Blood of Cain

18

Two hours after Dave had walked back to Gibraltar, I still sat in Jupiter’s fly bridge as the midnight hour approached. A warm breeze blew across the marina from the east, carrying the scent of the sea and night-blooming jasmine. Max slept curled up in a ball on the bench seat, an occasional dream-induced whimper escaping from her throat. I could hear a woman’s laugher coming from the Tiki Bar at the far end of the dock, the sound of Harleys cranking and pulling out of the parking lot. I was exhausted, tired but yet too wired to go down to the master berth for the delusion of real sleep. I had been sitting in the same spot for two hours thinking about the message the man with the falsetto voice had left with me. “She said one other thing … if you do have this mark on your left shoulder, you are related to her. She didn’t say how. Could you be her father?”

Courtney Burke said she was nineteen maybe close to twenty. Doing the math and trying to fit it in with the time-line of my life, I thought about the women I’d known — the women I’d taken to bed. I pictured Courtney’s face, the slight cleft in her chin, the texture of her hair, the slant of her cheekbones, and even the way she carried herself — straight, shoulders back, her strong sense of presence. Who might have resembled Courtney twenty years ago? I tried to superimpose images of former girlfriends over Courtney’s face. I struggled to match a gene pool that tonight had an opaque surface hiding the passage of time and people in my life. Most of the images were faded, blurred in a scrapbook that I rarely opened for all the reasons that they were part of the past.

I closed my eyes and attempted to run a movie trailer of my life from two decades ago through the film gate of my mind. Some of the women I’d known were there in full color, captured in slow-motion angles — the way they’d turned their heads, the way they’d smiled, their physical features still vivid. Other faces were harder to see through the lens of the past, the landscape of their appearances now more distant on the horizon, and the closer I tried to focus, the more stonewashed the faces became. It was like trying to replay a dream I’d made a mental note to remember, but couldn’t.

One picture stopped. It became a freeze-frame when I remembered her eyes.

Like the image of an old National Geographic cover.

Like Courtney’s eyes.

Her name was Andrea Hart. A woman destined for better things than what I could bring to the table after college graduation. She wanted no part of a possible “military life,” hop-scotch jumping from base-to-base if I wanted to climb the ladder while, at the same time, searching for purpose in what I would do. In retrospect, after we went our separate ways, I probably have Andrea to thank for my determination to get through Delta Force training and the Special Activities Division. The experience forever changed me — the good, bad, and ugly, scars and all.

Where was Andrea Hart tonight, twenty something years later? Could she be Courtney Burke’s mother? Could I be her father? No way. I touched the cleft in my chin and pictured her face. I stood from the captain’s chair, my back muscles in knots, a slight headache forming over my left eye, my scalp tight. “Come on, Max. Let’s go down. I need to use the computer to track a ghost from my past. If not, the image of Courtney and what she might represent, will haunt me for the rest of my life.”

She knew he was looking at her. Even from behind her, Courtney could feel his eyes on her like a breath. She was stirring cream and sugar into her black coffee when the man approached. She sat at the café counter inside the truck stop and sipped from a cup of coffee in front of her. She’d felt the man staring at her twice, both times when he’d walked past her, once heading from the restrooms, the second time when he pretended to be looking at magazines in the rack.

The man moved and sat on one of the stools beside her where he waited for the waitress to return from the kitchen. He glanced at Courtney, his face ruddy and chapped, lips cracked, eyes dancing like flames across her face. He said, “This place has the best coffee of all the truck stops in Florida.”

Courtney nodded. “It’s pretty good.”

“Ought to be real good. I hear the nightshift manager, gal’s name is Flo, puts on a fresh pot ever’ half hour.”

“Really?”

“Hell yeah. But this time of night they’ll go through a few pots ever’ hour anyhow.”

Courtney sipped her coffee.

“What brings a girl like you in here? Can’t imagine you drivin’ a rig.”

“I’m not. I hitched this far. The trucker was going toward Miami. I didn’t want to go down there.”

The man ran his tongue over his front teeth and swallowed. “Where do you want to go?”

“Which way are you headed?”

“It for damn sure ain’t Miami. You almost need a passport to drive through the city. Try askin’ for directions if you don’t speak Spanish.” He grinned, a small crack in his bottom lip strawberry red.

Courtney finished her coffee and turned toward the man. “Where’d you say you were going?”

“Anywhere you want to go, sugar.” He grinned, his breath smelling of beer and beef jerky. “C’mon girl, jet’s jump in the truck. My rig’s fueled up and good to go all night long, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” Courtney followed the man out the door, keeping her back to the three security cameras she’d spotted earlier. She unzipped her purse as she walked, her fingers touching the Beretta, her thoughts touching the face of her grandmother so far away.

They were in the cab of the big-rig less than a minute when he made his move. The trucker reach behind his seat and pulled out two cans of Budweiser from a small cooler. “How ‘bout a cold one?”

“No thanks. Never got used to how beer tastes.”

“I wonder how you’d taste.” He popped the top on the can and took a long pull, his Adam’s apple moving like a piston.

Courtney rested her hand on the Beretta in her open purse between her right leg and the cab door.

The man used the back of his left hand to wipe his mouth, his lips wet with beer foam and saliva. He grinned. “Best way to learn to like the taste of beer is to slip me some tongue. That way you can get the flavor little doses at a time. You got some damn pretty eyes, girl.”

“Please, just drive.”

He laughed and snorted, his eyes lowering from her face to her lap. “If you won’t slip me some tongue, I’ll slip you some. Take your pants off.”

“I’m on my period.”

“Take your panties off.”

“What if I took your head off?” She raised the Beretta and aimed right between his eyes.

“Oh shit! Put the gun down!”

“Drive!

“Huh?”

“Drive the truck! Head to Tampa.”

He held both hands up, a nerve below his right eye twitching like a beetle was crawling under his skin. “I ain’t goin’ that way.”

“You are now.”

“Listen, I’m supposed to have this load to New Orleans in a day. This truck’s got GPS on it, which means dispatch knows where it’s at twenty-four-seven.”

“You should’ve thought about that before you tried to force yourself on me.” She used her thumb to flip the safety off. “Drive.”

He cranked the diesel, his ruddy face now shiny with perspiration. He checked both side mirrors, put the truck in gear, and eased out of the parking lot. “You gonna keep that gun on me the whole way?”

“Yes.”

“You shoot me out there on the highway doin’ seventy, this rig will jack-knife, roll over and you’ll die, too.”

“But you’ll die first. Don’t talk to me again until we’re there.”

Although I hadn’t seen Andrea Hart in two decades, it didn’t take long to track her down. If I cared more about politics, I wouldn’t have had to use a combination of data-finding search engines, social media sites, and sites that accessed public records. I learned as much as I could about the woman I’d known as Andrea Hart.

She was now Andrea Logan, wife of U.S. senator, Lloyd Logan, a three-term member of the senate and chairman of the Appropriations Committee. More than that, he was a front-runner in the pack of candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination. I would have known about her status earlier had I watched cable news the last few months.

They lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan where she worked as director of development for a large conservative think tank guised as a foundation. I couldn’t find anything indicating Andrea had a daughter or any other children. No birth records. No school records. Any adoption records were probably sealed.

I stared at a picture of Andrea. Her eyes were still just as beautiful as the morning I’d first met her in a coffee shop twenty years earlier. I remembered walking in the crowded shop, and after waiting in line to order coffee at the counter, it appeared as if every table in the place was taken. From across the shop I first saw Andrea’s eyes, and then her smile. I stepped to her and she offered me the vacant chair across from her. We spent the entire morning talking. A week later to the day, a Sunday morning, she awoke next to me in bed, and in the soft morning light coming through the window, she traced her finger over my birthmark and said, “That is really beautiful. It’s like art.”

So damned long ago.

As the image of Andrea stared at me from my computer screen, I enlarged the picture then envisioned Courtney Burke’s eyes. Although Andrea’s eyes had a captivating command to them, they didn’t have the mesmerizing power and depth I’d seen in Courtney’s eyes. What would a geneticist say about the probability of Courtney’s iris color having come from the cobalt blue in my eyes and the hazel green in Andrea’s eyes?

Tomorrow I would do my best to find out.