Richard Doetsch - Half-Past Dawn

Jack silently railed against his father, his moral compromise for financial success, his lack of genuine honesty in his job. He swore that he was not going to let his dreams die, compromise himself for anything. Unbeknownst to his father, Jack formed his own plans.

It was in the summer, just before the start of his junior year, that he finally declared his major: criminal justice, a major that his father frowned upon.

Jack Keeler took the New York City police entrance exam in his senior year of college and headed to the Police Academy-much to the disappointment of his father-the day after graduation, his degree and pedigree making him a unique commodity in the New York City Police department.

It turned out that Jack was gifted with a gun, finishing head of his class at the range. He represented the N.Y. Police Academy at several competitions, always taking home the top prize. He never had a love for guns but found them to be like an extension of his body. His skill with a pistol in the obstacle-laden practical shooting courses was only bested by his ability with a rifle. His instructors recommended him for SWAT and made the military aware of his talent, but Jack would have none of it. He wanted to be engaged in fighting crime, solving crime; he wanted to use his mind far more than a firearm.

With the honors bestowed upon him, Jack was given accelerated entry into homicide, the division where he thought he could do the most good, applying his deductive reasoning to capturing those who committed the most heinous acts.

With an affection for puzzles since his teens, he was a natural as a detective. His aptitude helped him get assigned to a six-month apprenticeship under Detective Frank Archer. The department believed that the veteran would impart his wisdom and skills to someone with youthful energy, drive, and passion for police work.

Frank at first thought Keeler was some rich kid playing cops and robbers, a showboater who would be the front-page poster child of the “new” kind of cop. The fact of the matter was that Jack was not rich in the sense of privilege, having been raised in the upper-middle-class world afforded by his father’s income. Jack had all but rejected his father’s monetary assistance and connections upon graduating from college. He was neither arrogant nor vain, and his passion turned out to be entirely genuine.

Although Frank was fifteen years Jack’s senior, they became fast friends, working together on multiple cases over the six-month period. Jack absorbed his new friend’s knowledge, while Frank found Jack’s drive and commitment refreshing in a world where work ethics were as ephemeral as a cool summer breeze.

Frank’s world was the antithesis of the life Jack had started out in. He was street-tough and spoke his mind without thought; his bulldog body and attitude were the outward manifestation of his heart. Frank had spent ten years in homicide and had yet to become jaded. Bronx-born and -raised, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Army in search of adventure but ended up spending the majority of his ten years of service as a sergeant stateside, barring a single tour in Germany.

His wife, Lisa, never complained as they crisscrossed the country from base to base for six-month stints, but she exacted a promise from Frank that once he was out of the Army, he would figure out a way to buy her a small house with a garden, where they could settle down and have kids.

Frank fit right in at the NYPD, which was happy to embrace a military man. He worked his way through narcotics, robbery, and special units, finally settling into homicide. Lisa had feared for his life far more than she ever had when he was in the army.

She had hoped to overcome that by focusing on family and children. But despite all the years of trying, despite all of the doctors’ promises and bills, a child was not in their future. They dealt with their heartbreak as they did with so many of the problems they had faced in life: distraction. Lisa became a teacher, indirectly sating her maternal instinct by helping to form the lives of other people’s children, taking pleasure in her third-grade class and the students’ magical, inquisitive minds.

Frank found an even greater focus at work, rising to the top of his game, with multiple accommodations and countless convictions. He and Lisa purchased a small Cape Cod-style house in Byram Hills and had finally found a peaceful balance to life.

Jack rolled up his sleeve and stared at the intricate tattoo on his left forearm. It was truly like nothing he had ever seen before, not in print, not on canvas, and certainly not on skin. He looked at it closely, examining the dark ink, the tightly woven pattern, the odd lettering from a language he couldn’t fathom. He wracked his brain but could find no recollection of getting it. It certainly wasn’t something he would have chosen. The one on his hip was one thing, a drunken mistake. This was different, and while his memory of the last two days seemed to have slipped away, he knew that this mosaic on his flesh was somehow connected to Mia’s disappearance.

“Like my body art?” Jack asked, trying keep a little humor in the car before Mia’s situation overwhelmed them. He rolled down his sleeve.

“You know”-Frank suppressed a smile as he ate the bacon sandwich Jack’s mom had made for him-“that’s going to come up in this year’s campaign.”

“Front-page material,” Jack said.

“Mia’s not going to be happy.” Frank spoke as if confident that finding her was already a given.

“Hell,” Jack said, “she probably knows about it. Who’s to say we haven’t already fought about it?”

“Did it occur to you that maybe it was her idea? She may have had you branded, trying to make sure her prize cattle didn’t get lost.”

Jack reached around to his side and pulled out his Sig Sauer. He had fetched it from the oversized gun safe in his workshop before they left. He rarely touched it except to clean it, having left his particular talent with the weapon in his past.

“I haven’t seen you holding that in forever,” Frank said. “You remember how to use it?”

“Yeah,” Jack said quietly. “Don’t worry about me.”

“Why don’t you let me handle things involving weapons?” Frank smiled. “I have an aversion to being shot.”

Jack ignored the joke. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”

“You’ve got to learn to put that guilt away.” Frank admonished his friend as if he were his son. “Everyone else has except you.”

Jack didn’t respond. The car fell silent as Frank turned his eyes on the highway ahead.

Jack Keeler was dead-the world thought it, the papers screamed it, and it was the lead story on every local news channel. In the matter of an hour, Jack’s mind had gone from confusion to fear to relief and back to confusion. While the faint odor of Mia’s perfume had sparked his memory of the night before, and the two bears had helped fill in his memory from the beginning of the week, nothing else came forth. He tried everything: he looked at pictures, looked at her clothes in her closet, read her various Post-it note reminders around the house in hopes of dredging up those lost days, but he found no key to unleash his recent past.

“You know, if someone sees you alive,” Frank said, “it’s going to create a lot of questions.”

“Whoever has her thinks I’m dead. It’s an advantage for the moment.”

“Do you think this is connected to a case out of your office?”

“I’m sure the list of people who want me dead isn’t small, but then, why ask Mia about the box?”

“And you didn’t see the box before?”

He heard their demand; it still rang in his ears, box 7138. No matter how he tried, he could remember nothing about a box. When he saw it pulled from the rear of the Tahoe, he was more than surprised. Mia must have hidden it there underneath the tons of crap-soccer balls and tennis rackets, water bottles and blankets, shopping bags and toys-that they had accumulated over the summer. And what it contained he had no idea.