The cop bent over him and she heard the metallic click of handcuffs.
“Are you all right?” he asked her, his voice guttural and wet.
She groaned through the tape, tried to nod.
“Officer wounded,” he said, speaking into a radio clipped to his shirt. He recited her street address and a series of codes. He then took two steps toward her and fell first to his knees before collapsing forward, his head on her bare chest, their faces only inches apart.
“Your Honor…,” he said. And then he passed out.
EIGHT YEARS LATER
PRESENT DAY
THURSDAY
One
S ix men, all wearing white hard hats and orange ear protectors, huddled in one corner of what was to become a themed fast food restaurant, That’s a Wrap, that would sport vinyl wallpaper of Monroe, Bogart, Julia Roberts, Tom Hanks, and Harrison Ford. Not twenty feet away, on the far side of a temporary wall, passengers hurried down a long hallway that connected Salt Lake airport’s concourses C and D.
The entrance to the work site was through a thick sheet of black plastic. Sheetrock dust covered the floor along with scraps of aluminum conduit, pieces of electrical wire, and a half dozen used paper cups from the Starbucks down on concourse D.
There was debate among the workers about how to install a length of ventilation duct; the architect had neglected to note the location of the sprinkler system.
“There’s no way, Billy, that you’re going to get around that pipe,” the foreman said at last. “And you sure as shit can’t go through it.”
Billy disagreed. To illustrate his suggestion, he dragged two sawhorses to below the spot in question, threw two lengths of aluminum studs across them, and climbed up, while the foreman shouted out for him to use a stepladder because he didn’t want to lose his workman’s comp record.
But by then there was no stopping Billy. He punched a section of ceiling panel up and into the space above, and slid it to one side.
Shining a flashlight, he poked his head up inside.
“What the fuck?” he said. He withdrew his head and addressed his fellow workers. “Is this one of those haze-the-rookie things? Because if it is, it sucks.”
When no one answered, Billy jumped down and used a broom handle to knock the additional ceiling panels out of the way. The fourth panel wouldn’t budge. Neither would the fifth, or the sixth. He tried another, and it lifted partially. Billy carefully slid it to the left.
Now he and the others could see up into the false ceiling.
“What is that?” one of the men said. “A suit bag?”
It was a six-foot length of bulging, heavy black plastic, zippered shut.
The foreman took a tentative step forward.
“That ain’t no suit bag,” said the smallest of the six workers, a man with a goatee and a tattoo of three X’s on his neck. He spoke softly, which was not his way. “That’s a body bag. And there’s something in it.”
Two
W alt Fleming pulled the white Grand Cherokee marked “Blaine County Sheriff” to the curb in front of Elizabeth Shaler’s home. As he sat behind the wheel, staring up at the house, Walt realized he was rubbing the scar through the shirt of his blue uniform, a firm reminder of that evening eight years earlier. It still pulsed hot from time to time, for no reason at all. It did so now. He felt oddly nostalgic for a moment, reliving the event that had propelled him to the front page and secured his bid for county sheriff, an election he’d won by a landslide.
Now a household name, Liz Shaler had recently returned to her Sun Valley home-albeit a second home-allegedly to announce her candidacy for president. Walt’s job, along with the people inside, was to keep her alive. He radioed dispatch that he was leaving SD-1, his Cherokee, and heading inside.
A black Porsche Cayenne parked behind the Cherokee, and out from the passenger seat stepped Patrick Cutter, with his George Hamilton golfer’s tan and porcelain white smile. Walt acknowledged Dick O’Brien, Cutter’s security chief, visible through the windshield. O’Brien, stocky, and with an Irishman’s nose, offered Walt a mock salute. Two dark-suited minions, a man and a young woman, both of whom, judging by their black clothing, knew nothing about dressing for the arid Idaho summer, attempted to follow Cutter but were quickly turned back by their boss. They returned to the idling car a little sheepishly.
Liz Shaler’s 1950s ranch home would have fit inside Patrick Cutter’s six-bay garage. Walt wondered how that made Cutter feel as he bounded up the walkway like a kid arriving home from school.
The Secret Service agent held the door for Walt. “Looks like Dryer called in the varsity,” Walt said to Patrick Cutter.
“There’s been a credible threat,” Cutter announced. It struck Walt as both odd and unfortunate that Patrick Cutter, no matter how many billions he was worth, should have such intelligence ahead of local law enforcement. With the Cutter Communications Conference-C 3-less than twenty-four hours away, the proper chain of command would have been Dryer, Walt, and then O’Brien, who would tell Cutter; not the other way around.
Cutter could read a man’s face. “Don’t worry, Walt, no one’s pulling an end run on you. Dick O’Brien received the intel ahead of even Dryer.”
“That’s not possible,” Walt blurted out, without thinking.
“That’s the way it is,” Cutter said. “We do a lot of business with the military. Believe me. Those are our satellites they’re using, for Christ sakes.” He winked: a mannerism Walt found intentionally offensive.
They stood half in the house. A man with bad acne scars approached from the open kitchen. He was dressed like a preppie, wearing a white shirt, no tie, a blue blazer, blue jeans, and loafers. He offered his hand to Walt while still too far away for them to shake.
“Adam Dryer,” he said.
“At last,” Walt said. The man tried a little too hard with the handshake.
“You guys have not met?” an astonished Patrick Cutter asked.
“Not face-to-face,” Dryer said, still shaking Walt’s hand. “But if e-mail were any judge, we’re practically married.”
“Mr. Cutter mentioned a credible threat,” Walt said, getting free of the man’s eager hand.
“Did he?” Dryer asked, looking at Cutter disappointedly. “Have you met the AG?” Dryer stepped out of Walt’s line of sight.
Elizabeth Shaler was on the phone in the kitchen. Her eyes lit up at the sight of Walt, and she waved enthusiastically, then pointed to the phone and scrunched up her face into complaint. She wore a sleeveless white shirt with a simple string of pearls. The countertop blocked sight of the rest of her, but she hadn’t added a pound. If anything, he thought she looked a little too thin and not a day older than when the two of them had been in this house together under much different circumstances.
“I guess you have,” Dryer said, seeing Shaler’s reaction. He sounded almost jealous.
“It’s a small town,” Walt said.
“Or was,” Cutter added, trying too hard to be friendly, “until people like me moved in. Right, Sheriff?”
“Everybody, take a deep breath,” Walt said. “Everything’s fine. I want to hear about this threat. But first, I think I’m being summoned.”
In fact, Liz Shaler was waving him over to her and pointing down the hallway. She placed the phone down, gave Walt an affectionate hug, and said to Dryer, “I’m going to steal him for a minute.”
As she led him by the hand, Walt felt a pain in his gut just beneath the scar. Liz Shaler sensed this somehow and inquired, “Too familiar?”
“I’m fine.”
“It’s been too long,” she said, closing the door of a small study behind him. “Oh my God, how good it is to see you!”