The Voting Machine

Collecting Evidence

It was mid-afternoon by the time Luke and I returned to the city. We switched plates on the stolen car but it was still a risk coming back. But I was convinced it was much riskier to try and hide out in the wilderness. That would only give Shiro more time to tell more lies so that when they finally tracked me down no one would believe I was innocent. It was a risk coming back to Vegas. There was always the chance the cameras on the cop cars and the traffic lights might take a picture and run us through some database that recognized exactly who we were.

But I felt confident that was a chance worth taking. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I grew that hiding in the wild was not going to work. It would just give Shiro time to tell more lies about us. Then by the time they finally tracked us down in some cave, there wouldn't be a single stranger in the country who believed that we were innocent. The truth was the best weapon for survival and the path to the truth led through the city.

David's house was on a ramshackle block near UNLV. A chain of parked black and gray SUVs surrounded his tiny, flat ranch house like a fortress.

"The Feds are here," I said as Luke pulled to the curb a block away on Maryland Avenue.

Agents passed in and out of David's house, wearing rubber gloves and carrying note books and computer drives. A separate team had set up in the backyard with shovels and Geiger counters. I noticed one of them collecting dirt samples where I dug up the list of names in his garden a few nights earlier.

After we sat and observed for about twenty minutes, another SUV arrived. An older, powerfully-built man got out of the car and walked into the yard.

"Looks like the boss just showed up."

"That's Emmanuel Stevens," I said. "He's the head of the Vegas office."

The field agents quickly formed a crowd around their gray-haired leader. Stevens listened to their updates and his face colored with anger. He shouted, pointed them back in the direction of David's house and stormed back to his car.

Luke chuckled. "Boss man is not happy."

"He's looking for the files just like us," I said.

"He working for Shiro?"

"I don't know. He's not on our side, that's for sure. We got to get the files before he does."

"Well if they are on David's property, they're not leaving anytime soon."

"You're right. Besides, I've been thinking this wrong way. David would've never left them here. He knows this is the first place they'd look when he died."

"Where'd he leave them then?"

"Let's go to Zeke's house out in Henderson."

Thirty minutes later we reached the white, wealthy neighborhood in the suburb south of the city limits. We parked across the street from his house, with a full view of the family living room with Zeke's rattlesnake flag and framed photos of his Revolutionary War enactments. His widow had a visitor. They were sitting in the same chairs where Zeke had hosted me, drinking coffee from a pitcher on his polished silver tray. The guest was seated with her back to the window but I recognized right away that it was Annabelle. Her blonde hair was slicked back in a pony-tail and she wore silver blouse and slacks. This was her formal look when she went to business meetings or fundraisers for the Sunflower Foundation.

Annabelle and Zeke had been bitter enemies during the political campaign. The old man had called her a junkie, a spoiled little rich girl and a whore among other things. Now, judging from the body language of her conversation with his widow, you might mistake her for a friend of the family.

"What are you doing here Annabelle?" I wondered.

Luke grinned. "That girl was always crafty."

"She's looking for the same thing as the rest of us."

Annabelle and Helen talked for another half an hour. At first it was the old woman whose mouth was moving, with plenty of pauses for teary eyes and blowing her nose in a box of Kleenex.

Then in the final minutes, it was Annabelle's turn to speak and Helen sat back and listened. By the end of it, Helen was nodding in agreement with whatever it was that Annabelle was saying. They stood up together and ambled back somewhere out of sight inside the house.

When they returned, Annabelle was carrying a box with both hands and Helen opened the front door for her.

"Bingo."

"The files. Let's grab 'em," Luke said.

"How? We can't just walk up to Annabelle like we did with Brenda. Anabelle's not on the Watch List. She knows where we are, she's got to choose right away whether to turn us in or become an accomplice. Then she could wind up on that list herself."

"So what do we do then? Steal the files when she ain't lookin'?"

"Can't do that either. What if she's doing this to help us?"

"Well we ain't just givin' up. Not when we're this close to the files."

He was right of course. "How about we take the bug and GPS tracker Brenda gave us. We put it in her car and follow her until we get the chance to break in and snap some pictures of the files?"

"I like that."

After Annabelle set the files in the back seat of her Prius, she circled back into the house.

"Now's our chance," Luke said. He dashed across the street and slipped into the car's front passenger door, which she'd left unlocked. By the time she returned with a second box of files, Luke was back out of the car, crouched behind a set of plastic trash and recycling bins.

Annabelle gave Helen a final tearful embrace before she drove after with her prize. We followed her at a distance as she took the surface streets to Nellis Avenue, which led all the way to North Vegas. Finally she pulled in front of the Sunflower clinic at the corner of Cheyenne and MLK, the only one that wasn't burned to the ground in the arson attacks last month. This was the first time I'd been back to the site since our candidate gave a speech that ended with Zeke Junior taking a bullet through the neck.

She waited in her car until a husky black man in sunglasses emerged from the clinic and sat next to her in the passenger seat. We recognized the man right away Long Sleeves Louie, a recovering addict who used to work the pancake breakfasts with Luke. Louie used to be a roofer. One day he showed up for a shingles job drunk and stoned. He lost his balance on top of the roof and fell two stories. Just as he was about to hit the ground, he reached through a closed window to stop the fall. He saved himself from hitting the pavement, which would've killed or paralyzed him. But the broken glass sliced through every blood vessel in his forearms and he nearly bled to death before they got him to the hospital. After that Louie cleaned up and decided his life to helping others via the Sunflower Clinic. He also never wore short-sleeve shirts again.

Annabelle and Louie backtracked over to East Vegas where she left him in front of a shopping center on Maryland Avenue. It was across the street from the ruins of one of the torched clinics. He sat on a fold up chair with a donation box, holding up a hand-scrawled sign:

SUNFLOWER WILL RISE AGAIN