MIDNIGHT QUEST: A Short 'Men of Midnight' Novel (5 page)

“Wait.” Jacko pinched the bridge of his nose. “She was married? Jackman was her
married name
?” He’d had no idea she’d been married. She never talked about it at all. Of course she rarely talked to him about anything, particularly those last years when her brain had gone up in smoke. “This Jackman—was he…was he my father?”

Was it going to be this easy?

Felicity looked at him. “You didn’t know she was married?”

“Hell no. My mom could barely lurch from day to day there at the end and I was in and out of foster homes. She never spoke about her past. Like I said, I have no idea who her parents were. They can’t have been good parents if she was such a mess.”

“When were you born, Jacko, and where?” Felicity was frowning at the screen, waiting.

“I was born March 6, 1980, in Cross, Texas.” The most miserable hole in the state. If Texas ever needed an enema, Cross is where they’d give it.

She was silent for a couple of minutes as she worked furiously, then sat back. One last command and she pulled up data on her screen.

“Sara Garrett married Robert Jackman in 1977, and he died in 1978, so no, he couldn’t have been your father. She never divorced and kept the name.” Felicity looked at him soberly. “Jacko…your grandfather died very recently. Six months ago, actually.”

Whoa.
He’d had a grandfather alive all this time? “Jesus.”

“His wife, your grandmother, died fifteen years earlier. From what I can see, your grandfather was a respected member of the community. Certainly no legal issues. Grandmother, too. Your mom, on the other hand…” she hesitated.

“Was in and out of jail,” Jacko said bleakly. “For possession and solicitation. In and out of rehab. I know. I was taken away from her a bunch of times and put in foster homes. She’d do a little time, get out on good behavior, get me back, start collecting child support checks and go right back to chasing the next high. I learned long ago there was no saving her. I guess I always thought she came from bad genes herself.”

“Not necessarily.” Felicity frowned at the screen. “It’s hard to tell. Official data won’t give info on private behavior. Your grandfather might have been abusive, who knows? Yet he seemed to be well respected. He was given a few civic awards. Hmm. He must have had some money, too. There were a series of park benches donated in his wife’s name the year after she died. He had a huge ranch, though land lots have been sold off the last fifteen years.” She met Jacko’s eyes. “He died leaving everything to his daughter, ‘whereabouts unknown.’ Jacko, you’re her only heir, that ranch is yours.”

She turned the screen around so he could see the address and phone numbers of a law firm. She pressed a key and a secure printer started whirring. “That’s the law office that handled Lee Garrett’s affairs, I’m printing the info now.”

Jacko pulled the sheets and clutched them in his hand. He had an excellent memory and normally he wouldn’t need to keep the written info, but he was still reeling from the fact that he’d had a grandfather all along and hadn’t known it.

He scanned the printouts but they were a blur. He couldn’t seem to take in any of the info. He leaned in. “Do—do you have images for him?”

“Yeah.” She did that finger-blurring thing again, then sat back. The monitor showed a carousel of photographs and Jacko stared. They were mainly informal snapshots, some formal portraits, some cuttings from newspapers. Lee Garrett smiling into the lens, growing more unsmiling as he aged. Being handed some kind of award. With a hunting rifle, in hunting gear, one booted foot on the neck of a six-point buck. Standing next to a big Christmas tree. Several shots at restaurants. He’d been a member of the Rotary Club and there were lots of photos at Rotary dinners.

Jacko took in all the details greedily, but there was nothing there to hang on to. Garrett was tall, lanky, fair-skinned, with a full head of sandy hair. He had nothing in common with Jacko’s strong, stout build and dark skin. However hard Jacko looked, he could see no points of resemblance. Nothing.

His wife, too, was tall and slender. Attractive without making much of an effort. There were a couple of shots of her on a hunting trip, holding a shotgun as if she knew how to use it. There were no photographs of her much beyond the age of forty. Felicity said she died fifteen years ago. Felicity had included her birth date—1951. She died at 50.

He watched in a daze as the photos crossed the screen, and then— “Stop.”

Felicity obediently stopped the carousel of photos.

A family snapshot. Lee, his wife, a young girl standing between them, face scrunched up against the sun.

Jesus. His mother. Looking…normal. Like any other teenager in the ’70s. Peering closely, Jacko could vaguely see his mother in the teenager’s face. The last years he’d seen his mother, she’d been grossly underweight, face heavily lined, prematurely gray hair falling out in clumps. Teeth ground down to black stubs because of the meth. She looked like shit, always. None too clean and on the lookout for the next high, no matter the price.

This girl looked happy and energetic.

There she was, in another photo, happily holding up a sports trophy. And another, on a horse in English riding gear. And another one, in a cheerleader’s outfit.

What the fuck had happened to her?

There were no photographs of the girl after her late teens. She disappeared from the Garretts’ lives. Alice Garrett aged ten years in each photo and then she, too, disappeared. Only Lee Garrett remained, looking older and sadder and more stooped in each shot.

Jacko knew he’d just watched the breakdown of a family, and that was too bad, but he felt absolutely nothing. The faces meant nothing to him and his mother as a young girl was so unlike the woman he remembered, it was as if they were two different people.

He studied Lee and Alice Garrett again, searching deep inside himself for some spark of recognition, but got absolutely nothing. They were two faces out of the 260 million adults in the US. He wouldn’t believe they had anything to do with him if he hadn’t recognized his mother. Barely.

Wow. So what now?

“You know, Jacko,” Felicity said gently. “Maybe you might want to contact that lawyer. From what I gather, the house and property are there, waiting for an heir. At some point, everything will revert back to the state.”

Jacko stiffened. “I don’t need his money.” Fuck no. He was doing just fine. He’d saved a lot while in the Navy and ASI paid really well. And Lauren had inherited money from her mother and was earning more with her art. He didn’t need anybody’s money.

“Not for the money. But because in that house, there might be some stuff that will tell you what you need to know. I understand you’re okay with your past but surely more information would be…helpful?”

Damn right he was okay with his past, for the simple reason that he never ever thought about it. It was not a problem, no sir.

Except for right now, with Lauren pregnant. He needed to be okay with this because he was not going to lose Lauren, and he was going to be a good father. If it killed him, which it might.

Maybe Felicity was right. Maybe some more intel would be good.

“Here, Jacko.” Felicity pulled a flash drive he hadn’t even seen from the side of Puff the Magic Dragon and handed it to him. He turned it over in his hand. It was tiny, and knowing Felicity, it wasn’t available on the market and it could probably contain files the size of the NSA’s. “All this info, including photos, is on this drive. I also sent most of the pertinent data to your cell. Call the lawyer. See what he says. Maybe when you have time, go down and see the house.” She paused a beat, looking carefully at his face. “What have you got to lose?”

Because he couldn’t be doing worse than he was now, was the unspoken message. Jacko had gotten a glimpse of himself in a mirror and he looked like shit. Pale beneath his dark skin, deep purple bags under his eyes. He never looked like this. He had huge reserves. It took weeks of hard work or being on an op for him to even start to get tired.

Right now he was exhausted, wrung out.

And he was failing Lauren.

His shit was getting in the way of her happiness. She didn’t deserve this. She deserved a man who was whole.

Not a man who vomited at the thought of fatherhood.

For a guy who planned his every move in advance, Jacko hadn’t the faintest idea what came next. He only knew he had to take that first step toward finding out where he came from.

He swallowed heavily. “If I go…somewhere, make sure Lauren doesn’t worry. Make sure she’s okay.”

Even more bullshit from Mr. Straight Talk.

But Felicity understood a lot of what he wasn’t saying. She was smart, and she knew about secrets and the holes they dug in lives. Her parents had kept secrets all her life. She knew what this was like.

“Don’t worry about Lauren. We’ll all look after her.” Felicity nodded, stood up.

“I’m turning the transponder off.” The words were out before he could block them. All ASI vehicles had a transponder. Nobody ever turned theirs off. Why would they? But Jacko needed to go out on his own, without the connection to ASI. He didn’t want to be followed until he knew what he would uncover.

Felicity nodded soberly. “All right.” She had no expression on her face at all. “We okay here?”

“Yeah. And thanks.”

She put a hand on his shoulder, squeezed lightly and walked out.

Jacko sat in the super-quiet room a long time, thinking. Finally, he stood up and made his way to a lounge area that was usually empty during the working day. ASI employees gathered there when they worked late or had to work on weekends. It was always stocked with food and water and coffee.

Jacko didn’t want food. His stomach rose halfway up his gullet at the idea. But he did want some coffee and he wanted solitude.

He entered the lounge and, after a moment’s hesitation, locked the door. The door was never locked but right now he needed to be on his own. There wasn’t any bandwidth in him to talk to anyone.

He poured himself a big mug of coffee and downed it black, not tasting it. Not even feeling it. Then he scrolled through his cell until he had the lawyer’s name.

Ernest Mayer, Llc. Head of his own law firm. Three landlines and a cell, all with the same 619 prefix.

Jacko cradled the cell in the palm of his hand and stared at it, the plastic warming up while the coffee cooled down.

Do the hard thing.
The SEAL mantra.

He dialed the cell number and waited. A man answered with a single word. “Mayer.”

Jacko waited, a tight knot in his throat, his stomach balled up tight. Until he spoke, the machine wouldn’t be set in motion. But that was a lie. The machine was set in motion the second Lauren told him she was pregnant.

“Hello? Who is this?” The soft, cultivated male voice was impatient.

“Mr. Mayer, my name is Morton Jackman.” As always, his first name came out sounding strange. Morton was always for the most formal of occasions. When he signed official documents, the “Morton” was in a different hand. He never used it.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Jackman?”

“I understand you were the lawyer of Lee Garrett.”

“Yes, I was. Now I represent his estate.” A brief pause. “May I ask what this is about?”

Jacko clenched his jaw so hard his teeth ground together. “I’m the son of Sara Jackman.”

“I don’t know any Sara Jackman. I’m sorry, but—”

“You would have known her as Sara Garrett. Lee Garrett’s daughter.”

There was complete silence.

“Mr. Mayer?”

“I—yes. This is—this is incredible news. Sara Garrett ran away from home thirty-seven years ago and was never seen again.” He paused. “I am going to need proof, sir.”

“Mr. Mayer, I am sending you my birth certificate, my mother’s marriage certificate, the death certificate of her husband, Robert Jackman, her death certificate, and a copy of my passport.”

Jacko heard a faint ping. “I received the documents, Mr. Jackman. Please give me a moment to look at them.” The voice quavered and for the first time, Jacko realized he was an old man. He must have been Lee Garrett’s contemporary. Garrett had been over seventy years old when he passed away. “If these documents are valid, then you are the sole heir to Lee Garrett’s estate. It is considerable. There’s a home with several acres attached, close to a million dollars in investments, a—”

“I’m not interested in the estate, per se,” Jacko interrupted. “But I would like very much to see the house. Read any papers, documents Mr. Garrett—my grandfather—might have kept.”

His voice nearly choked on the word “grandfather”.

“Mr. Jackman. If what you’re saying is corroborated, then of course you can have full access to Lee Garrett’s home, his papers, anything you want. It will take time to process everything, but the estate will be yours. Lee—Mr. Garrett—left all of his assets to his daughter. If she is deceased, it all goes to you. I don’t know where you are, Mr. Jackman—”

“I live in Portland, Oregon,” Jacko said.

“If you could possibly plan a trip down south, at your convenience, we could start the paperwork for transferring the estate to you.”

Jacko was suddenly burning to get to old man Garrett’s house, start looking through his stuff, start getting fucking
answers.
Normally a patient man, a man who could lie in a sniper’s nest for days for a chance at a shot, he was feverish with hurry. He checked his watch and then the map in his head. “I’d like to drive down right away. What are your office hours?”

Silence. “It’s a long drive down, Mr. Jackman,” the lawyer answered, deep emotion shaking his voice. “You’ll probably arrive late Saturday evening or early Sunday morning. But I will come in for you at any time. Lee Garrett was one of my closest friends. I would do anything for his grandson. Call me when you have an estimated time of arrival. I will wait for you, Mr. Jackman, for as long as it takes.”

“I’m on my way,” Jacko said and clicked off.

He was tunnel-visioning, almost incapable of seeing or thinking of anything but the drive down to Rancho San Diego, getting to the home of a man who, improbably, might be his grandfather.