Authors: Kathy Disanto
Iceman.
Slipping my fingertips into the back
pockets of my jeans and tucking my tongue firmly in cheek, I rocked back on my
heels and sized up the faded gray sedan parked near UCSF Mount Zion’s rear loading
dock.
Tired
was the first adjective that came to mind.
“Nice ride, Agent Eagan.”
Jack opened the passenger-side door
and gave the small of my back a climb-in nudge. “I wasn’t after
nice
this trip. I was more in the market for
nondescript
.”
He waited for me to angle my legs in,
then closed the door before turning around for a last word with Jim. Watching
them together, I couldn’t help but shake my head. They were roughly the same
height and build, but Eagan had a look about him, an indefinable quality that
put him in a class all by himself.
In his black jeans and a white long-sleeved
t-shirt, he could have been the Norse god Thor incognito. His hair and
eyebrows where white-blond, his features chiseled and angular—strong jaw,
slightly cleft chin, firm lips. His eyes were his most striking feature by far.
They were a pale, icy blue, and when he turned them on you, it was like getting
zapped with a laser.
Or maybe that was just my reaction.
The two men shook hands. My brother
nodded to me as Eagan rounded the hood and slid into the driver’s seat.
“Ready to go?” he said.
“I guess.” I was still gazing at
Jim. I smiled as we traded a thumbs-up. “Wish I could have had more time with
them.”
“Soon,” he promised and started the
engine.
Jim gave me a final wave and ducked
back through the service entrance to join the rest of the family in my hospital
room. News of my release had been withheld and the hospital staff sworn to
secrecy, in order to give Eagan a chance to sneak me away.
“Cheer up.” Jack swung the coupe
out of the access drive and hung a right on Divisadero. “You’ll be back with
your family before you know it.”
Maybe, maybe not
. Once I made my next move against
the Ferrymen, all reunion bets would be off. Of course, Jack wasn’t aware of
the fact that I was planning a return engagement, and I didn’t intend to
enlighten him. Eagan struck me as the protective type, the
let’s lock her
up in a safe house for her own good and throw away the key
type. So I
smiled and nodded and kept my mouth shut.
“Let’s take the scenic route to the
outer loop,” he said as he slipped neatly around a Metro-Hover pulling over to
the curb, where two men and a woman waited in the enclosed bus stop. Earlier
in the evening the stop would have been crowded with commuters, but it was
after eight on a Friday night, and the nine-to-fivers had all gone home to the burbs.
“I swept for tracking devices, but I want to make sure nobody decides to do the
job the old-fashioned way and tail us.”
I angled around to face him. “Any reason
to think somebody might try?”
“Nope. But I didn’t live to the
ripe old age of thirty-eight by making assumptions and taking chances.”
“Guess not.”
He hung two more rights, followed by
a quick left into the heart of the shopping district, where I immediately got distracted
by the passing scenery, devouring the sights like a visitor to a strange new
world. Columbus had nothing on me as I rediscovered light, color, and motion.
My eyes drank in wide, bright windows framing kinetic displays peddling chocolaty
mink coats or canary-yellow parasails. The end of October was still nine days
off, but buildings on both sides of the street were already breaking out in
cheerful splotches of red and green. Rivers of pedestrians streamed down the
sidewalks. I saw a woman in a black cashmere coat pushing a stroller and found
myself smiling at her bright-eyed, apple-cheeked baby as the kiddo gleefully
gummed the tuft of yarn at the tail-end of her hot-pink stocking cap.
“Your family took it well,” Jack
said. “The fact that you had to go away for a while, I mean. They never even
asked where I’m taking you.”
“Because they understand the whys
and wherefores. This isn’t the first time the Gregsons have had to deal with
death threats, you know. Not that anybody has specifically threatened to kill
me,” I hastened to add. “Not in so many words.”
His lips quirked sardonically. “You
don’t think so? I would be interested in hearing exactly what your definition
of
being threatened
is, then.”
“Dad gets it all the time,” I
continued, ignoring the jab. “There’s always some whack job ready to vote his
or her least favorite politician out of office with a lucky headshot. Jim gets
his share, too.”
Jack slid the coupe into the left
lane. “Stands to reason in his line of work. It’s not unheard of for an
ex-con with blood in his eye to go after the prosecutor who put him away.”
My oldest brother is district
attorney for the city-state of Columbia, a global hub of political power even
before the unification. In its heyday, D.C. was the capital of the old United
States. Now the District has to settle for being one of three capitals for
Tri-America, the other two being Ottawa and Mexico City. The government
rotates between them, meaning the executive, legislative, and judicial branches
switch their collective base of operations once every two years. Sort of like
musical chairs, except everybody gets a seat. The locations are symbolic, anyway,
since most federal business is conducted electronically, but the symbolism helps
keep the constituents happy.
“Speaking of your brother Jim,”
Eagan continued, “I half expected him to insist on tagging along. I’m glad he
and I didn’t have to go a round before I could convince him that would have
been a bad idea.”
“Bart gave your plan his seal of
approval. If he says a plan is all right, then it is.” I paused, brow
furrowed. “I get why they agreed to my going away; what I don’t get is the
enthusiasm. Nobody in my family ever ran from a fight. How come they’re so
gung ho about
me
running?”
“Come on, A.J., you know why. They
nearly lost you.”
“But they didn’t, and I’m all right
now.”
Jack shook his head. “You’re still
not a hundred percent. Until you are, and until we’re sure the Ferrymen aren’t
actively hunting you, your family wants you to play it safe. What’s so strange
about that? And don’t think of it as running, think of it as staging a
strategic withdrawal.”
“Uh-huh.”
A comfortable silence settled
between us. The show outside my window recaptured my attention when Jack took
another left and cruised into the theater district. Not even my tinted glasses
could dim the jewel-like brilliance of marquees glittering in the crisp October
air. Streetlights dropped soft circles on sidewalks, washing pedestrians in a soft
white ebb-and-flow. Lines snaked up to the brightly lit doors of restaurants,
people laughing and chatting as they waited under canopies for their tables.
Limos and taxis swarmed the curbs, dropped their passengers, and glided off
again. Details leaped out at me: a coat collar turned up against the first
nip of fall; a scrap of white paper skittering down the sidewalk; a red silk scarf,
fringed at the end.
Eventually, the bright lights and
bustle fell behind us, and we rolled into the Tenderloin, where darkness stalks
the gaps between buildings. Here the night is barely held at bay by the
tentative glow from corner mom-and-pops and the garish auras of massage
parlors, bars, and adult bookstores. These are the city’s mean streets, where windows
are barred and the NFPD maintains a constant, visible presence.
Where street people with no warmth
to go home to at the end of the day fold in, wrap themselves in their bony
arms, and hang on with chattering teeth.
Where sharp-eyed packs of angry
young men lurk in doorways and stake claims on street corners, taunting one
another from a distance and talking trash to the ladies.
Where girls troll the sidewalks
wearing a yard of fabric, skyscraper heels, and a brittle shield of forced
bravado. Their too-old eyes are haunted by dark memories, darker fears, and
the tattered remnants of stolen innocence.
Watching a scrawny black-and-white dog
scavenge in the gutter, I told myself a person would have to be nuts to want to
see this, let alone miss it when she couldn’t. But I did, and I had.
Because out of sight is out of mind,
and I don’t want to forget.
The job takes me to neighborhoods as
bad this and worse on a regular basis, and the people I meet there have taught
me three lessons you can’t learn anywhere else. One, we’re all cut from the
same flawed cloth. Two, no human life is more important than another. And
three, if we could learn to care about other folks as much as we care about
ourselves, streets like these wouldn’t be nearly as mean.
Jack drove on. Next stop, Nob Hill.
Imagine going from Hades to Mount Olympus in one short hop, and you’ll get a
general idea of the contrast.
We passed Huntington Park—top-of-the-world,
green, well-manicured—nestled between the Grace Cathedral and the recently completed
reincarnation of the Union Pacific Club. Down the arrow-straight sidewalk bisecting
the park’s center, I could see the softly lit, twice-restored Fountain of the
Tortoises, streams of water from cherubs’ cheeks arcing into the luminous basin
below. An elderly couple strolled toward Taylor Street, hand-in-hand. Both
were gray-haired and wrapped in expensive taupe all-weather coats, but where he
was tall and thin, she was short and softly rounded. Ditto the dachshund
waddling at the end of the thin leash loosely held in the man’s left hand.
“You all right?” Jack asked.
I glanced over at him. “Fine, why?”
“You’re quiet. I thought something
might be bothering you.”
“No, I was just looking at ....” I
shrugged. “Just looking.”
“I guess you’ve got some catching up
to do,” he said with a smile.
I smiled back. “Seems like.” I
watched him check the rearview display and straightened in my seat. “How are we
doing?”
“Looks clear. We’ll double back and
loop Union Square again, to be sure. If we’re still clean, we’ll be good to
go.”
Thirty minutes later, we veered onto
an exit for 80, heading east. Jack gave the voice prompt for flight mode and
the SkyCoupe’s scissor wings swung smoothly out from the vehicle’s belly as the
tires retracted into the wheel wells with a muted
thump
. When he
engaged the thrusters, the worn sedan leaped toward the outbound tier like a
high-strung filly bolting from the starting gate, pressing us back against the
seats as we rapidly gained altitude.
I stared at Jack, both eyebrows
raised. “Pretty spry for a middle-aged coupe.”
He patted the dashboard. “She may
be middle-aged on the outside, but she’s state-of-the-art at heart.” He
activated the flight display. Speed, altitude, air traffic, and navigational
data materialized in color, forming a heads-up hologram on the windshield.
“We’ll head up to fifteen thousand feet,” he decided. “Traffic looks light
clear across the heartland. It’ll pick up some as we approach the Pennsylvania
border, but we’ll exit before we get tangled up in that mess around the
Metroplex.” The computer took over the piloting chores. Jack leaned back in
his seat and pinned me with that glacier-blue gaze. “How are you holding up?”
“Who, me? I’m in great shape.”
“The important thing now is not to
get ahead of yourself. It’s easy to get carried away at this stage and think
you’re stronger than you are, but you need time to heal. The physical injuries
are bad enough, but a hit like you took leaves wounds that don’t show. Fear,
maybe—the kind that gives you nightmares and wakes you up in a cold sweat. You
have to learn to deal with it. Then there’s the second guessing. You go over
each decision you made—once, twice, a hundred times—asking yourself what you
could have done differently. It takes a while to trust your instincts again.”
I searched his face. “The voice of
experience?”
He smiled faintly. “I’ve been
around that block a few times.”
“You seem to have rebounded all
right.”
“So far,” he agreed, but his tone
made it clear he didn’t intend to elaborate.
The reporter in me was dying for
details, but the fresh bruise in my own soul wouldn’t let me push for them. I decided
to change the subject. “Tell me about this place you’re taking me. I never
heard of Hobson’s Hope.”
“Neither has anyone else, and the
town council would just as soon keep it that way.”
“How come?”
“It goes back to the reason the town
was founded in the first place. It was the brainchild of a group called Salvage
Our Collective Karma, or—”
“SOCK? As in, argyle?”
“Yeah. I guess they didn’t think
that one through. Anyway, SOCK was started by an eccentric billionaire named
Whitfield Hobson and his wife, Abigail. Seems Mr. and Mrs. H blamed
overcrowded cities and modern architecture for,” Jack sketched quotes in the
air, “
the dehumanization of the individual, resulting in a serious decline
in the moral and intellectual fiber of society.
They figured society’s
only hope was to get back to its grassroots. Scrap the big, nasty cities in
favor of friendlier, more intimate communities capable of nurturing the human
spirit. The only problem was, their crusade to win hearts and minds fell
flat. So about fifty years ago Whitfield and Abigail and the handful of
likeminded folks they
did
manage to recruit built Hobson’s Hope on the
banks of the Monongahela. Current population around three thousand.