Firestarter(69)

Everett couldn't believe this was happening. He tried one last time. "Do you guys know the penalty for robbing the U.S. mail? They put you in Leavenworth, Kansas, for that."

"You can clear it with your postmaster when you get back to Teller," the other man said, speaking for the first time. "Now let's quit this f**king around, okay? Give us the bag of out-of-town mail."

Everett gave him the small sack of mail from Bradford and Williams. They opened it right there on the road and sorted through it impersonally. Robert Everett felt anger and a kind of sick shame. What they were doing wasn't right, not even if it was the secrets of the nuclear bomb in there. Opening the U.S. mail by the side of the road wasn't right. Ludicrously, he found himself feeling about the same way he would have felt if a strange man had come barging into his house and pulled off his wife's clothes.

"You guys are going to hear about this," he said in a choked, scared voice. "You'll see."

"Here they are," the other fellow said to OJ. He handed him six letters, all addressed in the same careful hand. Robert Everett recognized them well enough. They had come from the box at the Bradford general store. OJ put the letters in his pocket and the two of them walked back to their Caprice, leaving the opened bag of mail on the road. "You guys are going to hear about this!" Everett cried in a shaking voice.

Without looking back, OJ said, "Speak to your postmaster before you speak to anyone else. If you want to keep your Postal Service pension, that is." They drove away. Everett watched them go, raging, scared, sick to his stomach. At last he picked up the mailbag and tossed it back into the truck. "Robbed," he said, surprised to find he was near tears. "Robbed, I been robbed, oh goddammit, I been robbed."

He drove back to Teller as fast as the slushy roads would allow. He spoke to his postmaster, as the men had suggested. The Teller postmaster was Bill Cobham, and Everett was in Cobham's office for better than an hour. At times their voices came through the office door, loud and angry.

Cobham was fifty-six. He had been with the Postal Service for thirty-five years, and he was badly scared. At last he succeeded in communicating his fright to Robert Everett as well. And Everett never said a word, not even to his wife, about the day he had been robbed on the Teller Road between Bradford and Williams. But he never forgot it, and he never completely lost that sense of anger and shame... and disillusion.

10

By two-thirty Charlie had finished her snowman, and Andy, a little rested from his nap, had got up. Orville Jamieson and his new partner, George Sedaka, were on an airplane. Four hours later, As Andy and Charlie were sitting down to a game of five hundred rummy, the supper dishes washed and drying in the drainer, the letters were on Cap Hollister's desk.

CAP AND RAINBIRD

1

On March 24, Charlie McGee's birthday, Cap Hollister sat behind his desk filled with a great and ill-defined unease. The reason for the unease was not ill-defined; he expected John Rainbird in not quite an hour, and that was too much like expecting the devil to turn up on the dime. So to speak. And at least the devil stuck to a bargain once it was struck, if you believed his press releases, but Cap had always felt there was something in John Rainbird's personality that was fundamentally ungovernable. When all was said and done, he was nothing more than a hit man, and hit men always self-destruct sooner or later. Cap felt that when Rainbird went, it would be with a spectacular bang. Exactly how much did he know about the McGee operation? No more than he had to, surely, but... it nagged at him. Not for the first time he wondered if after this McGee affair was over it might not be wise to arrange an accident for the big Indian. In the memorable words of Cap's father, Rainbird was as crazy as a man eating rat turds and calling it caviar.

He sighed. Outside, a cold rain flew against the windows, driven by a strong wind. His study, so bright and pleasant in summer, was now filled with shifting gray shadows. They were not kind to him as he sat here with the McGee file on its library trolley at his left hand. The winter had aged him; he was not the same jaunty man who had biked up to the front door on that day in October when the McGees had escaped again, leaving a firestorm behind. Lines on his face that had been barely noticeable then had now deepened into fissures. He had been forced into the humiliation of bifocals-old man's glasses, he thought them-and adjusting to them had left him feeling nauseated for the first six weeks he wore them. These were the small things, the outward symbols of the way things had gone so crazily, maddeningly wrong. These were the things he bitched about to himself because all of his training and upbringing had schooled him against bitching about the grave matters that lay so closely below the surface.

As if that damned little girl were a personal jinx, the only two women he had cared deeply about since the death of his mother had both died of cancer this winter-his wife, Georgia, three days after Christmas, and his personal secretary, Rachel, only a little over a month ago.

He had known Georgia was gravely ill, of course; a mastectomy fourteen months before her death had slowed but not stopped the progress of the disease. Rachel's death had been a cruel surprise. Near the end he could remember (how unforgivable we sometimes seem in retrospect) joking that she needed fattening up, and Rachel throwing the jokes right back at him.

Now all he had left was the Shop-and he might not have that much longer. An insidious sort of cancer had invaded Cap himself. What would you call it? Cancer of the confidence? Something like that. And in the upper echelons, that sort of disease was nearly always fatal. Nixon, Lance, Helms... all victims of cancer of the credibility.