Mind + Body by Aaron Dunlap (free books to read TXT) 📖

The first Chinese restaurant we found was a little place in a shopping plaza, tucked between a drug store and a Greek café. There was, of course, a big aquarium filled with tropical fish right by the door and across from the counter. A dozen booths filled the rest of the room. I picked one where my back wouldn’t be exposed and I could see the front entrance.

A paper place mat explained the Chinese zodiac. Tiger, Ox, Monkey, all that nonsense.

It was early March and the weather was beginning to warm, the rest of the restaurant patrons wore light jackets. Birds began to chirp outside. My birthday was in a month, I realized. I wondered if my life would be settled by then, or if I’d still be choosing restaurant seats based on what my back is against and whether I can see the door. The thought made me feel tired and depressed.

A young Chinese woman with limited English came over and brought menus and took drink orders. I looked the menu over, trying to find the sweet and sour chicken, found it, and set the menu down. Amy’s menu was still on the table.

“No point looking?” I asked.

“Everybody has beef and broccoli.”

“They might have something new and innovative that would blow your mind.”

“Then what are you getting?”

“Sweet and sour chicken,” I said, smirking.

“Maybe they use a new kind of sour that’ll blow your mind.”

Drinks were brought, orders taken, menus removed.

“How was school?” I asked to fill the silence.

“Usual,” she said. “How was truancy?”

“Usual.” I nodded. “Bought a car today.”

She feigned amazement, “Really? A gun, a knife, and a V-8. You’re like a walking action movie now.”

“I’m not carrying the gun with me, thank you very much.”

I sipped hot tea from a tiny cup. It tasted like ginger; the tea, not the cup. The cup tasted like china; the porcelain, not the country.

“What. Is. Up. With your dad and those knives?” I asked, reflecting on the butterfly box full of sharp, pointy death.

“They’re Emersons, man,” she started, craning her head back, “they’re all he ever talks about. Delta Force, SEALs, SAS, everybody goes nuts for them. They’re supposed to stand up to a lot of abuse.”

“So that’s why you were looking at this one in the store,” I said, looking down at the metal and epoxy clipped to my right pocket.

“Yeah, I was just seeing if I remembered any of the ones he let me look at.”

“So these are the best in the business, I guess. I thought $180 seemed like a lot for a pocketknife.”

“Oh, you can spend a lot more. I guess people pay thousands of dollars for customized knives with wooden handles or whatever they want. Why was my dad showing you ‘the collection’ anyway?”

“I don’t know, he saw that I had the knife in my pocket when I showed up and he asked about it, like ‘Why is this kid showing up for my daughter packing edged weapons?’ I said the word Emerson and he turned into a museum curator.”

She smiled. “Well, when you left he grilled me for answers. ‘Who was that boy?’ ‘How do you know him?’ ‘Where does he live?’ I think he likes you. Most he’s said to me in a while.”

The food came, hot and steamy. I love the smell of fresh white rice when it’s nice and sticky.

Before I started eating, I asked, “You said military guys use those knives. Do you think your dad used them when he was in the Corps or something?”

“It’s possible,” she said, “but there’s no way I could know. I’m not entirely sure what he was doing in the Marines. When I was little he would take long trips all the time, when we lived on-base. He could have been some kind of black ops commando, or he could have taught recruits how to zip their pants up. He certainly doesn’t talk about it now, either way.”

She started eating her food, so I did the same. The sweet and sour was more sour than sweet, which was surprisingly all right with me. I thought about Amy’s parents; she said her mom left because of something her dad did. Maybe he was some black ops unit member and always had to rush out last-minute to go to some foreign country we’re not supposed to be in to kill some guy we’re not supposed to have killed.

I’d never heard of the Marine Corps having Special Forces, though. Army had Green Berets and Delta, Navy had SEALs and Team Six, the Air Force had the mostly-useless SOC, but the Marines… everybody talks about the Marines like they’re all special forces. Maybe Amy’s mom was sick of him having a secret life, or found out what he did, and left. When they lived on-base. Wait a minute.

“Wait a minute,” I said, sticking my fork in a tender chunk of chicken, “On-base. You lived in Quantico?”

She finished chewing and nodded. “Yeah, in on-base housing.”

“In Quantico.”

“Yeah…”

“Agh!”

“What?” She didn’t realize what she was missing.

“Why didn’t I know that?”

“Why… is that such a big deal?”

“My dad worked in Quantico my whole life and I’ve never been in there. It’s supposed to be like a fortress town or something. Whenever I asked if I could visit, he said security was too tight.”

“I remember it being like that,” she said, trying to turn her eyes backwards and see into her memory. “We lived there until I was about eight or nine. I had to carry a security pass and all kinds of papers in case I got lost or something. When we’d leave and come back, like for shopping or anything, we went through a checkpoint gate thing and my mom had to show a card and ID. There was a special sticker we had to put on our car too.”

“But you know the layout, how to get in?”

“Layout? It’s not like it’s a warehouse or something, it’s a whole town. The parts I saw were mostly housing and offices and the PX. I never went inside the actual base. We went through the east end a few times, by the river and the academies.”

“East end?”

She took another bite, and then explained the general organization of the town. On the far west was base housing and administrative buildings. In the middle was the base itself, spanning miles and miles of wooded terrain with airfields on the far east end. There was a whole fleet of helicopters, including Marine One, the President’s helicopter. East of that, right on the Potomac, were the DEA and FBI Academies, the Marine Corps University where my dad worked, and a few more buildings she never found out about. Near the river were some small parks and fields where officers would jog or sprawl out and watch the river roar.

“If you wanted to go to where you dad worked, you’d use the southeast entrance, it’s right by the University. There’s a checkpoint there, too.”

“I guess there’s another thing for my agenda,” I said.

“What’s your fixation with the place? It’s got nothing to do with any of this. The FBI isn’t headquartered there or anything, just an academy for them.”

“Oh, it’s nothing like that,” I said, “I just want to see the place at least once. My dad lived and died there, under a shroud of secrecy. I want to see where he worked, at least, maybe talk to some people he worked with and try to get some sort of explanation for why he died, or at least what he spent his life working on. Was he building nukes? Designing biological weapons? Calculating the optimum paint color for an oversea barracks? I know nothing; absolutely nothing about what he did and barely anything about who he was.”

I felt my voice begin to quiver so I stopped talking. Amy’s eyes were deep, and searching mine again. I slid a piece of pineapple around a pool of sauce with my fork, thinking of Paul Bunyan and his giant flapjacks for some reason.

“All right,” she said eventually, “I can try to get you there if you want. I mean, I don’t have the credentials to get us in there anymore.”

“My dad’s car should still be there,” I said, “someone called the house about it a week or so ago. I can use that as an ‘in’.”

She nodded. “That might work, but I wouldn’t call them about it first. They’ll tell you they’ll move it outside the gate for you to pick it up, or they’ll have someone drop it off. Just show up at the gate and explain to the guy why you’re there. If you have your dad’s ID it might help. That way everyone might be confused and you might get in. If you called and asked they’d just say no, but if you show up… who knows? Bonus points if you look completely destroyed.

“There’s still the other thing, though,” Amy continued. “Comstock. The FBI wants you to ask them something about him, so you/I/we have to figure out what the story is with him.”

“Yeah,” I sighed, “the whole thing sucks. I want answers, but I can’t exactly admit to the FBI or police about what I did Saturday night. And they know that, so it’s like we’re dancing on some stupid tightrope of innuendo and code words. It seems like they want to help me, but first I have to help them.”

“Maybe Comstock is selling drugs or something. Using students to filter the product down to the street level,” Amy said thoughtfully.

“DEA would be dealing with that.”

“Selling government secrets?”

“CIA. No, wait, NSA.”

“Running stolen guns through Africa?”

“ATF.”

“Playing professional basketball?”

“NBA.”

“Then I’m out of ideas.”

“And I’m out of acronyms,” I said.

“So what exactly does the FBI deal with, then?”

“Everything else, I guess. They’re like a federal version of a police force. Anything that the police would usually deal with, but it