Chapter 14

 

Jack was a kid again.  He had a bedroom of his own in a house.  In his dream he didn’t sleep on a sagging couch in the aluminum shack on wheels that his parents called home.  He had to sleep with a blanket because it was so cool at night.  And, quiet!  He heard laughter from the living room. He listened, trying to figure out what was different.  The laughter was from his parents.  Little Jack was sure of that.  This night his parents’ laughter sounded like other kids’ parents.

Their laughter wasn’t too loud and it wasn’t mean and when his parents spoke they didn’t slur their words.  How could that be?  His parents always had cocktails, or beer, or wine.  Pop always, always when he came home and Mom had her first glass of wine or a beer around 10:00-to calm her nerves. 

He smiled in his sleep.  He’d wrapped his forearms with towels, just in case, ‘cause when he came home they had been drinking for quite a while.  If they decided to beat him and ended up hurting themselves pounding on him, then the beatings would be worse.  So he wrapped the towels around just to be safe.  It had been three weeks since payday.  Pops had gone to the races.  And, he heard Pops calling the pawnshop. 

The chilled hospital air woke him from his dream.  His watch said it was nearly six in the morning, on the eighth day of November.  He knew that wasn’t right but when he walked over and looked at Dvora’s watch it said the same.  He had slept over eight hours.

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Dvora slept on her left side with hands between her legs.  She’d showered and her hair glowed shiny black.  He could see the pulse in her throat.  Pump, one thousand and two thousand and pump, one thousand and two thousand and pump.  He timed her pulse.  Her heartbeat at rest was fifty.

He wanted to wake her so they could watch Meghan get better.  He left her sleeping.  Meghan looked worse but was getting better.  Her bruises were as dark and ugly as they’d get before they yellowed away.  Her skin looked more like skin now, less like parchment, and not as likely to crack.

He centered and reached out to connect with her. He had done this so many times when she was sleeping as a child that he knew what it should feel like.  Was she sleeping or something worse?  At first he couldn’t feel her.  Fear shrank his touch. He pushed the fear away and reached out again with as much love as he owned.  He went deeper.  She was in there.  He told her to be calm, that she was broken and needed to fix herself.  He hoped she understood.

There was a glimmer.  He was sure there was.  He told her he was by her side and she was safe and she needed to rest and believe in herself and fix herself.  He told her he would protect her like he always had and that she was safe.  He told her to hold on.  He told her he knew she could do it, just like she had always done everything she really wanted to do.  He told her to want to live.  He told her to want to live like nothing she had every wanted before.  He told her she had to live because he didn’t want to face life without her.

He heard Dvora’s duck-footed, dancer’s step behind him and turned smiling.  He wondered whether to tell her about his connection with Meghan.

She smiled back until she saw Meghan.

“The bruises are as bad as they’ll get…”

She got that pissed-off look between her eyes, “You don’t have to explain bruises to a dancer,” she said.

Over her shoulder he saw a man dry-mopping the hall.  Jack moved in front of Dvora.  The man did a fine job on the floor, using steady sweeps, letting the inertia of the mop-head do most of the work.  When the man turned to wring the mop in the bucket, he bent over.  Latissimus dorsi jumped out in his back.  The man turned toward them again and Jack saw what had set off his alarm.  Under the man’s long sleeve sweat shirt, on the inside of his left forearm, what could have been the outline of a knife in a sheath stood out for part of a second before it was gone.

Jack appeared to lean on a chair.  As he did, he hefted it for weight.  It was designed to comfort and hold for a long vigil.  It was a sturdy, useful chair, maybe a few pounds heavier than a big plate at the gym.  He knew he could hammer-throw fifty pounds hard enough to savage a knife-fighter.

Jack visualized the windup. Best to start with his back to the man and release at half a turn.  Just like a hip throw.  He walked around the chair with his back to the mopping man, bent his knees, lifted the chair slightly, stopped and stepped away from the chair.

The mop man’s left shoelace was tied long down to the top of his work shoe.  The other was tied up high.  His right sleeve was rolled way up.  He was a bad boy, but he was one of Bob’s bad boys. Jack examined everyone in range.  One of the nurse’s aides was a huge woman with heavy scar pads on her knuckles.  The electrician changing a fixture down the hall wore a flack vest under his work shirt.  Bob said he’d send three people for a surprise party. All three wore the required recognition codes.  There would be others he didn’t know about.  Bob was a sneaky son-of-a-gun and would hide some of them from him, knowing Jack might give away Bob’s boys and girls.

He and Dvora watched Meghan get better.  They watched nurses.  The big, sloppy looking brunette twitched and muttered, but never took her eyes off Meghan the whole time she was there.  The tiny one with the extensions in her hair moved like she was on Quaaludes, but turned as quick as a lizard when Meghan’s hand twitched enough to rustle the sheet.  Later, he couldn’t remember who started it.  They told each other Meghan stories.  He told his version of Meghan winning the science fair in high school.  He was sure Dvora had heard his sister’s version.

“Meghan was twelve, not yet used to becoming a woman, and a year from high school graduation.  She stood on stage, her voice quivering with fright, making her presentation.  One of the judges, the one from Stanford who liked the sound of his own voice, questioned her on a correlation.  Meghan looked at him with what could only be pity and said, ’If you have your calculator with you, I could walk you through the math.’  The judge colored and shut up, but Meghan was certain he was the one who ‘misplaced’ the scholarship application so she ended up going to Cal.”

Dvora brought up the bicycle story.  “It was a Sunday morning about a year ago.  We’d gone for a run.  There was a storm.  We waited out the rain, standing under an awning for a long time.  By the time we returned home, Meghan cramped up.  She lay on her back with her left leg bent so I could dig hard into her calf.  I asked again about the little scars on her knees.  Meghan said she’d had them since she learned how to ride a bike.”

Dvora stretched, yawning and then laughed a little, “Meghan said you worked hard trying to teach her, but that it was slow going until she made the deal with the bike.  I teased her, but she wouldn’t tell me what the deal was. She said it was a secret.  That was part of the deal.”

He had tried to teach Meghan to ride a bike.  It was as clear in his mind as if it were hours ago, not years. She was five.  No, she would have been six.  It was one of those frying-pan hot, Central Valley days.  The only wild things moving were birds.  The sound of freeway traffic snarled, carrying a long way on the convection-oven wind.  For a change the big shady place in the park wasn’t full of sleeping drunks and junkies.  The ground was baked hard like dusty concrete.

Meghan had fallen for the fifteenth or twentieth time. Her face under the dirt was bright red from the heat with a streak of darker red where she’d wiped her chin with a cut hand.  Both knees were gone in her brand new little 501s.

“Come on Meg, let’s call it a day.  We’ll take it up again in the morning before I leave,” he said.

Meghan was determined, if that mild of a word could describe her focus.  She’d been that way since birth.

“I want to do it now, Jack,” she said frustrated to tears.  “If this bike would only understand.  I don’t want to hurt this bike.  I just want to ride it.  This bike keeps throwing me off.”

He didn’t smile when he asked, “Why do you think it’s trying to throw you off?”

“I don’t know.  I’m going to have a talk with this bike.  I know I can make this bike understand,” she said.

“Okay, Meg.  I’ll wait under that biggest tree in the shade.”

He sat with his back to the rough bark of the huge Valley Oak.  Meghan leaned the bike against a tree across the clearing and talked.  She talked for a long time, waving her arms and then holding them out like she was riding.  She stopped and stood, as if listening.  She talked more.  Finally he heard her say, very clearly, and so much like the way Pops said it that it made him clench his jaw, “It’s a deal!”

She sat on the seat, steadied herself and shoved off, slow and wobbly.  She gained speed and confidence, riding in a circle.  He stood, wanting to run and help, knowing he had to stay back.  Meghan went round and round, then rode in a figure eight for circuit after circuit.  Finally she straightened and pedaled over to him, stopping only a little roughly.

“Neat, huh?” She asked, smiling the biggest smile-bigger than her birthday smile.

“Real neat!  What are you doing differently?” He asked.

She looked puzzled. “I’m not doing nothing different.  I made this bike understand.  We made a deal.”

“Why don’t you ride home?  I’ll run by your side.”

She took off, yelling, “Okay!” over her shoulder as he ran to catch up.  She had to pedal around their block three times before she’d stop.  He could hear Mom and Pops yelling at each other inside the house all the way from the sidewalk.  Meghan never seemed to hear them, even when they were yelling at her.  On their way up the driveway, he asked her about the deal she’d made with the bike.  She said she couldn’t tell him, ‘cause that was part of the deal.

Over the years that followed, when they were close and not fighting about this or that, he’d occasionally ask her about the deal with the bike.  She’d get that far away look and say, with that little girl smile, “I can’t tell you Jack.  That’s part of the deal.”

One of the orderlies pushed the dinner cart past the room.  He hadn’t eaten anything besides snacks in three days.  He turned to Dvora and said, “I’m starving,” just as she said it.  He waited for her to speak. She waited for him.  They both opened their mouths and said, “Do you want to get a bite?”

The corners of Dvora’s mouth turned up just as he grinned.  He said, “What’s so funny?” right as she said it.

“Cut it out!” they both said at exactly the same time.  They couldn’t stop laughing.  They staggered out of the room and down the hall toward the little pray-and-fall-apart-in-room and collapsed on the sofa.  When she could catch her breath, she turned to him and said, “Stop it!” just as he said it.  He laughed so hard he farted.

Her laugh was mostly lyrical, but  every few laughs she would laugh like a donkey’s bray and start him up again.  They laughed themselves out.  He hadn’t laughed like that since his prenuptial agreement held up under appeal.

AFTER bread and soup and salad and a huge piece of salmon with perfect pasta, he excused himself from the table.  He walked outside to call Alice Stewart from the sidewalk.  Alice was CTO for DealMaker and second only to him in capital.  Part of her job was to translate the grunts, clicks, whistles, and glottal stops programmers used as language into human speech.  Then she had to translate human speech back into programmerese.

“Jack, it’s so good to hear your voice.  You got my messages?”

“Yes, thank you so much.”

“My heart goes out to you.  Olga has been keeping us up to date.”

He explained his twitch about ReWire’s stock and a few of the others in the field.  He didn’t explain who his source was in Hong Kong.  The list of stocks he gave Alice included the ones Lee had given him plus a few he thought had to be clean to act as controls.

“I’m going to ask Bob to help out too.”

The phone seemed to grow cold in his hand.  After a few seconds Alice asked, “By Bob do you mean Robert E. Lee White?”

“Yes.”

Any other time and he would have been on the receiving end of her legendary temper. “Well just fuck me, Jack.  Please don’t ask me to work closely with him.  I know he’s your best friend and all, but the cold-fish, son-of-a-bitch flat pisses me off.”  Jack told her he’d try his best to keep their interaction to a minimum.

Then he called Bob.

“ I’m sure you spotted the first team I put in.  Other teams will check in on the shift change.”

“Will you have all of them check in?”

Bob laughed his high-pitched country laugh and said, “You think in straight lines.  I can’t have you giving my best operatives away, can I?”

“I’d hate to break one of your people by mistake,” Jack said.

Talking to Bob White was a lesson in patience.  Bob employed a man who had suffered a head injury in an automobile accident.  Bob used this man in roles where patience and meticulous attention to detail were more important than reaction time and deductive reasoning.  This man followed people.  He sat in cars for hours on stakeouts.  This man finished Bob’s sentences for him.

“If you start to hurt one of them, they are instructed to say, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.”  Bob was, in his own quiet way, preaching to him again.

“I’ve asked Alice to help me look into ReWire and the other stocks.”

Again there was a long silence, even for Bob.  “Please don’t ask me to work too close with that Alice.  I understand she’s a great friend to you and your partner and all, but I’m a God fearing man and the way she talks sets me on edge.”

“I’ll try Bob.”

Jack walked back to the table in time to give in to a piece of cheesecake.  He told Dvora about the conversations and his twitch.  “I knew there was something wrong with that damned company, but you know Meghan.  She’s intensely loyal and hates to be wrong.”  Dvora sat silently for a minute making soup out of her Gelato with her spoon.

Finally she shook her head and laughed.  “Alice and Bob are so freaking funny. It’s like junior high.  We should just cut out the suspense and set them up on a date.”

She saw his confused look and asked, “Don’t tell me you haven’t seen it?”

He hadn’t and now it was obvious. Bob and Alice were warm for each other’s forms.  She went for dark, small, quiet men, and you couldn’t get much darker, smaller, and quieter than Bob.  Bob used to say that’s why he was such a good night fighter.  With his mouth closed and eye hidden behind the scope, he was invisible.  He liked big, strong women.  Alice’s power lifting records had been in the open class.  And, they were two of the toughest and most decent people he had ever met.

He said, “I never saw it.  Make sure you tell me any other insights you have.  My brain seems to have turned to porridge.  I’m not even sure ReWire’s dirty.  It’s just a hunch.”

She shrugged her shoulders to ease the tension of days sitting and waiting, before she leaned forward and said.  “Meghan told me about one of your so called hunches.  You were home on leave before going to the Gulf.  You left for a run and then came sprinting back to the house.  You wouldn’t let Meghan go to school that day.  She said she hated missing school, hated being at home with your parents. I didn’t believe the story.  She showed me the newspaper clippings about the riot at the high-school across the field.”

He didn’t remember when he knew he had a gift.  By the time he was an adult, he had come to trust it.  And one day, without realizing it, he came to rely on it.  Sometimes it wasn’t there, but it was never wrong. In the war he’d kept his A-team out of three ambushes with it.  Six days after his hardship discharge, because he needed to take care of Meghan after Mom and Pops were killed in the car wreck, his A-team walked into one.  Two men lived.  Either his parent’s death had saved his life, or he’d killed most of his brothers. Dvora’s private cell line rang.  It was Captain Yan, ordering them to appear in only twenty minutes.