Jade Sky Read Free

the loss made it worse. Not trusting his voice, he nodded and looked at the plain wooden cross on the living room wall. She squeezed him tighter, and they stood in the foyer like that, frozen in time, until a whine interrupted them. Matt smiled, let her go, and dropped to one knee. He grabbed the Basset hound by the ears and kissed his nose. "How's my boy?" Ted's tail thumped against the floor as he licked Matt's nose. His breath stank worse than Monica's.
    "Coffee?" she asked.
    "Yeah."
    She stepped into the kitchen, sniffed the dregs in the bottom of the pot, and poured it into the sink. "I'll make a fresh one." She puttered in the kitchen, and he couldn't help but try to catch a peek under the T-shirt when she reached up for the can of Folgers. Granny-panties, white cotton, fraying elastic. Every husband's dream.
    They talked about nothing over breakfast — Deputy Drake had arrested Kevin Bartell for screaming drunken poetry at his ex-girlfriend's house again, Jen and Bill found out they're having twins, and PanTex laid off twenty more people. Nothing changed in White Spruce; it just got older, more tired. As Monica cleared the dishes she paused at the sink. "Are you home long?"
    He nodded. "I reckon a week or two at least. I'll have paperwork, but I can do it from here, or if needs be, down at the local." ICAP didn't have an office in White Spruce, or anywhere else outside Washington, D.C., but the Clifford Davis Federal Building in Memphis wasn't too awful a commute once or twice a week.
    "Good. Pastor Joe's been asking about you, and you can take me to my appointment on Thursday."
    Matt polished off the last of his coffee. "I'd love to." A strong, proud, intelligent, willful woman, Monica remained . . . brittle. She'd lost their first baby just out of high school, ten months after their honeymoon, while he fought half a world away with the Third Infantry. They'd been "trying again" for eight years, and in that time his beautiful, loving wife had lurched in and out of depression and dependency. Now pregnant again, she lived in constant terror of losing their boy. "Hmph."
    "What?" She put the dishes in the sink and turned on the water.
    He opened his mouth and wasn't sure what to say. At that moment he knew that she carried their son as sure as he knew his own name. "Do we find out the sex this week?"
    She nodded, defensive. "If we want to, and the bean cooperates on the ultrasound."
    He smiled at her. "Whatever you want to do, babe."
    She put a fingertip to her lips and rolled her eyes up to the ceiling. "Um . . . I'll think about it." Her dazzling smile emerged from the uncertainty. "It'll be fun to bounce around some names."
     
    *   *   *
     
    The conference call leached away two monotonous hours of Matt's life before anyone said anything interesting. He sat in his living room, staring aghast at his laptop, as Jeff defended the intelligence and their actions despite countless, repetitive questions that made it clear in no uncertain terms that the powers that be considered losing two squads of ICAP agents politically unacceptable.
    Matt's mind leapt to dozens of choice comments about civilians in general and bureaucrats in particular, but he would never say them. It wasn't that he'd lose his job — the Six Million Dollar Man had nothing on your average aug — he just knew that it wouldn't help.
    "Can't some of your men read minds, Agent Hannes?" the jowly pencil-pusher from Belgium asked.
    Conor, onscreen next to Jeff, rolled his eyes. Jeff scowled for the millionth time. "No. Late-second precognitive therapy has enabled a few select agents to utilize short-term prediction, so they can predict what someone is about to say or do, but only the barest moment beforehand. Think of it like ultra-fast reflexes. Nobody can read anybody's mind."
    Though the chances of anyone even looking at him were remote, Matt schooled his face into a blank mask. So-called "late-second" precognition, no more than a second or two out,