Dead Watch

picked up the phone and said “Hello” with a broken-tooth lisp. “My dad said you called,” Dorn said when he’d identified himself.
    “Are you okay? Are you getting back?”
    “No. I’m really, really messed up. Not hurt bad, but my nose is broken . . .” She started crying, caught herself, and then said, “And they broke my teeth so I look like some kind of fu-fu-fu-fucking hillbilly or something. . . .” And she started crying again.
    “Can I come and see you?”
    “Yes. I’m just sitting here, with this thing in my arm. I have to go to imaging tomorrow morning, but I’ll be back before noon. A dentist is coming tomorrow afternoon . . .”
    “I need to see you privately. Is there any possibility . . . ?”
    “Dad comes in the morning and then he goes to work, and he and Mom come for lunch about twelve-twenty. If you were here after ten, it should be private.”
    “I’ll be there,” Jake said.
    “Don’t look at me weird when you get here,” she said. “I’m ugly now, so don’t look at me weird.”
    “Cathy, I’ve got a friend who was hit in the face with a piece of shrapnel the size of a butcher knife and it almost took his face off. We folded it back over and got him to the hospital, and today he’s got this little white scar. You can’t even see it unless he’s got a tan. The docs can do anything. In a couple of months, you’ll be looking great, and I’ll introduce you to the president.”
    She hiccuped, then said, “Really?”
    “Count on it.”

    “Now I’m going to have to trust you,” he told Madison, back in the living room. “I have a possible source into Goodman.”
    He told her about Cathy Ann Dorn: “I’d love to get her into Goodman’s office, take the hard drives out of his computer.”
    “Jake: think,” Madison said. “She nearly gotten beaten to death. That’s not a coincidence. You’d send her back in there?”
    Jake frowned: Cathy Ann wasn’t exactly in the army. “Okay, that’s not the best idea. But she’s a resource. I’ll think of something.”
    “Interesting job you have . . .”

    Madison asked him how he came to work for the president. Jake filled her in, told her about his grandparents’ ranch, and the distance between himself and his parents. Then, “You want another beer?”
    “Sure. One more couldn’t hurt.”
    She came back to his grandparents, and he talked about working the ranch, about how his grandfather resisted the transition from horses to ATVs. “I used to envy those kids with the big Hondas and Polarises riding around in a cloud of smoke, tearing up the countryside. I’d be sitting up there on some mutt, take me fifteen minutes to get somewhere you could get in one minute on a Honda,” Jake said. “Now, I’m nothing but grateful. Would have been nice if the family had been a little tighter, you know, my parents, but hell. I had a pretty good childhood, all in all. Thought I’d die myself, though, when Grandma went . . .”
    She told him about her childhood, in Lexington and Richmond. Her father had been a lawyer, her mother a housewife. Her father committed suicide when he was fifty.
    “I hated him for it,” she said, getting out of her chair, wandering around the room with the bottle in her hand. “I was in college, and we’d had some growing-up troubles, and some arguments, and they got pretty hot and I did some screaming and I never had a chance to make it okay before he went out in the backyard and shot himself.”
    “Was there . . . ? Did you know why?”
    “Yes. He was depressed. Major depression of the medical sort. He wouldn’t go to a shrink, because he still thought he might run for a serious political office—he was on the Richmond City Council twice. He didn’t want a ‘mental illness’ brought up. So he had some pills from his M.D., but they weren’t working . . . And one day, a really nice day, he went out in the yard and sat in a swing for a while, and then blam . A neighbor heard it and came running . . . Maybe that’s why I married an older guy. Maybe I was trying to get back to Daddy.”
    She sat down again, but when she sat down, she sat on the couch with Jake. Feeling precisely like a teenager in a movie theater, Jake let his left arm fall along the top of the couch. He started thinking about his breath, and what he’d eaten. Beer should cover it, he hoped.
    She was talking about riding, and did a little butt-hop closer on the couch, and he thought,