The night before, he’d helped his friend, Harry White, celebrate his eightieth birthday. The octogenarian was sleeping off the night’s excesses on a downstairs couch. Mercer hadn’t indulged nearly as much as Harry, so his head felt reasonably clear, but this morning his mind was troubled. He wanted to stay relaxed, but the muscles in his legs and back began to tense, his fists tightening with unreleased energy. He grunted and rolled out of bed.
Mercer was a mining engineer and consultant who had reached the pinnacle of his profession. Within the hard-rock mining industry, his capabilities were almost legendary. A recent article in a trade publication credited him with saving more than four hundred lives following mining disasters and in the next paragraph detailed the more than three billion dollars in mineral finds he’d made for various mining concerns all over the globe. His fees had made him a wealthy man, and maybe that was part of his problem. He’d become too comfortable.
The thrill of making a new find or the adrenaline rush of delving into the earth to pull out trapped men had begun to pale. Since his struggle against Ivan Kerikov and his ecoterrorist allies in Alaska last October, Mercer was having a hard time returning to his normal life. He felt a hollowness that just wouldn’t go away. He wanted to believe he hadn’t become addicted to that kind of mortal danger, but it was difficult to convince himself. Pitting his reputation against the normal hazards of his career didn’t seem to be enough anymore.
His street was lined with identical three-story town-houses, close enough to the city center to be convenient but far enough away to remain quiet. Unlike the others, Mercer lived in his alone and had done extensive remodeling to turn it into his home. The lion’s share of his income went into its mortgage. The front quarter of the building was open from floor to roof with his bedroom overlooking the atrium. An antique spiral staircase connected the levels. He dressed quickly and spun down to retrieve the morning paper from the front step.
The second floor had two small guest rooms and a balconied library with a view of the tiled mezzanine. It also contained what had become Mercer’s living room, a reproduction of an English gentleman’s club that he and his friends affectionately called The Bar. It had two sectional leather couches, several matching chairs, a television, and a large ornate mahogany bar fronted by six dark cane stools. The lump under a blanket on one of the couches was Harry. Behind the bar was a circa 1950s lock-lever refrigerator and shelving for enough liquor to shame most commercial drinking establishments. The automatic coffee maker on the back bar had already brewed a barely potable sludge.
Seated with his coffee and paper, Mercer tried to read through the day’s fare. The Post led with another story about the fatal bombing at Jerusalem’s Western Wall six weeks ago. Defense Minister Chaim Levine, a hard-line candidate for the upcoming elections, said that if he were leading the country, such attacks would never happen, and if they did, the investigation would take days, not weeks. He was calling for a draconian crackdown on all Palestinians and a suspension of the latest peace talks. Mercer read that another victim had died in the hospital, bringing the death toll to one hundred and sixty-seven. The destabilized Middle East held his attention for only a couple of paragraphs, and he slid the rest of the paper out of reach.
Harry still snored from the couch. His rattling breathing sounded like the explosive grunts of some large animal. He gave a startled snort, and then he was awake, yawning broadly.
Mercer smiled. “Good morning. How do you feel on the first day of the rest of your life?”
“Jesus Christ,” Harry rasped “What time is it?”
Mercer looked at his watch. “Six-thirty.”
“I liked it better when you and Aggie were together. You never came downstairs until after nine.” Harry immediately recognized his gaffe. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry. That was a rotten thing to say.”
Aggie Johnston had been gone for four months, and Mercer still felt the ache of her absence. She had been in Alaska with him and had gone through even more than he had. The relationship that followed had been rocky even at its best. Though she came from a wealthy family who controlled a multinational oil company, she was an ardent environmentalist, and the attraction she and Mercer shared was not strong enough to overcome their different views of his profession. He had not wanted it to end, but he couldn’t stand the arguments either. All he remembered of the day of their breakup was walking around Washington for nearly ten hours in a total fog, his mind unable to accept what had happened even if the decision had been his.
For the first time in over a decade, since the death of his fiancée, Tory Wilkes, Mercer had let someone into his life only to lose her again. Now, whenever he looked at a woman, he wouldn’t allow himself to feel anything. He lived like a monk, and the pain made it easy to ignore the sexual side of his nature. On the rare occasion an attractive woman entered Tiny’s, the neighborhood bar he and Harry frequented, his conflicting emotions would leave him sullen and withdrawn.
“Don’t worry about it.” Mercer tried to smile.
Harry levered himself up from the couch and took a moment to roll up his pant leg to strap on his prosthetic limb. He’d lost his leg so long ago, his walk to the bar was natural and without any trace of a limp.
Mercer had met Harry the night he moved into the renovated townhouse. He had gone to Tiny’s as a distraction from the monotony of unpacking while Harry seemed to live in the seedy establishment. Harry was more than twice Mercer’s age, but both enjoyed a recluse’s solitude and a bachelor’s aversion to sobriety. They never analyzed the deep friendship that had grown since then, but others who knew them realized that, in each other, they sought the family neither had. Childless, Harry needed to know that there would be someone who remembered him after he was gone. Mercer wanted the stabilizing force that his friend represented, a responsibility and loyalty to someone other than himself. In many ways, one was an older version of the other, yet they complemented as well. Harry acted as a temper to Mercer and Mercer’s vitality reminded the octogenarian what his life had once been. And along the way, they had learned to rely on each other, an act alien to both men. What had started casually had solidified into a bond stronger than any father and son’s, for this was an association of choice.
Mercer made a fresh pot of coffee, one not brewed to his masochistic tastes, while Harry smoked through his first of forty daily cigarettes. Harry was quieter than normal, and Mercer sensed something was bothering him. “You okay?”
“Ah, it’s nothing.” While time may have thinned his frame so that his hands and feet seemed oversized and folds of skin hung from his face, Harry’s voice still grated like a rusty machine tool. “How long have we known each other?”
“Going on seven years now. Why?”
“I made the mistake of watching this news show a couple days ago. They had a segment about aging.”
“Oh shit.”
“Oh shit is right,” Harry replied. “Do you know that statistically I’ve been dead for nearly fifteen years? According to the experts, I have a more dangerous lifestyle than an L.A. gang member. I smoke two packs a day, down a couple bottles of booze a week, and the last time I got any exercise was World War Two.”
Mercer grinned. “Don’t worry about it. You’re the other end of the spectrum, that’s all. You make up for the health-nut Wall Street types who drop dead at forty. When was the last time you were sick?”