Warning: This book contains rough language and violent scenes. The rough language is not gratuitous, nor are the violent scenes. ReKill is the second book in the series that started with ReWire
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He dozed in the big, ugly, brown recliner Lee threatened to give away every time the Veterans’ charity had curbside pickup. She sat on the window seat, feet curled under, in blue tights and his ancient gray 49rs sweatshirt that had somehow become hers. His phone rang from the sideboard with Mike’s new ring. He hoped she would answer so he wouldn’t have to get up. He watched her move from cross-legged sitting to walking as he wondered how he deserved so elegant a creature.
“Hey, Mike. Jack’s just waking up,” she said arching her brow to ask him if he was capable of talking yet. He nodded and waved her off as she started to walk the phone over. Movement was finally a little easier. Lee sat back down on the window seat.
The charcoal sketch of the buildings as they dropped away toward the bay took shape under her precise hands. She looked around absentmindedly and held out her left hand, palm down. The charcoal pencil that dropped to the floor when she stood lifted from the rug and floated into her open hand. Daybreak had been cloudy and cold with the smell of coming rain heavy in the air. By early evening the view over the roofs of the Marina district out over the Bay was better than any tourist had a right to expect.
Mike called from the forty-five hundred square feet of efficient luxury in the Trinity Alps he called a cabin. The sound of his daughter’s guitar cords ripped the usual deep silence. He heard Mike shout for her to take a break and laugh at something she shouted back before he said, “Sorry about the noise, Jack. Heather’s getting so good I hate to stop her.”
“What’s up, Mike?” Mike had called three times during the week to talk about some unnamed thing. He hadn’t had time to listen, knowing the man well enough to know it was too important to hurry. He asked Mike to call him on Sunday afternoon when he could take all the time his friend needed.
“I was going to give you details over the phone and email files, but I don’t want to plant any ideas. Would you two come up for a couple, three days? Do you good to get out in the woods.”
He hung up promising he would call back later that day with travel details.
Lee asked, “Road trip?”
HE and Mike had a connection that went deep. Neither of them realized the connection at first. Mike’s name was actually Miguel Octavio Reyes. He’d been a warrant officer Huey pilot in Vietnam flying medevac. Jack had to be dusted off twice, once in the Gulf and once in the unnamed place. Their wars were twenty-five years apart, but they were still connected. Mike had been shot down three times in Vietnam. The last time he was shot down Mike lost his right arm from just below the elbow down.
Mike said he used to have a deep, puckered scar on the inside of his right forearm from a childhood fireworks accident. The scar itched, especially in the humid, disease-ridden Petri dish of Vietnam. He swore the spot on the missing arm itched to this day. He said changing to being a lefty had been tough and very strange. Other than that, he didn’t say much. Like most men who’d seen brothers killed or killed other men’s brothers, they didn’t talk about it. They tried not to think about it.
Like all DealMaker partners, Mike’s financial karma was very good: in other areas-not so much. The worst of it hadn’t been losing the arm. His worshipped young wife was staying with friends in Carmel. She brought their new baby boy when she hurried toward Travis Air Force Base. Beloved wife wanted to meet the flying hospital that carried her newly one-armed husband.
Maybe she was driving a little too fast in the Tule fog of a miserable February day, just south of Sacramento. She drove I-5 toward Sacramento to take I-80 over to Travis. Friends said she hadn’t driven the delta because of a radio report about a construction bottleneck on Highway 12. The fourteen-vehicle wreck sandwiched wife’s Mustang between the burning gasoline truck and the flatbed carrying ready-mix. The autopsy said child died on impact. His beloved wife cooked, trapped in the wreckage.
Over the next ten years Mike spent a few spells in VA hospitals drying out. Mostly, he didn’t bother. One day he was driving near Pittsburg, California, coming home from his mindless job unloading fertilizer at the petrochemical plant. He said he could hear voices calling out to him from the pea-soup ocean fog. The voices told him to drive his pickup into the next bridge abutment. While he was seriously considering this suggestion he came upon a seven-vehicle pile-up. Quick work with his fire extinguishers and the big winch bolted to the front of his four-by-four helped save all but one out of a family of six. One of the truckers didn’t make it either. Mike broke bones in his foot kicking windows in to get people out. After that he took a big part of his life back.
“YES-road-trip.” He told her about Mike’s call and his unnamed troubles. She knew something was up from her talks with Heather, Mike’s daughter, but hadn’t pressed for details. He heard Heather and Lee talking on the phone about clothes and music and such. He didn’t quite know how his girlfriend and the almost twelve-year old daughter of one of his partners connected, but they had.
Jack still wasn’t a hundred percent. Their battle with the Church of the Seven Sisters had taken a toll on both of them. His knee and shoulder operations, on top of the concussion and pneumonia, took the juice right out of him. He was eager to test the knee on a hike. Thankfully, the tear in the meniscus was tiny and the cartilage undamaged. There had been a little more damage to the shoulder than the doctors originally thought. The first day after shoulder surgery he lived on Vicodin and tried to sleep sitting up in his recliner.
Lee said, “I’m not sleeping alone, shoulder or no shoulder.”
The next day he came home from physical therapy to find an adjustable hospital bed in their bedroom. For six weeks he slept sitting up in bed with his arm in a sling and his true love next to him.
HE wanted to fly into Redding and rent a car. It would have been better to fly into Weaverville, but the airport was closed-again. Lee had fallen in love with driving on what were to her wide-open roads, so they drove. Early spring in the central valley of California, still officially winter, was beyond beautiful. The grasses were hues of new deep greens. The earth was still moist. Of the natives, the Valley Oaks were his favorites.
The mighty Oaks grew along rivers in the run-off areas a little up the hill so their bases weren’t underwater, except in the wettest years. It was as if each of the big Oaks had its own ecosystem. Their secret branch networks didn’t reveal themselves until mid November and didn’t lose all their leaves until January or February. In winter they stood stark, home to squirrels and birds that didn’t migrate. When the Tule fog moved over the banks of the estuaries and spilled out onto flat land, it was as if they stood guard above it. In late spring the twigs at the far end of the branches showed green as the trees slowly came back to life. He counted nine different shades of green and Lee, with younger female eyes, said she saw fourteen. He bowed to youth and superior genetics.
Along streambeds and overflows the riparian world was different. Flocks of migratory birds enjoyed clouds of insects. More rice farmers flooded their fallow fields in winter now, providing hunting grounds for egrets and herons. The white blur of the hovering North American Kite, ready to stoop, appeared often enough to feel like a mile marker. The quiet confidence of the car and driver along with the filtered heat of the sun warming his face through the window lulled him into semi-sleep.
Off in the distance to the West the coastal range reared up as a blur. To the East the air was too full to see the foothills, but the white tops of the Sierra peered through. Anything above five thousand feet was still under a heavy blanket of snow. Winter had been brutal. The giant storm that nearly killed them was just a hint of what came later. Wherever they crossed the Sacramento River, it ran full and strong.
The river ruled the interior valley for tens of millions of years before they built the dam near Shasta. The new natives figured that was the way it had always been. If Shasta blew, as live volcanoes will, a wall of hot mud fifty feet high would slide down the course of the old Sacramento. Some of it would be contained, but much of it would push out to the hills on the west and east. The rich soil, fed by millions of years of floods, would be richer still. If anyone had the will to rebuild the farms and orchards, towns and villages, the area would be more fertile than before. Accuweather.com predicted a short and dry spring. The great reservoir at Shasta was nearly full.
They planned to stop in Redding for a late lunch. He’d thought about building a vacation home north and east of Redding. The area had some of the best trout fishing in the continental US. Sometime back he lost the urge to hunt the elusive trout. Most of the urge was gone after he’d been in Redding one day during a heat wave. 111 degrees and it wasn’t close to being a record.