Invincible

Kristin knew what he’d said only because she knew how her proud father felt about anyone seeing him like he was now. “I know you don’t want to see anyone. You don’t have a choice.”

His gray eyes blazed with anger, and one cheek lifted as the side of his mouth turned down in a snarl. “No!”

That was clear enough. But Flick was waiting in the visitors’ lounge down the hall. God knew how long the inquisitive nine-year-old could last in a hospital waiting room without getting into trouble. Kristin had warned Flick to behave herself and hurried to her father’s room to prepare him for seeing his granddaughter. She didn’t have a lot of time to argue with him.

Her stomach knotted as she watched the once-invincible Harry Lassiter visibly struggle to say, “I ih e ere?”

Why is she here?

Kristin had debated whether to tell her father that Flick had gotten herself thrown out of school. It was one more thing he didn’t need to worry about. But she didn’t want to set a bad example by asking Flick to lie, and Flick would likely blurt it out anyway.

“Flick was worried when you stopped emailing. She got herself thrown out of school so she could come find out what happened to you.”

Kristin thought she saw the flicker of a smile cross half her father’s face. If so, it was the first since his stroke.

He sighed audibly. “Aw igh.”

“Well, all right,” Kristin said with a smile of her own, relieved that he’d given in so easily. “I’ll be right back. I left her—”

“Gramps!”

Kristin turned to find Flick poised in the doorway, a look of horror on her face.

“Ow! Ow! Ow!” her father howled, creating a gar-goyle face that caused Flick to whimper, before he turned away with a sound of anguish, flailing with his one good hand under the sheet.

Out! Out! Out!

Kristin fought the urge to grab Flick and run—from her father, from her job, from her self-destructing life.

But she stood her ground. Because in her head she heard: Never run from a challenge. Remember, you’re invincible.

“You’re scaring Flick, Dad,” Kristin said in a firm voice. “Flick, come here,” she said in an equally firm voice.

Flick tore fearful eyes from her grandfather’s supine body and stared dazed at her mother.

“Come here,” Kristin repeated, holding out her hand to her daughter. “I know Gramps looks different. I would have prepared you, if you’d waited in the lounge. Because of his stroke, the right side of his face droops. That’s why he looks so…funny. So…weird. So…odd,” Kristin finished, after searching for the right word and never finding it.

“Dad, look at us,” she commanded her father. “I want Flick to see your face in repose.” His face would still look strange, but not so horrible as it had when he’d howled. Kristin kept a reassuring hand on Flick’s shoulder, to stop her in case she was tempted to run.

Kristin caught the stab of betrayal in her father’s eyes as he slowly turned back to face his granddaughter.

Grandfather and granddaughter stared at each other somberly for a full thirty seconds before her father said, “Iz oo, ik.”

“I missed you, too, Gramps,” Flick said.

“Air oo, uh?”

“Yeah,” Flick agreed. “You scared me pretty bad.”

Kristin barely managed to avoid rolling her eyes. Trust Flick to be totally honest.

“I’m okay now,” Flick continued. She left the security of Kristin’s side and crossed to her grandfather, bracing her hands on the bed to lift herself up and plop her rump down next to his hips. “But your face does look bizarre.”

Bizarre: Strikingly out of the ordinary. That was the word Kristin had been seeking. Trust Flick to root it out of her enormous vocabulary.

Kristin glanced at her watch, a twenty-five-dollar Timex with a brown leather band that Flick had given her for Christmas, which lit in the dark and kept perfect time. If she didn’t leave soon she was going to be late for her meeting with SIRT. “Dad, I’ve got a meeting. We have to leave, but—”

“Ik an ay ere.”

Flick can stay here.

“I don’t know, Dad,” Kristin said, staring worriedly at her daughter.

“I’ll be fine, Mom,” Flick said. “Visiting hours aren’t over till four. I checked.”

“You’re sure it won’t be too much for you, Dad?”

“Gramps, you need to comb your hair,” Flick said, eyeing his tousled blond hair with her head tilted. “It’s a mess. Where’s your comb?”

“No om. Us.”

No comb. Brush.

Flick hopped down and rummaged through the drawer in the small metal chest beside the bed. She found a boar-bristle hairbrush, set it on the bed, then climbed back up beside him. “Where do you want your part?”

He turned relieved eyes to Kristin and said, “O. I ine.”

Go. I’m fine.

Kristin hurried from the room before she could reconsider. She couldn’t miss her investigative meeting with SIRT. And maybe, if Flick had enough trouble communicating with her grandfather, he’d reconsider the speech therapy he’d been refusing.

Kristin headed east from Jackson Memorial on the Dolphin Expressway and kept her fingers crossed as she merged onto I-95 North toward the Miami Field Office. On paper, the MFO was only a seventeen-minute drive straight up the Interstate from the hospital. But all it took was one fender bender to turn I-95 into a parking lot in the middle of the day.

She exhaled when she found traffic moving freely. But she hadn’t driven more than a mile before she found herself slowing to a crawl. “Come on!” she muttered, pounding the steering wheel of her Camry. She checked her watch. She’d given herself an extra twenty minutes to get there, just in case, and it looked like she was going to need every second of it.

She turned the radio to a station that played upbeat Latin music and imagined herself sitting on a warm beach under a colorful umbrella with an ice-cold mojito in hand. She was doing a lot of imagining these days, because her life kept shifting out of her control.

During the past week, she had been asked to spy in London, called 911 to come get her father after his stroke, been involved in another shooting incident at work, in which her partner was seriously wounded, and picked up her errant daughter at the airport after she’d been thrown out of school.

Kristin felt like she’d hit her limit of bad news for one week. Except she now had to face the Shooting Incident Review Team, which held her fate in its hands. What if the board decided to suspend her? Or fire her? She felt a knot forming in the pit of her stomach.

Breathe, Kristin. This, too, shall pass.

But where would she be when it did?

It took fifteen minutes before she passed a two-car accident, which wasn’t even blocking the lane, but which motorists had slowed down to ogle. She made fast time the rest of the way to the exit for North Miami Beach, but she could almost feel the minutes ticking away.

The concrete-and-glass MFO building took up an entire city block and more. The FBI had set up shop in Miami as far back as 1924, and there were still enough criminals—and violations of the rights of American citizens in Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America—to keep the MFO hopping.