Mistress

Bullets rip across my windshield and tear through the dashboard and I cut the steering wheel hard right and navigate the turn and pray that this Jeep doesn’t topple over, especially on a slick road, praying that the angle I’ve given myself will make up for the centrifugal force and the SUV behind me is completely out of position and I make the turn but the SUV slams on the brakes and it’s too little too late and I look in my rearview mirror but I don’t have one anymore so I crane my neck around while I keep driving forward and the SUV has…

Yes, it’s gone off the road, missing the curve and sending it into underbrush and, if there’s any justice, an unforgiving tree.

I let out a breath. You narrowly escaped again, Benjamin.

But the bell tolls for thee.

Chapter 23

I double back to my cabin, taking a different route to avoid the bad guys. I hate to say that I hope they died in a collision with a tree, because I hate to wish death on anybody, but let’s just say it wouldn’t ruin my day.

I stay for a grand total of two minutes, long enough to pack a bag full of possessions. I try not to linger too long on the hundreds of bullets lodged in the walls, furniture, and floor, or on the fact that most of the glass wall on the lake-facing side of my cabin is in tiny shards now. I’ll never feel safe in this place again. And I owe Steve Sykes a new Jeep (or at least an old one).

I decide to stay close by and find a hotel for the night, or what remains of the night. There’s no real reason why those guys shooting at me, even if they are in one piece, would stick around Lake Anna, and if they were still on the hunt for me tonight, they’d likely be watching the highways. Plus I don’t trust myself driving long distances in the rain and dark on my Triumph.

I get a single room with a queen bed and a tiny bathroom at a chain hotel. There’s no couch in here, but there’s one of those cheap little love seats. I push it up against the door. Then I take my car keys and balance them on the manual latch on the door so that if any weight pushes on the door from the outside, the keys will drop to the floor and land on a strategically placed tiny hand mirror that I found in Steve’s Jeep. The sound of keys falling onto glass will, I hope, alert me if anyone’s trying to join me tonight. Clever, right? I saw that in Conspiracy Theory. Mel Gibson, Julia Roberts. I might have been the only one who saw it.

I probably won’t need that warning, because I doubt I’ll be able to sleep. I know this much: I need to. I still have a hangover from that little thing with my plane crashing to the earth, and tonight hasn’t exactly been a picnic, either. My heart is racing and my head is pounding and my limbs are jangling, but I know that underneath the nerves, I desperately need rest.

I pace the cheap carpet while my mind scatters in twenty directions like cockroaches fleeing light. Was President James Buchanan gay? Did John Wilkes Booth’s fiancée have an affair with President Lincoln’s son Robert? Isn’t it odd that Robert Todd Lincoln was present at two presidential assassinations but not his own father’s? I mean, what kind of odds are those-

Stop. Focus, Ben. Concentrate on another set of odds: your odds of survival. Whoever’s trying to kill me only has to succeed once, after all. I have to succeed every time in avoiding them.

I turn the shower dial as hot as it goes and let the water punish me. I put my forehead against the wall and try to think about that lobbyist Jonathan Liu and what Diana might have known that got her killed and might get me killed, and then I’m thinking of Janet Leigh in the shower in Psycho and then that remake with Vince Vaughn, and that probably wasn’t his best career move, but then again he got to have sex with Anne Heche-or wait, that wasn’t Psycho, that was Return to Paradise-anyway, I’m vulnerable, because how well can you defend yourself when you’re wet and naked?

Not very. I mean, I’m not much of a threat to anyone when I’m clothed. Naked, about the only thing I could do is scare somebody for a few seconds.

I dry off and put on some clothes that I brought from the cabin, stuff I haven’t worn for ten years, and try to relax, to think of something that won’t freak me out, to take a small break from all this so I can get some rest.

By 2:00 a.m., I’m convinced that Buchanan was gay.

By 3:00 a.m., it’s clear that, while Julia Roberts can obviously hold her own in a lead role, I prefer her in ensemble casts like the ones in Mona Lisa Smile and Mystic Pizza and Steel Magnolias, which makes me briefly consider whether I’m gay, too.

By 4:00 a.m., I’ve put the presidents in alphabetical order.