Читать книгу Collision Course - Don Pendleton - Страница 11

If pressed, Stephen Caine couldn’t pinpoint when things had begun to fall apart. Not just the gradual erosion of his personal life, but the future of the entire country grew bleaker by the day as his anger and bitterness consumed him.

It was a lot like Chinese water torture, Caine decided. Just this slow drip, drip, drip that built up over time until each drop felt like a ball-peen hammer and sounded like thunder. Every day something else happened, another loss, a fresh insult, and his frustration had become intolerable.

Things started happening and he couldn’t really remember doing them, not fully anyway. He didn’t black out, but he operated on autopilot for so much of the day that decisions he made on the edge of sleep would be fully formed and operational plans by the time the morning came around. On his own, he felt helpless to act. A majority of the people who actually made the effort to vote had chosen wrong, had bought into the bullshit and the spin machine and now everything was spiraling out of control.

Caine set the empty shot glass of bourbon on the bar and eased down a few swallows of his Bud Light to cool the burning in the pit of his stomach. He knew he was a cliché. Strangely, that realization really didn’t make him feel any better.

The bar was working class, which he definitely wasn’t, but slumming made him feel better. His father would have been right at home here, smoking unfiltered cigarettes and downing bourbon like water while watching the flickering images of sports on the TV above the bar. Caine had learned everything he believed about politics by listening to what his father said and then doing the opposite.

A talking head on the TV was explaining why collateral damage wasn’t the same as those killed by deliberate acts of terrorism. The bartender moved over and took Caine’s empty shot glass. She was forty and skinny and tired. She had a plain face and a smoker’s squint. Caine had forgotten her name.

“You want another shot?” she asked.

“Let me ask you something,” Caine said.

She looked down the bar at the handful of other customers to see if they were happy. Once she decided they were fine she turned back toward Caine. Her eyes were green.

“What’s that?”

“You know what the electoral college is for?”

“You think you’re funny? You think I’m stupid ’cause I tend bar so you can ask me these questions then laugh at me?”

Caine blinked in surprise. Whatever he’d been expecting that wasn’t it.

“No,” he answered her. “I don’t think that. I was using the question as a lead-in, more of a rhetorical thing, so I could pontificate. You know, like drunks are supposed to do.”

The bartender looked at Caine, evaluating him. She picked up the empty shot glass and placed it in the steel-lined sink behind the bar.

“Fine,” she said. “The electoral college are the ones who actually cast the votes for the President, right? They look at the popular vote for their state, then cast the votes of their electoral college for the person who won the popular vote.”

“But they don’t have to,” Caine said. He was starting to feel the bourbon now.

This caught the woman by surprise, and she gave him a look like he was trying to be sly.

“No, it’s true.” Caine laughed. “They are free to cast the electoral votes for whomever they wish. They don’t, by law, have to cast them for whoever wins the popular vote.”

“That true?” she asked.

Caine smiled up at her. “Pour me another good one, if you please.” He slid a twenty across the bar, and the bartender smoothly went through her motions. “Supposedly it’s because of demagogues,” he continued.

He slid the hard liquor down his throat with a smooth, practiced motion. He reflected that there was a handgun in his car. He didn’t believe in guns, not anymore, but it was there, in the trunk. There was no way Charisa would ever have let it into the house, but Charisa wasn’t there anymore. He’d lost his wife and gained a gun.

How great was that?

Of course he didn’t have the house anymore, either. The settlement had been very clear; they split the house right down the middle. Didn’t much matter that the slimeball lawyer she’d left him for had a sprawling ranch-style twice the size of their old fixer-upper.

“Why?” the bartender repeated.

“What?” Caine blinked up at her.

“Why demagogues?” She sounded exasperated. “You were talking about the electoral college, remember?”

Caine gave her a dour smile and shrugged. The bartender snorted and dismissed him, moving down the bar. Someone came into the bar from the outside, and Caine realized it had started to rain.

He left a good tip by way of apology and headed out the door. Outside the rain turned everything gray. He couldn’t stop thinking about Charisa, about everything he’d lost.

He would never get her back, he knew. Would never get back his Army buddies who’d fallen in Mogadishu, either. Or his brother, Justin, who’d joined the Marines and never came back from Iraq.

But if Stephen Caine couldn’t get justice, he’d get revenge.

Someone would pay.