“Darlene, what is it? Is everything all right?” Martin sounded genuinely worried, probably fearing that the protesters had turned violent.

“Everything here is fine, Marty,” Darlene said. “In fact, it’s better than fine. It’s really something special, except you’re not here and you should be.”

“Is that why you’re calling me?”

Darlene heard the anger in her husband’s voice. He had never had much of a temper, but lately outbursts to one degree or another had been coming more and more frequently. At the podium, Kim was entertaining the crowd with stock humorous stories about Darlene’s college days.

“Look, I know you’re concerned about the polls, honey,” Darlene said to Martin, “but you need to stand up for what you believe. Polls don’t mean a thing. Polls didn’t get you reelected; people did. And these people care about you.”

Martin breathed heavily into the phone. “Darlene, what the hell is wrong with you! Are you blind?”

Darlene’s pulse accelerated the way it did in the moments before they fought. She felt defensive and was surprised at how quickly her husband had angered. “Please don’t speak to me that way, Martin,” she said in a harsh whisper.

“Agent Siliphant radioed me. I know how many protesters are there. Do you think I want to come just to get shouted down by an angry mob? Do you know what my approval rating is right now? Do you?”

“Marty … I…”

“Thirty-eight! Down in less than a year from sixty.”

“Please, Martin. Do this for the children.”

“You better have made a good excuse for why it is I’m not there, Darlene. I don’t want to hear on the news tonight that President Mallory is a coward, or doesn’t give a shit about needy kids. That club wouldn’t exist except for my initiative.”

There was a click and the line went dead. Darlene stood shaking, breathing deeply to calm herself. At the podium, the mayor had taken over and was regaling the crowd with a story about his childhood on the harrowing streets of D.C.

Kim appeared by her side. “Let me guess,” she said. “It didn’t go well.”

Darlene’s hands were still shaking. “I’m really worried about him,” she said. “It was never like Martin to behave this way. He’s never run from a fight in his life. What do you think we should do?”

Kim answered with an impish grin. “I say once we’re done here, we’ve got two choices for what we should do next.”

“And those would be?”

“Either we go shopping, or we go get a drink.”

CHAPTER 4

Fighting to control his speed and to maintain at least a modicum of concentration, Lou made the thirty-mile drive from D.C. to DeLand Regional in forty minutes. He hadn’t bothered to change out of his scrubs.

Over the years, like most people with a television, he had sat riveted to the set countless times, watching reports of pathetic souls who had, for whatever reason, lost it and gone postal—murdering at random. In most cases, the explanation for the carnage remained a mystery, cloaked in the catchall of crazy. After a short stay as the lead, the stories inevitably slipped from the news. The killers who didn’t take their own lives, or weren’t shot to bits by the police, vanished to prison someplace, or into an asylum. To everyone aside from their shattered families, and the shattered families of their victims, the memory of them vanished like April snow.