Blackjack Wayward

Chapter Twenty-Five

The control surfaces wobbled, sending me spiraling up and down as I compensated, like a video game gone amuck, the virtual car slamming from side to side as you tried to get it under control. I was going too fast, in part because the thrust-to-weight ratio overcompensated for my 250 pounds instead of Odyssey’s hundred or so tons, but also because of the twinge in my nerves that sent uneven messages to my toes, as they worked the boot throttles.

Could she be there?

If I saw her, what would I say? I mean, she had a lot to answer for. Claire had been right: Apogee let me burn, sitting idle while they sent me down the river. They blamed me for everything, for raising Hashima Island into near orbit, for killing almost three hundred oil rig workers in the North Atlantic, for all the dead while we were defending Retcon’s base. None of them I had been guilty of. Yet they pinned all those crimes on me and sent me to the mind-prison, wiping their hands clean of the whole incident.

I bet it made for great tabloids and tell-all books. In fact, I was dying to read Atmosphero’s new biography. In it, I’d be painted as the mindless barbarian, the savage he and his companions had overcome to save the world.

I saw them in my mind, taking credit, accepting the accolades. I saw them, sitting at a poker game laughing their asses off, talking their crap about me, while I rotted. I couldn’t help but wonder if some of them ever thought about that day, how crazy it became. I wonder if any of those a*sholes ever spared a thought about what would have happened if I hadn’t been there.

I approached her family’s suburban home, fighting every instinct telling me to turn around, to find a small, nameless village in a country with no extradition treaty, and let the world forget about me. For every bit of common sense that kept telling me to run, there was a singular voice in the back of my head that shouted down all reason, ushering me forward. A chorus, urging me to fight on, to face all the horrors in front of me, and for once, to stand on my own. I came in low, leaving a trail of black smoke in my wake. It was midday, and a few kids were riding their bikes down the street; a woman walked her Yorkie just a hundred feet from where I intended to land.

In their previous incarnation, my boots were simple jump-thrusters, barely strong enough to send me a few dozen feet in the air. The new ones were super-mach monsters, wonderful if you wanted to travel across the planet in record time, but not so useful for slowing down to land. I watched my forward momentum unlike my previous landing attempts but I had nothing to reverse my speed. I cut the thrusters and tucked my feet under me, spinning my body around; then I fired the thrusters in the opposite direction I was traveling until my speed was near to zero. This should have been followed by a short drop of a few feet to a graceful landing, but I executed the maneuver too close to the ground and, instead of coming to a complete stop when I reversed thrust, I melted the pavement and fell into a hot pit of dirt, gravel, and shattered asphalt. I dug myself out in time to catch the dog-walking lady pull the little dog to her grasp by yanking its neck on the collar. As she ran away, I figured I had thirty minutes until the place was crawling with cops and supers.

The Hughes’ was an elegant home in a subdivision where the smallest house must have had five or six bedrooms. Italian columns flanked the grand entrance and a vast Chicago pavers driveway curved from the street to a three-car garage. The walled back yard shared its border with a golf course, giving the house an impression of vastness despite being in a modest lot of no more than half an acre.

The front double doors were weathered oak, reconditioned from an older home, and probably cost a fortune. Above it was a high door window that allowed a view of the interior vaulted roof.

I looked around for fancy security systems, but I saw no cameras visible, nor special sensors. I couldn’t figure Madelyne to leave her home unguarded.

Before I could knock, the door opened and out came Ms. Hughes. She was oblivious to me at first, more concerned with fiddling with her keys.

“Excuse me,” I said, trying to make my presence known without startling her, but she jumped, almost dropping her keys, her frightened eyes scanning me for a threat. I stood well away, raising my hands, trying to look non-threatening.

“Sorry,” I said.

Ms. Hughes didn’t move for a few awkward moments, just looked me up and down, her eyes narrowing as she seemed to recognize me.

She was tall, like her daughter, with a slim physique and the same naturally bronze skin color. Her face was also quite similar, despite a shorter nose, a more pointed chin, and eyes slightly lighter green. The woman could pass as Madelyne’s older sister. She wore a tan three-piece suit with matching shoes, and, oddly enough, she was missing one of her gold hoop earrings.

“Hello there,” she said, managing a pleasant smile.

“You must be Ms. Hughes,” I said, brushing dust from my shoulders off. “My name is Dale McKeown. I’m a friend of your daughter’s.”

“Well, I’m afraid that she’s not here,” she said, still pensive.

“I’m not here to hurt her. Or you, for that matter.”

She cocked her head to one side, “Excuse me?”

“No,” I went on, wanting to slap myself for being so foolish. To talk of being a threat, implied she had to be worried, and her expression darkened momentarily. “Like I said, I’m a friend of hers. Well, at least...we’re, um, we’re acquainted. And I have reason to believe she might be in danger.”

Ms. Hughes smiled.

“You’re a friend of hers?”

I nodded, but couldn’t hold under the glare of her stare. I found myself studying the polished marble floors.

“For my part.”

“Wait a second,” she said, her posture and demeanor changing. She crossed her arms under her breasts and cocked her hip slightly to the left, eyeing me as if I were under an investigation light. It was eerie to see the mother using the same posture as the daughter. “You’re either her friend or you’re not. Which one is it?”

I shook my head, looking back down the street. The bicycle kids were near the crater I had made, and about a block away was the dog lady, busy chatting into her cell phone, no doubt calling the authorities.

“I don’t honestly know,” I managed, regretting the whole thing.

“That’s the oddest thing to say,” she said. “You come all this way to find her and you don’t know if you’re friends? I hope you’re not a villain, coming to get revenge on her. They keep me under a pretty tight watch, you know.”

The dog-walking woman was gesticulating to whomever she was talking to on the phone, indicating my size with wild hand motions and turning this direction every so often as if making sure what the address was.

“I’m sorry,” I said, stepping away. “I didn’t mean to bother you.”

“You’re Blackjack, aren’t you?”

I stopped, not sure why I suddenly felt so vulnerable, as if a thousand supers were around the corner, ready to come down on me like the wrath of God.

“But your real name is Dale, right?”

I nodded.

“I was headed out to–” she started, motioning at her keys.

“I didn’t mean to just barge in,” I said, wanting nothing more than to run away.

“No, no, that’s not what I mean,” she smiled, exasperated. “I can always be a little late. But let’s not chat here. Would you mind coming in?” she said, swinging the door wide. The grand entrance opened to a formal dining room behind two pillars like those outside. To one side was a living room with a leather sectional, a vast library dominating the far wall, and a mahogany working desk, and to the other was a kitchen.

Feeling like I was walking into a trap, I stepped inside and let her herd me into the kitchen, which had a dark pebbled marble similar to what I had in my old Malibu home. The kitchen was decorated with a weathered cherry wood, and I could tell from the faucet alone that this place had cost a fortune. Beside the large double sink was a full-sized wine chiller, a double door steel refrigerator, and a swinging peninsular with two chairs, which she directed me to.

“Can I get you something to drink?”

The wicker chair didn’t seem capable of holding my weight, so I just rested against it, fearing I would shatter the thing.

“I’m fine, thank you.”

“Well, I was going to make myself some tea. Do you like tea?” she said, fidgeting with one of the cabinets before stopping and looking at me closely. “Maddie’s a coffee person. Would you prefer coffee? I have a Cuban coffee maker, if you have the courage to drink the stuff. It keeps me up if I drink it too late, so I usually pass.”

“I don’t want to be a bother,” I said.

“Don’t be silly. I’ll make some Cuban coffee. It’s early enough that I can have a shot.”

I tested my weight on the rickety chair, but from the groan, I felt no confidence it could hold me.

“Is that like espresso?”

She paused for a second, “I’m not sure if one is stronger than the other. I know that Madelyne’s father would take a full pot with him in the morning before going to work. He’d say it kept him going until lunch.”

“Her father was Cuban?”

She nodded.

“Hughes doesn’t seem Hispanic.”

Ms. Hughes laughed. “Oh, no. He wasn’t...I meant to say her stepfather was...I mean,” she paused, giggling at her confusion. “Madelyne’s actual father, my first husband, was Cuban. He passed when she was nine.”

She came out of the pantry with a small, metal coffee maker and unscrewed the top, filling it from the refrigerator’s in-door water filter as she continued.

“Mr. Hughes was my second husband, Scotch-Irish, with a little bit of German thrown in. A truly lovely man. I have always had a talent for it.”

I shrugged, not following.

“I could tell the bad ones from the good ones. He was a good father to Maddie, Mr. Hughes was.”

“I see,” I said.

“He passed last year,” she said. “Well, about a year and a half now. Since just before that business you two were embroiled in.”

I felt another weight settle onto an already crushing mountain of guilt. As if killing her friend wasn’t enough, she had also been grieving the death of her stepfather. Would my mistakes ever stop compounding?

“Ms. Hughes, I want you to know that I was a gentleman to your daughter–”

“I’m sure,” she said, placing a small tin atop the water reservoir and filling it with a black ground coffee that was more like powder, and far darker than any I had ever seen. When the tin was full of the coffee, she patted it down, screwed the top onto the reservoir, and placed it directly on a burner.

“I was.”

“Well, I tried talking to her about it. She, of course, would tell her mother nothing. You have any children?”

I shook my head.

“Wait until you do,” she said, chuckling as if she was relishing my future pain. “They don’t talk to you at all. I mean, when Maddie would come home from school, I’d say, ‘how was your day, darling?’ and all she would say is ‘fine’. ‘Fine!’ as if that was enough to satisfy a mother’s need to know. The worst word in the dictionary, ‘fine.’ If I had it my way, I’d remove it altogether.”

I smiled, not even realizing I was leaning back in the rickety chair, but little by little feeling more comfortable.

“She was worried about you,” I said. “During our....”

“I heard somewhere you kidnapped her–”

“Oh, no.”

“But they said you were stuck together.”

I shifted, “Well, it wasn’t like that–”

“She was here for some time, you know, after they patched her back together in Africa in Superdynamic’s base. You know Superdynamic?”

I nodded.

“I was out there four months while she recovered,” she said, leaning against the counter and wiping a strand of hair from her face. Suddenly her face broke and she turned away. “I’m sorry.”

“I tried to stop him from hurting her,” I said, suddenly emotional, so close to the one person most affected by what happened to Madelyne. “I tried...and I failed.”

Ms. Hughes looked at me, wiping at the edges of her eyes with a kitchen towel.

“She’s all I have,” she managed.

I didn’t know what else to say, what to do. I was tempted to point out the scar down my face, the mark that had mostly healed. To show her the others that never had, but I doubted she would understand. How could she care? Her little girl almost died and it was all because of me.

The coffee pot began to sing and she pulled it off the burner, turning it off. Grabbing a set of floral decor teacups, she placed each on a matching saucer and poured the scalding black liquid into each.

“You’ll have to forgive me; I don’t have actual espresso cups.”

“That’s fine,” I said as she handed me my cup. I took a sip, letting the burning hot coffee sit on my tongue and cheeks for a moment before swishing it down. “Wow, that is strong.”

She smiled, satisfied, and sipped her own.

“Maddie sat there,” she pointed out the window at a table set beside the pool that overlooked the golf course. “For two months after she came back. She just sat there and didn’t do anything. I had to force the girl to eat a sandwich or some soup, or anything. But she didn’t say a word to me about it.”

“It was a hard time,” I said.

“I mean, I know what happened. A mother knows how to get things from her child, you know?”

I smiled, imagining the endless probing questions.

“They talked about you quite a bit,” she went on. “In the news, that is. I read an article about how you got into the whole business. Your hair was a lot shorter back then.”

“Yeah, they put me in a mind-prison and forgot about me,” I said running my fingers through the stringy hair.

“You look better with shorter hair. Anyway, I read something about how you started with bank robberies. Is that right?”

I nodded, not wanting to remember, and thankfully the phone rang.

“Oh,” she said, stepping out of the kitchen. “Give me just a moment.”

Ms. Hughes walked to the other side of the house, leaving me alone. I half expected a wall to break down and a whole team of supers to charge in, but nothing happened, and Ms. Hughes was loud enough on the phone – even though she was down the hall – that I could tell she was talking to an acquaintance, apologizing for being late.

I turned my attention to a small dining table that sat along a windowsill couch that overlooked the pool. Along the wall from the kitchen there were a dozen wooden picture frames, all of Madelyne at various ages. One picture that caught my attention was of her and her real father, taken when she was no more than five. They were in front of a much smaller house, Madelyne sitting on his shoulders, playfully pretending she was eating his head. Her father was heavily tanned, as if he had worked outside his whole life, with slick black hair (lightly tossed by her assault). He wore black slacks and a patterned work shirt with a black tie, in fashion more like what you’d find in the early 1980s.

Next to that one was a picture I had seen before, in Madelyne’s apartment. It was a candid shot of her and Barry Ashbourne, a.k.a. Pulsewave, beside a dance floor, though they weren’t taking part. She was exploding in laughter, and anyone could tell by how he leaned into her that more than friendship brewed there.

“Sorry about that,” Ms. Hughes said, coming back with the wireless phone, a loud beep sounding as she shut off the communication.

“No, I’m the sorry one,” I said. “I’m sorry I bothered you.”

I started away when she looked past me at the pictures on the wall, noticing the photo of Pulsewave. For a moment, she was lost in thought.

“Barry was the first boyfriend she ever brought home.”

Stepping back, I gave her room, and she moved to the picture, pulling it from the wall, studying it closely.

“He was a nice boy but I knew he wasn’t for her. A mother knows. Very polite, very handsome, but...I don’t know...he wasn’t for her.”

I looked out the window at a pair of golfers, wondering when they were coming, when I’d get put down and sent back to Utopia. When my little world tour would come to an end.

“Why did you do it?” she said.

I tried to answer a few times, unable to keep my eyes on her, or to look away. I felt a knot in my stomach, maybe from the coffee, or could she have put something in it to knock me out?

“I’m not a very good person,” I managed.

She pursed her lips, unhappy with the answer.

“Maddie would cry whenever it came on the TV,” she said. “After a while they didn’t talk about it, you know. They went on to the next disaster, like they always do. But for a few months, you were all they talked about on the news. She would change the channel and go outside, or go upstairs, and cry it all away. But it didn’t go away, did it?”

I shook my head, “Not for me.”

“And you say you’re here to help her?”

“Well,” I said, trying to rephrase it. I didn’t want to give Ms. Hughes the impression that her daughter was in danger. “I just worry about her.”

She smiled, “That doesn’t sound too bad.”

But her approval wasn’t enough for me, just like Apogee’s validation hadn’t been enough. I knew there was something dark inside me, something hollow and horrible, something that was dying to come out, to take over, to unleash itself on the world. I had let it loose on Shard World, against alien beasts that were unrecognizable to me, inhuman and easy to destroy. I had dropped all semblance of control during my return in the mind-prison, also killing and maiming at will, even stooping so low as rape when Aryani’s affections were denied to me. Once again in the Outback, I had chosen the company of a murderous villain simply because she accepted me as I was, refusing to challenge me to become better as Apogee did. Later, I had unleashed my anger, murdered dozens, maybe hundreds. Regardless of whether they were alien foes, implanted perceptions, or murderous villains, I had lost myself in the mayhem, destroyed everything I touched, and left a wake of death in my path.

Even now, I was worried about what would happen if heroes showed up at Ms. Hughes’ house. I’d seen how callous and reckless they were at times. Had I come here, only to put Madelyne’s mother in danger?

I looked back at the golfers, afraid Ms. Hughes would see my lip quivering, my chin pinch, and I thought back to the mind-prison, to the horror in the desert, to how low I had gone when nothing had mattered. And now to face the person most impacted by Madelyne’s horrible ordeal, to stand in her kitchen, to see the pictures on her wall and to know the anguish of almost having lost her daughter was too much for me. Was there no end to the depths of the pit beneath me? Would there be no end to the shame I felt, no salvation for me in the end?

Maybe I was just cursed, destined for a hard fall, and I was only going to take everyone with me.

“Are you okay?” she asked placing her hand on my arm.

I shook my head, feeling the tears welling at my eyelids.

“Your daughter saved me,” I said. “And I threw it all away.”

Ms. Hughes humphed.

“That’s not too smart.”

I shook my head.

“You called for help, didn’t you? That phone call....”

She seemed surprised at first, then bewildered, and finally upset, a triumvirate of emotions that I had seen in that exact order in her daughter.

“I’m not in the habit of being called a liar,” she said. “Especially not in my own house.”

“Huh?” I said, wiping my eyes.

“I didn’t call for help.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just don’t know what to expect.”

I looked back and found her smiling, “I see what she sees in you.”

“I don’t know...I just don’t.”

“I’m going to tell you something now, and I hope you can be discreet,” she said. “And with that, I mean, you’ll make sure that Madelyne never finds out I told you. Is that something I can trust you with?”

I almost laughed, and I felt like telling her that my ride was almost over, that every hero in the world was about to descend on our location and that shortly, I’d be plugged back into the mind-prison of Utopia.

“I promise,” I said.

She nodded and sipped her coffee, looking out the window.

“Madelyne’s father, her biological father, he was a rascal like you. He had an idealized view of romance, like you, and he swept me off my feet like a tornado I couldn’t avoid. He was trouble, I could tell from the way he looked at me. He didn’t just want me as his woman, he wanted my soul to be intertwined with his. I knew it when I married him.”

Ms. Hughes smiled, “He made a living as a charter fisherman, and he would take his clients out fishing for days. But as time passed, and our love matured – things change with time, you see – I got the feeling that he wasn’t being honest with me. A woman has a way of knowing.”

I finished my coffee and she went back to the counter, picking up the pot and refilling my cup.

“So I figured he was meeting with lady friends on those three and four day trips out to sea. I started following him, and no, he wasn’t being honest. But it wasn’t what I had thought.”

“What was it?”

“He was working for some unsavory characters, using his boat to run between the Keys and Cuba. Bobby – that was his name, Robert Robau – was shuttling people and guns back and forth. I don’t have to remind you of how illegal that was, even back then in the early eighties. He was risking our whole family, and for what? I couldn’t understand. So I asked him, I said, “Why are you doing this? Think of your little girl.”

“’I am thinking of her,’ he told me. “It’s because of her I’m doing this.’”

I shrugged, not following.

“My husband was risking his life and his freedom, because he was afraid that the horrors of his home country would follow him here. He was an idealist, a dreamer. To him, his life wasn’t as important as those around him. And I know, his fears turned out not to be well founded. Castro’s ideology had no danger of spreading to this country, but he saw it spread to Nicaragua and other countries in South America and he grew concerned. So he did something about it.”

She placed her cup down on the saucer and shook her head, smiling wistfully.

“Well, Madelyne is very much her father’s girl. Driven, that one. Devoted and loyal.”

“She’s the only friend I have left,” I said.

“If you consider her a friend,” she went on, as if reading my mind, “then you’ll do a small favor for me.”

I nodded.

“Forgive her.”

But before I could say anything, a figure came hovering down from the skies, just a dozen feet from the windows.

It was Superdynamic and he pointed at me, beckoning me to come outside.