Midas

“Yes.”

“Was it. . was it bad?”

“I think it’s always bad when someone dies who doesn’t have to.”

She closed her eyes for a moment. With them still closed she said, “He was going to stop, you know.”

“Hutch? Stop what?”

“He was going to stop working for these people. He didn’t like what they were doing.”

“He told you that?”

She nodded. “He just flew them. And it was exciting at first. Glamorous and fun. And he made a lot of money. But he said he thought he was working for the good guys. Only it turned out they were the bad guys. That’s what he told me. So he was going to stop.” She sniffled, holding back another barrage of tears. “Well. . he did stop working for them, didn’t he? He just stopped a little too late.”

“Why East End, Terry?”

“I don’t know. I guess even bad guys have to live somewhere, don’t they?” When he nodded tentatively, she took his hand. Not shaking it, just holding it for support. Or simply to have some human contact. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Things are just so muddy. That’s what Hutch would have told you. Things are muddy. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Justin said, then he gently released his hand, thanked her for talking to him, stepped outside. She closed the door behind him and he heard the click of the lock turning inside. He walked to his car that he’d parked in the thin gravel driveway. Muddy, he thought. A strange phrase but an accurate one. Things were definitely muddy. Thick, slimy, filthy, and muddy.

He got behind the wheel, started the ignition, glanced in his rearview mirror. . and there were those eyes again. The big brown round saucer eyes that he’d seen peering out at him from behind the Cookes’ front door.

“You know, it’s dangerous to get into strangers’ cars,” he told the little girl.

“You’re not a stranger,” she said. “You know my mom.”

“Hannah, right?”

“My sister’s Reysa.”

“I have to go now, Hannah, so you’d better go inside. I don’t want your mom to worry.”

“My mom’s not worried. She’s afraid.”

“I know she is. But you don’t want her to worry, too, do you?”

“No.” But the little girl didn’t make any move to leave. “Can you help her stop being afraid?”

“I don’t know. I’m going to try. But I don’t know.”

“Sometimes she’s too afraid to take us to McDonald’s. Yesterday, Reysa cried because she wanted a Big Mac but Mommy wouldn’t take us.”

“Sometimes,” Justin told her, “when people are afraid it makes them not act like themselves. But you know what? It always changes. People change back to the way they were. And they act just like they used to. You and your sister have to try to be really nice to your mom while she’s nervous and afraid. That’s what she needs. And pretty soon she’ll be just like she used to be.”

“And she’ll take us to McDonald’s?”

“I promise.”

Nine-year-old Hannah Cooke thought about this for a moment, then she decided to continue the conversation from the front seat. She pulled herself up over the top of the passenger seat and plopped alongside Justin. As she landed, something fell out of her hand. Something small and shiny.

“What’s that?” Justin asked.

The girl reached down, picked it up with her right hand, then opened the palm of her left to show him what she had.

“Jacks,” he said quietly. “Are you a good jacks player?”

“Uh-huh,” she told him. “I play all the time. Are you good?”

“I haven’t played in a long time.”

“I know. That’s what happens to grown-ups. They stop playing.”

“Can I ask you something, honey?” She nodded, so he said, “Do you know what your mom’s so afraid of?”

“The men.”

“What men?”

“The men Daddy brought to the house.”

“Do you know who they were?”

Hannah shook her head. “One was scary. I didn’t like him.”

“Do you remember anything about him?”

“Uh-huh. He was a general.”

“A general? Like in the army?”

“I think he wasn’t a real general. Just an assistant general.”

“An assistant general? Like a colonel?”

“No. He wasn’t a colonel. He was an assistant general. And he was mean to my daddy.”

“How about the other man? Was he mean, too?”

“No. He was nice. I liked him.”

“What did you like about him?”

“He played with me. The general talked bad to my dad but the nice one played with me. For a long time.”

“Hannah,” Justin said, and suddenly the inside of the car seemed very quiet and still. “Did he play jacks with you?”

“Yup,” the little girl said. “And guess what?”

“What?”

“He was really, really, really good.”

He was back in his house by a few minutes before ten, happy to be in East End, happy to be away from soldiers and bureaucrats and widows. By ten, he was at his living room window, looking at the house across the street, catty-corner from his. Reggie’s lights were on. She was awake. Go on, he told himself. She told you to come over. So go. Go. But he stayed, one knee on the couch, his arms leaning on the backrest, looking at the stillness of her front yard.

Justin’s eyes slowly grew accustomed to the darkness outside his window. He could make out the edges of the telephone wires across the street. And the hedges that sat below them. He thought about the little girl’s jacks, the way her soft hands curled around them, and it made his stomach hurt. He thought about Martha Peck, not knowing whether or not she’d come through as promised. And the colonel; his fierce and misplaced loyalty. Again, he could see Hannah Cooke’s hand curl around the jack, and now he closed his eyes and he was back inside Harper’s, walking through the bombed-out remains, and Chuck Billings was pulling a jack out of the wall. A tiny children’s toy, embedded in the wall. A toy stained with dried red-brown blood.

He opened his eyes. Saw-or maybe just felt-some kind of movement in Reggie’s house. Maybe she’d noticed his car. Maybe she was coming over. He waited but there was no further movement. Just silence. And shadows.

Things are muddy, he thought. Things are muddy.

He looked at his watch. Ten-twenty.

He walked over to his computer, turned it on, waited for it to boot up. When it was ready, he went to his “Shared” folder, where he kept his downloaded music. He turned the volume on his computer all the way up, clicked on a Tim Curry song from the early ’80s, “I Do the Rock.” He let the music wash over him, its hard, staccato rhythm and its cynical obscure lyrics. In a crazy world, the only thing that still made any sense was to do the rock. Forget ideology. Forget growing old. Stay away from fame and politics and philosophy. Just do the rock. Justin agreed. It was about the only thing that still made sense to him, too. But his job was to make sense of things he didn’t understand, so, music blaring, he went to the folder he’d cleverly labeled “MI” for “Murder Investigation” and began to update his list. The first column he went to was “Connections.” There he found the link he’d initially marked as so tentative-Vice President Phillip Dandridge-between Bradford Collins and Hutchinson Cooke. He had typed in several