Free Shift: A Novel by Tim Kring and Dale Peck Page B

towering beeches, four Doric columns holding up the porch: the Wiz hadn’t missed a detail in his colonial fantasia. Revolutions had been planned behind those paneled doors, assassinations, infiltrations, arms sales to ex-Nazis and Muslim extremists, yet it was hard to imagine anything more coming through them than a smartly dressed housewife with her arms around a pair of well-coifed children, the beaming face of a Negro maid looking over their shoulders.
    Something was coming through the door now. Something as far from that dream of domestic bliss as it was from the equally unreal world of international espionage and covert ops.
    Melchior could only look at it in bits and pieces. A bathrobe. A cane. Licks of gray hair sticking out like antennas from a mostly bald head. The Negro servant was there, though. A man, not a woman, guiding the shaking figure like a parent teaching a toddler to walk. A toddler with a bottle of bourbon in his right hand and a dark patch in the middle of his half-open robe. Melchior had photographed the bodies of thirteen schoolchildren killed by an errant rocket in the mountainsof rural Guatemala, had picked up the pieces of a Company agent after the man walked by a Saigon cafe just as a shrapnel bomb went off, but he couldn’t look at the Wiz. Not like this.
    Instead he looked down at the seat next to him. A creased sheet of paper sat on the passenger’s side. The blueprint had been through a lot in the past five days. There was a bullet hole in the upper-left quadrant, a few drops of dried blood in the lower left. The creases from the time it had spent folded in his shoe were so deep they’d rendered the diagram all but useless—that is, if you wanted to attempt to duplicate what had been drawn there. But you could see what it depicted just fine.
    He looked up at the porch. The man in the bathrobe was talking animatedly to no one, gesticulating so wildly with his bottle that twelve-year-old bourbon splashed all over him. A part of Melchior wanted to walk up there and pour the whole bottle over the decrepit figure and set it on fire. The Wiz would have wanted him to do it. The Wiz would have put the lighter in his hands. But that wasn’t the Wiz up there. The Wiz would’ve recognized his own car. The Wiz would have told him to get his ass up there and have a drink. Of course, the Wiz would have made him use the back door, but that was the Wiz for you: you could take the boy out of Mississippi, but, as the plantation house testified, you couldn’t take Mississippi out of the boy.
    Melchior looked down at the blueprint again. At the time, he hadn’t been sure why he didn’t give it to Everton. Oh sure, he was pissed off. But he’d been pissed off at the Company a million times before, over substantive issues, like the refusal to support the Hungarian uprising in ’56 or the idiocy of sending fourteen hundred poorly trained men into Cuba on the heels of a wildly popular revolution. But now he knew that he could’ve never given the paper to Everton. Not even if Everton had shaken his hand and offered him the country’s thanks and given him a corner office and a secretary who didn’t wear panties. Because Melchior didn’t work for Everton and he didn’t work for the Company and he didn’t work for the United States of America. He worked for the Wiz, and even after Drew Everton had stared at him like a Klansman looking at a black man with his dick in the lily-white pussy of Mrs. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Melchior would’ve still walked across that wide green lawn beneath the shade of the towering beeches and up the bluestonesteps flanked by those Doric columns and handed that piece of paper to the Wiz. All the Wiz had to do was cock a finger at him, say “Git on up here, boy,” as though he were calling his dog for dinner.
    “Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest,”
Melchior said to the empty car. Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself.
    The Wiz hadn’t taught him