The cop got out of his car and walked purposefully up to the Porsche, stopping at the driver’s window. Miles had already powered it down.
“Good day, Officer,” he said.
“You have any idea how fast you were going?”
“I think you picked me up when I was doing about ninety,” Miles said.
“License and registration,” the cop said.
Miles had already retrieved the registration from the small leather folder in the glove box. He’d set his wallet on the passenger seat after removing his license. He handed everything to the officer.
The cop looked at the two items and said, “Wait here.”
He walked back to his cruiser and got in.
Miles turned the radio back on. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” came through the speakers. This had always been one of his favorites. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, letting the music envelop him. The song was interrupted by a persistent whoosh of cars and trucks passing by on the highway.
The track was just finishing when Miles heard the police officer’s boots crunching on pebbles as he approached.
“Mr. Cookson,” the officer said gravely.
“Yes sir?”
“You need to slow down,” he said, handing him a ticket.
“Yes sir.”
Miles offered a respectful smile as the cop headed back to his car. Miles leaned over, opened the glove box again, and tucked the ticket in there with the other three he’d received since getting the bad news from his doctor a few days earlier.
Fuck it, he thought, slamming the glove box door shut.
Before long, he figured, they’d take his license away. But by then, he’d probably have to give up driving anyway. In fact, earlier that day, coming up on a red light, when he went to put his right foot on the brake, it had done this weird wobble, like his foot had a mind of its own. There’d only been a momentary hesitation in applying pressure to the pedal, but driving safely was all about response time, instant decisions. When a little girl ran into the street after a ball, you couldn’t send a message to your foot via snail mail to hit the fucking brake.
Scared him.
It was enough to convince him his driving days were limited.
Might as well get out on the road and drive like a son of a bitch while he could. Put the Porsche through its paces before he had to give it up. Hadn’t even had the car a year. Dropped nearly two hundred grand on it. Added every possible option he could.
You make a few mill a year, you gotta spend it on something.
Miles’s reckless, don’t-give-a-flying-fuck attitude had not been limited to driving. He’d been drinking to excess every night. Not that having a few drinks was living on the edge, but Miles had pretty much given up alcohol more than a decade ago. Went through the whole “body is a temple” bullshit. Drank eight glasses of water a day. Even followed Gwyneth Paltrow on Twitter, not that he agreed with even half of her life philosophy.
But in the last week, he’d renewed his friendship with Absolut Vodka. And he’d found that it went very well with Cheetos. Fucking Cheetos. He’d been through the McDonald’s drive-through twice, gorging on Big Macs and fries. He couldn’t believe how good this shit tasted. Took home Domino’s one night. Ate the whole goddamn pizza himself. Woke up at midnight with the worst heartburn of his entire life. Briefly wondered — and at some level hoped — it was a heart attack and things could be over now.
Driving too fast and eating crap weren’t the only risky things he’d been doing.
Two days earlier he’d gone skydiving. Not for the first time, but it was something he hadn’t done since his twenties. When it came to the moment when he was to pull the rip cord, he thought about whether to bother. What a perfect way to go out. Okay, sure, the doc said he could have quite a few years left, but what was the quality of that life going to be? Maybe this was the way to end things. One big splat and you’re done. Skip the part where someone has to help you go to the bathroom and wipe your ass. Skip the part where it takes an hour and a half to walk from the bedroom to the kitchen because your arms and legs are all fucking akimbo. Skip the part where it takes you five minutes to give the waiter your order because you can’t form the words and get them the fuck out of your mouth.
But he yanked on that rip cord. The parachute deployed. Miles drifted safely back to Earth.
Miles had spent much of the week playing the “Why Me?” movie in his mind. Why him? Why did he have to get this? What the hell had he done to offend the gods that he had to be saddled with this?
Pretty un-fucking-fair, that’s what it was. Sure, other people had problems and serious diseases and millions of them were living in poverty or fleeing drug cartels south of the border or dying of starvation and dehydration in Africa, but Miles didn’t give a rat’s ass about any of them. He didn’t care about rising oceans or climate change or how the world was eating too much beef which meant cattle were farting too much methane into the atmosphere. He didn’t care about the rise of right-wing extremism or that every country in the world seemed determined to vote into power the stupidest knuckle-dragging politicians they could find.
And yet, as much as he was focused on his own situation, his own future, something was nagging at him. A sense that this was not all about him.
There is one tiny piece of good news... You have no children. If you did, this would be devastating news for them.
“Are you going to tell me what this is about?”
Miles was at his desk, staring at his computer screen. Before him were the detailed proposals for several new apps his company had in development, but he wasn’t seeing any of it. He couldn’t focus. It wasn’t vision related. He couldn’t concentrate.
At first, he wasn’t even aware that his personal assistant, Dorian, was standing there.
“Hello?” said Dorian, who was holding a metal Coke can. “Is this what you wanted?”
He turned, looked at the can, and said, “You were careful not to touch the top?”
“Yes.”
“Put it in a plastic bag and seal it,” he said.
“You’re the boss, I get that, and lots of times I have to do things you want without knowing what it’s about, but this crosses a line.”
Dorian, thirty-eight, had been working alongside Miles for nearly a decade, and there’d rarely been secrets between them. Dorian, slightly built, barely 110 pounds, with short-cropped black hair, oversized, black-framed glasses, pulled off the androgynous look with style, always coming to work dressed in a black button-down collared shirt, black jeans, and black sneakers with white, rubber soles. Less politically correct visitors would often whisper a question to Miles, wanting to know whether his assistant was male or female. Invariably, he would answer, “Does it make a difference?”
In all the time she’d worked for him, Dorian had offered very little information about her private life, and Miles had learned not to ask.
Miles said, eyeing the Coke can, “It’s personal.”
“No shit,” Dorian said. “You ask me to stalk your brother, and grab something he’s touched, something that he’s put to his mouth, and bring it to you. You’re right, that’s very personal, and you’ve brought me into it. I can think of only one reason why you would want me to do that. You want a sample of his DNA. So I ask myself, why would you want that?”
“Dorian, just—”
“Maybe it’s that you don’t really think he’s your brother? Or maybe someone broke into your place and did a dump on your living room rug and you’re wondering if it was him?”
“Why would you even—”
“Just blue-skying.” Dorian shrugged, but then gave him a steely glare. “And while we’re on the topic of strange behavior, what’s been going on with you lately? Gone half the time, jumping out of planes, drinking. You think I don’t notice this stuff?”