The Next President by Joseph Flynn Read Free Book Online Page B

Pickpocket.
    When J. D. had called on the little thief to repay his debt, Pickpocket hadn’t asked why J. D. needed him. He didn’t pry, overtly, into J. D.‘s personal life. But J. D. knew that the little thief lived to learn people’s secrets.
    And the machine that lay so conveniently close at hand might well tell him how far Pickpocket had penetrated the life and times of his mysterious employer
    But J. D. was an experienced hunter. He recognized a snare when he saw one.
    And having fallen into one trap already was more than enough for him.
    A little over two months earlier, on a Tuesday, the first day of July, life as J. D. Cade had known it came to an abrupt end when he picked up his morning mail. Among the postal odds and ends, he found a manila envelope postmarked Lake Charles, Louisiana but when he opened it he was certain it had been forwarded from the dead-letter office in hell. Inside were three eight-by-ten black-and-white photos, the first of which showed Alvy McCray dead, broken, bloodied, and suspended upside down in the compressed cab of his pickup truck.
     
    J. D. had opened the envelope as he stood in the doorway of his Santa Barara home. His first impulse upon seeing the image ofAlvy’s mortal remains was to snap his head up and look for the marksman lining him up in his sights. His second reaction had been to bolt inside his house and slam the door behind him. With his back against the wall, he looked at the other two photos and was not surprised by what he saw. He half expected a hail of gunfire to slam into his house.
    Even when it didn’t happen, he was under no illusion that the threat was any less real. He knew there had to be somebody—some minders—watching him. Otherwise there was no point in mailing the photos to him. If he’d been off sailing to Tahiti, his mail—and those goddamn pictures—would just be gathering dust at the post office. Somebody had to be around to make sure he was picking up his mail.
    J. D. could all but feel the life he’d built for himself slipping through his fingers. More than thirty-three years had passed since Alvy’s death. In that time J. D. had settled in California, married, co founded L-A-B Fashions with his wife, grown rich, become a father, and raised a son he loved more than life. He’d divorced amicably, sold his share of the business to his ex, and watched his boy go off to college in his old hometown.
    But this… this was an assault on the very foundation of his being. And it was only just beginning.
    The second envelope came a week later, postmarked Paris, Texas. It contained a clipping from his hometown paper, the Southern Illinoisan, about the accidental electrocution of one Ivar McCray. McCray reportedly had been building a pipe bomb when he died. He was described as a biker who allegedly was attempting to extort money from a local merchant named Barton Laney. With the clipping were two color photos. One showed McCray’s gruesomely twisted corpse—and next to it muddy footprints with clearly defined tread patterns. The other photo was a candid shot of his son, Evan, taken at a sidewalk cafe with one foot resting on the opposite knee. The tread pattern of his sneaker was identical to one of the footprints found next to Ivar McCray’s body.
    J. D. had no trouble remembering that Evan’s girlfriend was named Pru Laney, and he had no doubt that the deceased McCray was a member of the clan his family had fought for so long.
    The third envelope, postmarked Americus, Georgia, came the following week—and the contents made clear just what was expected of him. There was another photo. This time it was of presidential candidate Senator Franklin Delano Rawley. Along with the photo, J. D. had been sent a PCR-a personal communications resource.
     
    The PCR had first appeared just after the turn of the century. A lineal descendant of the cell phone, it included functions for paging, e-mail, web browsing, and global positioning homing The last