I groaned. Ben O’Farrell was my lawyer. Sharp as a tack and vaguely disreputable. He’d agreed to represent me, after all.
“Happy to hear you, too.”
“Ben, it’s not that I don’t like you, but every time you call it’s bad news.”
“You’ve been subpoenaed by the Senate.”
Not one to mince words was Ben.
“Excuse me?”
“A special oversight committee of the United States Senate requests the honor of your presence at upcoming hearings regarding the Center for the Study of Paranatural Biology. I guess they think you’re some kind of expert on the subject.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
Yeah, I’d heard him, and as a result my brain froze. Senate? Subpoena? Hearings? As in Joe McCarthy and the Hollywood blacklist? As in Iran-Contra?
“Kitty?”
“Is this bad? I mean, how bad is it?”
“Calm down. It isn’t bad. Senate committees have hearings all the time. It’s how they get information. Since they don’t know anything about paranatural biology, they’ve called hearings.”
It made sense. He even made it sound routine. I still couldn’t keep the panic out of my voice. “What am I going to do?”
“You’re going to go to Washington, D.C., and answer the nice senators’ questions.”
That was on the other side of the country. How much time did I have? Could I drive it? Fly? Did I have anything I could wear to Congress? Would they tell me the questions they wanted to ask ahead of time, as if I could study for it like it was some kind of test?
They didn’t expect me to do this by myself, did they?
“Ben? You have to come with me.”
Now he sounded panicked. “Oh, no. They’re just going to ask you questions. You don’t need a lawyer there.”
“Come on. Please? Think of it as a vacation. It’ll all go on the expense account.”
“I don’t have time—”
“Honestly, what do you think the odds are that I can keep out of trouble once I open my mou
th? Isn’t there this whole ‘contempt of Congress’ thing that happens when I say something that pisses them off? Would you rather be there from the start or have to fly in in the middle of things to get me out of jail for mouthing off at somebody important?”
His sigh was that of a martyr. “When you’re right, you’re right.”
Victory! “Thanks, Ben. I really appreciate it. When do we need to be there?”
“We’ve got a couple weeks yet.”
And here I was, going the wrong way.
“So I can drive there from Barstow in time.”
“What the hell are you doing in Barstow?”
“Driving?”