Detective Danny Cavanaugh 01 - The Brink

know. But the way Sydney explained it, it could happen. This could be the starting point, Danny boy. And I can’t see any way to stop it.” Chip whipped over to a knife block and extracted a ten-inch serrated blade. He cut the rolls in half, sliced them along their spines, and placed them open-faced on the grill. He suddenly stopped working on their food and looked over at Danny for a few seconds. “You want me to check her out, don’t you?”
    “You think you could?” Danny asked. “I mean, even though you’re officially retired, you still know how to get information about her kind of people, don’t you?”
    Chip stared at Danny with a look that no person with two fully functioning eyes could ever achieve. “I’ll use my special talents to check out the lovely Ms. Dumas and her fascinating story, even down to her old lovers. I want to know if I’ll have any competition.”
    “I know of one.”
    A spark ignited in Chip’s eye. “Do tell.”
    “The prince of Monaco.”
    Chip was silent for a long moment, but the spark never left his eye. “I said competition Cavanaugh, not no-contests.”
    Danny heard the shower water squeak off. Both Chip and he looked in the direction of the locker room. A subject change was needed.
    “So, what happened to your eye? Seriously, no bullshit,” Danny asked, changing the subject. He downed the last bit of Shiner Bock from his thick pint glass etched with the Bull Run emblem.
    Chip bent over the grill and lifted the rolls with his spatula. “Just a bit longer,” he said, eyeing them. Then he stood tall and answered Danny’s question. “My retina used to spontaneously split in half.”
    Danny winced. “Sounds painful.”
    “No shit. Over my lifetime it split, for no apparent reason mind you, a total of sixty-three times.”
    “What exactly would happen?”
    Chip balled his fists, stuck them together, and then broke them apart. “The retina would be one piece and then split in two.” Then he banged his fists together again. “Over the course of several minutes to several days, the two halves would then fuse together again.”
    Danny couldn’t help wincing again. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. Is it rare?”
    Chip nodded. “One in ten million people have this condition. I was documented in the AMJA. I was flown to clinics in Boston and New York to be poked and prodded like a fucking lab rat. About four years ago, I was informed that my number had come up for a retinal transplant.” He tapped the eye patch. “Needless to say, the operation was not a success.”
    “That’s what got you out of the police business?”
    Chip nodded.
    “What’d you do, sue the doctor and buy the bar?”
    Chip chuckled. “Ah, the American Dream. Go under the knife and hope the doc botches the operation so you can make millions.” Chip checked the rolls again and decided they were done. He extracted two plates off the rack above the grill and placed them on top of the lawsuit documents. He continued his story as he plated the sandwiches.
    “I was well informed of the chances that the surgery wouldn’t take. I made my money the really old-fashioned way, Danny. I inherited it. My grandfather was a boat builder and patented a polymer coating used in fiberglass boats to make hulls stronger yet lighter.”
    “No shit?”
    “No shit. He sold the patent and made millions.”
    “Sounds like almost as fantastic a story as Sydney’s.”
    Chip shrugged as he handed Danny a plate. “And yet they both tell the same tale.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “They both illustrate that most of the world’s money is in the hands of a relative few. As it gets passed down from one generation to the next, it builds wider and stronger divisions between the haves and have-nots. Like Einstein said, the greatest force in the universe is compound interest. Until changes are made to that phenomenon, there will always be Bilderbergers trying to take over the world and retired, one-eyed cops who are able to open up bars and act like eighteen-year-old boys forever.”
    Danny decided to wait for Sydney to eat, which wasn’t very long. He was on his way back from refilling his glass with a second beer when Sydney appeared in the locker room doorway on the far side of the kitchen.
    Danny studied Sydney’s new outfit. It had been left in one of the waitresses’ lockers after her untimely dismissal. The black pants, which were not meant to stop at her calves, nevertheless fit the rest of her body.