No Corner to Hide (The Max Masterson Series Book 2) (30 page)

Rory looked down at his little brother, who was trying to quietly swallow the last of Rory’s brownie. He had already finished his own, and the guilty look on his face was enough to convict the young boy in any court in the land. Normally, Rory would have taken the opportunity to thrash him and take back what was left of his lunch, but he didn’t care about that now. He needed guidance.

“Johnny, get the phone and call Dad.”

“Where is it?” the boy replied, his speech garbled by the prodigious amount of brownie that had not left his mouth.
“Look in your pocket, you ass.”
“I’m tellin’,” he responded.
“Johnny, if you don’t hurry up, that guy down there is going to kill one of our calves, and then I’m telling on you . . . hurry up, you turd.”
Fumbling on the outside of his pants, Johnny felt the familiar outline of the cell phone. He pulled it out and quickly handed it to Rory, who flipped it open and said, “Dad.”

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abio stood in a half crouch, his knife in his right hand. “Here, boy.” He slowly crept toward his prey and whistled. “Fab, I don’t think that’s a boy cow. It has those milky

things down there. I remember them being bigger on TV . . .” “Shut up, Frankie. Here boy.” He took another step in the calf ’s direction, prepared to run at the first sign of aggression. It was the closest he had been to a living animal that large outside of a zoo, and his heart was pounding with adrenaline. The heifer raised its head and continued to placidly chew its hay.

“Look how big its eyes are. I never saw such big eyes . . .” Arthur had expressed what his cohorts were thinking. “Are you gonna kill that cow?”

“Both of you just shut up.”

He didn’t move forward, deliberating his next move. “I’m going to cut us up some steaks, and then we’ll be eating better than those assholes down there. Then who’s the hero?”

Fabio took another tentative step toward his prey.
“Maybe you oughta milk it.”
“Do you know how to milk a cow, Frankie? I sure don’t. Why don’t you just crawl under there and start milking, and when you’re done pulling on those tits, I’ll get me some meat.”

“I’m not touchin’ those things.”

Fabio turned his head, intent on continuing the ludicrous argument. “You freakin’ idiot. You’ll scare it away.” The young milk cow sensed danger in his voice, and raised its ears. They froze in their tracks and stepped back. The trio moved backward in synchronized movements, holding their arms in a mock surrender posture.

Arthur had never been out of the city, and his gaze was intent on the animal’s eyes, just like he had seen in countless movies when the main character encounters a wild animal in the jungle. If he had been paying attention to where he was stepping he wouldn’t have stepped into the steaming pile of cow manure. The scent hit his nostrils and he yelled, pulling his leather-soled street shoes up in an attempt to extract both feet at once. He succeeded until gravity took over, and came back to the ground in a stomp, still in the center of the cow pie. The manure splattered all over the jeans of Fabio and Frankie, who immediately concluded that he had done it on purpose. They took off in his direction, startling the calf, who began a quick amble in the opposite direction and the protection of the herd.

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D
ad, Dad!” Rory had entered panic mode, and Johnny was already hysterical. “He’s getting closer,” he screamed. “Tell me what you see. How many are there? Do they all have knives?”

Rory looked through the sight of his hunting rifle at the unfolding emergency over two hundred fifty yards away. “Three of ’em. First, two of them were chasing the third man around, and then the one with the knife started chasing the heifer again.”

“He’s gaining on her!” Johnny was standing erect, his young eyes intent on the chase.
“Set your sights on the one with the knife. Can you make the shot?”
Rory had become proficient with the hand-me-down .30-06 rifle, having bagged his first buck when he was the same age as his little brother, but this was a person, and he was running, and they were now six hundred yards away. He had never intended to do any shooting, just looking through the scope while his sisters used the only two pairs of binoculars from their bedroom windows.
“I don’t know,” Rory replied. He’s about six hundred yards away at the low end of the pasture, and he’s moving fast.”
“Don’t hit the heifer, but peel off a shot behind her. At least they’ll know someone’s shooting at them.” Dad didn’t think that there was much chance of Rory hitting anything at that distance. Even in controlled conditions and without a crosswind, a bullet would drop over two and a half inches over six hundred yards, and the ground was the most likely target. Rory took aim and fired just as the man with the knife came within the last ten yards of the now-frightened Jersey cow and lunged.
The bullet tore through Fabio’s neck, sending fragments of tissue and blood in a pink spray over his companions. The impact threw his body face forward in midlunge and he hit the hard ground with a thud, slicing his cheek on a frozen cow pie before the report of the gun was heard. While the boys ran at full tilt back to the house, Frankie and Arthur stood agape and watched as Fabio’s lifeblood leaked onto the frozen ground, not only from the neck wound, but from the knife that had pierced his torso. It was still in his hand.
“Let’s get out of here,” Frankie said, his voice shaking. They ran.

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ord traveled fast. Instantaneously, in fact. America had reached the stage where the government received the news in the same time as everyone else, and Bill Staffman and Andrew Fox kept an impressive assortment of news

sources running 24-7 in the White House press room. It was their job, to monitor the wall of information and advise the president on breaking news. The crisis in New York had dominated the world for days, and sparse images of the burning city were interspersed with stories and interviews of evacuees.

When the story of a New Yorker being killed over a milk cow by a local upstate boy became known, the collective anger was at an all-time high. It pitted city against country, and country was outnumbered. The metropolitan point of view was that it was just a cow, and nobody, especially a New Yorker, should die over a cow. The rural view was basic, and expected; they had the right to protect their own, and these interlopers from the city had no right to be there in the first place. The reality of the situation was this: The boy didn’t intend to kill, just to frighten. His father instructed him to frighten, not kill. The perception of that reality could never be reconciled between urban and rural, but with a little tweaking, they could all blame it on the president. It was the American way.

Bill Staffman was the first to brief Max on the situation. He had been there from the start of the campaign, dealing with the press on a daily basis while Max made himself unavailable. It was a war of words, and Bill had become a master of taking away and giving back, supplying sound bites on political issues that were so short that Max’s every word was used on a 24-7 basis in continuous loop. While the other candidates’ words were filtered, sliced, and spun to create a product that appealed to their viewers, the world heard the essence of Max’s message.

“Mr. President, we have a problem.”
“Good!”
“Why do you say that?”
“I needed something to get my mind off the other problems,” Max

quipped. They both laughed heartily. “If you came in and told me we had a
big
problem, then I’d have to start worrying.” They laughed again, and it was therapeutic. The tension around the White House had steadily increased to near panic level, and a little dark levity at the right time worked wonders to improve morale.

When Staffman had fully briefed the president, Max insisted upon a full report of how the media was spinning the incident for their respective audiences. “How is Glenda spinning it?”

“That’s the strangest of all, sir. She’s calling it a lack of leadership.

Apparently, this disaster has become your fault.”
“Listen. I’ve got to get out there. I can’t fix this unless I can be
seen doing something about it.”
“Planning on giving the Secret Service a few conniption fits?” “Yep. Send Armstrong up here.”
Sixty seconds later, Armstrong appeared. “I’m thinking of taking
a little road trip,” Max began. Armstrong groaned. “With all of the
respect in every molecule in my brain, Mr. President . . .” When his chief Secret Service agent used formality, it was his way of getting Max’s attention. “Go on, say what you have to say, and then I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” Max responded, anticipating that he was
about to hear every reason why it was a bad idea.
“We just recovered the vice president, and now you want to go on
some damn fool . . .” Armstrong sensed his words were bordering on
insubordination, and toned it down in midsentence. “Mr. President,
the American people need to see you leading from here, and not
placing yourself in harm’s way.”
“. . . but I was going to go in disguise . . .”
“Well sir, that’s all well and good. Then you can give up the idea
of traveling in disguise for the rest of your term in office, and I can
go back to protecting you in the conventional way. Everyone, and I
mean the press, your enemies, and eight-year-old kids on the street
will be trying to catch you at that game.” Armstrong was right, and
Max knew it.
“OK, I’ll take that advice. But how do you suggest I get my
message to the people?”
Staffman took the opportunity to speak first. “That’s what I came
up here to brief you about, Mr. President. We have pieced together
some footage of you and Rachel, some stuff that we had left over
from your inaugural, and with a voice-over and some tweaking, you
can deliver a message of hope without going anywhere. We rigged
some drones with holographic projectors. I know that you have used
this cutting-edge technology to your advantage before. We can send
them anywhere we want, spreading the message. We can take that
same image and message and broadcast it around the world through
every media outlet that will run it, and Max, they
will
run it.”

u

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he drone appeared on the horizon. Its compact engine provided the only mechanical sound that many of the inhabitants of the tent city had heard in days. They emerged en masse from tents and walked toward the hovering drone. When

they came within listening distance, the hologram of Max and Rachel appeared on the ground in front of them. He had used a similar device on the night before the general election, but the image was indoors, under controlled lighting conditions, where the viewer was unable to discern whether the image standing on a stage was real. This attempt was outdoors, and although the day was slipping into the gray of evening, the image projected from the drone had a translucent effect.

“You create your own reality. I want you to create a winning reality.”

Max sat on the hood of his Corvette. By word of mouth and the sound of his engine, the crowd assembled on the large expanse of field surrounding his chosen location. Rachel was at his side, dressed in her flight suit and jacket. He took the extremely dangerous course of dealing with Americans in a crisis situation without anyone to protect him from the wrath of people who had, most likely, voted him into office. If he failed at his message, the end result might lead to panic and the end of hope right then, right there. If they didn’t listen now, in their time of need, they were doomed to life as a nation of complainers. He needed for them to dig deep into their heritage as Americans and triumph over adversity.

“Crowd up close, so you can hear me,” he announced in his loudest voice. He wore a winter jacket with no adornment other than the presidential seal in gold. They only saw the man with the most recognizable face in the world, sitting on a convertible Corvette in the middle of the winter, wearing a jacket and freezing his ass off, just like the rest of them. He was only there in their minds, but he had brought the world before “The Inaugural Event” back to their consciousness, and the image was comforting.

“I can tell you without any doubt in my mind, that you will survive this. This is not the end of the world, or the end of the world of your children or of your grandchildren. We will survive, and survive well.” The crowd cheered. They were in desperate need of hope. Despite the efforts of volunteers to find relatives, family, to take in these people, the residents of the tent city had nothing and nobody for the time being, and they were acutely aware of it.

“I’m waiting here with you for the help you need. Whatever you are going through, we are going to make the bad parts temporary.” They cheered again, and for the moment, he was their only hope. They were cold, uncomfortable, and hungry. It was clear that they did not want to be there. They would be his toughest audience, because in life, New Yorkers take pride in being the toughest audience of badasses that a person can confront.

“You are all you’ve got. You can’t expect me to wipe your ass for you. The government cannot and should not provide for your every need,” Max began.

“Here it comes,” shouted a middle-aged man. “Now he will be telling us to be patient.”

“I want you to be patient,” Max responded. At the same time, I want you to appreciate that we are doing the best with a bad situation. You will not starve to death, and we are going to feed you better from now on. We have found several chefs from the City to help us with that, and we will be bringing good food to you in a New York minute.”

“We are a free people, free to succeed or fail, and we will not fail.” “Quitting is not an option. Failure is not an option. The only acceptable choice is to survive, and to persevere until you are back home, in your own bed, and not in fear.”

“In a few minutes, there will be helicopters that will land in that clearing right over there, and we will try to take care of your needs. Who’s hungry?” The crowd cheered.

Max continued, “I’ve got government cheese . . .” The crowd moaned loudly in unison. “I know, I tried some of that a few days ago. How can you eat that stuff?” Max smiled, and a cheer rose. They stamped their feet, and the relief was palpable.