Run To You

want.” Other people might not detect that edge, but Beau wasn’t other people. He’d been competing with his brother since the womb. It was the you-got-a-blue-ribbon-and-I-got-a-red-ribbon edge. It was the I-should-be-happy-for-you-but-I’m-not edge. The edge that crept into their voices when one did better than the other. When one of them was doing a little better in life than the other.
    “Your point, sand sailor?” Today it was Beau doing better than Blake. Beau clutching the blue ribbon while Blake held red. Tomorrow things could change.
    “You can send someone else, grunt.”
    “I don’t want to send someone else.” For the past three years he’d worked his ass off. Mostly because he didn’t know a different way of doing things. He was a Junger. Jungers made overachievers look like slackers.
    “Where is this job?”
    “New Orleans.”
    “Lovett is on the way.” Blake had obviously been drinking. Again.
    “Last time I checked, Louisiana is south of the Texas Panhandle.”
    “What we’ve got here is a fluid situation.” Since Blake had retired from the teams, he’d been drinking more than usual. There’d been a time when both brothers could drink all comers under the table. It was that whole competition thing. Beau wondered who Blake was competing against these days. “I’d come and get her, but I told Vince I’d stay here and help him out with some last-minute renovations.” In the background, Blake popped the top of an aluminum can. “How’s Mom?”
    Beau let his brother change the subject for now and watched the lights of a sailboat as it slowly drifted past. “Too thin.” His mother had always been thin, but she seemed to be thinner than usual. He glanced at the veranda where his mom and Stella had polished off a bottle of wine before heading to bed and presumably passing out. Within the black curtain of a moonless night, the light from the back of the house bathed the stucco arches and columns in soft gold and lit the upstairs veranda in pale shadows. As he talked with his brother about their concerns for their mother’s weight, he glanced up at the guest room windows. Well, one of the guest rooms. The windows were dark and reflected the dim light from outside.
    “Could be the stress of living with Dr. Mike.”
    “Could be,” Beau agreed. He and his brother knew that when their mother felt stress, she didn’t eat. They’d lived with it just as they’d lived with their father’s cheating. “I’ll talk to Mike.” He needed to get off the phone and make a few more calls before he called it a night. But not before he fired his brother up. “Oh. One more thing.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Batman’s a pussy.”
    “Bullshit! Batman is genius and a skilled veteran of ninjutsu. All Batman has to do is shove kryptonite up Superman’s ass and he’s fucking useless.”
    Beau laughed as he pictured his brother jumping up in defense of his superhero. “Superman is faster than a speeding locomotive.”
    “Batman has the Batmobile and Batpod. Both are rigged with grappling hooks and machine guns.”
    “Superman is the man of steel.” Beau smiled in the darkness. “Means he’s rigged with a dick of steel. A big dick of steel trumps gadgets any day of the week.”
    “What good does that do when he only bones Lois Lane?”
    “Being a one-woman man isn’t a weakness.”
    “It’s kryptonite, man. Kryptonite.”
    Blake was being a drama queen, but even if monogamy was kryptonite, Beau wanted to give it a try. It had to be better than waking up with a parade of nameless women at the age of thirty-eight. Rather than argue, he got off the phone, then made a few calls. He left a message regarding the change he needed to his itinerary with his operations manager, Deborah, and chatted briefly with his second-in-command, Curt Hill. He’d incorporated Junger Security in Nevada because of the tax and privacy advantages. He had a physical business address in Las Vegas and owned a condo in Henderson, but his work took him all over the country. He was home so little, he didn’t really feel at home when he was there. Which in turn gave him little time for the social life he’d been meaning to get.
    He tossed his phone on a padded deck chair and dived into the deep end of the pool. He might have joined the corps, but he’d spent most of his childhood swimming in anticipation of BUD/S.
    He came up for a breath, then started the steady combat stroke his father had taught him. A combination of