Robert Tanenbaum - Counterplay

He wasn’t as bad off as her mother had been, but he wasn’t all there anymore, either. He often forgot things-whether it was a doctor’s appointment, or something as simple as his key and locking himself out of his house. A couple of times he’d called her, his voice weepy and on the edge of panic, to say he had driven somewhere but couldn’t quite figure out how to get back. He was lost but too afraid of strangers to ask for directions, so Marlene would have to go retrieve him, or call the neighbor she’d left a spare house key with to let him in.

Ever since the death of her mother, he’d grown more frail. She was worried that he wasn’t eating or sleeping well. She had plenty of money from the sale of her security company-more than she or Butch or their children would be able to use in their lifetimes-and wanted to use it to make his life, and hers, easier. She’d found a fabulous assisted-care facility, “more like a permanent vacation in a five-star hotel,” she told him. But he refused to go.

“I will not go into a nursing home,” he’d shouted.

“Take it easy, Pops,” she replied in as calm a voice as she could muster. “It’s not a nursing home. I would never do that to you. It’s a community for senior citizens. You’d have your own apartment, a social center, including a pool and a billiards and card room. There’s someone around 24/7 if you need help, and all your meals and laundry and stuff is taken care of…. It’s like Club Med.”

“Call it whatever you want, but it’s where you send people to die who are no longer useful,” her father shouted again and retreated up to his bedroom.

“I plan to die in the same house I lived in with your mother for more than fifty years!” he yelled through the door when she asked him to open it. “This is the house where you and your sisters and brothers were brought the day you was born. You were all raised here…this is where we were a family, goddammit!”

Marlene used a bobby pin from her hair and unlocked the door. He didn’t seem to notice but looked around behind her as if he expected to see someone spying. “You know I’ve seen her,” he whispered.

“Who, Pops?”

“Your mother. She sometimes shows up in the doorway at night when I’m in bed. If I get up and try to find her, she disappears. But I can hear her moving around out there…. I think she’s waiting for me. But if I go to this living facility, she won’t know where to find me so that we can go to heaven together.”

The old man had sat down on the bed and started weeping. “I miss her so much,” he said. “I’d even take the crazy version back.”

Marlene had laid down on the bed next to him and pulled him close. In some ways, it was romantic, the way her old man looked forward to spending eternity with his sweetheart. But his visions of an unsettled ghost made her wonder if the manner of her mother’s death was weighing on her father’s conscience. But she couldn’t ask him. She just couldn’t, and instead she said, “It’s your imagination, Pops. Mom’s in heaven with Jesus waiting for you there.”

She repeated an offer for him to come live with her, Butch, and the boys, but not even the promise of daily contact with his beloved grandsons could get him to budge. “We’d get on each other’s nerves,” he said, “and then I’d have no place to go that was my own. I want my house, where I can do what I want, when I want. Besides, the guys at the VFW would miss me.”

So she’d left the debate for another day. Marlene had arrived at 10 °Centre Street a bit unsettled, but she brightened when she saw Harry Kipman walking up to the entrance. She adored Harry. He liked to play the irascible intellectual, but she knew he was not just bright, but kind and warm. She hadn’t minded the teasing about her weaponry, but it did remind her that she was falling back into old patterns.

Doesn’t matter, she thought, I’m defending my family, and I’m not about to leave their security up to someone else.

As soon as he could start barking orders, Fulton had immediately beefed up the police presence around her husband until wherever Butch went, he looked like a presidential candidate surrounded by Secret Service agents. She accepted the extra police patrols around the loft and even the presence of escorts when the boys went out. But she’d declined her own bodyguard.

You lose your edge when you depend on someone else, she’d told Fulton. And he’d known her better than to argue.

She’d fought it again when Butch came home and announced that the Department of Homeland Security was beefing up the detail. However, Jaxon, another longtime friend of the family, had persuaded her that the new teams were professionals who knew how to stay out of the way but would be ready just in case.

Marlene wasn’t the only one who wasn’t thrilled with being shadowed by federal agents. Even more adamantly against the whole idea was Lucy. She was back in Taos, New Mexico, with Ned, and didn’t want anybody spying on her. I’ve got Ned, she pointed out before she left. He’s the only secret agent man I need.

No one’s doubting Ned’s abilities, Marlene had said as the subject of the conversation stood bashfully to the side with his head down and Stetson in his hand while mother and daughter argued in the loft before they left that past January to return to Taos.

Like her husband, Marlene liked the young man and acknowledged that his hobby as a quick-draw gunslinger at Western competitions had come in handy when Lucy’s life had been threatened several times over the past year. But again, that had all been about reactions; he wasn’t trained to be proactive when dealing with a security threat. He’s only one man, and he may be a target himself. Kane, or whomever he sends, is not going to step out onto the street and ask for a fair fight. You won’t even know the feds are there.

Yes, I will, Lucy said, placing her hands on her hips with her feet apart, an obstinate stance she’d inherited from her mother. And I’m not going to give up my privacy for the latest madman du jour who has it in for this family.

Looking at her defiant daughter, Marlene was struck again by the changes in the thin, pale, and frightened young woman who’d gone to Taos, New Mexico, almost a year earlier to help at a Catholic mission for Taos Indian kids. Bookish and wrapped up in Catholic mysticism, she’d done little up to that point to make herself attractive to members of the opposite sex. A savant at picking up languages-having mastered nearly sixty already-she’d accompanied her mother to Taos, hoping to learn Tewa, one of the oldest and most individualistic languages left in the world from the Pueblo Indians there. Whether it was the outdoor life or her love for her young cowboy, Lucy had blossomed into a tanned, muscular but well-filled-out young woman, who if not pretty in the classical sense of a rose was certainly beautiful in the sense of a desert flower.

Marlene then turned to John Jojola to persuade Lucy, but he’d been no help. These federal agents might be okay in the city, he said. But every time some guy from the FBI shows up in town, it’s all over the reservation faster than you can pick up the telephone. And the people in town can smell the difference between the tourists and out-of-town cops. One spends money on doodads, the other doesn’t. I’m worried that if the bad guys show up in town, we won’t know which is which, and they might spot the feds first, which would make them more cautious. I’d rather they were overconfident. He’d put his arm around Marlene’s shoulders. Come on, I’ll keep an eye on the young lovebirds. Us cowboys and Indians blend in better in our West. If Ned doesn’t see them first, me and my guys will.