Jack Be Nimble: Tyro Book 2

by Ben English

  That night after seeing her in the pool with her neighbors’ kids, Bryce had stood at the window for about an hour watching her sleep. On top of the thrill he got from his sneak over the wall and from carefully choosing the best, most shadowy spot near her bed, Bryce loved to watch over Mercedes as she slept. It was something he’d never noticed during the years they’d been married. That night watching her sleep, the faintest of smiles gracing her face, he felt like a protector, a guardian. It was a good feeling. Something he could maybe do without becoming bored.

  With all its leafy darkness the back yard could be a spooky place however, and Bryce eventually left. She wasn’t really doing anything, after all, just lying there. He could get better on cable TV.

  The street was just as quiet tonight. He opened his door and half-slid out. “Not quite drunk,” he said to the empty street, which righted itself after only a slight yaw and pitch. He needed to settle his stomach. Maybe Mercedes would give him something to drink. She was a nice girl. His father always said as much.

  Just as he reached the rear bumper, a clacking hum and buzz sounded from her driveway, and Bryce leaned back against the Jeep as the garage door rolled up and open. She had a new green car. Another shiver of giddiness passed through Bryce as Mercedes backed out into the street, moving way too fast. She was actually within five feet of him, but all he saw was the back of her head as she looked over her shoulder, pulling onto the road with far less daintiness than the police would approve. Mercedes was in a hurry. As she shifted gears and jabbed at what had to be the garage door remote, Bryce started to speak. Before he could think of something to say, he caught his reflection in her window. He was a mess. Hair wild, tangled up clothes, teeth all fangy-like. No way I look so bad, he thought.

  Mercedes pulled away with a brief, high squeak of rubber on pavement.

  He took a couple of steps after the car, but a thump and drone from the garage stopped Bryce in his tracks. He turned, and it was a few moments before he realized the full possibilities of what he was looking at.

  The garage door was only halfway to the pavement. Stuck.

  *

  His entire life, until this exact moment, Jack hadn’t considered himself a car guy. Automobiles of any kind were mere tools, and while Jack wasn’t above leasing a muscle car when he was in L.A. playing movie star, he truly didn’t care. Zero car ego, until the Tesla Roadster Sport. He wasn’t a car guy, but he was a man, and damn if Jack didn’t like the way the Roadster handled. Fast, solid, and glitzy as hell—just the sort of thing an insipid, aimless player would drive on a night like this in the Big Orange—therefore a decent cover. The next time he had to play Hollywood, he’d rent one. He guided it through the sparse traffic, letting the car lazily flex its muscles and slide pantherlike down the moonlit aisle of concrete and steel that was Highway 101.

  For some reason Jack had always liked 101, enjoyed the idea of it ever since he’d read Kerouac’s On the Road. An American testimony in asphalt binding the edge of the continent like a book, running even with the line of the Pacific. If he kept on this road he could sail right on up the coast, through San Francisco, beyond.

  Jack eased his foot down a fraction on the accelerator, and the car strained against gravity, bounding forward like a stone leopard torn free of its moorings. Jack sighed and rolled his shoulders against the cushions. He checked his watch. Just after ten. That made it about one o’clock in Havana. Alonzo might still be awake. Jack looked around for signs of police, and dialed in the number. The last time he’d been in California the anti-cellphone laws had been on the verge of repeal, but that didn’t stop manufacturers from equipping their vehicles with additional electric ports and options for in-car phone use. The carbon fiber trim made it hard to find the buttons on the first try, but that was to be expected. Welcomed, even.

  Jack had a long, long history of spectacular first-try failures.

  He connected his phone to the car’s stereo and the sound of the dial tone filled the car, softer and somehow more pliant thanks to the Roadster’s speakers.

  Alonzo answered on the phone’s sixth ring. “What?” he demanded.

  “Hey buddy, were you sleeping?”

  “No. In the middle of a really long blink,” Alonzo replied. He coughed repeatedly over the line, exaggerating the sound into a gurgling rasp, and then knocked the phone against something hard. Probably the wall. Jack smiled. If he’d chosen a serious tone at the outset of their conversation, his friend would have responded in kind, assumed the worst. The rhythmic thudding stopped. “Sorry, man, I dropped the phone. Can’t you sleep, or what?”

  “That’d be a bad idea just now.” Jack eased the car around an elderly woman behind the wheel of a new Lincoln. “The flight into L.A. landed late, so I’m on my way to get the papers right now. Still on the road.”

  “You like the car?”

  Jack grinned. “Tesla Roadster. Very funny. Your idea?”

  “If you have to ask, I’m losing my touch. Where are you?”

  “Just over the hill. Coming up on Universal Studios on the right.” The lights blazed an ugly smear into the yellowish murk that was the L.A. sky. He squinted and looked away.

  Alonzo yawned. “So you’re close. Want to hear how my day went?”

  “Sure.”

  “Is this line secure?”

  Jack fished the phone from its moorings and keyed in the encryption option. He replaced the phone. “512 bits-worth, Al.

  “Espinosa’s new security guy met me at the airport. Ever hear of Aaron Eck?”

  Jack shook his head, then added, “No,” remembering his partner was two thousand miles away. The disembodied voice continued.

  “He retired a few years back from the Secret Service. Played football for the University of Michigan.” Alonzo seemed to be coming awake. “He’s got some pretty good ideas about keeping a lid on the Goodwill Games and all that mess, but there’s even better news.

  “Heh. Vern and Mack Tanner are still down here, finishing up that training tour with the Cuban Guard. We’ve got intel on a drug factory not a mile outside Santiago de Cuba, man.”

  Jack could hear the excitement in the other man’s voice. “Just like the old days. You going to hit it?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “It’ll be great press for Espinosa’s oath of office in a couple days.”

  Alonzo agreed. “Security will be a mess, Jack,” he repeated. “The Vice President will be in town, then all the other bigwigs a few days later when the Games start. You’ve met William Burns before, right?”

  “Just once. The VP knows about us, Al.” Though just from the occasional NSA report, Jack added silently, or the whiff the press occasionally got of their activities.

  “Well, that’s fine then. Espinosa wants us around for the week, but says everything will be fine. All the little strings wrapped up,” he said. “Oh, and get this; his guy, Eck, trained most of the Secret Service detailed to Burns, so—”

  “‘Everything’s wrapped up,’” Jack echoed.

  “Tight. Least they’re trying to make it that way. From where I stand, their security measures look more like a castle of Swiss cheese. Everywhere I look, I see chalk outlines waiting to happen.”

  “Well, you’re the great Alonzo Noel, hyperbole in the vocabulary of the private security community.”

  Alonzo’s reply violated an FCC regulation, then he chuckled sleepily. It was obviously an effort. “Espinosa said he wants to take us spearfishing sometime after the Games. I swear, Jack, the guy’s so – um.”

  “I get it. He told me once that when the doctor handed him to his mother the first time, he said, ‘Congratulations, ma’am, you have given birth to an eight-pound ham.’ I’ll bet he’s got his nose in everything you’re doing, wants to know everything.”

  “Yeah. ‘The devil’s in the details.’”

  “That sounds familiar. Hey, thanks for the update. Why don’t you go back to bed? What do you think you’re doing on the phone this late?
”

  “Right, might stunt my growth. Hey, Jack.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You make me wear a clown suit again, I’ll kill you.”

  Jack smiled. “The Major thought you looked pretty sexy in those big floppy shoes.”

  “I mean it, man, I’ll kill you.” His friend laughed. “‘Night, Jack.”

  “‘Night, dear.” The car speakers popped and crackled as Jack disconnected.

  *

  A small part of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony drifted through the house. She’d left without turning off the bedroom stereo. Must be going someplace important. She’d never done that when they were married. Whether she was walking out of a room or out of a life, Mercedes always tidied up after herself. The thought, slow enough in coming, brought a hot flush to Bryce’s neck and a cold trickle through his veins.

  He drifted from room to room, gradually sobering as he took in the physical evidence of Mercedes’ new life. His footsteps sounded hollow on the hardwood floor. Where did she get the money to do this place up, he wondered. She’d decorated her home with the same energy and consideration she had poured into their condo, though not in the same style.

  Her taste in music hadn’t changed. For a birthday a few years back Bryce bought her a better stereo system, and she’d immediately filled the hard drive with music, different stuff: jazz, rock, a little country (he shuddered). Harry Connick, Jr. played from the recessed speakers now, a jaunty number about some guy riding a roller coaster from Coney Island to Key West.

  The lights were on in the living room. There were a few paintings on the walls of the largish, vaulted space, a few nice pieces of furniture. Nothing cheap but nothing garish or too high-flown. She’d hung a bunch of plants from the rafters in the ceiling. Generally speaking, Mercedes had a way of arranging things so they always looked good but never conspicuous. He’d always liked that about her. He looked around for a television and realized it was shut in an antique cabinet he’d taken at first for a wine cupboard. It set off to the side where it wouldn’t be the focus of the room. Mercedes didn’t watch much TV, he remembered, so of course she wouldn’t build her entire living room around one, like a normal person would. She was still carefully partitioning her life, he noticed. Chairs with spindled backs, a huge overstuffed couch, matching armchairs. Each of these pieces had a proper name, but then, those were things he’d never bothered to learn.

  Turning slowly in his wife’s living room, Bryce felt a narrow pang. He wondered if he hadn’t made a mistake somewhere. Would his life be any different if he knew the names of the damn furniture? What did any of this crap matter? Bryce felt another thin blade of frustration flicker through him as he looked at the pieces of crystal on the mantle. There was a picture of her parents set among them. Though he’d looked at that picture often enough when it rested on another mantle, Bryce had never asked his wife about the two people in it. The woman was a knockout; darkish and sexy in a fun sort of way, and the man looked simply brilliant as well, not staring at the photographer but caught in the act of greeting someone off-camera. Strong jaw, rakish grin with a witty comment burgeoning behind his eyes, which were not quite the same shade of fiery aqua green as his daughter’s. The laughter was there; the captivation. It was hard to look away from the couple. They’d given their best graces to their daughter. To Mercedes. Bryce found tears blurring the corners of his vision.

  The strangers on the mantle suddenly seemed very important to him. Bryce wished with an abrupt and surprising ache that he could know them, talk to them, make a connection somehow with those graceful, happy people. Without that sort of connection, really, what was a man? What was a man worth, alone?

  Bryce shook his head and clawed briefly at his temple. This was pathetic. His therapist would term this a depression spiral, and send Bryce off for Prozac at the drive-thru pharmacy.

  That’s all he needed. Another person telling him he wasn’t just fine by himself, just fine the way he was. Bryce wasn’t good enough. Bryce wasn’t living up to his potential. His whole life it had been the same damn thing. Everybody around him—well, maybe not Mercedes, not at first, at least. It didn’t matter! Why did he have to live according to somebody else’s standards of average, of what was acceptable?

  Bryce paced the length of the room and then went under an archway into the study. Got to be something to drink here somewhere. The study shared a wall and a back-to-back fireplace with the living room and had twice the number of plants as any other room. Same stuffed, comfy-looking chairs. Light from the kitchen and dining room illuminated rows and rows of bookshelves, all full. Bryce could see well enough to know that no sideboards or open cabinets held any wine, and he found himself swearing at the expanse of french doors leading to the back patio. She had gushed all over the doors.

  Bryce walked through the dining room, around the table, and into the kitchen. An empty saucepan sat over a burner, which was off. Flour and some spice jars sat open on the counter, next to a package of crinkly spaghetti. Bryce was tempted to tear a piece of bread from the long loaf and try to find some peanut butter, but first things first. The cupboards were glass-faced; he peered into each, then opened the refrigerator. Bryce swore to himself in the kitchen and threw his hands in the air.

  Nothing to drink.

  He poured himself a glass of water and drank it slowly. What was wrong with him? So what if he didn’t know what to call furniture? A couch is a couch. Bryce leaned back against the center island in the kitchen, careful not to knock his head against any of the pots and pans hanging there. So Merse is doing okay. That’s great; good for her. Just great. Hard work deserves reward, and this house was definitely that.

  Except she’d bought the house on his credit, under his name, as his wife.

  Great, just great. He threw the rest of his water on the floor. Maybe she’d slip on it and crack her sharp little coccyx.

  As if the gulp of water had tipped the balance in Bryce’s system, he suddenly had to relieve himself. The closest toilet adjoined a room down the hall to the garage—then Bryce thought, Why not on her lawn? Bryce made for the front door, walking down a short hallway lined with pictures. It took half a minute to undo all the latches and locks (new, he noticed) and nearly an equal amount of time standing on the edge of her front porch before he could ease the insistent pressure.

  Satisfied with himself and feeling a bit less drunk, Bryce stepped back into the house. Five of her damn pictures hung along the approach to the dining room, and Bryce blinked at each for a few moments. It was the pictures, taking the damn silly pictures, that pulled her away from him months ago. He found it trite that she could have become distracted—obsessed was a better word—with such a pathetic pastime. Bryce harbored little more than disdain for trivial-minded people, and he wondered how taking pictures—they weren’t even that good—could have become more important to Mercedes than the needs of her husband. Bryce realized he still had the glass of water in his hand, and he turned back toward the kitchen.

  “Whoops,” he said, swiping an elbow against the final frame in the hallway. It hit the wooden floor with a hard, sharp clatter, and he glanced back at his feet.

  The glass over the photo had crazed but remained solidly in the frame. The heavy border, apparently, had saved his wife’s “masterpiece.” Well. He’d pass this way on his exit. No reason to hurry.

  Until this point Bryce had wandered the house with little more than a vague plan to mar it, to damage her house somehow. Tip some furniture over, crack a pane of glass somewhere, maybe rip up some of the clothes he’d bought her. She had a solid glass globe, a fist-sized Earth, that he had always wanted to throw through something. He hefted the thick tumbler in his hand, and then had a thought. It struck him there in the foyer that he could actually be in the house when she got back. Of course.

  She’d been in a hurry; she’d never expect him. Whatever errand that sent her driving off into the dark had obviously distracted her. She’d driven right by without even seeing him. Perf
ect. After entering the garage Bryce had thumbed the reset button on the garage door opener, and it had shut smoothly. Heh. Maybe he would knock over a few things first, enough to shock and disorient her so she’d be distracted enough for him to really take her by surprise. And then…

  And then…

  And what would happen then? Bryce felt all giddy-cold again. The lightheadedness hit him in uneven waves, and he set the glass tumbler safely on the table with effort. Images whirled and danced through his mind; eddied and burst in bubbles of memory and anger. He stared for a long moment at the hardwood floor, swaying slightly, seeing her long body splayed, spinning wildly across its finely polished surface. Was this a memory, or an earnest wish of things to come? He let his gaze slide around the room. They’d fought that night in the house she loved. A house without much furniture yet. He saw her flying against the wall, felt her ribs give a bit under his knuckles—he’d hurt his hands badly that night. Took a stitch before he could check himself into a hotel.

  She’d always loved the damn house. Fixed it up and nattered about it for weeks before they – He squeezed his eyes shut as hard as he could, remembering the look of sadness and shock she’d leveled at him when he had shoved her out of the kitchen, back against the table.

  Bryce laid his palms on the pine table. Weeks before he’d caught her spying on him, she’d loved this place, cared for it. Cared for it like she’d never cared for him. All along.

  She had planned on leaving him months before that night, sure. Probably even from the beginning. Waiting for an excuse, any excuse, to move right into her little hidey-hole. He rubbed at the smooth surface. The pine was like the floor, as hot honey-gold as her skin…

  Bryce blinked, pressing the heel of his hand hard into one eye. He was starting to sober up, and he wasn’t quite ready. The feeling of loss, of something misplaced, persisted. He reached to pick up the glass on the table, and noticed the neatly-fanned papers for the first time. Everything in the house was just so neat, so arranged. He worked his fingers under the bottom sheaf, intending to send the whole lot flying, then stopped. No, something bigger.