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  The Last Virginia Gentleman

  Michael Kilian

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  For my wife, Pamela,

  who brought us home to Virginia

  One

  Vicky Clay could still see. Not well, not clearly, but in a vague and hazy way, as she might recall a dream. She was aware of her dusty, old-fashioned hotel room as a patchy mix of shadow and yellow lamplight. To her side, just at the edge of her peripheral vision, she could make out the blurred, fleshy line of her husband’s naked shoulder.

  She could hear—not Meade Clay’s breathing, for he was strangely quiet—but the dull buzz of people laughing and talking downstairs. She heard them well enough to recognize a voice or two, yet they seemed strangely distant, as though miles away.

  What she was aware of most was an odd tingling sensation throughout her unclad body—not on the surface of her skin, which was oddly numb, but beneath, within, as though a low-voltage current was running through her. It was a hot, humid Virginia June evening. She had been very sweaty when she and Meade had finished making love. Now all sense of warmth was gone. Yet neither was there cold.

  What had she done that night that could make her feel this way? Nothing very healthy maybe, but nothing unusual, nothing she didn’t do all the time, especially during the spring racing season.

  A horse Vicky had trained had won the big steeplechase event that afternoon, the victory getting her very excited, all juiced up, wanting a man, though not her husband. She’d wanted someone more special, the handsome, courtly Captain Showers. Every woman in Dandytown wanted him. Or else, perhaps, one of the important men from Washington who were there for the races.

  But she’d gotten nowhere with any of them. Her husband had kept hanging around, scaring them all off. Meade had been drinking and in a foul mood, and had been arguing and fighting with her all day. Finally, in the driveway of the inn, in front of some of the most respectable people in Dandytown, he had given in to his frustration and hit her. She had screamed at him that she hated him, that she wished he was dead, and she’d meant it.

  But she’d started drinking herself, and eventually got so drunk she’d gone to their room with him, just to have someone between her legs. When she got like that, she’d sleep with anyone. She’d even tried taking on a horse once, as she’d heard Catherine the Great of Russia had done, on a hot night when she’d been all alone at Meade’s place and raving mad and all flipped out on wine and drugs. The damned beast had almost killed her.

  The next day, she’d let it gorge itself on feed and water and then galloped it in the heat until it had dropped and died.

  She and Meade had done more than get drunk this evening. He’d had some good cocaine in his veterinarian’s bag, and they’d both snorted up a couple of lines each before pulling off their clothes. She’d wanted him quite a lot by then. She’d felt flush and racy when they’d hit the bed, pulling her legs up tight, lifting her hips, urging him into her.

  He’d given her what she’d wanted, exhausting himself, and for the first time that long, hot dusty day she’d felt at peace. As he rolled off, she’d stretched out her short, muscular legs and squeezed her thighs together and then completely relaxed. She’d closed her eyes, and drifted away into a warm, dreamy sleep.

  Now she was awake again, but in the strangest way. She could see, and hear, and feel the peculiar tingling.

  But she could not move.

  She could open and close her eyes, could turn her head, ever so slightly. But her arms and hands and fingers wouldn’t budge. She demanded of her legs that they move, that one foot lift and cross the other, but nothing happened. Except for the tingle, her bones and tissue seemed so much nothingness.

  Vicky thought—hoped—that she might somehow still be asleep, that her dreaminess was an actual dream from which she would soon awake. But a woman’s sudden, clear, loud laughter coming from the room below seemed to rebuke her for her foolish, forlorn notion. She was awake. Everything was very real.

  And she could not move. She strained. She willed herself to stir with such horrendous effort she feared she might hurt herself inside. She saw her arm shift and fall to her side. But nothing more.

  Vicky now became very frightened. She tried to speak but heard only a weird, gurgling exhalation. Again she tried, but all she could produce was the same monster noise. The strain of her vocal effort made her feel faint.

  What the goddamn hell was wrong? What had happened? Had Meade bound her to the bed? She could feel no strap, no cord. From what she could see of her own naked flesh—the curves of her breasts, her forearm and motionless hand—there were no restraints.

  There was a gentle, almost imperceptible motion to her chest—the tiny, rhythmic act of breathing. She calmed herself, concentrating on the sensation. She was small, but very strong, as full of stamina as a good distance horse. Whatever had gone wrong with her, she was resisting it, holding up, her strength surviving. Perhaps this would pass, this strange and awful thing. She must be having a bad reaction to the mix of alcohol and cocaine. It happened. Some people died of it. She was strong. She was not in a coma. Her heart was working. She was breathing, though sound now came to her ears all fuzzy, buzzing and fuzzy. Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear. Fuzzy Wuzzy had …

  Her mind locked on the sudden, remembered image of a horse she had put down a few weeks earlier, after it had failed a mere three-foot timber jump. It had stumbled and fallen, spraining a foreleg. Furious with the feckless, balky beast, she had treated the injury as Meade might a deadly fracture. None of her husband’s various poisons were at hand to inject into the creature, but she had found some “elephant juice”—etorphine—an analgesic that full strength could be eighty thousand times as powerful as morphine. A careful, measured dose could extend a horse’s endurance wondrously, could smother all the pain and strain of a hard stretch drive.

  She had given the animal ten times the normal dose, yet it had taken so long to die. The shot had instantly paralyzed it, rendering it a lumpy pile of meat and bone and hide upon the grass. But its eyes had remained alive. They had bulged, staring at her with fear and fury.

  Did her eyes look like that now?

  Another thought. Horrible thought. Searching the memory. Remembering a tiny, stabbing pain. Where? In a funny place. In the side of her buttock. A quick, sticking prick of pain. Like a thorn or nettle. Just below her hip. It was what had awakened her. She’d thought it was from a sharp stitch in the bedspread, but that was wrong.

  Something now was moving in the room, a shape emerging from the gloom of a corner. It came near, and became a face. Curious face, staring intently, as Vicky had stared at the dying horse. Dead horse.

  The face turned away. Hands reached over her husband, lifting his arm, opening his hand. Vicky saw an object—long and thin and shiny. A syringe. It was placed in her husband’s hand and his fingers were curled over it. Then hand and needle were gently lowered. Disappeared.

  Needle. There had been a prick of pain in her hip.

  She heard a word, softly spoken, spoken as two distinct words. “Good bye.” A farewell. A finality. Then silence.

  The shadowy face returned, peering close. Then a terrible smile. But no further word. The face withdrew. For a long momen
t, there was nothing. Then one last sound. The dull thud and click of the door closing.

  Vicky tried to cry out, raging, begging for the face to return, but this time she could not even produce the gurgling. So she shouted inside, to herself, furiously, wrenchingly, hopelessly, hatefully.

  “Elephant juice.” She must have been given elephant juice. She was suddenly as terrified as a child who had just reasoned out mortality, the inevitability of the end of all life. The certainty of what was happening to her was awesome. And maddening and inescapable.

  It was done.

  It was as irretrievable as a bad jump realized in midair. She was dying. She was dead. Vicky Clay, twenty-six years old. Finished. Ended. In a very short time, she would be nothing. Forever. Forever and ever and ever and never again. What she had done to so many horses had just been done to her. She wanted so fiercely to scream.

  How long would it take? How long could it? Hours? Minutes? Lying stiff and still and soundless. Imprisoned in her own corpse. Next to this wretched man, this rotten son of a bitch. Just inches away. Already dead? At peace? Or dying like herself? Was he as miserable as her? Or happy and gloating and satisfied? Was this his doing? The son of a bitch. The bastard. The self-righteous, whining motherfucking cocksucking loser asshole bastard dirty sonofabitch. She hated him with white-hot, incandescent hatred. She hated the face she had just seen, hated not knowing why this was being done to her, hated, hated, hated. HATED!

  Fury and despair combined within her like a combustible mixture, exploding in a sudden burst of desperate struggle.

  Her head lifted, and in a last, flailing thrust, her torso rose and twisted. She fell over on her side, one arm and hand now pressed against Meade’s skin. Her fingertips felt nothing, but she sensed the pressure against them.

  She lay motionless for a moment, waiting for the oxygen to accumulate again, her face next to the leathery flesh of his neck just millimeters away. The light was dimming, growing dark around the edges of her vision. Only little wisps of life left. She gathered the very last of her energy, and directed it now as will, forcing a motion of her fingers, a motion fueled only by the grimmest determination and purpose. She would not simply stop, simply end, simply vanish. She would leave something behind. A name. Keep mind on name. A brand. A name. Leave the name. Biting and scraping and digging. Again and again. Darkness complete. Silence. She lost all sense of time. Hours, minutes, days, it was all the same. But she was going now. Slipping down the slope, slipping beneath the sea. Drowning in infinity, spinning into nothingness. Only her fingers alive. Digging and scraping, in spasms. Then still. Very still. All gone. All was …

  Two

  There was a crisis in Belize. Not a hell of a lot of excitement. Not World War III. Belize was barely a country. If the British hadn’t clung to it for so long as a little banana colony, it would have become part of Mexico or Guatemala long ago. But now there was trouble there, and Mexico and Guatemala were probably part of it. Belize was nothing. Guatemala was next to nothing. But Mexico was a big deal. So Robert Moody was worried. The president might not be very concerned, even though he had won the Texas Democratic presidential primary largely with the Hispanic vote, but he didn’t have to be. He had Moody for that.

  What had happened in Belize happened all the time in Latin America. Some cabinet minister had been ambushed in his car and the government was blaming Guatemala. Some Guatemalan citizens had been arrested and the Guatemalan government was threatening retaliation. There had been some shooting on the border and between Belizean police and unidentified parties. The nasty stuff appeared to be over in a few hours, but it remained an official crisis nonetheless, with the U.S. embassy in Belmopan put on full security and a couple of navy destroyers standing by off the coast near Belize City. A National Security Council crisis management team had gathered in the White House situation room. The NSC had standing orders to do this at the first sign of any trouble. In the next election, Moody was not going to give the Republicans any chance to call his Democrats international softies and wimps.

  But where was he, Robert Moody, the goddamned White House chief of staff, for crying out loud? He was standing here in a Virginia country inn in a fool place called Dandytown seventy miles from the capital and talking about these high-priority matters with some sleepy National Security Council duty officer over a pay phone. He’d boot a subordinate halfway across the Washington Ellipse if he caught him or her discussing a national security matter over a pay phone.

  “This line’s not secure,” Moody informed the man on the other end.

  “Not secure. Understood, sir.”

  “You’re sure the president’s been informed?” Moody said. He pressed the receiver close to his ear. He was in the Dandytown Inn’s central hallway, the crowded noisy bar to one side and the crowded, noisy dining room to the other. The steeplechase weekend had drawn people from all over Virginia and Maryland, and even the inn’s lobby was full of them, talking and laughing, all very loudly.

  “Yes sir. General St. Angelo gave him a full report.”

  “And?”

  “That was all, sir.”

  “What was the president’s response? Does he want me to come in? What did he say?”

  It would take Moody a good hour and a half to get back to the capital, unless he called for a helicopter.

  “He just said to keep him informed of developments—as they occur, if they occur.”

  The president was up at his seashore retreat in Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, taking another of the long weekends he insisted on no matter what else was happening in the world, communing with nature as though he were Henry David Thoreau and not the leader of the mightiest nation on earth. When he got in these moods he’d completely isolate himself from Moody and the rest of his staff, taking with him only a secretary and a small Secret Service detail. He’d urged Moody to go on a similar retreat.

  “Get off by yourself for the weekend, Bob,” he had said, in that paternal, patronizing, upper-class way of his. “Get some rest. Stay off the phones. Enjoy yourself. Our greatest work lies just ahead. I want to be able to call on your full energies.”

  If it weren’t for Moody’s “full energies,” the man wouldn’t have been elected in the first place.

  “What about the secretary of state?” Moody asked.

  “We tried Geneva, sir,” said the national security officer. “Can’t locate him. He’s gone mountain climbing.”

  For a fleeting moment, Moody thought of zooming into Washington—chief of staff to the rescue—taking charge of whatever was going on in Central America while the nation’s principal diplomat, a Dartmouth mope named Charles “Skip” Hollis, was off in Switzerland supposedly attending a United Nations conference, but essentially engaging in a little junketeering to indulge his fondness for rock climbing, more likely some foothill than the Matterhorn. Though a friend of the president’s and a man born to wealth, the secretary of state was an empty-headed chump who couldn’t tell Belize from Spanish Harlem. He was one of the president’s biggest cabinet mistakes and a lot of people in Washington expected him to be out of office by the end of the year. If the Belizeans and Guatemalans started having at one another, and Moody was in place doing Hollis’s work for him, it could be just the nudge that was needed.

  But it would also be a little obvious. And besides, it was hard to tell just what the hell was going on down there in Central America.

  A little jab wouldn’t hurt, however.

  “Has anyone talked to the Belizean ambassador?” Moody asked.

  “No sir.”

  “Well, have someone send him a message from the White House, authorized by me, warning that any harm done to U.S. citizens or property will be viewed seriously. Send another one to the Guatemalan ambassador.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And find out what the Mexicans are doing.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And keep me informed.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Now switch me up to Wolf
enson. He should be in my office.”

  “Yes sir.”

  As Moody waited to be transferred to his principal aide, he noticed a tall, very slender man in riding clothes standing in the shadows of the hall nearby. The fellow had silver hair and looked close to forty, yet he wore the black riding boots, white breeches, and blue blazer that marked him as one of the steeplechase jockeys. Could jockeys be that old? This steeplechasing was nothing at all like any horse racing Moody knew about.

  “Can I help you with something, friend?” Moody asked the man. The fellow was more than six feet tall, very tan in the way of these horse country outdoorsmen, and handsome, though his nose appeared to have been broken and he had a slight scar on the side of his face. Moody had seen him before, probably in Washington, but couldn’t recall exactly where.

  “I’m just waiting to use the phone,” the man said.

  “Well, I’m talking to the White House.”

  “Oh yes. Of course. Terribly sorry.” He moved back, taking a position in the doorway of the bar, politely out of earshot.

  His speech was refined—that odd, old Virginia aristocratic accent that Moody had heard too much of in his life. It had the same Old English origins as the speech in his native West Virginia, but it was not at all the same. He knew this man, but from where?

  Suddenly Moody felt self-conscious, especially about his dress. This was a country weekend, and he was wearing a suit, a dark, Brooks Brothers pinstripe that stood out like a clown costume in contrast to the more casual sport coats and blazers of the wealthy locals. His new wife, Deena, had chided him when they were getting ready for dinner, saying the boardroom suit in these surroundings made him look like a redneck dressed up for church. She had said it in her playful, jesting way—little ol’ Southern accent thick as her perfume—but as usual she was woundingly close to the mark. Moody was a man born in the hollows, and for all his fine education and millions, it still showed. His lank, black hair, pink, raw-boned face, sharp chin and long neck—none of it seemed to go with the expensive garb he favored, or with the immense power he enjoyed.