A Man Overboard (14 page)

He thought of Grandmom’s smiling face and the worn Bible held tight in her feeble grasp.

Then he broke his eyes away from the care-free play of the birds and told his inner musings to shut up. Again, he’d been down that intellectual road before, and he wasn’t about to let little birds lead him back to its chains right now.

Maybe I did drown
, he thought again, the Sandman refusing to go away. Maybe all the thoughts of the afterlife were due to the fact that he was
in
the afterlife.

“You think I could be dead? That all of this is…” And for a second, Jack thought that Donny might just fizzle away, disappear back into the imagination of purgatory once he’d figured it out. The jig was up, he cracked the code, the first part of the test passed.

But Donny didn’t disappear behind a proud smile. Instead, he set two mugs on the counter beside the percolating coffee maker and stared at him. “Are you saying that I’m not real? Because if that’s what you’re suggesting, I might have to ask you to leave.” Then he leaned against the counter and sighed. “I know that all of this has to be taking a toll on you. Everything’s happening so fast, it has to be messing with your head, the world spinning out of control and crap. But you’re not dead. You’re not asleep in some government lab. You’re not on an alien spacecraft. You’re in
my
house. Come on, man. Get it together.” He turned to the stove.

“If Stacey
is
the Anna in the letters…” The possibilities that such a notion allowed for had circled around his head all night. Like planets he knew to be there but not wanting to observe them with a telescope for fear of finding out that, yes, mankind actually was the product of a genetic experiment conducted by green men on Mars. Actually examining any of the insinuations could have sent him over the edge last night, but he knew that he’d have to face it eventually. He decided that eventually would be now.

“The way I see it,” Donny said, filling the two porcelain mugs, “is that either she had her mother set all this up to be with Vadim again, which would mean that she knew she didn’t have cancer; she thought she had cancer, and Viktoriya helped Vadim get her back unbeknownst to Stacey; or this has nothing to do with a past love relationship, and it’s all strictly business.” He handed a blue Fraternal Order of Police mug to Jack. “KGB-type business.”

“You think Stacey—”

“—
Anna
.”

“Maybe.”

“Possibly.”

“You think that my wife could be a Russian spy?”

Donny shrugged. “I’m a detective. I’m trained to consider every possibility. Granted, it’s not the most likely one, but—”

“But until we find out who the man in the photo is, who Vadim is, what Viktoriya’s up to, why they wanted me dead, whether or not Stacey’s alive…”

“Yeah, we don’t know much of anything, Jack. So here’s my advice: stop thinking about it. You’re only driving yourself crazy. You don’t know. Don’t go throwing your marriage away or disrespecting Stacey’s memory until you have
all
the facts.”

Seeing his own face move back and forth in the reflection cast by his coffee, he asked, “Is that what you’d do?”

“Hell no. But I’m telling you what
you
should do. Wait. Keep your head down, stay alive, let the Feds figure this thing out. You ain’t gonna help anyone by getting yourself killed or locked up.”

He lifted the cup and took a sip. “Fine.”

“Good. Now, I mean it. Don’t go dumping on Stacey until you have a reason in stone to. She’s your soul mate, your son’s mother, and my friend. Give her the benefit of the doubt.”

“‘Love hopes all things, believes all things…’” he muttered.

“What’s that?”

Jack looked up. “Something from the Bible.”

“Didn’t know you still remembered all that stuff.”

“Neither did I.” He took another sip. But the verse hadn’t come from school; it had come from the wall of Grandmom’s living room. Memories came flooding back. Memories of Jack catching her standing there, tears in her eyes, just staring at the framed words, as if God’s hand had taken to scribbling on walls again. He could recall every detail of those moments, her black shoes over pantyhose, the flowered dresses she loved to wear, her glasses hanging from her neck, the whirl of white hair crowning her head… She had never explained what it was that made that specific scripture so special to her, but Jack knew it had to do with Grandpa. The story was that he’d died of a heart attack on his way to the train after work one day. But what was usually omitted from the story was where he was coming from; for he had surely died after work, but he had not been coming straight from work. And when five hundred dollars was found in his pocket, the rumors began to circulate. Prostitutes, cocaine, you name it. Of course, Grandmom always rejected such nonsense, even if she couldn’t explain it herself. Their marriage had been a good one, and she wasn’t about to let some mysterious unknown tarnish the whole thing. Yeah, it was Grandpa’s death that made those verses special to her, Jack was pretty certain of that; especially now that they seemed applicable to his own situation.

“You mind if I take a shower?” he asked Donny.

“I’m making us breakfast, man. Relax for a second.” He opened the fridge and took out a carton of eggs. “When we’re done eating, you can take a shower. God knows you need one. You smell like pickled diarrhea.”

And he realized that his last shower had been shared with Stacey.

Or Anna…

* * * *

Jack stepped into the hallway with a bath towel tied around his waist and called out for Donny. When Donny didn’t answer, Jack assumed he was still out on his morning jog through the neighborhood. He went into Donny’s bedroom and, opening dresser drawers, began looking for some clean clothes that might fit him. Jack was a respectable one-eighty-five with a six-pack, but it wasn’t because Donny was a donut cop on the verge of a heart attack that Jack would most likely be unable to fit into his clothes. Donny was two hundred and twenty pounds of solid, veins-popping-out mass. And he never ate donuts.

Movement in his periphery put his search on pause. Standing tall, he turned and gazed into a full-length mirror that was hanging on the wall across from him. He didn’t look one-eighty-five anymore. He looked frail, weak. A salesman. And he wondered just how in the world this small man staring back at him was going to set things right.

With a gun, that’s how. Guns were the great equalizers, as the man in his garage had learned. But then, that was what Donny and Johnson were talking about, wasn’t it? That was the kind of Hollywood crap that would get him killed.
Or save his life,
as had been the case with the intruder. With nowhere to go, though, it was irrelevant. He could daydream all he wanted of storming some Communist compound with his lonely 9mm blazing, rescuing his wife and son from the hands of some ridiculous James Bond villain with metal teeth, but without a compound to storm, the fantasy could never tempt reality.

He turned away from the sight and went back to the dressers, rummaging through socks and…black-laced lingerie? Unless his friend was into some really strange stuff or spent his nights as an undercover drag queen, it looked as if Donny’s girlfriend had begun to take over ample dresser space. He found three more outfits, some T-shirts, pajamas, and some really short jean shorts that he hoped were hers, too. But that didn’t seem like something Donny would allow. Sharing his bed with a woman was one thing, but his dresser? That wasn’t the Donny he knew. Maybe this relationship was serious. If so, it would be the first for his friend.

Setting down the lace and pushing from his mind the more recent memories that such material suggested, he settled on the smallest clothes he could find. A dark pair of jeans that fit him fine and a tight, black T-shirt that was probably the girlfriend’s. He pulled them on and looked in the mirror. The shirt was a little tight, but it made him look more like the one-eighty-five he used to be, so he didn’t mind. He just double-checked to make sure that PINK wasn’t spelled out in some obscure location. Satisfied that he could walk around in public without ending up on some “escaped from Walmart” website, he turned back to close the drawers. That’s when he noticed a little black box nestled into the corner of the top drawer. Curiosity moved his hand to it, and he took it out, flipping the lid open. A diamond ring. It
was
serious. Jack couldn’t believe it. He put the box back before Donny could walk in behind him and catch him in his girlfriend’s clothes holding the engagement ring, all his dresser drawers opened. That could be an awkward moment. Jack grabbed a pair of socks, shut the drawers, and went back to the bathroom for his sneakers.

Finally clean and dressed for the first time in a week, he descended the stairs. And though the fresh feeling didn’t do anything for the nightmare decor still hanging in his soul, it did fill him with an eagerness to get something done. But without direction, he could only settle down on the patio and sit beneath the ascending sun, thinking.

He thought about
The House of Thunder
by Dean Koontz,
October’s Ghost
by Ryne Douglas Pearson,
Seventeen Moments of Spring
by Yulian Semyonov… They were all novels of Soviet interest, but each one was as different as the next. He hadn’t seen a note in Pearson’s
Simple Simon
, though he supposed he could’ve missed it. But if the notes were pertinent to the reason they were being removed from his house, either to save them from the fire or to ensure their destruction via another means, then
Simple Simon
might
have been left behind because it didn’t share the same relevance as the others. Or the man hadn’t found it in the midst of the clothes piled on the bed. Unless, believing Jack to be dead and knowing that Stacey had
Simple Simon
on the boat with her, he would have no reason to look for it. How the guy would know that, though, was way beyond Jack’s realm of limited understanding. If only he could examine the novel again, but holding his hand up in the air and having the morning breeze reassemble it in his grasp was probably just as likely to happen as finding the paperback still intact beneath the smoldering pile of his former home.

He went back inside and sat himself at Donny’s computer. A screensaver was going through a slideshow of bikini-clad beauties positioned erotically in front of various world-renowned locations. The Giza Plateau, Easter Island, Mount Rushmore, the Great Wall of China. As Jack chased the airbrushed and silicone-loaded hotties away with a gentle move of the mouse, he wondered if married life would finally mature Donnie. He entered
Simple Simon
into Amazon’s search bar. Though he didn’t think
Mercury Rising
involved a Soviet plot, he wanted to make sure that the movie was true to the novel in that regard. After reading through a few reviews, it seemed that it was. One reviewer stated, “The whole NSA side of the story was great, making it the techno-thriller it is and topping it off with a twist of government conspiracy so believable that it may leave you uncomfortable next time you watch C-Span or read about certain clandestine operations and DoD budgets…” It sounded like Jack’s type of story. Like Stacey’s. But the thing that was odd about Stacey having this novel (apart from it being in the same series with
October’s Ghost
) was that she’d been getting all her books from the library lately. So why had she paid for this particular one? If it was sent to her like the others had been, then it would be part of the same puzzle whether it had a Soviet plot or not.

And then, depending on what I believed was going on, I’d either want my wife back or I wouldn’t…

Was Johnson actually hinting at…

The screensaver came back on, the near-naked women smiling at him, promising things they could never offer.
Would
never offer. They were teasing him. But fake or not, they were beautiful. Though not as beautiful as Stacey. And she had made him an actual promise. Made a covenant with him. The looks of seduction she teased him with actually led to fulfillment. And again, the God thoughts crept back into his thought process, reminding him that her beauty was one of the major reasons he rejected atheism. For though Stacey hated the concept of a Creator, her existence alone was proof enough for him that there was one. He couldn’t believe that she was an accident, that beauty itself was an accident, that virtues like truth and love weren’t virtues at all but just strange quirks fabricated by chance to simply confuse a pointless reality. At least until this splinter of doubt came infecting his conviction: what if she had been
too
perfect? She could have certainly done better than him. What if this Vadim guy was—

A sudden thought came crashing through his psyche like a thunderbolt from Olympus, riding the wings of a memory. A memory from that night on the boat. Of what Stacey had said to him from beneath the depths of a drunken stupor.

I haven’t gotten this drunk since Joseph was conceived!

To which he replied, “What are you talking about? You were as sober as a judge…”

That must’ve been the other guy, then!

He took a deep breath, refusing to accept that line of thought, focusing on Grandmom’s picture.
Love believes all things, hopes all things.
He wouldn’t throw away the validity of their relationship on idiotic conjecture.

He just wouldn’t.

He walked out to the patio.

21

He opened his eyes, and the first thing he noticed was the sun’s changed position in the sky. It was now above the big puffy clouds and the chemical trails cutting paths through them. He squinted against the brightness and lifted his head off the back of the chair, absorbing his surroundings. After the mental re-entry back to his current location, he forced himself to his feet and walked to the kitchen. The microwave displayed 12:22 as being the current time. He’d been asleep for almost three hours. “Don?” he called.