Castle Danger--The Mental States Read online

I think we all wondered why Beverly, one of the most anti-social people I’d ever met, was communications director. But Andrew had his reasons for all of us being where we were. Or so I liked to tell myself. There was reassurance in perpetuating the myth of the man’s infallibility.

  The new guy looked at me, nodded. Then snapped his fingers and pointed my way. “How do we do it?”

  Hell if I knew. But I was a bit too mesmerized to say that. He wanted my input? Really? Swoon.

  “We target women. Jolene’s always come across as a tomboy. She’s put down a lot of other women on the campaign trail. Female Democrats will only vote for her like swallowing bad medicine.”

  He grinned. Turned back to Bev. “I wouldn’t have put it that way, but yeah. We all know she’s one of the guys.”

  Beverly threw up her hands. “They’re going to see through it! As soon as we start asking around, they’re going to circle the wagons.”

  Another advisor, this one sitting at the table behind his own laptop, looked up and shook his head. “No, they won’t. Keep them talking long enough, the façade will break. Seriously, look at her last campaign. Like trying to hold a conversation in a big fart cloud.”

  The new guy rubbed his hands together. “Let’s get to it, then!”

  While the rest of the group morphed into smaller clusters, our new leader — or so it seemed — headed towards me, his hand out. I shook it. Like shaking a brick.

  “Tennyson Washington.”

  Okay, that sealed the deal. He was definitely our new leader.

  “Manny Jahnke. Nice to meet you.”

  He did a double-take. “Wait, I thought you were a woman.”

  Chills. How the fuck did he—

  “How the fuck did you—”

  That big hand landed on my shoulder. He pulled me close. “I’m on a need-to-know basis. But I need to know everything. Let me ask you, do you feel like you’re being forced to dress like a man? Pressured in any way?”

  I shook my head. Honestly, it had all made sense when the Senator and I made the deal. Was Tennyson telling me to reconsider? Just come right on out and be myself, mid-stream?

  He smiled. “How about we discuss it later? Grab a beer?”

  He was on his way before I realized I’d said yes. But then it occurred to me. “Wait.”

  Tennyson turned around.

  I looked back at the conference room, up and down the hallway. “Where’s Dylan?”

  First, a word on Jolene Buchannan. A ‘hands in the dirt’ rep from the Southwest corner of Minnesota. One of the first Democrats elected there in ages, symptom of an exhaustion with the Republican stick-in-the-mud who’d blocked one too many things during the Obama years, until his supporters got sick of the ‘status quo’ and turned to a Tea Party small-business owner to oust him in the primary. Unsurprisingly, the naïve, unschooled challenger was in over his head. Just about drowned in the shit storm of campaign politics, but then Buchannan just tsunamied the guy and has been on a “Yes, yes, yes” streak ever since. The woman knew how to speak plainly, burn down bullshit, and gut a walleye. Maybe she was a lesbian? Maybe she was a socialist? Didn’t matter at the time. She knew how to play local politics. And since her election, she’d become a go-to on the cable news shows, always funny, always informed, and always ready for a fight.

  The only person I could imagine as a real threat to Andrew Marquette.

  (To be honest, I might even vote for her myself.)

  As for Tennyson Washington, we’re talking pure mercenary. One of the top five campaign managers in the country. Last I’d heard, he’d helped a black woman Democrat win a Senate seat in Utah. Oh yeah, that’s some great work. But he didn’t care about the party. He cared about who offered him the most money and the most freedom to win in his way. Instead of revealing where he really stood on the political spectrum, he made out that his motives were about the candidates themselves. He backed someone because he believed in the person, and I expect the pay day helped cement those beliefs. Instead of pissing off people in one party or the other, he’d become the guy everyone wanted to be seen with — photo ops at fundraisers, meetings, rallies — just to have some of his winning nature rub off on them.

  He was charming. And handsome. And rock hard. And … let’s talk about Dylan.

  We called the other HQ. We called his cell. We tweeted at him. We DM’d him on Facebook and Snapchat. We texted him. Once we discovered he still had a landline, we even called him on that.

  An hour later, we were still waiting for a response. All of us. I mean, at least twelve people I counted, including Andrew himself, and we had no pings at all.

  I drove out to Dylan’s place and met up with Joel — our first meeting since we nodded at each other in passing over a week ago — and Agent Thorn, my favorite BCA agent, who’d recently taken a leave of absence to lead security for Marquette’s campaign.

  Joel was last to join us, then opted for a grunt over a handshake. “You tried the knob yet?”

  “We haven’t even knocked yet. Waiting for you.” Thorn, flat-delivery. Another one who didn’t like me much, especially since I’d shoehorned Joel onto his security team in spite of Joel having nearly killed Thorn’s BCA partner.

  It was a second floor flat in an older home, nothing special. I’d have expected a college student to rent it, but Dylan was thirty-four and six years removed from grad school. Then again, this was Nordeast Minneapolis, an arty, foodie sort of place, where artists and restaurant workers still lived like college students. Dylan hadn’t struck me as the art-school type, but I was living proof that appearances can be deceiving. Besides, I’d never seen him in his natural habitat.

  I had first met Dylan when he and Thorn came to pick me up for my first meeting with Andrew Marquette, sort of against my will. Back then, he came across as a flunky. Just a yes man for Marquette. But it turned out that he was not only good friends with the Senator. This man was brilliant. I mean, he was a big picture guy. He’d been leading the Senator towards higher offices since well before he’d entered politics. It took patience, luck, but also a sense of when to make the right moves and when to hold back. So far, they had executed the plan to perfection.

  Since Dylan had worked closely with Hans, he had to get used to working with me, too, which meant putting the past behind us. Or at least the night he first met me, decked out as Hannah and a far cry from compliant when he and Thorn escorted me to Marquette’s house. The night I made this deal.

  All he said when he was told we would be working together was, “Neat.”

  He gave me props for being a quick study, but I was surprised a mind of his caliber was able to put up with a nobody like me getting put into the big game right away. But if it rankled him, he never showed it, unlike everyone else in the office suddenly needing to look away or leave when I walked into a room. I shadowed him as he worked on getting the most money from the most people. We made them want to give, without asking for much in return. And if they did, he appealed to their better nature, made them want to be team players. Weren’t we all in this together? Somehow it worked. Dylan had found a way to make cynical, selfish millionaires want to be a part of something bigger than their bank accounts. He also taught me the tricks of the trade for grabbing social media attention without seeming desperate about it, and the longer I watched him work, the more I learned about what makes a rally, a speech, or a fundraiser really work.

  We drank together at St. Paul bars near the HQ, handled the Twitter account for the campaign, handled some of the more exclusive events on the Senator’s schedule, and became pretty good work-friends. But I’d never seen his apartment and he’d had no reason to visit my townhouse.

  Now, looking at his door, it occurred to me that Dylan kept a strict wall between his work and private life. He wasn’t making a lot of money, by choice, because he knew there would be a payoff down the line, once Andrew was in the Governor’s mansion. So he lived in a functional, in-need-of-repair apartment in the cheaper part of town, near a
rt installations, galleries, head shops, an authentic British fish ‘n chips joint, and several craft beer tap rooms. There was more going on in that man than met the eye.

  I nodded at Thorn, then knocked on the door.

  No answer.

  I knocked again, louder and longer.

  Still nothing.

  Joel sighed and stepped up, pushing me aside. It was good to see him, even if I wasn’t about to let him know that. Was pretty sure he didn’t feel the same way, but I knew he liked this job I’d got him as one of Marquette’s bodyguards, sort of ‘Secret Service’ like, allowing him to conceal and carry his .45 in a pancake holster on his right hip. He pounded on the door with the side of his fist, as if I hadn’t knocked ‘manly’ enough.

  “Dylan! Come on, man. Wakey, wakey!”

  Still nothing.

  There we were all three of us, arms crossed, on a tight landing at the top of rickety stairs. We could hear hip-hop bleeding through the cracks of the bottom floor apartment, someone inside rapping along, only knowing half the words. Joel lifted his fist to pound again, but Thorn caught it. “Hold off.” He pulled a key from his pocket, fit it into the door, and unlocked it. I hadn’t expected that. Did that mean he had a key for my place, too, and Joel’s? Before I could ask him, he pushed the door open, just far enough to stick his head inside. “Anyone here?”

  I was getting nervous. “Shouldn’t we call the police?”

  Thorn and Joel stepped past me into the apartment. “Do what you want, but you know the rule.”

  The rule, never spoken and yet clear to everyone on the campaign team, was No police.

  I followed them in, and walked into a wall of smell.

  Rotten food.

  A whole Chinese takeout meal on a low coffee table, uneaten except for half an eggroll. It looked like Dylan liked to eat his dinner on couch pillows on the floor while watching TV news. The old set, a thick nineties throwback, was on but muted.

  Thorn picked up the paper sack the food had been packed into, checked the receipt stapled to the side. “Two days ago. You’ve talked to him since then, right?”

  I thought I had, but I got my phone out and checked. Scrolled. Scrolled.

  “Yesterday, but mostly one word answers. Said he was busy with stuff.”

  “Stuff?”

  “His word. Stuff. Usually means—”

  “I know what it means. Jesus.”

  Thorn disappeared into the bedroom. I didn’t want to disturb anything, didn’t want to sit down. I hoped my keen cop-trained eyes would scope out the key to this mystery, but all I saw was the sorry mess of an untidy guy too busy at work to do his laundry. Joel opened his refrigerator, pulled out a can of local brew, something Belgian. “Want one?”

  I shook my head.

  Thorn shouted from the bedroom. “Manny, can you call Dylan’s phone again, please?”

  It didn’t take a genius. Chills up and down my arm. I pressed the screen to call Dylan …

  … and heard an EDM riff come from the other room. Thorn walked out into the living room, holding the ringing phone.

  His face had gone a little pale. Rare for the ‘seen-it-all’ state agent. The look he sent my way spoke volumes. “Who’s going to tell Andrew?”

  “Tell him what?”

  Thorn shook the still ringing phone at me. “That’s the sort of thing he pays you and Dylan to figure out, not me.”

  He was right. I killed the call, took a deep breath, and dialed Andrew’s number.

  2

  Seconds later I had more on my plate than my grandpa at an all-you-can-eat buffet. This wasn’t just a disaster for the campaign — we had a missing man. Foul play? An accident? Or had he simply run the fuck away, maybe because we had a new campaign manager, meaning we’d have to go through Tennyson Washington whenever we wanted to deal with Andrew Marquette?

  I had no idea. But by six that evening, we’d spent the whole day brainstorming, searching, knowing we couldn’t call in the cops, even though we had a state agent with an entire network of people-finders, both electronic and in-the-flesh, that we couldn’t use. We were back to the shoe leather days of Raymond Chandler.

  Finally, I met up with Tennyson at the lobby bar of the St. Paul Hotel, a place I’d normally stay away from. One beer there cost the same as the twelve-pack in my fridge, but worse than the price was the Downton Abbey ambience.

  We sat in a couple of pertly upholstered high-back chairs, our glasses on coasters on tables that might have been crafted in the 1840s. I was a sweaty mess from too much walking and too much worry, my jeans noticeably heavier now than when I put them on that morning. Yet despite the toasty room temperature, I was wearing my sport coat to hide my soaked armpits.

  Across from me, Tennyson looked regal after a full day of rallying the troops. His suit, a luxury. That tie, man, that beautiful silk Japanese floral tie made the whole thing. Everything about his body was hard. A good hard. But the suit transformed that hardness into something sophisticated. A chiseled statue of self-possessed power. He was at ease with the surroundings — of course he was, this being the sort of place where political types did their drinking, on expense accounts, naturally.

  Yet amid the extravagant accoutrements of white privilege, Tennyson’s position was fascinating. A black man from Texas, educated on the West Coast, soon discovered for his genius at political maneuvering, now a rich man who could afford not only to drink among the upper class, but also to choose which of them he wanted to launch into public office. He was very powerful in a very narrow and specific arena, and that suited him just fine. It meant he helped career politicians into power whether or not they were qualified to govern a state or legislate for the country. But they would never have any real power over Tennyson.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  I knew what he meant. “He’s gone and he left his phone behind. Looks like he left before he got a chance to eat. But no sign of a struggle, no sign of a call, text, or message that would have caused him to run away. The guy’s just … gone.”

  “His car?”

  “Thorn had no choice but to get some cops to keep an eye out. He told them the thing had been stolen, probably by joy-riders. Look, we checked every place we could think of, checked his apartment again right before I came here, and there’s nothing. Thorn and Joel are going to keep looking anyway though.”

  Sly grin. “Joel?”

  “You don’t know Joel.”

  “But you do. You call him by his first name, but the other one is still Thorn. So you know Joel.”

  I took a sip of beer. I didn’t want to be psychoanalyzed. “Yeah, sure. Joel and me … we’re friends, I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “Used to be.”

  Tennyson cocked an eyebrow. “You mean, you used to …”

  Oh, shit. “No, no, sorry. No. We were … we were cops, you know that, right? Partners.”

  He leaned closer, elbow on the arm of the chair. “I didn’t know that, no. Wow, I never would’ve guessed.”

  He really knew how to bring you into a conversation, make you talk without thinking. Which I did when I said, “But you know about … me. You know about me being … you know.”

  “See, that’s the sort of detail people are going to tell you right away. Not, ‘Manny was a cop,’ but, ‘Manny is transsexual.’ Sorry, I don’t mean that badly.”

  I held up my palm. “No, I get it. It’s fine.”

  Awkward. He tried on a smile. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Sure you did. That’s fine. I get it.”

  The smile settled into well-worn laughter lines. Looked like it was right at home on his face. He even treated me to a pearly white teeth-display. “So, when do I get to meet her?”

  “Her who?”

  “Her you. Weren’t you paying attention?”

  I shook my head. Glanced around. It was a quiet night at the bar, but there were a few handfuls of people, all well-groomed and post-work, yet the day’s weight had taken the cu
stomary pizazz out of their postures. Women’s high heels dangled from toes while their fingers made loops around the tops of their wine glasses. Men, ties loosened, jackets off, sleeves rolled up. Groups of threes and fours, no more. None of the Marquette gang was there, which meant it was either too early, or they knew Tennyson would be here, so this wasn’t the place to vent about the trials and tribulations on the campaign trail.

  The man certainly had an intimidating aura, and his interest in Hannah was starting to make me nervous. Maybe he wanted to convince Andrew to change his mind and let her come out to play. Especially with Buchannan aiming for the same group of LGBT voters, in an age when not many voters in that demographic trusted a professed Republican, putting the queers and trannies upfront in the campaign might make a statement.

  I shook my head. “No, we discussed this. We don’t want to risk it looking like pandering, or like we’re trying to have a ‘token’ transsexual in the campaign.”

  Tennyson frowned. “What? No, I didn’t say ‘when does the team get to meet her?’ I’m serious, Manny. I’m well aware of what that sudden change would do for us, both good and bad. But I was just wondering, you know, this would stay between us. It would be a shame never to meet the real you. Otherwise, when I talk to you, I’m never going to know exactly who it is I’m talking to, do you know what I mean?”

  He crossed his legs, tilted his head slightly, and kept that smile on full beam. A master communicator, drawing me in. I instinctively checked his left ring-finger for a wedding ring (and yes, he had one) before telling myself that this wasn’t flirting. Of course it wasn’t. Jesus, of course it wasn’t. Was it?

  I hadn’t gotten that far along in my transition, didn’t know what it felt like to flirt with a man. I’d watched transsexual porn, lots of it. I’d watched testimonials from transwomen who detailed what it was like to admit things to themselves for the first time, like an attraction to men. Not to gay men. To straight men, because we were women, right? I wasn’t attracted to men who wanted to fuck men. I wasn’t attracted to trannies, which some people thought was the only logical attraction for us. One day, when I was ready, I would have to figure it out for myself. Maybe there was still a part of me that liked women. Maybe none of this was about sex, like ‘having sex’ sex, and more about my own fucked-up sense of self.