The Hatching: A Novel (12 page)

Outside the room, Annie was watching the cop play the duck game on the phone, giving him pointers on how to eat the most pellets.

“You hear that sound, Officer?” The cop looked up from the phone and sheepishly handed it back to Annie.

“No sir. I’ve been stuck on level eight for a while, and your daughter was showing me how to get past it.”

“She’s a smart kid, that one,” Mike said. “Thanks for watching her.” He reached out to take Annie’s hand. “Come on, beautiful. Uncle Leshaun’s still sleeping. I’ll come back later, after I drop you off at your mom’s. What do you say we go get some ice cream, see
if it cuts the heat a little?” He shook his head. “Crazy weather for April, isn’t it?”

In the parking garage, he was already starting to back the car out when his phone rang. Annie knew the drill and handed it up front without complaint. Mike didn’t recognize the number, but it was a DC area code, so he picked up.

“Is this Special Agent Rich?”

“Yep, but I’m not on the clock today.”

“You are now. This is the director.”

“The director of what?”

“
The
director.”

Mike had to stop himself from blurting out, “Bullshit.” Not that Annie had never heard him swear before, but if it was really the director of the agency, it wasn’t in his best interest to sound like a moron.

“There’s been a plane crash,” the director said. “Happened maybe five minutes ago. You’re the closest agent in the vicinity, and we need you there.”

Mike cradled the phone between his shoulder and his ear and shifted the car into drive. “I heard it. Didn’t know what it was.”

“Well, you do now. You know Bill Henderson?”

“Of Henderson Tech?” Mike said. The phone Mike was talking on was an HT model, and the computer he had in his office was an HT as well. And even if Mike hadn’t known what kind of phone or computer he had, there probably wasn’t a single person in the entire country who didn’t know who Bill Henderson was, let alone in Minneapolis, where Henderson was the success story to end all success stories. Henderson employed more than forty thousand people on nine campuses on the western edge of the city. And that was just in Minneapolis. “Yeah, I know Bill Henderson. I mean, I don’t know him personally, but I know who he is. Why?” Mike asked, then immediately said, “Oh.”

“Right now we don’t have any reason to suspect it was anything other than an accident. You’ll get more details on-site, but when a billionaire falls from the sky, particularly a billionaire who was the president’s largest donor during her last campaign, all bets are off. If anything—anything—looks like terrorism or like it was something other than just a plane crash, I’ll expect a phone call directly. And I mean anything. If I find out from the television that there was something suspicious and you haven’t already told me about it, your career will look less promising. You can let the locals set up a perimeter, but we’ve got a team ready to be wheels up within the hour and on the ground by midafternoon. Make no mistake: the agency is going to be on this one. You call this number, the one I called you from. Keep me tight in the loop on this one, Agent Rich. You got it?”

“Uh, yes sir,” Mike said.

“Good. Here’s my assistant. He’ll give you the details.”

Mike took the address from the assistant, hung up the phone, and then turned to look at Annie.

“Sorry, beautiful, but this is a big deal. We’re going to have to take a rain check on the ice cream, okay?”

Annie scowled, but he could tell she was faking it, and she didn’t raise a fuss when he said he had to call Fanny.

The phone clicked through to voice mail. “Fanny,” Mike said, “it’s me. Something came up. I need you to come get Annie. I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t a big deal, but trust me when I tell you this, I really can’t get out of it.” He left the address for Fanny and asked her to call back as soon as she could, resisting the urge to tell her to follow the plume of smoke. The gray ribbon was thick in the air, and even though he knew the address he had been given was more than ten blocks away, the smoke looked closer. As he drove, he tried Dawson’s number, but Annie’s stepdad was evidently
away from his phone as well. Mike had to step hard on the thought that the reason his ex-wife and her new husband weren’t answering the phone was that they were naked and in bed.

“Okay, beautiful,” he said over his shoulder. “Mommy’s not answering, so you’re going to be stuck with me for a while. I’ve got to do some work.”

He flipped the cherries on even though he didn’t drive faster than the speed limit, conscious of his daughter sitting in the back. There wasn’t much in the way of traffic, though he could already see the strobes of emergency vehicles up ahead.

“Daddy?”

“Yeah, beautiful?” he said, distracted by her voice and by what her voice meant: that he’d have to figure out what to do with her once they got to the crash site. Annie wasn’t sheltered. She knew that he worked for the agency, knew he carried a gun, knew that occasionally there were guys like Two-Two who might shoot at him, knew why Leshaun was in the hospital, but that didn’t mean Mike thought it was the best idea to walk around with her near the smoking crater the plane would have left in the ground. Or, oh hell, he thought, it was probably worse than that. Almost certainly the plane hit a house or a building or something.

“Daddy,” Annie said, and there was something measured and hesitant in her voice. “I think I’m getting too old for you to call me ‘beautiful’ all the time.”

“Oh.” Mike slowed down at a red light and then, after checking both left and right, cruised through the intersection. He could hear sirens growing closer, and wondered how big of a clusterfuck this was going to be. Ambulance, fire, police. City workers, utilities, probably county and state everything. Likely to be feebies or other federals too. “Okay, beau—Annie. Annie.”

He glanced in the rearview mirror, but Annie was looking out
the window, watching the buildings pass by. It was something he knew she must have been thinking about, and even though the expression was overused, it broke his heart. It was too soon, he thought, too soon for her to be negotiating the passage from being a child to being an adult. She was only nine, for Christ’s sake, not even into the double digits yet. Of course, that wasn’t what really bothered him about it. He called her “beautiful” because she was beautiful, and she was his Annie and would always be his Annie no matter what he called her, but he couldn’t shake off the conversation from the day before, the way Fanny had insisted that she and Annie had to have the same last name. Mike hadn’t asked Fanny to change her last name to Rich when they got married but she’d done it anyway, and he hadn’t fought when Fanny changed it to Dawson when she remarried. He understood that when you married a guy whose first name was Rich, you probably didn’t want your last name to be Rich, particularly when it was a name you’d brought along from your first marriage. Still, it stuck in him that Fanny thought it wouldn’t be a big deal to change Annie’s last name. Fanny had never been the kind of woman to use their kid as a pawn, and he was sure she didn’t mean it that way, was sure she meant exactly what she said—that it was too weird for her to have a kid with a different last name—but he didn’t understand why it was
now
, months after Fanny Rich had become Fanny Dawson, that it suddenly mattered so much. Why now? What had suddenly changed in his ex-wife’s new marriage?

Oh.

Now he understood.

“Hey beau—Annie?” he said. It was going to take some getting used to. “How’s Mommy been feeling? Everything okay at home?”

“Fine,” Annie said.

A fire truck came barreling through the intersection ahead of
them, and Mike slowed down to check both ways before turning. They were close enough that he could see people standing on the sidewalk and pointing. A block away, maybe two.

“She been sick at all or anything like that?”

“She’s been sleeping a lot,” Annie said. “She’s been going to bed earlier than me. Rich has been reading to me before bed.”

Mike brought the car to a complete stop and closed his eyes. He thought he might puke, which was kind of funny since he’d basically been asking Annie if his ex-wife was suffering from morning sickness. She hadn’t been sick when she was pregnant with Annie, but she’d been tired the entire first trimester.

There was a burst from a siren behind him and he opened his eyes and then pulled out into the intersection, turning the corner. He was about to ask Annie another question, but then he saw the building.

It was a school. “Oh fuck,” he said.

“Daddy! You owe me a dollar!”

“Sorry Annie. I’ll get you later, okay?” The street was choked with ambulances, police cars, and fire trucks, and in his rearview mirror he saw something that looked like it might be a SWAT truck rolling after him. The building was old and faced with brick, and he saw that the sign out front read B
ILL
H
ENDERSON
E
LEMENTARY
S
CHOOL
. He wanted to laugh. Henderson’s plane had evidently crashed on the property of the elementary school named after him, but the sight of two or three hundred children milling around on the front lawn stopped him from finding it funny. “Fuck.”

“Daddy!”

“Right. Sorry. It’s just. Okay.” He tried calling Fanny again, but once again, it went to voice mail. He pulled the car to the side of the street, angling it in next to a police cruiser, and then just sat there for a moment considering his options.

“Daddy?”

He sighed. He didn’t really have any options. He’d never even seen the director of the agency before, except on TV when he was going through congressional hearings. If Mike fucked this up, he was going to find himself transferred out of Minnesota and working the ass end of the worst posting in America, wherever that was. He looked back at Annie and saw she was staring at him, waiting for an answer. “It’s my boss,” he said, though he didn’t really think he could explain to her. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t leave Annie in the car, but if he didn’t get out of the car—he couldn’t ignore a direct order from the director of the agency—he wouldn’t be living near Annie anymore anyway. “Okay. Okay. Okay. Let’s do it,” he said. “How do you feel about helping me out today, sweetheart?”

Annie shrugged, but she got out of the car when he did. She tagged along as he walked past the spectators and the gathering camera crews, kept with him as he held out his badge and ducked under the yellow tape that had already gone up. He turned the corner of the building and stopped with a sudden surge of relief. “Thank. Fucking. God.”

“That’s three dollars now, Daddy.”

He glanced at Annie and then looked back at the field behind the school. The building was untouched, but there was a deep gouge in the dirt on the soccer field behind the school, starting from one goal and reaching almost all the way to the other, where the thick beam of smoke spiraled from a bundled mess of metal. There was a crew of firefighters hosing down a small section that was still burning and seemed to be giving off the majority of the smoke flooding the sky, but two other trucks already seemed to be packing up, and the ambulance crews, as far as Mike could tell, were just standing around. If there had been children playing on
the field when the plane hit, it would still have been a circus of fevered activity.

A uniformed policewoman walked past them. Mike stopped her. “No kids?” he asked.

“Nah,” the woman said. “I guess they’d just gone inside for lunch or something. According to one of the teachers, they missed being out there by about three minutes. The people on the plane weren’t so lucky. Not much to do but hose it down and clean it up.” She looked down at Annie and gave a little smile. “What’s up with the munchkin?”

“She had a fever last night, so no school for her. I was going to take the day off and make it a daddy day,” Mike said. “You know how it is, though. Sometimes you don’t have a choice about working. Tried calling the ex-wife, but . . .” He stared at the cop.

She figured it out. “Nope. Sorry, man. I’m on the clock, and I can’t play babysitter, especially for a suit.”

Mike shrugged. “Can’t blame a guy for trying.”

“Actually, it’s some kind of sexist bullshit.” She glanced at Annie again. “Sorry about that honey.”

Annie shrugged. “Daddy swears a lot.”

“Not that much, honey.”

“You said the F word three times already.”

“Yeah,” Mike said. “Sorry.” He looked back at the cop. “And you’re right. I probably wouldn’t have asked a man. Not cool.”

“I don’t like it, but I get it,” the cop said. “Good luck with it all. You might not want to take her too close to the scene. It’s, uh, it’s maybe not age appropriate.”

“Grisly?”

“Half the plane disintegrated, and what’s left has been worked over by the fire.” She started to walk away but then stopped and touched Mike’s arm. “Try one of the ambulance crews. Look for a
short, thick blond woman. Tell her Melissa asked if she could lend you a hand. At least until your ex-wife shows up.”

Mike nodded and made a beeline to the ambulances, Annie’s hand in his. It turned out that the thick blond woman was the only female among the EMTs. Mike went through his song and dance about Annie having to stay home from school because she’d had a fever the night before and how he had to work unexpectedly, but he might as well not have bothered: at the mention of the policewoman’s name, the EMT lit up with a smile and beckoned Annie to come sit in the ambulance. “I’ve got a daughter about her age,” she said. “We’ll hang out. You cool if I give her a little bit of candy?”

Mike would have been cool with a whole bunch of candy if it meant he didn’t have to take his daughter into the wreckage. He texted Fanny to tell her that Annie was hanging with the EMTs and added the address again in case she missed it on the earlier voice mail. By the time he was ten steps away from the ambulance Annie had gum in her mouth and was playing a video game on the woman’s phone and lounging on a gurney as if it were a couch.

Near the plane, the grass was wet from the firefighters’ hoses, and he felt mud sliding under his shoes. He wished he were wearing a pair of good boots. As he stepped past a piece of metal the size of a car’s hood—part of a wing?—a tall, olive-skinned man in a suit held up his hand. “Sorry pal.”