Free Blackbird by Tom Wright Page A

spelled it for me. ‘Middle name’s got three letters – what is it?’
    I thought about it for a minute, listening to the busy clicking of his keyboard as he worked on something, probably lecture notes.
    ‘Asa,’ I said.
    ‘You son of a bitch!’ he yelped. ‘How the hell do you do that?’
    ‘Nothing else came to mind but Bob and Gig. They didn’t seem to fit.’
    ‘Damn,’ he sighed. ‘So what’s up, JB?’
    ‘I want a consult. Can I buy you a drink?’
    ‘Just me, or do I bring Abby?’
    ‘Just you,’ I said. ‘This is business.’
    ‘When?’
    ‘Now.’
    ‘Okay, let’s make it John Boy’s, but you’ve got to sell it to her. We were gonna watch To Kill a Mockingbird tonight.’
    I heard him call his wife to the phone.
    ‘Hey, crime fighter,’ she said. I pictured dark intelligent eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, her glossy chestnut hair and crooked smile. At this time of day I was sure she’d be wearing her old sweats and carrying a cup of apple tea around with her.
    ‘Atticus gets the guy off,’ I said.
    ‘Yeah, yeah, I know, they all ended happy in those days, that’s what I like about old movies. What’s happening?’
    ‘I want your husband.’
    ‘You want him? Jim, this man is my only stuff. I need him. Where would I find a replacement at my age?’
    ‘I’ll cook the Special for you this weekend,’ I said, meaning charcoal-grilled salmon fillets with caper and raisin sauce, one of the three real-meal recipes Rachel had taught me years ago based on her belief that a man had to be able to put at least that many different credible meals on the table if necessary. ‘On the grill outside if the weather’s good, otherwise I’ll broil it in the kitchen.’
    There was a silent pause, which told me I had her.
    ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘But I want him returned in good condition.’
    ‘No worries,’ I said. ‘It’s only his mind I’m interested in.’
    ‘His what?’
    Beginning to feel that a little momentum might be building, I looked at the mantel again, the other end this time, where the watercolour caricature Jana had had done for me by a friend of hers a few birthdays ago leaned against the bricks: two charging tigers wearing jerseys numbered 39 and 22, the numbers Johnny Trammel and I had worn the year Bragg won State.
    ‘Growl a little growl for me, baby,’ she’d said as she handed it to me. ‘And I’ll show you what real tigers do in the dark.’
    I’d brought it in here from the workshop last week in hopes of reawakening some sense of life in the place, but it hadn’t done that, managing only to bring back the smell of the Bragg Field locker rooms vividly enough to send me on a reconnaissance tour of the house in search of missed laundry or forgotten cat food.
    I decided on one more call before I left to meet Jonas, this one to Johnny over in Burnsville at the western end of the county, to see if I could get him and Li signed on for the cookout too. Not that you had to come up with anything special for him – he’d never been famous for turning down anything that came on a plate. He was still easy because in recent years he’d always seemed too preoccupied even to notice what he was eating, which I took to be a hazard of the legal profession. Some of the guys he represented would be hard on anybody’s appetite.
    The spring we graduated he’d tossed a half-dozen scholarship offers in the trash and started visiting recruiters, eventually ending up in Delta Force and being awarded two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star for his actions in places where hatreds a thousand years old ran like underground rivers, places whose names he would, along with what he’d done there, take with him to the grave. I shouldn’t have known, but did, that his last mission was a so-called black op, a HALO – high altitude, low opening – jump from a C-130 in friendly airspace, he and his squad free-falling thirty thousand feet on a moonless night, five dark silences slanting like raptors