Dead Watch

vague ache in his brain, a hotter, harsher pain where the stitches were holding his scalp together. Sunlight hurt his eyes; he needed sunglasses. And he was really beginning to hurt now. He got a cab, had it drop him at the alley. Cunningham came out on his back balcony and shouted, “That was quick.”
    Jake called back, “I owe you, Harley. Big-time.”
    “Ah, bullshit, man, glad you’re okay.”
    “Couple bottles of single malt, anyway.”
    Cunningham threw up his hands. “Now that you mention it,” he said, “you do owe me . . .”

    Inside, Jake did a quick check of the house, then went into the bathroom and looked at himself. They’d cut a bit of hair away from the scalp gash and put a piece of tape over the stitches. That didn’t look so good. He peeled off his clothes, turned to look at his back. He had a row of cue-width bruises on his shoulder blades, back, butt, and legs, already in the deep-purple stage, with streaks of red. They’d be a sickly yellow-black in a week.
    If Cunningham hadn’t been there with his shotgun, if they’d had time to really work on him, he would have needed all the insurance that he had . . . or none at all.

    Despite the headache and the bruises, he got Patterson’s home phone number and called. He got an out-of-office phone message that said he was in Atlanta and would be back in the office in four days. The message gave his e-mail address and said that it would be checked daily.
    Uh-uh. No waiting in modern times. He went online, got a list of Atlanta hotels, and started calling, beginning with those he thought a political consultant might patronize.
    He hit on the third try: Patterson was at the Four Seasons.
    He called Gina, told her his problem, got routed through to the White House travel office, and booked on a jet leaving National at one o’clock. He’d have to hustle.
    He cleaned up, shaved, showered, dressed, shoved a Dopp kit and a change of clothes in a carry-on bag, called a cab.

    The cabdriver was named Charlie, a morose man so fat that he’d crushed the front seat in his aging Chevy. Charlie’s head barely protruded over the back of the seat, showing an untidy mop of hair that looked like a stand of ornamental grass, yellow-white and erect. He worked eighteen-hour days, and was Jake’s cabbie of choice. Charlie took his cab calls in the back room of a twenty-four-hour newsstand, and so could provide a summary and commentary on news from around the country.
    He had a disaster that Jake hadn’t heard about: “Big shoot-out between the Border Patrol and the coyotes, down around El Paso. There were some Chinese involved, I guess they were coming across, and somebody started shooting. Two or three dead Border Patrol, a bunch of dead Chinamen. I don’t know about the coyotes. They say the Border Patrol crossed the river chasing them . . .”
    “Ah, boy.”
    “Well, what you gonna do?” Charlie asked. “Gotta keep them out somehow.”
    “The penalty for crossing the border isn’t death,” Jake said. “What else happened?”
    “Mostly bad weather. Lots of tornadoes out in Oklahoma and Kansas. Some small town got it, but nobody was killed. Still on strike in Detroit. The Canadian prime minister got a nosebleed during a press conference and he’s at the hospital for a checkup. One of the jurors in the Crippen trial got thrown out because he got caught watching trial news . . .”
    Charlie concluded with, “By the way, you look terrible. What’s the story on your scalp?”
    “Got mugged last night. Beat the heck out of me.”
    “You all right?” Charlie asked. “You think you ought to be flying?”
    “They gave me some pills. I’m okay.”
    “Huh. Tell you what—you got a Frankenstein vibe going, them stitches sticking out like that. You ought to buy a hat.”

    He arrived at the gate at National with fifteen minutes to spare. He bought a couple of hunting magazines, and Scientific American, and a ball cap to cover the scalp wound. There wasn’t much in the way of ball caps at the gate, and only one that fit: a pink cap with a Hello Kitty logo on the front.
    He took the cap, got on the plane. A headache had been lingering in the background all morning, and in the plane, it got worse. Bad enough that he couldn’t read for the first half hour of the flight. He had the window seat, and kept the window shutter closed to avoid the light. Tried to relax, took a pill that the doc said wouldn’t make him too woozy. That helped