Political Suicide Read Free Page A

popular, believed he was about to be arrested for killing someone—not killing, but murdering.
    Who? How? For the moment, the questions far outstripped their answers. One thing that did make sense was that McHugh’s first move would be to call Lou. Their history together was a colorful and at times wildly adventurous one that included parachuting with two magnums of champagne onto a remote field, where two bewildered women were waiting with their picnic baskets for their double blind dates to arrive. If Lou were in mortal trouble, there were few people he would turn to before calling McHugh.
    The December afternoon was already dark, and the wipers on Lou’s ten-year-old Camry were working to keep up with a fine, windblown snow. He pulled off of Route 50 and onto a secondary road lined with McMansions, many of which were already decorated for Christmas. White bulb country, Lou had once heard someone describe upscale neighborhoods such as this one—understated holiday decor featuring small white lights on the front shrubs and electric candles in every window. Nice enough, but he was still partial to the tangled strings of blinking colored bulbs outlining Dimitri’s Pizza shop, just below his apartment in D.C.
    It was one of Walter Filstrup’s few sensible rules that clients be identified only by their assigned numbers, and that no doctor’s name could be removed from the office. In a totally out-of-character concession to the man, Lou kept his client numbers next to their initials on a card in his wallet, and their contact information locked in his smartphone, which, at that moment, was resting on the worn passenger seat of the Toyota. McHugh’s cell phone number was in it, but if he had wanted Lou to call, he would have said so.
    Murder.
    What in the hell is the man talking about?
    The two of them had met once or twice a month since McHugh’s monitoring contract became active, sometimes at the PWO, sometimes at McHugh’s home or D.C. office, and less frequently at a restaurant. Filstrup insisted that Lou include a credit card validation that he paid for his own meal. Lou never reacted maturely to being told what to do, and he resented the implication that he or the other associate director could be bought—certainly not for the price of a dinner. So, even though Filstrup’s policy made some sense, Lou had taken trips in McHugh’s plane, and gone to a couple of Redskins games thanks to his friend’s season tickets.
    As things evolved between them, McHugh did test Lou once by claiming he never had the time to see a doctor, and had ordered some Percocets from an Internet pharmacy in Canada to deal with a chronically balky back. His reasoning was that alcohol was the substance that had gotten him a PWO contract, not painkillers. Lou made little attempt to point out the foolishness of that belief, or the quickness with which a positive random urine test for Percocet or any such drug would get his license pulled. McHugh’s denial was as thick as a glacier, but he still knew what was at stake, so Lou extracted a promise that, when the Percocet bottles arrived in the promised plain brown wrapper, they would be opened in his presence and the pills dumped in the toilet.
    After the pills had been disposed of, Lou sat beside the phone as McHugh made an appointment with his orthopedist. The final steps would be the assurance that the orthopedist had been informed of McHugh’s status with the PWO, and would provide the program a copy of any prescription he wrote.
    “No thanks necessary,” Lou had said as the last of the Percocets swirled down the toilet.
    “None given,” McHugh had replied testily.
    Not long after that exchange, when Lou mentioned in passing that Emily was assigned to do a school report on a new piece of environmental legislation, McHugh arranged for the congressman sponsoring the actual bill to speak at Emily’s school. Case closed. Friendship preserved.
    Lou cruised through the gated entrance of