deal of experience spying on the haunts of people and their activities.
Slow and methodical was the best way, like a pilot’s checklist. You
just had to hope nothing happened to make you improvise.
Lee’s bent nose was a permanent badge of honor from his time as an
amateur boxer in the Navy, where he had taken out his youthful
aggression in a square of roped canvas against an opponent of like
weight and ability. A pair of stout gloves, quick hands and nimble
feet, a cagey mind and a strong heart had constituted his arsenal of
weapons. The majority of the time, they had been enough for victory.
After his military stint, things had worked out mostly okay for him.
Never rich, never actually poor despite being mostly self-employed over
the years; never quite alone, though he had been divorced for almost
fifteen years. The only good thing from that marriage had just turned
twenty. His daughter was tall, blond and brainy, as well as the proud
bearer of a full academic scholarship to the University of Virginia and
a star on the women’s lacrosse team. And for the last ten years, Renee
Adams had had no interest whatsoever in having anything to do with her
old man. A decision that had her mother’s full blessing, if not her
insistence, Lee well knew. And his ex had seemed so kind on those
first few dates, so infatuated with his Navy uniform, so enthusiastic
in tearing up his bed.
His ex-wife, a former stripper named Trish Bardoe, had married on the
rebound a fellow by the name of Eddie Stipowicz, an unemployed engineer
with a drinking problem. Lee thought she was heading for disaster and
had tried to get custody of Renee on the grounds that her mom and
stepfather could not provide for her. Well, about that time, Eddie, a
sneaky runt Lee despised, invented, mostly by accident, some microchip
piece of crap that had made him a gazillionaire. Lee’s custody battle
had lost its juice after that. To add insult to injury, there had been
stories on Eddie in the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek and a
number of other publications. He was famous. Their house had even
been featured in Architectural Digest.
Lee had gotten that issue of the Digest. Trish’s new home was grossly
huge, mostly crimson red or eggplant so dark it made Lee think of the
inside of a coffin. The windows were cathedral-size, the furniture
large enough to become lost in and there were enough wood moldings,
paneling and staircases to heat a typical midwestern town for an entire
year. There were also stone fountains sculpted with naked people.
What a kicker! A photo of the happy couple was included in the spread.
In Lee’s opinion they might as well have captioned it “The Nerd and
the Bombshell strike it rich in poor taste.”
One photo had captured Lee’s complete attention, however. Renee had
been poised on the most magnificent stallion Lee had ever seen, on a
field of grass that was so green and perfectly trimmed that it looked
like a pond of sea glass. Lee had carefully cut that photo out and put
it away in a safe spot-his family album of sorts. The article, of
course, made no mention of him; no reason that it should. The one
thing that had ticked him off, though, was the reference to Renee as
Ed’s daughter.
“Stepdaughter,” Lee had said out loud when he read that line.
“Stepdaughter. That one you can’t take away, Trish.” Most of the time
he felt no envy for the wealth his ex-wife now had, for it meant that
his daughter would never want. But sometimes it still hurt.
When you had something for all those years, something you had made with
a part of yourself, and loved more than it was probably good to love
anything, and then lost it-well, Lee tried never to dwell for long on
that loss. Big tough guy that he was, when he did let himself think
about the massive hole dead center in his chest, he ended up blubbering
like a baby.
Life was so funny sometimes. Funny like when you get a clean bill of