Hidden Allegiance: A Jackson Quick Adventure Read online

  Mack extends his arms toward us. “I owe Jackson. I owe you both, really. I know the last time we saw each other it didn’t go well. I accused you of some things that were unfair. I was… lashing out.”

  Bella laughs humorlessly.

  “My wife is dead, Bella,” his admission stops her laughter, but doesn’t elicit sympathy. “It wasn’t the cancer. Her kidneys failed. All of that chemo… Anyhow,” he sighs. “I was recovering and she was slipping away. It happened fast. There was no time for a donor. I wasn’t a match. Even if I had been, I wasn’t in any condition to give it to her.

  “I told her what I’d done. I told her that I’d betrayed you, Bella. That after all of my years of service to your father, all that your family had done for us, that I’d blamed you for not doing more. I let that anger cloud my judgment. I’d allowed myself to be manipulated by Sir Spencer. She told me I was wrong. I was wrong.”

  Bella reaches for my hand, lacing her fingers between mine.

  “I just…” Mack’s pale lips quiver and he struggles to control them, “I promised her I would make it right.”

  “I don’t buy it,” Bella says flatly. “It’s too much, Mack.”

  “It’s a little convenient,” I say. “I mean, you tried to kill me. You likened Bella to Judas, and then—”

  “I know. I know. What I did was—”

  “Unforgivable,” Bella states.

  Mack looks down at his feet and mumbles something unintelligible.

  “What?” Bella snaps.

  “I knew it was a fool’s errand,” he says louder than necessary. “I told my wife that. But she made me promise, so…” He waves his hands as if to shoo himself away and walks back to his Mazda. I almost feel sad for him.

  Mack yanks open the door, slips into the driver’s seat, struggling for a second to pull his leg into the cabin, and pulls the door shut behind him. He’s working hard not to look at us, fumbling to get his keys in the ignition.

  “How?” I call out, loud enough for him to hear me through the windshield.

  He jerks his head and stares at us, measuring whether or not to answer.

  I walk to the driver’s side. “How?”

  He lowers the window. “How what?”

  “How did you plan to give me back my life?” I glance back at Bella, whose arms are folded across her chest in defiance.

  “I know people, Jackson,” he says earnestly. “They know people who know things.”

  “Stop speaking in riddles, Mack,” I say. “I don’t have the time or inclination—”

  “Your parents were murdered,” he blurts. “I mean, their deaths weren’t accidental.”

  I’ve always known who was to blame for my parents’ death. Me. If I hadn’t taken a gun to school, they’d be alive. If I hadn’t gotten caught with it, they’d have seen me graduate from high school.

  If the vice principal and a couple of cops hadn’t summoned them to campus, I’d never have bounced from place to place. I’d have had a lifelong home, without a doubt.

  This is my truth.

  CHAPTER 5

  My parents were buried in a small plot near our home. I remember it in a way most adults remember their favorite Christmas morning as a child. It lives just beneath the surface, bits and pieces unexpectedly poking through.

  The smell of wet, fresh cut grass is a memento of the wrinkled man on the riding lawn mower rumbling through his morning duties at the cemetery as we arrived in our limo. The sound of gravel crunching under rubber tires is a souvenir of the wheels of the first of two hearses kicking up dust ahead of us in the procession.

  The cold of granite countertops, a token of my parents’ headstones, carved to remind me of what I’d done and the date I did it.

  I didn’t cry at their funeral. I couldn’t. Even when adults I barely knew squeezed my shoulders and told me that I’d be okay, or the pastor, who didn’t know us at all, promised me I’d see them again in Heaven, my eyes were dry. It was too easy to swallow past the lump that never grew in my throat.

  I was in shock, coping with a loss I was too young to fully understand. What I knew was that I was responsible and that I’d probably spend the rest of my life paying penance.

  Both my maternal and paternal grandparents were dead and so was my mother’s divorced sister. Social services sent me to live with a foster family for a couple of weeks until my cousin, my dead aunt’s daughter, could drop her life for a few days and pick me up.

  She’d missed the funeral, and missed most of my life. Looking back, I don’t blame her. She was a young professional who didn’t ask to raise an orphan. She was always kind to me, but never engaged or interested.

  She had access to a small portion of the trust my parents left for me, which was enough to clothe and feed me. It wasn’t enough, however, to send me to a private school, and so I was essentially remanded to an alternative school.

  For two full years there, I learned the real definition of bullying. I also learned how to defend myself, how to fight like a frightened animal. I survived, but got angrier, and took it out on my cousin. I holed up in my room binge watching television before Netflix made it popular, ingesting a steady diet of music. I was non-communicative, except when I was a smart ass. She finally had enough.

  With help from the alternative school, she talked a small prep school in Chatham, Virginia into taking me as a charity case. They gave me a scholarship, despite my poor academic record, and I moved. I never saw my cousin again, but I owe her for getting me into the boarding school. It changed my life.

  Part of the deal was that I had to maintain a C average in my classes and be involved in extracurricular activities.

  Running was always an escape for me, so I joined the cross-country team. I guess, figuratively, I’d always been running from something.

  I kept my grades up, knowing this was a chance at something approaching normalcy I wouldn’t get again, and did pretty well. My roommate wouldn’t necessarily have agreed.

  He transferred to another dorm after close to a year of coping with my violent nightmares. I slept through them. He didn’t, and complained I would cry out loud and mumble odd things about my parents. He thought I was crazy.

  I roomed alone for the rest of my time there. My friends were television and music. I could escape inside of them, live vicariously through the creativity of others. It was as healthy a way as I knew to cope.

  It worked well enough that I got accepted into my father’s alma mater, the only school to which I applied. I moved to Raleigh and a single dorm at North Carolina State University. The red-bricked urban campus wasn’t as idyllic as the colleges I’d seen in the movies, but I liked it.

  Every once in a while, I’d drive to a nearby gun range in Holly Springs to watch the rifle team practice. My dad had been on the team when he was there. The pops of the .177 air rifles somehow made me feel closer to him. I never picked up a gun, though. It felt like it would be a betrayal or something. Shooting was for my dad and me. It was our connection. I was good at something he loved.

  I was a natural.

  Funny how life happens.

  Fast-forward a handful of years, a couple of conspiracies, and I don’t go a day without making sure there’s a round in the chamber.

  Wouldn’t my parents be so proud?

  ***

  Mack’s hotel room is next to the Southwest Freeway near Kirby Drive. His second-floor room overlooks the southbound lanes. I stand with my nose pressed against the glass, the cars streaming past the fog on the window. A faint whoosh of sound vibrates the cheap pane when a pair of eighteen-wheelers rumbles by.

  Bella’s in a chair in the corner of the room between a pull-chain floor lamp and the full-sized bed. One leg is crossed over the other, her foot bouncing up and down impatiently.

  “I don’t really get this, Jackson. We don’t need Mack.”<
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  Mack is getting ice from the machine at the end of the hall. He’s thirsty, and the warm bottled Ozarka waters on the nightstand wouldn’t do without ice.

  “I know we don’t need him. But if he has information about my parents’ deaths and how they relate to anything that’s going on right now…” Three more semis barrel down highway 59 and the window rumbles against my forehead.

  “How so?” Bella asks. “Jackson, look at me.”

  I push myself away from the glass and turn around. She’s worried about me. I can see it in the bounce of her foot and the furrow in her forehead.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “I mean, the connection is thin, right? Even if we don’t need him, we can use Mack.” I glance over my shoulder at the door, step closer to Bella, and lower my voice. “We don’t have a lot of people on our side,” I remind her. “It’s you and me.”

  “And George,” she adds.

  “Kinda. He’s no more or less trustworthy than Mack.”

  “George didn’t try to kill you.”

  “True. But we’re dealing with a lot of gray here. There’s really no black or white. No good guys, no bad guys. Just us and them, and a couple of people who might be a means to an end.”

  There’s an electronic beep at the door, a click, and Mack shoulders his way into the room. “George still in the car?” he asks, toting the ice bucket to the desk next to the flat screen television on the far side of the room.

  “Yeah,” I reply. “He had a phone call to make.”

  “To whom?” Mack asks, dipping his fingers into the bucket and clawing out a couple of cubes.

  “I don’t know. Doesn’t matter right now.”

  “Doesn’t it?” Mack drops the cubes into a plastic cup and reaches for a bottle of water.

  “You’re not one to question anything right now, Mack,” Bella interjects. “Just get to your point. We have more important things to do.”

  “Blogis and Sir Spencer go way back,” he starts, pouring some of the water over the ice.

  “We know this,” Bella snaps, her glare darting between Mack and me. “You could have told us this on the street. You didn’t need to drag us back to your hotel room.”

  “What you may not know is that they go way back with your family, Jackson.” Ignoring Bella, Mack points the cup toward me before taking a swig.

  “I know my dad worked with them. I have flashes of memories where one or both of them would come to our house. I’d blocked a lot of it out, but—”

  “Not your father.”

  “What?”

  “Your mother.”

  “What about her?”

  “She was the connection to Sir Spencer and Blogis.” Mack shrugs, as if this life-altering information is nothing more than an aside.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Your mother was an asset of Sir Spencer’s,” he says. “She recruited your dad while they were in college.”

  “That makes no sense,” I tell him, my brain scanning for refuting evidence. “She was a stay-at-home mom. She… my dad… How do you know this?”

  “My job is information,” he says flatly. “I’m good at my job.”

  I say nothing, waiting for more as he slurps down the crushed ice before he offers another piece of information.

  “Your father was a crack shot, right? He was a marksman. Sir Spencer needed a marksman. Your mother put the two of them together.”

  “Let’s say I believe this…” My hands are trembling; my chest is tight. “What does this have to do with their deaths?”

  “They were leaving the operation,” he explains. “Your mother, in some trite Hollywood-esque fashion, actually fell in love with your dad. They both loved you. They wanted out.”

  “So?”

  “So,” he swirls the empty plastic cup so that the lone ice cube spins around the bottom, “Sir Spencer didn’t want them out. It was too risky to his operation.”

  “He killed them?” My hands are balled into fists, my teeth clenched. Everything I’ve known, the black and white, has smudged into an indigestible gray.

  I thought I knew my parents’ relationship with each other, with me. Now Mack is telling me it’s wrong. I was wrong about them. I was wrong about…

  Am I wrong about everything?

  Mack pops open a small briefcase sitting next to the television. He pulls out a small object, tossing it to me. I catch it against my chest, almost dropping it. It’s a thumb drive.

  “The rest is there. It’s from Sir Spencer’s system.”

  “You got this from his computer?” Bella asks.

  “From the cloud,” Mack says. “Everything these days is in the cloud. People are so stupid about the stuff they put on there, thinking it’s safe. Search hard enough in the cloud, and you’ll find who shot Kennedy, where Jimmy Hoffa is buried, and why that Malaysian pilot downed his own airplane in the Pacific.”

  “You’re not going to tell me?” I ask. Part of me wants to plug in the drive and devour the information. Part of me wants to throw it back at him and deny every last bit of what he’s telling me.

  Ignorance is bliss. Or in my case, it’s the less mind-cranking of the two options.

  “I did. You don’t need me to spell it out. It’s on the drive.”

  “So how does this help us get our lives back?” Bella asks.

  “Really, Bella?” Mack laughs. “I know you’re smarter than that.”

  “He’s telling us that we can’t get our lives back unless we end Sir Spencer’s,” I say.

  ***

  I’m Dorothy in Oz, in search of some elusive wizard at the end of a yellow brick road. Along the way, picking up tagalongs offering help for their own selfish reasons.

  George is the lion; he’s got no courage. Mack is the Tin Man, in search of his heart. Sir Spencer is maybe the wizard. He’s a faceless charlatan who hides behind his deception to maintain the illusion of power and influence.

  I guess Bella is actually Dorothy. She’s the one who deserves to go home, who spun into this world without realizing what was happening to her. Plus, she looks better in a blue-and-white gingham frock and red heels.

  That makes me Toto: allegiant to Dorothy, wary of strangers, barking danger along the way. It’d be nice if she could click her heels and we’d be safely home.

  Instead, we’ve trekked from Mack’s hotel room to George’s four-story town home off of Kirby Drive. These mid-rise stucco buildings, where four sit on the land formerly occupied by one, have become a developer’s panacea inside Houston’s crowded inner loop. They’re not cheap, judging by the high six figure FOR SALE flyer on the front stoop of the home next to George’s. I know television reporters, especially good ones, in a market the size of Houston are well compensated. Even with the diminution of technology and the ever-present journalists who report, carry a camera, and edit their own material, the top dogs make good money. They don’t, however, make costly timepiece, high-end SUV, and super-expensive home types of cash.

  George pushes the buttons on a keypad by his garage door, opening it electronically. It rises, revealing an empty space, save a Thule bike rack, a Cannondale racing bicycle, and a set of Ping golf clubs in a large personalized bag emblazoned KING GEORGE.

  His Highness slips a key into a deadbolt above the handle on the door into the first floor of his home and invites us to follow him. He doesn’t close the garage door behind us, but instead bounds up a set of stairs to the second level.

  It opens into a wide expanse of a stereotypical bachelor’s home. The walls are a shade darker than white, adorned with oversized Leroy Neiman prints.

  I recognize one as Nolan Ryan in an Astros uniform, another as Earl Campbell wearing the burnt orange of the University of Texas Longhorns, and a third as Roger Staubach, star emblazoned on a silver helmet, dropping back to pass. Each is enca
sed in matching thick, high-gloss black frames.

  The wide-plank, light pine floors are bare, except for a black leather sectional in the middle of the room and a pair of media room recliners. They face a large flat screen television that serves as the focal point above an encased gas fireplace with a large, Romanesque limestone surround.

  Three regional Emmy awards sit atop the mantel just beneath the television. There’s also a Columbia DuPont baton and a bust of Edward R. Murrow. This is the focal point of the room. It’s intentional. George clearly wants everyone who sits in the room to see his trophies, to see his worth as a journalist. He might as well have some flashing neon arrows aimed at them.

  Mack drops himself into one of the recliners and Bella finds a corner of the sofa. George has walked to the far end of the great room, past a glass dining table, and into his kitchen.

  “Does anyone need a drink?” he asks from behind the bar separating the kitchen from the rest of the floor. “I’ve got plenty of options.”

  “Johnny Walker Black,” calls Mack, “if you’ve got that option.”

  “Sure thing,” George says and reaches into the frosted glass cabinet next to a large stainless steel range hood. “Mr. and Mrs. Quick, anything for you?”

  “Water,” Bella replies. Her eyes are closed and she’s pinching the bridge of her nose.

  “Same.” I slide onto the sofa next to Bella. “Headache?” I whisper.

  “No, just stress. This is a lot to take in, Jackson.” She glances at Mack, whose eyes are closed but whose ears are likely wide open.

  I inch closer to her, aware of the eavesdropper next to us. “I get it. You don’t trust Mack, and you don’t trust George. Frankly, neither do I. What choice do we have?”

  “None,” she admits. “That’s the stressful part. We’ve engaged ourselves in a fight we cannot win. We’ve, by complete necessity, aligned ourselves with the least of three evils. This won’t end well, Jackson.”

  “Don’t you trust me?” I ask. “Don’t you trust my instincts?”