Jeffrey gave Sam a parting salute and followed after her. “What did I do that’s got you so angry? Whatever it is, I apologize,” he said.
“You came here and interrupted an old man’s convalescence to stir up a painful past that just about destroyed him, and you want to know why I’m upset? He cries out in the middle of the night sometimes, did you know that? No. How could you? He’s had a very rough time of it for as long as I’ve been alive — my mother told me all about it once I was old enough to understand. He went from being a respected academic to an outcast, an intellectual forced to earn his living with his hands. Everyone he was close to either shunned him, or is dead — my mother, my grandmother, his supposed friends that wanted nothing to do with him once he was no longer the campus golden boy… I’m sorry about your brother, by the way. I never met him. But I’m still sorry.”
“I… I didn’t realize. I’m sorry too, Kaycee. Really.”
They walked along in silence, the treetops quivering from a light breeze, budding with the promise of spring, and Jeffrey tried a different tack.
“What were you doing before you moved out here?”
“I’m a translator. I took a sabbatical to look after him for ninety days, and I’ve been doing freelance work in the meantime. I’ll return to my job in another month, back in New York, and then he’ll be alone again, out here in the middle of God’s ass crack.”
“A translator. That’s interesting. What language?”
She stopped and turned to face him.
“Look. Jeffrey, right? I’m sure you’re a nice guy, and you mean well, but I’m not in a great mood right now, and I’ve never been good with chitty chat. Don’t take it the wrong way, but we’re not going to go get a cup of coffee somewhere while I tell you all about my hopes and dreams. You came, you got what you wanted, and now you’re leaving. That’s all the contact we’ll ever have. So it doesn’t really matter what I do or what you do, does it? I’m just the rude chick who almost shot you today — it’s probably best if we leave it at that.”
He returned her gaze, several responses on the tip of his tongue, then he thought better of it and offered a smile. “Thankfully, almost being shot’s like almost being pregnant. That would have seriously ruined my day. I guess I owe you one for not blowing my head off.”
Her expression softened, and he noticed that she had tiny flecks of gold in her hazel irises that caught the sun when the light hit them just right. “Around here, I think they actually offer a reward for every lawyer you shoot,” she said.
“I knew I liked the place for a reason.”
They resumed walking down the path, startling a squirrel that scampered up a nearby tree, and Jeffrey was struck by how idyllic the setting was.
“It’s beautiful out here,” he said, and she nodded.
“I know. It is. And I’m sorry if I’m wound up. It’s just that it’s been such a struggle for him to get better, and each one of these episodes takes more out of him than you know. He’ll be up for days now, replaying things in his head, and it’ll just make things more difficult for us all. He’s not a young man, in case you didn’t notice, and for all his brave front, he almost died when he fell — he was all alone, and he easily could have. He lay on the floor for hours before he was able to crawl to the phone.” She paused as they neared the bend in the drive. “That’s why I’m here.”
“What are you going to do once you have to go back to work?”
“That’s one of my problems. I don’t know. He needs someone around, but I’m all he’s got. I figure I’ll tackle that in another month. Of course he says he’s fine, and that he’ll do okay by himself, but we’ve already seen how that turned out. A repeat performance, and he wouldn’t be so lucky…”
“No. I can see how he wouldn’t be.”
They arrived at the gate and Jeffrey offered her his hand. She took it, shaking it with a surprisingly strong grip, her shoulders square beneath the sweater as she studied him.
“I thought you wanted my number.”
“I do. Just tell me. I’ll remember it.”
“You sure you will?”
“I’m good with things like that. I will.”
She gave him a 212 area code number and he repeated it back to her.
“There. It’s now locked away in my memory banks, never to be forgotten. Kaycee and Sam. Have gun, will travel.”
She laughed lightly and spun, leaving him to slip out the same way he had come in. “Take care, lawyer man.”
“You too,” he said, and for a reason he couldn’t have explained, he felt like something important had just happened, something essential to his being that he didn’t understand but that was as tangible as a punch to the gut. Then his inner voice came to the rescue, chastising him for having improper thoughts about Kaycee when he was in a hot and heavy relationship with Monica — the new love of his life. That was unlike him. He was usually as ethical as they came. And yet the stirring in him that Kaycee had caused was undeniable.
He watched as she made her way back up the drive, and when she disappeared into the grove of trees he felt unaccountably empty, as though a part of him had been taken with her as she returned to an old man on a rustic porch who was waiting for dusk, as, ultimately, were they all.
TWENTY-FIVE
Suspicions Allayed
Jeffrey flipped the sun visor down as he approached Washington’s outskirts, mulling over the professor’s disclosures, a dark idea beginning to form. Was there something to his hypothesis that the government had been involved in covert testing of bio-warfare agents forty years ago? And even if so, why would it matter now? That was ancient history — hardly the sort of thing that got planes blown up, even if you were the hardest-boiled conspiracy theorist on Earth.
And yet Keith had chosen to send Jeffrey on a quest to talk to the ex-academic, and had obviously believed that his story was an important enough aspect of whatever he’d been researching to warrant making the trip a priority. He replayed the discussion over and over, but didn’t see anything he might have overlooked the first time — and his memory couldn’t expunge the image of Kaycee standing in the sun, holding a gun on him, blond mop shimmering like an angry lion’s, her eyes radiating an allure that was as undeniable as it was powerful.
No matter how he sliced the professor’s account, at the end of the day it was nothing more than a theory about sins of the past that had no bearing on the present that he could see. A tragic tale of abuse of power, no question, and if true, evidence that the government had been dirty, but that was hardly front page news even on a slow day. Try as he might there was no smoking gun, and as he pulled to the curb near Jakes’ office, he was no closer to a hoped-for breakthrough than when he’d started in the morning. Although something had shifted in his perspective, and he was no longer thinking his brother had been crazy: Something about the professor’s tale had resonated with Jeffrey, and by the end of their discussion he’d been left feeling that his brother had been sane, but pulling at a dangerous thread — and one worth killing over.
He slipped the keys through the mail slot as instructed, forgoing the note since the car was in plain view, and then walked to the corner and flagged down a taxi at the intersection. The driver dropped him off a hundred yards from the storage facility, and he saw with relief that he still had time to rummage through his things so he could bring a box of belongings back with him to the condo, satisfying any prying eyes.
Jeffrey spent a half hour in his locked area and got more clothes, as well as some photographs and personal items, and packed them all into a large carton that would just fit in his trunk. He carefully clasped the padlock and carried his carton past the desk clerk getting ready to shut down and then out to his car. He’d guessed correctly on the box’s size, and soon was winding his way back home, glad to be rid of the Taurus and feeling like he’d need to take a long shower to get the vehicle’s stink off his skin.