Silken Prey

CHAPTER 1
    S
queak.
    Tubbs was half-asleep on the couch, his face covered with an unfolded
Star Tribune
. The overhead light was still on, and when he’d collapsed on the couch, he’d been too tired to get up and turn it off. The squeak wasn’t so much consciously felt, as
understood
: he had a visitor. But nobody knocked.
    •   •   •
    T UBBS WAS A POLITICAL.
    In his case, political wasn’t an adjective, but a noun. He didn’t have a particular job, most of the time, though sometimes he did: an aide to this state senator or that one, a lobbyist for the Minnesota Association of Whatever, a staffer for so-and-so’s campaign. So-and-so was almost always a Democrat.
    He’d started with Jimmy Carter in ’76, when he was eighteen, stayed pure until he jumped to the Jesse Ventura gubernatorial revolt in ’98, and then it was back to the Democrats. He’d never done anything else.
    He was a political; and frequently, a fixer.
    Occasionally, a bagman.
    Several times—like just now—a nervous, semi-competent blackmailer.
    •   •   •
    T UBBS SLEPT, USUALLY, in the smaller of his two bedrooms. The other was a chaotic office, the floor stacked with position papers and reports and magazines, with four overflowing file cabinets against one wall. An Apple iMac sat in the middle of his desk, surrounded by more stacks of paper. A disassembled Mac Pro body and a cinema screen hunkered on the floor to one side of the desk, along with an abandoned Sony desktop. Boxes of old three-and-a-half-inch computer disks sat on bookshelves over the radiator. They’d been saved by simple negligence: he no longer knew what was on any of them.
    The desk had four drawers. One was taken up with current employment and tax files, and the others were occupied by office junk: envelopes, stationery, yellow legal pads, staplers, rubber bands, thumb drives, Post-it notes, scissors, several pairs of fingernail clippers, Sharpies, business cards, dozens of ballpoints, five or six coffee cups from political campaigns and lobbyist groups, tangles of computer connectors.
    He had two printers, one a heavy-duty Canon office machine, the other a Brother multiple-use copy/fax/scan/print model.
    There were three small thirty-inch televisions in his office, all fastened to the wall above the desk, so he could work on the iMac and watch C-SPAN, Fox, and CNN all at once. A sixty-inch LED screen hung on the living room wall opposite the couch where he’d been napping.
    •   •   •
    S
QUEAK.
    This time he opened his eyes.
    •   •   •
    T UBBS REACHED OUT for his cell phone, punched the button on top, checked the time: three-fifteen in the morning. He’d had any number of visitors at three-fifteen, but to get through the apartment house’s front door, they had to buzz him. He frowned, sat up, listening, smacked his lips; his mouth tasted like a chicken had been roosting in it, and the room smelled of cold chili.
    Then his doorbell blipped: a quiet
ding-dong
. Not the buzzer from outside, which was a raucous
ZZZZTTT
, but the doorbell. Tubbs dropped his feet off the couch, thinking,
Neighbor
. Had to be Mrs. Thomas R. Jefferson. She sometimes got disoriented at night, out looking for her deceased husband, and several times had locked herself out of her own apartment.
    Tubbs padded across the floor in his stocking feet. There was nothing tubby about Tubbs: he was a tall man, and thin. Though he’d lived a life of fund-raising dinners and high-stress campaigns, he’d ignored the proffered sheet cake, Ding Dongs, Pepsi, Mr. Goodbars, and even the odd moon pies, as well as the stacks of Hungry-Man microwave meals found in campaign refrigerators. A vegetarian, he went instead for the soy-based proteins, the non-fat cereals, and the celery sticks. If he found himself cornered at a church-basement dinner, he looked for the Jell-O with shredded carrots and onions, and those little pink marshmallows.
    Tubbs had blond hair, still thick as he pushed into his fifties, a neatly cropped mustache, and a flat belly. Given his habits and his diet, he figured his life expectancy was about ninety-six. Maybe ninety-nine.
    One big deficit: he hadn’t had a regular woman since his third wife departed five years earlier. On the other hand, the irregular women came along often enough—campaign volunteers, legislative staff, the occasional lobbyist. He had always been a popular man, a man with political stories that were funny, generally