by J. M. Colail
D was nodding, his brow still furrowed. “Had some bridge work done.”
“Yeah, that’s a popular one. While you were out they implanted a transmitter in one of your bones, probably your jaw since your gums were already opened up. A small, nonmetallic transmitter with a forty-year lithium power cell. Nontoxic and high frequency, detectable via satellite from virtually anywhere.”
“Motherfucker,” D said, rubbing his jaw.
“The device is deactivated when an asset retires, dies, or otherwise leaves, as you did.”
“But you got it reactivated, right?”
“I have prevented a lot of assassinations in my time. There are a lot of people at the Pentagon who owe me favors.”
“Who’s to prevent somebody else from trackin’ me with this fuckin’ thing?” D said, looking like he wanted to rip his jaw out of his skull to be rid of it.
“Oh, no. The frequency is key-code encrypted. It was actually quite difficult to gain access to it. I made sure no one else ever could, though. I had your encryptions purged from the system once I had them.”
D still looked troubled. “I don’t like the idea a some bug in my head lettin’ you track me. No offense meant ta you, but I ain’t one ta be on no leash.”
“I know.” She thought for a moment. “If you want me to shut it down, I will.”
He opened his mouth quickly, probably to say “hell yes,” then shut it again, thinking. He heaved a mighty sigh. “Better not. You gonna be lookin’ in on Jack, I guess?” She nodded. “You might need ta find me. Was already thinking we oughta set up some kinda weekly check-in, so if I miss it you know somethin’s up. Guess… be good if you was able ta find me,” he said, grudgingly.
“I think so too.”
He held her eyes for a moment, and then got up. “I’m gonna sack out. Be leavin’ in the mornin’… if yer okay, that is,” he added.
She flapped a hand. “I’m fine.” He started to head to the second bedroom. “D?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I ask you something?”
He turned back. “Shoot.”
Megan considered her phrasing before speaking. “What is it that you want, ultimately? Once you’re done with the brothers, and say you’ve gotten Jack free of Witsec. What are you hoping for then?”
He leaned against the wall. “Well, he wants… ya know, a life. A garden and a dog and… normal stuff.”
She cocked her head. “Is that what you want?”
“What I want is ta give him what he wants.” He sighed. “I jus’ hope I remember how.” He turned and went into the bedroom, shutting the door behind him
“CAN’T I ride in a wheelchair?”
“No. You have to go on a gurney. You just had surgery, for Christ’s sake.”
“Yesterday.”
“Gurney.”
“Fine.” But Jack at least insisted on getting out of bed and onto the gurney himself, which he did very slowly and carefully.
Churchill walked at his side as he was loaded into an elevator and taken to the rooftop helipad, where a medevac helicopter was waiting. “The helicopter will take us to the airport,” Churchill said, “and we’ll fly from there.”
“I can fly?”
“The government has planes with medical equipment; it’ll be just like being back in your room.”
“Swell.” Jack held onto the edges of his gurney, feeling acrophobic all of a sudden, as they loaded him into the helicopter. Churchill got in next to the pilot and a flight nurse climbed in and tucked himself next to the gurney. Jack stared out the window at the Baltimore cityscape. I wonder if he’s still in town, or if he’s halfway across the country. Jack was struck by the absurd hope that D was still in town, and that he might by chance look up and see the helicopter leaving. One last good-bye, even if he didn’t know Jack was on board.
The nurse was putting a headset on Jack, cutting off most external sound as the rotor blades started up. “You okay, Jack?” Churchill said, tinny through the headset.
Jack nodded. “I’m okay.” Just shot full of holes and heartbroken. No big thing. He reached out and touched the window glass with one finger as the helicopter lifted off, zooming away from the hospital faster than Jack expected. Within a few minutes, the city was receding as they headed for BWI.
Good-bye, D. I miss you already.
JACK WOKE up in yet another hospital room. As before, Churchill was sitting in a chair by the bed, except now it was night, and this wasn’t Baltimore. “Jesus, did I sleep the whole flight?” he rasped.
Churchill gave a start and dropped the book he’d been reading. “Oh, shit… uh, yeah. The nurse gave you a sedative so you would.”
“Is this Albany?”
He grinned. “We were never going to Albany, Jack. We always say we are in case we’re overheard. It’s our little code word.”
“Oh. Where’s this, then?”
“Welcome to Portland, Jack. Your new home.”
“Maine?”
“Oregon.”
Jack stared.
“I know; it’s far.”
“Jesus.”
“You’ll be here in the hospital for at least a week before we can take you to your new house.”
“Where am I going to work? Do I have a name? What about money? How am I—”
Churchill held up a hand. “Shh. There’ll be time for all those discussions later. Everything’s taken care of; you don’t have to worry.” He got up and came closer. “But if you’d like to know your new name, here it is.” He handed Jack a driver’s license.
He stared at it, an Oregon license, with his face on it next to a name that was only half his. Jack Davies. Generic. Everyday. Ordinary.
Safe.
There had to be a zillion guys named Jack Davies in the country. How would anyone find him with this name?
Especially people he wanted to find him?
D WAS checking around for anything he’d forgotten when Megan shuffled out of her room in a bathrobe, looking even more bruised and battered than the night before, if that were possible. He felt another surge of anger at Petros for the job he’d done on his friend.
Friend. His only friend apart from Jack. And now the only friend he could see whenever he wanted to. After years of being alone, the idea of being so again had lost its appeal, and he was glad that she was in his corner, at least.
“You heading out?” she said, the words half-swallowed in a huge yawn.
“Yeah. Headin’ up ta New York. Brothers got a big presence up there; gonna sniff ’round a bit, find a place ta crash, scout things out.”
“I’ll be here for at least a week. After that, I don’t know. You got my cell.”
He nodded, patting his pocket for car keys, and coming to an embarrassingly obvious realization. “Oh, fuck. I don’t have a car.”
She held out her keys. “Take this one. Treasury issue. I’d advise you to swap the plates as fast as you can.” She shrugged off his objection before he’d even voiced it. “They’ll send me another one. Don’t worry about it.”
He took the keys. “Well… all right.” They stood there by the door in awkward silence for a moment. D felt something else was required, but he was ill at ease in this situation.
Megan just smiled, then stepped close and hugged him. D hugged back after a moment’s hesitation, being careful of her many injuries. “You take care. Keep me posted.”
“Will do. And, uh….”
“Soon as I’m back on my feet I’ll look in on him. You, uh… have a message you want me to give him?”
D considered that. “No. I cain’t tell Jack nothin’ he don’t already know. Not through no third party, anyhow. Not even if it’s you.”
“Understood.”
D let his eyes linger for a moment on her battered face. “Thank you,” he said, hoping she could hear the many layers and vast depths of his gratitude.
She sighed. “Get out of here before you embarrass both of us,” she said, shoving him out the door. He picked up his bag
s, one with clothes and one with guns, and headed out.
He found Megan’s nondescript Taurus in the parking lot and climbed in, that old sense of beginning a new venture lending lift to his rotors as they spun faster and faster. He backed out and turned the car’s nose first to the street, then to the highway, then to mighty I-95, north to New York.
D shook out his mirrored sunglasses and slid them onto his face, letting the miles accumulate between him and the emotional, wrenching days he’d spent in Baltimore, each click of the odometer stripping him back, closer to who he’d once been, freezing his mind and focusing his thoughts onto one goal, one target, one plan.
A grim little smile creased his lips as morning broke over Maryland, a smile that meant only one thing: that someone was going to be very, very sorry.
CHAPTER 28
Three months later….
JACK WAS watching a little boy, about three years old, try to pick up a pumpkin that was at least as big as he was. The boy had curly blond hair and was wearing overalls and a bright red hoodie. His little arms didn’t even reach halfway around the pumpkin, but he was screwing up his face and giving it the old college try.
A man came up to the boy and crouched at his side. He was wearing jeans and a gray cable-knit turtleneck sweater with expensive-looking leather gloves. He had casual stubble and his hair was mussed in that weekend-suburban-dad way. He owned the world and knew it. “You like that one, sport?” he said to the little boy.
“Daddy, this one!” said the boy, pointing and looking up at his father, who could do anything, lift anything, give him anything, and towered so high that he blocked the sun. “This big one!”
“Okay,” the man said, chuckling. A prettily plump woman came up with a wagon in tow, a girl of about six hanging onto her hand. The dad lifted the large pumpkin and put it in the wagon with the two that were already there. “All right, that’ll be plenty for jack-o’-lanterns,” he said. “Let’s find some tiny ones and then we’ll go to Aunt Sharon’s house.”
“Up!” the little boy cried, bouncing on his tiny feet. The father reached down and swung the boy effortlessly up to his shoulders and hung on to his legs as they walked away, unaware that Jack was watching them go.
He looked down at the pumpkins scattered all around the field, waiting to be chosen for exalted Halloween duty.
Why am I here? Why the fuck do I need a pumpkin? I don’t have anyone to help me carve it or tease me about what a bad job I’m making of it.
He looked around at his fellow pumpkin-shoppers. Families, couples, kids, grandparents. His eyes snagged on a pair of men in jeans and colorful sweaters, joking with each other and play-shoving as they debated their pumpkin choices. As he watched, the men caught hands and squeezed briefly, then let go.
He sighed and picked up a good-sized pumpkin. What the hell. Single people need jack-o’-lanterns too.
“HEY, JACK!”
Jack looked up from the intimidating pile of books and magazines sitting at the information desk, waiting to be reshelved. Lydia was coming out from the backroom, pulling on her coat. “Yeah?”
“You’re on recovery tonight?”
“Sadly, yes.”
“Well, we’re going out to Skully’s. Do you want to come?”
“I’ll be another half-hour at least. Can I meet you there?”
“Sure,” she said, beaming a wide smile at him. Terrance, the manager, was waiting at the front door to unlock it so Lydia and the other booksellers could leave. “See you in a little while.”
Jack nodded, tossing her an absent wave as he quickly sorted the books into piles by area of the store. Fiction, sports, kids, history…. He frowned at a large coffee stain on an expensive coffee-table book about stained-glass windows. Another one for the damaged pile, he grumbled to himself. Goddamned customers.
“I’ll just be twenty minutes or so, Jack,” said Terrance as he headed for the cash office with his arms full of register drawers. “Do what you can.”
“Okay.”
“And can you check the tables?” he called from across the store.
“Sure.” Jack left the desk and went to the rear of the store, where several reading tables sat near the Psychology section. It was a frequent dumping-ground for customer castoffs. Indeed, there were several piles of books and a few empty coffee cups waiting for him. Jack gathered everything up and took it back to the service desk, his mind pleasantly blank.
Churchill had offered him several choices of employment, for all of which he was extravagantly overqualified. Even so, the idea of working somewhere where he didn’t have to make life-or-death decisions had its appeal, at least at this stage of his life in which he was still recovering from a serious injury and adjusting to not only a new name but a new existence.
This job had been his choice. Bookstores had always been among his favorite places, and while he knew retail was hard work, surely book retail would be more pleasant than, say, electronics or cars. So far, he enjoyed the job. He was an ordinary bookseller and cashier, and the work was peaceful. His co-workers laughed when he used that word to describe it, to which he could only reply that peace was a relative term.
He’d worried that his age would set him apart from his co-workers but soon found that wasn’t the case. The sellers ran the gamut of ages from the predictable college students and young adults to forty-year-olds to one feisty retiree who wore garish pentacle jewelry and Birkenstocks to work and could tell you anything you wanted to know about Tarot cards. No one blinked an eye to find a thirty-six-year-old man working as a bookseller.
He’d spent a week in the hospital, and then another three weeks regaining his strength in an ordinary two-bedroom apartment which the Marshal’s office had thoughtfully furnished in a style Jack thought of privately as “temporary-housing chic.” He’d had thoughts of spiffing the place up a little, but every time he got close to doing so, something stopped him.
You won’t be here that long. Don’t get too comfortable.
Which could just as easily be true as not. He could be here another two weeks, or another two years. A lot of things about this situation were difficult. Not being able to do his work. Getting used to a new identity. Being separated from the man he loved. But that uncertainty… the more time went by, that was becoming the thing that kept him awake. Not knowing how long his exile would last, or if it would ever end at all.
His co-workers greeted him warmly when he finally made it to the local bar where they often gathered for drinks after shifts. He was mildly dismayed to see Geoff there. He hadn’t expected to see him here since tonight was his night off. Geoff was twenty-eight and took every opportunity to chat him up. He clearly had… motives. Geoff was a nice enough guy. Good-looking too. But Jack just couldn’t go there; not now.
It didn’t help that his co-workers were forever trying to fix him up. He hadn’t told anyone that he was gay, but somehow they all seemed to know. He avoided Geoff’s eyes and took a chair next to Gloria, his favorite co-worker. She was twenty-two and heavily Goth, and Jack had no idea why, but he adored her. “Hi, handsome,” she said as he sat down. “How’s tricks?”
“Oh, you know. Sell some books, shelve some books.”
“You’re breaking Geoff’s little heart,” she muttered.
Jack glanced over at him. “He’ll live.”
“All night he’s asking if you’re coming, when you’re coming, and now here you are and you give him the brush-off.”
“He just doesn’t give up.”
“He might if you told him you were spoken for.” Gloria knocked back a shot of something.
Jack stared. “How did you know that?” he whispered. He had never breathed so much as a syllable even suggesting that he might be attached.
She met his eyes. “I didn’t until you said that. I suspected.”
He sagged. Walked right into that one, Francisco. “Oh. Did you also suspect I’m a moron? Because I am.”
“Piffle. Sooooo,” she said, leaning closer
so their conversation could be at least semi-intimate. “Who is he?”
Oh God. The words “long story” don’t even begin to cover it. “No one you know.”
“I didn’t think it was anyone I knew; I was asking who he is.”
“I… can’t really talk about it.”
Wrong answer. Jack could all but see the curiosity level jack up a few notches in her eyes. “You can’t talk about it? Why not?”
“It’s complicated.”
She eyed him. “Don’t tell me he’s one of those married, closeted guys. No, wait… he’s a Baptist minister, right? And he runs one of those bullshit ex-gay re-education programs and shouts from the pulpit about the evils of the hell-bound queers. And he works for the Pat Robertson campaign.”
Jack had to chuckle at the picture she painted and its total lack of resemblance to reality. “Yep, you got it. Hit the nail on the head. But it really gets me off when he cries out to Jesus while he’s fucking me.”
Gloria laughed. “Fine, don’t tell me.”
He stared at the table, wishing for a beer. “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you,” he said. “It’s just complicated. And it’s hard for me to talk about him or even think about him, because I can’t be with him right now.”
“How long since you’ve seen him?”
“Three months.”
Her eyes widened. “Shit.”
Jack nodded. “Seems like longer sometimes. Thinking about my time with him… I don’t know. Sometimes it doesn’t feel real, like I must have dreamed it.” He sighed. “I don’t even have a picture of him.”
“When are you going to see him again?”
He met her gaze. “I don’t know. Maybe never.”
She shook her head. “Jesus, Jack.”
Jack jerked himself out of the conversation. “I really can’t talk about this.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes sympathetic. “Whatever the hell’s going on with you, it can’t be good.”
“Hi, Jack!” Jack and Gloria both looked up, surprised. Geoff had ventured around the table and was standing over them, all puppyish enthusiasm and wide-eyed hope. Jack felt like shit. “How’s it going?”