“I knew I’d win you over.”
“Win me over?” Her hand attempted to cover his, but his fingers still poked out underneath. “I said I’d consider it, James Richter, not that I’d convert.”
“Once you go black, baby.” Eyes crease with hard-fought lines.
“Oh, get over yourself!” A hand squeezes a hand. “Want to get out of—”
An alarm chimes.
“Shit.” Richter reached for his link. “I have to take this. Sorry. Bee are bee.” As he stood, the server placed the bill on the table. Richter pointed at Benton. “Don’t pay that.” He winked and left for the front of the restaurant.
He ducked into the coat room and flashed his Milicom badge at the attending employee. “Out.” The young man blinked at the silver circle and trotted from the room, closing the doors behind him.
Richter activated his link, which blanketed him in a privacy wall constructed from flickering photon discharge. Within the cylinder, a smaller holo sputtered to life, confident in its recipient’s identity after genetic identification and the glare of a biometrics heuristic.
Benton watched as her date nearly jogged back to the table. Something crawled behind those eyes, those gorgeous gray eyes.
“Sorry, Hope.” He placed the bill and a debit slip into the table’s scanner, at the same time ordering another bottle of the Tempranillo. “I gotta go, but you should stay. Call some friends. Put it on my numbers.”
“But—Where are you—”
“Wyo—Fuck. Sorry, can’t give you details.” He stooped to give her an absent-minded hug, stood, then bent down again to kiss her cheek. “I’m sorry, it’s work. You look beautiful tonight.” He cradled her cheek in his hand.
“Okay, well, when will you be—”
“Don’t know. Listen, there’s transport waiting. I have to—I’m sorry. I’ll see you soon, I promise.” He turned and walked away, not thinking of anything but “work.”
Hope Benton sat at the table until the bottle of wine arrived. The server poured her a glass, but when he’d left, she filled it to the top.
She wondered if she would see James Richter again.
In the fall of 2021, some things happened.
David Smith Jennings, on leave from Milicom Arlington, visited the childhood home of his friend Gregory Bates in Roanoke, Virginia, with their fellow officers Antonia Cervera, Michael Balfour and James Richter. The Bates family home, a sprawling manse in the Neo-Plantation style, became the site of a weekend party before the Milicom soldiers had to return to base for a silver anniversary memorial. The Mayflower Hills Bates estate overlooked a tributary of the Roanoke River, and it was on those banks that one Robert Ray “Buddy” McClure attempted to rape young Lieutenant Cervera as the party raged on just behind them. McClure, a vagrant from Harkness, Michigan, who for almost a year had been hitching the east coast, making a living from itinerant roofing, and who had in fact been hired by the Bates family to renovate the roof of their guest house, suffered a fractured collar bone from Cervera’s self-defense, but still managed to successfully sodomize his victim after knocking her unconscious with a rock.
Upon waking her hung-over colleagues the next morning and contacting the authorities, Cervera was able to successfully identify her attacker from a police lineup. McClure had been found and detained just hours after the rape by the Roanoke PD on drunk and disorderly charges.
Because crimes against Milicom personnel were federal offenses, the McClure rape case went before the federal court located in Roanoke. Judge Hannah Kilbourne oversaw the case. Attorney Abrah Allen-Kennedy acted as McClure’s defense attorney. Allen-Kennedy, with the star power of her lineage and the sheer brilliance of her academic career, having graduated high school at age eight, Colgate at twelve and OU Law at fourteen, drew a crowd of several thousand reporters to the Roanoke courthouse. The proceedings were broadcast live on Court TV 1-7.
No one was really surprised when Allen-Kennedy secured McClure’s release with a not-guilty verdict.
The once-close friendship between Milicom colleagues David Jennings and Antonia Cervera effectively ended once Jennings revealed that he was dating Allen-Kennedy, whom he had met at a Roanoke bar on the last day of court proceedings in the McClure trial.
Hounded by paparazzi as they left the bar, Jennings and Allen-Kennedy ducked into a toy store on the next block. In the back, stacked between displays of Let’s Eat Meat Elmo and Mistress Beasley dolls, Jennings found twenty small stuffed bears. Their design was charming in its simplicity, and the lack of a plastic nose nub gave the toys a humble demeanor. Jennings purchased one of the bears for the giggling lawyer. Outside of the store, he ripped the Honeybear Brown tag from the bear’s ear.
She held his hand as they flagged down a cab and returned to her hotel.
They watched the hotel room television under the preface of “just hanging out,” but the show didn’t hold either of their interests. They seemed more interested in exploring each other, and after half an hour, Jennings turned the “Hank the Cowboy” show off with the remote in his right hand as his left made the daring jump beneath Allen- Kennedy’s black silk thong.
Network executives from CBS cancelled “Hank the Cowboy” the next week, citing demographic analyses that showed that even the rapidly-fading Boomer generation was sick of CGI retro-dramas. The program spent the next three years bouncing between the E!, Comedy Central and Sci Fi networks before being shelved for good. Unfortunately, all surviving digital copies and source material for the series were lost in the cave-in of a secure archive facility in Wind River, Wyoming, along with three original James McNeill Whistler paintings and an original paper copy of Paul Evan Hughes’s
These things happen.
“Cunt!” Les Harris, creator and former screenwriter for the “Hank the Cowboy” series, threw the framed photograph of his wife at the wall link. The frame snapped, the glass shattered, but the only damage to the link was a small divot the frame’s corner had inscribed into the plastic face. Harris went into the basement, unlocked his handgun from its safe, and shot himself in the right temple because his wife had decided to leave him after hearing that “Hank” had been cancelled and CBS was terminating Les’s contract.
“Cunt!”
Jealous co-worker Sandra Chappelle pushed Sugar Williams to the ground in an alley off of 7th Avenue and wiped Williams’ blood from her swishblade with a used tissue. Chappelle remembered friendly discussions over hurried lunches about starting a new toy line with Williams. When Sugar took Sandra’s “Honeybear Brown” design and secured a lucrative deal with Mattel, and when every tabloid in every newsstand in the city broadcast a photograph of Abrah Allen-Kennedy running from the photog with a Honeybear in tow, someone had to die.
“Cunt!”
Antonia Cervera remembered the word she’d spoken to Abrah Allen-Kennedy after she’d gotten rapist Buddy McClure off. Months later, Cervera saw Kennedy walking with David Jennings in downtown Arlington, their hands held. Already furious about the rumors that her former friend and that bitch lawyer were engaged, this seeming- confirmation of a relationship pushed her over the edge, and as the happy couple walked by, Cervera lashed out, swiping two deep, two shallow nail marks across the left side of the lawyer’s face. Cervera flicked the tiny bits of face from underneath her fingernails and spit at Jennings, who knocked her to the sidewalk with a reflex right hook.
Fourteen years later, standing as Jennings was sworn into presidential office, Cervera saw the faint, poorly- concealed lines on the impending First Lady’s face. She smiled. Forgiveness only goes so far. Abrah was still a cunt.
The site command center was situated in a volcanic bubble seven miles beneath the surface. Jennings noted the fresh fill of quickcrete that composed the center’s floor. Scientists, soldiers: the room hummed with activity, but that hum quieted to a tickling underwhine as he entered and three dozen people turned to salute.
“As you were.” He approached the main display in at the bubble’s core. “Show me.”
