How had two New York hoods gotten by the Marine sentries at the gate?
Leaving the car idling, he got out and walked around to look at the front bumper. Residing there was a nice blue Department of Defense officer’s sticker. Clean and new.
Harrison got back behind the wheel. He closed the door and sat looking at the door that Fat Tony had gone through on his way upstairs to kill him as he waited for his heart to slow down and his breathing to get back to normal. His hands were still shaking from the adrenal aftershock.
These two worked for the Costello-Shapiro family in New York, the Big Bad Apple. Well, tonight they had been attending to a little chore for Freeman McNally.
Harrison had no proof of course, but he didn’t need any. He knew Freeman McNally. Freeman had succeeded at an extremely risky enterprise by killing anyone in whom he had the slightest doubt. Why Anselmo and Pioche had agreed to do this little job for Freeman was an interesting question, but one that would probably never be answered. A favor for a new business associate? Good ol’ Freeman. A friend indeed.
Ford got out of the car again and closed the door. He looked for the spent shell of the last round he had fired into friend Vinnie. It had been flipped fifteen feet to the right of where he stood. He pocketed it and went back through the lot to find the others. The search took three minutes, but he found them.
Back behind the wheel of the car, he picked up the automatic and popped the clip from the handle. Still held six rounds. He slipped the clip back in place and put the safety on.
Other men would come after him, of course. If Freeman could reach him here in the FBI barracks at Quantico he could reach him anywhere — in a police car in Evansville, a barracks on Okinawa, a hut on a beach in Tasmania—anywhere.
It took Harrison Ronald about ten seconds to decide. Not really. It took him ten seconds before he was ready to announce the decision to himself.
It’s the only choice I’ve got, he told himself.
He had actually made the decision before he stuffed Vinnie in the backseat and picked up the shells, but now it was official.
Harrison Ronald put the car in gear and fed gas. He coasted through the parking lot, avoiding the little driveway that went up by the office, and headed for the main gate and the interstate to Washington.
It was funny, when you thought about it. He had been scared silly for ten months, day and night and in between, and now he wasn’t. He should have been, but he wasn’t. As he drove along he even whistled.
Jake Grafton parked the car three blocks from what was left of Willie Teal’s place and walked. Fire trucks and hoses were everywhere. Cops accosted him.
He showed them his military ID. Since he was still in uniform, he was allowed to pass.
Standing across the street from Willie Teal’s, Jake Grafton marveled. The entire row from here to the corner was a smoking ruin. Six firemen played water on the wreckage by the light of three big portable floodlights. Behind a yellow police-line tape, several hundred black people stood watching, occasionally pointing.
Jake turned to the nearest policeman and said to him, “I’m looking for a reporter named Jack Yocke. Seen him around?”
“Young? Late twenties? Yeah. Saw him a while ago. Look over there, why don’cha?”
Yocke was interviewing a woman. He scribbled furiously in his notebook and occasionally tossed in a question. At one point he looked up and saw Grafton. He thanked the woman, spoke to her in a low, inaudible tone, then walked toward the naval officer.
“Somebody said the fireman had used enough water to float a battleship, but we certainly didn’t expect to see the Navy show up to take advantage of that fact.”
“Who did this?”
Yocke’s eyebrows went up. “The police are right over there. They’re working their side of the street and I’m working mine. My version will be in tomorrow’s paper.”
“Gimme a straight answer.”
Yocke grinned. “Prevailing opinion is that Freeman McNally just put a competitor out of business. Off the record, with a guarantee of anonymity, witnesses tell me four cars, eight men. They used grenade launchers. Just sat in the cars cool as ice cubes in January and fired grenades through the windows. The firemen and police are still carting bodies out of Teal’s place. Ain’t pretty.”
“You about finished here?”
Yocke shrugged.
“I want to have a little talk. Off the record, of course.”
“Is there any other way?”
Yocke led the way toward his car. Walking toward it he asked, “You hungry?”
“Yeah.”
They went to an all-night restaurant, a Denny’s, and got a seat well back from the door. The place was almost empty. After they had ordered, Jake said, “Tell me about this town. Tell me about Washington.”
“You didn’t come out here in the middle of the night to get a civics lecture.”
“I want to know how Washington works.”
“If you find out, you’ll be the only one who knows.”
“Okay, Jack Yocke, The Washington Post’s star cynic, let’s hear it.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Yep.”
Yocke took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, then settled himself comfortably behind his podium. “Metropolitan Washington is basically three cities. The first, and largest, is composed of federal government employees who live in the suburbs and commute. This is the richest, most stable community in the country. They are well paid, well educated, and never face layoffs or mergers or takeovers or competition or shrinking profit margins. It’s a socialist Utopia. These people and the suburbanites who provide goods and services to them are Democrats: big government pays their wages and they believe in it with all the fervor of Jesus clinging to the cross.
“The second group, the smallest, is made up of the movers and shakers, the elected and appointed officials who make policy. This is official Washington, the Georgetown cocktail-party power elite. These people are the actors on the national stage: their audience is out there beyond the beltway. They’re in the city but never a part of it.
“The last group are the inner-city residents, who are seventy percent black. This group only works in federal office buildings at night, when they clean them. The city of Washington is the biggest employer; forty-six thousand jobs for a population of about 586,000 people in the district.”
Jake whistled. “Isn’t that high?”
“One in every thirteen people works for the city. Highest average in the nation. But major industry dried up in Washington years ago, leaving only service jobs — waiters, maids, bus drivers, and so on. So the politicians create jobs, just like in Russia. The inner-city residents, like the suburbanites and the residents of every major inner city in the country, are also Democrats. They cling to big government like calves to the tit.”
“So what the hell is wrong?” Jake Grafton asked.
“Depends on who you ask. The black militants and the political preachers — that’s all the preachers, by the way — claim it’s racism. The liberals — you have to be rich and white to have enough guilt to fit into this category — claim it’s all the fault of a parsimonious government, a government that doesn’t do enough. I’ve never met a liberal yet who thought we had enough government. This even though the district has one of the highest tax rates in the country and the federal government kicks in a thousand bucks a head for every man, woman, and child every year.”
Jack Yocke shrugged grandly. “To continue my tale, the schools in the suburbs are as good as any in the country. The schools in the inner city are right down there with the worst — fifty percent dropout rate, crime, drugs, abysmal test scores, poisonous race relations — by every measure abominable. The average inner-city resident is ignorant as a post, poor as a church mouse, paranoid about racial matters, and lives in a decaying slum. He collects a government check and complains about potholes that are never filled and garbage that is never hauled away while the local politicians orate and posture and play racial politics for all they’re worth and steal everything that isn’t nailed down. He’ll vote for Marion Barry for mayor even though he knows the man is probably a drug addict and a perjurer because Barry uses the white establishment as a scapegoat for all his troubles.