In the Grey (44 page)

Neev dropped Alex in the
doorway and went into the office.

As her body fell to the
ground, Alex knew she was dying. A formally dressed cricket raised
his top hat and bowed. Jesse returned and scowled at the cricket.
With each passing moment, Jesse appeared more and more solid. She
felt someone step over her. She opened her eyes.

Hector James crept up
behind Neev and shoved his taser at her behind. Neev screamed and
spun around. Hector James’s taser caught her abdomen. Screaming,
Neev fell to the floor next to her desk.

“
Yes!” Hector James
cheered. He jumped up and down with excitement. “I did it! I did
it! It worked! It worked! Whoo hoo!”

He leaned his head back
and gave a maniacal laugh.

“
Alex?” he looked around
for her. “Did you see?”

Seeing her lying on the
ground, Hector James dropped his taser and ran to Alex.

“
You look like you’re
dying,” the child whispered.

“
Not yet,” Alex pointed
up.

Eoin’s face appeared in
the basement door window.

“
You have to open the
door,” Alex said.

“
I can’t,” Hector James
said. “It needs a key on both sides. I tried already. The security
door, too. There’s no way he can get inside.”

Dahlia appeared next to
Jesse. A lovely woman in life, she looked like an angel now. She
caressed Hector James’s face. Unable to see her, he looked to where
she stood, and beamed.

“
Mommy would be proud of
me,” Hector James said.

“
Yes, she would,” Alex
said. “I am too.”

Dahlia smiled at
Alex.

“
How much
time . . . ?” Alex asked Dahlia and
Jesse.

“
Enough,” Dahlia
said.

“
We’re here to remind
you,” Jesse said.

“
Remember, Alex,” Dahlia
said. “Everything depends on you remembering.”

FF

“
The
Gadfly
?” Rebecca Hargreaves
laughed.

Alex was mashing potatoes,
and Patrick was carving a turkey in the kitchen of her mother’s big
house in Cherry Hills. It was Christmas or Easter or Thanksgiving
or one of those family celebrations where caterers made the food
and the family did the work. Her mother was dressed to the nines.
Paul was wearing a suit that Gretel had bought him.

“
Yeah,” Paul was mixing
drinks by the refrigerator. “Isn’t that weird?”

“
That’s very strange,”
Rebecca said. She was folding napkins. “Have you read it,
darling?”

“
Not my cup of tea, I’m
afraid,”
Patrick shook his
head.

“
But you’ve heard of it?”
Rebecca asked.

Patrick nodded.

“
Alex?” Rebecca
asked.

She shook her
head.

“
Cooper told me that her
father spent a couple of years in New York City. He fell in with a
group of Russian immigrants,” Paul said. “He just happened upon
them one sunny afternoon on the way to the laundry. They were
sitting on the stoop smoking. It was quite a crowd – Ayn Rand,
George Gurdjieff when he was in town, Nate Brandon, and other
Russian intellectuals. They met at an American heiress’s apartment.
Sometimes, a bunch of hardcore Russian physicists would show up;
you know, those guys they brought over after the war. They would
get together to drink and argue about the fate of the
world.”

Paul laughed at the
idea.

“
I thought Ayn Rand didn’t
get along with anyone,” Rebecca said.

“
I don’t know that she got
along with these guys,” Paul said. “But this was a kind
of . . . home base, a sort of incubator for
revolutionary thought, I guess. Anyway, Cooper’s father was kind of
a celebrity with them because he was a test pilot. A couple of the
physicists actually designed the planes Cooper’s father flew. This
one guy . . . I can’t come up with his name,
something with a V, he had an epic, four-week-long argument with
Cooper’s dad. He gave Cooper’s dad this book to prove his
point.”

“
But it’s from the 1800s?”
Patrick said. Rebecca shook her head.

“
The book is an original
printing,” Paul said. “Cooper said her father thought the guy was a
nut, but didn’t want to offend this influential group. Of course,
he died in one of their creations, so you’ve got to
wonder.”

“
Not a group of folks I’d
like to piss off,” Alex said.

“
Alexandra, really,”
Rebecca said. “Who says ‘piss off’? Makes you sound
crass.”

Alex smiled at the
reprimand. Patrick furrowed his brow to keep from
laughing.

“
The book was very popular
in the Soviet Union,” Paul said. “Here’s the kicker. It’s a lot
like
Atlas Shrugged
.”

“
How so?”

“
It’s about revolution and
love,” Paul said. “Personally, I think Rand stole most of her ideas
from it, but . . .”

Paul shrugged. Max and
Erin came in the kitchen.

“
We set the table,” Max
said. “What’s our next duty?”

“
Duty!” Rebecca pretended
to be offended. “I thought you’d want to participate.”

“
Thinking, that’s what
gets you in trouble,” Max laughed.

“
Max!” Alex
said.

Rebecca
laughed.

“
What’s next, Mom?” Erin
asked.

“
China,” Rebecca said.
“It’s under the . . .”

“
I’ll get it,” Erin
said.

Talking to each other,
Erin and Max left the room.

“
Well, I for one would
like to read this
Gadfly
,” Rebecca said.

“
It’s in storage,” Paul
said. Uncharacteristic of Paul, he looked Alex straight in the
face. His dark eyes burned with intensity, “I took it to a couple
of book dealers. They weren’t sure what to do with it. If you
promise not to ruin its ‘buy-the-beach-house’ value, I’ll bring it
the next time I’m in town.”

“
I promise!” Rebecca said.
“Maybe if I read that, I can figure out what Alan Greenspan is
talking about. That man can go on and on. He’s always ‘Ayn Rand
this’ and ‘Ayn Rand that.’ She seemed like a bitter old prune to
me.”

“
Me too,” Alex
said.

They laughed. The laughter
lingered in the air as the scene changed. She was standing in a
grey fog.

She looked for Max, but he
wasn’t there.

She looked for Jesse, but
he was nowhere to be found.

“
Max?” She walked into the
grey mist. “John?”

Her heart squeezed with
loss.

“
Josh?” she whispered
Raz’s birth name. She shivered.

She felt movement around
her.

“
Jesse? Are you here?” She
yelled.

The still, grey mist crept
into her bones.

“
Max?”

“
Go to sleep.”

Alex slowly turned in
place. She saw only mist.

Where did the voice come
from?

“
Go to sleep.”

The voice was right behind
her. Alex spun in place. She blinked at the bright visage of the
Blue Fairy.

“
Rest now,” the Blue Fairy
said. “We’ll need your strength.”

“
The
boy . . .”

“
My eye is on him,” she
said. “Sleep.”

Alex closed her eyes and
was out.

F

Thursday, early
morning

November 25 – 3:19 a.m.
MST

Denver, CO

Sound asleep, Eoin felt a
tug on his arm. He opened his eyes to see his year-old daughter
looking at him.

“
Buzz,” she
said.

“
Buzz?”

“
Buzz,” she pointed to his
phone.

She climbed over him and
onto the bed. He held up the covers and she scooted under
them.

“
Maeve, me love,” he
rolled over. “Did you come in here to tell me about the
phone?”

Her large blue eyes
blinked at him. He gave her his pillow.

“
Eoin?” his wife, Delilah,
looked up from her pillow.

“
Buzz,” Maeve
repeated.

“
My phone is
ringing.”

“
You should answer it,”
Delilah crossed her eyes and he smiled.

He grabbed his cell phone
and puzzled at the number.

“
Yeah?” Eoin
asked.

“
It happened,” a young
boy’s voice came over the phone.

“
Hector James?” Eoin
asked.

“
On my ninja phone,”
Hector James said. “I got my blue taser from the
drawer.”

“
Good,” Eoin said. “You’ll
be careful.”

“
I will,” Hector James
said. “And I get to zap her, right?”

“
You do,” Eoin
said.

“
Okay,” Hector James said.
“I’m not super scared, but . . . you’ll come like
you promised.”

“
I’m on my way,” Eoin
said.

He got out of bed and
began throwing on his clothes.

“
What is it?” Delilah, his
wife, asked.

His eyes fixed on his
daughter, he said, “It’s what we talked about.”

“
Should I call 911?”
Delilah asked.

“
Let me get there first,”
Eoin said. “We don’t know what . . .”

Panic gripped him. For the
briefest moment, his mind went to the moment his father was dragged
from the house and beaten to death on their stoop. He shook the
memory from his head.

“
You’re going to be okay,
right?” Delilah asked.

She got out of bed and
hugged him tight.

“
If you don’t hear from me
in a half hour, call everyone you can think of,” Eoin said. “Start
with emergency services and . . . and
I . . . and I . . . It’s been really
great, all of this.”

He kissed the back of her
hand.

“
Thank you,” he
whispered.

She gave him a puzzled
look.

“
I couldn’t love you
more,” he said.

Eoin kissed her forehead
and left the room. He was almost out the door when he heard her
yell, “See you in a bit!”

He closed his eyes and
hoped that was true.

He jogged down the
stairwell from their apartment above the bakery to the street. He
zipped into the darkened storefront for a few supplies and then
jumped in his car. Somehow, and he would never know how, he met
only green lights on his journey across Denver. He pulled up in
front of the rooming house in less than fifteen minutes.

He saw Samantha first. He
kneeled down and rolled her over. She’d broken open her chin and
possibly lost a couple of teeth in her fall. But she was breathing.
He dug in his pocket for the tiny bottle of pure bergamot. He put
the bottle under her nose.

“
Earl Grey tea,” he said
into her ear.

Nothing
happened.

“
Come on Sami, love,” Eoin
said. He waved his hand from the bottle to her nose. “Earl Grey
tea.”

“
Earl Grey tea,” Samantha
said.

Her lips moved, but her
eyes didn’t open.

“
Sami, you have to do
better than that,” Eoin said. “Come on back, love. For Art. For
your mum. For Alex . . .”

“
For tea,” Samantha said
and opened her eyes. “Did it happen?”

“
I’m afraid so,” Eoin
said.

“
Art!” Samantha hopped to
standing, and then weaved. “Don’t feel great.”

She grabbed her chin. She
pulled it away to look at the blood.

“
Hurts,” she said through
swelling lips.

“
You’ve busted your chin,”
Eoin said.

“
Oh my God, Art!” Samantha
said.

“
Slowly,” Eoin grabbed her
arm. They walked to where Art’s body lay. “Used the new hockey
stick. Good girl.”

He dropped to
Raz.

“
He’s alive,” Eoin looked
up at the sky. “Oh thank you, Lord. He’s alive.”

The powerful man lay in a
fetal position on his right side. Eoin looked at the wound. His
head was bruised, but not bleeding. She’d smacked him with the fat
side of the hockey stick blade and not the edge as she was
instructed. He only hoped that might have protected him from brain
damage.

“
Hang in there buddy,”
Eoin said in Raz’s ear. “Help’s on the way.”

Eoin jumped up and grabbed
Samantha’s arm. Dazed, she was staring at the ground. Eoin leaned
over to get right next to her face. He grabbed her shoulders and
gave her a little shake.

“
You have to wake up!”
Eoin said in an intense whisper. “I cannot do this alone. Wake up!
I need that tough lawyer, the Navy officer,
the . . .”