Supreme Justice Read Free

there were no tourists here yet, and he might have been a ghost haunting the place. Maybe he was. Maybe that was why he felt so much at home here.
    As he ambled through ANC, he seemed to sense the souls of the dead walking with him. Fellow ghosts, perhaps. Anyway, they sure as hell didn’t haunt him. They only added to the serenity. Around him, at rest, were men and women who had made a difference—many had given their lives simply in defense of a vague ideal, while others had a more solid intellectual grasp on what had led them into government service. Either way, Reeder appreciated every one of them and relished their company.
    As he often did, Reeder—on this brisk April morning, the sun slowly climbing in an almost painfully blue sky—found himself in front of the grave of John F. Kennedy. Not a perfect man, but a great one nonetheless, and a hero.
    Most visitors had been taught in school about that day in Dallas. They rightly thought of the assassination as a tragedy, the day America lost its innocence, sixty-some years ago. Although Reeder shared those feelings, the tragedy for him involved Clint Hill as well, the Secret Service agent who ran from the limo behind Kennedy’s to jump aboard the President’s vehicle and help reel Jackie back into the car when she crawled onto the trunk lid to retrieve a piece of her husband’s skull.
    Hill, a decorated agent who finally retired in 1975 (a decade before Reeder’s birth), had always been haunted by not making it to Kennedy’s car in time to take the third shot himself.
    When his turn to take a shot came, Reeder was there, saving President Gregory Bennett, but he well understood Hill’s frustration.
    President Bennett had been shaking hands, pressing the flesh, in the town of Burke, Virginia, on a day not unlike this one, when Reeder saw something. To this day, he didn’t know for sure exactly what tipped him: a narrowing of the eyes perhaps, a subtle shift in body language— something —but a millisecond before he saw the shooter raise his pistol, Reeder moved. The only reaction he had time for was to dive in front of the President, taking the bullet. It clipped his Kevlar vest, burrowed into his shoulder, shattered his collarbone, ricocheted, and tore through his rotator cuff.
    Two agents took down the shooter before he could fire again, while others hustled President Bennett into his bulletproof limousine and to the safety of the White House.
    Reeder ended up at Inova Fairfax Hospital, where surgeons did their utmost to repair the mess that was his shoulder. Weeks of recuperation and physical therapy followed. By leaving him in the hospital, the Service’s hope had been to somewhat derail the media frenzy, at least.
    It hadn’t worked.
    So many reporters were on hand when he was released, the hospital nearly had to shut down.
    Looking at President Kennedy’s grave, Reeder knew that without question had he acted a nanosecond later, he would have entered the same living hell as Clint Hill. Instead, Reeder had saved a president.
    As it happened, a president he despised, a leader of the Free World who stood against everything that Reeder believed in. That had meant a different sort of hell for him than Hill’s, but like Hill he had done his best. Even been decorated for it.
    Like everybody else here in Arlington, though, medals didn’t mean shit to Joe Reeder. Particularly that medal . . .
    What had he gotten out of it, really? The satisfaction of doing his job? A shoulder that predicted precipitation better than the Weather Channel? The reality that the near martyr President Bennett had been sent swaggering into a second term?
    Besides serving as his personal weather vane, that balky shoulder had relegated Reeder to a desk job. This he tolerated for only a month before putting his papers in and retiring on disability. Or anyway, that had been the official reason.
    For almost four years, liberal-minded Reeder had stood in the background like any good agent,