by J. A. Jance
As for the meeting itself? That has changed, too. For one thing, attendees are younger. As Amazon takes over more and more pieces of South Lake Union, the electricians and carpenters have been replaced by IT guys and gals, and yes, these days more women have been added into the AA mix. Even so, when I showed up last night, there were still a few of the old-timers around who recognized me on sight. One by one they came up to greet me, shake hands, and remind me to “keep coming back.”
I’m not one of those super-observant AA guys. I’m not someone who goes to a meeting every day (Did that. Ninety meetings in ninety days. Got the tee-shirt!) or even every week. Despite the objections of straight-arrow AA guys, I drink the occasional non-alcoholic O’Doul’s, and I go to meetings when I need to go to meetings—as in when I’m down in the dumps. This was one of those times.
Roger, the guy who stood up and spoke at the meeting that night, looked like a kid. He was probably mid-thirties, which means, compared to me, he really was a kid. He’d been picked up for a DUI on Christmas Eve. When he’d called his wife to come bail him out, she had told him to go to hell. When he’d finally gotten cut loose and made it home on Christmas morning, his wife had packed up the two kids and gone home to her mother. I looked at the nodding heads around the room as we all remembered our own holiday screwups which had routinely devastated our kids and broken our spouses’ hearts.
Fortunately for Roger, someone had had dragged him to an ER to go through withdrawal under medical supervision. The idea that DTs can actually kill you isn’t something that’s widely recognized outside the world of Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, having been properly medicated, Roger was through the worst of it—including the shakes, chills, and hallucinations—but this was his first regular meeting. I gave him high marks for having balls enough to stand up, say his piece, and remind the rest of us why we were there.
When the meeting was over, I walked back across Clay, rode upstairs in the elevator, went to bed, and slept like a baby for the first time in weeks.
The next morning, at what seemed like the crack of dawn, I headed for Ballard, the neighborhood north of Seattle where Scott and Cherisse live. Ballard is also where I grew up. Back then, it was primarily a Scandinavian enclave. I was raised in an apartment situated over a bakery where I lived with my mother, who was a World War II vintage single mom.
My mother, left to raise a child on her own and with little formal education, had supported us by working out of our home as a seamstress. Women in town would bring her photos of dresses gleaned from catalogs and magazines, and she would make knock-off copies. She was obviously very talented, something I regret to say I failed to recognize as a kid. Going to school in a shirt she’d made on her Singer sewing machine was always something of an embarrassment when all the other boys were wearing clothes from J. C. Penney or Sears. I should have told her I was sorry about that before she died, but of course I never did.
These days Seattle cops, even cops in the Tactical Electronics Unit, are strongly encouraged to live inside the city limits. Because Cherisse’s IT job comes with flexible hours and the ability to telecommute on occasion, it wasn’t necessary for Scott and Cherisse to live close to her job. They moved out to the burbs on the east side of Lake Washington. Originally they had made an offer on a house in a suburb called Burien south of Seattle proper. When that deal fell through, they ended up buying a place in Ballard, a sweet little 1930s bungalow on NW 57th Street just a few blocks from the now long-demolished apartment building where my mother and I had once lived.
I never met my father. He died before I was born and before my parents married as well. A few years ago I met up with some long-lost relatives, including my father’s aging sister, Hannah Mencken Greenwald. She generously saw to it that both of my kids—Scott and Kelly—came into sizable inheritances that grew out of a collection of family-owned oil wells in eastern Texas. My last name, bestowed on me by my unmarried mother, came as a result of where my father was from—Beaumont, Texas—rather than his family name.
Hannah’s bequest meant that Scott had been able to quit a well-paying engineering job in Silicon Valley, for which he had trained but hated, and sign up for his dream job at Seattle PD. When I learned he was intent on following my footsteps and going into law enforcement, you could have knocked me over with a feather. His work in the TEU is a whole different can of worms from working Patrol or Homicide, but a cop is still a cop.
Armed with their inheritance, Scott and Cherisse had been able to pay cash for their new house and also completely update it before move-in day. (A long family history of my never exactly completed DIY remodeling projects may have had something to do with that.) They had also been able to retire their mutual collection of student loans, so not only were they living mortgage free, they were almost completely debt free as well. I could have helped them on both of those scores. My second wife, Anne Corley, left me with a bundle, but they seemed to view help from me as coming with some kind of strings attached, while the money from a great aunt they had never met could be accepted and used without similar complications.
I pulled up in front of their house at 7:30 on the dot. Then, with Scott belted into the passenger seat, I made my way through gridlocked traffic going back into the city. His appointment was with a dentist in downtown Seattle on Olive in a building unimaginatively named the Medical Dental Building. I slid into the coffee shop on the third floor, whipped out my iPad, and spent the next two hours or so reading the news and, yes, doing that day’s crossword puzzle. At the ripe old age of seventy-two, I find that even the Friday puzzles no longer faze me. Practice makes perfect.
At ten thirty-five, Scott sent me a text saying that he was done and ready to go home. We went downstairs where the attendants extricated my Mercedes from its individual elevator-accessed parking spot and sent us back up the narrow driveway and out onto Sixth Avenue.
Full confession here: I love watching America’s Funniest Home Videos. I worked as a cop all my adult life. Out on the street, people who do stupid stuff often end up dead. The people pulling stupid stunts on AFV may end up bruised and battered on occasion, but they aren’t dead, and I find that refreshing.
So I’ve seen the videos—several of them prize-winning videos—of drugged-up folks yammering away while being driven home from dental procedures, usually the extraction of wisdom teeth. Maybe it’s a sudden lack of wisdom that makes them blab their heads off. Although I didn’t have the camera running, that was certainly the case here. Scott was high as a kite and running off at the mouth.
“Am I too old?” he mumbled.
“Too old for what?” I asked. “Too old to have your wisdom teeth pulled?”
“Too old to have kids. Cherisse always said she didn’t wanna have kids, and now all of a sudden I think she does.”
Because of the meds, he had trouble getting his tongue around the necessary s’s. Listening to him try to talk around that severe lisp made it hard to keep from laughing, but I managed.
“Look,” I said. “From where I’m sitting, age forty-four looks like a long way from the end of the line. You’re just a couple of years older than that Ross guy who hit a home run for the Cubs in the last game of last year’s world series. I was twenty-eight when you were born. Your sister was eighteen when she had Kayla, so we’re all over the map here. If you and Cherisse want to have kids, go ahead and have ’em.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “My gut’s telling me that it’s just too late.” At that point he burst into tears.
There’s no sense trying to reason with people who are a: drunk or b: high, so I didn’t. Instead, I drove him home, handing out a whole bunch of well-worn platitudes along the way. I walked him into the house and settled him in his recliner in the family room. (Scott is his father’s son after all. Of course he has a recliner.) After making sure his iPad, the TV remote, and a pitcher of water were all within easy reach, I let myself back out of the house and drove back to Belltown Terrace.
“So what do y
ou think’s going on with him?” Mel asked.
It was Friday evening, and we were having our late dinner in our favorite quiet corner of El Gaucho, seated in a raised booth that nonetheless gave us a front row view of the continuous action happening in the kitchen.
“I don’t know. Midlife crisis maybe? I didn’t bother asking him, not when he was clearly under the influence. That’s a conversation we’ll need to have some other time when he isn’t.”
Mel sighed. “Could be it has nothing to do with how old he is and there’s something else going on with the marriage.”
Mel’s pretty much on the beam when it comes to relationships, and I had a feeling she might be right. “Could be,” I agreed.
“How about my own guy’s post-midlife crisis?” she asked, breezily changing the subject and pointing the conversation in my direction. I’m gradually adjusting to Mel’s sudden shifts in conversation and being able to negotiate some, but that one still caught me flat-footed.
“I’m bored,” I admitted finally, after a pause. “I miss the action. I miss doing something useful.”
What was it my mother used to say? Ask and you shall receive. In this case, it was a matter from my lips to God’s ears. I was about to be thrown back into the action, all right—in spades.
About the Author
J. A. JANCE is the New York Times bestselling author of the J. P. Beaumont series, the Joanna Brady series, the Ali Reynolds series, and five interrelated thrillers about the Walker Family, as well as a volume of poetry. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.
www.JAJance.com
www.witnessimpulse.com
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Also by J. A. Jance
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Payment in Kind
Without Due Process
Failure to Appear
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Tombstone Courage
Shoot/Don’t Shoot
Dead to Rights
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Exit Wounds
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Judgment Call
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Random Acts: A Joanna Brady and Ali Reynolds Novella
Downfall
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Kiss of the Bees
Day of the Dead
Queen of the Night
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Edge of Evil
Web of Evil
Hand of Evil
Cruel Intent
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Left for Dead
Deadly Stakes
Moving Target
A Last Goodbye: An Ali Reynolds Novella
Cold Betrayal
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Poetry
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Excerpt from Proof of Life copyright © 2017 by J.A. Jance
still dead. Copyright © 2017 by J. A. Jance. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.
Digital Edition AUGUST 2017 ISBN: 9780062835970
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