"I want you to stay," said the Colonel. "I want you to stay forever, if you've a mind to. And if I wake up tomorrow and you're gone again…then I'm still the luckiest man on earth to have spent one night with you."

Baby rested her head on his chest, felt his heart pounding and knew that it belonged to her.

CHAPTER 36

The woman who answered the door wore a bad wig atop her wrinkled face, a shapeless blue cotton dress hanging on her bony frame.

"Mrs. Harrison," started Moseby, "I'm John-"

"I remember you…" The woman chewed her lip, revealed her few remaining teeth. "We talked a while ago…you were driving one of the Colonel's trucks."

"Couple weeks ago, yes, ma'am," said Moseby.

"Couple weeks? Seemed longer." She peered at Moseby. "You got a touch of it, didn't you?"

"Ma'am?"

"D.C. fever," said the woman. "I can see it in your eyes. Told you not to go there. No place for an outsider." She looked at Rakkim. "That your owner?"

"No, ma'am," said Moseby. "I'm not indentured. This is my friend Rikki."

"Good morning, Mrs. Harrison," said Rakkim. "Pleasure to meet you."

"I bet," said the woman. "What do you boys want?"

"Can we come in, Mrs. Harrison?" said Rakkim. "I'd like to talk to you. My wife, Sarah, had dealings with your late husband."

"You're Sarah's husband? That girl in Muslim country? Come on in. Make sure you wipe your feet." She shuffled into the house, feet slapping on the wood floor. "Darryl! We got company." She waved at a sagging sofa. "Sit yourselves down, I'll fetch you boys something to drink."

A man walked from a side room, skinny as the woman, equally toothless, his hair in patches on his scalp.

"The white boy's Sarah's husband," Mrs. Harrison shouted from the kitchen.

"Pleased to make your acquaintance," said Darryl, pumping Rakkim's hand. He hesitated, did the same for Moseby. "Howdy."

Mrs. Harrison emerged from the kitchen carrying two bottles of Coca-Cola between the fingers of her left hand, a bottle opener in the other. Rakkim saw Darryl's eyes widen at the bounty. She popped the tops, passed the bottles to Rakkim and Moseby. "Didn't figure you boys would cotton to cold well water," she cackled. "Go ahead, drink up."

"What about you?" said Rakkim.

"Darryl and I aren't thirsty," said Mrs. Harrison.

"No…no, we ain't," said Darryl.

"I want you to know," Mrs. Harrison said to Moseby, "the reason I didn't invite you into the house last time wasn't 'cause of your skin color. We're not racists in this family, not like some I could mention." Darryl nodded. "Just that my brother-in-law here was away, and it wouldn't be right for a woman alone to have a strange man in the house."

Moseby sipped his Coca-Cola. "No offense taken."

"Where were you, Darryl?" said Rakkim.

"Away." Darryl didn't take his eyes off the pop bottle in Rakkim's hand.

"Your wife has been a good friend to this family," Mrs. Harrison said to Rakkim. "She bought things from my husband for years, big things and little things, always paid top dollar. Asked about his health too. Only one who ever did. Are you a historian too?"

"No, not me." Rakkim took a long drink, the coldness and carbonation numbing his tongue, trickling down his dry throat. Nothing like it. He looked around the living room, surprised at the cleanliness and relative opulence of the surroundings. Hand-crafted furniture, a hutch filled with china, wallscreen TV. Even a piano in one corner. He checked the rad counter on his wrist-relatively low radiation count too. Credit the new-looking air scrubber on the roof. He looked at Darryl. "I'm not that thirsty and I'd hate to see the bubbles go to waste. Would you mind sharing this with me?"

Darryl glanced at his sister. "Okay…that would be good. No sense wasting."

Rakkim handed the bottle over.

Darryl started to snatch it, forced himself to slow down.

"Rikki and I are going back into the city, ma'am," said Moseby.

"That's foolish," said Mrs. Harrison. "You're going to poison yourself."

"We've got a better vehicle this time," said Moseby.

"I noticed," said Mrs. Harrison. "Seems like I saw a man named Corbett driving a van just like it."

"We bought it from Corbett," said Rakkim.

"That so?" Mrs. Harrison massaged her gums with a forefinger. "Well, you might have paid him, but the Corbett I know would sooner give up his balls than that war wagon."

"He's got no need for the van now," said Rakkim. "Or his balls."

"Glad to hear it." Mrs. Harrison examined her forefinger. "Honest…like your wife, that's saying something, but you still don't know where you're going, and the war wagon's not going to change that," she said. "Couple of outsiders driving around the city thinking treasure's going to call out to them."

Rakkim walked over to the family photographs that lined one whole wall. Photographs, not holograms, some of them ancient black-and-whites too. Poor folk in their Sunday best, kids behind the wheels of trucks, hard-eyed men and suspicious women, two young men in homemade rad-suits pretending to hold up the Washington Monument.

"That's me and Eldon on our first trip into the city together," said Darryl, standing beside him. "We hammered out an FBI insignia from inside a federal building a day later. Sold it for almost eight hundred dollars. Would have got twice that much but we chipped it."

"You chipped it," said Mrs. Harrison.

Rakkim checked out a grainy snapshot of a tired young man with a cigarette dangling from his lip, an automatic rifle slung in front of him. His jungle camouflage uniform blended in with the dense green foliage around him. A medal under glass was on the wall next to him. "Who's the soldier?"

Darryl stood beside him. "That's Eldon Harrison the first," he said, his gums whistling slightly. "Our great-grandpa. We got an Eldon in every generation since. My brother was the fourth in the line."

"Looks like he saw clear to the other side," said Rakkim. "That's a Silver Star."

"Yup. They don't give those out in cereal boxes."

"Where was that photo taken?"

"Vietnam. First war we ever lost. Not the last, though." Darryl sipped the Coca-Cola, offered it to Rakkim.

"You finish it," said Rakkim.

"Obliged," said Darryl, as fixed on the photo as Rakkim. "He was killed in action eighteen days after that picture was taken. A real hero. The best of us. Never even got to see Eldon Harrison Junior."

"I'm sorry," said Rakkim.

Darryl nodded.

"You had any more time to think about what we talked about, ma'am?" said Moseby.

Mrs. Harrison sat across from him, knees pressed together. "I've tried my best, but I can't come up with anything else. I'd tell you if I could."

"I know that," said Moseby. "It's just that sometimes things that you don't think are important turn out to be."

"I made Eldon three fried eggs the morning he left for the city and there was a spot of blood in one of the yolks," said Mrs. Harrison, her hands in her lap like they didn't even belong to her. "Just the tiniest spot of blood, but that's bad luck. I was going to throw them all out, start fresh, but Eldon told me I was crazy to waste good food." She blinked back tears. "That was the last meal I ever cooked for my husband. You'd think what I cooked or didn't cook wasn't important, but I think of that fried egg sizzling away in a dab of bacon grease, and I see that spot of blood…and…and I just want to die."

Darryl looked over at his sister-in-law, then at Rakkim. Shrugged.

Rakkim stared at another photo, a wedding photo, the young couple holding hands, grinning shyly at the camera. The slender bride seemed lost in the folds of her wedding gown, the groom stiff. He squinted at the date on the bottom.