Tail Spin

“It was great,” he said.

“I’m glad. You must be real macho. I slept in that bed once and I thought my back was going to break, the mattress was so hard. I’m so glad no one tried to get in and kill me.” She refilled his bowl, not saying a word. “Truth is, I didn’t sleep all that well because every single sound was a bad guy coming to get me, even though I knew you were close, knew I was safe.”

“Understandable.”

“I kept my gun right beside me. Yes, the safety was on, Jack. Around three o’clock, I started hoping some idiot would show up and press his nose against my window. Question—if you shoot a gun through a storm window, does the bullet go straight through or does the glass throw it off target?”

“These windows? Straight through.” He added without any consideration at all, “You could sleep with me.”

As a simple declarative sentence with only five words in it, it should have flown high and proud. But it didn’t.

Rachael’s eyes fastened on his. “Sleep with you?”

“Ah, you know, as in sleep in my bed. I’d be close enough so that even if a bad guy did get in, he’d have to go through me first.”

Rachael said matter-of-factly, “Yeah, he would. Okay, I’ll think about making you the tethered goat.”

“Well, I don’t guess I was thinking of myself in exactly that way. Not really a goat. You know—” He shut his mouth.

She let him off the hook, but barely. He looked so interested, his eyes narrowed on her face, unblinking. She said, “I called my mom earlier, told her everything is peachy. She’d called Uncle Gillette and, bless him, he knew it was important to keep what happened under wraps, so he didn’t spill the beans.

“Still, she’s worried about me being all alone in Jimmy’s house, no friends around. I think she wants to sleep with me, too.”

Jack choked on his coffee. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “I hope you talked her out of coming here. Three in that bed wouldn’t be good.”

“I told her I’d visit soon. She’s still in shock that Jimmy was murdered and I’m now a rich woman. She was stuttering when I told her Jimmy left me a full third of his estate. I still haven’t called my sisters, and believe me, their mother Jacqueline hasn’t called me. I want to wait to make contact until this is all resolved.”

Jack said, “I checked for any leftover reporters camping on the curb. Evidently, they decided there’ll be nothing exciting happening here, thank God.”

“Yeah, but we should keep a close watch. You never know when one of the vultures will leap out at you from behind a garbage can.”

He nodded, spooned in more oatmeal, frowned. He dropped his spoon. “Sorry, no more. I’ve tried, but it’s the same taste, bite after bite.”

“Doesn’t Cheerios taste the same bite after bite?”

“Nope. The milk softens up the little donuts at different rates, so each bite is a surprise.”

“You’re nuts,” she said, and grinned at him. “You look like such a regular guy, sitting here at the breakfast table, a bowl of oatmeal in front of you, but then I think about who you are, what you do, and what you did for four years—the Elite Crime Unit, that’s what it’s called, right?”

He nodded.

“What was that really like?”

He straightened his bowl, neatly folded his napkin, stared out the large window by the country oak kitchen table toward the lovely white gazebo in the backyard. He looked back at her. “Fact is, every single day brought new horrors, and you couldn’t escape them. They followed you everywhere, even in your dreams. My dreams aren’t so vivid and bloody now, thank God.

“There are scary people out there, Rachael, and you know what? Drugging you and tying a concrete block to your feet so after you drown you don’t come back up to the surface—that qualifies big-time.

“In the ECU, we called them monsters and evil and psychopaths, all to dehumanize them. But what I kept seeing was each of those individuals as a baby—laughing, crying, innocent, and I’d wonder every single day, why? What happened to make that baby grow up to kill and destroy and inflict unimaginable pain and horror?

“We caught a good number of them, put most of them down, no choice. We saved some lives.”

“Why did you leave the unit?”

“Because I knew something would die in me if I stayed. When I first joined the ECU, I was told the time to burnout was about five years, and they gave me a list of symptoms to look out for. One of the main symptoms was ‘feeling death inside you,’ and I knew I’d reached my limit. I only made it to four years. Savich scooped me up before I could go civilian again and return to a prosecutor’s office.”

“Are you glad you stayed in the FBI?”

“Oh yes. Savich’s unit is special, all the agents are smart as a whip, the experience level is very high, and they care. It’s a good unit—cohesive, everyone ready to cover everyone else’s back. Sure there’s the mind-numbing bureaucracy, some idiot agents who act like they should run the world, but most agents I know want to do a good job. They want to make things better. I’m sounding like a recruiting poster, sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

Jack rose from the table, carried his bowl to the sink, and washed it. He wiped his hands on a towel. “First thing this morning, let’s go to Black Rock Lake. I want to see firsthand where all this happened. I want to trace your footsteps back to your house.”

THIRTY-NINE

An hour later, they stood together at the end of the wooden dock and stared down at the blue water lapping gently against the pilings, shimmering beneath the bright sunlight. It was beautiful, and Rachael thought, I could be down there, tethered to that block, my hair waving in the water, dead and gone forever.

She said, “As you can see, it’s not very deep here, maybe twelve feet max.”

He looked down at the water and felt such a punch of rage he nearly lost his breath. Even though he’d seen and heard just about everything one human being could do to another, this was different. This was Rachael. He said, keeping the violence out of his voice, “Two people carried you down this dock, one had your arms, the other your legs. You said you couldn’t tell if they were male or female. Think about it a minute, try to put yourself back there, listen.”