The Short Takes by James Grady

Author:James Grady
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2019-01-22T15:23:54+00:00

Russian Roulette

of the Condor

CHAMBER ONE

Will You Still Need Me

Silver-haired, blue-eyed Vin held an empty white coffee mug as he stood at the kitchen sink. He looked through the window to the outside world where across the road came a stranger carrying a black cane and walking without a limp.

Satellite radio filled this house inside Washington, DC’s Beltway that Thursday morning in April 2016, savvy rock songs curated by a human being, not an algorithm. Amidst the music, Vin heard Merle in the dining room whimpering goodbye to the changing of the guard.

This two-story house rose from a grass lawn and was set back from a curved suburban road just over the Maryland border from America’s white marble capital city, a gothic dwelling surrounded by a black iron bars fence tall enough to keep out casual interlopers but short enough to not look like a prison or a fortress or their inevitable fusion.

Vin looked away from the kitchen window.

Poured his attention into the empty white coffee mug.

Today I’ll work how the globe spins, he thought, yet now I’m standing here, showered and dressed after T’ai chi, then coffee at the dining room table with Merle and her insisted-on actual paper copies of the day’s New York Times and Washington Post—

—and I’m vacillating over whether to microwave a third cup from the glass pot of cold coffee. Whether to boil the tea kettle, make a fresh pot. Whether to go no more coffee today, stick my mug in the dishwasher.

He set the empty white coffee mug on the kitchen counter.

Glanced out the window, but black cane man was gone.

Vin filled the tea kettle, put it on the stove’s burner, whumped on that blue flame.

The man with the black cane didn’t limp.

“Bonnie,” said Vin: “Scan perimeter.”

A.I. Bonnie filled the three screens on the kitchen wall with images: Ms. Night Shift driving away. The curved tree line bordering the back yard. Middleclass homes seen through the black pole fence and across the two-lane old highway/commuter road.

Those screens scrolled: Sensors Track No Intrusion.

Vin turned his back on the open door to the dining room. Grabbed a glass jar filled with coffee beans. Heard shoes stepping on the wooden floor and turned around to see Mr. Day Shift enter the kitchen carrying his black medical bag.

“Hey, Justin. Everything OK?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” Justin put his black medical bag on the kitchen table. “She seems pretty good this morning. Moving fine. Almost a smile. Might be the new meds.”

“Might be.”

“Speaking of new meds,” said Justin, “orders sent some for you.”

“How many pills can one person take?”

“This is just a new version of the nose spray to counter the side effects of that prostate med.”

Justin flicked the first snap on his medical bag.

The tea kettle on the stove rumbled with heating water.

Vin shook coffee beans into the grinder, pushed its lid down for a whine that drowned out the music and all other sounds in the kitchen until Vin stopped the grind.

Heard the rumbling tea kettle generate a soft toot.

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