Between A Grizzly and Her Cub: Part One

A few polite golf claps concluded Chad’s speech. He reckoned most of them, perhaps fewer than that, came half-hearted. He stood behind his podium in the small, elementary school cafeteria he and his team borrowed.

He had lectured that America remained the only first-world country where entire families go broke from injury or disease. He recounted the tales of many such families, financially ruined by medical bills. He wondered if anyone cared.

Congressman (or did they prefer “congress person” nowadays?) Mitch Barrow marched up the stage to accept Chad’s microphone.

Chad hesitated, felt he should share something more with his audience. He swore he heard the second hand of his wristwatch. He knew that every tick represented an American closer to death from a treatable illness.

Mitch wrapped his overly smooth hand around Chad’s microphone. He smiled a little too hard, stared Chad in the eye. That’s enough, the stare seemed to say. Let’s not subtract the “fun” from fundraiser.

Chad surrendered his microphone. The thirty-five-year-old stepped from his stage and wandered towards the refreshment table. He met Rose along the way.

The seventy-something woman smiled at him. “Nice speech, Chad.”

Chad shrugged. Would a single voter demand a better healthcare plan as a consequence of his speech?

He filled a plastic cub with club soda. “My blog just lost its two biggest sponsors.”

“You in it for the sponsors?” Rose asked. She worked as an editor for a democrat-based, political magazine. She published a few of Chad’s blogs when she could talk her supervisors into it.

“I can’t write fulltime without them,” Chad said. “Words without readers won’t pay my rent.”

Rose squeezed his arm. “Maybe it’s time you found a second interest in your life. You spend so much time in front of your computer with your research and writing. You need a life outside politics. Set your blogs and columns on the back-burner. Find a job the forces you to leave the house.”

“Ambitions go to the back-burner to die,” Chad said.

She ignored this. “When’s the last time you shared a meal? Your solitude isn’t healthy.”

Chad knocked back the last of his soda water. “I’ll have you know that Alice provides me with wonderful company every night.”

“You cat doesn’t count.” She led him towards the open, makeshift bar at the other side of the cafeteria. “Let’s get you a drink.”

Chad dug in his heels. “I don’t drink. You know that.”

Rose sighed, exhausted. “What do you do for fun?”

“Scrabble.”

“By yourself?”

“You can play Scrabble by yourself.”

“What a waste! You won’t stay young and handsome forever.”

He dropped his gaze. He did not, at five-foot-five with a slight gut, appear handsome.

He checked his cellphone (which he had tuned to silent so as not to interrupt his speech). Someone had called, but Chad didn’t recognize the number. Whoever had called him, she or he had left a message.

Chad shouldered his way through the crowd, headed towards the nearest exit.

Mitch concluded his own onstage speech, the usually grandstand event with no real message. He promised everyone everything without any concrete plan on how they would get it. No wonder the voters continued to reelect him.

Chad passed two kids, brothers by the looks of them. An image of Chad’s mother surfaced in his mind.

He saw her skeletal, yellowed body, stretched across her bed. Her sunken eyes stared into the near distance while Chad and his older brother changed her bedpan. He recalled, with a boulder of guilt, how much he wanted her to die.

Liver failure. No money to treat or make her comfortable.

Dad had vanished a year beforehand.

The chilly breeze slapped him from his trance as soon as he stepped outside. Fort Myers, Florida did not often get this cold.

He checked his voicemail.

One. New. Message. The drive-through-speaker-like voice crackled from Chad’s cellphone. A beep stretched, and then:

“This message is for Chad Heel. I am Detective Redwood of the Fort Myers PD. I need you to call me back at this number ASAP.” He left his number.

Chad blinked. What had happened to David? His mind conjured terrible suggestions, tragedies that might’ve befallen his brother’s wife or ten-year-old son.

He dialed David’s number. It rang several times before it switched to voicemail. He disconnected and dialed Detective Redwood’s number.

“Redwood.” He sounded exhausted.

“This is Chad Heel. I got your—”

“Ah,” Redwood said. “Right. I’m going to need you to come down to the autopsy room and identify your brother.”

The air in Chad’s lungs froze. “I’m sorry. . . . Could you repeat that?

Redwood sighed. “I take it nobody informed you about your brother’s death.”

“No. No one called me to tell me that my brother died.”

“Sorry about that.” Redwood sounded at best distracted and at worse disinterested. “I regret to inform you that your brother killed himself around three o’clock today.”

Chad paced the school’s parking lot. “David wouldn’t do that. He had a wife and—”

“A kid. Right,” Redwood said. “Well, that plastic bag didn’t wrap itself around his face.”

A sense of the surreal overwhelmed Chad. “This is how the police department tells me—”

“I don’t want to ask David's ten-year-old son to identify the body,” Redwood said, “and his wife seems a bad candidate, given her condition. That leaves you, unless I grab someone from his family law practice.”

Chad steadied himself against a flagpole. “Wait. Back up. What condition?”

Another pause. “You didn’t know? She’s fighting skin cancer. Losing, too.”

“You really suck at this, Officer Redwood.”

“Detective Redwood. I’m not a security officer. I’m not a psychiatrist, either. I’m a detective with a desk overflown with paperwork. Can you make it to the autopsy department by nine tomorrow morning?”

“I’ll be there.” Chad hung up, gazed heavenward at the American flag that flapped above him.

David wouldn’t kill himself. The method of suicide didn’t even make sense.

It all smelled wrong . . .

(Yep. A legal thriller. I'm performing some temporary, paralegal work in Florida, if that explains anything.

(Don't forget to check out my movie review blog at moviesmartinwolt.blogspot.com. I'll knock out The Judge in a day or two at that site.

(The third novel in my Darkwana series will appear on kindle in two months! Meanwhile, feel free to sample and/or download "Daughters of Darkwana and "Dreamers of Darkwana"!

(Thanks for reading!)