by David Beers
Matthew laughed quietly. “No. Brain is still trucking along. Just resting. Had a busy three days. Busier three days than I may have ever had before, and I just need some sleep. You gotten any sleep lately?”
“I got five hours last night, but I doubt I’ll be getting any tonight. Like I said, big things happening over here and sleeping will slow them down.”
“How’s Jake?” Matthew asked, sounding child-like. “I like him. You like him?”
“Yeah, Jake’s good. Green, but good. Why do you like him?”
“You got an insecure kid on your hands, and most of the time, those kids outwork anyone else. He’s probably working right now, isn’t he?”
Art looked out his open door. Jake was gone, was always gone, only showing up when he had some more news to deliver. The rest of the people under Art sent emails and reports, but none of them were developing Jake’s ideas. None of them thought about the lumber, even if they had been too late, and not a single soul in the entire FBI had thought about the phone. So yeah, the kid was working, the kid was always working—probably more than Art himself.
“Yeah, he’s off trying to find you.”
“Good. Good for him. I really do wish him the best of luck; he’d probably have a hellofa career if his first case hadn’t been this one, because now he’s just going to die like everyone else.”
“I talked to a priest, Matthew.”
“That’s right, you’re Catholic,” Brand said.
“He’s not too worried about what you’re doing.”
Again, the soft chuckle. “Well, one, he’s not a physicist, and two, he’s probably going to heaven. I wouldn’t worry either if those things applied to me. Are you still worried, Art?”
Art wanted to say no, but he wasn’t going to lie right now. He was worried, but also excited. Maybe the priest had been right. Maybe the creator doesn’t allow his pots to destroy each other. Art showed up in Texas, without any authority to do so, and found this kid sitting down there working a case that he probably had no business working—except he had busted ass the previous two years and so his superiors made him detective. Divine Providence. Art had never seen it. He’d read about it, knew the story of Jonah, knew the story of Paul being blinded on the roads and then going on to spread the Good News far and wide. Divine Providence happened before and it could happen now. Maybe miracles weren’t done with. Maybe God moved his hand when he was ready and maybe God had moved his hand with Jake, putting him in the right place at the right time, so that the madman on the other end of this call couldn’t damn them all.
“Yeah, I’m worried, Matthew. I’m going to be worried until you’re dead. Not in jail, not frozen, but completely dead. But I’m coming to realize something pretty important, something maybe the rest of the world doesn’t see fully. You’re not God. You never were.”
Jake reported back to Art. He was right; the phone was wirelessly tapped, beamed up into satellites which garbled the data before beaming back down to Earth, and then bounced through an endless array of servers until Matthew’s encrypted computer grabbed it up. Matthew Brand had access to everything Jake had said over the past few weeks.
There wasn’t any way to trace it.
“No fucking surprise there,” Art said.
The techies were fairly certain Brand couldn’t listen unless the phone was being utilized, as in Jake was on a call.
“There’s that at least,” Art said.
The phone sat by itself in the passenger’s seat of Jake’s car right now, battery in. He’d spoken with Art for two hours about it, brought in other people, all experts that Jake didn’t know in fields that he had never considered. They talked and talked and talked about what could be done.
“It’s a God damn miracle,” Art said at one point, looking at the phone on the table.
Art attributed a lot of today to God, and probably a lot of other people at the table did as well. Jake didn’t know whether that was true or not. Jake did know that they had an opportunity here and all the ideas that were passed around didn’t seem to fully grasp what they could do. Or maybe everyone grasped it, but they didn’t know how to fully capitalize on it. Jake didn’t either.
Not yet at least.
Jake grabbed his new phone from his pocket, the one now issued from the FBI, and dialed up his father, wanting to talk to him, wanting to hear something besides this case for a few minutes.
“Tell me a story,” he said, so his father did.
Oh, Jesus. I’ve been drinking and thinking. Your mother is out with some other couple somewhere, and I’m just sitting here on our balcony with a scotch. I’ve been thinking about this for a while and I didn’t know how to tell you, exactly. I suppose drunk isn’t the best way, but I might not have the courage later. I don’t know, just listen.
Vietnam wasn’t easy. I don’t really know any other way to put it. It wasn’t easy. I’m not going to sit here and go into detail about what went on over there because I think too many people have done that already. A lot of people that didn’t need to die, did, and that’s about all there is to say on it. When I came back though, to the states, my mind wasn’t right. I’m alright now, and that’s in large part to your mother. Woman can get as drunk as she wants on vacation, because if it wasn’t for her, I probably wouldn’t be much of anything right now. Not that I’m much of anything as it is, but I have enough money in my bank account to see me out of this world and I got it legally for the most part, so that should count for something.
When I came back from Vietnam, a life like I currently have wasn’t a possibility. I planned on drinking a lot, shooting some H, and having sex with as many women as I could find. That, at twenty-three, was what I considered the good life. I met your mom at a Waffle House. She was waitressing, and I was coming in and out of there every week or so. I made sure I sat in her section. Half the time I was drunk and the other half I was in there with some rowdy Army buddies after midnight. But I always sat in her section. She didn’t want anything to do with me, not a thing. She served me, but that’s because she had to. She wasn’t necessarily pleasant about it, either. I didn’t mind. She was a knockout, and trust me on this, you do what it takes to have a knockout serve you food even if you have to pay her. If you understand that, you’re ninety percent ahead of every other man in this world.
So months came and went and I stayed pretty much drunk. Your mom pretty much sober.
One day I said something like, “Why don’t you just go out with me? Just once?”
She put my coke down and walked off. She didn’t come back the rest of the night and I didn’t say nothing else about it either. When she served me the next time, neither of us mentioned it. This is about three months to me being back and showing up at that Waffle House.
So, I was drunk another night and said, “You ain’t gotta be a bitch about it, but why not just go out with me? You give me an answer as to why you won’t and I’ll leave ya alone about it.”
Now you repeat this, Jake, and you and I are going to have a lot of problems in the future. I don’t know if we got a super long future to begin with given this Brand guy, but whatever future that is, you don’t say a word about this to your mother. I need you to understand that, this is between us, and I don’t think it’ll change anything between us because everything is still the same as it was five minutes ago.
Your mom said, “Because I’m pregnant, asshole. You feel like raising some other man’s son?”
And I looked at the Coke she had placed down on the table, then glanced at her belly, not seeing much of a poke—but she was only three months pregnant—and then back to my Coke. I was eating alone, thank God, because I don’t know what would have happened if my Army pals were there. She went away, leaving me with my Coke, and neither of us said another word to each other the rest of the night. I got in my car, drank some of the bottle I had under my seat, and then drove home just about as drunk as I’d ever been. I couldn’t sleep though, which wasn’t normal, because when I drink the lig
hts simply go out. I laid in bed all night thinking about what she said. Did I want to raise another man’s son? Hell no, I didn’t. I seen this video once of what happens when a male lion takes over a pride. He murders all the cubs already there, and while I didn’t want to go around murdering children, I certainly didn’t want to be raising someone else’s offspring. She knew it too. She knew that almost everyone she met from here on out wasn’t going to want to raise some other man’s child, so here she was, having the child anyway, and understanding what that meant.
The whole time I thought she didn’t want to date me because I was a drunk Vietnam vet. The whole time I’m sitting here thinking that everything that’s going on between us rests on me and how fucked up I normally was when I saw her. Except it didn’t have nothing to do with that at all, not really. Your mom had demons that I couldn’t even begin to understand. She was living by herself, pregnant, and serving hash-browns on the graveyard shift at a diner.
I woke up with a bad hangover the next day. I mean I closed the blinds and didn’t get out of bed for hours and hours. Just lay there, head on top of one pillow. I kept thinking about those words over and over. You feel like raising some other man’s son? Last night the answer was hell no, and maybe it had a bit of anger in it too. Anger that such a pretty woman was pregnant with another man’s kid. Anger that I didn’t have a chance with her, maybe anger that I had said something so offensive, without even considering what she was going through. That morning though, with a headache trying to split me in two, I didn’t feel anger. I didn’t feel Hell no either.
I felt, might as well give it a shot. I mean it, son, you get a good-looking woman that will serve you food, you try to hang on.
So I waited a day and a night. The next night at one in the morning, I walked in sober. I wore my uniform from the Army, because I didn’t have a suit, and I didn’t want to show up looking like the asshole I was. I didn’t sit down, I just stood at the counter and waited for her to walk over.
“Getting it to-go tonight?” She asked.
So I said, “I don’t know if I want to raise another man’s son, to be honest. Maybe I will and maybe I won’t, but that doesn’t scare me away from wanting to get dinner with you and seeing where it goes from there. That’s as honest as I can be, and if that’s okay with you, I’d like to take you out the next night you have off.”
The cook turned around at this point and was looking at me too. Your mom didn’t say anything right away, but she placed the pad and pen down and just looked at me. I stood there and looked back. I was incapable of feeling stupid from being stared at because drill sergeants did that shit all the time. So I stared and she stared and the cook stared too and finally she said, “Okay. I’m off tomorrow. I’ll meet you here and we can decide what we want to do.”
So this is probably a shit way to tell you, but if we’re going to die in the next month or so, I figured you ought to know how good of a woman your mother is. She turned me from a boozing, drug using, tail-chasing little shit, into someone that wanted to raise progeny not from myself. That’s you, Jake. Now, you’re my son; you’re not anyone else’s son, so I don’t want you to start thinking any nonsense like that. I love you and I never wanted another child, or else we would have had one.
Hell, I don’t know why I told you all of this. Probably the drink. I’m sorry it’s coming out like this.
“It’s okay...” Jake whispered.
His imagination was blooming, a flower uncurling its petals and announcing its beauty to the world.
“You okay? Jesus, I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“I’m okay, Dad. Hey, I have to go. You may have just saved everything.”
Jake hung the phone up without waiting on a response. He stared out the windshield, but saw nothing. His father—what would his father do for him? Anything. Jake knew it as sure as he knew his own name, and yet, his father had just told Jake that there was no biology connecting them. The love that each possessed for the other was based on actions alone, on belief, but not on any DNA shared. What had Brand done for his own son? He had killed for him, and now he was trying to destroy the world for him.
Jake didn’t know if it was possible, if they could pull this off, but his father had just given him an idea that might put them all face to face with Brand—that might, actually, bring Brand right to them.
17
Joe’s suitcase sat in front of him, the handle pushed down, as he waited for a Greyhound bus. He’d taken a taxi to the station, bought a ticket heading to Los Angeles, and then sat on one of the benches while he waited for the bus to arrive. He didn’t know if he would make it to Los Angeles, didn’t know if he was being lied to about this whole thing, only that Sally told him to buy the ticket, and after he did, someone would be in touch.
“Go to the back of the bus, sit in the last seat on the left, next to the window. If someone is already sitting there, you need to find a way to make them move. It won’t be good for anyone involved if you’re not the person in that seat.”
Joe arrived two hours early so that there wouldn’t be any problem getting whatever seat he wanted. Back seat, front seat, hell, he could ride in the baggage compartment as early as he was.
People began showing up slowly, wandering in. This was a long trip, days, and it didn’t look like that many people were going to show up for it. It was cheaper than a plane ride but a lot more aggravation. Sally didn’t say anything about anyone sitting next to him, so he supposed if someone sat down, that would be fine—but maybe, from the look of things, he’d have the row to himself.
What are you going to do if you get out to LA and all you have to show for it is less money in your bank account?
That possibility seemed more and more realistic the longer he was separated from Sally. Prostitute or not, the woman was a professional at getting people to believe her. When Joe listened to her, he found himself believing everything she said, that she would introduce him to someone who could give him the information he needed. All he needed to do was pony up the money to both her and the guy. Now though, with only ten people sitting at this bus stop, he didn’t feel so confident. He wasn’t going to turn around, of course, but he was beginning to think nothing would happen outside of a long trip across the country—wasting what little time he had left to find Brand.
Had he told Larry this new plan, Larry would have laughed and spelled out all the possible problems in glorious detail. He hadn’t though; he only told Larry that he would be leaving, and now here he was with the sun just beginning its slow ascent to the top of the sky, without a number to call or a person to discuss any of this with.
Joe watched the bus pull up. He stood, grabbed his single bag, and moved to start the line for entrance. At the very least, he’d do what Sally said and hope for the best. What else was there?
Joe found the seat he was instructed to sit in. He did so, leaning his head against the window, but still keeping an eye on the rest of the people climbing aboard. They took their seats, most looking at something on their phones. The whole world only looked down now, none of them paying any attention to what went on around them. Joe might have been like that a few years ago, but no more. The cocaine probably had something to do with that, because it was tough to keep focused on a cellphone when you had that much powder making your brain jump. He held a pretty big sack of it in his pocket, and planned on using the restroom whenever he needed to keep the high going.
The engines started rumbling and everyone was in their seats. No one looked back at Joe. No one stood to come sit next to him. No one did a single thing as the bus pulled away from the sidewalk and the driver began making announcements. Joe was alone and leaving Matthew Brand. He was heading across the country based on some prostitute’s word.
He felt sick and he felt tired, and rather than his usual modus operandi when he felt tired, he closed his eyes and let sleep take over.
Joe felt the presence next to him and woke up slowly, his eyes just barely opening. Someon
e had taken a seat, and from the feel of things, the man was large.
The feel of things was right.
The man must have been pushing three hundred pounds. His large, beefy arms spilled over both hand rests, pushing into Joe’s area. The man seemed not to notice that he had just taken over someone else’s spot, but was instead trying to rearrange his abnormally large gut into a comfortable sitting position. This involved moving his ass side to side and front to back. His head was bald and his skin the color of porcelain. His shirt was triple-x if not quadruple, with only the word ADIDAS across it.
Joe sat up a bit, trying to make room for the man who was going to take the room whether Joe acquiesced or not. He wasn’t fully awake, but was coming to it.
The fat man looked over.
“How are ya?” He asked.
“I’m good. Tired. You mind if I take the aisle seat on the other side of you? Probably going to need to use the bathroom in a few.” If Joe was going to be awake, then he was going to be high, and moving back and forth across this beast would not be easy.
The fat man cocked his head to the side. “You should get some more sleep if you’re tired.”
Joe saw the man’s hand sitting on the arm rest, a big, flabby—if strong—looking thing. Joe watched in stunned terror as the man’s hand moved with the grace of a ballerina, pulling a syringe from his pocket, and then digging said syringe into Joe’s leg. He felt the piercing metal dig into his flesh and tried to let out a sharp cry, but the fat man’s other hand had wrapped around his mouth, and then Joe started swimming in a giant pool of darkness.
18
The New York Times
Online Edition
Blackout Rolls Across North East
Explanation Not Forthcoming