First Family (Sean King & Michelle Maxwell 4)

Carlos left and Quarry unlocked the door to the little house and walked in. Everything was ready, except for one missing piece. But that would come.

An hour later Quarry lifted into the sky in his Cessna. The low-level winds were rough and his little plane crab-walked across the sky, but it didn’t bother him. He’d flown through a lot worse. A little turbulence would never kill him. A lot of other things could, though. And probably would.

He had a lot to think about, and he did his best thinking while flying along. At a few thousand feet up, his mind seemed to clear even as the air thinned. In the back of the plane was a box filled with cables and wires. In that box, and in a second box up at the mine, he would draw out his doomsday scenario. He would only use it if he had to, and he hoped he didn’t.

As he flew, Quarry’s thoughts went back to the last time Tippi had ever spoken. He and his wife had rushed to Atlanta when they’d been told how desperately ill their daughter was. Quarry had never wanted his little girl to move to the big city, but children grow up and you have to let them.

When the doctor at the hospital told them what had happened, neither of them could believe it. Not their Tippi. There must have been some mistake. But there had been no mistake. She had already sunk into a coma because of the blood loss. However, the physical evidence was conclusive, they’d been told.

Cameron had left the room to get some coffee and Quarry had been leaning up against the wall, his jeans dirty, his shirt stained with sweat from the long ride over from Alabama in summer heat with no air conditioning. He’d come right from the fields after his wife had raced across the tilled dirt screaming about the phone call she’d gotten. The compressed, artificial air in the big hospital had been foul, suffocating for a man used to wide-open spaces.

The police had also come in and Quarry had had to deal with them. He’d become so enraged at their line of questioning that Cameron had been forced to make him leave the room, the only person on earth, other than Tippi, who had that sort of influence over him. The cops had finished and gone on their way. From their sour looks as they trudged past him down the hall, Quarry held out little hope of getting any justice that way.

And so he’d been alone in her room, just him and his little girl. The machines had been clunking, and the pumps pumping; the monitor making its little screeches that felt like the boom of artillery to Quarry. Even screaming shots of anti-aircraft fire aimed at his Phantom in the skies over Vietnam had never scared him as badly as the whine of that damn machine while it dutifully recorded his baby’s desperately poor condition.

It was extremely doubtful she would ever recover, the doctors had warned them. One unsympathetic white coat with the bedside manner of a hyena had been especially pessimistic. “Too much blood loss. Brain damage. Part of her mind had already died.” He added, “If it makes you feel any better, she’s not experiencing any pain. And it’s not really your daughter there anymore. She’s already gone, actually.”

This had not only not made Quarry feel better, he’d knocked the doctor’s front teeth out and nearly been banned from the hospital because of it.

And then while he’d been standing there Tippi had opened her eyes and looked at him. Just like that. He remembered every moment of it precisely, vividly, as he flew along the thermals in his Cessna.

He’d been so shocked that at first he didn’t know what to do. He’d blinked, thinking his vision was just messed up, or he was merely seeing what he wanted to see rather than what was actually there.

“Daddy?”

He was next to her in an instant, holding her hand, his face bare inches from hers.

“Tippi? Baby. Daddy’s right here. Right here.”

Her head started swaying from side to side and the monitor was screeching like it never had before. He was terrified he would lose her again to the shadows, to the part of her mind that was no longer there.

He squeezed her hand, gently held her chin in place, stopping the swaying so her eyes focused only on him. “Tippi. I’m right here. Your momma’ll be right back. Don’t you go away now. Tippi! Don’t you go away!”

Her eyes had closed, panicking him. He looked around to maybe call somebody. Get some help to hold his daughter with them.

“Daddy?”

He jerked back. “I’m here, baby.” Despite trying to hold them back, the tears came hard and fierce down his lined face, a face that had aged more in the last day than in the last ten years.

“I love you.”

“I love you too, baby.” He put one hand against his chest trying to stop his heart from ripping through. “Tippi, you got to tell me what happened. You got to tell me who did this to you.”

Her eyes started to lose focus again and then closed. He searched frantically through his mind for anything to keep her attention.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” he said.

It was the first line from Pride and Prejudice.

They’d read the book back and forth to each other over the years.

Tippi opened her eyes, smiled, and a gush of air came out of Quarry, because he was convinced that God

had just given him his little girl back, despite what the white coats had said.

“Tell me who did this to you, Tippi. Tell me, baby,” he said as firmly as he could.

She mouthed only four words but it was enough. He understood them.