Russell Andrews - Midas

“You’re not a stranger,” she said. “You know my mom.”

“Hannah, right?”

“My sister’s Reysa.”

“I have to go now, Hannah, so you’d better go inside. I don’t want your mom to worry.”

“My mom’s not worried. She’s afraid.”

“I know she is. But you don’t want her to worry, too, do you?”

“No.” But the little girl didn’t make any move to leave. “Can you help her stop being afraid?”

“I don’t know. I’m going to try. But I don’t know.”

“Sometimes she’s too afraid to take us to McDonald’s. Yesterday, Reysa cried because she wanted a Big Mac but Mommy wouldn’t take us.”

“Sometimes,” Justin told her, “when people are afraid it makes them not act like themselves. But you know what? It always changes. People change back to the way they were. And they act just like they used to. You and your sister have to try to be really nice to your mom while she’s nervous and afraid. That’s what she needs. And pretty soon she’ll be just like she used to be.”

“And she’ll take us to McDonald’s?”

“I promise.”

Nine-year-old Hannah Cooke thought about this for a moment, then she decided to continue the conversation from the front seat. She pulled herself up over the top of the passenger seat and plopped alongside Justin. As she landed, something fell out of her hand. Something small and shiny.

“What’s that?” Justin asked.

The girl reached down, picked it up with her right hand, then opened the palm of her left to show him what she had.

“Jacks,” he said quietly. “Are you a good jacks player?”

“Uh-huh,” she told him. “I play all the time. Are you good?”

“I haven’t played in a long time.”

“I know. That’s what happens to grown-ups. They stop playing.”

“Can I ask you something, honey?” She nodded, so he said, “Do you know what your mom’s so afraid of?”

“The men.”

“What men?”

“The men Daddy brought to the house.”

“Do you know who they were?”

Hannah shook her head. “One was scary. I didn’t like him.”

“Do you remember anything about him?”

“Uh-huh. He was a general.”

“A general? Like in the army?”

“I think he wasn’t a real general. Just an assistant general.”

“An assistant general? Like a colonel?”

“No. He wasn’t a colonel. He was an assistant general. And he was mean to my daddy.”

“How about the other man? Was he mean, too?”

“No. He was nice. I liked him.”

“What did you like about him?”

“He played with me. The general talked bad to my dad but the nice one played with me. For a long time.”

“Hannah,” Justin said, and suddenly the inside of the car seemed very quiet and still. “Did he play jacks with you?”

“Yup,” the little girl said. “And guess what?”

“What?”

“He was really, really, really good.”

He was back in his house by a few minutes before ten, happy to be in East End, happy to be away from soldiers and bureaucrats and widows. By ten, he was at his living room window, looking at the house across the street, catty-corner from his. Reggie’s lights were on. She was awake. Go on , he told himself. She told you to come over. So go. Go. But he stayed, one knee on the couch, his arms leaning on the backrest, looking at the stillness of her front yard.

Justin’s eyes slowly grew accustomed to the darkness outside his window. He could make out the edges of the telephone wires across the street. And the hedges that sat below them. He thought about the little girl’s jacks, the way her soft hands curled around them, and it made his stomach hurt. He thought about Martha Peck, not knowing whether or not she’d come through as promised. And the colonel; his fierce and misplaced loyalty. Again, he could see Hannah Cooke’s hand curl around the jack, and now he closed his eyes and he was back inside Harper’s, walking through the bombed-out remains, and Chuck Billings was pulling a jack out of the wall. A tiny children’s toy, embedded in the wall. A toy stained with dried red-brown blood.

He opened his eyes. Saw-or maybe just felt-some kind of movement in Reggie’s house. Maybe she’d noticed his car. Maybe she was coming over. He waited but there was no further movement. Just silence. And shadows.

Things are muddy , he thought. Things are muddy.

He looked at his watch. Ten-twenty.

He walked over to his computer, turned it on, waited for it to boot up. When it was ready, he went to his “Shared” folder, where he kept his downloaded music. He turned the volume on his computer all the way up, clicked on a Tim Curry song from the early ’80s, “I Do the Rock.” He let the music wash over him, its hard, staccato rhythm and its cynical obscure lyrics. In a crazy world, the only thing that still made any sense was to do the rock. Forget ideology. Forget growing old. Stay away from fame and politics and philosophy. Just do the rock. Justin agreed. It was about the only thing that still made sense to him, too. But his job was to make sense of things he didn’t understand, so, music blaring, he went to the folder he’d cleverly labeled “MI” for “Murder Investigation” and began to update his list. The first column he went to was “Connections.” There he found the link he’d initially marked as so tentative-Vice President Phillip Dandridge-between Bradford Collins and Hutchinson Cooke. He had typed in several question marks his first go-round. Now he deleted every one of them. He didn’t know what it meant, but he had a firm connection. Dandridge definitely knew both men. Justin stared at the fact, couldn’t make anything new of it, glad in a way that he couldn’t because what the hell was he possibly going to do to the vice president of the United States if it ever came to that, so he began typing again, adding everything he’d learned in D.C. Not a hell of a lot, he realized as he typed. But small bits and pieces. In the space he’d allotted for Hutch Cooke, he added, “Daughter plays with jacks,” and to the right of that he put in “Connection to bomb?”-and then he typed in all the question marks he’d just removed from link number one. He also wrote down just about everything he could remember that had come out of the mouth of Theresa Cooke. He even wrote down, “I fell down the tower-Eiffel Tower.” It seemed idiotic, but he’d learned never to dismiss anything. It meant that Cooke was a game player, he liked puzzles. Info that somehow might prove relevant since this was as complicated a puzzle as Justin could imagine. When he’d entered everything he could recall, he was about to shut down the computer, stopped, went back into the file, and added one more thing: “Everything’s muddy.” It seemed fitting.

Then he turned the computer off, took the half bottle of single-malt scotch left over from the night before, and went back to his lookout spot on the couch.

Reggie’s windows were dark now. She’d gone to bed.

Justin decided he’d better do the same.

His visitors would be arriving at nine in the morning. It was going to be a long and interesting day. He had to stay sharp. He’d have to be alert because he was going to need to absorb a lot of information.

Yes, he decided. Definitely time for bed.

One last look across the street.

Nothing but darkness.

Everything’s muddy.

He went to his computer, clicked on an illegally downloaded version of Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine,” and cranked it up. It was the perfect song.

A half a bottle of scotch and three-quarters of a thick, hand-rolled joint later, Justin Westwood was sound asleep.

Nuri Al-Bazaad liked driving American cars.