What he saw inside that huge room confirmed it: people here were trying to kill each other.
What it reminded him of was an epic movie battle scene set in medieval times. War cries and shrieks of pain and rage echoing above the thunder of horses’ hooves and the clash of steel swords on armor plating and chain mail. Except these battle chargers were made of titanium, not flesh and bone, and carried their riders on wheels instead of hooves.
Out on the gleaming honey-gold hardwood floor, four wheelchairs were engaged in a no-holds-barred duel for possession of what appeared to be a regulation-size volleyball. Now the ball rose above the fray in a tall arc, to be plucked from the air by a long brown arm and tucked between drawn-up knees and leaning chest. The four chairs swiveled, drew apart amid cries of “Here here here!” and “Get ’im, get the—” and “No you ain’t, mother—” then smashed together again more violently than before.
Cory’s fascination carried him into the room, where he found a spot in the shadow of a bank of bleacher seats from which to watch the mayhem. Now that he could see it more clearly, the contest on the court seemed less like a battle between medieval knights and more like a grudge match being settled via amusement park bumper cars—though the canted wheels on the low-slung chairs did resemble warriors’ shields, even down to the dents and dings. The occupants of the wheelchairs—four young males of assorted ethnicities—all wore expressions of murderous intent, but the chairs moved clumsily, slowly, and their clashes produced more noise than effect.
Again the white ball arced into the air, to be retrieved by a lanky black kid wearing a Dodgers baseball cap—backward, of course. After tucking the ball into his lap, the kid hunched protectively over it and slapped at the wheels of his chair with hands wearing gloves with the fingers cut off, pumping as hard as he could for the far end of the court. The other three chairs massed in frantic pursuit. One, manned by a stocky boy of an indeterminate racial mix, seemed to be angling to cut off the possessor of the ball, before it was smashed viciously from the side by another pursuer. Over they went, toppling forward almost in slow motion, chair and occupant together, spilling the latter facedown onto the court. Above him, the chair’s wheels spun ineffectively, like the futilely waving appendages of a half-squashed beetle.
Cory lunged forward and was about to dash onto the court to render assistance when his arm was caught and held in a grip of incredible strength.
“Leave him be. They got him down there, they’ll get him up.”
The reflexive jerk of his head toward the speaker was off target by a couple of feet. Adjusting his gaze downward, he felt a jolt of recognition that made his breath catch, though the face was one he’d seen only as a very small child’s. It only reminded him of one he’d last seen nearly thirty years before, and since then only in his dreams.
You have our mother’s eyes.
He didn’t say that aloud but smiled wryly at the broad-shouldered young man beside him and nodded toward the knot of wheelchairs now gathering around the fallen one out on the court. “You sure they won’t just kill him? They sure seemed to be trying to a minute ago.”
“Nah—he’s safe. He’s not who they’re mad at.” The young man reached across his body and the wire-rimmed wheel of his chair to offer his cropped-gloved hand. “Hi, I’m Matt.”
Cory put his hand in the warm, hard grip and felt emotions expand and shiver inside his chest. He fought to keep them out of his voice as he replied, “I’m Cory. We spoke on the phone. I’m your—” He had to grab for a breath anyway.
So Matt finished it for him. “My Guardian Angel. My bro. Yeah, I know.”
Chapter 2
He’d seen him come in, of course he had.
He’d thought he was prepared for this. Should have been. Hell, he’d talked to the guy on the phone two or three times since the day Wade had called him from the hospital to tell him the Angel he’d always thought was a figment of his childhood imagination was real.
“You look like Wade,” he said, feeling like he needed to unclog his throat. “A little bit—around the eyes.”
“Well, we both got the blue ones, I guess.”
This brother’s eyes were darker than Wade’s, Matt noticed. And looked like they’d seen a whole lot more of what was bad in the world. Which was saying something, considering Wade was a homicide cop.
“Yeah? Whose did I get?”
“Mom’s. You got Mom’s eyes.”
About then, Matt realized he was still holding his brother’s hand, and evidently it occurred to Cory about the same time. There was a mutual rush of breath, and he got his arms up about the same time Cory’s arms came around him.
Matt had gotten over being shy about showing emotions five years ago, so he shouldn’t be ashamed to be tearing up now. And he wasn’t.
He could hear some hoots and whistles coming from the court, though, so after some throat-clearings and coughs and a backslap or two, he and Cory let go of each other. Dee-Jon, Frankie and Ray had gotten Vincent picked up off the floor, and all four were churning across the floor toward them, along with Dog and Wayans in their regular chairs, moving in from the far sidelines.
“Woo hoo, look at Teach, I think he got him a girlfriend!”
“Hey, Teach, I didn’t know you was—”
“Yo, Teach, who the ugly bi—”
At which point Matt held up his hand and put on his fierce-coach look and hollered, “Whoa, guys—I won’t have any of that trash talk about my brother.”
By this time he and Cory were surrounded, and the exclamations came at him from all sides.
“Brother!”
“He yo brothah?”
“Hey, you told us your bro was a cop. He don’t look like no cop.”
“Yeah, he look like a wuss.”
Matt glanced up at Cory to see how he was taking this, but Cory was grinning, so he did, too. “Nah, this is my other brother. He’s a reporter.”
“You got a othah brothah? How come you never—”
“Reporter—like on CNN?”
“How come I never seen you on TV?”
“Yeah, Dee-Jon, like you watch the news.”
Cory waited for the chorus to die down, then said, “I’m the other kind of reporter. A journalist—you know, a writer.”
The kids didn’t have too much to say about that. The chairs rocked and swiveled a little bit, and some heads nodded. Shoulders shrugged.
“Huh. A writer…”
“A writer—okay, that’s cool.”
“He’s been in more war zones than you guys have,” Matt said, which got the kids going again.
Dee-Jon shot his chin up. “Yeah? You ever been shot?”
“I have, actually,” Cory said.
Obviously thrown a little bit by that, Dee-Jon hesitated, then said, “Yeah, well, I have, too. That’s what put me in this chair. I was just walkin’ down the street, doin’ ma’ thing, not botherin’ nobody, know what I’m sayin’? And this car comes cruisin’, and this dude starts in shootin’—like, eh-eh-eh-eh—an’ next thing I know I’m down on the sidewalk lookin’ up at the sky, and I don’t feel nothin’. Still don’t. But, hey, I can still satisfy my woman, don’t think I can’t.”
That brought a whole barrage of hoots and comments, most of them in the kind of language Matt had pretty much gotten used to and given up trying to ban entirely. He wasn’t sure about how his big brother was taking it, though.
But Cory hadn’t batted an eye, just started asking questions, asking the kids how they’d gotten hurt, what had happened to them that put them in the chairs. In about ten seconds he had them all pulled in close around him, and was listening while each one told his story, sometimes yelling over the other eager voices, sometimes almost whispering in a respectful silence.
Ray, describing how his dad liked to beat up on him and throw him up against a wall when he was crazy drunk, and one day missed the wall and threw him through a third-floor apartment window instead.
And Dog, admitt
ing how he’d been living up to his nickname hotdogging it on his dirt bike out on the Mojave Desert, showing off for his friends the day he’d flipped over and broken his neck. “I was stupid,” Dog said with a shrug. “Now I gots to pay.”
Wayans wasn’t stupid, just unlucky, having been born with spina bifida. And Vincent hadn’t had much to do with the automobile accident that had injured him, either, just happened to be in the wrong intersection at the exact time when a corporate lawyer on his way home from entertaining a client at a Beverly Hills nightclub failed to notice the light was red.
Frankie tried to get away with his favorite story about getting attacked by a shark, but the others shouted him down, so he had to admit he’d gotten his injury skateboarding illegally in the Los Angeles River’s concrete bed.
Matt hung back and watched his brother, the way the kids responded to him, the way he listened, not with sugary sympathy, but with his complete attention, interest that was focused and genuine, and that made people want to open up and spill things they wouldn’t normally think about telling a stranger. He could see what had made his brother a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, although the whole war-correspondent thing was still hard for him to grasp. He’d been prepared to like this newfound long-lost brother—particularly since he’d had those dreamlike memories of him protecting him from the bad scary stuff of his nightmares. What he hadn’t expected to feel was respect. Maybe even awe.
“Hey, guys,” he said, breaking into the chorus of questions now being fired at Cory from all sides, “you want to know about my brother, go home and do an Internet search on Cory Pearson. That’s P-E-A-R-S-O-N for you semiliterates. Now get out of here so he and I can spend some time together. We’ve got a lot to catch up on. Go on, hit the showers.”
The response was predictable.
“Ah, man.”
“Hey, it’s early—how come we gotta quit now?”
“Yeah, I wanna hit something.”
“You can’t hit nothin’—you a wussy.”
“I’m ’a show you wussy—you hit like a little girl.”
The noise drifted off across the court as the six kids headed for the locker room. Matt and Cory followed, slowly.
“I see what you meant when you said it’s not each other they’re mad at. That game they were playing—it’s what they call Murderball, right?”
“Officially,” Matt said, pausing to scoop up the forgotten volleyball, “it’s called quad rugby. It’s been an official sport of the Paralympics since…I think, Atlanta.”
Cory nodded. “I’ve done some reading up on it. The rules allow them to do just about anything they can to the chairs, right? But they can’t go after the occupant. Whoever thought up that game was a genius. Gives them a chance to beat up on the thing they hate most and can’t live without. One thing, though. Doesn’t the ‘quad’ stand for—”
“Quadriplegic—yeah, it does. And most people think the same thing, which is that quads can’t move their arms, but that’s not true. There’s a whole range of motion, depending on where the SCI occurred.”
Cory glanced at him. “But you’re not—”
“No—I’m a para-T-11, to be exact.” He grinned lopsidedly up at his brother. “That’s how we refer to ourselves. These kids are mostly paras, too. Dee-Jon is the only one who’s a quad, and he’d like to try out for the U.S. Paralympic team someday. No, when I started this program, it was supposed to be wheelchair basketball. But the kids had other ideas. They were so rough on the chairs, I finally quit fighting it and went looking for some sponsorship so we could get some rugby chairs. You might have noticed, they’re built a little differently than regular chairs, even the sports models.” He slapped the canted wheel of his own chair.
Cory grinned. “I noticed. Also noticed you’re short a couple.”
“We’re working on it. Those suckers cost a couple thousand apiece. We got lucky right off the bat, because the guy that hit Vincent got his law firm to cough up the cost of the first two. The U.S. Quad Rugby Team gave us one. And…you know, it’s taken us a couple of years to get the other three, but we’ll get there. Eventually.”
“I might be able to help with that,” Cory said, so offhandedly Matt wasn’t sure he’d heard him for a moment.
Then, when he was sure, he didn’t know what to say. He bounced the volleyball once and coughed and finally said, “That’d be cool, man. Really. Thanks.” He looked over at his brother, but Cory wasn’t looking at him. Carefully not looking at him. His profile gave nothing away.
“No problem.”
They’d reached the gymnasium door. Matt swiveled his chair about halfway to facing his brother and said, “I’ve got to supervise these guys, but I’ll be free in an hour or so, if you want to…uh, I don’t know. Like…hang out?”
Okay, he’d been hanging out with teenagers too long.
Cory grinned as if he’d had the same thought, and in the spirit of the moment, said, “Okay, cool. I’ll be here.”
Matt nodded and went wheeling into the hallway, leaving his brother standing in the doorway. Halfway to the locker rooms, from which he could hear the usual racket and hair-curling language as his team got themselves and each other into the showers, he paused and looked back. The doorway was empty.
So. He was alone. Nobody to see him when he let his head fall back and exhaled at the ceiling, not sure whether he felt like laughing or crying. What he wanted to do, he supposed, was both. So instead he smiled to himself, like a little kid with a new bike. Shook his head, whooshed out more air, scrubbed his hands over his face, smiled again. Sniffed, wiped his eyes and muttered some swear words he’d never let the kids hear him use.
After a few minutes, when he had himself under control again, he swiveled and wheeled himself on down to the locker room.
Matt slid a dripping medium-rare hamburger patty onto Cory’s plate and said, “Don’t be shy, bro. Dig in.”
“Looks great,” his brother said, helping himself to slices of tomato and onion.
But behind the rimless glasses, his eyes held shadows. He hadn’t said much, either, the whole time Matt had been fixing the burgers, just watched everything he did with that quiet focus that seemed to be his natural way. Now, with food on the table, and nobody with any particular reason to say anything, silence fell. It didn’t seem like a comfortable silence.
Matt doctored up his burger the way he liked it, took a bite, chewed and swallowed, then said, super-casually, “Hey, man. I hope you’re not blaming yourself, or anything like that.”
Cory put down his burger, and one corner of his mouth went up as he glanced over at Matt. “For what part?”
“What part? For losing track of us—Wade and me and…the little girls. Waiting so long to try to find us. What the hell did you think I meant? This?” He hit the rim of the wheel and threw him a look. “Why would you be blaming yourself for this?”
Cory shrugged and picked up his burger. Put it down again and stared at it as if it had turned bad on him all of a sudden. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Okay, wait.” Matt couldn’t believe this guy. He huffed out a laugh. “You’re not thinking you could have changed what happened to me. If you’d been here. That’s crap. That’s just…Look here, okay? I probably would have found some other way to screw up my life. It’s just the way I am. You’ve got no way of knowing this, but I’ve always been a daredevil, taking chances I shouldn’t, even when I knew better. You being around wouldn’t have changed that.”
Cory gave him an appraising look, and the light was back in his eyes, as if he’d put the guilt away, for now. “A chance-taker, huh? That why you chose to teach in an inner-city school?”
Matt snorted. “Hadn’t thought about it quite like that, but…yeah, maybe. Probably.”
“Wade told me he was surprised—that’s an under-statement, by the way—when you decided to become a teacher. He said you weren’t ever much for school…being indoors. Said you reminded him of Tom Sawyer. You’d always rather be ou
tdoors, mixed up in some sort of adventure. And by the way, he blames you for any and all trouble you two got into when you were kids.”
Matt laughed silently, nodding while he chewed. “He would.”
“You did get through college, though. That’s something.”
“Yeah, well, I guess it’s a good thing I did…as it turns out. Gave me something to fall back on, career wise. Not that I’m any great shakes as an academic, you understand. I started out teaching phys ed, substitute teaching now and then. Now I teach ninth grade social studies in addition to the PE. Seems to be working out okay. It’s a challenge, though, I grant you, going up against the gang influence—drugs, the whole culture of violence. I like it, though—and you’re right, maybe because it’s a challenge. Like…maybe I had something to prove to myself. Maybe.”
Cory said mildly, “Seems like you could have done that just as well by going back to your old job.”
“Hey,” Matt said, letting himself back away from the table. “Forgot the beer. Can I get you one?”
“Sure.”
He could feel those dark blue eyes boring into him as he made his way to the fridge, got out two cold ones and came back to the table. His brother didn’t push, though. Just waited, as Matt was discovering was his natural way.
Matt slid one of the cans across to Cory and popped open the other. Took a drink, then figured there was no use avoiding the subject. He should have known it would come up, and was going to come up again, his brother being who he was.
“The mountains, you mean. The river.” There. That wasn’t so bad, was it?
“I had a talk with your former partner,” his brother said quietly.
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