Mattie giggled. “She’s been on for the whole time,” she said. “You’re my bestie, Dad.”
Quinn heard a faint click on the line.
“You still there, sweetie?”
“She hung up.” It was Kim’s voice, quiet, brooding like a glowing ember in a steady breeze.
Unable to stand the nights of sleepless worry, she’d told him to hit the road not long after he returned from his first deployment with OSI. She still loved him, she’d said, still wanted to keep in touch, but as long as he carried a gun and put himself in harm’s way for a living, she couldn’t be married to him. As much as he loved her, as much as he wanted to quit and work as a greengrocer or a postman, Quinn knew he’d die if he did anything else.
When he’d given the broken thirteenth-century Japanese dagger Yawaraka-Te back to Miyagi, she’d simply said: “It broke doing what it was made to do — and so it is with you Quinn-san. The blade must cut, even at its own peril.”
Quinn waited for Kim to say something else, anything. She didn’t.
“How are you doing?” he said, craving a few more words in spite of himself.
“We’re fine,” she said. “My mom’s retiring this year so that will help out with carting Mattie around to orchestra practice and indoor soccer and everything else.”
“I don’t remember being that busy when I was seven,” Quinn said, a weak attempt at conversation.
“You were never seven,” Kim said. “Your dad once told me you popped out already grown up and ready to pick a fight with the doctor for putting your mom in such an unladylike position.”
Quinn sighed. “Guess you heard I can’t be there till later,” he said, sounding more sheepish than he would have liked. It didn’t suit him.
“I heard,” Kim said.
“I’m really sorry,” Quinn went on. The conversation was beginning to make his head hurt. “If it wasn’t extremely important, I’d blow it off.”
“I know where we rank, Jericho,” Kim said, her voice quieter now, but just as acid.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know,” she said. “But I gotta tell you, I don’t deserve to worry myself to death all the time and Mattie doesn’t deserve to grow up with a part-time father.”
“Okay,” Quinn said. “I am sorry, though. Someday I’ll be able to explain.”
Kim sniffed. “Seriously, Jer,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. To tell you the truth, I stopped putting circles around important dates on my calendar long before we ever got divorced.”
CHAPTER 10
Professor Matthew Pollard leaned against the lectern with both hands and tried to identify the new couple sitting at the back of the amphitheater classroom. At six-four he was too tall for the lectern, causing him to stoop.
Given his own way, he would have been wearing an unbleached hemp shirt and a pair of surf shorts, but his wife — not to mention the dean of the College of Philosophy — insisted he dress like a professor. Wavy black hair was pulled back in a short stub of a ponytail. His neatly trimmed beard would have made him look “bad” if not for his easy grin and the slightly too-large academic corduroy jacket complete with suede elbow patches.
He flipped through a notebook, pretending to look at it while he glanced up at the two strangers.
They weren’t his students. Pollard knew each of the fifty-three moldable freshman minds in his ethics class by face if not by name. The man was in his mid-twenties, blond and shaggy. He was likely a local, wearing blue jeans and a faded Carhartt denim jacket — typical dress for winter in northern Idaho. The woman wore tight jeans and a fashionable black turtleneck, leaning forward, plump and partridge-like, on the back row of the small auditorium. She held a green jacket across her lap and looked toward Pollard from beneath a set of heavy black bangs. Her head tilted as if she wanted to give the impression of paying attention, but the contours of her bronze face were slack with boredom. She reminded him of someone he’d known long ago, someone from a time that he did his best to forget.
This particular class — he called it Who Are the Monsters? — was known for its heated, gloves-off debate. But the strangers didn’t seem the least bit interested in the subject matter of his class. They appeared to be focused solely on him, studying him like an insect under a magnifying glass. He tried to calm his racing heart. He was an ethics teacher now, nothing more.
A restless buzz ran through the students and he pushed the thoughts away.
“… going to give us our final today, Professor Pollard?” A tall girl slouching on the front row of seats rescued him. Dressed in a black knee-length canvas jacket festooned with lengths of bicycle chain, she asked the question the rest of the class was dying to have answered.
Her name was Katherine, but she preferred the name Crash. Of the students who showed up regularly, only this one seemed to grasp even a tiny shred of his message. Three-inch platform boots with gaudy chrome buckles, and a mop of coal-colored bangs that gave her the appearance of a baby face Hitler, belied her true intelligence. Pollard thought she might be a pretty girl if not for the fact she was running from any and all aspects of life she thought could be considered normal. A pierced tongue and the tattoo of a fishhook at the corner of her heavily rouged lips told the world she flowed an entirely different direction than the mainstream.
“As a matter of fact I am.” Pollard nodded, trying not to focus on the strangers in the back. “Remember our very first assignment?”
“Sure.” Crash shrugged, but sat up straighter as she always did once they started a discussion. “You had us define evil.”
“Okay, then,” Pollard said, beginning to pace back and forth on the raised platform behind the lectern. “We’ve read, discussed, debated, written papers… and read some more. Some of you believe you can now define evil. So now, a semester later, let’s drill down.”
He looked directly at Crash’s eyes. Despite her counterculture costume, they sparkled with inquisitive brightness. “Is it ever right to do something evil in order to achieve an end state that is good?”
Crash rolled her big eyes and tossed her pen on the desk. “Governments use that excuse all the—”
“Save it.” Pollard raised an open palm to shush her. “That’s your final. Give me between fifteen hundred and two thousand words on whether or not evil actions can be used for good purpose. Quote three sources from your reading this semester.” He smiled. “Only one of them can be me and you may not use Chuck Norris as a source.”
A boy with a buzz cut leaning against the side wall raised his hand. “Professor, how many pages does it have to be?”
Pollard sighed. “Go for word count, Royce. If you give me something that’s twenty pages long and huge font, I’ll move you into my own personal ‘evil’ category. Same goes for you overachievers who use those tiny, unreadable fonts so you can cram more in to a few pages. That, my friends is the pure epitome of evil. E-mail your papers to me by next Wednesday.”
The woman in the back stood and motioned for the man in the Carhartt jacket to do the same. There was no doubt that it was she who was in charge. She flicked her bangs, and made momentary eye contact with Pollard, as if she wanted him to remember her, then walked out with her apparent lackey close on her heels.
“Okay.” Pollard rubbed his beard, trying to get the image of the dark woman out of his head. “I’m expecting great things here… ”
He watched Crash as she gathered her books and shoved them in a backpack with a gaudy red anarchy symbol painted on the back. For all her posturing against “the man,” for all her outward trappings of rebellion, Pollard could see the goodness and intensity in her eyes. She’d grow out of her funk and become a doctor or a lawyer or some other high-powered professional. She was that smart and that good.