage. He liked being choked, and he liked choking. And his favorite place to blow off steam was Indigo Island, the home of the former attorney general of the United States.

Jolie went back to Google. There were no references to Owen Pintek and his sexual preferences other than this Enquirer article and another in the same tabloid—a rehash. Jolie often watched CNN on the nights she was home. She’d never seen any reference to Pintek’s homosexuality. She’d never read about it in the paper. She doubted this story had made the mainstream media. It was all innuendo.

She went back to the Google search, looking for other references to the VP, and found the important one, halfway down the third page. Just a small snippet, a quote from the Port St. Joe Star .

Owen Pintek was in town on Memorial Day weekend.

He was at Indigo.

Jolie drove into the empty parking lot of the Starliner Motel. The neon sign was dark. She remembered that first night, remembered the way the sign buzzed and blinked: N- VACA-CY. The office door was locked. She walked around the side of the office, which also served as Royce Brady’s living quarters, but the shades were pulled and no light seeped out. She knocked on the door out of practice, but she knew the place was empty.

There is always a feeling to a place that has been abandoned. Even if it’s only been a day or two, everyone knows. The animals know and move in. People driving by sense the place isn’t lived-in anymore.

Jolie tried Brady’s number, got his voice mail. She should know the disposition of the case against him, but didn’t. Was he incarcerated? Doubtful. She was sure he’d have been able to make bail. In fact, it could be that he wasn’t even charged.

She could ask Skeet, and he’d probably tell her. But then he’d want to know why.

She ran through the sequence of events on the day of the standoff. According to Mrs. Frawley’s granddaughter, Charly, Luke Perdue left with a man on the morning of the standoff. An hour later he took Kathy Westbrook hostage and holed up in the motel room. Chief Akers negotiated with him for several hours, and it looked as if it would turn out all right. Then Luke brought his hostage to the door, and that was when it went wrong. The FBI sniper killed them both.

Which led to the question, did the FBI have anything to do with his? Could it have been a setup?

If it was a setup, there would have to be a reason. Jolie couldn’t think of any, except a tenuous relationship between Luke and Riley’s breakup and the vice president acting on his predilection for young men. Both happened on the same night, on the same weekend.

It all became clear. Luke didn’t just go out to get some pot and then left. He left because he saw something. Something that scared him.

Scared or not, Luke had told Amy. He’d involved her in it somehow. Jolie was sure of it.

She took the walkway that ran along the front of the units. She came to the oleanders and looked through a gap in the hedge at the railroad tracks beyond. The streetlight shone on them. The rails glimmered like a broken silver necklace.

Jolie could guess the location of the shooter’s railcar by the trajectory of the bullet that crashed through Perdue’s throat. She pictured the FBI sniper and his spotter lying belly-down on the railcar’s roof.

What happened that day? What made Luke take that woman hostage?

A road paralleled the railroad tracks.

Jolie pushed through the break in the oleanders, crossed the tracks, and stepped onto the road. The street followed a slight grade to a shallow basin. Jolie saw houses and trees along the road, the glow of their windows.

She started down the hill.

37

The CO2 Dan-Inject JM Standard, extremely compact and with a total length no longer than its barrel, was made for precision shooting, although Landry hardly worried about it from ten feet away. The lookout’s body had blocked the entrance to the galley—it would have been impossible to miss him. Landry broke the tranquilizer rifle down and cleaned it while he waited for the triptascoline to take effect, taking his time and admiring the sleek efficiency of this model and its weather-resistant anodized aluminum parts.

When he was done, he gently laid the JM Standard in its soft-sided case and turned his attention to the lookout. He removed the dart from the lookout’s neck, dragged him to the other bench seat in the galley, and propped him up. He started the IV drip and adjusted it downward.

Next, Landry walked Frank to the radio and had him call his security detail. Frank told the head of security he was having too much fun out here, and he would be back home in the morning. The head of his security detail believed him. In fact, the man’s voice betrayed the fact that this had happened many times. The head of security made the same weak arguments he must have made before. But Frank, drugged as he was, could be headstrong. And Landry had primed the pump, telling Frank he was cooking sea bass accompanied by a very nice Pouilly-Fuissé. They were old friends by this time—blood cousins. So Frank sounded three sheets to the wind but happy, which was exactly what Landry wanted. Afterwards, he led Frank back to bed and let him sleep.

Landry took the boat out into the bay. It was going on dark, but that was fine. His attention turned to his captive, the lookout. He knew he would have to be patient with this man.

Turned out, it didn’t take long to break him. The man, an FBI agent named Eric Salter, was ambivalent, angry, and riddled with guilt. Once he started talking, he didn’t stop.

Eric Salter told Landry that he and his partner had been sent to monitor the former attorney general’s actions. Salter admitted that the surveillance wasn’t officially sanctioned by the FBI. He and the other guy, the dead man currently residing in the Hinckley’s bench seat, were “on their own.”

“What’s your partner’s name?”

“He’s not my partner. He’s a private investigator named Bakus. Some investigator. He doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.”

The reason Salter was here at all was because of a mistake he’d made in Iraq. He’d killed innocent civilians. Someone in the U.S. knew what he’d done and held it over his head.

Salter told Landry he’d been en route to a hostage situation four weeks ago when he received a call on a secure line.

The caller told him to shoot the man in the motel room.

Eric Salter was a sniper with the FBI.

He said no, of course. But then they put his eight-year-old daughter on the line. She’d been picked up on her way to school.