AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The puzzle had been completed in the past few hours. The Seabrooks four sitting in the bleachers at a baseball game. Johnny was in his uniform, snorting into Ruby’s neck. She was shoving him away, recoiling with delighted disgust. Deborah had struck an arch actressy pose, arms unfurled overhead as if she’d just taken a hot-tub plunge into a giant martini glass. Mason’s grin was faint but pronounced, the contented if bemused patriarch.
So much character frozen into a single image, broken into a thousand pieces.
And then put back together.
Ruby followed Evan’s stare, her chin dipping demurely. “I finished it when everyone went to bed,” she said. “I wanted to do it before you left.”
Her vulnerable gaze was almost more than Evan could take. It moved past him to the foot of the stairs, and then her eyes misted and she swallowed once, hard.
He’d placed his rucksack there in the foyer.
Deborah and Mason took note as well, and a heaviness descended on them that Evan didn’t fully grasp until he realized that it was inside him as well.
His intercostals still burned each time he inhaled, and he could barely lift his left arm over his head. The kitchen felt homey and warm. No one could find the spot in the soffit where he’d dug out the slug and patched the bullet hole. And no one would guess that a few nights prior a man had bled out on the very tiles beneath their feet. Evan was glad they’d never know anything about that. That he had preserved this home for this family, a family of survivors.
“It was a pleasure meeting you.” Evan offered his hand.
Deborah took it, her grip cool and firm, and gave a stately tilt of her head. “Evan No-Last-Name.”
Mason shook next, nodding a few times at Evan as if they both knew what more he wanted to say.
Evan turned to Ruby next, and she stepped forward and hugged him. “I thought I got to keep you.”
He hugged her back.
Let go.
She didn’t.
Her voice was muffled against his chest. “What do I do if the monsters come back?”
He bent his face to the top of her head and said, “You call me.”
63
A New Man
The elderly man with tousled white hair walked with some difficulty across Concourse C of the Dubai International Airport. His nose was wide and puttylike, his spine curled arthritically, and he relied heavily on a cane to move his right leg. Behind him he pulled a rolling carry-on composed of Tumi’s trademark black ballistic nylon. Attached to the handle was a canary-yellow circular luggage tag emblazoned with a tour-group name:GOLDEN YEARS CRUISES.
It was slow going.
The beautiful modern facility exuded a timeless weariness and excitement, the forever-day and forever-night of airport terminals. Between gates C21 and C23 waited the cheery leprechaun-green façade of McGettigan’s Irish Pub, its neon sign sprouting the inevitable clover.
DXB served as a gateway to most of America’s endless wars, operators and mercenaries rolling through on their way to Baghdad, Sana’a, and countless other hotspots. For them McGettigan’s was the pub of choice.
The elderly man entered and scanned the cheery interior. A long, curved bar underlit with a purple glow, TVs piping in US football and Europeanfútbol, a library wall of antique books and another composed of a neat stack of stripped firewood on which customers had written initials or love equations with permanent markers. One set of windows overlooked a runway, the other offering a glimpse of distant green hills. The elaborate fabric lamps dangling from the ceiling looked like roses or crumpled tissues depending on one’s Rorschachian tendencies. Along with illuminated glass shelves housing spirits, they suffused the bar with a welcoming light.
Trudging forward on that bum leg, the man took a seat at the bar next to a tall, slender man nervously sipping a pint and slotted his carry-on between their stools where the other man had left his.
“Hallo,” the elderly man said, offering a hand. “Matthew Ross, but you can call me Matty.”
The slender man gave an irritated shake and turned back to his drink. “Derek Tenpenny.”
The sole TV devoted to news scrolled headlines on the crawl—a fresh outbreak of violence in the Gaza Strip, another celebrity divorce, the American environmental bill stalled out.
“Where you headed to, friend?” the old man asked.
“Look, I’d prefer not to chitchat, okay?”
