“And a good table,” the widow was saying. “I had a hot meal waiting for him every night, no matter how late he was.”
“He was a lucky man,” said the doc, glancing along the hall. They had let down the wheels and were trundling him off. He was so thin, so light—not to mention so stiff—that the bag almost bounced off the gurney as it bumped across the carpet grip-strip in the bedroom doorway.
“I saw your table,” he added. “Quite a spread you put on.”
“I did my best,” she said. “Of course, we had to cancel the big party. Two-hundred people—all his old friends from work and all his clubs—but the Lord spared him for our own little celebration the night before and I’m glad. He always used to say there’s nothing like good home cooking. He bought me that for our golden wedding.” She had taken a handkerchief out of her pocket—a cotton hanky, with lace edging and an embroidered initial on one corner—and she was waving it at the dining room wall. The doc glanced over and saw a framed cross-stitch, lettering above a picture of a cooking pot and a chopping board with half an onion on it.
“He bought me the kit, and I stitched it myself,” she said.
The doc heard the van door slam and drew a breath to start his goodbyes.
She sniffed and dabbed her eyes with her cotton hanky.
“I should have known he wasn’t right,” she said. “He hardly touched his food. Just pushed it around the plate. If only he’d told me he was feeling ill I could have driven him to the hospital.”
Now, this was a quandary. If he’d had the stroke in a hospital he might have survived, but what was the use of telling her that now? And wasn’t it better for him to go quickly at home in his own bed after a romantic dinner with his wife of sixty years than to linger in hospice until the next stroke killed him?
“You have nothing to feel guilty about,” the doc said. He’d noticed the dehydration, the stomach concave between the hipbones. If the old coot had been too proud or too stubborn to say he was sick, it wasn’t his wife’s fault. With one last smile and a pat on the hand, he said goodbye and went home to his own marriage: mess and McDonald’s and lucky if she had a Kleenex, much less a pressed cotton square.
Left alone, the widow started clearing the table. It had been a risk, leaving it that way, but who could resist it? She laid the silverware in the velvet nests, looking forward to the first night of peace in decades. She placed the crystal back in the cabinet, thinking about all those floozies he had invited to their party, assuming she wouldn’t know.
Finally, she crumpled the menu card and put it on the pile to recycle, thinking of all those nights she had made a second meal when the first had dried up in the oven, thinking of the way he had wolfed down every scrap of her special dinner without tasting it, as usual.
Thinking of how much she had enjoyed sprouting those kidney beans, dipping those fly agarics in batter, stopping the thermometer in the pork and chicken braise from creeping up to 140˚, shredding those rhubarb leaves nice and thin, and trying to make a sugar syrup sweet enough to mask the holly berries. That was her triumph, she knew.
She took one last look at that goddamned golden wedding present she had to stitch herself, as she dropped it into the trashcan: Kissin’ Don’t Last, it said. Cookin’ Do.
RIPPLE
by Baron R. Birtcher
It is said that bad things come in threes. If there’s any truth to that, the first two were sure as hell about to show up at my front door.
I hadn’t been home long, maybe a half hour or so spent watching the lingering remnants of the Kona sunset leach from the sky while I tipped a cold bottle of Asahi to my lips. I had skipped my regular visit to Snyder’s bar, and had dropped in at Lola’s instead, in order to catch a little face time with Lani, who bartended there. But, by late afternoon the tourists had descended on the place like a swarm of pink-faced locusts, so I left Lani at the blender to mix their fruit drinks and things with umbrellas.
I stepped off the lanai and wandered back inside my house for a fresh beer, and vaguely wondered what I might throw on the hibachi for dinner, when a soft but persistent rapping interrupted my thoughts. I popped the top off another bottle and answered the door.
“You’re here,” Snyder said.
“This is where I live.”
He appeared uncharacteristically ashen in the pale yellow glow of the porch light, and his chest heaved as he spoke, as though he had sprinted all the way to my house from town. I stepped aside to let him in, but he shook his head and made no move to enter.
“Listen man,” he said. “A very large, very serious-looking dude was in my bar asking for you.”
“He give you a name?”
“No. He hung around for about two hours waiting for you, then paid his tab and split.”
A cluster of moths fluttered at the edges of the encroaching darkness, hungry for the light. Snyder’s eyes stopped twitching, and he looked like he was slowly coming back into himself.
“You could have called,” I said.
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I see guys like that in my place, I think black helicopters. I stay off the airwaves. Cats like him draw a lot of water in this world. I don’t understand it, but I never ever fuck with it.”
Some might call it paranoia, but I knew he had personal reasons for his caution. Like many of us here on the islands, he had a past life he didn’t talk about, and I didn’t ask. But somehow it had altered the trajectory of his life like a prism. Still, he was a friend, and I knew he had my back. He had demonstrated that on more than one occasion.
“What’d he look like?” I asked.
“Your size, maybe a little bigger. Six-three or -four, 225 easy. Solid. Ponytail, short stubbly beard.”
“Tattoo on his forearm?”
Snyder threw a question at me with his eyes. “Navy Seal emblem.”
“Rex Blackwood.”
“You know this dude?”
I nodded. “He helped me bring the Kehau across from the mainland. Saved my ass. Shot the guy who nearly took off my head with a shotgun.” I felt an involuntary twinge in my shoulder.
“You guys are close?” The expression of alarm that had earlier occupied his features turned to incredulity.
“We don’t share nose-hair clippers or anything, but yeah, I guess we’re close.”
Snyder heaved a sigh, showed me a wan smile, and shook his head.
He began to turn away and head back to his truck, but was stopped in his tracks by the unmistakable mechanized snap of a cocked hammer. A scorching flood of adrenaline rushed through my veins, and I felt every fiber in my body tense as the muzzle of a matte black .45 appeared from nowhere and pressed into the side of Snyder’s head.
“Step away from the door, bartender. You can go now.”
Snyder’s face went hard, all trace of anything but feral rage disappeared in an instant. Despite his laid back façade, Snyder was nobody to mess with. I instinctively felt for the Berretta I usually carried in my waistband, but knew I had put it away when I had come home.
“That’s bar owner,” Snyder said. “And you can fuck yourself.”
I could only see the hand that held the automatic, knuckles turning white as fingers tightened on the grip.
“I’ll say it one more time. Step away from the door and go.”
Snyder’s eyes cut sideways, trying for eye contact with the man who held the gun. “I’m not typically much of a joiner, but I think I’ll just stay here and hang with you two guys.”
A long three-second vacuum of stillness followed, broken only by the rattle of wind in the palm fronds overhead, and the faint, distant hum of traffic on the two-lane highway.
The barrel of the .45 pulled away from Snyder’s temple, and Rex Blackwood stepped into the light, thumbing the hammer back in place. He pressed his fingers to Snyder’s back and directed him into my house.
“Hello, Travis,” Blackwood said. “I like this guy.”
• • •
“What the he
ll is the matter with you people,” I said. “Doesn’t anybody use the phone anymore?”
I had poured stiff drinks for all three of us, and we had taken up seats on the lanai. The moon had risen early and floated over the bay like a white pearl, painting a crenellated pathway toward the shoreline, and the surrounding landscape with edges of silver light and shadow.
“Not when I’m working,” Rex said. He pointed upwards toward the sky. I assumed he was referring to the satellites that roved in constant orbit overhead.
Snyder shot me a look, but kept quiet.
“There are easier ways to find me,” I said.
“Not since you moved off your boat and into the jungle.”
“It’s a coffee plantation.”
“Tomato, tomahto. Either way, you’re out here in the boonies, and for all I know you’ve strung trip wires and shit all over this place.”
“I’m not growing dope, for chrissakes.”
“Call it an abundance of caution.”
Despite my having known Rex Blackwood for over a decade, his professional resume was not something he spoke about. I knew he had been a SEAL, had been seriously wounded in Vietnam, and subsequently reassigned to the NSA where he had been involved in operations that went beyond black. I also had cause to believe that his service record had been redacted thoroughly and buried in a government vault so deep and dark that it probably had its own gravitational pull. That’s about all I knew, or cared to know. Though he was a friend to me, I considered him to be the proverbial “No Man” referred to in the term “No Man’s Land”.
Ice rattled in our glasses as we waited each other out in protracted silence.
“I need your help, Travis,” Rex said finally.
“I’m a cop,” I said. “A retired cop. What could you possibly need from me?”
“How long have you lived on this island?” He waved a hand in the direction of the thick vegetation that blanketed the slopes of Hualālai. “Twenty years?”
“That’s about right. And?”
“I need to locate somebody.”
“Why?”
“Because he has something in his possession that somebody else wants back.”
“Can you try to be a little more ambiguous?”
I watched Rex weigh his thoughts as he squinted into the night. After a moment, he turned his gaze on Snyder.
“You’re a man of few words.”
“How many words do you want to hear?” Snyder said.
“You’re a bit of a wiseass, too.”
Snyder leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and drilled Blackwood with a hard stare. “I’ll tell you what else I am: I’m a two-tour combat veteran, and the victor in a fairly violent difference of opinion with a Mexican cartel. During my time in ’Nam, I encountered more than my share of spooks, and I know one when I see one.”
Rex took a sip from his glass, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and set it gently on the table beside him.
“I don’t work with the Agency,” he said, then turned his gaze to me to make sure the point was clear. His eyes were like a car crash. “Never have.”
“Rex,” I said. “You gotta be a little more forthcoming here. If you want help, you’ve got to give me something.”
He leaned back in his chair and looked from my face to Snyder’s. When he finally spoke, his tone was subdued in a way that wasn’t at all like him.
“This shit goes no further, understood?”
When neither Snyder nor I disagreed, he went on.
“I work for a private organization that has a very long reach. Its name is not important. What I do is investigate anomalies.”
“Anomalies,” Snyder repeated.
“That’s right. Things that happen that shouldn’t happen…Black Swan events. Events that have the potential to tip scales that ought not be tipped. I investigate them, and when necessary, I do what needs to be done in order to set those things back into balance.”
“What kinds of things?” I asked.
“Every kind.”
Snyder caught my eye and shook his head. “Spook shit.”
“Not nearly as spooky as the fallout if they don’t get handled. That is a stone fact.”
“Who are you looking for here?” I asked.
“A young man. Don’t ask me his name. His father came across something he shouldn’t have. I went to retrieve it—quietly—but I was too late. By the time I found him, his brains were sticking out of his hat.”
“Now this young man has whatever it is you were looking for,” Snyder put in.
“The dead man’s son. Yes, he does. And I’m not the only person looking for him.” Blackwood paused again, inhaled deeply, and turned to me. “You don’t want it on your conscience if I’m not the first one to find him.”
“I’m not going to be a party to murder,” I said.
“I’m not the one who’ll be doing the murdering. And for the record, they call it ‘termination’ when those other guys do it. That’s why I need your help. I don’t know this jungle. The kid’s holed-up out there somewhere, and I am all out of time.”
“Fuck.”
“Travis,” he said. “You help me find him. I’m just going to have a frank and candid exchange of views.”
“Bullshit,” Snyder said.
Blackwood picked up his glass, stirred the contents with his finger, and took a swig.
“There’s a saying in my circles that you should both be aware of,” Rex said. “If you watch what the Company is doing, you know what the government wants done. That is stone fact number two.”
• • •
“The last ping we tracked off his cell phone was here,” Rex said, planting a finger on a point on the map that marked where an unpaved road peeled off the main highway on the east side of the island. “That was six hours ago.”
“How the hell did he get there?” I asked.
“He rented a car.”
“So, he’s presumably ditched it and the cell phone by now.”
“Then the first thing we need to do is locate the abandoned car,” Snyder said. “He can’t have gotten very far on foot.”
“Assuming he didn’t simply toss the phone out the window and keep driving.”
“Doubtful,” I said, and placed my own finger on the map. “Look here. If he drives much further, he’s back in a residential zone that runs all the way to Hilo.”
“How long will it take for us to get to this spot?” Blackwood asked.
“Hour-and-a-half, two hours,” I estimated.
Snyder picked up a pencil and traced a rough circle on the map.
“This is about how far he could travel on foot—assuming he ditched the car—and allowing a little extra for the time it’ll take us to get there.”
“Before we haul out of here half-cocked, let’s see if we can shrink this search area.”
We spent the next twenty minutes poring over a topo map, relying on what local knowledge Snyder and I could contribute, ultimately eliminating the least likely places for a man to go underground. By the time we had finished, we were left with only a couple of likely choices after considering the necessity for a reliable source of potable water, reasonable distance from populated areas, and the other logical requisites for a man who wanted to fall off the grid.
I dashed off a note to Lani, telling her that I would be away for a few hours, and not to worry. That last part was a futile attempt at decency, knowing that she was well aware of the trouble that similar messages from me had presaged. I collected the two handguns I had earlier stashed away and quickly got myself dressed in a pair of black jeans, a dark windbreaker, and hiking boots. Since Snyder had arrived in shorts and flip-flops, I lent him a set of clothes, as well. We did a quick toss of the kitchen for bottled water, fruit, granola bars, and anything else I could find, and loaded them into a plastic sack.
“We’ll take my truck,” Snyder said, once the three of us had assembled in front of my house. He drove a Ford 4x4 king cab, which was fa
r more practical for our purposes than the bright orange, canvas-topped Jeep Wrangler that I had parked in my garage.
“Hang on,” Blackwood said as he stepped over toward his car.
We watched in stunned silence as Blackwood extracted two military grade duffel bags from the trunk of his rental and placed them on the tailgate of the pickup. It was clear to both Snyder and me what they contained.
“How the hell did you get those over here?” Snyder asked.
“I don’t fly commercial,” Blackwood said.
He unzipped the first bag and withdrew two Heckler & Koch MP7 submachine guns, handing one to each of us. “You know how these work?”
I knew that they fired 4.6x30mm armor piercing, high-velocity ammunition, and that these particular weapons were fitted with 40-round box magazines and noise suppressors. I also knew they were lightweight, constructed mostly of polymers, and could reduce a human body to pink mist before it even knew it was dead. I had, unfortunately, encountered one of their earlier incarnations while on the streets as an L.A. cop. Yes, I knew how they worked.
“You aim the pointy end away from you, right?” Snyder asked.
I looked again into Blackwood’s face.
“Who the hell is running this shit show?” I asked.
“If I’m expecting a knife fight, I believe in arming myself with a gun,” Blackwood said. “Is that going to be a problem?”
He withdrew a third, similar weapon from the other duffel. This one resembled those he had given to Snyder and me, but the aperture sights had been removed and replaced with a telescopic optical laser sight. In Rex Blackwood’s hands, I was certain this was as deadly a device as any I would ever care to come into contact with.
We stacked the guns on the floorboards in the back seat of Snyder’s truck, together with enough ammunition to hold off the Bolivian army, and my plastic sack of groceries.
“Before we saddle up,” Snyder said, “there’s a little wisdom I used to offer my boys before we’d skip off the Hueys and hump the jungle in Indian Country: ‘No plan survives contact with the enemy.’ The late Helmuth von Moltke said that.”
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