He scanned the printouts but they were a blur. He couldn’t seem to take in any of the info. He leaned in. “Do—do you have images for him?”
“Yeah.” She did that finger-blurring thing again, then sat back. The monitor showed a carousel of photographs and Jacko stared. They were mainly informal snapshots, some formal portraits, some cuttings from newspapers. Lee Garrett smiling into the lens, growing more unsmiling as he aged. Being handed some kind of award. With a hunting rifle, in hunting gear, one booted foot on the neck of a six-point buck. Standing next to a big Christmas tree. Several shots at restaurants. He’d been a member of the Rotary Club and there were lots of photos at Rotary dinners.
Jacko took in all the details greedily, but there was nothing there to hang on to. Garrett was tall, lanky, fair-skinned, with a full head of sandy hair. He had nothing in common with Jacko’s strong, stout build and dark skin. However hard Jacko looked, he could see no points of resemblance. Nothing.
His wife, too, was tall and slender. Attractive without making much of an effort. There were a couple of shots of her on a hunting trip, holding a shotgun as if she knew how to use it. There were no photographs of her much beyond the age of forty. Felicity said she died fifteen years ago. Felicity had included her birth date—1951. She died at 50.
He watched in a daze as the photos crossed the screen, and then— “Stop.”
Felicity obediently stopped the carousel of photos.
A family snapshot. Lee, his wife, a young girl standing between them, face scrunched up against the sun.
Jesus. His mother. Looking…normal. Like any other teenager in the ’70s. Peering closely, Jacko could vaguely see his mother in the teenager’s face. The last years he’d seen his mother, she’d been grossly underweight, face heavily lined, prematurely gray hair falling out in clumps. Teeth ground down to black stubs because of the meth. She looked like shit, always. None too clean and on the lookout for the next high, no matter the price.
This girl looked happy and energetic.
There she was, in another photo, happily holding up a sports trophy. And another, on a horse in English riding gear. And another one, in a cheerleader’s outfit.
What the fuck had happened to her?
There were no photographs of the girl after her late teens. She disappeared from the Garretts’ lives. Alice Garrett aged ten years in each photo and then she, too, disappeared. Only Lee Garrett remained, looking older and sadder and more stooped in each shot.
Jacko knew he’d just watched the breakdown of a family, and that was too bad, but he felt absolutely nothing. The faces meant nothing to him and his mother as a young girl was so unlike the woman he remembered, it was as if they were two different people.
He studied Lee and Alice Garrett again, searching deep inside himself for some spark of recognition, but got absolutely nothing. They were two faces out of the 260 million adults in the US. He wouldn’t believe they had anything to do with him if he hadn’t recognized his mother. Barely.
Wow. So what now?
“You know, Jacko,” Felicity said gently. “Maybe you might want to contact that lawyer. From what I gather, the house and property are there, waiting for an heir. At some point, everything will revert back to the state.”
Jacko stiffened. “I don’t need his money.” Fuck no. He was doing just fine. He’d saved a lot while in the Navy and ASI paid really well. And Lauren had inherited money from her mother and was earning more with her art. He didn’t need anybody’s money.
“Not for the money. But because in that house, there might be some stuff that will tell you what you need to know. I understand you’re okay with your past but surely more information would be…helpful?”
Damn right he was okay with his past, for the simple reason that he never ever thought about it. It was not a problem, no sir.
Except for right now, with Lauren pregnant. He needed to be okay with this because he was not going to lose Lauren, and he was going to be a good father. If it killed him, which it might.
Maybe Felicity was right. Maybe some more intel would be good.
“Here, Jacko.” Felicity pulled a flash drive he hadn’t even seen from the side of Puff the Magic Dragon and handed it to him. He turned it over in his hand. It was tiny, and knowing Felicity, it wasn’t available on the market and it could probably contain files the size of the NSA’s. “All this info, including photos, is on this drive. I also sent most of the pertinent data to your cell. Call the lawyer. See what he says. Maybe when you have time, go down and see the house.” She paused a beat, looking carefully at his face. “What have you got to lose?”
Because he couldn’t be doing worse than he was now, was the unspoken message. Jacko had gotten a glimpse of himself in a mirror and he looked like shit. Pale beneath his dark skin, deep purple bags under his eyes. He never looked like this. He had huge reserves. It took weeks of hard work or being on an op for him to even start to get tired.
Right now he was exhausted, wrung out.
And he was failing Lauren.
His shit was getting in the way of her happiness. She didn’t deserve this. She deserved a man who was whole.
Not a man who vomited at the thought of fatherhood.
For a guy who planned his every move in advance, Jacko hadn’t the faintest idea what came next. He only knew he had to take that first step toward finding out where he came from.
He swallowed heavily. “If I go…somewhere, make sure Lauren doesn’t worry. Make sure she’s okay.”
Even more bullshit from Mr. Straight Talk.
But Felicity understood a lot of what he wasn’t saying. She was smart, and she knew about secrets and the holes they dug in lives. Her parents had kept secrets all her life. She knew what this was like.
“Don’t worry about Lauren. We’ll all look after her.” Felicity nodded, stood up.
“I’m turning the transponder off.” The words were out before he could block them. All ASI vehicles had a transponder. Nobody ever turned theirs off. Why would they? But Jacko needed to go out on his own, without the connection to ASI. He didn’t want to be followed until he knew what he would uncover.
Felicity nodded soberly. “All right.” She had no expression on her face at all. “We okay here?”
“Yeah. And thanks.”
She put a hand on his shoulder, squeezed lightly and walked out.
Jacko sat in the super-quiet room a long time, thinking. Finally, he stood up and made his way to a lounge area that was usually empty during the working day. ASI employees gathered there when they worked late or had to work on weekends. It was always stocked with food and water and coffee.
Jacko didn’t want food. His stomach rose halfway up his gullet at the idea. But he did want some coffee and he wanted solitude.
He entered the lounge and, after a moment’s hesitation, locked the door. The door was never locked but right now he needed to be on his own. There wasn’t any bandwidth in him to talk to anyone.
He poured himself a big mug of coffee and downed it black, not tasting it. Not even feeling it. Then he scrolled through his cell until he had the lawyer’s name.
Ernest Mayer, Llc. Head of his own law firm. Three landlines and a cell, all with the same 619 prefix.
Jacko cradled the cell in the palm of his hand and stared at it, the plastic warming up while the coffee cooled down.
Do the hard thing. The SEAL mantra.
He dialed the cell number and waited. A man answered with a single word. “Mayer.”
Jacko waited, a tight knot in his throat, his stomach balled up tight. Until he spoke, the machine wouldn’t be set in motion. But that was a lie. The machine was set in motion the second Lauren told him she was pregnant.
“Hello? Who is this?” The soft, cultivated male voice was impatient.
“Mr. Mayer, my name is Morton Jackman.” As always, his first name came out sounding strange. Morton was always for the most formal of occasions. When he signed official documents, the “Morton”
was in a different hand. He never used it.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Jackman?”
“I understand you were the lawyer of Lee Garrett.”
“Yes, I was. Now I represent his estate.” A brief pause. “May I ask what this is about?”
Jacko clenched his jaw so hard his teeth ground together. “I’m the son of Sara Jackman.”
“I don’t know any Sara Jackman. I’m sorry, but—”
“You would have known her as Sara Garrett. Lee Garrett’s daughter.”
There was complete silence.
“Mr. Mayer?”
“I—yes. This is—this is incredible news. Sara Garrett ran away from home thirty-seven years ago and was never seen again.” He paused. “I am going to need proof, sir.”
“Mr. Mayer, I am sending you my birth certificate, my mother’s marriage certificate, the death certificate of her husband, Robert Jackman, her death certificate, and a copy of my passport.”
Jacko heard a faint ping. “I received the documents, Mr. Jackman. Please give me a moment to look at them.” The voice quavered and for the first time, Jacko realized he was an old man. He must have been Lee Garrett’s contemporary. Garrett had been over seventy years old when he passed away. “If these documents are valid, then you are the sole heir to Lee Garrett’s estate. It is considerable. There’s a home with several acres attached, close to a million dollars in investments, a—”
“I’m not interested in the estate, per se,” Jacko interrupted. “But I would like very much to see the house. Read any papers, documents Mr. Garrett—my grandfather—might have kept.”
His voice nearly choked on the word “grandfather”.
“Mr. Jackman. If what you’re saying is corroborated, then of course you can have full access to Lee Garrett’s home, his papers, anything you want. It will take time to process everything, but the estate will be yours. Lee—Mr. Garrett—left all of his assets to his daughter. If she is deceased, it all goes to you. I don’t know where you are, Mr. Jackman—”
“I live in Portland, Oregon,” Jacko said.
“If you could possibly plan a trip down south, at your convenience, we could start the paperwork for transferring the estate to you.”
Jacko was suddenly burning to get to old man Garrett’s house, start looking through his stuff, start getting fucking answers. Normally a patient man, a man who could lie in a sniper’s nest for days for a chance at a shot, he was feverish with hurry. He checked his watch and then the map in his head. “I’d like to drive down right away. What are your office hours?”
Silence. “It’s a long drive down, Mr. Jackman,” the lawyer answered, deep emotion shaking his voice. “You’ll probably arrive late Saturday evening or early Sunday morning. But I will come in for you at any time. Lee Garrett was one of my closest friends. I would do anything for his grandson. Call me when you have an estimated time of arrival. I will wait for you, Mr. Jackman, for as long as it takes.”
“I’m on my way,” Jacko said and clicked off.
He was tunnel-visioning, almost incapable of seeing or thinking of anything but the drive down to Rancho San Diego, getting to the home of a man who, improbably, might be his grandfather.
But some vestige of something—some sense of duty—made him stop by Metal’s desk. Metal was in the middle of planning the logistics of a bug-out encampment for a small company. ASI’s newest growth market was planning for when the shit hit the fan. An amazingly large number of people thought the apocalypse was coming in one form or another, and wanted to plan for survival.
ASI was planning its own survival encampment. Metal was the resident expert, with Jacko advising.
He was totally into the plan for the small company, nose an inch from his screen. Jacko tapped him on the shoulder. “Yo, bro.”
Metal sat up, shook his head as if just coming back from a long dive, turned around. He frowned. “Hey, man, you look like shit.” The exact same thing Felicity had said, only she’d said it more gently.
“I’ve got some personal time coming,” Jacko said. “I’m taking it now.”
He turned his whole body into a “don’t mess with me” zone. Jacko was good at that. He was an alpha male and was good at intimidating. But Metal was an alpha male, too. Metal stood up and got right in Jacko’s grill.
“You do have personal time coming, a lot of it. But right now is not a good time. We have the Ferrago contract coming up and—”
“Metal. Honey.” Felicity suddenly appeared at Metal’s side, a pretty hand on Metal’s big shoulder. “Jacko really does need the time off. He won’t be long, will you, Jacko?”
Jacko shook his head.
Metal shut up, but he had a big scowl on his face. Felicity had let him know he shouldn’t pursue this, and whatever Felicity wanted, she got. But Metal wasn’t happy about it and he was showing it.
Metal was his closest friend. If it were anything else, Jacko would have talked it over with him. Planned it, maybe. Taken time off when the company had a down moment, though those were rare. ASI was a fair company and if he gave notice, they’d work around his needs. Him suddenly disappearing like this wasn’t fair to the company.
He hated that. He hated not being able to talk to his best friend.
But the truth was—he couldn’t. He was vibrating inside. His throat was hot and tight. There was no way words could get out, even if he had words to explain what was going on, which he didn’t.
This was bad. All of it was bad. Lauren having a baby that was half his was really bad.
He couldn’t talk about it, any of it.
Jacko turned on his heel and left.
When the back employee door closed behind him, Jacko stood in the chilly air. He knew it was cold but the cold never affected him. And right now? He felt like a nuclear reactor. Unfortunately, one about ready to blow.
In his SUV, he drummed his fingers on the wheel. He had a go-bag in the back. He was always prepared. The go-bag had several changes of clothes, a basic toiletry kit and a very well-stocked medical kit. It also had about four thousand dollars in cash, a Glock 19 and a Sig Sauer P320 with a thousand rounds of ammo.
Besides the go-bag, there was an M24 sniper rifle in its case, a pup tent and sleeping bag, several cases of water and enough MREs to survive several days.
Because you never know.
The gates to the ASI compound opened and Jacko drove through and then stopped in the driving rain. He usually turned right, toward home. He should stop by the house, explain things to Lauren. She worried about him when he was out of town. She worried about him in general, fussing when he wasn’t eating properly, wasn’t dressed warmly enough, wasn’t getting enough sleep.
She loved him.
He had to swing by, tell her he was leaving for a few days.
North was home. South was California, and maybe Texas.
North was home and love. South was his painful past.
The rain swept a lash of water over the windshield so strong it overwhelmed even the SUV’s powerful wipers.
Jacko pulled out and turned left. South.
Lauren worried. Jacko was supposed to be home in the early afternoon. She’d been waiting for his call to say he was coming home but hadn’t heard anything at all. The celebratory dinner was almost ready. She had the roast in the oven and the house was filled with mouthwatering scents. They only made her stomach clench.
Wasn’t it early for morning sickness? Evening sickness, in this case.
In her heart, she knew she wasn’t nauseous because of the pregnancy. She was frightened of Jacko’s reaction. Nothing much shook him, but the news that they were expecting a baby seemed to have bowled him over.
And yet they had so much sex, it was a miracle she hadn’t become pregnant before this.
A wave of heat shot through her as she thought of their sex life. For the two years she’d been on the run from her murderous step-cousin, she hadn’t had sex at all. And even before then…well, she’d always been kind of picky
. She had more sex in a week with Jacko than in the previous decade. She couldn’t even remember sex with other men, though she had had a few boyfriends in college. They were wiped from her mind, as if they had never existed.
Sometimes she thought Jacko was imprinted on her. She spent so much time in his arms, her skin sweaty with the heat of sex, she thought it was a miracle his tribal tattoos didn’t transfer themselves to her skin.
She was sitting on the couch, having given up any pretense of work. No way could she settle down and work while waiting for Jacko, unsure of his reaction.
She had a monthly shot but it couldn’t possibly be a bulwark against the kind of sex she had with Jacko. Long, intense, endless. No shot of chemicals in the world could counteract all that sperm. Some nights her whole groin was wet with their juices.
She fingered a cushion as another flash of heat shot through her. The night before Jacko left for Mexico, they’d made love right here, on this couch. They hadn’t even made it to the bedroom. That look she’d come to recognize so intimately had flashed across his dark face and the next thing she knew, they were both naked and he was buried in her, thrusting hard…
Lauren tilted her head back and closed her eyes. Wanting her lover with every fiber of her being. They had no barriers between them. She loved that. Loved that they were so attuned to each other. That stiffness this morning between them broke her heart. She couldn’t stand it, not one second more. When he came home they’d have it out, though if he didn’t want the child—
If he didn’t want the child, what was she going to do? Because she did want it. Her hand curled over her stomach. It was still flat. According to the billion articles she’d read on the internet, their child was still basically just some cells, multiplying furiously. But she loved it already and nothing on this earth would keep her from it.
If Jacko didn’t want this baby, there was no compromise possible. She wasn’t aborting, she wasn’t going to give it up for adoption, this baby was hers. She loved it. She loved Jacko. If she couldn’t have both…