The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(4)
Mike glanced over at Leshaun, but his partner was ostentatiously not listening. Leshaun was doing what he was supposed to be doing, which was staring at the alley. There wasn’t much chance that the prick they were waiting for, Two-Two O’Leary, was going to show up, but given that he used as much of the meth as he sold, and had wounded an agent in a bust gone bad the week before, it probably wasn’t the worst thing in the world to have one of them paying attention.
“All I can do is keep apologizing.” He glanced at Leshaun again and decided he didn’t care if Leshaun was listening or not. It wasn’t like they hadn’t talked about his relationship with Fanny—or Leshaun and Leshaun’s ex-wife’s relationship—more than he had ever talked about it with his therapist, or, for that matter, with Fanny. Maybe if he’d talked about things with Fanny as much as he had with Leshaun, things would still be okay. “You know I’m sorry. About everything. I’m sorry about everything. Not just being late.” Mike waited for Fanny to say something, but there was only silence. He went on. “I’ve been talking with my therapist about it, and I know that I’m late saying this. I mean, I guess I’m late with everything, but I’m trying to say I should have told you I was sorry a long time ago. I didn’t mean to let things fall apart, and even though I’m not really happy about it, I am happy that you’re happy. And you know, Dawson—Rich—seems like he makes you happy, and I know that Annie loves him. So, you know, I’m sorry. I’m doing my best to be a different kind of guy, a better man, but there’s always going to be a part of me that’s just the way I am. And that goes for the job too.”
“Mike.” Fanny’s voice seemed faint, and Mike shifted again. He couldn’t tell if it was his shitty phone cutting out or if she was talking more softly. “Mike,” she repeated. “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
“What? You going to divorce me again?”
Leshaun straightened and then leaned a little bit out the open window. Mike sat up in his seat. There was a car pulling into the alley. A Honda, which wasn’t really Two-Two’s ride of choice, but it was the first action they’d seen for a while. The car stopped with its trunk hanging over the sidewalk, and then a black teenager, maybe fifteen or sixteen, got out of the passenger-side door. Mike relaxed, and Leshaun sat back. Two-Two was selling guns and meth, but he was also big time in with the Aryan Nations. There wasn’t much chance he was rolling with a black kid.
“I want to change Annie’s name,” Fanny said.
“What?”
“I want her to have the same last name as me, Mike.”
“Just a second.” Mike put the phone down on his thigh and rubbed his face with his free hand. He wished he still smoked, though it wasn’t as if Leshaun would have let him light up in the car. The car. The goddamned car felt so close and hot. With his bulletproof vest over his T-shirt, he was sweating. Couldn’t they run the engine just for a few minutes, have a little f*cking air-conditioning? He needed to stand outside for a minute, to stand up, to get some fresh air. He opened the door. He needed a blast of cold air like they had in those gum commercials, but it wasn’t any cooler outside the car.
“Mike?” Leshaun was looking at him. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing man. I’m not going anywhere. I’m just going to stand outside, okay? I just want to take this call outside the car for a minute. Is that okay with you? Do you mind?” He realized his voice had gotten loud and hard, and he knew that when he was done talking to Fanny he was going to have to apologize to Leshaun. Leshaun was a good partner, a good friend, and he’d understand, but still, it made Mike feel like an *. Like more of an *. Leshaun nodded, and Mike got out of the car. He shut the door behind him, not that it mattered with the windows open.
He lifted the phone back up. “What are you talking about, Fanny?”
“Come on, Mike. You had to see this coming. Didn’t you see this coming?”
“No, Fanny, I didn’t see this coming.”
“Oh, Mike. You never see anything coming.”
He heard the brush of the phone against Fanny’s cheek and then the low murmur of her saying something to Dawson. He pressed the phone hard against his ear. “You’re not changing Annie’s name. She’s my f*cking daughter, and she’s going to be Annie Rich, not Annie f*cking Dawson.”
“Mike,” she said. “Annie’s my daughter too. It’s weird, having her have a different last name from me.”
“You didn’t have to change your name to Dawson,” Mike said. Even as he said it, he knew it was the wrong thing to say, but he couldn’t help himself.
Fanny sighed. “We can talk about this later, but it’s going to happen. I’m sorry, Mike, I am, but things have changed.”
“I’m trying to change too,” Mike said.
“I appreciate that. I do,” she said, and then neither of them said anything for a few seconds. Mike could hear Fanny breathing. Finally, she said, “Do you want to talk to Annie?”
“Please,” he said. He felt defeated.
Mike leaned against the car, facing the alley. He shifted against the side of the car, rolled his shoulder, and tugged down on his T-shirt under the vest. It was wet with sweat. Better to be uncomfortable than dead, though. The agent Two-Two had shot in Eau Claire probably would have died if he hadn’t been wearing body armor: three shots stopped by body armor, one bullet clean through the agent’s biceps. It was a hundred miles from Eau Claire back to Minnesota, though, and hell, nobody thought Two-Two—even hopped up on Nazi meth—was going to come back to his bar after the debacle in Wisconsin. He adjusted the strapping to loosen the vest. Normally he had a shirt over it, but when they were just going to sit in a car all day, he figured there wasn’t much point trying to hide it. And of course, it’s not like he wasn’t wearing his badge hanging off the chain around his neck. He loved being able to wear it, loved the way people looked at him differently when he introduced himself as Special Agent Rich, but as he fingered the chain, he thought that there were times when it felt like something he needed to take off more often.