Fuzzy Navel

“It’s not even worth a Band-Aid, McGlade.”

“You got a mirror?”

I hand him the tweezing mirror from the vanity. He holds it on an angle and looks.

“We cut my shirt off for this? I paid sixty bucks for that shirt.”

I sigh, stand up. Mom, however, stares down at Harry with a strange look on her face.

“Mom, you all right?”

“Harry… McGlade is your last name, right?”

“Yeah. Harrison Harold McGlade. I see you’re loving my chest hair. The ladies think it’s cute. I go into bars, ask them if they want a fuzzy navel. Then I lift up my shirt and jiggle. If it gets a laugh, I ask them if they’d like something stiffer.”

Mom seems transfixed.

“Is that a birthmark on your chest?”

“Port-wine stain. Looks like a fish, doesn’t it?”

Harry uses his fingers to part the gray, giving us a better view. His birthmark is several inches long, and indeed shaped like a fish, with an ovalish body and a triangle-like tail.

“Yes, it does,” Mom says. “It’s very distinctive. How old are you? Forty-nine?”

“Yeah. But the doctor says I have the body of a thirty-year-old, if the thirty-year-old was really unhealthy and close to death.”

I don’t like where this is going. My mother seems way too interested in Harry. “Mom?”

She ignores me. “Were you born in March?”

Harry’s eyes narrow. “On the twenty-ninth. How did you know that?”

Mom’s knees begin to shake, and I put my arm around her for support.

“Mom? What’s wrong?”

“One last thing,” Mom says to Harry. “Were you adopted?”

Oh my God, no. A thousand times no.

Mom had told me that before she met my father, she had a baby out of wedlock. A baby boy. With a sailor she had a one-night stand with when she was a teenager. When I became a cop, I’d tried to track my half brother down, tickled that I had a sibling out there. But I never thought that my brother could be someone like…

“No,” Harry says.

Thank Christ.

“I was raised by the state,” he continues. “In an orphanage.”

Mom’s jaw hangs limp. So does mine. Harry puts two and two together and says, “Are you saying that I might be your son?”

Mom nods.

Harry grins, his smile as wide as a canoe.

“Mom! Sis! It’s so good to be home!”

9:28 P.M.

JACK

IF KARMA IS REAL, I must have done something unspeakable in a previous life.

“This has to be some kind of mistake,” I say to my mother. I may have actually been pleading a little. “He doesn’t look anything like you.”

“He looks like his father.”

Harry makes puppy dog eyes and says, “Mom? Tell me about Dad.”

I don’t have time for this. Latham is bleeding and we’re surrounded by snipers. I need to kill the lights and grab the gun.

I poke my head into the hallway, on the opposite side of the fridge. While FMJs can shoot through it, the snipers can’t see through it. That means I can run to the laundry room and hit the circuit breaker without being spotted.

“He was a sailor,” Mom says. “I never knew his last name.”

“I’m going for the fuse box,” I say.

“What was his first name, Mom?”

Mom pats Harry on the head. “His name was Ralph.” She used the same soothing voice on me when I was younger and sick with the flu. “You have his eyes.”

“I’m going now,” I a

“Did you love him?” Harry ask.

Mom says, “For about three hours.”

“Wow,” Harry says. “Three hours.”

“Latham!” I call out to my fiancé. “I’m going for the circuit breaker!”

I hoped for a be careful. Instead I got: “Is that creepy private eye really your brother?”

I rub my eyes.

“Ralph had a lot of body hair too,” Mom says. “All over.”

That’s my cue. I duck low, suck in a breath, then hustle out the door and down the rest of the hallway, skidding into the laundry room. No one shoots me. The circuit breaker is on the wall, next to the dryer. I hook a finger through the metal ring on the door and tug. It’s stubborn, and doesn’t want to open. The panel isn’t broken, it has a strong spring inside that makes sure it’s always closed. I pull really hard, my finger aching, and then it finally gives. I squint at the rows of breakers, and press the large black button that reads MAIN .

The house goes dark, and the panel door slams back into place. I don’t hesitate, scrambling back into the hall, using memory and feel to find my bedroom. I take four steps inside before bumping into the bed. Then I spread my hands out over the top, seeking the ammo bag. My fingers brush the carrying strap, and I jerk the bag to me. I work the zipper, stick my hand inside, and yank out my competition pistol, a Kimber Eclipse II.45 ACP. I flip the safety and jack a round into the chamber. I feel around for extra clips, find three. They’re all empty. Bullets have been on my shopping list for a while.

There’s also a nylon holster in the bag. I shrug that onto my shoulder, the straps getting twisted in the dark but still doing the job.

Then I head for the window to sneak outside and round up the bad guys.

9:31 P.M.

PESSOLANO

WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT in the house, Pessolano takes the Leupold optics off the quick-release mount, puts it back into his bag, and attaches a Gen 3 starlight scope to the rifle.

Night vision works by using an image intensifier with a photoelectric effect to amplify ambient light. At least, that’s what the instruction manual says. Pessolano doesn’t understand it, but he knows that it turns images from pitch-black into a phosphorescent green.

He peers through the scope, and there, silhouetted at the bedroom window, is the female cop. He has one remaining Lapua FMJ round left, so he aims carefully, trying to adjust for the wind that has picked up.

BANG!

He sees the bullet strike the cop in the head, sees her jerk back, and smiles as she collapses.

“Bull’s-eye,” Pessolano says to himself.

This is so much more rewarding than working at a video store.

9:34 P.M.

MARY

MARY STRENG IS STILL TRYING to wrap her mind around the possibility that this strange man in her bathroom might actually be her son.

Almost fifty years have passed since she gave up her infant boy. She doesn’t remember his exact birthday, only that it was before Easter, and bitterly cold. Labor had been lonely, frightening, miserable, the pain of childbirth exacerbated by the knowledge that she wasn’t going to keep her baby. She’d gotten pregnant at eighteen years old, still in high school. Dropped out when she began to show. Left home soon after that, never telling her parents the reason why, preferring their protestations to their judgments. Got a job at a deli in another part of town. Lived in a fugue for a few months, then moved back home and finished school when it was all over.

She used to fantasize that someone adopted her son. Someone rich and caring, who spoiled him with extravagant gifts. A year later she met her future husband and got on with her life. Mary still thought of her son sometimes, on cold days in March, but she managed to forgive herself.

Hearing that Harry had been raised by the state, and not by Mary’s imaginary perfect family, reopened a long-sealed box of regret. She wants to ask him about his life. If he’s happy. If his childhood was okay. If he hates her.

Then she hears the shot, hears the thump of her daughter hitting the floor, and all thoughts of her past flit away.