The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(28)

“Uh, yes sir,” Mike said.

“Good. Here’s my assistant. He’ll give you the details.”

Mike took the address from the assistant, hung up the phone, and then turned to look at Annie.

“Sorry, beautiful, but this is a big deal. We’re going to have to take a rain check on the ice cream, okay?”

Annie scowled, but he could tell she was faking it, and she didn’t raise a fuss when he said he had to call Fanny.

The phone clicked through to voice mail. “Fanny,” Mike said, “it’s me. Something came up. I need you to come get Annie. I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t a big deal, but trust me when I tell you this, I really can’t get out of it.” He left the address for Fanny and asked her to call back as soon as she could, resisting the urge to tell her to follow the plume of smoke. The gray ribbon was thick in the air, and even though he knew the address he had been given was more than ten blocks away, the smoke looked closer. As he drove, he tried Dawson’s number, but Annie’s stepdad was evidently away from his phone as well. Mike had to step hard on the thought that the reason his ex-wife and her new husband weren’t answering the phone was that they were naked and in bed.

“Okay, beautiful,” he said over his shoulder. “Mommy’s not answering, so you’re going to be stuck with me for a while. I’ve got to do some work.”

He flipped the cherries on even though he didn’t drive faster than the speed limit, conscious of his daughter sitting in the back. There wasn’t much in the way of traffic, though he could already see the strobes of emergency vehicles up ahead.

“Daddy?”

“Yeah, beautiful?” he said, distracted by her voice and by what her voice meant: that he’d have to figure out what to do with her once they got to the crash site. Annie wasn’t sheltered. She knew that he worked for the agency, knew he carried a gun, knew that occasionally there were guys like Two-Two who might shoot at him, knew why Leshaun was in the hospital, but that didn’t mean Mike thought it was the best idea to walk around with her near the smoking crater the plane would have left in the ground. Or, oh hell, he thought, it was probably worse than that. Almost certainly the plane hit a house or a building or something.

“Daddy,” Annie said, and there was something measured and hesitant in her voice. “I think I’m getting too old for you to call me ‘beautiful’ all the time.”

“Oh.” Mike slowed down at a red light and then, after checking both left and right, cruised through the intersection. He could hear sirens growing closer, and wondered how big of a clusterf*ck this was going to be. Ambulance, fire, police. City workers, utilities, probably county and state everything. Likely to be feebies or other federals too. “Okay, beau—Annie. Annie.”

He glanced in the rearview mirror, but Annie was looking out the window, watching the buildings pass by. It was something he knew she must have been thinking about, and even though the expression was overused, it broke his heart. It was too soon, he thought, too soon for her to be negotiating the passage from being a child to being an adult. She was only nine, for Christ’s sake, not even into the double digits yet. Of course, that wasn’t what really bothered him about it. He called her “beautiful” because she was beautiful, and she was his Annie and would always be his Annie no matter what he called her, but he couldn’t shake off the conversation from the day before, the way Fanny had insisted that she and Annie had to have the same last name. Mike hadn’t asked Fanny to change her last name to Rich when they got married but she’d done it anyway, and he hadn’t fought when Fanny changed it to Dawson when she remarried. He understood that when you married a guy whose first name was Rich, you probably didn’t want your last name to be Rich, particularly when it was a name you’d brought along from your first marriage. Still, it stuck in him that Fanny thought it wouldn’t be a big deal to change Annie’s last name. Fanny had never been the kind of woman to use their kid as a pawn, and he was sure she didn’t mean it that way, was sure she meant exactly what she said—that it was too weird for her to have a kid with a different last name—but he didn’t understand why it was now, months after Fanny Rich had become Fanny Dawson, that it suddenly mattered so much. Why now? What had suddenly changed in his ex-wife’s new marriage?

Oh.

Now he understood.

“Hey beau—Annie?” he said. It was going to take some getting used to. “How’s Mommy been feeling? Everything okay at home?”

“Fine,” Annie said.

A fire truck came barreling through the intersection ahead of them, and Mike slowed down to check both ways before turning. They were close enough that he could see people standing on the sidewalk and pointing. A block away, maybe two.

“She been sick at all or anything like that?”

“She’s been sleeping a lot,” Annie said. “She’s been going to bed earlier than me. Rich has been reading to me before bed.”

Mike brought the car to a complete stop and closed his eyes. He thought he might puke, which was kind of funny since he’d basically been asking Annie if his ex-wife was suffering from morning sickness. She hadn’t been sick when she was pregnant with Annie, but she’d been tired the entire first trimester.

There was a burst from a siren behind him and he opened his eyes and then pulled out into the intersection, turning the corner. He was about to ask Annie another question, but then he saw the building.