Quest for redemption, p.2
Quest for Redemption, page 2
The flight would be brutal, with three legs, a total of ten hours in the air, plus a couple of layovers. They wouldn’t reach their destination till almost dawn, local time. Flying was certainly far from his favorite thing, but he was okay once he got to where he was going. He much preferred driving, but that certainly wasn’t going to happen, not on this trip. At least the jet lag wouldn’t be as bad as it was going to Europe. There was no time difference. He’d never done a north-to-south jaunt like this one, but the time thing would certainly help.
The pump dinged and Jim replaced the hose, capped the tank and closed the lid without thinking about it, even as he kept an eye on things, making sure there wasn’t a spill, that the cap was tight, the lid properly shut. He locked the car, glanced around the parking lot quickly and headed inside. Locking it and checking the surroundings were two things that he did automatically. Security, always security. You never knew who might be watching, figuring that any guy who drove a Lexus SUV would have a few bucks, and whatever was in the rig would be worth stealing.
The store was like dozens of others he’d been in, bustling with people, food everywhere, tempting him with doughnuts and brownies and double cheeseburgers. He walked past all of it to the milk case, picked out a gallon of skim and got in line behind four other people, right next to the carefully positioned hot food stand. “What the hell,” he muttered as he snagged an egg roll. He went back to the dairy case, got a pint of chocolate milk, and returned to the checkout.
The sun was low in the sky as he turned west for home, munching the egg roll, the Classic Rewind channel pumping The Knack’s “My Sharona” through the Lexus’ speakers. Damn, but this rig had a great stereo system. He reached for the volume knob to turn it up, then decided against it. His hearing wasn’t what it used to be, and he didn’t want to make the long decline even steeper. That song was big at the end of his senior year of high school at St. Francis, the small Milwaukee suburb where he’d grown up. Ah, those were the days…except, of course, for the state championship game. Two free throws to win the title for the Mariners, at least one to force overtime…and he missed them both.
Shit.
His tailbone hurt where he’d come down hard on the mat. Shifting in his seat, trying to ease the pain, Jim wondered idly why he had to think of that game again. It was a helluva long time ago, after all. Twenty-six years. He’d avoided class reunions after his first wife’s death in ’05. There were still one or two guys from the team who had never gotten over that last game, and the subject always seemed to come up. Without his wife there to hold him back, Jim didn’t trust himself to stay calm when the inevitable drunken reverie turned borderline insulting. He couldn’t blame them, in a way; after all, he’d been on the team as a freshman in ’76, when the Mariners won it all, but the rest of the guys from the ’79 team didn’t have that to fall back on. For them, their only chance for the gold trophy ended when Jim air-balled the free throw that would’ve taken them to OT.
He could understand the lingering resentment, but sooner or later you had to move on from those things. He’d done his best to do that. Yeah, the misses had not only cost St. Francis the title, but probably kept him from getting a ride to a Division 1 college. So, he’d gone to UW-Platteville, where his career ended with a knee injury during his freshman season. Six months later he met Suzy, and his life changed so much for the better that it wasn’t even funny. Marriage, a daughter…none of that would’ve happened if he’d made those stupid free throws.
He sighed. It had all turned out for the best, but even so, he’d been thinking of that championship game more than a little in recent months. It didn’t do any good to rehash it, of course. He couldn’t go back in time. A few months ago, he’d told Gina about it and she kind of dismissed it, saying, “What, are you late getting to your midlife crisis?” Jim never figured out if she was kidding or serious. She muttered something in Italian after that but wouldn’t tell him the English version. He suspected it wouldn’t be very complimentary.
But maybe she’d been on to something. It was going on three years now since he and Mark had gone into Serbia to rescue Sophie from that war criminal. The mission was a success, and as for the guy who’d caused all the trouble, Mark left him on that island in the Danube with a hole in his head. Jim always wondered if he would’ve had the guts to do that. The mission, though…that was one of the best times of his life. What a team they’d made, Mark and the German captain, Krieger, even old Paul, the retired Brit SAS officer, men of accomplishment and courage, true warriors, and they’d welcomed Jim into their presence, treated him as an equal. It was a rush like nothing he’d ever felt, better than hoisting the gold trophy with his teammates in ’76, better than getting his black belt, better than winning that tournament grand championship in Rice Lake on the day he and Gina first got together.
But that time, short and intense, was receding into the past every day. As satisfying as his job was, as his marriage was—or at least as it used to be—nothing approached what he’d felt on the mission to rescue his sister-in-law. Was it the excitement? The danger? The chance to prove himself alongside two highly decorated combat veterans? His knee had kept him out of military service, one of his life’s great disappointments, but he’d proven himself in Somalia and then alongside Mark and Krieger in Serbia, hadn’t he? Yes, he had, and he reveled in that feeling of comradeship, a feeling that working for OSS helped keep alive, even if it was far less dangerous than those tense days and nights in the Balkans.
He thought of the company now, as he drove west on State 173. The OSS building was two miles behind him, on the outskirts of Zion here in northeast Illinois. Home was about twenty-five miles to the west and north, across the Wisconsin line to Camp Lake, outside Wilmot. He didn’t mind the commute, not really. Traffic was usually mild, and it gave him time to decompress from his day. Working for OSS was certainly the best job he’d ever had, but it got to be intense sometimes. There was a lot of testosterone in the building, a lot of alpha dogs who had to be kept on short leashes. Even the women were hard chargers. Mark was very good at managing it all, which was to be expected, since he had twenty-plus years as an officer in the Army to fall back on. Jim had always worked in offices where women tended to run the show, and it was far different now. He had to admit, he liked it this way. The women at OSS didn’t seem to mind, either. None of them were shrinking violets, and the workplace was disciplined and organized. A lot of that had to do with Mark’s leadership, and the caliber of people he recruited.
Jim hadn’t been too sure about working for his younger brother, but Mark proved to be a fair and supremely efficient boss. His responsibilities at the office and at home kept him occupied. His wife, Sophie, had given birth to a girl, who was coming up on her second birthday in a few months. Elise was a little doll, but Jim well remembered how much time an infant—a toddler, now—demanded from her parents, and he certainly didn’t hold that against Mark. But he also remembered how good it had felt to have a brother again, after so many years of that bond being strained by distance and jealousy. Most of that was Jim’s fault, he’d acknowledged that long ago, and one of his great joys was becoming close again with his brother. Jim’s mission to Somalia in ’11 started the healing, and they’d grown even closer after the Serbia operation a year later. Recently, though, they seemed to be drifting apart again, and that bothered Jim. Just one more thing to add to his ever-growing list of things to think about…
An Alfa Romeo sports car zoomed past on his left, swerved effortlessly back into his lane and accelerated away. It was a beauty, silver, maybe a 4C, looked new. Italian, like Gina. He remembered the first, and so far only, time he’d been to his wife’s native country, on their honeymoon tour three years ago. Man, that had been great…right up until the incident in Capua.
He’d met Gina a year earlier at a martial arts tournament, when she was living way up in Washburn, about as far north in Wisconsin as you could get. They started seeing each other just a few weeks before he went to Somalia, the trip that almost cost him his life. He shook his head. Had that really happened? Yes, it had. The book he wrote about his fight to escape the terrorist camp had been a modest success, and for a time there was talk that Netflix would make it into a movie. Then the political climate changed after the election, and American heroism wasn’t quite as fashionable as it had been a few years earlier among the Hollywood set. So, the TV part of his dreams would almost surely never happen.
But the Gina part sure had. He vividly remembered their first night together at that hotel in Rice Lake, almost as far north as Washburn. Jim had driven up there from Cedar Lake, not too far from where he lived now, to compete in a martial arts tournament. She was there, a familiar face from a competition earlier in the year. The evening after the tournament they went back to the hotel. Jim had already checked out of his room, but then they planned to have dinner together and she offered him the use of her room to change, suggesting a dip in the hot tub to unwind from the intense action of the grand championship, which Jim had won over a much younger competitor. His first sight of her in that dark green bikini, walking over to join him…he couldn’t believe how good she looked, a woman in her early forties who’d had twins twenty years earlier. Her mother had named her after another Italian, the actress Gina Lollobrigida, and Signora Russo was right on the money with that one. Jim’s Gina was as strikingly beautiful as her namesake, and three inches taller to boot.
Gina had a shorter commute, only thirteen miles north from the lake to Burlington. The job had started right about the time she made the move south from Washburn three years earlier, just before their wedding. It provided them with much-needed financial security as the Illinois OSS branch got organized and Jim was without income for a couple months. Jim had never begrudged Gina her success, which was long overdue after years of struggling as a widowed mom, but she’d been working a lot of hours in the last few months. There was a dojo in Burlington, and he’d urged her to check it out. She also practiced kyudo, the Japanese art of archery, or at least used to. Her bow was gathering dust at home. Yeah, the job was taking up a lot of her time.
At least, he assumed it was the job taking her time…
Another memory, not nearly as pleasant as their Italy trip, drifted in. That, too, had been happening more often lately. As he crossed the border into Wisconsin, he couldn’t keep himself from bringing it back, in living color. He knew that he shouldn’t, that he should push it aside and focus on the present, but here it was again. He sighed, and gave in.
CHAPTER TWO
Burlington, Wisconsin — Three months earlier
“They really should have had this in the summer,” Jim said, surveying the crowd inside the banquet hall. “How many people will be here, anyway?”
“The nursing department has over a hundred people all by itself,” Gina said, handing her coat to the teenage girl at the coat rack. “Plus, a lot of the doctors who worked with Alice will be here, too.” Putting her coat ticket in her clutch, Gina picked a loose thread from her skirt and flicked it away. It was the red skirt with the zipper up one side, the one Jim had always liked, and she’d chosen a black off-the-shoulder top. It could be a devastating combination, one she hadn’t worn in a while. But it had been a while since they’d been to a party, hadn’t it? She was saying something, and Jim had to tear himself away from looking at her. “…and she’s moving to Arizona next week.”
“She’s not staying down there for the summer, is she?”
“No, but this summer she and her husband are going on a round-the-world cruise. Three months. So, the retirement party has to be now.”
Jim grunted at that. He’d grown up in Wisconsin but had never been a big fan of its winters, except for basketball. Once he stopped playing the game, though, there was nothing left to carry him through the brutal three or four, or sometimes five, months of the season. He just had to hunker down, keep the snow shovel handy and ride it out. Keep his mouth, shut, too, he’d learned, because Gina, amazingly enough for a woman who’d grown up in the relatively temperate clime of Italy’s Adriatic coast, absolutely loved the winter. Not enough to do her share of the shoveling, Jim sometimes thought, but what the hell. It was a man’s job anyway. His dad had always done the shoveling when Jim was a kid.
She responded to his grunt like she always did, with a gentle slap on the arm. “Farsene una ragione,” she said. Get over it. Jim had picked up a fair amount of Italian since they’d started out, especially her pet phrases and the rather colorful profanities she sometimes employed when things didn’t go exactly right with an appliance, or her car, or just about anything. At least tonight, in public, she would stay away from phrases like “avere uno faccia da culo” or the slightly more acerbic “che cazzo fai.” She’d told him once that she’d picked up a lot of it from her grandfather, a longshoreman on the docks of Ravenna, much to her mother’s dismay.
The evening had actually started out pretty well. Jim already knew a number of Gina’s colleagues and had seen many of them at the hospital Christmas party a couple months earlier. The hors d’oeuvres were plentiful and delicious, the bar was open, and he was actually enjoying himself, somewhat to his surprise. A deejay was spinning records and several couples were dancing. Jim was nursing his only drink of the evening—every man had to know his limitations, as the great philosopher Dirty Harry Callahan had once said—and talking to one of the nurses’ husbands about the young Greek kid on the Bucks who seemed to be getting better by the game, when the deejay started Santana’s “Black Magic Woman.”
“Excuse me,” Jim said, “I always dance with my wife on this one.” He made his way to the table where Gina was sitting with another woman. Tapping his wife on the shoulder, he said, “Hey, Bellissima, let’s dance!”
She hesitated, glanced at the action on the floor, then shook her head. “I’m sorry, I’m just not into the music tonight.”
He was stunned. This was the first time Gina had ever turned him down for a dance. In fact, she was often the one who suggested it, on those relatively few occasions when they went to a place with music. For a moment, he didn’t know what to say, so he sat down.
She put a hand on his leg. “Sorry, Jim,” she said. Her colleague, noticing the tension, excused herself and headed to the bar.
“Are you feeling all right?” he finally asked.
A shrug. “Yeah. I guess. Just kind of…well, not in the mood. Maybe later?”
“Okay.” He fidgeted in his chair, fiddled with his drink glass, felt Gina’s hand on his. She gave him a smile, then looked past him toward the food table. Jim thought he saw a flicker of recognition in her eyes, and her smile widened just a bit. He turned to follow her gaze but didn’t recognize any of the several people standing there.
The song ended. “I have to visit the men’s room,” he said, rising. “Don’t go anywhere.”
“I’ll be here.” The deejay rolled into Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon.”
There was a line at the urinals, so Jim waited his turn, did his business, and was discarding his paper towel when he heard the unmistakable opening of ABBA’s “Take a Chance On Me.” That was one of Gina’s favorites. If he hustled, he could get her on the floor for most of the song.
Jim weaved his way through the partygoers at the entrance to the hall, saw their table…empty. Was he mistaken? No, that was his drink glass, and Gina’s clutch was sitting in the center of the table. He’d always advised her against leaving something like a clutch or purse sitting around. She obviously felt this was a safe crowd. But where was she?
There was a flash of red on the dance floor. It was Gina, and the zipper on the right side of her skirt was now a few inches higher than it had been when they arrived. About halfway up, showing her legs in all their considerable glory, and they were moving as she danced with a man he didn’t recognize. Younger than her by about ten or fifteen years, pretty fit, wearing tight jeans and a dark brown sport coat over a white shirt that was opened at least one button too far. A gold chain around his neck completed the ensemble. He had a full head of blonde hair and a fashionable dusting of stubble that framed a smile as he moved with her. Something clicked. “He was at the food table when she looked over there,” Jim said to himself.
“What’s that?”
Jim looked at the man next to him. It was the fellow he’d been talking basketball with a few minutes ago, before Gina’s turn-down. “Oh, sorry. Just watching my wife out there, dancing.”
“Yeah, she’s looking pretty hot, if you don’t mind my saying,” the man said. Jim remembered his name, Carl something-or-other. It appeared that Carl was a couple or three drinks into the evening.
“Who’s the guy with her?” Jim asked.
“Oh, that’s Doctor Boz. That’s what the nurses call him, anyway, Doctor Boz. Last name’s really Boswell, he’s an OB/GYN at the hospital.”
“Really?” Jim felt his hackles rising, but tamped them down. Control your breathing, he told himself.
“Yeah. He’s the only male doc in that department, but Cindy—that’s my wife—tells me that most of the nurses have him as their doctor. Hell, she does. He’s probably seen half the women in the hospital naked.”
Jim thought that was an exaggeration—probably—but interesting, nonetheless. Who was Gina using these days? She’d been at the Burlington hospital for more than two years now, ever since she’d moved down here from Washburn. He had no idea who she was seeing as her own doctor. For some reason, that seemed to bother him. Shouldn’t a husband know who his wife’s doctor is?
The song ended, Dr. Boz gave Gina one last twirl, then gathered her into his arms as she laughed. “Hell of a thing,” Carl said next to him. “How often do you see a guy who you know has seen your wife naked? And not just seen her, but touched her…” He tossed down the last of his drink. “Better find Cindy,” he said, and moved away.
