My Hero (3 page)

“How about it, Cal?” Dooley asked quietly.

Cal pondered the label on the beer bottle while he dragged his thumbnail through its wet center, effectively slicing it in two. Not so different from what had happened to his life nine months ago when he took the bullet meant for President Randolph Jennings. One minute he'd been at the top of his game—strong, agile, in control. The next minute all of that was gone.

Those seconds flashed before his eyes again. He preceded Jennings through the hotel door, out into the bright September sunlight. He could still feel the change in temperature and humidity as they passed from air-conditioning to the heat of the D.C. afternoon. He could feel the distance between himself and the President, a palpable measure, close enough to protect the man yet removed enough so the man didn't trip over his feet. Right where he needed to be. On point. In control. Ready. For anything. Everything.

He heard the first bullet. It went thunk as it bit a chunk out of the pavement just ahead of him, and his body reacted instantly, independent of his mind, twisting sideways, inserting himself just as he'd been trained between…

“Cal?” Dooley asked again. “How about it?”

“What?” He blinked the dark bar into focus.

“Come on home, Cal.”

He sighed. Hell, why not? Where else was there to go?

It didn't take long to quit the town limits of Honeycomb, whose population had slipped to about seven hundred souls in the two decades that Cal had been away. Out on the state road, he stomped on the accelerator of his rebuilt '64 Thun-derbird convertible—his convalescent gift to himself despite the vertigo that had kept him from driving it for a lousy three months—and blew past Dooley's pickup at eighty-five miles per hour with plenty of juice to spare.

Okay. So it was a high-school stunt, a stupid testosterone trick. Still, it managed to lift Cal's spirit a notch for a couple of seconds. The hot wind scrubbed his face while the summer sun beat down on the top of his head. From horizon to horizon, there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and since it was nearing noon, there were no ragged shadows to smudge the landscape or dull the greens of the mesquite trees and the prickly pears along both sides of the road. It was as pure a summer day as they made in this part of South Texas.

The ranch appeared in the distance, what was left of the land that had been in his family for nearly a hundred and fifty years. With each successive generation selling off a parcel here and a couple hundred acres there, Rancho Allegro was down to twelve hundred acres now. At the going rate of about eight hundred bucks an acre, Ruthie's half would net her a nice half million to pour into a restaurant venture, but Cal was hoping she'd reconsider. As little as he'd been back here these past twenty years, the place was still home, and at the moment he didn't have any other.

The house itself was no great shakes. Just a single-story yellow stucco with several cinderblock and aluminum siding additions. The outbuildings, all pre-fab, were a sandy color that matched the dry ground on which they were lashed.

He eased his foot off the gas, close enough now to see Dooley's lineback mare shoving her muzzle over the fence and swishing her tail. His sister, Ruth, was outside, her skirt whipping around her legs as she tended her tomato plants. At this distance, with her long, dark hair, her tiny waist and narrow shoulders, it would have been easy to mistake her for their mother.

Cal pulled into the gravel drive, half expecting to see his sister beat an angry and hasty retreat into the house to avoid another confrontation. When she stood her ground, he mouthed a silent curse. She had already ripped him a new one this morning. Wasn't that enough?

By the time he was out of the car, Ruthie had crossed the yard with a basket of tomatoes slung over her arm.

“I'm glad Dooley found you,” she said.

Cal breathed a faint sigh of relief, recognizing an apology, even a grudging one, when he heard it. “I wasn't all that hard to find, sis,” he answered in his own conciliatory code. One of these days, he thought, he and Ruthie might actually say “I love you” out loud, surprising the hell out of each other.

She lifted a hand to shield her eyes from the sun, and then said, “Diana called.”

The headache Cal had been nursing all morning blossomed inside his skull. He swore softly.

“She wants you to call her lawyer,” Ruth said. “Something about the divorce. She said—”

“Yeah. Yeah. Okay.”

“And you got another call.” Ruthie was on a definite roll, if not a direct mission. “From the White House, Cal. A woman named Janet Adler. She—”

“Janet Adcock?”

“Yeah, maybe that was it. She said it was important that you get back to her as quickly as possible. I nearly called you at Ramon's, but then Dooley offered to drive into town and get you.”

As if on cue, Dooley, who had obviously maintained the proper speed limit, swung into the drive. He aimed a dark “you damned fool” glare at Cal before he smiled at Ruth. “Hi, honey,” he said, angling his long bones out of the dusty pickup.

“Hi, yourself. I'm going in to slice these tomatoes. Lunch will be ready in about twenty minutes. Cal, that'll give you time to return at least one of those calls, so you do it, you hear?”

He nodded even as he wondered why the hell Diana wanted him to call her lawyer. This divorce was supposed to be a no-brainer, wasn't it? And what did Janet Adcock want?

The conversation with Diana's lawyer quickly deteriorated to a childish chorus of
Did, too's
and
Did not's.
Frederick Burton, of Bishop, Burton, and DePew, was looking for some paperwork he claimed to have mailed to Cal three weeks ago for his signature.

“I never got it,” Cal told him.

“It was sent in care of Mrs. Ruth Reese on Rural Route 3, Honeycomb, Texas.”

“I don't care. I never got it.”

The more Cal insisted he hadn't received the papers, the more the lawyer argued that he had. Of course, the difference between them was that Burton was probably consulting an actual file while Cal was depending on his not-so-reliable gray matter. He really wasn't all that certain the paperwork hadn't arrived, only to be crammed in a drawer or shoved in the glove compartment of the Thunderbird. But one of the things he'd learned in the nine months following the assassination attempt was that a little belligerence went a long way in covering up short-term memory problems.

“Why don't I just fax them to you?” Frederick Burton suggested, then didn't find it so hilarious when Cal informed him that the nearest fax machine was probably two counties over. “I'll get them in today's mail, then,” he said. “You really need to sign them, Mr. Griffin, for the divorce to proceed.”

Cal could feel the headache flare in his right temple, somewhere in the vicinity of the metal plate. He closed his eyes a moment, then asked, “How's Diana?” There was no longer any trace of defensive anger in his tone.

“Excuse me?”

“How's my wife?”

The silence at the other end of the line was eloquent. Well, hell. Diana was a beautiful woman, and one who enjoyed, even craved, sexual encounters of the dramatic kind. Why wouldn't she be sleeping with her divorce attorney?

Finally Burton replied, “She's fine. She sends her regards, as always.”

“I'll bet.”

Cal broke the connection and stared straight ahead. They had met in First Class on the red eye from L.A. to New York. Diana Koslov was a honey blonde with a honey voice whose job description with a D.C. PR firm was fairly loose. He was never sure exactly what she did except get off airplanes into limousines, take phone calls from people whose names she thought he ought to recognize, and strike terror in the hearts of maître d's in every major city in the contiguous forty-eight.

During that flight, somewhere over the heartland, they had renewed their dues in the Mile High Club. Diana liked it rough, and Cal, tough guy, had been only too happy to accede to her demands. The six or eight weeks after that were a blur of hotel rooms, twisted sheets and gardenia-scented sex. How they wound up getting married, he wasn't quite sure. He'd probably repressed it, although he had a vague recollection of the Fourth of July celebration on the Mall and Diana's beautiful face framed by the most spectacular fireworks he'd ever seen. More than likely it had something to do with his inability to spend his nights as a sexual athlete and his days protecting the President of the United States. Part of it was just that he was thirty-seven years old with not much to show for his life except a couple medals and an address book that was the envy of every agent on the White House detail.

The marriage didn't go to hell right away. It took at least six weeks. Then, on a warm September Sunday afternoon, Thomas Earl Starks made his bid for the history books by trying to kill the President, and the sole fatality had been Cal's marriage. Well, his marriage and maybe his career. The jury was still out on that.

“Cal, lunch'll be ready in five minutes,” Ruth called.

“Great.”

He didn't even realize he was still holding the phone until it rang in his hand. It was Janet Adcock. After the formalities, she softened her starched Deputy Director of Communications voice and asked, “How are you doing, Cal?”

“Tolerable.” It was his standard reply. Nobody really wanted to hear that his head was still aching, his balance was often touch and go, his leg hurt like hell and his knee had locked up on him again this morning. Plus he didn't want word to get back to his superiors at the Secret Service that his recuperation wasn't right on track as he'd led them to believe.

“I'm glad you're doing well,” she said. “The President sends his best.”

“Thanks.”

“We need to ask a favor of you, Cal.”

Oh, brother. The
we
implied there'd been at least one meeting and his name had been mentioned. Janet had probably drawn the short straw and got to make the call.

“No,” he said.

“What do you mean, no? You don't even know what it is.”

“I don't need to know. Whatever it is, Janet, I can't help you.”

“Just listen for a minute, will you?”

She didn't give him much choice as she immediately launched into some long-winded monologue about a TV documentary, the upcoming one-year anniversary of the assassination attempt, and Randolph Jennings' eternal gratitude for Cal's cooperation.

“The documentary is tentatively scheduled to air in mid-September,” Janet said, “and could be a real boon to the reelection campaign. It'll be part of the VIP Channel's biography series. You've probably seen it. The shows are very well done.”

“Nope. Haven't seen them. We don't get TV out here in Honeycomb,” he drawled at the same time he was looking out the window at Dooley's huge satellite dish that brought in something like eleven thousand channels, only two of which were ever watched for cooking shows and rodeos.

He could tell from Janet's faint, sympathetic, Sarah Lawrence murmur that she believed him. “Well, trust me,” she said. “They're quite good. They'll be calling this segment ‘Hero Week,’ Cal.”

He snorted.

“Let me tell you a little more…”

“Not interested, Janet.”

“Cal, if you'd just—”

“Sorry.”

What followed next was a stubborn silence, a staring contest across two thousand miles. Cal could just picture Granite Janet sinking her eye teeth into her lush bottom lip, pulling at a hank of light brown hair, twisting it around her index finger before she planted the abused lock behind the ear unencumbered by the phone, all the while glaring out through her always open office door, ready to bite off the head or gonads, depending on his crime, of the next guy who dared to enter.

For a minute—oh, damn!—he missed his job and the West Wing so much he almost wished Starks' bullet had wiped his memories clean instead of just short circuiting some of them.

“Cal, maybe I'm not making myself clear. The VIP Channel is going to do this profile of you whether you cooperate with them or not. Their producer is on her way to Texas this evening, I'm told. President Jennings would be extremely grateful if—”

“All right, Janet. God dammit.” Hero Week. Shit.

“Oh, good.” She didn't dwell on her victory. Janet had way too much class for that, and was too smart to give him an opportunity to renege. “Let me give you the producer's name. I have it here somewhere. Cal, I'm going to put you on hold a second. Don't you dare hang up on me.”

Hero Week. He wanted to snap the receiver in half, maybe bash it against the metal plate in his skull and see which dented first. After nine months, interest in the assassination attempt had slackened. It was yesterday's news. Old stuff. Nobody had called him in weeks, thank God. Even the Secret Service wasn't trying to trot him out as their poster boy anymore.

He wasn't a hero. He'd just been doing his job, and if he had to do it again—which admittedly he did just about every night in his brutal dreams—he'd zig rather than zag when he threw that body block into the President to push him back through the door they had just exited. That way the bullet that grazed his head before it smashed into his thigh might have just hit the leg. Of course, without his head to slow it down a bit, the slug might have shattered his femur. You never knew. The hero business was pretty unpredictable.

“Cal?”

“I'm still here, Janet.”

“The producer's name is Holly Hicks. She'll be flying into Houston tonight, and we thought…”

There was that
we
again.

“…it would be a nice touch and show a real spirit of cooperation if you were the one who met her at the airport.”

“In Houston?”

“Yes. She's flying from Newark to…” He could hear papers shuffling. “Yes. Intercontinental Airport in Houston. She's on Continental. ETA is nine P.M.”

Cal shook his aching head and considered telling Janet that Houston was over two hundred miles from Honeycomb. But then he thought about his Thunderbird and the top down under clear blue skies and his foot jamming the accelerator while the T-bird ate up and spat out big stretches of road going northeast on 59.

“Okay. Nine P.M. I'll be there,” he said.

“Great. I'll let them know in New York.”