Daredevil's Run

And he’d be willing to bet she’d deny it with her last breath.

He looked at his watch and rose, smiling apologetically. “Wow, look at the time. I’ve taken up more of yours than I intended to. I’d figured on being halfway to L.A. by now.”

“You’d have hit rush hour traffic,” Alex said stiffly. “Probably better this way.”

“Yeah, maybe. Well—” He held out his hand. “I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.”

“No problem,” she said as she took his hand and shook it—a quick, hard grip.

“It’s been a big help. I think I understand a little better what I’m dealing with now.”

“Glad one of us does.” She said it with a smile, but her voice had the funny little rasp to it that told him she was keeping a tight grip on emotions she didn’t intend to share.

They exchanged the usual goodbyes and thank-yous and Cory left the offices of Penny Tours feeling lighter of heart and of mind than when he’d arrived, for reasons he couldn’t quite explain.

After Matt’s brother had gone, Alex made her way to her desk and lowered herself carefully into the chair he’d just vacated. She felt shaky and weak in the knees—a fact that both frustrated and infuriated her.

“Damn you, Matt,” she said aloud.

As if she’d heard the name, or—which was more likely, since she was practically deaf—sensed something, the dog Annie came padding across the room to thrust her white muzzle under Alex’s hand. After receiving her expected ear fondle and neck hug, the old Lab collapsed with a groan at Alex’s feet and went instantly back to sleep.

That was where they both were some time later when Eve returned from the Rafting Center.

She opened the back door a crack and peeked through it, then, seeing Alex was alone, came to claim the chair at the empty desk next to hers. She slouched into it and spun it around with a noisy creak to face Alex.

“Hey,” she said, with a poorly suppressed grin. “Your visitor take off?”

“Yeah,” Alex said, rousing herself. “So, how’d it go with the Las Colinas kids?”

“Great. Everybody had a ball, as usual.” The grin blossomed. “Bobby got dunked.”

“No way.”

“Oh yeah, way. Twice, actually—he’d just managed to climb back in the boat when he went over again. The kids loved it. Randy got some great footage.”

“Nice.” Alex produced a grin in return, though her heart wasn’t in it.

In the silence that followed, Eve rotated her chair back and forth with that annoying creaking sound, and finally said, “So, the dude with the glasses. You said he’s Matt’s brother? Sure didn’t look like a cop.”

“Cop? Oh, no, no, different brother.” Alex waved a hand dismissively, hoping Eve would take the hint from that and leave it alone. The last thing she felt like doing was explaining Matt Callahan’s family to Eve. The last person she wanted to talk about in any way was Matt Callahan.

He was the last person she wanted to think about, too, and she knew she was going to do that whether she wanted to or not, as well.

“So, what did he want with you? I thought you and that guy were finished.”

Alex scrubbed her burning eyes with the hand she’d used to try to fend off the question. “We were—we are. It’s not—it’s nothing to do with me, actually. He just…had some questions about Matt. About the accident, and…stuff like that.”

“That’s kind of weird, isn’t it? Why ask you? Why not just ask his brother?”

“It’s not that simple. He doesn’t really know Matt. He hasn’t seen him since they were little kids. Look, it’s a long story, okay? And I don’t really feel like talking about it right now.”

And instantly she thought, Damn, why did you do that? You know Eve’s going to have her feelings hurt.

And yes, now she was looking like a kicked puppy. Which she really didn’t deserve.

“Sorry,” Alex said gruffly. “Hey, you know me. I just…really don’t want to talk about it. Okay? I’ll tell you all about it later, I promise.”

“Well, you better,” Eve said sternly, then grinned as she levered herself out of the chair. “Hey, the guides are getting together at The Corral to toast Bobby’s double dunking. You coming?”

“I…dunno. I have a killer headache and a bunch of paperwork to do here before I can call it a day. You go on. Maybe I’ll catch up with you later.”

“Okay.” Eve paused at the door to look back at her, head tilted. “Hey, Alex.”

“Yeah?”

“He’s not thinking about coming back, is he? Your ex? I mean, you’re not thinking about taking him back?”

Alex gave a short hard bark of a laugh. “Oh, hell no.”

“Well, good. Because the guy ran out on you, right? I mean, I remember how it was. It was pretty rough around here for a while.”

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Alex said with a flip of her hand, as if she were swatting at a fly. “Matt Callahan and I are ancient history.”

Eve hesitated, then nodded. She gave the door frame a slap. “Okay. See you later. I’ll save you a cold one.”

For a few minutes after she’d gone, Alex sat without moving. Then, slowly, she swiveled to the desk and reached for the phone. Picked it up. Held it for a long time, then put it back in its cradle without dialing the number she still remembered, even after five years.

Just as she remembered the words they’d spoken to each other then. Words she didn’t want to remember. Words that made her cringe to remember.

“Ah, jeez, Matt. Don’t do this.”

“Do what? It’s not like I’m asking you to run off and get married tomorrow. Just talk about it. Why’s that so hard? We’ve been doing this—whatever it is we’re doing—for five years. Don’t you think it’s about time?”

“Doing what? What’ve we been doing? Seems to me we’ve been fighting for five years! So now you want to get married?”

“Yeah, and what is it we fight about? I’ll tell you what we fight about—we start to get close, and you get scared, so you do something to screw it up.”

“I don’t! That’s bull—”

“Sure you do. Every damn time things start to get really good for us. Just because your mother messed up your head—”

“Don’t you dare blame my mother for this!”

“Why not? She’s managed to convince you every man’s a jerk like your father, leaving her cold when he found out she was pregnant. Well, I’m not your father, okay? I’m not a jerk. We’ve been working together, sleeping together—hell, we’ve been best friends—for five years, you should know that by now. We’ve got a good thing going. Or it could be good, if you’d quit trying to ruin it. It’s no big secret how I feel about you, I tell you often enough. So, now I’m asking you.” He paused to give her a hard, burning look. “Do you love me?”

Do I love you? The question was a white-hot fire burning inside her head. Somewhere inside the fire was the answer she feared even more than she feared losing Matt. The answer she couldn’t bring herself to grab hold of or even look at, as if, like some mythical curse it would sear her eyes blind, or turn her to stone.

“It’s…complicated,” she mumbled, her face stiff with pain.

“I don’t see what’s so complicated about it. You either do, or you don’t.”

She’d turned away, then. But she remembered Matt’s face…tight-lipped, stubborn as only he could be. And his hands…their movements jerky and hurried as he packed his climbing gear.

Cory heard the ruckus before he saw it, as soon as he entered the foyer of the rec center. He was able to follow the sounds of mayhem to their source, the indoor basketball arena, where, from an open doorway, the noise pulsed and billowed like a heavy curtain in a high wind. He braced himself and paused there to assess the likelihood that carnage either had already ensued within or was about to. He’d been in battle zones, live ammo firefights less noisy and less violent.

What he saw inside that huge room confirmed it: people here were trying to kill each other.

What it reminded him of was an epic movie battle scene set in medieval times. War cries and shrieks of pain and rage echoing above the thunder of horses’ hooves and the clash of steel swords on armor plating and chain mail. Except these battle chargers were made of titanium, not flesh and bone, and carried their riders on wheels instead of hooves.

Out on the gleaming honey-gold hardwood floor, four wheelchairs were engaged in a no-holds-barred duel for possession of what appeared to be a regulationsize volleyball. Now the ball rose above the fray in a tall arc, to be plucked from the air by a long brown arm and tucked between drawn-up knees and leaning chest. The four chairs swiveled, drew apart amid cries of “Here here here!” and “Get ‘im, get the—” and “No you ain’t, mother—” then smashed together again more violently than before.

Cory’s fascination carried him into the room, where he found a spot in the shadow of a bank of bleacher seats from which to watch the mayhem. Now that he could see it more clearly, the contest on the court seemed less like a battle between medieval knights and more like a grudge match being settled via amusement park bumper cars—though the canted wheels on the low-slung chairs did resemble warriors’ shields, even down to the dents and dings. The occupants of the wheelchairs—four young males of assorted ethnicities—all wore expressions of murderous intent, but the chairs moved clumsily, slowly, and their clashes produced more noise than effect.

Again the white ball arced into the air, to be retrieved by a lanky black kid wearing a Dodgers baseball cap—backward, of course. After tucking the ball into his lap, the kid hunched protectively over it and slapped at the wheels of his chair with hands wearing gloves with the fingers cut off, pumping as hard as he could for the far end of the court. The other three chairs massed in frantic pursuit. One, manned by a stocky boy of an indeterminate racial mix, seemed to be angling to cut off the possessor of the ball, before it was smashed viciously from the side by another pursuer. Over they went, toppling forward almost in slow motion, chair and occupant together, spilling the latter facedown onto the court. Above him, the chair’s wheels spun ineffectively, like the futilely waving appendages of a half-squashed beetle.

Cory lunged forward and was about to dash onto the court to render assistance when his arm was caught and held in a grip of incredible strength.

“Leave him be. They got him down there, they’ll get him up.”

The reflexive jerk of his head toward the speaker was off target by a couple of feet. Adjusting his gaze downward, he felt a jolt of recognition that made his breath catch, though the face was one he’d seen only as a very small child’s. It only reminded him of one he’d last seen nearly thirty years before, and since then only in his dreams.

You have our mother’s eyes.

He didn’t say that aloud but smiled wryly at the broad-shouldered young man beside him and nodded toward the knot of wheelchairs now gathering around the fallen one out on the court. “You sure they won’t just kill him? They sure seemed to be trying to a minute ago.”

“Nah—he’s safe. He’s not who they’re mad at.” The young man reached across his body and the wirerimmed wheel of his chair to offer his cropped-gloved hand. “Hi, I’m Matt.”

Cory put his hand in the warm, hard grip and felt emotions expand and shiver inside his chest. He fought to keep them out of his voice as he replied, “I’m Cory. We spoke on the phone. I’m your—” He had to grab for a breath anyway.

So Matt finished it for him. “My Guardian Angel. My bro. Yeah, I know.”

Chapter 2

He’d seen him come in, of course he had.

He’d thought he was prepared for this. Should have been. Hell, he’d talked to the guy on the phone two or three times since the day Wade had called him from the hospital to tell him the Angel he’d always thought was a figment of his childhood imagination was real.

“You look like Wade,” he said, feeling like he needed to unclog his throat. “A little bit—around the eyes.”

“Well, we both got the blue ones, I guess.”

This brother’s eyes were darker than Wade’s, Matt noticed. And looked like they’d seen a whole lot more of what was bad in the world. Which was saying something, considering Wade was a homicide cop.

“Yeah? Whose did I get?”

“Mom’s. You got Mom’s eyes.”

About then, Matt realized he was still holding his brother’s hand, and evidently it occurred to Cory about the same time. There was a mutual rush of breath, and he got his arms up about the same time Cory’s arms came around him.

Matt had gotten over being shy about showing emotions five years ago, so he shouldn’t be ashamed to be tearing up now. And he wasn’t.

He could hear some hoots and whistles coming from the court, though, so after some throat-clearings and coughs and a backslap or two, he and Cory let go of each other. Dee-Jon, Frankie and Ray had gotten Vincent picked up off the floor, and all four were churning across the floor toward them, along with Dog and Wayans in their regular chairs, moving in from the far sidelines.

“Woo hoo, look at Teach, I think he got him a girlfriend!”

“Hey, Teach, I didn’t know you was—”

“Yo, Teach, who the ugly bi—”

At which point Matt held up his hand and put on his fierce-coach look and hollered, “Whoa, guys—I won’t have any of that trash talk about my brother.”

By this time he and Cory were surrounded, and the exclamations came at him from all sides.

“Brother!”

“He yo brothah?”

“Hey, you told us your bro was a cop. He don’t look like no cop.”

“Yeah, he look like a wuss.”

Matt glanced up at Cory to see how he was taking this, but Cory was grinning, so he did, too. “Nah, this is my other brother. He’s a reporter.”

“You got a othah brothah? How come you never—”

“Reporter—like on CNN?”

“How come I never seen you on TV?”

“Yeah, Dee-Jon, like you watch the news.”

Cory waited for the chorus to die down, then said, “I’m the other kind of reporter. A journalist—you know, a writer.”

The kids didn’t have too much to say about that. The chairs rocked and swiveled a little bit, and some heads nodded. Shoulders shrugged.

“Huh. A writer…”

“A writer—okay, that’s cool.”

“He’s been in more war zones than you guys have,” Matt said, which got the kids going again.

Dee-Jon shot his chin up. “Yeah? You ever been shot?”

“I have, actually,” Cory said.

Obviously thrown a little bit by that, Dee-Jon hesitated, then said, “Yeah, well, I have, too. That’s what put me in this chair. I was just walkin’ down the street, doin’ ma’ thing, not botherin’ nobody, know what I’m sayin’? And this car comes cruisin’, and this dude starts in shootin’—like, eh-eh-eh-eh—an’ next thing I know I’m down on the sidewalk lookin’ up at the sky, and I don’t feel nothin’. Still don’t. But, hey, I can still satisfy my woman, don’t think I can’t.”

That brought a whole barrage of hoots and comments, most of them in the kind of language Matt had pretty much gotten used to and given up trying to ban entirely. He wasn’t sure about how his big brother was taking it, though.

But Cory hadn’t batted an eye, just started asking questions, asking the kids how they’d gotten hurt, what had happened to them that put them in the chairs. In about ten seconds he had them all pulled in close around him, and was listening while each one told his story, sometimes yelling over the other eager voices, sometimes almost whispering in a respectful silence.

Ray, describing how his dad liked to beat up on him and throw him up against a wall when he was crazy drunk, and one day missed the wall and threw him through a third-floor apartment window instead.

And Dog, admitting how he’d been living up to his nickname hotdogging it on his dirt bike out on the Mojave Desert, showing off for his friends the day he’d flipped over and broken his neck. “I was stupid,” Dog said with a shrug. “Now I gots to pay.”

Wayans wasn’t stupid, just unlucky, having been born with spina bifida. And Vincent hadn’t had much to do with the automobile accident that had injured him, either, just happened to be in the wrong intersection at the exact time when a corporate lawyer on his way home from entertaining a client at a Beverly Hills nightclub failed to notice the light was red.

Frankie tried to get away with his favorite story about getting attacked by a shark, but the others shouted him down, so he had to admit he’d gotten his injury skateboarding illegally in the Los Angeles River’s concrete bed.

Matt hung back and watched his brother, the way the kids responded to him, the way he listened, not with sugary sympathy, but with his complete attention, interest that was focused and genuine, and that made people want to open up and spill things they wouldn’t normally think about telling a stranger. He could see what had made his brother a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, although the whole war-correspondent thing was still hard for him to grasp. He’d been prepared to like this newfound long-lost brother—particularly since he’d had those dreamlike memories of him protecting him from the bad scary stuff of his nightmares. What he hadn’t expected to feel was respect. Maybe even awe.

“Hey, guys,” he said, breaking into the chorus of questions now being fired at Cory from all sides, “you want to know about my brother, go home and do an Internet search on Cory Pearson. That’s P-E-A-R-S-O-N for you semiliterates. Now get out of here so he and I can spend some time together. We’ve got a lot to catch up on. Go on, hit the showers.”

The response was predictable.

“Ah, man.”

“Hey, it’s early—how come we gotta quit now?”

“Yeah, I wanna hit something.”

“You can’t hit nothin’—you a wussy.”

“I’m ‘a show you wussy—you hit like a little girl.”

The noise drifted off across the court as the six kids headed for the locker room. Matt and Cory followed, slowly.

“I see what you meant when you said it’s not each other they’re mad at. That game they were playing—it’s what they call Murderball, right?”

“Officially,” Matt said, pausing to scoop up the forgotten volleyball, “it’s called quad rugby. It’s been an official sport of the Paralympics since…I think, Atlanta.”

Cory nodded. “I’ve done some reading up on it. The rules allow them to do just about anything they can to the chairs, right? But they can’t go after the occupant. Whoever thought up that game was a genius. Gives them a chance to beat up on the thing they hate most and can’t live without. One thing, though. Doesn’t the ‘quad’ stand for—”

“Quadriplegic—yeah, it does. And most people think the same thing, which is that quads can’t move their arms, but that’s not true. There’s a whole range of motion, depending on where the SCI occurred.”

Cory glanced at him. “But you’re not—”

“No—I’m a para-T-11, to be exact.” He grinned lopsidedly up at his brother. “That’s how we refer to ourselves. These kids are mostly paras, too. Dee-Jon is the only one who’s a quad, and he’d like to try out for the U.S. Paralympic team someday. No, when I started this program, it was supposed to be wheelchair basketball. But the kids had other ideas. They were so rough on the chairs, I finally quit fighting it and went looking for some sponsorship so we could get some rugby chairs. You might have noticed, they’re built a little differently than regular chairs, even the sports models.” He slapped the canted wheel of his own chair.

Cory grinned. “I noticed. Also noticed you’re short a couple.”

“We’re working on it. Those suckers cost a couple thousand apiece. We got lucky right off the bat, because the guy that hit Vincent got his law firm to cough up the cost of the first two. The U.S. Quad Rugby Team gave us one. And…you know, it’s taken us a couple of years to get the other three, but we’ll get there. Eventually.”

“I might be able to help with that,” Cory said, so offhandedly Matt wasn’t sure he’d heard him for a moment.

Then, when he was sure, he didn’t know what to say. He bounced the volleyball once and coughed and finally said, “That’d be cool, man. Really. Thanks.” He looked over at his brother, but Cory wasn’t looking at him. Carefully not looking at him. His profile gave nothing away.

“No problem.”

They’d reached the gymnasium door. Matt swiveled his chair about halfway to facing his brother and said, “I’ve got to supervise these guys, but I’ll be free in an hour or so, if you want to…uh, I don’t know. Like…hang out?”

Okay, he’d been hanging out with teenagers too long.

Cory grinned as if he’d had the same thought, and in the spirit of the moment, said, “Okay, cool. I’ll be here.”

Matt nodded and went wheeling into the hallway, leaving his brother standing in the doorway. Halfway to the locker rooms, from which he could hear the usual racket and hair-curling language as his team got themselves and each other into the showers, he paused and looked back. The doorway was empty.

So. He was alone. Nobody to see him when he let his head fall back and exhaled at the ceiling, not sure whether he felt like laughing or crying. What he wanted to do, he supposed, was both. So instead he smiled to himself, like a little kid with a new bike. Shook his head, whooshed out more air, scrubbed his hands over his face, smiled again. Sniffed, wiped his eyes and muttered some swear words he’d never let the kids hear him use.

After a few minutes, when he had himself under control again, he swiveled and wheeled himself on down to the locker room.

Matt slid a dripping medium-rare hamburger patty onto Cory’s plate and said, “Don’t be shy, bro. Dig in.”

“Looks great,” his brother said, helping himself to slices of tomato and onion.

But behind the rimless glasses, his eyes held shadows. He hadn’t said much, either, the whole time Matt had been fixing the burgers, just watched everything he did with that quiet focus that seemed to be his natural way. Now, with food on the table, and nobody with any particular reason to say anything, silence fell. It didn’t seem like a comfortable silence.

Matt doctored up his burger the way he liked it, took a bite, chewed and swallowed, then said, super-casually, “Hey, man. I hope you’re not blaming yourself, or anything like that.”

Cory put down his burger, and one corner of his mouth went up as he glanced over at Matt. “For what part?”

“What part? For losing track of us—Wade and me and…the little girls. Waiting so long to try to find us. What the hell did you think I meant? This?” He hit the rim of the wheel and threw him a look. “Why would you be blaming yourself for this?”

Cory shrugged and picked up his burger. Put it down again and stared at it as if it had turned bad on him all of a sudden. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Okay, wait.” Matt couldn’t believe this guy. He huffed out a laugh. “You’re not thinking you could have changed what happened to me. If you’d been here. That’s crap. That’s just…Look here, okay? I probably would have found some other way to screw up my life. It’s just the way I am. You’ve got no way of knowing this, but I’ve always been a daredevil, taking chances I shouldn’t, even when I knew better. You being around wouldn’t have changed that.”

Cory gave him an appraising look, and the light was back in his eyes, as if he’d put the guilt away, for now. “A chance-taker, huh? That why you chose to teach in an inner-city school?”

Matt snorted. “Hadn’t thought about it quite like that, but…yeah, maybe. Probably.”

“Wade told me he was surprised—that’s an understatement, by the way—when you decided to become a teacher. He said you weren’t ever much for school…being indoors. Said you reminded him of Tom Sawyer. You’d always rather be outdoors, mixed up in some sort of adventure. And by the way, he blames you for any and all trouble you two got into when you were kids.”