He thought of how they’d resisted Brandy sleeping with Christina, going as far as to lock her outside for all of five minutes until her pitiful whimpering won Alex over. From then on, it was Christina and
Brandy’s room. Now, staring at Lisa’s pain-scarred face, Alex couldn’t help but long for Brandy’s protective instincts to guide her to Lisa’s bedside. He couldn’t be in fourteen places at once. He couldn’t be at the hospital, at home with Christina, at Joseph’s bedside and taking care to make preparations for Lisa’s homecoming. What an unbelievable relief the four paws of Brandy Mendez would be.
Alex’s cell phone vibrated again.
“Mendez.”
“Alex you watching TV?” There was urgency in Danny’s voice that unnerved Alex.
“It’s on,” Alex said, “I’m not really watching it, no.”
“Turn to channel 8, quick.”
Reaching over to Lisa’s bedside, Alex fumbled, carefully searching for the controller. He had to be careful. One lonely control panel called the nurse, changed the channel and set the bed in motion with the touch of any number of buttons. One wrong push and Lisa’s otherwise restful recuperation suddenly turned into a very bad day.
Nervously, Alex twisted and turned the controller betwixt and between shadows and light until he found the right button.
“You there yet?” Danny asked.
“Gimme a second,” Alex said. “This control thing isn’t exactly Alex-friendly.”
“…as many as thirteen are reported dead and at least eight reported to have sustained serious to life-threatening injuries. Hospitals, already overburdened with victims of the police department bombing are now scrambling to find even more beds for the victims of this horrible act. The second in as many days…”
“Danny, what is this?” Alex said, as the color drained from his face. “What’s going on? Thirteen dead...where?”
“Wal-Mart, dude! You believe that? Somebody blew up the freaking Wal-Mart!”
“You have got to be kidding me! When?”
“Apparently within a few hours of the station getting hit, we don’t know exactly. Might have been before we got hit. Police were too busy to respond. Emergency operators got ambulances out there pretty quick but I heard that one Deputy Sheriff was the only law out there for hours!”
“Who did it, Danny?”
“Alex, we don’t know yet, but you know as well as I do that this isn’t a coincidence. I don’t even know if we’ve got enough manpower to cover this thing and Chief Steelman says the Feds are coming in soon.” Danny stopped and sighed. “To be honest, they can have it! I’ve seen this war on the front lines and I don’t want any more of it.”
“Danny what exactly are you saying?”
He didn’t immediately respond, which made Alex even more nervous. After a couple seconds, Alex heard another deep sigh.
“Steelman made me captain of homicide. There was talk, but it’s official.”
“Hey, that’s great! A real cop in there is just what we need right now.”
On TV, the news reporter was interviewing an elderly man. Alex caught enough to surmise the old man was a bit of a hero.
“Alex I’m quitting.” Danny’s words reverberated through Alex like the bells of Notre Dame.
“What? What do you mean, quitting?”
“I’m done. You weren’t there, Alex. You didn’t see the gunman, didn’t watch as he drew a line on helpless civilians and outgunned a hundred cops. You didn’t watch the bullets dance off him like they were nothing. You didn’t drag…” Danny’s voice trailed off suddenly.
Alex’s anger boiled over.
“You listen here, Danny. I know good and well who dragged Lisa from that mess. I know who stayed by her side through the hail of bullets. I know who I owe my wife’s life to—my son’s life. I know who protected her when I couldn’t be there to do it myself. I know that man is the bravest man to ever pin on a badge, so what’s with this coward’s attitude?”
“I just... Alex it just hit me is all. I sat up there with Lisa. Man, I rode in the ambulance with her. I watched her nearly bleed to death. I saw the place go up and knew. I knew I’d just watched people die.”
“Yeah, Danny. They died and for what? They died so that some idiot with no business being there could prove a point nobody even gives a rip about. Now you’re just gonna let the guy win?”
“Don’t you get it, Alex? What are we gonna do? Put a thumb on trial? A toe? The guy’s dead, man. So is his friend. Whoever blew up the Wal-Mart. There’s no victory here, Alex. There’s no winning. We don’t get to arrest the bad guy this time. This time, they do get away with it.”
***
Eric felt very lucky to have sustained such minor injuries. A broken wrist, two cracked ribs—though it felt more like nine every time he so much as twitched—a few cuts and bruises. All things considered, not a terribly bad day for Eric Reid. He felt lucky if unemployment was the worst of his problems.
Eric couldn’t reconcile when he’d become separated from Jenny.
His thoughts were so cloudy. He wasn’t sure which memories were real and which he imagined. He thought he’d remembered holding Jenny’s hand for some time, pulling her to safety, but apparently it hadn’t been as long as he’d thought. Her ankle had snapped, probably causing her to lose her balance. She was less than half Eric’s distance from the building when it went up. Shards of metal, glass and God knows what else tore through her body like deadly pin prick laser beams.
Eric remembered losing consciousness for what seemed like only a few short minutes, he thought. But it had been long enough for Jenny to bleed out. By the time Eric found her, she was gone. Her face and arms were covered in cuts. Her clothes soaked in blood. The images, whether real or imagined, haunted Eric and yet he felt lucky, selfish, sure, but undeniably lucky.
“There was nothing you could’ve done, Son,” the policeman had told him. Though school was out, the principal had organized a memorial service, inviting the whole town. Eric wasn’t sure what to expect, except for one thing. Teenage hypocrisy would be alive and well tomorrow at Jenny Anderson’s memorial service. Kids that hadn’t spoken of her, much less to her, in years would be crying rivers of guilt-ridden tears as if they’d lost someone for whom they genuinely cared.
The biggest hypocrite of all would be giving Jenny’s eulogy and Eric still had little more than a sentence of his tribute written.
“What can I say about Jenny Anderson?” his eulogy began.
He’d spent the better part of the last hour unable to come up with a suitable response. He could say he worked with her a lot, but it wasn’t by choice. She’d call him “Stud Muffin” and “Babe.” She didn’t know it made him sick to his stomach and that revelation probably wouldn’t do much to sooth the tortured spirits of Jenny’s parents. She loved to ask him out, not realizing Eric had no intention of ever saying yes.
Now, Eric wondered if she loved the fact that he was wishing her alive if for no other reason than to hear her ask him again.
***
“Danny, you make me sick!” Alex snapped.
“I know.”
“No you don’t know!” Alex insisted, his anger seething. “You can’t know because you’re not up here now. It’s not your daughter at home wondering when Mommy’s gonna come back and if she’s going to walk in or be carried in. It’s not your son fighting for his life in there because some psycho decided to use his mother for target practice. You’re not sidelined like I am, you selfish piece of garbage! How dare you say youknow!”
“Wait just a…”
“No, you wait! You owe me and you owe Lisa. And you owe every person that died in there. You owe it to them to find a way that they can rest in peace. You owe it to the rest of us to help uslivein peace.
That’s your job, Danny! Now do your job, you hear me?”
“Youarea Mendez,” Danny said solemnly.
“What does that mean?”
“Ted would have said the same
thing. So would Lisa, I’d wager.”
Alex was frozen by the mere mention of his late brother. “You knew Ted?”
“Yeah of course,” Danny said. “Mostly by reputation, but we had our moments. You knew that. I’m a little bit older than you, remember?
He was a couple years ahead of me, but we got along because, well, probably for the same reason you and me get along. He was a Mendez.”
“Danny, I…”
“Alex, I’m not gonna quit. You’re right. I owe it to too many people.”
“Danny, I’m sorry. I didn’t… I…”
“Shut up, before I change my mind,” Danny sighed. “I wish it was you, Alex. I wish to God you were in charge of this instead of me. I don’t know what to do. I’m a good cop but I’m not a leader. Never was. I don’t know how I have gotten this far without you. How do I fix this, Alex? How do I put a dead man in jail? How do you bring the dead back to life?”
“You don’t,” Alex said. “You don’t, Danny. You move on. You build a roadblock. You build up a wall. You keep the danger out. You can’t change what happened and you can’t erase time. But you can stop it from happening again. That’s your job, Danny.”
“Question is why’d it happen, Alex? Why here, why us?”
“You figure that one out, Danny, and you’ll know how to stop it from happening again.”
CHAPTER 9
Unimaginable Fantasy
Vengeance belonged to God alone, so the saying goes. What a mighty powerful sword to wield, Eric thought. And boy had it struck an expert blow.
Television provided little escape from the stinging reality smothering Eric.
Soap operas? No thanks. Game shows? Not today. News? No, he’d had enough news to last him a lifetime. Not sports, Sci-Fi Channel, Discovery or the many late night infomercials could take his mind off the muddled future that lay ahead, to say nothing of the murkiness covering the recent past. Nothing could erase the horrific sounds of explosions, destruction and, yes, death. No matter what channel he landed on, he saw devastation and chaos.
He could close his eyes, but death was right in front of him. His mind’s eye could not escape the horrific images of broken bodies, demolished ruins and shattered lives. No matter how he tried to breathe in the scent of the popcorn he’d just popped, the soap he’d used in the shower or even the unfriendly scent of his unwashed dog, nothing could force the smell of death from his nostrils.
No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t close his ears tight enough to escape the screams of untold numbers as they writhed in broken agony, mourned lost loved ones or burned to death themselves.
Eric didn’t know too many details of the explosion. The news was now reporting anywhere from ten to more than seventy dead. He knew of three for sure, Jenny Anderson, Lester Reynolds and an elderly black janitor he’d only known as Beulah. She’d been a sweet old granny of about 70 years. Her hair was salt and pepper. Her skin was as black as night and she always radiated the smell of peppermint, as much from her favorite hand cream as from the endless stash of candy peppermints she kept on her.
Eric would miss Beulah.
Tears filled Eric’s eyes as he thought of the many peppermint candies Beulah shared with him. He’d often felt as if she were another grandmother. She was just that type. Beulah’s passing had robbed the world of a sweet soul. A light had gone out and Eric felt certain he was not alone in feeling enveloped by the ensuing darkness.
***
Alex felt like a scared child, as he thought about how greatly his world had changed in the last several days. He was a father for a second time, this time to a beautiful baby boy. What should have been a time of celebration was a time of mourning and worry and uncertain confusion. The future had become so blurred in the last 72 hours. The police station gone, countless lives destroyed. His own wife laid up, battling injuries the extent of which doctors couldn’t truly know. The Wal-Mart bombed.
Bombed!
Suddenly the city of Longview had an unwanted kinship with the residents of New York, New Jersey, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania.
“Why us?” he thought. Why here? Why such a small insignificant target? What does it prove? That you can destroy small towns too?
What kind of cowards would do this?
Feeling like a child away from home for the first time, perhaps like a soldier thousands of miles away on a distant battlefield, Alex had a sudden craving for something familiar. He didn’t know what, but something—something that hadn’t changed. Anything that, in the last 72 hours, remained blissfully untouched by the goings on in the world of Alex Mendez.
With nowhere left to turn, Alex dialed a number he hadn’t dialed in almost a year. Not out of anger. Not because of some secret scandal nobody spoke about. Simply because time has a way of sneaking past when you’re not looking and, while Alex wasn’t looking, an entire year had passed since he last spoke with her.
He dialed the number quickly, realizing he could easily lose his nerve if he wasn’t careful. It rang once and Alex almost hung up. Just as it rang a second time, she answered the phone. Alex had woken her and he knew it.
“Hello?” she said, pausing then asking “Is someone there?” Her thick accent had slightly dissipated since they’d last spoke. Perhaps it was just her voice when she was so rudely awakened at such an ungodly hour. Whatever the case, Alex thought for a moment how very different she sounded. Subtle, he thought, but dramatic to the trained ear.
“Mommy,” he whispered, his voice adopting the sleepy Puerto Rican accent of Luisa Mendez, the woman that had given him life. “It’s me, Alex.”
***
Wiping his eyes, Eric fought back memories of the vivacious Beulah. He’d miss her, even if he’d never really told her how much he adored her maternal nature.
He’d surely miss Lester Reynolds, though for very different reasons. The old transplanted Oklahoma Pharmacy Technician with thick coke bottle glasses, a potbelly that would make Santa Claus envious and an endless collection of homespun Southern wisdom. Eric had never spoken to Lester personally, but he couldn’t help listening whenever the pudgy Oklahoma native spun one of his famous yarns with the various members of the pharmacy staff.
The sun had gone down hours ago and still he sat unable to shed even the dimmest of light on Jenny Anderson. His mind had wandered through images of Beulah, Lester and a few others that had been lost in a tragedy that made no sense. Eric had thought of things to say about each of them. He’d considered why each was special. Still, he could not find a way to immortalize the late Jenny Anderson.
What was she like? What did she like? Who was Jenny Anderson?
Who was the girl behind the girl he’d known as annoying and unattractive? His tapping pen gave no answer to the piece of paper waiting patiently for something beyond the simple question which seemed to lack even the simplest answer. The silence of his room in the wee hours of the morning served only to distract from the task at hand.
Eric’s room was typical of a science geek. On the wall above his bed, there was a slightly tattered poster of Jeri Ryan, a la her Star Trek Borg persona. The walls of Eric’s bedroom were lined with tributes to the casts of the various Star Trek incarnations, both new and old.
Though he had no posters to celebrate them, his collection of Star Wars memorabilia was big enough to have impressed George Lucas himself.
He’d bought an original Millennium Falcon on E-bay. Complete with vintage 1970’s likenesses of Han Solo and Chewbacca. For nearly two years it had remained suspended from his ceiling by fishing line, angled as if fleeing from Darth Vader’s imperial fighters, or perhaps pursuing the same.
Atop his bookshelf were action figures from the original trilogy as well as those from the new series. It was always neat to Eric to see the tiny action figure of young Anakin Skywalker standing as if ready to face off against the aged, black-mask-wearing version of his future self.
This was Eric. These things defined him. More than anything, this is who he
was.
Today, however, most of Eric’s fascinations had lost their meaning. The very fabric of his life had been turned on its ear. Life no longer made sense, not that it ever had; but there had always been familiarity, comfort. There had always been certainties.
It was certain that Beulah would smell of peppermint. It was certain that Lester Reynolds had endless Oklahoma yarns yet un-spun. It was certain that Jenny Anderson would ask Eric on a date, despite equally certain rejection. It was certain Eric would go to a job he hated, working with people he couldn’t relate to, fantasizing about girls who’d never give him the time of day.
Itwascertain.
Now there were no certainties. No Beulah, No Lester. No more of Jenny’s unwelcome advances. What could he say about Jenny Anderson? If she was anything, she was constant. A certainty in a world that craved familiar. A guarantee. She was, to him at least, sanity.
Truth wasn’t always pretty. But the ugly truth with which he was now faced repulsed him to no end.
He needed Jenny. Not because she was a great friend or some profound distributor of vast amounts of Southern wisdom. She smelled closer to pepper spray than peppermint. And yet her death had left a horrible void in Eric’s life.
What could Eric say about Jenny Anderson? He could say he needed her. It wasn’t until she was gone that he realized what a great, if odd, purpose she served. Whereas so many others had always served as a constant reminder of Eric’s low station in the social pecking order,
Jenny Anderson had always been there to prove that Eric wasn’t the lowest man on the proverbial high school social totem pole.
What could he say about Jenny Anderson? Her death, while tragic in and of itself was compounded by the selfish notion that Eric’s own station on the high school social ladder had just moved down a notch.
Letting out a huge sigh, Eric Reid contemplated how he was going to put a positive spin on that less than flattering notion.
Mourning Reign Page 5
