Thomas Prescott Superpack (65 page)

I can still remember seeing my sister the day it happened. My dad’s accountant called and informed me about my parents. They’d been coming back from a concert in California, flying in one of the small Lear jets used by my father’s company. The plane had experienced catastrophic engine failure and crashed into the Sierra Nevadas.

Lacy was at swim practice and I drove to her high school. When she got out of the pool, I remember thinking,
when did my sister get tits
? Seriously, I’d just found out my parents were dead and I almost felt worse that I hadn’t noticed my sister’s tits? I wonder what Freud would have had to say about that?

Anyhow, I moved back home and Lacy and I leaned on one another for support. I came to realize how fun and amazing she was. Her room was filled with paintings; sunsets, landscapes, murals, all done by her exquisite hand. Over the next two years, she became
my everything. When it was time for her to go to college, she decided on Temple University in Philadelphia, which happened to have both a world class swim team and boasted the Tyler Art School, one of the best art programs in the country. Coincidentally, after becoming the youngest detective in the history of the SPD, Internal Affairs was coming after me for allegedly and I quote, “Shooting a rape suspect in the balls.” Actually, I’d shot him in the penis. His balls weren’t what he was sticking in little boys’ rears. I might have been able to weather the storm, but after I smashed a fellow detective’s face—a not-so-friendly guy named Ethan who is now chewing Juicy Fruit in the great beyond—into a locker, I handed over my badge. It sounds better when I say I voluntarily handed it over and not that it took four cops, my sergeant, my captain, and the cleaning lady to get it out of my pocket.

Needless to say, I no longer had any reason to stay in Washington and life without Lacy seemed utterly insignificant, so I tagged along.

We shared a nice two-bedroom loft near the college and Lacy soon became the star of the Temple swim team. As for me, I was now twenty-eight, happily unemployed, and slowly began to chip away at the seven-figure inheritance left by my parents—mainly giving it to Starbucks. Five hundred Pumpkin Spice lattes later, I ran into an old friend from the academy who was now a detective with the Philadelphia Police Department. He asked if I wanted to work a couple of cold cases. I’d just learned that there wasn’t a fourth season of
Arrested Development
on Netflix, so I had some time to kill. I solved five cases the first year, seven the second. That’s when the FBI’s Violent Crime Unit came knocking for me. And Multiple Sclerosis came for Lacy.

It was just fatigue at first. Lacy figured it was from her grueling schedule; up at 6:00 a.m., in the pool for two hours, classes from nine until four, and another two hours in the pool. When the fatigue persisted, she wrote it off as the flu; a bug that needed to run its course. But after six weeks, it had started to affect her swimming. She went from winning her events—the 100 back, the 200 back, the 100 IM, and the 400 butterfly— to getting second or third, and once she even placed fifth (Something that had never happened in more than ten years of competition.) One day in February of her junior year, she came home early from practice. I was working my first case as a special contract agent to the FBI’s Violent Crime Unit, packing for a trip to North Carolina—a suspected serial killer was going after elderly couples—and I asked what was wrong. She’d said that she was too dizzy to swim.

The dizziness lasted the entire week I was gone—we caught the suspect scouting a Perkins—and into a second week. The doctors said it was a virus. She would get better. And she did. The dizziness went away. She was fine for almost two months. Then her legs started tingling. Two weeks later it was numbness in her hands. She was sent to a specialist. There is no proof-positive test that confirms MS and the symptoms mimic many that could be from a variety of conditions, but after six months the neurologist felt confident diagnosing Lacy with multiple sclerosis.

I went on sabbatical, spending my time reading every piece of literature there was on MS. Lacy tried to take it in stride, but when Temple took away her scholarship, she crumbled. She went into a fit of depression, which easily could have been a side effect of any of the many drugs—Prednisone, Copaxone, Amantadine—she was taking daily. She quit school and spent her days on the couch. I took care of her, cooked her healthy meals, washed her clothes, and cleaned her room. From what I’d read, exercising was perhaps the most vital instrument against the disease and I tried everything in my power to get her to go for a run, or a swim (she scoffed in my face every time I mentioned swimming), throw the football, anything really. But she wasn’t having it. After six months of watching her wallow and pack on twenty pounds, I told her that I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t just watch her give up on life.

So I went back to work.

The FBI wanted me to assist a task force in Maine. A brother had mutilated his pregnant sister then went on a killing spree. It would be the first time I had left my sister since she was diagnosed. A month earlier, I’d read a post on an MS blog from a woman whose son had been diagnosed and like Lacy, had become couch-ridden. She couldn’t get him out of the house; she could barely get him to wipe his own ass. So one day she came home with a puppy. The kid was instantly revitalized, playing with the puppy, taking it outside for walks and within a couple
weeks he was back to his old self.

I don’t know why I bought her a pug. If I could go back and do it all over again, I would have gotten a Saint Bernard. As I was walking out the door, headed to the airport, I tossed the little guy on her chest—then, no bigger than a hamster—and said, “When I get back, you better be off this fucking couch.”

But, I never made it back.

I was in Maine for close to month, following Tristan Grayer’s dead body cookie crumbs, when I was shot twice and took a fifty-foot plummet into the Atlantic Ocean. When I was released from the hospital, I decided I wanted to stay in Maine. I had fallen for one of the members of our task force, the medical examiner Dr. Caitlin Dodds, and I thought a change of scenery would be good for Lacy.

Lacy and Baxter joined me in a large house on the Penobscot Bay and suddenly the shoe was on the other foot. The combination of her love for her new dog—which happened to have a neurological disorder of his own,
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
—and having to take care of me, propelled her out of her funk. The day she told me that she had decided to tackle this MS thing head on, that it wouldn’t steal another second of her life, I cried.

She was a new woman. She got back into shape, she started to paint again, and she got involved in MS fundraising. Meanwhile, I mended my body and took a position teaching a criminology class at the local university.

Lacy met a guy—one of my students actually (and now her fiancee)—and her paintings, which were hanging in a couple local coffee shops, had started to garner much due praise. She was even slated for a gallery opening. But then the lights went off. As in, her eyesight. Temporary blindness is an uncommon flare-up, but not unprecedented. I half expected Lacy to revert back to her lifeless self, but it didn’t slow her down a bit. She had her boyfriend or me take her places, she still painted, still swam each morning.

It was then that I realized my sister was tougher than me.

But sadly, MS wouldn’t be her biggest test. The serial killer everyone thought dead—except me of course—had come back for an encore presentation. And this time he was gunning for me personally. Women close to me started to die. I won’t go into details. I can’t. It hurts too much.

Lacy was kidnapped. Duct taped, thrown on a boat, destined to become a science project once she reached the island her killer was taking her to. You can read about the story if you want, there are a couple books out there detailing the entire saga, but what’s important is that Lacy escaped. Jumped off the boat and swam nearly a mile and a half to an island.

Compared to what Lacy had been through the last ten years, a couple of pirates were nothing. I was proud of her for her courage, but I was worried it was going to cost her nine millimeters of lead.

I said, “I’m not telling you to roll over for these dickheads, just don’t paint a target on your forehead.”

Gilroy turned around and stared at Lacy. Then he turned to me and said, “You’d better tighten the leash on her before she gets us all killed.”

Lacy cocked her head to the side and said, “Excuse me? Did you just say leash?”

“Yes. You need to be trained better.”

“First, I am not some dog you keep on a leash, you pig. And two, I was trying to help, and God knows you’re too wrapped up in yourself to think of anyone else and even if you weren’t such a prick, you’re too big of a pussy to say anything.”

Gilroy leaned back. Trinity turned and gave Lacy a quick glance. I thought I saw a touch of a smirk hiding somewhere under her heavy lipstick.

“You better watch your mouth young lady. You have no idea who you’re talking to.”

“Sure I do. You’re Gilroy Andrews. Big ego. Little dick.”

Gilroy flushed. He glared at her and said, “You just make sure you don’t do anything stupid.”

I’d been watching patiently, waiting for him to step over the line, whereby, I would slam my fist into his face. But, Lacy didn’t need my help. And I didn’t want to dent my knuckles on his huge incisors.

Gilroy turned, muttered something under his breath, and faced forward.

Lacy leaned towards me and said, “Can you believe that jerk?”

I shrugged and said, “He comes from a broken home.”

She laughed.

“Try not to get in any fights while I’m gone.”

“Gone? Where are you going?” she asked.

“To the bathroom.”

She looked at the pirates and said, “You think that’s a good idea?”

“There’s only one way to find out.”

WHITE HOUSE MESS

2:30
p.m.

Paul Garret sat down with his Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper and a heaping bowl of Frosted Flakes. The White House Mess never ceased to remind him of a college cafeteria. At 39, he should have started eating healthier, he couldn’t go ten seconds without hearing about changing metabolisms or South Beach this or South Beach that. The truth of the matter was he weighed the same as he had his junior year of high school, 157 pounds. And he would die weighing 157 pounds.

He took a long swig of the soda—really his only vice apart from the occasional glass of scotch—and poured half the glass of milk over his cereal. He was still having trouble digesting the two-hour Situation Room meeting. An aging African civil rights activist living in exile and a
presumed
dead
African warlord take over a cruise ship and demand medical aid.

But, the more he thought about, the less surprised he was.

As Press Secretary, he was familiar with any number of World Health issues. For the past ten years, the World Health budget had been nearly a billion dollars—merely a sliver of the annual budget. And he knew the majority of the countries in the UN had similar programs, although not as heavily funded as the United States. It never ceased to amaze him how the United States had to be best at everything, from pollution to charity. What most people didn’t know is that the United States borrowed most of this money from other countries. He once again thought of the national deficit, and shook his head. In the five years he had been in the White House, the last year as Press Secretary, the deficit had continued to skyrocket with no ceiling in sight.

Anyhow, those were topics for another day.

Paul finished off his cereal, moved the bowl aside and picked up the stack of pages a White House intern had delivered to him ten minutes earlier. The top page was a color photograph of a cruise ship. It was on the water with hundreds of people scattered about the large vessel. Near the front, under a thick blue line running the length of the ship, stenciled in the same blue, was “Afrikaans.”

The
Oceanic Afrikaans
had eight decks. Garret thought back to the cruise his wife and two small boys had taken only a year earlier. A five-day Disney Cruise on the Caribbean. There had been over three thousand passengers on the ship and something like 22 decks. If Garret hadn’t known he was on the water, he never would have suspected it. The cruise had been enjoyable, mostly because his boys had had so much fun playing with Mickey and Goofy and doing all the Disney stuff, but Garret had been disappointed by the food, as well as the atmosphere, and after five days he had been happy the cruise was over.

Garret flipped the page. There was a small blurb downloaded from
cruises.com
.

Five stars. Intimate in scale, but grandly outfitted, the
Oceanic Afrikaans
hosts no more than 208 pampered guests. (Though most passengers are American and British, guests from Germany, Switzerland, Australia, and elsewhere sometimes spice up the mix.) Strictly upper-crust, the
Afrikaans
caters to guests who are well mannered and prefer their fellow vacationers to be the same. Generally, they aren't into pool games and deck parties, preferring a good book and cocktail chatter over champagne and caviar, or a taste of the line's special complimentary goodies, such as free massages on deck and soothing eucalyptus-oil baths drawn in suites upon request. The dining can rival the finest on the continent, most notably, Pretoria, the Michelin two-star restaurant on Deck 2. An extremely high passenger/crew ratio and a high standard of training ensure that service is both personal and top-notch. Staff members greet you by name from the moment you check in, and your wish is their command.