Detective Danny Cavanaugh 01 - The Brink

air to get us both to shore,” she said.
    Sydney shoved the mouthpiece in his mouth, and they both dove under the water. Danny tried to keep his breathing as calm as possible as he swam away from the boat. What seemed like an eternity ticked by before he felt a tap on his shoulder. Sydney finally needed air.
    Danny pulled the regulator’s mouthpiece from his lips and felt around in the murky blackness for her face. He hovered under the water, as he heard the faint sound of her inhaling a breath. She tapped his shoulder again, and he returned the mouthpiece to his lips. They kept up that same routine until his feet finally struck the Potomac’s muddy shoreline.

Chapter 65
    President Jack Butcher ended his phone call with the First Lady. Instead of focusing on the events transpiring in D.C., Jack needed a break from it. He wanted to hear every detail of his wife’s trip.
    Monica Butcher was halfway through her tour of the Middle East to promote women’s rights within those countries. She regaled her husband with detailed accounts of interacting with everyday people of other cultures. She listed the food and drinks that were considered haute cuisine in far-off lands. She also offered her innermost thoughts on foreign dignitaries that, if the press ever got a hold of them, would be fodder for the talking heads for weeks and would certainly taint his administration’s foreign policy efforts. But that’s why Jack loved Monica. She called them like she saw them. She was his island of reality in an unrelenting ocean of bullshit.
    Jack also reveled in his wife’s toughness. Monica was stronger than Jack when it came to their emotions. The only time Jack ever saw his wife lose it was when their little boy’s body finally gave up on his incredible will to live.
    Jack swiveled over to the credenza and grabbed the lone photo of his son, Simon, that adorned the Oval Office. He wanted more photos of their only child surrounding him at work, but Monica thought that some visitors might think he was parading their dead son around to gain political leverage. Although that was the furthest thing from the truth, Jack had agreed with his wife and left her to decorate the private areas of the residence with the solemn reminders of their little boy.
    Jack was immediately consumed by the photo of him crouching over Simon’s deathbed. He noticed the way he had purposefully bent down so he and Simon were equals. He had posed that way for a selfish reason. He wanted it to seem that Simon was in better shape than he actually was, that he didn’t require the hours of attention that Jack simply could not provide in the last weeks of his son’s life.
    As tears invaded the corners of his eyes, Jack also noticed the way Simon held his father’s hand so tightly, like even death itself couldn’t sever their bond. But it had. An agonizing and, worst of all, patient death had waited for Simon to expire slowly. The last weeks had been the most painful of his short life. His disease, dysautonomic mitochondrial myopathy, its name so clinical and clerical, seemed like it couldn’t be the cause for Simon’s demise.
    Jack spent as much time as he could during those final weeks with Simon, even taking days at a time away from his senatorial campaign. Seeing their hands gripped together in the photo reminded Jack of one particular night only days before Simon’s death.
    Simon Butcher gazed into his father’s eyes. “You’re falling back in the polls, Dad,” he coughed out through what seemed like a solid wall of phlegm.
    Sitting here, alone in the Oval Office, Jack could almost feel his son’s sweat-soaked hair as he remembered stroking it.
    “Don’t worry about that, Simon. The only thing you need to worry about is getting better.”
    Simon’s glassy eyes squinted as he smiled at his father. There had been many times in the past when Simon had been hospitalized and had bounced back. But this time was different. Jack knew it. More important, Simon also knew it. They both knew that there was little else they could do than to watch the body of an eleven-year-old boy slowly wither away.
    Jack noticed his son was struggling to speak again. He nearly shushed him when three words crept out of Simon’s mouth.
    “Simon says win.”
    Ever since Jack taught the ‘Simon says’ game to his son, Simon used it to emphasize things he wanted his dad to remember.
    Simon says pick me up at three o’clock after school. Simon says play hoops with me.