Hot Streak

It was going to be an incredible, exhilarating experience to go birthday shopping for his own daughter. Something like a bona fide twenty-four-carat gold miracle. And after all the tragedy of birth defects he'd seen in the offspring of his platoon members, a beautiful, healthy daughter of his own was heart-stopping jubilation. As she sat between them with her hands in her lap, he quickly surveyed the five perfect fingers on each of her hands and thought of Denny's baby boy who was missing all the fingers on one hand. Then a swift perusal of her Reebok-clad feet assured him no deformities existed. Lloyd's baby girl had had six operations on her clubfoot before she was three. And Carrie was free of the other birth defects attributed to Agent Orange too. Thank you, God.

Why them and not me? The question silently looped through his mind… Why, why, why? Maybe he'd been in the hospital when his platoon had been most heavily sprayed; maybe the damn purple heart had saved him from the moonscape they'd all talked about at Ashau when they'd bathed in the bomb craters. Or maybe pure luck had kept him out of the most toxic areas just sprayed for “mosquitoes.”

The Vietnamese birth defects had been reported very early in the Saigon papers, but the military administration had called it VC propaganda. American servicemen had been told the spraying was harmless to humans and animals. Another instance of war contractors placing profits over people. Legal research of the chemical companies after the war had proven they'd known about dioxin's deadly consequences as early as 1957. Carey always had the urge to kill when he thought of the chemical companies' derivative sovereign immunity defense which argued they had been employed by the government as war contractors and, like the government, couldn't be sued. The defense so often used by war criminals: “We were only following orders.”

Brushing a hand over his forehead, he forced away his black thoughts. Count your blessings, he reminded himself. But a twinge of guilt colored his own happiness. How lucky he was and how unlucky so many of his friends were.

“Headache?” Molly inquired, their daughter deep in thought as she mentally cataloged her birthday list.

He smiled. “Hell, no… too much happiness,” he said softly. “I'm not used to it. But,” he added with a small smile, “I'm damn well going to enjoy getting used to it.”

“You're glad I stopped at Ely Lake to look you up?”

“Do fish swim?” he said, glancing at her with a quick lift of his eyebrows and a flashing grin. “I'm considering shackling you and Pooh to my wrist. That's how glad.”

“That's pretty glad,” she teased, “for an independent man.”

“What time is it?” he murmured in return, insinuation clear in his voice.

She looked at the dashboard clock. “Almost nine.”

“Good.”

“It's too early,” she warned.

“When.”

“Bedtime's at nine-thirty.”

“I think I can wait.”

“You have to.”

There was a moment of considered silence before he said, “Maybe…”

“Carey!” Her whisper was hushed, but in the single breathy word, beneath the small indignation, was piquant anticipation.

“You make the hot chocolate, and I'll do the bedtime story.” Urgency threaded lightly through his words, but then his expression changed, his dark eyes surveying the young girl between them and he very quietly added, “May I?”

It was the first time in his life he'd ever tucked a child into bed, the first time he'd told a bedtime story, and the first time he'd had to fight back tears since Dhani Maclntosh. Molly was in the habit of telling an extemporaneous story which drifted off on tangents like an Alice in Wonderland narrative. So Carey picked up the plot and added some creative color of his own with wizards and princesses and a quest for a treasure in emeralds.

“Thanks, Carey,” one sleepy young girl murmured as the chapter ended, “you're nice.”

He wanted to crush her in his arms and tell her he loved her, tell her he was her father, map out their entire future together, but Molly wanted to proceed more slowly until they knew each other better. Instead, he said, “You're nice, too, Pooh… the very nicest little girl I know.” Bending low, he kissed her lightly on the forehead. “Sleep tight.”

She was staring thoughtfully at him when he straightened, her face framed by the pink-flowered pillow. “Your eyes are a lot like mine.”

The plain words hit him like a jolt, and in a flurry of mental activity he discarded the first dozen unsuitable answers that came to mind. “Lucky me,” he finally said.

“And you play a mean game of pinball.” She spoke the words with a quiet gravity, and he had an irrational sensation he was being graded. An overwhelming feeling of panic assailed him, fear that he would somehow fail this young child's test. He desperately hoped that she would not dislike him once she knew the truth. She meant too much to him.

He smiled. “You and I'll have to teach your mom someday.”

Her little nose curled up. “She won't.”

“Maybe we can coax her to come to London. My house there has a room full of game machines. We'll tell her she can have tea with the queen,” he teased.

“She'd like that. Could she really? I know you're teasing, but somebody has tea with the queen 'cuz I saw a picture once with everyone in big hats outside a red brick mansion. Mom would die of happiness. Why do you have a house in London?”

“Because my dad had one, and now I've got it. I can't promise the queen, but I can line up a duchess or two if we can convince your mom to come.”

“Hey, way to go… we'll work on her together.” Her eyes were alight.

“I'd like that,” Carey softly said.

Molly drove Carey out to the airport, and for the first time in her life she encountered paparazzi upclose and personal. A crowd of photographers were stretched out along the chain-link fence surrounding the airstrip for private planes. The scene reminded her of all the telecasts she'd seen on TV for visiting dignitaries or rock stars or the astronauts returning from some space mission. It was unnerving. As they stepped from the car the crowd seemed to surge into the fence, and dozens of shouted questions sailed across the twenty yards of tarmac.

“What's her name?”

“Is she American?”

“Is she going back with you?”

“Is she why you shut down production?”

“Hey! Turn this way, lady!”

“Would you call this one serious, Count?”

“How serious?”

Ignoring the uproar of questions with a calm based on years of experience, his arm protectively around Molly's waist, Carey guided her away from the clamoring photographers to the sanctuary of the hangar.

“Carey!” Molly whispered, the turbulence of sound following them inside. “Does this happen often?”

“Ignore it,” he replied casually, used to deflecting the attention aroused by his looks, wealth, and reputation.

“Ignore it?” she inquired with mild incredulity. The swell of noise followed them into the quiet of the hangar like a thin wave of haphazard exclamation marks. “How does one become that blasй?”

“Practice.”

She looked up at him in astonishment. “How long does it take,” she quietly asked, a private person in an increasingly public world of instant telecommunications and computer trail dossiers, “to practice up?”

Glancing down at her, he smiled. “Thirty-three years,” he said. “Don't worry, I'll have someone bring your car in here so you won't have to see them again. Oh, shit!” he swore, and pushed Molly behind him just as a flash exploded from close range. “Jesus! Paolo, don't you ever give up?”

The short, stocky man dressed in mechanic's overalls shrugged negligently. “Smile, Count,” he said in heavily