And it’s a good time. A time when things can be done.”

“Yeah? So when are you running?” Danny asked, reaching for his drink on the table—lime-flavored seltzer.

“Not me. You,” she said sharply. “War hero. Conservative. Man of color.”

“Who says?” said Danny.

“You’re conservative.”

“Who says I’m a war hero?” He didn’t necessarily con-

RAZOR’S EDGE

31

sider himself conservative, either. Nor liberal, for that matter.

Hell, he wasn’t even comfortable with “man of color.”

“Come on, Daniel. Give yourself some credit. You would be an excellent congressman. From there, who knows?”

Danny rolled his eyes but said nothing. They’d had conversations along this line two or three times before. At some point he thought he might want to work for or in the government somehow; a lot of service guys ended up there. But as far as politics was concerned, he didn’t think he could manage the bullshitting.

“I want you to talk to him,” said Jemma. “I gave him your phone number.”

“What?”

“The general line, routed through Edwards,” said Jemma quickly. “Don’t worry. I was vague on your assignment, as per instructions.”

“Jem, I really don’t want—”

“You can’t stay in the Air Force forever, Danny. You have to think about your future.”

“Right now?”

“Yes, now—you have to think about us.”

“I do think about us,” he said, and had an impulse to throw down the phone, grab a flight to New York, race to the small apartment she rented near campus, and throw himself on top of her.

Not that that would solve anything. It’d feel good, though.

“You have responsibilities,” she said, back in her professor’s voice. “Responsibilities to our people.”

Jemma really did believe in cultural and societal responsibility, but generally when she started talking about it, she was skirting some issue between them.

32

DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND

“I miss you a lot,” he told her.

“Me too,” she said. “I saw little Robert today.”

“How are they?” Danny tried not to let the wince get into his voice. Little Robert was the cuter-than-hell two-year-old son of a friend of theirs who lived near Jemma.

His father had served with Danny in the Air Force, leaving to take a job in the city as an investigator for the SEC.

“They’re great. He called me Auntie,” she said. “I like it.”

“You feeling those urges, Jem?”

“What? For a kid? No way. No way.”

They talked for a while more. When Jemma brought up Stephens again, he agreed to at least talk to him.

“Don’t go back on your word,” she said. “I’ll know.”

“All right, baby, I won’t.” As he hung up the phone, the urge to go to her was so strong that he got up and decided to hit the gym before dinner.

Melcross, Nevada (outside Las Vegas) 1900

THE RESTAURANT ADVERTISED ITSELF AS HANDICAPPED AC-cessible, but like most places, the advertisement fell far short of the reality. The first barrier was a two-inch rise at the curb from the parking lot—not a great deal, certainly, and not the biggest bump Zen Stockard had even faced that day, but it was an annoying precursor of what lay ahead. The front entrance sat behind three very high and shallow steps; Zen had to wait outside as his wife went in to ask that the side door be unlocked. That was at the end of a tight ramp, and Jeff had to maneuver through the door and into the narrow hall with a series of pirouette re-versals that would have been difficult for a ballerina, let alone a man in a wheelchair. Getting into the dining room RAZOR’S EDGE

33

involved passing through the kitchen; Zen was almost smacked in the face by a waitress carrying a tray full of fancy spaghetti. On a different day, he might have laughed it off with a joke about not wanting his calamari in his lap, but tonight he was in a foul mood and just barely managed not to complain when the kitchen door smacked up against his rear wheel as he passed onto the thick carpet of the eating area.

It was no wonder many disabled people thought A.B.’s—the abbreviation stood for “able bodied” and was not necessarily benign—had it in for them. It wasn’t a matter of being different; that was something you could accept, or at least view as a necessary condition. It was more the smiley stares that accompanied the bumps and turns, the “look at all I’ve done for you and you’re still bitchin’ at me?” attitudes.

“We’d like a better table,” said Zen as the maitre d’

showed them to a small, dim spot at the back, basically hiding them from the rest of the clientele.

“Jeff—”

“How about that one,” Zen said, pointing toward the front of the room.

It was a challenge, and the maitre d’ knew it. But give the man credit—despite his frown, he led them there.

“You really want to sit up here?” Breanna asked. “It’s going to be right in a draft.”

“I like drafts,” said Zen.

“And I thought I was in a bad mood.”

“I’m just hungry.” He took the menu.

“Wine?” Breanna asked.

“Beer.”

“I doubt they have anything you like,” she said, glancing around the fancy Italian restaurant.

Her prediction proved incorrect, as there were several 34

DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND

relatively good brews on tap, including the Anchor Steam that Zen opted for. But even that failed to lift his mood.

“Happy anniversary,” said Breanna, holding up her glass—a reserve Chianti from Antinori that she pro-nounced “perfect.”

“Anniversary of our first date,” said Zen, clicking the glass gently. “If it was really a date.”

“A date is a date is a date. Boy, you are in a bad mood,”

said his wife. She took a long sip from her glass. “I should have ordered a whole bottle.”

“Hmmph.”

“Fentress did bad today, huh?”

“He’s lucky I don’t wash him out.”

“Oh, come on, I saw him fly yesterday. He wasn’t that bad.”

Zen took up his menu, trying to decide between the gnocchi with pesto or one of the ten thousand spaghetti choices.

“You said yourself there’d be a transition,” said Breanna.

“I was optimistic.”

“Jeff—sooner or later, there are going to be other pilots in the program.”

“You think I’m giving him a hard time on purpose?”

Breanna gave him one of her most severe frowns—her cheeks shot inward and her brow furrowed down—before pretending to study the menu.

Zen didn’t consider Fentress a bad sort, really; he was smarter than hell, with an engineering degree and several published papers on complicated computer compressions that Jennifer Gleason said were quite good. But he also had a certain lapdog quality to him, an I’ll-do-anything-you-want thing that irked Zen.

Plus he’d screwed up on the flight today.

RAZOR’S EDGE

35

So had he, Zen knew, on his first few flights.

Still, the kid—he was a kid, not even twenty-five yet—pissed him off.

Fentress wanted his job. He’d said something like that the first day they met, during one of the bullshit orientation “talks,” actually an informal job interview.

Still, he had gone ahead and selected Fentress for the program anyway. What the hell was he thinking?

That Curly was better than one of the jocks who wanted his job.

Less threatening?

Bullshit.

“You havin’ fish?” Zen asked his wife.

“With Chianti? No,” said Bree.

The waiter approached. “Buona sera,” he said, using Italian to say good evening.

It was the sort of thing Breanna ate up. “Buona sera,”

she replied lightly. “Per piacere, un po’ d’acqua fresco,”

she said, asking for water, then added in Italian that he could bring it later, after they ordered.

The waiter treated her like a long lost cousin. They began debating the merits of several dishes. Zen watched sourly. He loved Bree—truly he did—but she could act like such a jerk sometimes. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see her get up and start dancing with the buffoon.