by Tim Kehoe
My dad looked away. “And in another six years, I hope to be doing this still. I think Carson has a lot of adventures left in him.”
He paused again. He looked over at me again. And then he looked down at the podium.
He said nothing.
Thirty seconds passed.
A minute passed.
A murmur started to grow from the crowd.
But he just kept staring at the podium.
I had never seen him like this.
He looked broken.
Sad.
Scared.
My dad was never scared.
Was this because of me?
What should I do?
Should I get up and go? Would he follow me? Could he? He had a room full of people here to see him. Maybe I could get back to my grandpa’s house before he called. I could explain it all to my grandpa and apologize. He would see that I was okay, and I’d promise never to do it again.
I was just about to stand up when he looked forward and continued talking.
“Kidd’s newest adventure has its roots in Chicago,” he finally spoke. “And by definition, Chicago stinks. In the language of the Potawatomi Indian tribe, the word ‘Chicago’ literally means ‘wild and smelly onion.’ In the Algonquian tribe, the word ‘Chicago’ means ‘smells bad.’
“The one thing historians and scholars are unclear about, however, is whether those early dwellers were referring to the wild leeks that were abundant along the river, or if it was early social commentary describing corrupt Chicago politics and the infestation of the Sicilian mafia.”
The crowd started to laugh, and I stood up and walked toward the aisle.
“The new book opens in a small Illinois town,” my dad said. Then he let out a large sigh. “And I’ve got to tell you, this is far and away my darkest and most twisted book to date. I mean, there is some truly sick stuff happening in this small town. And Carson meets his match in this book. I think the readers will be surprised—”
He paused as I started walking up the main aisle. I could feel people turning to look at me now. I tried not to make eye contact with any of them.
“Ah,” my dad muttered. “Carson discovers that . . .” He paused again. “Let’s just say sometimes it is hard to tell your enemies from your friends.”
I stopped in the darkness.
That was odd. That was almost identical to the thing Attorney General Como had said. I turned back toward my dad when—
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
CHAPTER THREE
* * *
Three quick explosions thundered through the ballroom, and I watched my dad fall to the stage floor. I let out a scream, and then, as if time had slowed, I saw Gary, Como’s secret service man, stand up. The spotlight lit his body as he stood. He had a gun in his hand and started to point it across the room, looking for the shooter.
My eyes followed the path of the gun. It pointed to a skinny man in a leather jacket standing off to the side. The skinny man’s slicked-back hair shimmered in the spotlight. Did he have a gun? Had he just shot my dad?
Several more explosions rang out. These were faster and higher-pitched. Blood and brain matter seemed to hang in the air where the head of the man with the slicked-back hair had been. Then, as if someone had pushed a fast-forward button, the room erupted in chaos. People were screaming. People were crying and climbing over chairs and one another.
A mass of bodies filled the aisle and swept me out the ballroom doors.
I saw Joe, the other secret service agent, fighting the crowd in an effort to get into the ballroom. His gun was drawn, and he was shoving people out of his way. I ran down a hall I didn’t recognize. And then another hall. There was a door with an EXIT sign. I went through the door and found myself in an alley.
I fell to the ground and grabbed my face and started to cry.
“Oh, god! Oh, god!”
I stopped and looked around. With no one in sight, I cried harder.
“Oh my god,” I cried. “Oh, god. Oh, god. Oh, god.”
I tried to stop but couldn’t. My eyes stung. My nose was running. Not here. Not like this.
Pull yourself together, Furious!
I sat up and wiped my nose on my sleeve. I could hear sirens coming from every direction. I wondered if I should go back inside and help my dad. There had been so much blood. There was no way he was still alive. I looked toward the street, and cop cars were trying to cut through the crowd of people in the street in front of the hotel. I needed to leave. They would call my grandpa soon, and he would panic when he couldn’t find me. I couldn’t do that to him. He had already been through so much. And I didn’t want him to know I’d lied to him. I had to try to get home before he got the call.
I crossed Fifth and looked back toward the hotel. A half-dozen cop cars were blocking the street, and people were pouring out of the front door. I turned and headed to the corner subway station. I could take the subway to Grand Central and then catch a train back to my grandpa’s house in New Canaan.
I made my way down to the subway platform. The lights in the station were bright and my eyes burned from crying. I closed my eyes for a second and pictures of my dad’s body hitting the stage were vivid in my mind. I could see the blood on his dress shirt, face, and hair. I tried to replace the image, but I knew it was pointless. I had no control over the way my screwed-up mind retained images. The picture of my dad’s dead body would stick forever. Every detail would sit right next to the image I saw of my mom’s dead body.
A train raced into the station and came to a quick stop. I got on and headed to the back of the car. I sprawled out on a double seat and stared out the window.
It was uncanny, I realized. My mom and dad had been killed in almost the exact same way. Three shots to the body. Both of them killed at hotels.
I wasn’t there when my mom was killed. She had left me with my grandpa while she went to some small Illinois tourist town called Galena. I guess that was the first sign that something was wrong. She had never left me behind. My mom traveled for business, and I always went with her. We had been all over the world together. But she’d been acting very strange before the trip to Galena. She had even reached out to my dad, something she had never done in the six years they had been divorced. If there was anyone on the planet tougher than my dad, it was my mom. And I was positive something was wrong as she pulled out of my grandpa’s driveway. She seemed nervous. Like we were saying good-bye for the last time. And it turned out we were.
Most of what I knew about my mom’s murder came from what I read in the Galena Gazette. Which wasn’t much. The Gazette ran a picture of my mom’s bloody body on the sidewalk in front of the DeSoto House Hotel in downtown Galena. The sheriff was quoted as saying that a car pulled up and someone opened fire. That was it. The whole thing was over in a matter of seconds, and he said that my mom had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I never really believed that.
The article went on to say that, until very recently, Galena hadn’t had a murder since the Chicago gangster Al Capone had used the area as a hideout seventy years ago. So it’s not like drive-by shootings happened all the time there. Galena was a little town of six hundred people and no recorded violence. The shooting was not random. She was killed on purpose. But why?
My mom was an accountant. We had moved around so much, neither of us had friends, much less enemies. And judging by how nervous my dad and grandpa had been since her death, they didn’t seem to believe it was random either. And now my dad was dead too.
Someone was hunting my family.
I got off at Grand Central to transfer to the New Haven line. I looked at my phone. It was 8:09 p.m. and it was an hour ride to New Canaan. The next train left at 8:30. I sat down on a bench and pushed my hair back. It immediately fell over my eyes. My long hair always bothered my dad.
I closed my eyes and images of the ballroom rushed in again. I could see my dad standing behind the podium. I cou
ld see the look of fear and sadness as we locked eyes. What was he worried about? Why had my grandpa and my dad been so worried about me? Did they know someone was after us? Was I next? Did it end with the guy with the slicked-back hair?
The train to New Canaan pulled into the station. I got on and stared out the window for the better part of an hour, thinking about my mom and dad. I suddenly realized that, technically, I was an orphan. My grandpa was the only family I had left in this world. I couldn’t stop crying as the train cut through the Connecticut countryside. Should I call my grandpa? What would I say? Hey, it’s me, just checking in. I wanted to make sure you hadn’t realized I’m an ungrateful liar.
My grandpa took me in after my mom died. I guess it sort of made sense to me. I hadn’t lived with my dad in years. I actually had no memory of my parents together and had only seen my dad once or twice a year since the divorce. He was busy traveling and writing his books, but I had always hoped that we would spend some time together eventually. But at my mom’s funeral, my dad came up to me and said he was working on his new book and he had a lot of research to do. He said his research would take him to a dangerous place. That it wasn’t safe and he would need to go there alone.
But I had spent six years traveling with my mom and we had seen all kinds of dangerous places. My mom took a job as an accountant with a government contractor after she left my dad. Her job required us to travel a lot. Her company sent us from city to city and country to country. We’d usually stay in a city or country for a few weeks and then move on. My mom would enroll me in school at the closest military base. When we weren’t close to a base, she would enroll me in a local school. I was always the new kid. New teachers, books, and faces. But the same questions. Same stares. Same crap. Just a different town or country. Sometimes a different language. Often a language that I didn’t even speak.
I had learned to survive dangerous places. But my dad didn’t listen. At my mom’s funeral he said we would talk about the “arrangement” after his book was finished. That’s part of the reason I was so excited to see his book event in the paper this morning. The story said he had finished his new book and it was set to come out next week. I was hoping that maybe I could spend time with him now. But now that was never going to happen.
My phone vibrated. It was my grandpa calling. I clicked accept and held the phone to my ear.
“Hello,” I said.
“Furious? Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I lied.
“Where are you?”
“I’m at Andy McMahon’s.” I squeezed my open hand into a fist as I lied again. I hated lying to my grandpa. And picking Andy’s house was a huge mistake. Andy lived right next door. It wouldn’t be hard for my grandpa to figure out I was lying. He could practically look out the window and see that I was lying.
“I need you to come home,” he insisted.
I looked down at the clock on the phone. The train was still fifteen to twenty minutes from New Canaan.
“Can we just finish the game we’re playing?” I asked.
There was a moment of silence and then I heard my grandpa sigh and I knew he had heard about my dad. He sounded defeated. He sounded exactly like he did after my mom was killed.
“Finish it quickly and then come straight home,” he said. “Okay?”
“Okay,” I said and clicked cancel on my phone.
I bit down hard on my lip to fight back the tears. Why hadn’t I just told my grandpa the truth? Once you start lying, it just takes on a life of its own.
I stared at the clock on my phone thinking about my grandpa. He was a good guy. Quiet, for the most part. Very different from my dad. My dad had been larger than life. He was always putting on a show. But my mom was more like my grandpa—her dad. She never wanted to draw attention to herself. She tried to stay out of the spotlight as much as possible. In fact, my parents divorced just months after my dad’s first book became a huge international bestseller. Just after the fame had started. She had only been a part of that for a few months, but she always said it was the worst period of her life.
My parents got divorced when I was six years old. And, oddly enough, I have no memories of anything before six. Not a single memory. I had seen many shrinks over the years, and many of them said six years old was psychologically the absolute worst age for a child to experience divorce. Something about the way the brain is forming at that age can cause a lifetime of difficulties. I’m no shrink, but I believed it. And they all found it fascinating that while I can’t remember a thing before the age of six, I’m cursed with a photographic memory of practically everything after six. After the divorce.
I could recount every single detail of all the time I’d spent with my dad since the divorce. Of course, there weren’t really that many times to recall. Over the years, my mom and I only saw him on the rare occasion we all ended up in the same city or country at the same time. And that had happened about a dozen times in six years. And it never went well. Well, actually, it always started out great but never ended well.
My dad would show up and book a room at whatever hotel my mom and I were staying at that week, and he would try to be the big man. His visits usually centered around food. My dad loved good food. No matter where we were, he would always know how to find the best food. We could be in a small town in the middle of Prague, in the Czech Republic, and my dad would say, “Oh, there’s the best little place just a few blocks from here. They’ve got a chef named Ronald and he makes an amazing grilled sea bass.” And, sure enough, the three of us would enter the restaurant and a chef named Ronald would hurry over to say hello to my dad. In the middle of Prague! That’s what he did. He was always the big man putting on a big show. And, secretly, I loved it.
He was truly larger than life. But my mom said he hadn’t always been that way. The Robert she fell in love with had been a kind, hardworking, and idealistic journalist. She’d tell me stories about their life in Saint Paul, Minnesota. My mom grew up in New Canaan but went away to college in Minnesota. My dad had grown up in Saint Paul, and they met at the University of Minnesota. My dad was a journalism major and my mom was studying economics and Italian. After they graduated, my dad took a job as a reporter at the Saint Paul Pioneer Press. And he was good at it. My mom said he loved to fight for the underdogs. He even won a big award for a series of stories that exposed some crooked politicians.
My mom claimed my dad invented the Robert Jones persona to help sell books. But then it consumed him. He bought into his own creation, she said. But so did she, from time to time. By the second or third day of his visits, the two of them would be holding hands and laughing. By the end of the first week, they would look like a couple again. We would look like a family again. And then this thing from the past would creep in. They would start to fight about my dad’s fame and the books. Ultimately, my dad would leave.
The train slowed as it pulled into the New Canaan station. It was the last stop on the line, and I was the last passenger. I got off and walked the four blocks to my grandpa’s house.
There was a cop car idling in the driveway behind my grandpa’s squad car.
CHAPTER FOUR
* * *
My grandpa had been the chief of police in New Canaan for almost thirty years, so seeing a cop car in the driveway wasn’t completely out of place. It didn’t mean there was necessarily something wrong. Or that my grandpa had started a manhunt looking for his missing grandson. At least that’s what I told myself as I walked through the back door.
My grandpa was sitting at the kitchen table with Lieutenant Miller.
“There you are, Furious. I told you just to finish the one game. I was starting to get worried,” my grandpa said as he stood up and walked toward me.
“Sorry it took so long,” I said.
He put his arm around me and gave me some sort of half hug. We weren’t a real touchy-feely family, and an arm around the shoulder was practically like a bear hug for us.
“Furious, you
remember Lieutenant Miller, right?”
Of course I remembered Lieutenant Miller. This mind of mine wouldn’t let me forget anything. Ever. And Lieutenant Miller was one of only a handful of cops in New Canaan. Miller had worked for my grandpa for almost twenty years.
“How are you, Lieutenant?” I asked.
Lieutenant Miller gave me a sympathetic smile. “I’m okay, Furious.”
“Come on and sit down.” My grandpa gestured toward the small kitchen table.
“What’s going on?” I said without moving.
My grandpa let out another long sigh, and his eyes watered as he looked at me. “I’m so sorry, Furious. It’s your dad. He’s been shot.”
My grandpa went on talking, but I didn’t hear anything after the word “shot.” My legs were weak and my eyes stung. Something about the words coming out of my grandpa’s mouth made my dad’s death more real than having seen it for myself. I started to cry, and my grandpa squeezed me harder.
Lieutenant Miller stood up and walked past us toward the back door.
“I’m going to let you two be alone, Bud. I’ll stop back in the morning.”
I heard the back door slam shut, and I cried even harder.
“I’m so sorry, Furious. I’m so sorry. No one should have to go through what you’ve been through. What we’ve been—”
My grandpa’s voice cracked and he stopped talking. I stood there with his arm around me for several minutes. Images of my dad’s body on the stage flooded my stupid photographic mind. And then there were the images of his face. The look of sadness and fear in his eyes when he saw me. Those were his last few feelings. He died disappointed in me. I hadn’t seen my dad in seven months, and disappointment would forever be his last thought of me.
“You know I’m always here for you, right?” my grandpa said, hugging me even harder this time.
I nodded.
“We’ve just got each other now,” he added.