A God In Ruins

A God In Ruins

“The two of you must set off volcanos.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s right.”

“And you’ve got control of the monster.”

“I see a future in it.”

“Well, drop by again if you’re in the neighborhood.”

The bell gonged, and he went to his corner and she to hers, and they snarled across the ring at each other.

“It still hurts, baby,” he rasped at last.

“It still hurts,” she whispered. “Quinn, I flew here to talk over another matter with you. It’s about your father.”

Quinn reacted as she knew he would, in tight-lipped, tight jawed, teeth-clenched confusion.

“It’s been five years since you contacted them. Isn’t enough enough?”

“This is weird,” he answered, “Greer speaking on behalf of Dan O’Connell.”

“You haven’t been out of their sight. They read every letter you’ve sent Rita and Mal. They have spent enough tears to re star the universe. When you joined the Corps, I was a basket case. Dan came to New York and pleaded for me to give him forgiveness. He was wasted over the abortion. I forgave him. See? I’m not as stubborn as you. I forgave him.”

“I don’t want to hear any more,” Quinn said.

“Well, you’re in no condition now to impose your wishes, so you’re going to listen. Dan knew that you and I would never end up together, but he was extremely kind. He and your mother insisted on watching over my well-being, as though I was their child. I forgave him and, later, I accepted help. I went to a number of shrinks, but they all turned out to be mind fuckers. It was your dad, Dan O’Connell, who taught Greer to return to being Greer, and that I had to continue playing Greer’s game in life. The man grieves for you with a passion of kings. If there is such a thing as redemption, they have redeemed themselves.”

Quinn turned the wheels of his chair in a sightless circle, stood, and fished for the door.

“Let go of your rage, Quinn! God has punished them enough! Stop this goddamned silence of the Irish! Stop this goddamned Eugene O’Neill play!”

Quinn was unable to speak coherently under a deluge of bursting floodgates. She eased him back into the wheelchair. He attempted to stuff his agony back inside him.

“Quinn,” she said softly, “Dan has had a stroke. He needs you, buddy.”

“Oh, God!” Quinn cried and stuttered and mumbled, more tears coming under his bandaged eyes. Greer attended him until his trembling subsided.

“How bad’s Dan?”

“Half and half. It’s certainly not a full recovery, but he isn’t crippled. He has some trouble walking and talking. The pain is in his chest, just as it was in mine and yours.”

“Mom?”

“She’s also devastated by her sin to her church. And you are the only son she’ll ever have.”

They sat silently for ever so long until day turned to evening. “I have to go now,” she said. “Can I tell your parents to be expecting your call?”

(f\r 7)

Yes.

“And thus closes another chapter in the splendid adventure of Quinn and Greer,” she said.

“Baby .. .” he pleaded, “just once.”

“Please don’t ask me,” she cried.

“Baby .. . baby .. .”

Greer lifted her skirt and straddled his lap, facing him. He lifted her top. He knew she would wear her clothes that way. Those little breasts were just the same. One kiss, two. “Baby .. . baby ... go now,” he said.

Quinn O’Connell was empty, but filled. The anger was gone. So was the affair with Greer.

There were people who loved him fiercely, and he could love them again.

Yet can finality truly be final even so? There still lingered the

haunting of his birth mother’s name—and his father. Would this bloody nagging ever come to a close? He was beginning a process which might allow him to spend the rest of his life with the mystery. In doing so, then perhaps he could allow Dan and Siobhan to come in closer and for him to give what was due them.

He sensed the nurse entering to wheel him back to his room, then asked her if she would write a letter for him.

Wanting to be near Quinn as much as she could, Mandy took the letter, which was written to Mal. It didn’t reveal anything of the raid, because he’d have to remain silent until the presidential press conference.

And how was Rita? No lack of letters from her. Every year brought new batches of photographs. How old was she now? Twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. Every photograph lingered in his wallet until it was eventually replaced by a newer one. She was magnificent. Her letters to him were powerful in what was left unsaid.

Later, Dr. Llewellyn Comfort came with a small platoon of lesser physicians and interns trailing behind him. He nodded to Mandy to remove the bandage, and he hummed an unintelligible aria as she did his bidding.

The room was darkened as she rinsed his eyes with a solution that set them free. Quinn squinted, then saw a half dozen smiling faces arrayed behind Dr. Comfort.

“Bravo,” said one doctor.

“Lovely, lovely, lovely,” agreed Comfort.

Mandy was faint with Quinn’s beauty and power. She realized it was the end of her unrequited love, because he’d see her in daylight soon.

“So, that’s what you look like, doctor,” Quinn said. “Hi, Mandy.”

The doctor examined him, happy with the results.

“I like a man who loves his own handiwork,” Quinn said. “Can I have a look?”

Not much more than a thin line of the path of the shrapnel and a small mark where it had made its exit. “A dueling scar,” Quinn said, allowing his fright to bubble out of him.

“We’ll get most of that cleaned up,” Comfort said. “Keep your shades drawn, just use the dim lamp until you adjust. You’ll be fine in a few days. I’ve done every wound in the book, but you take the gold, Gunner. A one-eighty between your skull and skin and hair.”

“Thank you, doctor.”

“In my line of work we don’t see too many breaks from God. He must have you lined up for something big.”

When they left, Quinn held Mandy’s hand, kissed it, and thanked her for her kindness. What the hell! Mandy wanted some memories. Why not?

“How about dinner when they let me go out?” he asked.

“You don’t have to,” she said, reddening.

“I want to,” Quinn retorted strongly. Once said, he saw a certain loveliness in her. Every woman is beautiful, he had often said to himself.

The phone broke the awkwardness. “It’s for you, Gunner,” Mandy said, and left the room.

“Gunner Quinn,” he said.

“Hi, son,” Dan’s voice rasped.

“Hi, Dad.”

“What the hell are you doing in a German hospital? I thought you were at Pendleton.”

“I got a little messed up on a training exercise. Just some scrapes and bruises. Greer was here. Thank you for taking care of her in New York.”

“She’s a wonderful woman,” Dan said.

Quinn stepped in to stop the coming apologies. “Dad, let’s start anew. Let’s just put the past behind us. I want to come home, soon as I can.”

“Do you forgive me, son?”

“Of course I do. You’re my dad.”

“Marine gunner, huh?” Dan said. “Now, you just had to go and get a higher rank than me, didn’t you?”

Quinn laughed. It hurt his scar. “Is Mom there?” “She’s right here. I’ll put her on. I love you, Quinn.” “I love you, Dad ... I love you.”

Quinn spent a restful night, the sleep of the reprieved. There had been many women since Greer, but none had put out the Olympian flame he held for her. He felt now that there could and would be life after Greer.

How well he slept after he had spoken to his mother and father! They slept well that night, too.

There was a knock on Quinn’s door.

“Come in,” he called from the easy chair.

General Keith Brickhouse, commandant of the Marines, entered.

Quinn came to his feet. The general waved him back into his seat, hung his hat and riding crop on the door peg, turned a chair around so he could lean his arms on the back.

“Army treating you okay here?”

“Everyone’s been great, sir.”

“That’s a pretty damned good job Dr. Comfort did on your head.”

“I’m lucky I still have a head.” “We need to talk a few things over. In another day you’re going to be very big news. Please speak up now, and let’s keep it informal. You’re up for a big medal. I’d say the Congressional Medal is indicated, but it’s peacetime and there’s politics. So you’ll have to settle for a Navy Cross.”

Quinn shook his head. “Sorry, sir. I cry a lot these days, more in the past week than all my life combined. I can’t accept a medal.”

“Why?” Brickhouse demanded, then added, “As if I didn’t know.”

“If you know, then don’t ask.”

“Gunner, the RAM team, to a man, wants you to wear it on behalf of all of them. The President is going to issue a special unit citation medal for the rest of the men. The raid was one of the great chapters in Marine Corps history.”

Quinn spoke nothing in return.

“You’ve a brilliant career ahead, Gunner. Before all the hoopla starts, I wanted to thank you personally. Will my smoking bother you?”

“Not at all, sir. As for my future, I’ve reached my capacity as a Marine. General, I cannot live with such violence. Funny to say after Urbakkan, but I’m not made of the stuff to take more hits like that. The cockpit was filled with brains dripping from the bulkheads and roof. Someone’s eye was pasted against a window and stared at me all the way back. And I must add, sir, I got no sweet feelings about the Iranians I killed. I must have gotten over a hundred of those poor devils in their sleep. General Brickhouse, I’m grieving far too much for Jeremiah Duncan and the others. Sorry, sorry.”

Brickhouse followed his cigarette smoke to the window, sat on the deep sill, and commented on the nasty weather of middle Europe. “We all reach a saturation point, all of us.”

“But there’s a difference. You know—and General Duncan knew—what to do with your saturation points. That’s why you’re a general.”

“You think so?”

“I know how Jeremiah Duncan was all but destroyed by Nam, but he had the guts to—to gut it out. The Corps is in my being, and I can take its spirit with me. I’m starting to get some idea where my future worth may lie,” Quinn said.

Brickhouse weighed the proposition of cajoling, arm twisting, sweetening the pot. Gunner O’Connell was one powerful man. Guts enough to cry. God, the times he’d wished he could weep. God, the times he’d turned away from his wife’s breast. Go till you fall, that’s what.

“It will be a great loss to the Corps,” the commandant said at last.

“But we have some other business on the table.”

(t\7 . t>

Yes, sir.

“Everything surrounding the formation of the RAM Company and the SCARAB was secret. The raid was of extraordinary importance in proving we could retaliate virtually within hours at any point in the world. It also proved the great stamina of that aircraft. Now then, Gunner, you are aware of the nature of the raid being a military operation and not a CIA operation, which would be under the surveillance of a congressional oversight committee.”

“General Duncan trained me very carefully.”

“How so?”

“He schooled me on the political ramifications of the military in a democracy. He drilled it into me that the Corps does not drop their pants and bend over before the other services or Congress. Democracy’s daisy chain, he called it.”

“You’ve heard of Senator Sol Lightner of North Carolina?”

“Mr. Powerhouse, undefeatable. Heads the intelligence oversight and is the hit man on armed services. Not friendly to the Corps,” Quinn replied.

“That’s him. He’s been in the Senate over twenty years. Well, he’s on the way to Frankfurt with one of his dobermans. Senator Sol is pissed off that he wasn’t advised of the raid in advance. Our position—the President’s, that is—is that it was not only a strictly military affair, but that the need for security overpowered the need to share. The inference is that the senator’s office leaks copiously.”

“But, General,” Quinn interrupted, “the President didn’t ask me if it was okay. He said raid; so we raided.”

Brickhouse smiled. “Just giving you the gist. What the senator is going to try to hit us with is twofold. One, the raid smacks of a massacre. It was overkill. Second, there’s a big no-no. Autopsies performed on our five dead show them all to be riddled with shrapnel from an American cluster bomb.”

“What the hell were we supposed to do, sir? Sit down and hammer out the rules of engagement with the Iranians?”

“Senator Lightner has the magic buzz word to create a media feeding frenzy, namely, our men were killed by friendly fire! TV goes ape shit interviewing the weeping loved ones of the deceased. The print people will unlimber their big verbs on the “We didn’t play fair’ theme by using cluster bombs, and the Marine Corps is going to get busted for our blood lust.”

“What the hell’s this all about?”

“It has its origins with the American people, who want to wage war without casualties. When the words friendly fire emblazon the headlines, half-truths will tarnish one of the great moments in our military history. But we had to advertise to the terrorists that we will hit them again and again.”

“The truth is, sir, our people were killed by one of our cluster bombs.

That’s the truth.”

“We are not playing semperfi and buddy-buddy, Gunner. Remember that your hero, Jeremiah Duncan, as well as myself, has had to feed the Congress a little.”

Quinn wobbled to his feet. His head throbbed now. Horseshit! The Corps comes first. He tilted his carafe of water, spilling it, missing the glass.

“You’re telling me to lie, sir?”

“Oh, hell, no. Just be creative with the truth. We weren’t raised that way, but our countrymen expect us to be saints, to be sparkly clean and pure. All the shit you had to go through to train and carry out a raid against terrorism. Now you’ve still got to justify it. And the press can be as bloodthirsty as the enemy. From what Jeremiah told me about you, you’ll know how to handle it.”

Keith Brickhouse troweled on the mortar of honor and duty and set the bricks of responsibility on his shoulders. Quinn had a sense of capability, a calm feeling of his own capacity.

Although Quinn wanted to walk to the conference room, Mandy would not let him. She wheeled him in. It was not only the wound, but he had expended blood and stamina unconditionally, and his entire body needed revitalizing. The flight from Urbakkan had demanded his final ounce of strength. He had borrowed too much strength from his own willpower, and it had debilitated him with recurring migraines.

The commandant and Senator Sol Lightner came in and took seats at the conference table. The committee lawyer looked up from the table, half rose, and nodded.

Quinn detected an adversarial relationship at once. V. VINCENT ZAC CO his card read: SPECIAL COUNSEL. The card was undersized but expensive, as was Vincent himself. Formfitting suit, Hoover collar, and the big mustache that small men of the world wear to send a message of their macho. The handshake told Quinn that the counsel had not made his way up through hard labor.

Senator Lightner was honored, honored, honored. He purred on, “We ought to have this little visit before the President’s news conference tomorrow to see if we are all on the same page. I think informality is the order of the day. Now, you do understand, Gunner, that hearings are a usual way of life in the Congress, and you might be asked the same questions later, under oath.”

Jesus, Quinn thought, the last clone of Senator Claghorn on Fibber McGee and Molly, or was it Fred Alien*? A senator’s senator, with honey-drawn banter. Hearings that ensure legislators a role in the separation of powers.

Lightner returned to his seat, lit a cigarillo, and nodded to Zacco,

whose papers were rustling in anticipation. Zacco cleared his throat

repetitively, tuning up. He oozed out a question or two to give a false impression of gentleness and feigned innocence.

Quinn’s guard went on alert.

Vincent led Quinn through his acquaintance and relationship with the late Major General Duncan, his joining the RAM unit, and an “understanding” of Quinn’s role in the raid.

Quinn explained that there were separate entities within the company:

namely, the fighting section, the front cabin men and command, and the aircraft itself. Quinn’s job had been to coordinate the three and oversee the training schedules. In addition, Quinn had worked on the logistics of possible future targets. Quinn had also had his voice in all meetings and a hand on every piece of equipment that flowed to the Marines and had been tested for the SCARAB.

“In actual fact,” Zacco said, “you were not only second in command, but the general’s complete staff.”

“In a manner of speaking,” Quinn answered. “This was his manner of operation, to travel light. Likewise, every man in the unit had a second, third, and fourth skill. Everyone knew how to handle every weapon we carried, and so forth.”

“But a drop in rank straight down from major general to Marine gunner? No disrespect, but shouldn’t there have been a stronger chain of command? Perhaps a colonel directly under Duncan?”

“Well, unfortunately,” Quinn said, “the man who could answer that is no longer here. However, and fortunately, it worked so well that we were right.”

Brickhouse allowed a meager smile to form up.

“”Kiss,” General Duncan would say.”

“”Kiss,” indeed!” Brickhouse retorted.

“It stands for, Keep It Simple, Stupid,” Quinn retorted.

The corners of Brickhouse’s lips smiled higher.

“I know you are hesitant to give an opinion, but wouldn’t you agree that Duncan was a maverick and played a maverick’s game?” Zacco asked.

“I’ll give you my opinion,” Quinn replied. “In my opinion,

Jeremiah Duncan was the greatest Marine I ever met.”

“And men tended to follow him blindly.” That was V. Vincent Zacco’s first mouse turd, Quinn thought as he stared at the counsel’s beaver-squirrel-rat glint. “Let me take that a bit further. Didn’t he have the officers’ helmets wired so he could move you around like robots?”

Quinn laughed out loud. “Duncan made suggestions. The man on the scene made the decision. Our network gave us unity. We moved like a chorus line. Blindly? Hell, this was one of the best trained and informed group of men in any of the services. As far as the missing colonel in the chain of command was concerned, we obviously didn’t need him.”

Lightner’s cigarillo ash grew longer on his frozen face. Zacco switched quickly to the savagery and overkill of the raid.

“The facts on the ground were clear,” Quinn said. “We were compelled to fight in a walled-in, tight area. Our first strike was not only to take as many of them out as possible, but to inflict confusion. We weren’t high on enemy blood, sir. We just didn’t want anyone to get a lucky shot at the SCARAB.”

“So,” Zacco shot back quickly, “many Iranians came out to the middle of the courtyard and tried to surrender.”

“Yes, but maybe you’d like to tell me what we were supposed to do with prisoners.”

“So you massacred them!”

“Not exactly, sir. We were ordered to shoot over their heads and drive them away from the plane, then keep them pinned down.”

Christ! Quinn thought, how could Duncan have made decisions knowing he’d be grilled by Congress later on.

Sol Lightner’s ever kindly Kris Kringle expression was tainted by his wart hog eyes above his hanging jowls.

Zacco then attacked the speed at which the raid was put together. Was it not a sloppy affair, throwing in men not trained properly for the particular mission?

“The very cornerstone of the unit was advance preparation and development of a line of skills. This was guaranteed by drill after drill after drill. Duncan and his pilots checked out the SCARAB for nearly two hours every time it was flown. The systems were pushed every which way in training. The great strength of the SCARAB herself has been proved by her murderous flight to and from the target.”

Quinn had warded off every attack with the ease of a fencing master.

“Shouldn’t we take a little break?” the senator said, knowing his doberman had worked the questioning in to the critical areas, ones that Quinn could not talk around.

“I’d like to continue,” Quinn pressed, “as long as I feel okay.”

He felt that even in his state he had more stamina than the lawyer, who was near yelping in frustration.

“I take it that you and General Duncan were quite friendly.”

“We worked very closely. A lot of formality was dropped. However, our relationship was by the book.”

“You visited his home often?”

“General Duncan’s office traveled with him, in his head, in his briefcase, in the trunk of his car. The office was open for business twenty-four hours a day. He called, I came.”

“And you had dinner together?”

“He fed his dogs as well.”

“At the table?”

“What the hell has this got to do with the raid on Urbakkan?”

“I’m coming to that,” Zacco rumbled, sensing his first taste of blood. “You saw movies together, shot a round of golf with him now and then?”

“May I intercede?” Brickhouse interceded. “General Duncan found Quinn O’Connell to be the best young prospect for a high command that he had ever seen. I’d say, with the amount of responsibility Jeremiah laid on, probably they were closer as friends—and don’t forget, in this kind of unit, the very fine line between officer and enlisted man often blurs.”

“I am suggesting,” Zacco said, “you two were close enough that if you survived him, which you have, you’d do anything to protect his record.”

Quinn saw foul men and their foul tactics. He could do little but glare as he watched Senator Lightner cock his head waiting for his attack dog to strike.

“You wouldn’t lie for General Duncan,” Zacco said, “or cover up out of your deep respect and personal friendship?”

Quinn felt his hands grip the arms of his chair, and he started to rise. Sit down! he ordered himself, sit fucking down, Quinn!

“Like flying to Vegas in a government helicopter to keep a hot date?”

“That is most disgusting,” Brickhouse exclaimed. “Don’t answer it, Gunner.”

“Now, gentlemen,” cooed Lightner, “I do believe it is within counsel’s

purview to establish that if, in Duncan’s position of unlimited power

without accountability, he might have crossed the line and taken

advantage—“

“Of what?” Quinn snapped. “Taxpayers’ dollars? It’s clear what you two are trying to do. I don’t know how low you plan to take this, but I don’t rat on a fellow Marine on matters that are none of your fucking business.”

They had him.

“I’ve only a few more questions,” Zacco said eagerly. “These homemade cluster bombs. You helped Duncan concoct them?”

“We worked with the finest munitions and ordnance people in the country. The weight of the men, the weight of the bombs, the titanium wings, were all factored in to make the plane lighter.”

“This was not a safe bomb,” Zacco accused.

“It was as safe as we could make it. We tested over a hundred of them successfully.”

“But it was not a safe bomb because it exploded at the wrong time and killed five Marine officers. Gunner, they were killed by an American cluster bomb, were they not?”

unpl >j

1 hey were.

“And you were wounded by the same bomb.”

“Yes.”

“Friendly fire,” the counselor snapped.

Hang on, Quinn, he compelled himself. Look at him in his rat’s eyes.

But stay calm, bubba. Quinn shrugged. “That’s a stupid expression. It’s the biggest oxymoron in the language. There is no such thing as friendly fire—safe bombs.”

“It is a term commonly used to denote death at the hands of one’s own people.”

“The bomb was my responsibility,” Quinn said. “I will take the blame.”

The ash fell from Senator Lightner’s cigarillo.

Zacco looked confused. “Would you care to explain that?” he mumbled.

“Sure. From the design to the installation to the firing, it was my baby. I checked the bomb racks at the Tikkah Air Base. They appeared secure. That was proved by the wild flight to Urbakkan. We flew at various altitudes, and the plane was nearly shaken to pieces. No bombs went off. If one had exploded, it would have been the end game You see, Mr. Zacco, you work with your people and your equipment to the best of your human capability, and then you have to trust. The Marine Corps is built on trust.”

A silence followed. Quinn was dead calm, his eyes fixed on the lawyer.

The lawyer didn’t like it.

“Shall I continue?”

Vito Vincent Zacco nodded cautiously.

“Between Tikkah Air Base and Fort Urbakkan, some glitch developed in

bomb rack four. Could have been the plane shaking violently, drastic

changes in temperature, perhaps a little ping of some sort of debris which was flying at us as we crossed closely over the ridge tops. I got no indication of a problem on the display panels or gauges.”

Lightner was transfixed. Zacco was confused.

“We positioned ourselves to fire,” Quinn said. “I had under a minute to unload the missile racks. One bomb obviously veered off course and fell short in the courtyard. It was too small for our FLIR to pick up, and we didn’t even sight it until the end of the raid. We moved our people away from the bomb, but she went off. Next half hour, forty minutes, was spent in ankle-deep blood, brains and guts on the ceiling, an amputation and a copilot with his guts about to spill out... we needed to patch a window .. . with Barakat’s knowledge of the terrain and IV’s courage, we made our rendezvous with the tanker plane .. . and after that ... IV stayed alive and instructed me for over two thousand miles .. . that was five and a half hours from the time we left the fort. When I touched down on the helipad of our container ship and cut the engines, IV died instantly.”

Zacco knew that when the fourth version of this insane story was told, Quinn would riddle himself with contradictions. He had the goods now to blame Quinn for the friendly-fire bomb.

“The bomb was my responsibility,” Quinn said, entirely taking the wind out of both inquisitors.

Senator Lightner had a rare moment of shame and disgust for himself. Zacco had been stripped of his congressional right to bully. He knocked on the table in successive knocks. “I have a feeling you have something more to tell me, Gunner.”

“Yeah, I sure do,” Quinn said with a lowered voice. “You’re a necrophilic, a corpse fucker. Now, get out of my sight.”

“Mr. Zacco,” the senator creamed reflectively, “the gunner has been through a tremendous ordeal. I suggest his remark was made in the heat of the moment. Kindly wait outside.”

The senator crushed an empty cigarillo box, tried but was unable to say something to Quinn. Quinn called for Mandy, waiting just beyond the door, who wheeled him away.

Now the scornful eyes of Commandant Brickhouse fell on Lightner. “I don’t think we’d better have a hearing on this,” the senator said. “I’m not going to tangle with Gunner Quinn.”

TROUBLESOME MESA, 1980

Oh, what a glorious valley. It echoed in a sound that said, “peace.”

Dan O’Connell was neither able to drive a car nor ride in the saddle. The first time Quinn swooped him up into his arms and set him in the passenger side, the two looked at each other, wordless but rich with joy. Neither of them ever said, “I’m sorry.” Dan was at his son’s side a good part of the day, at the chessboard, or the movies, or being wheeled into Mile High Stadium for a Bronco game.

Quinn said to himself, over and again, “This is what life should be all about.”

Dan O’Connell ceded his seat as state senator, and the governor selected Quinn to finish the term, even though it was a switch from Republican to Democratic.

Dan had made dramatic changes and lost some of his Brooklyn cop mentality, broadening his base and finally getting a keen and compassionate understanding of other people.

He had been confused by the roiling student protests of the Vietnam War, by the ruckus called music, and by the decline in the basic morality, yet he’d grown enough to understand the meaning of the civil rights movement.

It was good to have a son as knowledgeable as Quinn, who seemed to have a grasp on all kinds of events and was a student of human history and behavior.

With Dan and his son so close these days, Siobhan was able to free herself to take a path she longed for. Siobhan had always been a stalwart of the church. She had to make peace with Greer Little’s abortion and finally concluded that her church made mistakes. The mistakes usually came from men asked to give more than they had to give.

Siobhan soon represented Colorado as an upper-middle national committee woman. She and Dan traveled a lot on church tours of the cathedrals of grandeur in Italy and France, or they would cruise to the Alaskan glaciers, visit Buddhist temples, or charter for the Greek islands.

Quinn took over more and more of the ranch operation, bringing him into daily contact with the Martinez family. Consuelo and Pedro had four children, three of them university graduates, settled in cities as professionals with careers.

The remaining son, Juan, evolved into what seemed a natural passage from his father.

The Martinez family were twenty-five percent partners in the ranch operation. The changing of the guard from Pedro to Juan continued the close relationship with the O’Connells.

The families accorded one another the affection and respect of people who had spent a long time in one another’s kitchens. And this, too, was good. Dan had overcome a good part of his bigotry as the Martinezes largely replaced his own family back in Brooklyn.

The older people were delighted that Quinn and Juan would continue to run the ranch. Juan, in particular, was a cowboy’s cowboy, born to ride and rope, a mountain man with a graceful work ethic.

The clinker was that Carlos was missing. Quinn and Carlos had bud died so well, playing the games, dancing the music, riding like fury over the range, chasing girls, and tiptoeing into drinking and carousing when they felt manhood in their groins.

Carlos had gotten through law school in a blaze and been snatched up by a major Houston firm. His speciality, immigration. Whatever it consisted of, the family knew that Carlos would be good. Carlos was always flying off to the South and Caribbean and seemed prominent in his firm early on.

Quinn had only seen him once in the five years he was gone from Troublesome Mesa. They met in San Diego, mostly by happenstance, when Quinn was in the Corps.

Carlos had carved a hell of a life for himself, but why didn’t he ever return to Troublesome? Consuelo and Pedro visited him every year in Houston and wondered why their son remained a bachelor or why he didn’t let them know when he was traveling to Denver.

It had an eerie slant to it. Well, Quinn thought, I sure as hell didn’t get Carlos’ approval to join the Marines, and Carlos was certainly not indentured to the ranch. But he had loved the ranch. What made him divorce himself from it? In Quinn’s fantasy of the future, Carlos had always been riding alongside him.

Quinn’s homecoming brought a heartwarming letter from Carlos. He would come to the ranch for the first time in five years. When Carlos showed up, he and Quinn met each other as strangers.

Carlos wore an Italian suit, a wristwatch worth thousands, and was altogether a wealthy young dandy. It seemed that his reputation as a lawyer grew by the day.

Quinn’s thoughts of them riding and howling at the moon and tying one on fell awkwardly by the wayside.

Carlos’ visit was brief. They bumbled through their litanies, each realizing that they had outgrown one another and now lived in different worlds.

Carlos was dark and secretive and decorated like an expensive crown prince. What of his love life? Many ladies to love but none to marry, Carlos told him.

Something was strange, out of kilter with the homecoming. Carlos never

mentioned the third member of their childhood club, that little pest, Rita Maldonado. After she had graduated from Wellesley, she had stayed on in the East to do postgraduate work in creative writing and some teaching at the endless writers’ conferences.

Why had her letters to Quinn suddenly ceased? Why hadn’t she returned for Quinn’s homecoming? Well, now, all Marines freeze a part of their childhood, a perfect part. Life evolves and Quinn had made no provisions in his dreams for the adulthood of Carlos and Rita.

The rewards of his new life with his parents was countered by an emptiness over his pals.

If Carlos and Rita were Quinn’s disappointment, Reynaldo Maldonado mellowed it. They came together strongly, swapping tales of the Corps and tales of the road, conversing half the night away.

Maldonado remained unmarried but still had a collection of great beauties, particularly in Mexico, where he kept a studio in Cuernavaca. There was always a waiting line of magnificent creatures who wanted to model for him, and Quinn thought it wondrous how Mal had evaded the wrath of some jealous husband.

Each time Quinn came down to Mal’s, he was halted by the array of photographs on the mantel depicting Rita’s growth from a little girl to the present. Quinn studied the photographs each time with growing interest.

“Jesus,” he muttered one evening.

“You didn’t expect she’d stay in pigtails,” Mal said, carefully charting Quinn’s interest.

“She is really beautiful. I mean, unearthly beautiful.”

“Devastatingly so,” Mal said. “Give or take a little more of this and a little less of that, Rita is probably one of the most beautiful women in the world.”

“And she writes a lovely letter,” Quinn said. “Her letters were never

repetitious ad nauseam. She could relate any story about the wiggle on

the end of the nose of one of your models, or maybe Saturday night in

the old mining town, or the sheriff being the fattest gun in the West, or her walk through the wildflowers. You know, she was awfully pretty walking through a field of flowers, even when she was a kid, and then holding her skirts up to cross a stream.”

In contrast to his own catting around, Mal had raised Rita as a protective father with great intelligence. Rita had developed into Rita, and that was what he had prayed for.

Rita was a constant child, quietly off with her poetry, quite sweet, and quite charitable about her father’s wicked ways, for he also was a source of her growth.

Mal knew, almost from the beginning, how she had ached for Quinn from the time they first had come to Troublesome Mesa. It was something a father could do poor little about. Watching Rita progress and develop, and after Quinn broke up with Greer Little, perhaps he would notice her. Their age difference was not that awesome, but the years of separation put them on different plateaus.

She’s fully grown, Mal thought, and the homecoming fiesta is over and Siobhan and Dan are off to Florence. Well? What about it, Quinn? How many hearts were broken during your hitch in the Corps?

“What was Rita,” Quinn said, “sixteen or seventeen when I left?”

“She’s not seventeen anymore, Quinn? When you hooked up with Greer, Rita grieved as only a teenager could.”

“Oh, come on, Mal. I never gave her an improper look.”

“Yes,” Mal said, “and I felt very good about that. Even a roustabout artist can have lionesque protective instincts about his only daughter. Rita was always a holy light to me. She tried to model for me a couple of times, but she was too beautiful to ruin in stone or oil.”

“Why are you suddenly telling me this?” Quinn asked.

“She made a loud noise by her absence.”

“I missed her, too,” Quinn said. “I’ve loved Rita all my life but never thought of her as more than a little sister.”

“Exactly the point,” Mal retorted. “Rita is terrified that you’ll reject her as a woman.”

Quinn wanted to argue, but Mal’s pronouncement had too much sting to it, too many years of wisdom.

“Do you want to see the Quinn O’Connell shrine in her room?” Mal led him by the arm and opened her door. The walls were adorned with photographs of Quinn the ball player, Quinn the rodeo rider, Quinn the Marine. There was a torn football jersey hanging off a rafter, a scrapbook.

“How do you feel about this, Mal?”

“You can’t tell a person to change the longings of her heart. But now, well, you are back to stay, and I believe Rita wants to come back to stay and to write. I would like to see this part of her life resolved. In the drawers there are short stories and poems. Rita trying to prove to you and me that she is worthy of our love. That’s why little girls twist themselves in pretzels in ballet class, to win their father’s approval. That’s why big girls write erotic poetry, to win their lover.”

“And me, Quinn Patrick O’Connell?”

“Don’t you know how much I love you, amigo?” Mal said. “It has been no pleasure knowing her secret and having to remain silent all these years. Will you stand up and tell her now?”

Mal’s words chilled him. He was frightened. “Suppose I don’t.. . can’t love her that way?” Quinn asked.

“You’d have to be crazy not to love Rita, but it’s your heart, man, just tell her the truth.”

Quinn stared at her photographs and blended them with his own memories of a quiet little sloe-eyed, raven silk-haired being, tickled by him but hardly laughing to show him the stuff she was made of. Even in her early teens she had been scrumptious, classically round, voluptuous in a bikini.

“I’ve done something dreadful,” Mal said. “I knew she kept a drawer of secret poetry, and I went in without permission.” He opened the drawer and handed Quinn a paper. “She wrote this when she was sixteen.”

Our first night together after dark you never caught me following at reaching distance behind you on your way home from the river.

Had you looked back you would have seen the same child whose spare, uncharted body you would instinctively shield with yours against the sudden loss of passing time.

Twice you paused,

as if between movements of a symphony the secret panicked crackling leaves under my feet and artless rhythm in the audience of your forest.

An aspen tree marks the place where your land begins.

Its infinite shadows like fingerprints of the moments I have stood

beside it confusing your arms with its firm extended branches,

the deep cedar color of your skin,

the bark white corners of your eyes,

the sap which in unnatural light fills them,

runs down the ordinary roughness of wood,

your unshaven cheek. For the first time, this night,

I stayed longer to watch you walk toward the lit windows of your cabin saw your two halves split at the roots:

wood and flesh bark and skin the veins of dried leaves the greener veins across your wrists.

You never knew but we fell asleep together half of you beside me,

the other half locked behind a lit window,

all silent until the dark noisy grass woke us,

rousing itself with thoughts of its own fallen dew.

“God,” Quinn whispered. “Her stories? Have you ever read them, Mal?”

“She read to me once in a while, or used to. I never wanted to be in judgment of her. Suppose she has no talent. I don’t want to be the one to reject my daughter. Quinn, I’ve seen enough of her writing to know she isn’t going to make it. I’ll be there to pick her up when the realization comes to her. I’m a mediocre artist. I get through by being a Mexican tit man. I fart around with this modern bullshit because nobody, critics or clients, knows what it is but wouldn’t dare say so. You can’t get away with my shit as a writer.”

“Mal, no sale. You’re great.”

“He’s great,” Mal said, pointing at an original scribble by Van Gogh.

That night Quinn’s letters from Rita came out of his sea trunk. There were well over a hundred of them. Seen from letter to letter, their continuity was soon understood. Not exactly veiled words of love, but more of missing him as a part of the mountains. Nothing about boyfriends or her own growing maturity. She let the photographs do the talking.

Quinn had gotten one of two monkeys off his back. The resurrection with his parents was a great blessing. The other? Greer Little. He clung to a diminished, unreal thread. Hadn’t Rita done the same thing? The women who loved Marine gunners were plentiful, but .. .

Quinn was puzzled by his own soul opening up. He didn’t know if he loved her and wouldn’t know until they stood face to face.

Quinn quivered every time he thought of Rita. All the way to the upstate New York Writers Conference, he sighed constantly.

A powerful uncertainty it was whose moment of truth had come.

In the splendiferous woods bordering Lake George, the great old novelist Christopher Christopher held forth for ten weeks in the summer for serious aspiring writers. Ten weeks to feed the dream.

One had to go back a bit to remember Christopher’s last great novel. He had outlived his mediocre talent but knew the whens and hows. He became a legend.

Actually, did old Christopher have any masterpieces? His name wove in and out of a generation of magnificent American writers, from the ex patriots in Paris between world wars or in Pamplona, where he chased the bulls with Hemingway. Hadn’t he actually been a cub reporter who got an interview with Hemingway and after Papa’s death became a Hemingway “close friend” and aficionado. He wrote of visits to Cuba to arm wrestle Papa. Never happened.

What about Sinclair Lewis? Christopher Christopher’s New Yorker portrait of “Red” was certainly quintessential. Of course, not that many things had been written about Sinclair Lewis.

Christopher Christopher really made his big hit in American literature with an article for Esquire entitled “Chrysler Airflow—The Great American Car.”

A Broadway producer of zingy revues thought it had a catchy ring to it—The Great American Car. He named one of his annual follies after it, and eight hundred performances later, Christopher Christopher was made for life.

These days he was an American icon (who once had tossed a chilled martini into F. Scott Fitzgerald’s face). Now thatched with wild silver hair, he held forth at Lake George with a dozen “master” students conducting the eternal hunt for the great American novel.

“I’ve done my little bit, made my small contribution,” he would say as his eyes misted to the students of mixed gender.

“As Pearl, Pearl Buck, God rest her, said just before she passed on upstairs, “Christopher,” she said, ‘keep the flame.””

As he stared at the new students, some of whom had long since ripened, he wondered which of them, male or female, would become his bed mate for the summer.

“It is time to pass the torch,” Christopher whispered.

Rita Maldonado realized in less than two weeks that she had bought an ultimate con. Or she faced an ultimate reality about her writing. No one can teach writing sitting in a happy circle barbecuing each other’s writings. The criticism sessions could have killed a budding Shakespeare. Christopher drooled and dozed as his students had at it.

Rita was packing to leave when Quinn held up the brass knocker on the Jack London cabin. He was suddenly stricken with a notion that Rita might be in the middle of ... well, a scene.

He used the knocker and took a step backward.

Rita opened the door and squinted through the screen.

“I’ve come to see you,” he said.

The screen door squealed open, and he inched into the cabin. She was so beautiful he had to lower his eyes for fear of blushing. Rita took his hand to her lips and kissed the joint of one finger at least a dozen times. Then she reached behind him and slid the bolt.

Their foreheads came together gently. She began to tremble.

“I don’t want to hurt you anymore,” Quinn said, “but I feel like .. . this here, now is the great beyond .. . and we’re floating . Rita, I don’t want to hurt you anymore.”

She brought Quinn’s hand to her blouse and unbuttoned the top button with him, never taking her eyes from his, button by button.

“I love you, Rita.”

“Yes! Yes!”

She wore no bra.

“God, you’re beautiful. I’ve been a real fool.”

“Yes,” she said.

“I’m worried that—“ She pressed a finger to his lips. “Don’t worry.

Quinn, you’re never going to want to leave me.”

“I think you’re right,” Quinn said

“Shall we be lovers?”

“I want you so bad.”

“Bad or badly?”

“Both,” he said.

She turned from him and went to a big armchair. “Just enjoy,” she said, “I want to undress for you.” There wasn’t all that much to disrobe, jeans and panties. She did it deliberately, as she must have practiced the moment a hundred times in her fantasies.

Rita sat on the big arm of the chair and struck a pose, handed him her panties. Quinn rubbed it against his cheek, then tried to eat it, drink it, bite it.

The dinner gong sounded for those for whom the gong rang.

TROUBLESOME MESA—EARLY 1980s

Events, both sorrowful and joyous, befell Troublesome Mesa. Father Scan Logan, the gentle priest, passed away. He had never forgiven himself for his counseling an abortion for Quinn’s sweetheart; nor had he fully accepted the vows that imposed secrecy in the matter of Quinn’s biological parents.

Siobhan O’Connell, a church functionary with high midlevel contacts, began a quiet probe at Sean’s funeral about locating the mysterious Monsignor Gallico. It was fruitless. He had disappeared, leaving no footprints.

A few months later, Daniel O’Connell had another more devastating stroke that almost totally debilitated him.

A moment of unabashed bliss happened for the wedding of Quinn and Rita. Over three hundred people from all over the state gathered to celebrate. The wedding vows were performed at Dan’s bedside. Dan died shortly after with his wife holding one hand and his son holding the other.

So let it be. A bombastic wedding celebration and wake took place together with a party that Troublesome Mesa would never forget.

Quinn grieved for Dan in his long walk through the darkness. For all

their being at odds, for all the mistakes, he and his father had ended up on the same road. Quinn realized that he and his father had been cemented by the same sense of honor and love developed in the Marine Corps. No matter Dan’s flaws, these were overwhelmed by loyalty and honesty and courage.

After three months of intense mourning, Siobhan said, at the end of a meal one night, “We have to go on with life. I’m going to make an offer you can’t turn down. Why don’t you and Rita take a few months off just, just to follow your bliss? Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I’ll take care of everything.”

Their bliss led them to Venice. They arrived just a pinch before dawn and boarded the only gondola to be seen on the Grand Canal as a feeble sun arose, casting pastel glows mixed with foggy dew as in an Impressionist painting.

The honeymoon had been worth waiting for.

Glide, glide, glide skimmed the ornate boat; splish-splash whispered the gondolier’s rudder.

Under the little footbridges, click, click, click sounded the women’s heels.

The luring alleyways twisting and trapping as in a maze.

And not to forget the pigeons of San Marco Square.

Their corner suite of the Gritti Palace was mellowed by the smooth music of the Italian jazz saxophones and tapes of the San Remo Festival .. . and Pavarotti!

They did their initiation to Venice by making great love in a gondola. The rest of it was powerful, so powerful they seemed drugged and weary by daylight until the great blinds were opened and the sounds and light of that fairyland out there reached them.

At the end of a week, Quinn realized he had not thought of Greer Little since they arrived. Rita, him, Venice. A lifelong plan that absolutely thrilled him. Realizing he had not thought of Greer caused him to think about her. She was now locked away in a place in his memory. His desire for Rita was nearly crazy.

Yet, in the odd moments Rita seemed to stray. She could go from uncontrolled passion to a chilling, languid sadness.

It took six weeks for them to have their fill of Venice and find themselves flying back to America, starting to get homesick.

Once home, Rita dared her great challenge. The ranch and its divergent sounds, from bleating cattle to zooming pickup trucks and the general activity, threw her attempts to write off kilter.

She sought Quinn’s blessing and set up a studio at the Maldonado villa a half mile below. Her bedroom was huge, had a fireplace, and was isolated.

Rita put a small wardrobe for herself and Quinn down there. If she worked late, if he needed a break from the ranch, if they wanted to make mad love, the studio was perfect.

Now there was a commitment to write, but the plushest office is no guarantee for lush pages. Rita was alone with Rita, with nothing between her and her typewriter.

It was serenely quiet.

Mal was gone a good part of the time, sculpting or painting some gorgeous body. Jesus, Mal, all those rich married ladies who want their boobs aggrandized! Some of his clients were older ladies, not of the sturdiest stuff but defiant and flouting their sensuality.

Rita had seen a lifetime of her dad working them. Anyhow, he always seemed inspired, no matter their sag.

Mal settled into his studio down in Cuernavaca in order to give his daughter thinking space.

Quinn had some apprehensions about Rita’s studio. He did not want it to become the scene of her heartbreak. He traveled back and forth to Denver as a senator, or on ranch business or flying about the country to Democratic Party meetings. Ordinarily, he’d want Rita with him, but she was entitled to follow her own bliss and make her own life.

She wrote her Venice pages and read and corrected them, lured by the soft-scented fire. Thoughts which had been so clear in her mind had terrible trouble finding their way onto paper.

It was perfect here, she knew. Peace and isolation had been achieved. She had a wonderful, understanding husband. God, she thought, does God want writers to go to hell to write?

For all the ethereal wonderment, Rita began to feel she was in a trap, a cage. Why did the story stop suddenly?

Quinn was due home from San Francisco late. She admonished herself for not going into Denver to meet him and stay over at their condo. She didn’t like him flying into Troublesome at night.

She closed her eyes and thought of him, and the stirring between her legs went on automatic. She’d while away the hours thinking of Venice, and then his Jeep would vroom into the driveway. Hearing his voice was like eating chocolate. Rita purred and stretched and ran her hands over herself.

Her tummy felt squiggly. She made a pitcher of margueritas, which she never did when drinking alone. As she licked the salt around the top of the glass, her forehead broke into tiny droplets of perspiration. Now came unfettered fright.

The level in the marguerita pitcher lowered.

Quinn knew something was awry when he arrived a few hours later. Rita’ was slightly listing, and their kiss was punctuated with salt.

“I’m a couple of drinks up on you,” she said. “How did the meetings go?” He related the business of the trip. Dinner was sitting on the floor before the fireplace at the coffee table and afterwards, a sink into soft pillows with softer sax over the hi-fi.

Rita appeared misty-eyed, hardly taking her eyes off him. Quinn loved what he saw. It seemed that they were unable to pass each other without some kind of touch. Painted-on leather pants, bare midriff, an open blouse knotted under her breasts, glowing lipstick. He watched her clear the table .. .

“Quinn,” she said, meandering to her desk. “I’d like you to read my

pages. I realize some of them look like they were writ *

ten between the sheets. Look, I think I might need some help.”

Quinn was about to go into his standard evasion, but on this night the air had something different drifting on it.

“I’d be scared to death,” he said.

“Scared of hurting me? Scared of rejecting me, telling me I stink? Mal has played that game with me for years.”

“Rita, it isn’t as though Mal was telling you that you made the bacon too crisp, try to get it right the next time. Writing has been at the center of all your longings most of your life. I don’t have the proper credentials. I don’t want to screw around in a place I have no right to be.”

“I’ve heard all that before,” she said with a tart edge rising in her voice.

“Don’t be pissed at Mal for wanting to protect you from his ignorance. He was smart not to make that kind of mistake. Damned if I want to sit in judgment of you.”

“You’re both convincing. Frankly, I think you’re copping out. Between you and Mal, you’ve read every piece of literature written since the Middle Ages.”

“That doesn’t make me an expert.”

“Who is an expert? Christopher Christopher? I’ve reached that stage where anyone with a license to steal is a self-promoting prick in business to keep the wannabes coming back for one more writers’ conference. Quinn, do you know what it’s like making a submission for publication? You’re dead, rejected before you put it in the mail. “Your story is well-written but doesn’t fit our needs,” signed “The Editors,” who will remain nameless.”

“Rita, nobody forced you into writing.”

“Thanks, I really appreciate that. I’m twenty-five years old. I’ve been doing this since I was nine. I need a break. Mal takes my work to the literature professors on campus. “Shows a lot of promise, but needs work.””

“Haven’t you just answered your own question? What professors at the

University of Colorado, or all the universities in Colorado, have published anything of major note in the past fifty years?” Quinn argued.

“I want a straight answer. I want to hear cold-turkey truth from one person of literary integrity. Just one person. If I can’t get that from my husband, who can I get it from?”

Rita would not be deterred. She had drawn the line, and Quinn had to cross it.

“Are these the pages?” he asked. “All right, but I wish to hell I knew better about what I am doing.”

He knew enough.

Some of her earlier poetry had danced and leapt and was filled with cunning and grace and metaphors. Down through the years, as each new piece of non-poetry grew longer, it strayed. She was unable to organize the work, keep it under the central command of the writer. The dialogue came from pickled talking heads, not people of wit and observation.

There was a list of commonplace pitfalls, no sense of when a sentence could be expanded into a paragraph or a chapter shrunk to a few paragraphs. Her first chapter was front-loaded with information, a fear that novice writers have about leaving anything out of the manuscript.

What about the prerequisites? Writing required both enormous motivation and enormous drive. Rita had only enormous desire.

The baffling part of it was that lesser writers had succeeded. Rita could glow in spots. Some writers were ready to cut off their arms and legs for the title of writer. Was it possible she could rally her gifts, enhance them, and then make the commitment to enslave herself at the typewriter?

Perhaps Rita’s life and Troublesome Mesa and her beauty and her father had all been too perfect to arouse a bit of rage. Rita had been too protected, and her craving for expression could only carry her through a half dozen verses of a psalm.

Quinn set down the Venice pages deep in the night. He was dog tired, too tired to be intelligent about it now.

Rita had fallen asleep atop the bed, adrift in self-deprecation. She was curled up tightly, her perfect hair askew and an odor of tequila lingering. Rita couldn’t drink worth a damn. She had tipsied out.

Jesus, Quinn wondered, what was she making him do?

Rita’s eyes opened slowly, and the first thing Quinn saw was her fear.

“Hi,” he said, patting her hair.

“I’ll take a shower,” she said.

“It’s almost five o’clock,” Quinn answered. “I flew in late, remember?

I’m dead tired. Push over, let me on the bed.”

Quinn pressed his backside into her tummy and she wrapped her arm over him in a favorite sleeping pose, but she could sense his eyes were open and Quinn always knew when she was staring at him from behind.

“I need to hear it, Quinn,” she pressed.

“I loved you this morning more than I loved you yesterday, and I love you now more than I loved you earlier tonight. Isn’t that what really matters?”

“And with three you get egg roll!” Quinn felt the violent jerk of the comforter being flung off as she ripped it away from him. Quinn rose on an elbow as the end table lamp blared on. Rita stood over the bed, disheveled and rocking back and forth. Obviously, she had been awake and seething to a boil.

“It’s actually very good,” he said. “I don’t want to go into it point by point until I have a few hours’ sleep and can get my thoughts together.”

“I I”

Liar!

“There’s some fine writing there,” he said. He closed his eyes. “But most of it stinks!”

It was not Rita standing before him but a pained, contorted creature who had pushed herself beyond the edge. In that single instance of truth Rita heard what she had avoided for a decade and a half.

“It’s not the end of the earth,” Quinn said.

Lord, he’d never seen her like this! She was an angry Gypsy,

disconnected from herself. “Two things, two things, just two things,” she hissed. “That was all I wanted. I wanted to write, and I wanted to be perfect for you. I’m neither.”

“Let me hold you, darling.”

“No, you can’t hold me anymore.”

“Rita, get a grip—“

“I wanted to be perfect for you, Quinn. I was not perfect. Do you know what I mean?”

“How could you be? We were never promised to each other. You grew to be a woman while I was gone. I know you must have had lovers. It doesn’t matter now.”

“I thought,” she moaned, “that by becoming a great writer, you’d forgive me for my imperfection. I’m neither.”

Rita moaned low, all that beauty fallen into wreckage. “I did what I did in the hope you would learn and be jealous and pay attention to me. I did it to anger you. I did it .. .”

“What?”

“Carlos and I.”

The pain of his head wound came alive, and he fought for his feet and staggered around the room. Her sobs were loud and followed him until he turned to her and pushed her away.

Rita heard the screen door slam.

Vroom .. . vroom, vroom, vroom. The Jeep screamed away.

DENVER—EARLY 1980s

Bloody secrets! Bloody lies! The church, the ranch, his parents, the whole goddamned valley seemed to conspire.

This was far worse than losing Greer Little. Greer never betrayed him. He had seen truth in Rita. But what the hell, Quinn thought, he had been away at El Toro Air Base shagging the ladies, breaking hearts. She couldn’t make promises to him, for there were no promises to be made.

But Carlos? Hot and deliberate. Aimed to gore him! Why hadn’t she come to him with this before the wedding? Why did it have to be a part of the goddamned secrets and goddamned lies?

Reynaldo Maldonado returned from Cuernavaca after Rita had fled. He was shocked and hurt almost as deeply as Quinn.

“Sorry it took me so long to get here,” Mal told Quinn. “I made a couple of stops along the way.”

“Did you find her?”

“The day before yesterday she went to Carlos in Houston.”

Mal watched his son-in-law shudder.

“Apparently, she arrived in bad shape. She wouldn’t see me. Quinn, I

had no idea they were carrying on. When a woman deceives, she can carry it off so smoothly. Only, she got caught in her own web.”

“I thought she loved me more than this,” Quinn said.

“She does, beyond all reason. Don’t jump on me. My throat is dry from the salt from my eyes.”

“What kind of destructive logic consumed her with the notion that she had to become a writer to atone for a sin she never committed?”

“If anyone is responsible, I am. I should have seen it coming,” Mal said.

“Why didn’t she tell me? Why Carlos?” Quinn cried.

“Desperation from warped logic. Confusion. Quinn was the Quinn she could never really have. Carlos was the Quinn who loved her.”

“Stop it right now. I don’t want to hear his fucking name, right? I’ve got nasty images in my head. I could kill him.”

Mal unearthed his hash pipe. He found a bottle for Quinn.

“Rita grew up surrounded by dozens of drawings and wire figures and polished marble of her mother. Every pose of Mimi sang out that she was perfection. I remember Rita trying to imitate her mother. Maybe it all made her feel inferior to Mimi. When Mimi died, Rita wanted to supplant her mother in my heart. I couldn’t paint or sculpt her, and that probably cut her even more deeply.”

Quinn poured. Mal puffed.

“Then came a never-ending parade of women. What was I searching for? My dead wife. Poor Rita, always in an adjoining cabin on a cruise while daddy, next door, was banging some rich widow or some adulterous married woman. I didn’t even see her growing away, tucking herself in a corner writing poetry. Soulful, deeply hurt. That’s why I found Troublesome Mesa, so she would gain her self-respect.”

Quinn poured himself a neat double and closed his eyes. After he had

gone off to the Corps, he had tolled up the difference in their ages. It was not the number of years that counted. When a young man in Troublesome getting urges, Rita was still a little girl in the second grade. When Rita blossomed, Quinn was at the university, engaged in his flame-out affair with Greer Little. When he went into the Corps, Rita was just beginning Wellesley.

As his image of Rita had grown in the semi-isolation of the RAM unit, she had crept into his mind more and more. He equated it at first with missing the mountains. He was Colorado. She was Colorado. He looked forward to her letters and photographs. Yet he continued to correspond with her as he would a younger sister.

In a full, rich moment Mal had told Quinn what he had not seen. Rita was a glory among women, and she had waited for Quinn patiently. By the time of their marriage, he had begun to realize how deeply Rita had woven herself into his fabric.

“She’s my daughter,” Mal said. “I have to go to Houston and see what I can do.”

Quinn nodded his head that he understood.

“I’ll probably have to reach Carlos. Will she ever be able to come back to you?”

“No,” Quinn answered. “As for Carlos, if I see him, I’ll blow his face away.”

Siobhan broke her tour off and rushed back to Troublesome. She immediately grasped that the only thing she could do for Quinn was to leave him alone and be there, should he ask for help.

The ranch and other business had backed up so badly that Juan Martinez had to seek the boss out. When Juan entered the ranch office, he had to contain his shock at Quinn’s appearance. Quinn settled on the other side of the big partner’s desk and emptied his briefcase.

“These checks have to be countersigned,” Juan said. “The new fencing

along Silver Alley Creek looks very good. I want you to inspect it before I order more.” He studied a paper. “I don’t like the Mountain Feed bid. I’m for sending ten or twenty head to the feed lot and see if we aren’t spending too much per animal.”

Quinn studied the propositions, rubbing his beard and catching Juan’s eyes piercing him. “I guess I look like ten miles of dirt road,” Quinn said.

“Fifty miles,” Juan said, “after a thunderstorm.”

Quinn managed a smile as Juan rolled a cigarette, biting on the label of the drawstring to close the sack. A few of the Marines on the RAM team had rolled their own.

“Anything else?” Quinn asked.

“A lot else,” he retorted. “Siobhan and I have taken care of everything we can without you. So, what’s it to be?”

“I’m bleeding, man,” Quinn rasped, “valley of deceit, valley of lies, present company exempted. You don’t lie, Juan. I have lied for the honor of the Corps.”

“That’s not lying.”

“You’re his brother, you tell me, Juan.”

“I certainly sensed something was happening. But I don’t spy on my brother. It was none of my business. You had kept Rita longing for you for far too long. It happened in a moment when they were free. Now? Jesus, I don’t know. He is my brother, and I must come down on his side. The Martinez family is ready to leave the ranch.”

Quinn felt himself sinking, deflated.

“Carlos could not resist Rita. He can’t now,” Juan went on. “Even if it meant betraying you. You were younger than him, but you were his hero.”

“Why? Carlos did everything better than I. Macho, fists, sports, women, guitar strumming.”

“Carlos,” Juan interrupted, “worshiped you because of the quiet way you

stuck to your ideals. You would not let the gringos and Mormons gang

up on any Mexican kid. When Carlos ran away and took your father’s car, it was you who stood between Carlos and the sheriff. And your father came, and you made him take Carlos back.”

“Funny” Quinn mused, “for years I thought of Dan as another Archie Bunker.”

“Dan was reactionary as hell,” Juan said, “but he was a man of principle. He not only gave us a good life but he made us belong in this valley.” Juan picked up on Quinn’s desire to keep talking. “What is it, amigo?”

“Carlos could have said no.”

“How could he resist Rita Maldonado? Look, there are very few of us who know about this.”

“I don’t give a fuck who knows,” Quinn snapped. “One by one the valley unearths its dirty little secrets.” The delayed punch of Juan’s possible leaving the ranch hit him now. “Where would you go, Juan, what would you do?”

“My parents are enjoying their old age, except for the aches and pains. As for me, there’s enough in the Martinez kitty for me to start up a small ranch.”

“Does the idea appeal to you?”

Juan hesitated. He stood and his spurs jingled.

“How do you feel about it, Quinn?”

“I want you to stay,” Quinn answered, and rose from his chair. He gave Juan a big abrazo.

“This is my home,” Juan said.

“You did the right thing by not ratting on your brother.”

Denver had a nice flow to it. It was not a glorious or dynamic city, but it was friendly and had lots of elm trees. The O’Connell condo on Chessman Park afforded a lovely view to the state capital and the foothills into the Rockies.

Being the state capital and a town of Western tradition, there were always circles of lively ladies about.

Quinn eventually took up with Helena Baxter, a sharp CEO of a

Denver-sized public relations firm. She was twice divorced, with no children, and a pleasant and striking companion. They went into an “easy does it” relationship. It grew in warmth as six months passed since the disastrous night. Helena knew the ache in Quinn was dimming but would never totally go away. She was great about it, made him start to feel good about himself again. He reacted to her kindness with kindness of his own.

In the beginning Mal saw or called Quinn often. There wasn’t a lot of information about Rita. He saw her only once in six months. Quinn buried his loss in his vault, and Mal seemed to grow more distant. With Quinn in Denver a good part of the time, they grew somewhat as strangers to one another.

An aging showed in Reynaldo Maldonado’s eyes, and his work was hovered over by dark angels.

A moment of truth came with startling speed and completely unexpected. Quinn and Helena were at the breakfast table, checking the papers, making calls, trading little nothings when the lobby desk buzzed.

“Morning, Mr. O’Connell. Someone to see you. I sent him up.”

Quinn knew. He pulled himself together. His doorbell insisted. Quinn opened it and looked into the eyes of Carlos Martinez. Carlos entered without invitation, took a pistol from its inside holster, and placed it on the pass-through kitchen counter.

“Oh, my God,” Helena cried.

“No, no,” Carlos said with a barely audible voice. “I leave the pistol in your hands, Quinn. It is loaded. Kill me, or otherwise speak with me.”

Quinn took up the weapon, opened the chamber, took out the bullets, and put them in his pocket. He set the gun down and turned to Helena.

“We’ll be all right,” Quinn said.

Helena looked from one to the other. Carlos lowered his head and nodded in confirmation.

“I don’t think I’d better leave.”

“No, we’re going to be fine. I’ll call you at your office in about fifteen minutes.”

“Uh-uh,” Helena said. “I’ll wait in your study.”

She bussed Quinn’s cheek, glared volcanic at Carlos, and retreated, leaving the door slightly ajar.

“Nice lady,” Carlos said. “Can I take my coat off?”

“Sure, sit down.”

Carlos stared blankly through the big sliding windows. “For a lawyer I’ve lost my golden tongue,” he mumbled. “Let me try to get out what is shuttered in me as best I can.”

Quinn nodded.

“First, Rita is all right. She is all right. Better, much better.”

He asked for water and sipped. “I must let you know how much I hate

myself—“

“Save that shit.”

“All right, all right,” Carlos answered. “Then let me go point blank.

When she arrived at my place in Houston, she was in a bad way.

Hysterical, incoherent. A bad way. Yes, she had phoned me. Yes, I

told her come to Houston. I sent away my fiancee and told her not to

come back. I’m not going to lie to you, Quinn. You can’t hate me any

more than I hate myself. I, uh, was in exultation that Rita was

coming, in exultation. It overwhelmed any sense of decency, and sense

of honor—“

“Save the shit!” Quinn snapped. “I know how you’ve suffered.”

“She was in a bad way. For the first days she was under sedation and watched ‘round the clock. I travel a lot.”

“So I hear, a regular traveling laundry.”

“I’d be a septic tank for the fees I am paid. My point is that Rita had care day and night and the best professional help in Houston. I’m not going to try to lie to you, Quinn. I did this for me, Carlos. My desire for her has always been unbalanced.”

“Fuck it, get out, Carlos, before one of us gets killed.”

“No,” Carlos said.

Quinn felt Helena’s hand on his shoulder. “Let him speak,” she commanded.

No.

“Look at him, Quinn. He’s already a walking dead man. You’re not far behind. Let him speak.”

Quinn fell into an easy chair and stared at the carpet.

“Rita was awakened from her bad dream. For a time I was so thrilled by her restoration. But then, without sinking back into madness, she also began to die. Every day, every night. She wished for death. She does not love me, Quinn. I love her almost enough to try to keep her, but I love her too much to see her die.”

“Got a bundle of hot cash,” Quinn spat, “on your way to some quaint little offshore island. Offshore Martinez. Cash Carlos. Cocaine cash Carlos offshore Martinez.”

Helena realized that her days and nights with Quinn might be fast coming to a close. Thank God, she said to herself, she had not lost her soul to him. All that could be heard was their grunting breaths.

“We knew we couldn’t live with it anymore,” Carlos croaked. “Her head is clear now. She is very much on top of things. She called Mal a few days ago for him to come down to Houston.”

Quinn passed through the French doors to the balcony, easing back from his rage. A thousand sighs were released in a single sigh. He could not form words. Helena did. “Does Rita know you’re here?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Helena winced. Damn the lonely nights without that man.

“I’m fucked up now,” Quinn rasped. “The ebb tide and the high tide are ripping through my middle. Didn’t she know this would kill me?”

“She was sick. She is more well now than I’ve ever known her,” Carlos said.

“I’m not the only guy in the world who’s gotten stiffed. So what’s the proffer, what’s the tender? Lose my dignity—forgive? Can I set eyes on her again?”

“That’s up to you. Rita and I can’t go on together. Send her away if you must. Mal will be close by.”

“Can you?” Helena asked.

Quinn burst apart, sobbing. “I want children with her. I want to go to my end with her. It’s no time for mendacity. Maybe I can find forgiveness. I don’t know.”

Carlos knew what was coming, yet he took it bitterly. But Carlos was of Mexican stuff, and he had betrayed his friend and it would claw at him forever.

“Will it ever come to pass that you’ll forgive me?”

“We are men, Carlos. We are different from a man and a woman. I could not forgive you if you committed treason or committed a hate murder or raped. Your crime is ... not even a crime, yet there was a single moment in all of this it could have been prevented. You could have said no. I would have said no. Men who love each other cannot betray that trust. That’s worse than death.”

Carlos made aimlessly to a place where he could lean. He slipped into another chair. His body needed support. All about him, every day, he saw a parade of “honorable” men he did not trust and who did not trust him: politicians, border patrols, dealers, kingpins .. . . this was not only a game of boy and girl. This was mistrust because he was not to be trusted and those he dealt with were likewise ready to betray.

How could he tell Quinn that God had not made him into a Quinn? Carlos made the profound gesture to send her home, but only because he could not have her. And he would plunge back into his life of chartered jets and offshore sleaze, covering a pile of manure with a blanket of roses until that fucking day Carlos Martinez made the wrong move or the worse of two bad choices.

He needed to be alone to sort it out, and he went into the study.

Helena watched Quinn, sadly, hopefully.

Carlos returned in time. “It’s all set,” he said. He looked to Quinn, hoping desperately that Quinn would give him a flicker of respite. He gave a quick smile to Helena, took up his coat and went to the door, then stopped for a few seconds.

“Be sure to take your pistol,” Quinn said.

NEW YORK, NEW YEAR’S EVE 1999

It was still four hours to midnight. The party was jumping. The great

cruise ship pepsi GENERATION passed the nasdaq- TRADER partway up the

Hudson toward the tropicanaGEORGE

WASHINGTON BRIDGE.

Both ships were fully lit, and their noise-making capacity was in full blare. All of Manhattan was lit, a light to remember.

As the witching hour approached in each time zone, there would be big bangs from planet earth to announce to the heavens that we were still here.

Nasdaq TRADER had been chartered for the occasion by T3 Industries. An invitation to the party became one of the must celebrations in the country. The guest list was loaded with a Who’s Who in politics, industry, the banking behemoths, media kings and emperors, Nike and Addidas leapers, a deep scoop into the black leadership, movie and TV actor gods and a few celebrity mobsters given amnesty for the occasion, right-wing Baptists who called off the war on alcohol for this night, and a few Jews who were geniuses at T3 Industries. They had emigrated from Russia.

Thornton Tomtree bundled into an overcoat and stepped out of the

wheelhouse. Darnell was by the rail, staring at the mega-sight of Manhattan. He was alone, in reverie, unaware of the blowing horns.

“It’s been a hell of a life,” Thornton said with his breath darting downriver. “You know, I’m rather slow in giving credit to anyone but myself. It was your guidance and keen judgment that got us here, Darnell.”

“My daddy, God rest his soul, told me, “Darnell, take care of that white boy. He’s major.” Lord Thornton, am I really standing here? Will everything turn into a pillar of salt?”

“I came to tell you something very important. You’d never guess.”

“Well, let’s see, it’s almost ten years ago that you creamed Senator Garbowski and became the big enchilada in Internet regulation. Our guest list on this pleasure boat controls a very large percentage of the national Republican apparatus. There’s a conga line of Baptists who can swing the balance of power in seven Southern states. Mr. Jefferson here is the number one exhibition in the black community. You’re fixing to run for president of the United States. You’re laying the groundwork for the election of 2004.”

Thornton blinked and gaped.

“Does Pucky know?”

“I just told her. She said it should be great fun.”

“You’ve sure got your ducks lined up. Your recognition factor is right up there with Madonna, Seinfeld, and Saddam Hussein. You’re holding lOU’s from a lot of powerful folks.”

“Because you alone have understood and have conducted the most brilliant public relations campaigns in American history, I want you to stay on for this. The media is our key to a nomination.”

“There are too many correspondents, too many networks and mini-networks, and too many super-cable stations, too many news-slurping sources, and those panels of experts reciting their dreary litanies. So, they dig lower and lower in the dumpster.”

“You’ve outfoxed them, Darnell, and kept them sympathetic to me for over a quarter of a century. The American people will never have a scandal involving me. I am cleaner than Nixon in bed. And the public doesn’t give a fiddler’s fuck about who is between the sheets with their leader, so long as the economy is good. Besides, the media is still recovering from the Starr chamber years of Clinton’s second term.”

“Oh, they’ll recover real fast for a presidential candidate. Scoop! Thornton Tomtree makes the Guinness Book of Records. He was masturbating at two years of age. However! He lied about it later and subordinated perjury and those are mortal sins, rickety, tickety, tin.”

“How much are we spending on this party?” Thornton asked.

“You know. With the gifts, the employees blow-out in Pawtucket, chartering this little rowboat for over three thousand of your closest friends. We must be in close to twenty million.”

“Don’t you get it, Darnell? This party allows me to spend twenty million non-campaign dollars and get a four-year running start.”

“I figured that out.”

Now silence between them. As the noise grew in decibels to shattering, the river hopped. Ashore, the tall shafts of buildings seemed to sway—blinding, deafening. There only seemed to be Thornton and Darnell in the quiet darkness at the railing of some ship.

The din and blasts and blinding light shower found its way to the nasdaq TRADER Darnell Jefferson clamped his hands over his ears and turned his eyes away. President Tomtree and “Uncle Tom.” It’s all flipped over. Listen, listen, he thought. The world is going mad.

TROUBLESOME MESA—EARLY EVENING

DECEMBER 31, 1999 State Senate Minority Leader Quinn Patrick O’Connell braked the Sno-cat and squinted through the swishes of the windshield wiper. His son, Duncan, jumped out of the Cat and sank down to his waist in snow.

His sister Rae operated the searchlight from inside the vehicle. Duncan came to the short log bridge and shoveled around, examined it, tested its weight-bearing capacity, then returned to the car. He opened the door, allowing a blast of frigid air to come in with him.

“Dad, the bridge looks solid to me.”

Quinn thought aloud. “We’ve got an awful heavy load in here. I think we’d better unload and sled the supplies over.”

This was a little conservative for the children, but Quinn always played on the side of caution when it came to them.

“Three sled loads should empty the cargo.”

The four of them worked like old packers filling the sled and, with two on the front and two on the rear, pulled it over the bridge, unloaded it and repeated the procedure two more times till the cat was emptied.

Rita and the children waited across the bridge as Quinn pumped himself

up and turned on the ignition. “Not too fast over the bridge,” he warned himself, “no slip-slides into the creek.” He applied the gas, released the brakes. The iron monster clawed its way over. The bridge did not give so much as a wobble.

Cheers!

Relief. They reloaded the Sno-Cat, and it purred a half mile uphill to Dan’s Shanty, the cabin in the sky.

It was anything but a shanty. The roof covering the living room and two sleeping lofts was a dome made of Plexiglas, and when filtering clouds gave way, one could see great pieces of the universe.

Lest we forget, Semper Fi, the essence of German shepherd, had already made the run to the cabin and greeted them. Man, he had a lot of guarding to do this night.

As Christmas approached, there had been rising apprehension that their long dream of seeing the new century in together at Dan’s Shanty might not happen. Senator Quinn and Rita were heavily in demand around the state. Grandmother Siobhan was confined to a wheelchair from a hip-replacement operation. She was in Denver and slated to be wheeled into a half dozen celebrations.

Snow covered the giant bubble, but as the fireplace and the heat of the cabin rose, it melted and slowly opened up the heavens to them.

Quinn mixed a weak concoction of champagne for the kids and a stiffer one for Rita and himself. At an altitude of twelve and a half thousand feet one did not need too much alcohol to get its message.

While the kids made up sleeping quarters, Quinn engaged in his second

most favorite sport, watching his wife move. The years had been

delicious to her, and she adored cavorting for him. She glided in

concert with herself, with her breasts always a bit loose and her hips

swaying like a Mexican village maiden at the water well. He had

watched her thus for twenty years, and for twenty years she had known it. Their mutual redemption from her affair with Carlos had given them an incredible strength.

Rita capped her kitchen duties by brushing past Quinn while bearing groceries and treating him to her devastating toss of the hair.

Life had been attacked as a new gift each morning. Although the need to find his origins never went away, it dulled because of their family success.

The years had given them peace and rewards. Through enormous love and plenty of hard work, their long-held dream had come true.

Dan’s Shanty was up to snuff, warm and filled with the aromas of a high mountain beans and meat meal. Semper Fi lowered his nose under his master’s champagne glass and gave it a quick flip, then backed off as though he were going to be beaten to death. Quinn pounced on him, and they wrestled till overcome by the smells and sounds of sizzling steak.

“Is this great or what!”

After the meal was devoured, it was still a few hours to the new century.

“I know by the gleam in your eye, Duncan .. .” Mother said on cue.

“I’ve got the springs cooled down to a hundred and four,” Duncan answered.

Well, she really only had to run twenty feet, but it was zero outside and this would be Semper Fi’s big moment.

Attired in string bikinis, the women ran screaming from the cabin to the springs.

“Hero! I’m a hero!”

“I am the bravest!”

“Jesus!”

Quinn served wine in paper cups as Duncan threw the ball for the dog. As each confirmed this was really the grandest thing in the world, they watched in awe and silence to let the comets put on their acts.

“And now!” said Quinn, “we separate the men from the boys and the people from the people.” He leapt from the springs, rolled in the snow, and returned to the steaming water as Semper Fi’s whiskers turned white with frozen moisture. Rita demanded respect from her children, who dragged her out into the snow, and she howled and Duncan howled when Rae tackled him and Rae howled when Rita plopped a load of snow on her back and all the coyotes in Troublesome Mesa howled.

Thank God, Semper Fi was there to protect them.

Duncan would soon be heading for the Colorado School of Mines to take two years of basic geology to better understand his turf. From there he would go to Colorado State, a ranking veterinarian school, and study to be a vet.

For years Duncan had fretted in silence about his desires. Every time he walked into the living room, he had to pass through two great guardians of the gate. On one side on a round table, a photograph of his grandfather, Dan O’Connell, receiving the Silver Medal and Purple Heart. On the mantel, a photograph of his father, Quinn Patrick O’Connell, in dress blues. Even his name, Duncan, was after a great Marine as the name Quinn had been after another.

Quinn got his son’s drift. The boy was struggling to decide whether to get in a few years of college before his Marine hitch, or do the hitch first.

“Son,” Quinn told him, “follow your own desires. Half the shit in this world comes from parents trying to bend their children into living as their alter egos.”

Rita spent her maternal efforts on Rae to always make the girl feel good about herself. The pixie should not and did not go into a beauty contest against her mother. Whenever Rae got down on herself or self-doubt seeped in, Rita would take her daughter and go off someplace for a few days, just the two of them.

They were close.

They had the tears, the rebellions, the pain that people living with people must endure, but bedrock was their family unit and it was powerful.

Neither Duncan nor Rae had a serious relationship at the moment, so they were thankful that only the four of them would be involved at Dan’s Shanty.

Quinn had his family in a safe place to live and grow from. He never cared to travel too far without them. His second office was in Denver. He shone as a Minority Whip in the Colorado Senate and many of his legislative positions were treasures. The last great liberal of the Rocky Mountains.

Rita learned from her mother-in-law the nuances of running the ranch, and with Juan in the saddle, the ranch had continued to prosper.

Rita’s main concern was that Quinn was wasting his talent in a position far too small for him. His Denver office had become a place of social and political ideas, a think tank for interns, a confessional, a place where rival Republicans could come in and argue, a place where adversaries could arbitrate.

The press spread Quinn’s name beyond Colorado borders. Quinn had a divine secret. He was not on the take, he did not lie, and he admitted to mistakes. Quinn’s space in Denver took on the feel of a local shrine.

He was a charming speaker with a mix of mountain and clean Marine humor, much in control and a very cool hand at his senate position.

Rita knew that his Colorado anchor was set because she and Duncan and Rae came first. It was time, she prayed, for the family to give him something back.

They ended the meal fat and sassy, sitting on a pillowed floor in long Johns before the fire.

Duncan rambled on about the large animal hospital he planned to build on the ranch with a research facilky for disease control and breeding.

Rita figured that Granddad Mal and Grandmother Siobhan had deliberately taken themselves out of the trip up to the Shanty so the four of them could spend this incredible event together.

Mal? Reynaldo Maldonado was somewhere in Mexico or Paris or Manila being lionized with a thirty-something year-old lady on his arm.

“This is the happiest day of my life. The other two happiest days were seeing you two born,” Quinn said.

“Who are you thinking about, Quinn?” his wife asked knowingly.

“Dan. It took us half our lives ‘

“You get it,” Rae said. “If any dad in the world gets it, you do.”

“Keep loving,” Quinn said.

“So serious?” Rita asked.

“I’m so filled, I’m liable to start bawling,” Quinn said.

“Hear! Hear!” Duncan said.

Quinn stood, jiggled the fire, and balanced on the hearth. Rita knew her man. “I think your dad wants to tell us something,” she said, “and he’s having trouble.”

After a silence Quinn said, “Jesus, you can’t even hold a private thought with this crowd. I don’t want to sound like a freaking martyr who made sacrifices for you. The joy of my life has come to fruition at this moment. The happiness and well-being of the three of you outweighed any ambitions I might have had. Well, now you’ve grown up, and I believe you can bear the public crucifixions that go with public office. I’ve come under a lot of pressure from the party lately. They are bound and determined to have me run for governor in two thousand and two.”

“Shit, man, that’s great!” Duncan erupted.

“Cool!” noted Rae.

“Let’s tickle the governor,” Rita said, grabbing his ankles while Duncan bear-hugged him and Rae shoved him off the hearth.

“You people know how ticklish I am, so cease! I say, cease! Seriously! And get that bloody dog out of my face. Defend your master or you’re raccoon meat!” Semper Fi decided the best way to defend his master was to lick his lips, nose, and eyes.

“Dessert!” Quinn cried, howling. “What do we have for dessert?”

“Well, there is apple pie, pumpkin pie, brownies, carrot cake, and Haagan-Das .. .”

When it was midnight, they held hands, cried a little, and wished one another well. They talked until the fire died, then wearily crept up to the sleeping lofts. Rae and Duncan had nice thick featherbeds beneath them and comforters to cover them.

Mom and Dad, on the other side of the Shanty, tucked into a double sleeping bag.

Quiet lovemaking so no sounds would reach the children. Slow dancing, passionately slow, skilled. It took two hours to play it out.

They held onto each other as they arose and flew into space and over the millennium bridge. The star show seemed to move down to earth. Each star became a flake of snow as it drifted down to the bubble.

“Can’t you sleep?” Quinn asked.

“No. There’s never been a night like this.”

She breathed hard and wiggled a bit, signs that Quinn read well.

“Something is weighing on you. You can talk about Carlos,” he said.

It had been nearly twenty years since she had returned to Quinn. Ten years had gone by since Carlos disappeared on a chartered jet in the Caribbean. When his body floated ashore, the autopsy showed a gun wound to the back of his head and severe bone shattering. He had obviously been thrown out of the plane over water.

Quinn brought Carlos’ body home and set him down in the Troublesome Mesa Cemetery.

“When I was in Houston, hovering between sanity and madness,” she began, “I knew even then that the key to my recovery was in the pages of the Venice book. My guilt about my affair with Carlos, be it before our marriage or not, eroded me. God strike me down if I ever harbor another secret like that.. . well, I’m building a case for myself,” she said suddenly, and stopped talking.

“Please let go of it,” said Quinn.

“Some kind of a miracle took place. One day in Houston I picked up the hundred and fifty pages of Venice that I had given to you to read. The first time I had heard your comments I went into a rage, but I did not realize then that I was literally forcing you to reject me.”

They were tight now, lying in the same direction with his arms about her. She was calm, and her voice sounded like fine wine.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I picked up my own pages and dared to read them. Suddenly, this vast mystery of writing began to fade like the sun burning off the morning fog. At least now I had some insight to comprehend my work. Through introspection I felt that any true dormant talent in me was emerging. I could clearly judge my own errors and understand your comments. The miracle came when I understood that a large part of the writer’s being, of his talent, could only emerge through hard, hard work. And maybe if I worked hard enough, I’d raise the talent level enough to succeed.”

“What did you learn?” he asked.

“I rewrote those hundred and fifty pages. Someday you’ll read them

maybe, maybe not. I’m not afraid for you to read them anymore. Again,

I learned that doing those hundred and fifty pages took more endurance

and willpower and raw strength than I believed a human being could possess. Well, these new pages were good, Quinn, but what a price.”

The woman was kissed as she loved it, over her neck and back, and his hands were smooth of touch and she whimpered with joy.

“So,” she said, “what was it that I really wanted? Was I really ready to give it all to be a writer? I used writing as a baby blanket. The fear, the enslavement to that bloody typewriter, the isolation, the numbed mind and scarred soul, all those things that make a writer. I wanted Quinn,” she said, “and I wanted Quinn’s children. In the end loving you was by far the more powerful of the two forces, and I’ve never shed a tear over the abandonment of the writer’s siren song. Thank you for taking me back twenty years ago.”

“I hope I can love you as much.”

“You do.”

“Wow!” he whispered at the wonder of it.

“Yeah,” she said, “wow!”

Quinn pulled her tush into his tummy and kissed her shoulders.

“You kidding me, Quinn?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Mind if I find out?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

THE ALAMO, MARYLAND

MOTHER’S DAY, 2002

AMERIGUN was a show dog with a single trick, the unimpeded promotion of gun sales. It swore to a single credo. Namely, that any American of any age could buy and own any weapon in any numbers without accountability ... as guaranteed by Second Amendment rights in the Constitution. Anything less was unacceptable, including baby locks on pistols.

Central to AMERIGUN’s credo, anchored in bedrock, immovable, was to portray gun owners as victims for trying to defend themselves as they were being hounded by a government conspiracy.

The nation had undergone too many bombings, too many drive-by and schoolyard shootings, too many church burnings and too many grown men playing weekend warriors in the woods.

In Bill Clinton there was finally an American president ready to stand up against the violence and its chief perpetrators. Once one of the most feared lobbys in Washington, AMERIGUN’s bite-and-rip bully-boy Doberman tactics were not working quite so well now.

The Clinton reelection in 1996 forced AMERIGUN into a defensive posture. Unable to compromise or think in any new direction, the organization began to sink in its own muck.

What had been unthinkable a decade earlier, newspaper articles and editorials, magazine pieces, and TV specials now catalogued the perils of reckless gun ownership. A big shift came as the American people solidly supported gun control. The issue was out in the open at last.

Bill Clinton, Southern boy from a Southern state, became the first American president to stand for gun control. He brought his message home by as many executive orders on gun control as he was able.

However, the American Congress defaulted on backup legislation.

AMERIGUN used the time-tested stick-and-carrot method on the Congress. Donations to the campaign fund or face defeat in reelection. Because gun control crossed party lines in “traditional” gun states, the political parties were equally timid.

It fell to city councils and state legislators to enact the measures that Washington had defaulted on. In local situations the call against arms had such public support as to allow dozens of new gun-control laws to get on the books.

By 2000 AMERIGUN had been badly battered, having lost tens of thousands of members. Its headquarters in McLean, Virginia, was a dinosaur with a kaput eight-million-dollar computer system. It was crawl out or die.

AMERIGUN’s secret handlers formed a super committee to “guide” the future destiny of the organization. These nine men and two women innocuously called themselves The Combine. Their names were not known to anyone, including AMERIGUN. They represented the weapons makers, lobbyists, and financial controllers.

Weapons makers were always nervous over the seamier sides of their product: gun smuggling, arms dealing, and massive domestic illegalities. Although AMERIGUN was somewhat diminished, it was necessary for The Combine to keep the organization going as a “clean” shield defending a dirty trade.

New AMERIGUN headquarters, the Alamo, were set up, out of harm’s way, in western Maryland with a view to the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Combine reduced AMERIGUN functions. They could carry on shooting seminars, publish the magazine, Weaponry, conduct mailings and competitions, and rise up and scream when ordered.

Longstanding leader of AMERIGUN, King Porter, understood that without The Combine’s financial support the organization would collapse.

Once King had been a terrifying predator who gained his spurs in Congress by fear tactics. His fall from grace only lathered up his innards for the moment of revenge.

For two decades King Porter had been the “rock of ages,” cemented into bedrock with a fifty-foot-high, twenty-foot-thick brick wall enclosing his brain.

King didn’t stand very tall in actuality. Most people looking at eye level saw the naked crown of his head with an occasional upright hair from the horseshoe fringe. His skin was stretched tightly over his face, flattening his cheeks into a mouth set with the left side of his face a fraction higher than the right.

His dress, by ancient tailor, had a Western swag to it, back snug and straight with heavily seamed outlines. Heels of Western boots pumped him up a bit. King’s eyes and ears allowed little humor. Not infrequently had he envisioned himself a Confederate general about to lead a cavalry charge when he appeared before a House or Senate hearing.

King Porter was bred and brewed as the middle and smallest male of nine stunted hillbilly kids. In order to survive he had willed himself an aura of power through intimidation. No one doubted he’d set them afire if angry enough. With rage always near the surface he was able to gain mastery over his siblings.

The level of rage was usually close to a boil, as was his memory of hunger and its pains.

Porter was at once an unpleasant person, bully, and righteous defender of the Second Amendment.

What really ticked King Porter off was that the names of The Combine were held secret from him. He had to deal with a single person representing The Combine. He loathed her.

Maud Traynor was the lawyer and sole contact to The Combine. She was a middle-aged, expensively dumpy bitch. Her language could startle a drunken sailor. She cracked her knuckles and blew foul cigarette smoke in his sensitive eyes. Maud Traynor, King was certain, was a practicing lesbian.

From his window he could see her pull into the circle in her vulgar red Ferrari. King greeted her at the elevator door with the stiffness of a Prussian field marshal. She pinched his cheek in passing. He smiled through locked teeth.

“Beautiful ride up here,” Maud said. “Saving your booze for the Fourth of July?” She was a no-nonsense rye drinker. King Porter slid into his seat tentatively.

“We’ve got a problem,” she said right off.

“We have?”

“It’s this off-year election. The polls show us clobbering the dirty dozen we tagged for defeat. But this cowboy running for governor of Colorado is opening his lead.”

“O’Donald?”

“O’Connell. Quinn Patrick O’fucking Connell. It was made clear, King, that we can’t have a gun-control freak in the middle of gun territory. He could poison all the states around him.”

King shook his head. “Too bad his daddy, old Daniel O’Connell, passed on. Dan was a real shooter.” King called for his records. Colorado had been saturated with infomercial tapes to three hundred radio talk shows in the region. Six hundred thousand pieces of literature had been mailed. Two or three weekly leaks to the tabloids had been accomplished. AMERIGUN’s website carried out a gnashing attack.

“Look at this,” King said. . O’Connell is the son of a death-row inmate and a prostitute. . possible fetal alcohol syndrome. . severe learning disabilities. . what is the true story behind his Navy Cross? A coverup was needed for his cowardice. . suspected drug addiction. . wife abuser. his father-in-law, Reynaldo Maldonado is red, left-wing professor and creator of pornographic art. . Maldonado probably committed incest with daughter when she was ten. . O’Connell suspected of sodomizing sheep. . Quinn’s Mexican wife cavorted with drug kingpin. . marital infidelity. . hit-and-run charge covered up. . tried to give state park concessions to Jap companies. . caught in woman’s rest room. . non-churchgoer.

.. . satanic rituals on ranch during full moons. . 666 tattooed on his penis. . O’Connell ranch a transit point for Mexican illegals, who are sold to farms for eight hundred dollars a head. . often seen in the company of Jewish money lenders. . son, Duncan, a campus radical and suspected gay. . daughter, Rae, badly retarded.

Maud took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “You know what we’ve got here, King?”

“Well, he refuses to answer these charges publicly.”

“Well, fathom that. I said, do you know what we’ve got here?”

“What?”

“A shithole, and we’ve just poured six hundred thousand dollars down it. Your stupid campaign is only making people flock to him.”

“This stupid campaign has worked time and time again,” King argued.

“Can’t you even understand a man who can’t be intimidated!”

“You go with what works,” he answered reactively. “Our education programs have always been successful. Be patient, because eventually some charge is going to stick to him.”

“I’ll tell you what’s stuck. AMERIGUN and The Combine are stuck with a fucking Democratic liberal for the next four years.”

“You were the one who signed off on this Colorado strategy,” King retorted.

“Well, it’s not working,” she grunted. “Close down the Denver operation, phone banks, ads, talk show and media handout sheets, and slink off quietly.”

King pounded his little fist on his desk and wheezed in discomfort.

“As of now,” Maud said, “The Combine wants you to plan a post-election party for O’Connell. Our thinking is that we should move our 2003 convention from Dallas to Denver. What I mean is, we come in blazing and go after the legislators. We bring in Hank Carleton and every kid who ever owned a squirrel gun who has risen to fame. We bus in demonstrators from Utah, Wyoming, Oklahoma, et cetera, et cetera. We show them how unpleasant life is going to be if gun-control shit is enacted. Your campaign has got to have smarts this time, King!”

“Convention in Denver. You bet it will!”

Maud unzipped and popped open her alligator/lizard/twenty-four-carat gold-trimmed briefcase and tucked in her papers. “Battlefield, Denver 2003. Concentrate your plans on the legislature. I want everything run through me for approval.”

Maud consumed another belt of rye and said, “Ahhh.” She didn’t move.

It wasn’t all over. The phone rang mercifully. It was for Maud. Probably her lesbian bitch partner, King thought, or maybe she’d brought a pretty boy to oil himself up in front of her.

“My granddaughter,” Maud said after she hung up. “We’ve a long horseback ride in the hills tomorrow. Ow-ee, I’m getting a bit of a buzz. I’ll bet you’d like me to drive off one of those curlicue roads back to Washington.”

“No such thing, Miss Maud. Do we have any more business?”

“Yeah,” she said, “we’ve got to do something about this fucking

magazine,” she said, reaching to an end table and throwing a half dozen

copies of Weaponry on his desk. She read the covers: “357 Sig, Colt

380, AR-15 keeps gaining fans despite media attacks, Springfields, H&K

USP .45 ASP, Savage, how to carry concealed, protecting freedom, more

guns less crime. And on page five the smiling face of King Porter on his continuing ‘to the bunkers’ sermon, rewrite one hundred and twenty. “We’re under siege, clean decent Americans are being stripped of their birthright by the United States government in defiance of our forefathers who gave us the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment/ cha, cha, cha!”

Everything that could stretch and stiffen did so inside King Porter.

“Here’s a good one,” Maud said, “God made man. Guns made man equal.

Guns are the legacy of liberty.”

“Just because .. . just because our magazine doesn’t feature a naked woman on the cover!” he cried.

Another belt of rye. “Hell, no, there’s no naked women. The sickos would rather squeeze a trigger than a woman’s breast. Guns are good old boys! They got them wham-whap two-fisted names, like .. . like Savage, Colt, Ruger, Baretta, Sigs, Winchester .. .”

Porter’s eyes widened. “Springfield!” he cried.

“Browning!” she exclaimed.

“Luger,” he cried.

“Smith & Wesson,” she said.

“Remington Viper,” he cried.

“Clock. Don’t forget Clock!” she said.

“Markov, Walther!” he retorted with a double.

“H and K,” she said.

“Mauser parabellum,” he cried.

“Anschutz,” she sang.

“Magnum! All sorts of mags,” he cried.

“I quit, you win,” Maud said. “Mags are it.”

King Porter was breathing hard and smiling at winner ship

“You start thinking about a few Sandis, or Debbies or Tracis on the cover.”

“What about Dixie?” he said, miffed. “I’m not turning Weaponry into a pornographic sex magazine.”

“Sex?” she said. “What the hell do you think this is all about,

King? Guns are the little people’s sex machines. Hell, they are nothing more than the extension of a cock. Bang! The ultimate orgasm! Guns make piss ants at the end of the bar as big as Hulk himself. Guns equalize the oppressed in his never-ending battle with the oppressor. Guns are empowerment!”

For a moment King Porter was in a little clapboard church in a gully by the creek at a foot-stomping tirade by its preacher. He snapped back to consciousness.

“The Combine is sending some designers to work on Weaponry. Maybe we’ll have a miss bang-bang beauty pageant. Let’s sell fifty thousand of them from newsstands and not hide them inside our raincoats. Let’s get ads from Ford trucks and Seagrams and ATT instead of all those chewing-tobacco ads. Let’s have stories written by real writers.”

Maud was tipsy. She managed to get into the elevator. King watched the circle. The Ferrari took off at a volume that shook the leaves on the trees. Maud Traynor’s red Ferrari screamed down the Alamo’s long driveway and onto the highway. King stood watching on his balcony and taking a few puffs from his inhalator, his baby blanket for years. Hope the bitch is found in scattered pieces at the bottom of a ditch, he wheezed to himself. Suppose she doesn’t run off the road, he thought; maybe I’d better tip off the state patrol there’s a dangerous drunk on the road.

The red tide of liberals was poisoning the country. No longer was he able to use “friendly persuasion” to make certain commies didn’t get on university teaching staffs and the subjects were kept pearly clean. No longer could he visit the local sheriffs and see that things were open for the gun clubs and shooting programs. It was even getting difficult to sway local and state government officials.

The colors outside flamed along with his red orange mood. His capacity to terrify had slithered away. He was in eternal battle, often with his own board.

And came the final humiliation, of exiling AMERIGUN to a puny reconverted hundred-year-old hotel. The Alamo! He had named it, and the Alamo would be heard from again.

King stared out to the land sloping down from the Alamo. He had plans of his own for the acreage he’d optioned all around. One day the Alamo would be the center of an AMERI GUN heritage park!

Great battles of our history would be reenacted. He, King Porter, would lead the first charge up San Juan Hill. Charge!

Kiddie rides on trains or a river would take them through virtual battlefields; Belleau Wood, the Normandy invasion, Iwo Jima, where a kid could plant a flag, Yorktown, and well .. . even Gettysburg.

And .. . and .. . and the Hall of the Great Gunfighters. For a dollar a kid could buckle up and fast-draw with a laser pistol against Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and .. . and .. . and .. . Doc Holliday.

And .. . and ... a very subdued, shrouded building depicting the demise of John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd and a scad of Mafia gangsters including Capone and .. . and the guy in the Texas tower sniping people on the ground .. .

And the heroes, the buffalo hunters and men who tamed Indians and the West. John Wayne, Jesse James, Davy Crockett!

And the kids could buy a replica only at the museum store with a host of AMERIGUN knives and grenades and pistols. And the crowning glory would be an amphitheater which would give a nightly replay of the Alamo!

DENVER, 2002-2003

QUINN PATRICK O’CONNELL WINS

GOVERNORSHIP OF COLORADO IN OFF-YEAR

ELECTION

Governor O’Connell stood as a lone pine in a burned-out forest. The Republican sweep took the state house in Denver and a majority of the national delegation to Washington.

Tuesday follows Monday. Quinn awoke to the reality that a sensible gun-control law didn’t have a chance. He would take his time, build bipartisan coalitions, push the easy legislation first. Once he had a sense of his statehouse, he might unwrap his gun-control bill. That would be a year off, anyhow.

Quinn did not face automatic Quinn haters. His father had been a shooter, a Republican, a Marine hero. Quinn was a hero of the state, a successful rancher and state senator and a diehard Coloradan.

For years the O’Connell office in Denver had been a place of civility, debate, and compromise. The Republicans relaxed, as long as Quinn didn’t push a liberal agenda too hard.

The mansion on 8th and Logan was too stilted for the O’Connells. They

used it for state functions, Girl Scout troops,

parties, and photo ops, but home was their Chessman Park condo a few blocks away.

During the first months Quinn traveled in the state’s King Air to get a pulse of the people and to prioritize his legislative program and win new constituents as a hands-on leader. His first goal was to balance the state’s resources for the coming century. Land and water laws were needed to protect the ranches and farms, for mining, housing developments, and the enormous tourist industry.

Quinn’s blue-ribbon panel contained a cross section of ideology, but at his personal behest they worked in a professional and intelligent manner. Quinn had imposed on them the canon that if one segment of the Colorado economy defaulted, the nature of the state could be lost.

He took on commencement speeches, town hall meetings, a semimonthly TV show, business lunches, union picnics, ribbon cutting ceremonies and, mercifully, he was a judge in the Miss Colorado beauty pageant.

Quinn ended his day’s work in the evening, phoning all over the state to congratulate the day’s winners or to express sorrow over deaths.

Denver was a legitimate small-time big city with generations of character and livability while retaining its cowboy gait.

He and Mayor Cholate formed a Coming to Denver committee. Gateway to the Rockies! Most sports-loving city in America!

The state supported the city in hiring a top museum curator to scout the world and put together exhibitions from Mongolia to Brazil to France and have their grand openings in Denver.

Likewise, he won support, with powerful persuasion, for the funds to upgrade the Denver Symphony Orchestra.

The Coming to Denver committee purchased a small hotel, large enough for the cast and crew of a Broadway musical. Quinn and the mayor hounded New York producers to stage their big shows.

Playing on Aspen’s glitz, a series of events were telecast from skiing to the Aspen Music Festival in the summer. In a smaller way, Telluride’s film and country-western festivals reached millions.

Some of the ski areas had gone “soft” as the number of skiers dwindled. Quinn convinced the newly rich entrepreneurs of China and Russia to build vacation towns for their countrymen. Little Moscow and Little Shanghai came into being and resulted in an open door for the state’s export products.

Quinn Patrick O’Connell created a feel-good atmosphere.

But always hovering over him was the coming AMERIGUN convention. AMERIGUN sent shock waves through the state capital with their announcement that a regional AMERIGUN office was being established in Denver.

AMERIGUN was picking a fight, making a power play. It was a defeat that Governor O’Connell could not abide without throwing his delicately balanced program into a heap.

As the year of 2003 rolled on, end game was near.

THE ALAMO—MARYLAND 2003

In the Alamo, King Porter seethed and wheezed the hours until the convention.

Deep down and not revealing it to a soul, King had prayed that Quinn would win the governorship. AMERIGUN and himself could prove their mettle by “victory at Denver.”

In the meantime, Quinn burned the midnight oil to try to craft some way to blunt the AMERIGUN assault.

Mayor Cholate simply did not want a rumble involving his police. Peace at any price. He conveniently booked a seminar in Tokyo during the gun group’s stay in Denver.

With limited knowledge, limited forces at his disposal, and limited

legal options, Quinn was simply outgunned. The helplessness of his

situation crashed down on him when AMERIGUN mailed flyers announcing the exhibition of a new weapon, The Colorado Blizzard, at the convention.

An Australian invention, the Blizzard, touted as the first great weapon of the new century, was a souped-up double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun that was fed cartridges through a machine-gun belt. Fifty times faster than the semiautomatic “street sweeper,” it could fire thousands of pellets a minute.

And, no law was broken to put it on exhibition!

Duncan unsnapped a Coors and flung himself onto the big couch.

A dying sun in the foothills and a rising night rubbed past each other, and one could nearly hear the cracking baseball bats from Coors Field.

“Dad, I was hoping,” Duncan said, “we’d take in a ball game.”

“Sorry. I gave our box away tonight. How about tomorrow?”

“Sure. Mom and Rae coming?”

“If we hold a gun to their heads. Speaking of guns, I hear you’re starting a terrorist cell at school.”

“Oh, shit,” Duncan moaned, “who ratted?”

“God save the whistle blowers,” Quinn said, “ski masks, lead pipes, a regular commando unit. You may be the answer to AMERIGUN’s prayers.”

Duncan was out of his seat. “Dad, haven’t we taken enough shit?”

“It comes with the territory. No one forced me to run for governor.”

“I’m glad this is on the table,” Duncan said. “I’m pissed at hearing how you fornicate with animals, and I’m pissed at hearing that Rae is a junkie and my mother is a lesbian prostitute.”

Bang, the fridge door slammed. Pfizz went another Coors top.

“Before you drown in your righteous indignation, Duncan, let me present

you with a little scene. Opening shot, all news *

casts: tear gas flying over the capitol lawn as Colorado state National Guard troops fire rubber bullets into an innocent crowd protesting the governor’s son Duncan’s hooded mob. Close-up, the governor’s son. Wreckage and fire around him considerable. Pan to shot of a bleeding King Porter. We cut away to Washington, where enraged senators are screaming for O’Connell’s ass. Denver loses a hundred million dollars in convention bookings, and the state has the mark of Cain on it for a generation. Thanks a lot, Duncan, nifty.”

“You knew who these people were! Why the hell did you have to run for governor?”

“At this moment I’d be hard pressed to give you an answer.”

Mal had been roused from his room by their yelling. He entered and snatched up the flyer on the Blizzard. “Because he wants to do something about their efforts to legalize this weapon. Maybe he did it because somebody has to stand up against evil.”

“Pardon me all to hell,” Duncan said sarcastically.

“All of us wonder,” Mal went on, “what are we doing here? This is your father, your family, and your state, Duncan. We don’t need your pouting. Either stand with us or go back to Fort Collins and play with your Rocky Mountain oysters. Your daddy is the poster boy for AMERIGUN, only he is outlined like a target. Ten points if you hit him between the eyes.”

“It’s like judging the beauty contests, Duncan. Somebody has to do the dirty work,” Quinn said.

Duncan laughed and cried at the same time, his cheeks reddening with shame. “I’m pretty naive, aren’t I?”

“Yep,” his grandfather agreed.

“Anything I can do, Dad?”

“Yep. I need help. I need it badly.”

“Governor’s office,” Marsha sang.

“Hello, Marsha, this is Dawn Mock. Is the governor in for me?”

“I’ll put you right through, Dr. Mock. Governor, it’s Dr. Mock.”

“Quinn,” Quinn said.

“I must talk to you right away,” she said.

“Jesus, I’ve got a parole board meeting in ten minutes, and after that I’m loaded.”

“It’s urgent, and it won’t take long. I’m on my way.” The line went dead.

“Marsha.”

“Yes, Governor.”

“Push the parole board meeting back a half hour. Cancel dinner with Assemblyman Bonnar at the Ship’s Tavern. Send Dr. Mock right in and hold all calls.”

Quinn wondered what the hell could be so urgent. In her ten months in office, it was the first time she had done this.

He smiled. Dr. Dawn Mock had been his first appointment and had bucked a nasty confirmation hearing. She had performed brilliantly.

The position of Colorado Bureau of Investigation was open. The glass ceiling was lowered for an African-American woman.

Dawn Mock, a mother of three and grandmother of six, was married to a retired detective who now ran a regional claims office of insurance adjusters.

Dawn’s reputation on the Chicago police force had been gained as a forensics wizard. Dr. Mock’s books, speeches, seminars, and appearances as a trial witness outshone the people above her. The powers to be took Dr. Mock for granted, even though she spent a fair part of every year on loan to other police forces.

The Colorado Bureau of Investigation was a compact unit of about fifty persons, mainly a support system for investigations in those towns that could not afford forensics labs or a staff of detectives.

State bureaus are rarely noted. Dawn Mock changed that. Quinn gave her a free hand and infused the bureau with new funds. Dr. Mock did the rest.

“Hi, Dawn,” he greeted her.

“Governor.”

Dawn rated a big smile. At fifty-something she had remained extremely attractive, belying her years of police work. She gestured to Quinn that she wanted secrecy. To one side of his office was a private room with a couch, a kitchenette, and small conference table. He closed the door behind her.

“You know Arne Skye?” she asked.

“I’ve met him a few times. Roving special agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.”

“He’s been working out of the Chicago office,” she continued. “Arne flew in to see me today. He wants to talk to you in total one-on-one secret.”

Quinn mulled this over. “What’s your experience with him, Dawn?”

“I’ve had a lot of contact with him through the years. He’s a legend in the bureau, good people. Arne’s always been up front with me.”

“You know I don’t like this back-alley crap,” Quinn said, annoyed.

“What do you think is on his mind?”

“Well, it’s either alcohol, tobacco, or firearms.”

“Maybe the AMERIGUN convention?” Quinn murmur red hopefully.

“I don’t want to speculate, Governor. I’ve been with you a year, and

I’ve never seen you draw a card from the bottom of the deck. Sorry

about putting you on the midnight rendezvous circuit, but—“

“Breeds mistrust,” Quinn interrupted.

“But,” she interrupted right back, “no public office in America can exist without its dirty little secrets.”

“Thanks for sharing that with me, Dawn.”

“Quinn, Arne Skye is one of the big hitters in police world. You’d have to be crazy not to meet with him.”

“God forgive me, where and when?”

“Have you got an unmarked car?”

“No problem.”

Dawn took a room key from her purse. STAR LITE MOTEL, the tag read, 11965 SANTE FE DRIVE, ROOM 106, and she slid it over the table.

“Santa Fe Drive. I haven’t cruised that street since I was a freshman at Boulder. This Arne Skye got a sense of humor or what? When?”

“Tonight, ten o’clock. He’ll be in the room waiting.”

“No tricks, no bugging, no video,” Quinn said firmly.

“You boys better start trusting each other.”

At nine-fifteen Quinn left the condo garage in Maldonado’s Cherokee.

Was this the break he had to have? It smelled of promise. Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was a small agency, some fifteen hundred agents, but they could be potent.

One of the nation’s oldest bureaus, it had been formed after the

American Revolution. In those days of yore, there had been no such thing as personal income tax. The new nation had to finance itself largely on taxes from alcohol and tobacco collected by the bureau. Later, firearms and arson were added to the bureau’s mandate.

Like the Marine Corps, the aTF. managed to fight off attempts to dissolve it. The bureau proved time and again they were uniquely empowered. They returned to the government in collected revenues twenty to thirty times their operating budget.

Quinn turned onto Santa Fe Drive, a diagonal truck route from the interstate to downtown Denver. He passed the train yards. The street had been once filled with truck stop cafes and hot-sheet motels. Swingers tacked their assets onto motel bulletin boards before partaking of the waterbeds and porno flicks.

The street now had a “safe” area with a strip of cantinas, musty bars, and restaurants where undocumented wetbacks gathered. Immigration raids were rare because too much of the agricultural economy and tourist industry depended on stoop labor and busboys.

As Governor, Quinn could do poor little about it. It was a federal problem. Quinn felt that corruption in Mexico and bleeding the underclass were beyond his powers to dent, much less change.

The Starlite Motel had seen better days and better days before that. Quinn wiggled the Cherokee into the lot and waited. The Starlite was a one-story affair about a hundred feet removed from a corner cantina. There was an intermittent but steady line of men going to one of the rooms in the motel and returning to the cantina.

Ten o’clock.

Quinn’s shoes crunched over broken glass. His key fudged on him. He shoved the door and it broke open. The room was totally dark.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Quinn sang.

After a beat a dim lamp clicked on. Quinn could not be certain who was behind the lamp. “Hello, Governor. Is anyone listening?”

“Not unless he’s one of yours,” Quinn said.

“Dr. Mock called me and vouched for your veracity. Nice to meet someone in office with veracity.” The voice came from behind his cover. Everything about Arne Skye was medium sized, except for his face. It was a roadmap of past raids, of one who had spent a life in purgatory. He studied Quinn, trying to search for clues beyond the governor’s unrevealing expression.

Arne Skye produced a bottle of vodka and small-sized Dixie cups from the bathroom.

“You going to do anything about AMERIGUN?” he said abruptly in a high voice of Norwegian influence.

“I thought you’d never ask,” Quinn replied.

“Dr. Dawn says the state has hit a brick wall.”

“These gun folks are artful dodgers,” Quinn said.

“You’ve hit a brick wall because it’s not your business. It’s mine.

What have you learned, Governor?”

“That you’re a crusty character.”

Skye’s roadmap changed as he broke into a smile. “Where are you with this?”

“Well, let’s see. There are up to five thousand, give or take, gun and knife shows held country wide each year, almost anonymously. The exhibition tables are leased so AMERIGUN is clear of any illegal sales by the exhibitors,” Quinn recited. “AMERIGUN is renting out fifteen hundred exhibition tables in the convention center. Largest number ever.”

A loud customer next door announced himself. The dying dove song cooed over to them. “What else?”

“Many exhibitions carry illegal weapons. Contact is made at the show by a buyer, and the transaction is usually carried out at a trailer court. There other categories of dirty weapons exhibited hilariously as ‘antiques. “And to avoid dealer licenses, they can sell weapons for cash under the guise of selling from a ‘personal collection’! No record of sale required and no registration.

“Twenty to thirty percent of guns in the hands of criminals and street gangs were purchased at these gun shows. If the state canvasses the exhibition floor, we might catch a few dozen street-level dealers. If they’re caught, it’s no skin off AMERIGUN’s ass,” Quinn recited.

The customer next door was vocally aroused.

“Shit,” Arne opined, “we can’t go on meeting like this, Governor. Now,

who have you spoken to confidentially about

AMERIGUN?”

“Dr. Mock and my attorney general, Doc Blanchard.”

“That’s it?”

“Well, my wife and father-in-law.”

“If there is any course of action, and I’m not saying there is, any operation has to be a dead-bolted secret,” Arne said.

“What about your bureau, Skye?”

Arne shook his head. “It must be a Colorado operation. Even the aTF. can be penetrated. It’s like this, safety locks on guns have just been voted down by the Congress for the fifth time. Any leaks to the gun people would be a disaster in this kind of hit. Now, let me ask you, Governor, what kind of people you have leading the Guard and state troopers?”

“Reb Butterworth is adjutant general of the Guard. Colonel Yancey Hawke is chief of the troopers. I’d split a secret with them. In fact, both are seething to make a raid.”

“I like your chances with those three people,” Skye appraised. He inched closer to Quinn.

“Could you order a special two-week training course for seventy guardsman and thirty troopers?”

“Training courses and seminars are ongoing. We’re always plucking some stupid climber off the top of a mountain, tracking forest fires, drug busts at the state lines, dusting for insects.”

“Crowd control?” Arne asked.

“We practice that drill regularly. Will the people in these courses have any idea of what we’re after?”

“No,” Arne said. “Anything you don’t understand about it?”

“No,” Quinn said.

“If you want to bust AMERIGUN’s ass—“ Arne began.

“I want to bust AMERIGUN’s ass,” Quinn replied.

“We are bypassing the FBI, the United States government, and the Denver police. As far as the aTF. is concerned, we don’t know nothing.

Capische^”

“Capische,” Quinn repeated.

“We may have the stars in perfect alignment,” Arne said. “Number one, it has to be a big haul, hundreds, maybe thousands of weapons. Second, it has to show up in Denver during the convention. Third, someone of rank in AMERIGUN has to be connected to the weapons. Finally, the action must be swift and bloodless.”

A ruckus broke out in one of the nearby pleasure rooms. A half dozen men stormed out of the cantina and hauled off one of their buddies lest the police arrive and detain them all.

Arne Skye got up. The low ceiling made him look taller than he was. “If you’ll have Butterworth and Colonel Yancey form up a hundred men for special training, I’ll contact you, through Dawn Mock.”

“We’ve got no deal, Arne.”

“You do need help, right?”

“You’re hedging your bets. I want you to show me that card you’re hiding up your sleeve.”

The governor had it figured out correctly. Arne would stay in as long as he wasn’t exposed. He would give the signal for a bust, maybe not. If the bust worked, there would probably be no investigation, for it would shut the mouths of Congress. If it went sour and was traced to him, so long career, and the governor might as well go back to Troublesome Mesa and stay.

Thirty years at the bureau, Skye thought, coming down to a single moment, possibility of gunfire, maintaining secrecy, and going over the head of his director. Shit!

Arne Skye had spent his life on the edge, sometimes completely ignoring

his superiors, their mandate, and sometimes bypassing the odds, but a miss here would mean the guillotine.

“You look like you’re in need of religious help,” Quinn said.

“I know why I came to Denver,” he shot back defensively. “If I knew what I know and failed to try to prevent it, it would end up as my legacy. I’m an honest cop, Governor, but I don’t mind cutting a few corners.”

“When I took office,” Quinn replied, “I thought I was going to come out Maytag sparkling. It doesn’t work like that, does it”?”

“It’s hard for guys like you and me,” Arne said. “This is the most important potential bust of three decades in the bureau. What do you know about the VEC-44?”

“It’s some kind of machine pistol,” Quinn aswered.

“You betcha,” Skye said. He took an arms case from his suitcase, unzipped it, and laid the weapon on the table. It was tiny and lightweight, had a three and a half-inch barrel, and weighed under three pounds. Modified to become fully automatic, it used powerful 9mm hollow-center ammunition, and had oversized clips holding a thirty-five-round capacity.

The weapon had been developed by Belgium as a NATO policing gun. Several thousand had been produced. NATO ultimately rejected the VEC-44 as inaccurate over forty yards and extremely dangerous when troops were dealing with civilians.

“It is worthless for target shooting or as a hunting weapon. The barrel gets so hot it becomes squirrely fast, and so the military rejected it. VEC-44 converted into fully automatic operates as an in-close kill machine designed for mean streets.” The vodka bottle lowered by two cups.

“When NATO dropped the weapon, Belgium sold the licenses and patents in Panama in the forbidden city of Colon. Colon is impossible to penetrate and is a world hub for drugs and arms smuggling.

“The package was finally taken over by Roy Sedgewick’s Ark Royal Arms

Ltd.” a Canadian manufacturer, always slightly ahead of the

government. VEC--44’s were converted into a cash crop. Small case lots drifted into the gun shows and under the counters of gun stores.

“Sedgewick siphoned off three thousand VEC-44’s and spirited them to his farm near Toronto. They were encased and hidden in a huge barn under bales of hay.

“When the Canadian government caught up with Sedge wick and Ark Royal, he had made preparation for his old age.

“In the paradoxical world of arms smuggling, Sedgewick hooked up with Hoop Hooper, the ‘commander’ of a two-hundred man militia, the Grand Army of Wisconsin.

“If Sedgewick could get the guns over the border, Hooper would stash them somewhere on his ‘national military territory.”

“With the wrath of the Canadian government close behind him, Sedgewick didn’t have many choices, despite his doubts about Hoop Hooper. He loaded his hidden arsenal onto a semitrailer and wheeled it down to Sault Ste. Marie, where it was reloaded onto a Great Lakes barge.

“The cache was enhanced by three and a half million rounds of ammunition, twenty thousand long clips, and a potpourri of grenades, rockets, machine guns, and mortars.

“Sedgewick estimated a street value of over three million dollars. Hoop Hooper was positive he could quickly move the guns to militias clear to the Pacific coast and as far south as the Mexican border.”

Quinn had become mesmerized at the tale.

“I waited for those VEC-44’s to move out of Canada for a year. Sure enough, I got tipped on a shipment of bonded crates to be passed through customs uninspected, apparently as a favor to a high American official.”

“Yowl Why the hell didn’t you seize them, Arne?”

“The guns were more valuable being traded in the States. I wanted to find out who the official was, and I wanted to learn their routes and the names of their customers, their communications, websites.

“The case was my baby, so aTF. Washington laid off. The guns were held in the bonded warehouse until they were to be collected. Next day I opened a number of cases, confirmed the content, and implanted a GPS system. You know the GPS?”

“Ground-positioning satellite,” Quinn answered, “I have one in my plane.”

“We followed signals right into the Grand Army of Wisconsin’s training camp between Madison and La Crosse. There they sit. We can remotely switch the GPS power off and on and randomly check the position. As soon as the GPS reports back, we turn off the power.”

“What about Hoop Hooper?”

“Alas, poor Hoop,” Arne said. “The FBI, which generally gets in our way, nabbed Hooper on mail fraud, money charges, income-tax evasion, illegal weapons, and criminal Internet scams. He pleaded guilty to get a reduced sentence but said nothing about the VEC-44’s. The guns would be his stake when he gets out of the penitentiary.”

“Jesus, what a story.”

“Hell, this is a fairly easy one,” Arne said. “Some of these schemes get really complicated.”

“Why are you doing this, Arne? It’s brinksmanship for you.”

“You might as well be asking why I spent thirty years of my life in aTF.. I don’t want those fuck heads to dump three thousand murder weapons onto the streets and woods of my country.”

“Arne, I be live you and thank you, man. Well, last question, who is the man who got the guns over the border?”

“A United States senator. Big in appropriations, major patriot in the red, white, and blue department. A real Yankee doodle dandy. Half his state owes him favors. He told Customs in Superior that it was a load of urgently needed Swedish farm machinery.”

“Good Lord,” Quinn whispered. “You’re talking about Senator]. Richard Darling!”

“Bingo,” Arne Skye said, “Dicky Darling.”

DENVER AND THE ALAMO, MARYLAND—A

WEEK BEFORE THE AMERIGUN CONVENTION

“Good afternoon, Governor’s office, Marsha speaking.”

An officious throat clearing. “This is King Porter calling from Maryland. May I speak with the governor?”

“Hold, please,” Marsha said, going to the intercom. “Governor, King Porter is on the line.”

Quinn was struck by the sudden call. “Put him on,” he said unevenly.

“Governor?”

(f\r . if

Yes, sir.

“King Porter here.”

“What can I do for you?” Quinn asked. “Well, Governor, I thought it would be neighborly for me to contact you. We have our differences, of course, but AMERIGUN is going to spend several days in your beautiful state, and I’d like to think, as Americans, we can call a truce during our visit. I may add, we are expecting over ten thousand delegates, you know, plus the exhibitors.”

“You will be greeted with open arms, Mr. Porter.” “King, call me King. We have a very active membership—“ “No problem. Denver knows how to throw a party.” “Yes, well, we certainly do not favor or anticipate any problems.”

“And we shall do our utmost to make you welcome.” “Governor, I wonder if I can beg a favor from you. It seems like Denver’s mayor will be out of the country. Could I impose upon you to welcome the delegates?” “Where and when, King?”

“We officially take over the Convention Center on the morning of the eleventh. The balance of that day goes to registering delegates and helping get the exhibitons set up. The welcoming ceremony takes place at six in the evening.”

Quinn jotted a note and passed it to Marsha, who had entered the office.

“We’ve got a date, King. Looking forward to meeting you.”

Quinn banged his fist on the desk and snarled.

“Well, he did hold out the olive branch,” Marsha said.

“You know where he wants to shove it. That slimy little son of a bitch! He’s dragging me up there like .. .”

“Ancient Hebrews being marched through Rome in chains,” Marsha said.

“Something like that.”

“Don’t worry, Governor, you’ll be a big hit. Dr. Mock dropped in and wants a few minutes with you. She’s waiting.”

“Have her come in, and hold everything.”

“I need good news, Dawn,” Quinn greeted her.

“You remember that big wheel of cheese you ordered from Wisconsin?”

“It never came.”

“It’s on the way,” Dawn said. “We’re all hooked in. I can monitor its progress from my office.”

Quinn cupped her hands in his, sighed, prayed, and kissed her fingertips.

“She’s on interstate ninety heading west, about to cross into Minnesota, beep, beep, beeping merrily along her way.”

welcome to colorado!

amerigun silver anniversary convention—denver september 13-17, 2003

“HeeHaw!”

It looked as though the late shows at Branson, Missouri, had emptied onto the interstate and all headed straight for Denver.

In Denver the bars had spare kegs piled up in their alleys, the hookers staked out their saloons, the gangs protected their drug turfs. Fun in the Rockies!

A lot of wholesome family events on the menu. Three thousand utterly priceless tickets would be raffled for a game between the Broncos and the dreamworksKANGAROOS, the latest Los Angeles expansion team at intelELWAY Stadium. Out in the mountains the billion or so aspen trees began their dance of gold. A thousand basketball tickets for the mcdonalds NUGGETS had few takers.

WELCOME AMERIGUN DELEGATES

“HeeHaw!”

The autumn air was crisp and gentle. Glorious deep breaths ensued.

Rae O’Connell watched her brother, Duncan, amble over the parking lot toward the entrance. Lordy, what a cowboy stud, she thought, a good thing we were all raised with morals.

“Hi! Over here, Duncan!”

They hugged. “I’ve got tickets,” she said.

“What time is Dad speaking?” Duncan asked.

“Six. We’ve got a couple hours to look around.”

Three hundred thousand square feet, filled with fourteen hundred ten-foot tables, burst open before them. The tables sagged under the weight of handguns, rifles, shotguns, night vision apparatus, knives, laser attachments, ammunition presses, sniper scopes, lock picks, burglary tools, surveillance bugs, T-shirts.

It was the devil’s fairyland.

A double table held three hundred separate and individual fake law enforcement badges where a man could button on the rank of sheriff, sheriff deputy, detective, U.S. Marshal.

There were tables of Kevlar vests and spy craft kits.

And

A tattoo artist.

And

Steroids, faintly disguised, and brass knuckles and lead filled sap gloves and blackjacks and body vests and pepper and mace spray sets and stun guns and electric cattle prods and police clubs and handcuffs.

The main aisle tables exhibited stealth climbing equipment and barbed-wire cutting tools and pistol magazines and SWAT carrying bags designed to disguise automatic weapons.

The hall was filling up now. Untrusting exhibitors stared suspiciously at untrusting customers. Word had been passed that the Denver police were on “live and let live” orders.

Camouflage uniforms closely following Army and Marine Corps specs took up a five-table area.

Next to it were bayonets, shooting earmuffs, bipods, machine gun tripods, combat boots, and bird shot.

Targets holding outlines of human beings.

And

Confederate flags.

And baseball caps bearing such identification as SWAT, aTF.,

FBI, SHERIFF, BORDER PATROL, U.S. MARSHAL SERVICE.

There was a table with a rainbow of military medals and ribbons on display, from the Order of Lenin to the Victorian Cross. Step right up and show the folks how courageous you were—in case you misplaced your own citation. All of the armed services military medals from the Spanish-American War to the present were on sale, except for the Congressional Medal of Honor, which had to be special-ordered.

Duncan and Rae retreated for a hot dog and Coke, munching listlessly, saying nothing, talking to one another with their eyes. If this is legal, then what is illegal? All disguised to defend liberty. All bitter, frightened people who had abandoned joy and laughter early on.

They were not exactly sterile, Duncan thought. Here, among fellow gunners, they were empowered by their numbers.

“What time is it?” Rae asked.

“Twenty to six,” Duncan answered.

“Let’s go into the hall.”

“I want to look at those book stalls.”

“I’ll go in and save us a seat, on the aisle near the rear. Is Mom coming?”

“Dad insisted she go up to Troublesome.”

“She’ll be here.”

Stacks of books, six tables long, stacks of pamphlets, three tables more.

The Turner Diaries was the major title, the book that had inspired the most infamous terrorist in American history, Timothy McVeigh. It had been his bible for blowing up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma.

There was a how-to table.

Terrorist Explosive Source Book “Folks!” called the loudspeakers, “be sure to register whether you are a delegate or just an AMERIGUN member visiting. We’d like to show just what kind of support we’ve got. Registration tables are at.. .”

How to:

Create Your Own Home Workshop Guns How to Build Claymore Mines Grenade

Launchers Blow Guns—The Breath of Death 101 Weapons for Women Beat the

Border Counterfeit ID Made Easy! Disguise Techniques The Outlaw’s

Bible—How to Evade the System by Using

Constitutional Law Just Say No to Drug Tests

The Poisoner’s Bihle—Deadly Concoctions Through the Ages How to Avoid

a Drunk-Driving Conviction Got to Get Money $$$$$--New York Street Con

Games Fugitive’s Guide—How to Run, Hide, and Survive Man-Trapping

Techniques Detonators

Slash, Thrust, Strangle Booby Traps Hostage Taking Forgotten

Legions—Obscure Combat Formations of the

Immortal German Waffen SS Protocols of the Elders of Zion—The True

Story of How the

Anti-Christ Gutter Religion Conspires to Take Over the

World

And the winner is! Body for Sale: An Inside Look at Medical Research,

Drug

Testing and Organ Transplants, and How YOU Can Profit from Them “Over here, Duncan!”

He slumped in beside her. The auditorium noises heightened in anticipation.

“Those so-called antique guns,” Duncan whispered to his sister, “are World War Two. Both the carbine and M-l ga rand are used today for hunting, and the World War One 03 is still one of the most accurate rifles in the world. Man, they’re twisting and distorting every law.”

“Every law and human decency,” Rae said. “Christ, I feel like I’m on a different planet: Mars, war, blood.”

He patted her shoulder. “Thank God for men like our Dad,” he said.

“Ladies and gentlemen! Folks! Shooters! Can I have your attention? The welcoming session of this great conclave will take place in fifteen minutes in the united airlines AUDITORIUM. Preferred seating to delegates and AMERI GUN members showing their registration badges. Governor O’Connell has agreed to personally welcome you all himself.

Make certain he gets a rip-roaring ovation.”

Duncan thought he was going to get his first asthma attack.

GOD SAVE THE SECOND AMENDMENT declared a banner on the balcony railing. Every seat was filled. Hall Carleton, a hall of fame football player turned actor in times past, filled his days with after-dinner speaking to agitated, hopping-mad groups of an immoderate Christian fellowship.

Hall mumbled toothily, a problem he had had with his acting. As the celebrity spokesman of AMERIGUN, he rose among them like a giant. Five, six, seven thousand people and growing were in the embrace of the protector.

King Porter shuffled his feet and gnashed his teeth, motivating himself for his upcoming hell-bent, Katie-bar-the-doors sermon.

The day of the gun had arrived in Denver.

Six o’clock. Hall Carleton banged the gavel and declared the convention open and smiled an ivory smile to the delegates.

“Fellow shooters! Please take your seats and let us prepare ourselves for the serious work ahead in the next three days. Now, we’re all “Mericans here. We love our freedom and our children, and we treat our women with respect. We are known for our fair play. My daddy,” Hall continued, choking a bit, “gave me a Daisy BB gun when I was five years old for picking blackbirds off the telegraph wires. I got so good, we had bird and rabbit for dinner whenever I went a-hunting. This old dawg can hunt!”

Cheers, whistles, stomps, drumroll.

“When I was chosen to star in some of the great film epics, I never

forgot where I came from and why. And I thank God-yes, you liberals,

there is a God—I thank the Almighty for allowing me to spend my

twilight, my declining years in the service of decent citizens asking

only for their God-given just rights. That’s all we ask of a

government turning more and more against these just and

constitutionally guaranteed rights.”

Cheers, whistles, stomps, drumroll. Both arms spread like a Moses parting the Red Sea.

“Now, I can’t say,” Hall Carleton said, “that everybody agrees with us. But we are tolerant. The man I am about to introduce may not support us on the various issues, but he will learn to. Because he is a fair-play man and he is a great “Merican hero, a great Marine, a great.. . rancher and governor. So, stand up and cheer our honorable opponent, Governor Quinn Patrick O’Connell of the great state of Colorado!”

Rae and Duncan turned to the entrance of the united airlines AUDITORIUM and saw their father and their mother beside him, calm as a whisper.

The band struck up the Marines’ march, “Semper Fidelis-Always Faithful.” Quinn strode slowly into the waves of hands reaching to be shaken. He nodded quickly to his children. The cheering intensified as he was greeted at the steps to the platform by Hall Carleton and King Porter. Be gracious in victory, King told himself. Down the line of board members Quinn went.

He stopped for a long handshake and shoulder slap from Senator].

Richard Darling, then came to the microphones. The cameras moved to

close-up, and a pan shot as a banner rolled down the balcony rail,

COLORADO GOES AMERIGUN.

Order at last. “With enemies like you,” Quinn began, “who needs friends?”

The unitedairlinesAUDITORIUM convulsed.

The governor and his family snuggled into a booth at Daddy Bruce, the renowned purveyor of spare ribs, long deceased. They chomped.

“What’s the matter with those people?” Rae asked.

“You can’t paint a single picture and call it universal. If there are common denominators, it would be poverty in youth, perhaps corporal punishment, dust and cactus life, or places of raw exploitation. They grow up to be losers and band with other losers in losers’ bars and losers’ trailer courts. Together, they flesh out who caused their birth-to-death misery. Few people have the guts to really look into themselves, so they go for the cliche villains. The government is the big, bad demon in their lives. They dream of being warriors, they play at being warriors. Their rationale is warped logic, but logical to them nonetheless. They stay as persecuted outcasts, a role they fit into, and therefore everyone is out to get them. So, enter the weapon, the equalizer, and shout out about fantasy rights they do not have .. . pass the sauce. The rest of the entire male world, from kings to commoners, have always been and always will be enchanted by the power of the gun. Sooner or later we lose our civility.”

“I’m glad we’re out of that hall,” Rita said shakily.

“So am I,” Quinn said.

“Are you going to be able to do anything, Dad?”

“Possibly,” he answered with a wink.

“Don’t do anything crazy,” Rae said.

“Tell him that,” Rita pressed.

Quinn waved a pair of gooey hands. Rae cleaned them off with wipes and napkins. Duncan pointed at his father’s chin, and she dabbed it.

Rita took her husband’s hand and pressed it against her cheek. “You son of a bitch,” she whispered, “please be careful.”

“Most of these gun people in town are just after a good time,” Duncan said.

“It’s the other ones I’m worried about,” Rita added.

Reynaldo Maldonado came in and pulled up a chair at the end of their table. He had eaten. He had seen his son-in-law’s welcome on TV. Gutsy.

Quinn checked his watch. “Take Rita and the kids back to the condo.

I’ll commandeer the Wagoneer.”

“Can we know where you’re going?” Rita asked.

“I’ll be in Dawn Mock’s office at the CBI. I have no idea how long the meeting will last.”

“Honey, please, no heroics,” Rita pleaded.

“You were there tonight. We’ve got to put a stop to this shit, or we’re going to start losing our country.”

They sat staring at the empty paper plates and empty paper cups as he left.

Quinn entered Dr. Dawn Mock’s office. Colonel Yancey Hawke, head of the state troopers, came to his feet and shook the governor’s hand.

“Hell, Governor,” Reb Butterworth, the Colorado National Guard commander said, “you could have won the governorship of Louisiana tonight.”

“Where is the mother lode now, Dawn?” Quinn asked. She brightened the screen and fed in a road map of Minnesota and made a face. “Nothing. Let’s run in an Iowa map.” She punched in coordinates and hummed, way .. . here we go.”

A fuzz ball on the monitor pulsated: peep .. . peep .. . peep.

“You’ll pardon the expression,” Dawn said, “they’re really truckin’. They’ve bypassed Des Moines and are heading west on eighty for the Nebraska state line.”

“Their speed tells me that there are two or more drivers, rotating,” Yancey observed.

Dawn Mock punched a number of keys. “At present speed they will hit the Nebraska-Colorado state line by morning. Colorado .. . Colorado .. . here we go. The interstate changes to Route Seventy-six. Four hours will get them into Denver, plus a food break.”

“They’ve timed this out to reach Denver by late afternoon,” Yancey concluded. “At dark they’ll go into the prearranged site.”

“Dr. Chin?” Dawn asked her CBI Internet buster.

“We are listening to a hundred of the most active gun websites,” Harry Chin said, checking his notes. “Nothing regarding a destination has shown up. However, there appears to be spirited activity for the purchase of VEC-44’s at the convention.”

“How many?” Reb asked.

“In the low hundreds,” Chin answered.

“Which says,” Dawn Mock said, “they’re going. to a prearranged location and deliver the VEC’s that have been sold. They won’t let the individual buyers pick up the weapons. The dozen or so dealers will retrieve the VEC’s and disperse them in their trailer camps and motels.”

“Yep,” Quinn agreed.

“They’re going to shag ass for the Utah line, maybe Four Corners.

That’s where the big dealers play.”

“Why all this brouhaha about the dump site? We can’t foul up on the destination. The little bouncing ball on the screen will lead us right into it. As for our forces, Reb, your people will be tucked into Elway Stadium within spitting distance of the convention center. Yancey, split your force into a triangle, use highspeed vehicles, and converge once we have the exact location.”

“And where would that be?” Yancey said.

“My primitive guess,” Quinn answered, “way out on West Colfax near the foothills. The strip is loaded with warehouses and factory outlets. Colfax will put them right on the interstate for Utah.”

“Governor,” Yancey moaned a bit, “I realize you want these people caught in the act, but we’re going to have better luck by nailing them right inside the Colorado line.”

“We know there is one or more relief drivers, but we do not know how many of them are in the trailer riding shotgun,” Quinn answered. “As soon as we slow them down, anywhere, anytime, anyplace they may go for their weapons.”

“What!” Reb said. “Crash a roadblock and drive the length of Colorado? Not rational.”

“Gunrunning isn’t rational,” Yancey said.

“Are you in contact with Arne Skye?” Quinn asked.

“Afraid not, Governor,” Dawn said. “He set up the GPS here and signed off. He’s taken himself out of the loop.”

“Rightfully,” Quinn answered. “We’re not to reveal his name on pain of death.” The governor held up both hands to create some thinking space.

“A roadblock is not what we want. If so, we could have seized them in Wisconsin or Iowa or Nebraska. A roadblock crashing and a high-speed chase will create a real mess.”

The heads of the troopers and the National Guard were a bit peeved, as was Dawn Mock. Harry Chin played it neutral. The other three perspired, and their fingernails fidgeted on the desktop.

“Denver is filled with late-night shopping traffic and tourists and conventioneers and forty thousand baseball fans all in the vicinity of the convention center. Governor, it could end up looking like the beach at Normandy if the bouncing ball ends up there.”

“If you are wrong, Governor, and believe me, they could have faked us out of our jock straps, we are in major shit,” Yancey warned.

“Yancey, put a video and still photographer at the state line. Let’s see if we can make a double confirmation by getting some plate numbers and what advertising they’re carrying on their sides.”

“We’re close, but no cigar,” Dawn said. “Suppose we rip into a warehouse filled with recliner chairs and Serta perfect mattresses?”

“Dr. Chin, do you have anything on Roy Sedgewick, Ark Royal Arms?”

“I’ve got two detectives at the airport covering passport control,” Chin said. “The Canadian government is breathing down Sedgewick’s neck. My information is that they are going to commence an audit at Ark Royal within a week. This could be the moment for him to flee, and he may need the money to be generated in Denver.”

“No.” Quinn mulled it over. “There aren’t many flights from Toronto to Denver. He’d use Chicago as his port of entry-there’s no passport control there—or he’s on his way to South America. No way Sedgewick will show up.”

“We’d better have some shithouse luck,” the adjutant general moaned.

“Amen,” Yancey said.

Quinn rolled his head about and cracked the bones of his spine and neck. “I love you guys. Dawn, do you have a place where I can crash for a few hours?”

“There’s a big couch in the hall outside the morgue. Hart’s people will report if they have anything new. I’ll be at the monitor here through the night.”

“Okay, you guys, you know the drill,” Quinn said.

“You’ve got more guts than brains,” Reb said, giving the governor a warm alarazo.

“Ditto,” Yancey Hawke said.

Dawn Mock slipped a pillow under the governor’s head and laid a blanket over him. She mussed up his hair and wrapped up his feet.

“Cool Hand Quinn,” she said softly, “have it your way. My way or the highway. Dirty decision time. You’re my hero, Governor.”

“Not me. Arne Skye.”

“Good night, man. I’ll be following the beeping ball.”

“Dawn, call Rita, will you? She’s at the condo.”

“Okay, get some sleep.”

“Tuck!” Quinn said, smacking his lips together. He unscrambled himself from his blanket, came to sitting, and held his face in his hands. “Yuck,” he repeated. “My name is Quinn Patrick O’Connell,” he told himself. “Now where am I ... what is that strange odor? The morgue!”

“Morning, Governor,” Dr. Dawn Mock said.

“Jesus, what time is it?”

“Past ten.”

“Huh, guess I must have been tired. Morning, Dawn.”

“Good news first or the bad news?” she asked.

“Good news.”

“There is none. Roy Sedgewick has disappeared into thin air.”

“He could be here in Denver, using an alias,” Quinn said, groping for his shoes.

“Or,” Dawn added, “halfway to somewhere. The Canadian government has put him on an Interpol alert. Interpol would cough him up in Europe. That leaves South America and Asia. I’d guess China. Sedgewick has a long history of gun running for the Chinese. I gather the Chinese financed him on getting the licenses for the VEC’s. If China is his route, forget it. He’s too well connected, and they’ll let him in and hide him.”

“Damn, so we scratch him, huh?”

“For sure we won’t find him today.”

Quinn stretched hard, yawned, excused himself. “I’m going to run to my condo and clean up. I’ll be back in an hour.”

Dawn gave a double thumbs-up sign, and a look passed from one to another that said, “Are we crazy or something?”

Rita smiled broadly to cover up her sleepless night, as did Rae. Quinn stood under an ice-cold shower until he could handle no more. An infusion of coffee awaited him as he exited the shower stall.

“I’m thinking,” Quinn said with a good feeling of putting on clean clothing, “you and the kids ought to move into the mansion. Take Mal with you.”

“Why?”

“Don’t give me a hard time.”

“All right. Duncan called earlier. He’s at the convention. I gave him my cellular in case you needed to reach him.”

The great “fairness” theme had evaporated with Governor O’Connell as he left the auditorium. One after another, the row of front benchers of the board came to the pulpit and roasted the demons of the anti-gun, anti-American, anti-Christ charlatans who ruled the government.

A basket of pro-AMERIGUN proposals and “whereas-es” was passed unanimously. Underaged gun owners, anti-children’s safety locks, anti-limitation of twenty guns per family, anti parental responsibility, anti-waiting periods, were all branded as violations of Second Amendment rights.

On this morning, King Porter made damned certain that last night’s resolutions were remembered. The basic AMERIGUN strategy was now to silence the major gun-control freaks and particularly one in a Western state. With Quinn O’Connell put in his place, the rest of the state houses in the nation would think twice about gun-control legislation.

King Porter whipped himself up into a lather with a romping, stomping revival sermon.

“Hello, Duncan, it’s Dad.”

“Hi, Dad. They just hung you. That Porter guy was frothing at the mouth.”

“So, what’s new?”

“I’ve canvassed the exhibition hall with four of Dr. Mock’s detectives. They estimate there may be several hundred illegal weapons in the hall, but there’s no way to get to them. By the time we get the legal search and seizure papers, they will have scattered.”

“Duncan, don’t lose the faith,” Quinn said. “I want you to get back to the condo, pronto, and move over to the mansion .. . and no fucking arguments!”

“Okay, Dad, I hear you.”

The instant Quinn saw Dawn Mock, he knew that something terrible had taken place. Harry Chin, usually expressionless, suddenly looked ancient. Dawn pointed at the GPS monitor.

“It stopped transmitting about fifteen minutes ago,” she said.

“There’s nothing I can do, Governor,” Dr. Chin said. “The batteries inside the crates have lost power, and the GPS has stopped transmitting.”

“They were supposed to last three years!”

“Batteries can be funny,” Chin answered.

“Dawn, get me Yancey.”

“Colonel Hawke here.”

“This is Quinn. Did you get any photographs of the truck last night?”

“Just going to call you, Governor. There was a bitching thunderstorm around the state line. Neither the video nor still photographs are able to identify anything.”

“We’ve lost contact with the truck,” Quinn said.

“Oh, Jesus. What do you want to do? Call it off?”

“Let me think for a minute, let me think,” Quinn mumbled to himself,

trying to retread a plan. “Here we go, Yancey. Hold your triangle. I still say West Coster will be the target area. I’ll leave it to you to contact Reb and make sure he keeps his people undercover at the stadium. I’ll get back to both of you soon as I can.”

“If it weren’t so tragic,” said Chin with a straight face, “it would be hilarious trying to find an unidentified semi truck and trailer in Denver.”

“Governor, let’s chuck it in. If we pull out of it right now, there won’t be any damage to you. None whatsoever,” Dawn pleaded.

“None whatsoever except a fucking AMERIGUN office in Denver telling us how to live our lives and three thousand more murder weapons on our streets.”

“Man, we tried,” she cried. “You’ve got to consider the careers of the people who have gone all the way with you.”

Quinn wound up as if to punch the monitor but only cursed it instead.

“We’ve got a long day coming up,” Quinn said at last, “at least four or five hours to run out every option.”

“We can’t keep it secret much longer,” Chin said. “It’s going to leak.”

“All right, give me two or three hours. I need you people here.”

They both nodded tentatively.

“Dr. Chin, find out for me who is the top man in the federal penitentiary system. Find out his military service, i.e.” which branch he served in. Keep lowering the search by rank until you find me a Marine.”

“Highest-ranking Marine in the penal system.”

Quinn was about to punch in the number for Hoop Hooper’s attorney, A. Wayne White, but stopped. “I’ll go to him last, Dawn. Once we start dealing with lawyers, our security is compromised.”

In the interim, Dr. Dawn Mock had pulled herself together and organized the bureau’s regular day’s work with her assistant in the outer office.

Harry Chin returned in six minutes. “Highest-ranking penitentiary official is George Appleton, First Deputy Director, Marine Corps, 1978-1986, rank of major, Viet combat, decorated.”

“Am I speaking to the Governor Quinn O’Connell?” Deputy Director George Appleton said excitedly into the phone.

“Yes, sir,” Quinn answered.

“Gunner O’Connell?”

“Yes, sir,” Quinn repeated.

“I am honored! I was in rapid deployment on my hitch. Now, what can I do for you, Governor?”

“This conversaton is Marine to Marine,” Quinn said.

“I understand,” Appleton said softly. “I think we’d better shoot a little verification.”

“Sure. There is my wife, Rita, in Denver and my secretary Marsha at the Capitol. You don’t have to tell them who you are, but that you need to speak to me about some cheese coming in from Wisconsin. Both of them will give you the same number. I am in Dr. Dawn Mock’s office at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.”

“We will be Marine to Marine,” Appleton assured himself.

“Absolutely.”

“I’ll be back to you on a secure line.”

Second by second tension ensued. Not a word passed between Quinn and Dawn, but she could almost see smoke coming from his ears as he pumped his brain for direction.

“Governor O’Connell here.”

“Appleton.”

“Semper Fi time?” Quinn asked.

“Semper Fi time,” Appleton pledged. “What do you have in mind?”

“There is an AMERIGUN convention taking place in Denver.”

“Yes, I’m aware. A very angry one.”

“We have intercepted a plan to dump up to three thousand VEC--44’s and millions of rounds of 9mm ammunition. We lost contact with the delivery truck. You have a prisoner in the system who is our last hope of giving us the destination of the weapons.”

“I see ...” Appleton’s voice trailed off. “Does he have a lawyer?”

“He has a rat’s nest full of them. We have been able to make this exclusively a state of Colorado caper. Actually, only six people know anything about the target, one of them my wife. Time will not allow us to deal with the lawyers. If I have to negotiate with them, we’ll probably be too late to apprehend the cargo, follow me?”

“Yes.”

“It will take the media months, if ever, to figure out how we pulled it off. And in that time we will fade into thin air.”

A scent of procrastination seemed to flow from Appleton’s phone. Quinn could hear the man breathing, weighing. Was it fair for the governor to use the federal system on an operation from which they had been bypassed?

Undoubtedly, Appleton thought, O’Connell had gotten tips along the line from the FBI or aTF.. Appleton was about to decline when the big picture of a great hero, Gunner Quinn O’Connell, loomed before him. After all, what the hell was O’Connell doing? Putting his ass on the line in the service of the people. On the other hand, the rancor between federal agencies would ensure a media convulsion. Why the hell does he have to give me that gyre ne shit?

“What do you need?” Appleton said at last.

“I want to speak, one to one, with a prisoner on a secure line.”

“Oh, hell, we do much worse,” Appleton sighed. “Bury my name, for God’s sake.”

“Hey,” Quinn said, “we’re on death-before-dishonor vows here. Your name will not emerge from this end.”

“Who do you want to speak to, and what facility is he in?”

“Herman Hooper, aka Hoop Hooper, Atlanta Penitentiary. Former leader of the Wisconsin militia. Bundle of charges. He’s pleaded guilty to get a reduced sentence, which has been lowered to twenty years from forty.”

“I’m on it,” Appleton said.

“And, George, we are desperate for time.”

Senator Dick Darling closed the morning’s session by pointing his finger toward Washington and shouting “thou shalt nots.” Hall Carleton was elected president of AMERIGUN, by acclamation, unopposed.

Carleton smiled so broadly his teeth shone clear to the last row as he and the senator held up each other’s arm in victory.

King Porter announced the afternoon’s business and an evening fare of barbecue and folk dancing.

Reb Butterworth spirited fifty guardsmen and troopers into Elway Stadium, one truck at a time. He was positive he had not raised alarm or suspicion.

The troops were housed in a wide corridor between the field seats and the balcony. Bedrolls and boxed rations were the order.

They would remain fully clothed and could reach their trucks in two minutes, with another four minutes bringing them to the convention center.

A report from Yancey Hawke. He had established his triangle, three positions that could converge at an instant’s notice. Each apex had some fifteen troopers and guardsmen all in secluded areas.

“Hi, Rae, it’s Daddy. You’re all in the mansion okay?”

“There seem to be twenty guards outside. Are we going to need them?”

“I hope not.”

Hours of midday dragged by, the longest of their lives. A pair of half-eaten pastrami sandwiches died on Dawn’s desk. Quinn was knotted up. He could barely get his teeth unclenched to drink his Coke. Dawn had been staring at the empty monitor. Tears welled in her eyes.

“We’ve been stiffed,” she said. “It’s four o’clock.”

“One more half hour,” he mumbled.

“You’ve been saying that since noon.”

“Never mind,” Dawn said to herself. “Why argue the point now? The governor had played it skillfully and bravely, but neither skill nor courage was the game. And no one has ever figured out how to stop time.”

Both of them clicked on as the scramble phone buzzed. Dawn nodded to Quinn. He lifted the receiver.

“Hello,” Quinn said.

Dawn put a headset on to listen.

“Hello,” the other end said. “Who am I speaking to?”

“Governor Quinn O’Connell, Marine Gunner O’Connell.”

“Tell me, Governor, who was your commander at the Urbakkan raid?”

“Major General Jeremiah Duncan.”

“And he won the Congressional Medal?”

“Yes, as a fighter pilot in World War Two. He received a posthumous Navy Cross for Urbakkan.”

“About how tall was Jeremiah Duncan?”

“He was on the short side, like five eight.”

“George Appleton here, Governor. Sorry to put you through the quiz. I flew to Atlanta after we spoke to set things up myself. Who is aware of my participation?”

“Dr. Dawn Mock, chief of the CBI. She’s been involved from the beginning. And Dr. Harry Chin, our Internet specialist.”

“I’m speaking to you on a secure phone? No tapping?”

**/”\.C *

Ur course not.

“And I’m just doing you a favor, and I don’t know what it’s about.”

“Yes, sir,” Quinn said.

“All right, here’s your man.”

“Hoop Hooper,” a voice growled.

“This is Quinn O’Connell, governor of Colorado.”

“Yeah, I know who you are.”

“Good. I’ll cut right to the chase. A semi and eighteen wheeler left the Wisconsin Grand Army two and a half days ago carrying three thousand VEC-44’s and a lot of massacre trimmings. Destination, Denver.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Governor.”

“We’ve lost the truck in the Denver environs,” Quinn plowed on, “and we may not find it here. But we sure as hell are not letting them out of the state. Roy Sedgewick was going to set up a nest egg for you with the Denver sales. Sedgewick is gone, probably en route to China. Hoop, you’ve got to know that Sedgewick was going to beat you out of a couple hundred grand either way. He fled because everyone’s hot breath was on him.”