Big If Page 9

  “The school is the magnet in this district,” Fundeberg was telling the reporters. “Reading scores are up, thanks to our aggressive program of Internet access.”

  The reporters wrote this down.

  “The gym has room for eight hundred cots,” said Fundeberg. “That’s well over half the town.”

  The helo settled in the outfield of a soupy baseball diamond. A pitiful committee waited at the edge of the rotor-wash, the bedraggled mayor, a priest whose hat blew off, a two-man FEMA team. Vi and Bobbie were busy kitting up, racking Uzis, tapping ears, adjusting the straps on their body armor. Herc and O’Teen straightened each other’s ties.

  “Right,” said Gretchen.

  Quick check of the radios and they were out the door. A crowd of refugees pushed up. Vi and Felker pushed them back. Gretchen took the VP through the gap with Herc, Tashmo, and O’Teen, a box of four around him. They hustled up the hill to the magnet school with the FEMA dudes and the delegation from the town.

  A light rain fell. Vi splashed across the grass, taking a position in the right-field power alley. She watched families stumble up from the town, carrying whatever they had rescued from the river. She saw young children with stuffed talking dinosaurs, men with rare and precious heirloom muskets, people saving their home encyclopedias, every family member carrying four volumes or as many as they could. She saw a woman with a small painted box marked Recipes and another woman in a dripping quilt carrying two goldfish in a bowl, the water sloshing as she walked. The woman held her hand over the open bowl, protecting the goldfish from the rain.

  Vi heard Felker on the comm. He said that he was going for a look Gretchen was herding the protection to the school. She said, Look at what?

  Felker was half static. He sounded far away. He said that he was going to the town.

  Gretchen said, Felker, that’s a negative. Thirteen your ass right back here. “Thirteen” was borrowed cop code. It meant do it now.

  Gretchen was hailing and recalling Felker all the way up the hill to the school, but Felker never copied back. Gretchen gave a final order before the gym swallowed her signal. She said, Vi, go find him—bring him back.

  Vi cut through the refugees to the red clay warning track, past the scoreboard and the ten-foot foul pole, down a grass embankment. She lost her footing on the bank and slid on her ass to a gravel fire road.

  The rain was pelting now. Vi was jogging down a street of prim brick homes with many family touches, trellises and flowerbeds and birdhouse mailboxes, hedges manicured. She saw a man loading a legless air hockey table into his pickup truck. She saw dogs chained in yards, barking in the rain, and others, at the windows, barking silently. She saw muddy Guardsmen coming uphill in a hurry, nearly bouncing off the back of their humvees. She saw men in denim drabs, prisoners searching for their jailers, trudging toward the shelter in the gym. She jogged, thirteening in all directions, hailing Felker on the comm, shouting Felker to her fist mike, shouting “Felker” at the lawns.

  The river was two streets ahead, flowing like a movie, flat and wide. Vi could see the streetlights of downtown, water halfway up, the roof of a doughnut shop, and a red sign for a Texaco, Free Travel Mug with Oil Change While Supplies Last. She heard a burst, three rounds, from a trailer park. She jogged in that direction, splashing to her ankles, moving closer to the river now.

  The trailer park was quickly flooding out. Some trailers were in place, bolted to concrete foundations. Others were half-moored, wagging slowly on an axis to the current’s push. She saw men in hunting clothes with shotguns in a silver jeep. She saw a family in a metal boat being towed by a station wagon full of children and possessions. She saw men moving between trailers, men in denim drabs, many with shaved heads—the prisoners. Some prisoners were helping the homeowners load their cars and boats. Others simply fled, ignoring cries for help. She saw a few prisoners going through the trailer homes, carrying gilt mirrors and personal computers and children’s bikes held high, but she couldn’t tell which prisoners were looting and which prisoners were helping. She could see the street lines, double yellow, through the moving water at her knees. She looked ahead and saw Felker in a yard.

  She shouted at him. Felker didn’t hear or didn’t look. A Doberman chained outside a trailer snapped at Felker, slashing and lunging in the water, yanking the chain taut. Felker was trying to unchain the dog and save it from drowning as the river rose, but he couldn’t get around the jaws of the dog to save it. Vi watched speechlessly, Felker dancing to the side, the dog splashing at him with its jaws. The Doberman was gray. Its head was blackened, wet.

  Vi heard a woman yelling from the doorway of the trailer, leaning on a single wooden crutch, holding a screaming baby in her arms. The baby was a few months old, Chinese or Korean, and wore a pink peapod suit. The woman had a cast on her left leg to her knee. She tried to pass the child out, but Felker couldn’t get around the dog, so he drew his Uzi and shot the animal, one burst to the sausage-side. The dog screamed. Felker winced and took its face off with a mercy burst. The dog disappeared, then buoyed up, half-headless and still chained, floating in a water-cloud of spreading red.

  Vi said, “Holy shit.”

  “Take the baby,” Felker said.

  The river pulled the dead dog in a long arc on the chain. Vi took the baby and the mother’s crutch. Felker locked the trailer and carried the mom, fireman-style, up the street toward the town, staggering and dropping her, a big awkward splash, lifting her again. The baby was bawling in Vi’s arms. The cast on the woman’s leg was covered with signatures and messages from friends, pink and purple inks, hearts and scrawls and messages, blurring now and running down the cast. The woman was laughing and weeping and making goo-goo at the baby and thanking Jesus Christ for His sweet eternal care. Felker asked her not to move around so much up there.

  They gave the baby and the mom to a group of convicts who were heading toward the gym.

  Felker, unburdened, turned to Vi. “There’s looters by the river. They’re killing watchdogs, going house to house, taking what they want.”

  Vi said, “Fuck it, man, who cares?”

  He started down the road, back toward the trailer park.

  She followed him. “Fuck it. Felker—”

  They walked into a cul-de-sac. Here the banks were gone. The trailers were coming loose from their foundations, drifting a few feet, filling with brown water, slowing to a stop. Some floated free and snagged in trees, great boxy derelicts. Others joined the current and started moving quickly as they sank, contents spilling from the open doors and windows, spice bottles, bobbing basketballs, empty plastic milk jugs saved for recycling, a trail of junk and bubbles. Vi was in cold river to her waist. She felt the loose ground slipping away under her feet.

  She saw convicts wading back and forth between the trailers.

  Felker squeezed a warning burst into the air. The looters turned and looked in three directions.

  Felker shouted, “Federal agent. Leave this area and proceed in an orderly fashion to the gym.”

  The inmates looked at Felker and each other, not hearing all of what he said, and some of them decided that it was best to run. Others had guns, muskets and long rifles and some handguns looted from the trailers, and they shot into the air, warning the warner, and Felker squeezed another burst into the air, his arm stiff, like a track and field official starting the sprinters. The looters shot back, also in the air, and a few more volleys were traded in this manner, then Felker popped his clip, slid in another, and started chasing them into the river. Some looters moved away. Others stood their ground and aimed this time.

  Vi said, “Felker.”

  Bullets kicked the water, nothing very close. No one was trying to shoot anyone. Most of the inmates ran away as best they could, half wading, stumbling and dunking, swimming a few strokes, spitting water in the air, kicking till they touched the ground, and pushing up to run again.

  One convict fled into the last trailer. The screen door was white alumi
num and twisted off the top hinge. Felker opened the crazy twisted door using the knob.

  He went in. Vi went in behind him.

  It was dark inside the trailer. She was standing in a snug wood-paneled kitchen. Felker disappeared around the corner, chasing the inmate. She felt the kitchen list, the floor yawing wide into the current. She braced herself, grabbing the faucet on the sink. She heard sheet metal twisting, felt the gunshot-pop of bolts, and, through the open door, the view was moving. They were floating free. Cabinets fell open and the whole thing rolled.

  She woke up in the woods, nowhere near the trailer park, vomiting and shivering, on her hands and knees. Her wallet and her creds were lost in the river. She could get replacement creds and didn’t care about the wallet or anything in it, except for a folded one-dollar bill she had carried every day since coming to Protection, the bill Jens had found in an old insurance file after Walter’s death.

  Vi made it to the outfield and saw no helo there. She called Movements from the gym, borrowing the cell phone of the priest whose hat had blown off in the rotor-wash. She called collect. She said, “Collect me. I’m in Hinman, Illinois.”

  She spent the night in the gym, coughing up the Mississippi, chatting with the priest and a roofer and his pal, playing Risk with children on the cots. Some pieces were missing and the board was water-stained, but she organized a regular Risk tournament.

  In the morning, she caught a ride on a medevac as far as Carbondale. They landed grandly on the roof of a hospital. Two goons from Human Resources were waiting for her there. Human Resources was the new and happy name for IAB, but no one had told the goons that they were new and happy. She asked about the others, Gretchen, Bobbie, Tashmo, and the men from Human said the team was safe in Washington. She asked about Felker and the goons said nothing.

  They flew her back to Beltsville on a government Gulfstream. They took her to Psych Services, dumped her in a room with a heavy maple table, big enough for two, and soundproof panels on the walls. She asked the two-way mirror for a Coke and a few minutes later, there was a knock. It was Boone Saxon, a senior threat investigator, carrying a can of Pepsi.

  Boone said, “Will Pepsi be all right?”

  She touched the can; it was warm. She asked the mirror for a cup of ice.

  Boone took her through the story from the helo in the outfield to the shootout with the looters and what happened in the trailer as it rolled. It was not a hostile Q&A, there were no Mirandas, but it wasn’t altogether friendly either, and she didn’t understand why it was Boone Saxon asking all the questions. Why not Gretchen? Why not Human? It didn’t make much sense. Boone was a threat man; he only did the threats.

  “Let’s go through it one more time,” Boone said. They went through it one more time. Vi asked for ice again, looking at herself and saying, “Can I get some fucking ice?”

  They went through it many times and Boone was finally satisfied.

  He turned to the mirror. “Get the ice,” he said.

  The Service gave her three days off to recover from the flood. Vi, not knowing where else to go, went back to Center Effing and stayed at her brother’s house. It was a bad visit. She was strung out, sweaty-palmed, jumping at small noises, and she fought with Jens the whole time. By the end of the three days, she was glad to go back to the detail.

  There was a rumor boom when Vi rejoined the team, and this became another way to pass the time between campaign events, the red-eyes and the van rides and the predawn breakfasts in the hotel coffee shops. The snipers said that Boone Saxon’s men were looking for Lloyd Felker, the person or the corpse, a big clandestine manhunt with negative results. The bomb techs said that Felker was definitely muerto—Boone Saxon had found him bloated, washed up in Kentucky, and they were only waiting on the dentals to announce it. This story grew less plausible with time—how long could dentals take? Soon the bomb techs were agreeing with O’Teen, who said that Felker was alive in Mexico, working as a bodyguard for the cocaleros, doesn’t speak the language and his memory is gone, like Charlton Heston’s buddy in The Planet of the Apes—the only thing he remembers is how to scan the hands, and the superstitious Mexicans call him El Pantero or the Man in Pants. The comm techs scoffed at El Pantero; they had good hard rumors placing Felker in Kansas City, Denver, several shitholes in Nevada, and Duprete, Missouri. Bobbie Taylor-Niles said that Felker was alive—she insisted on a happy ending—and she even watched the ropelines for him, thinking Felker might come in from the crowd one day. Vi herself did not believe or disbelieve that Felker was dead in the river or alive, though she watched the ropes for him as well, in the spirit of a porch light you leave on.

  Felker’s death or disappearance affected everybody differently. Herc Mercado got a buzz cut. O’Teen gave up cigarettes. Gretchen tried to lose some weight. Tashmo bought a pickup truck (he’d always wanted one).

  Herc, who lacked compassion, coined a word, Lloydify, which meant a total mental breakdown under pressure in the field. You could do a Lloyd or pull a Lloyd or feel somewhat Lloydish, and, after what they saw in Hinman, many of them did. When Sean Elias joined the team as deputy lead agent and heard his first Lloyd-word, Vi had to tell him where it came from.

  Vi came back from her run, took a long hot shower, and ate a piece of toast, sitting on the futon, looking at the dusty plants along the windowsill, her home in Tower South that was never quite a home.

  Most of the agents on the team had fairly shitty home lives, so Vi didn’t feel too bad having none at all. There was old Tashmo, cranky, middle-aged, thirty years a bodyguard, whose wife was always after him to fix the car, fix the disposall, who didn’t give him a goddamn minute’s peace the one day a week Tashmo managed to get home. There was Herc Mercado, twice divorced and not yet thirty, who often slept on O’Teen’s couch because his latest manic girlfriend had locked him out and he was sick of breaking his own door in. There was O’Teen himself, a balding bachelor who had tried computer dating but found that he kept getting matched up with losers, for some reason. And Felker too—he loved his wife and son; he was always telling Vi how much he missed them when he went away. But if he loved them so much, why did he walk into the flood? Was that the act of a happy man? Gretchen Williams was another story. Vi, as Gretchen’s assigned driver, picked her up and dropped her off at home before and after each deployment. Every time Vi did, she saw how Gretchen and her son set each other off, the little fights, the tension in the air. Why the agents had such shitty home lives was a question Vi had asked herself many times. The pressures of the detail were special and acute—the endless travel, the need to toggle back and forth from vacant mode along the ropes (the total watchfulness, scan the hands and scan the hands, always the hair trigger) to normal people mode, whatever that might be.

  Vi dressed and went down to the lobby to wait for Bobbie Taylor-Niles. Most bodyguards had rocky lives away from vacant mode, but nobody’s was rockier than Bobbie’s. When they traveled with the VP, Vi and Bobbie roomed together, dressed together, ate together, worked together, flirted with the newsmen in the hotel bars together. Sometimes, on the worst nights, after a big crowd, a day of overflowing crowds, they even slept together, two women in a bed sized for a king. They would get into their hotel room at nine or ten p.m., strip themselves of clothes, comm net, shooting harness, body armor. They would shower (not together), and maybe, if they were feeling wanton, slip into play clothes, as Bobbie called them, jeans and a t-shirt for Vi, pearls and a plum blazer for Bobbie, and go down to the lobby bar or up to the roof bar, wherever the hotel was serving alcoholic drinks, and have an alcoholic drink, lite beer for Vi, and for Bobbie vodka up.

  Bobbie Taylor-Niles was a presence in a bar, a beauty and a bombshell and a magnet for the guys, less a woman than an ocean liner of desire, continuous and sleek, with long, knifing legs and hair a shade her colorist called sand, short for Streisand. Bobbie called herself the scenic route and men seemed to agree. She was not exactly young these days (she was frank about her age, which was
thirty-nine-and-seven-quarters), but young men found her sexy in the older-woman way and old men found her sexy, period. This last fact was strategically important, Bobbie said, because she planned to marry a distinguished man of years and reputation, wealthy or at least well-to-do, a carnal, cynical arrangement maybe, but Bobbie had tried every other kind of marriage.

  She numbered her ex-husbands I, II, and III, like movie sequels or world wars. Husband I was her first supervisor in the Criminal Division, El Paso station, a guy named Doyle Doak, who did rope tricks in his office and crossed into Mexico for eyeglass appointments, saved a couple bucks that way, no wonder he was always sea-sick, fucking cheap-ass dick, Bobbie said. In Washington, she met Husband II, a Senate lawyer who wrote banking regulations, who was quite a force in banking regulation, but who lost his job when he forgot to put not in a certain crucial sentence, accidentally abolishing all private debt in the United States. Bobbie, disappointed, left Husband II for Husband III, a surgeon in Virginia, an oral surgeon—actually a dentist, which was pretty much the same thing as a surgeon, Bobbie said. The dentist, Dr. Potter Niles, had a spreading practice in the suburbs and was certainly not poor. Vi had never met the dentist, never heard his voice, and Bobbie rarely spoke of him except to ridicule his taste in things, which was, she said, ultra–Reader’s Digest. Dr. Potter Niles read the Reader’s Digests in his own waiting room and Bobbie sometimes caught him lounging in his waiting room at night, like it was a real living room. She left the dentist and moved in with an old flame, the man she called the Admiral, a two-star Navy surgeon, a true medical surgeon, the former personal physician to the president.

  Vi knew that Potter Niles still loved Bobbie. Vi knew this from the support checks he sent every month. Bobbie, whose personal finances were often chaotic, asked Vi to cash these checks. Potter always wrote a little note on the memo line—Come back to me, or words to that effect. Bobbie got the checks in the mail, tore the envelopes, sometimes tearing the checks too in her impatience, and never read the long, anguished letters Potter included with the checks. He must have guessed this, for he wrote a Cliffs Notes version on the paper she did read. Bobbie endorsed the checks on the back in lavender ink, scrawled No! next to Come back to me, and gave the checks to Vi, who endorsed them for deposit to her NOW account. Vi’s bank cleared them and sent them on to Potter’s bank, which cleared them again, debiting his account, and so Bobbie’s reply came back to Potter canceled with his monthly statements.