The Click

More than three weeks passed and Oliver Hitchcock’s sleep had been pummeled

with nightmares of guilt and regret, emotions he successfully avoided in the light of day. On this particular morning the bedroom was still dark when he shook himself out of one of those nightmares. He glanced to his right, toward the wrinkled sheets next to him, then looked around the room. He was alone but could hear rustling sounds from the kitchen. He started to rise, but the pain of reality flashed through his head as quickly as the nightmare receded. At that moment all he could think about was how difficult it was for his daughter to have children, how she now only had one. No! He wasn’t going there. The past was the past. Learn from it but don’t dwell on it— the CIA code. Easier said than done … this time.

Before starting a fight with his buried emotions, those feelings he refused to acknowledge much of his life, he heard footsteps. Janine Rousseau, Detective Janine Rousseau, forty-five years of age, tiptoed into the opened doorway wearing a thin robe. Hitch watched her smile, then drop her robe exposing the body of a twenty year old. She approached licking her lips and crawled back into bed. With her bare hands reaching under the covers she managed to draw him into the present, into her. For the next twenty minutes they made love for the fourth time in twelve hours. Before he could catch his breath Janine was in her robe once again strolling back to the kitchen.

He rose from the bed and yawned, then jumped into his trousers and shoes and walked after her carrying his shirt. “Have you seen my cap?” he asked.

“Where you left it, on the couch in the living room,” Janine answered standing at the kitchen stove with her back to him.

It was there as she said, along with her black leather jacket with VAMA in yellow down one sleeve, a Miami-classic black leather shoulder holster and matching pearl handled laser handgun, an empty bottle of vodka, two glasses, and a half empty pitcher of orange juice. Hitch picked up his Muckraker cap, which he constantly wore as a reminder

of better times, and stood there buttoning his shirt, all the while noticing for the first time a framed photo of Janine standing with a young girl, probably seven or eight, in front of the Eifel Tower.

“I’m done with this, Janine,” he announced as he opened the front door to leave.

“I doubt that,” he heard back and glared at her.

“You’re too narcissistic to give up the good life of whisky and women. Besides, your clock may not be clicking but it is ticking and there’s only so much life left in it, and in you. You’ll be back.

Hitch ached to put Rousseau down, to let her know she was full of shit. Instead he turned and marched out leaving the door ajar.