Big Mango (9786167611037) by Jake Needham Page B

for subtle
meanings and thoughtful insights he might have missed the first
time around. He found none.
    Okay, maybe he wasn’t any big deal—he hadn’t
done all that much with his life, he supposed—but why did his son
see him as such a loser? It certainly wasn’t true. Was it?
    As he thought about his conversation with
Michael, Eddie idly picked up the envelope Rupert had left on his
desk and toyed with it, sliding it absentmindedly from hand to
hand. Forgetting his vow not to open it until he had decided
whether to accept Rupert’s offer, he slipped his forefinger under
the back flap, ripped it across the top, and shook the contents out
onto his desk. As he sat for a long time looking at what spilled
out, he could feel the sting of Michael’s words being shouldered
aside by a growing sense of foreboding.
    There was nothing particularly sinister or
even surprising about what was in the envelope. It was exactly what
Rupert had said it would be. Still, looking at it spread out across
his desk, Eddie thought he could feel the air around him start to
grow heavy. At the very moment he opened the envelope, he was
certain the atmosphere began to give off a restless, distinctive
odor: oxygen being burned into ozone somewhere nearby, the first
forewarning of an approaching storm. It was a vivid premonition.
Bolts of lightning, still too far away to be seen, were coming
closer by the minute. Soon, he felt absolutely sure, they would be
slashing the sky around his head.
    Eddie cautiously picked up a rectangular red
and gold folder and opened the cover. Inside was a ticket for a San
Francisco to Bangkok flight on Singapore Airlines leaving Wednesday
just before midnight. It was a round-trip ticket with an open
return. At least, Eddie noted, it was first class.
    There was cash, too: hundred dollar bills,
ten of them. And there was a letter from the Oriental Hotel in
Bangkok confirming that a suite had been reserved for Mr. Rupert
Edward Dare for an indefinite stay. The letter begged to thank Mr.
Dare for the $5000 cash deposit to his account. A suite at one of
the most famous hotels in the world and a first-class ticket on
Singapore Airlines would normally be fine with him, but there was
something about the open return and the indefinite stay part of the
letter that bothered him a lot.
    When he thought about it later, Eddie
realized he had acted unconsciously after that. He dug around on
his desk until he found the remote control and then punched on the
little Sony that he kept in the office for watching sports when he
was pretending to work on weekends. He had only been going to check
out CNN, as he remembered, just to see what the weather was like in
Bangkok; purely out of curiosity.
    “Anything else before I leave, Eddie?” Joshua
was standing just inside the door and Eddie registered the concern
on his face even in the fading twilight of the office. He had no
secrets from Joshua, so he had told him about Marinus Rupert and
about the Secret Service. He had told Joshua what he knew, and that
hadn’t taken long.
    “I’m okay, Joshua.” Eddie hesitated and then
decided to take the easy way out. “The call from Jennifer was no
big deal. A problem with Mike. Nothing I can’t handle.”
    Joshua nodded, but his expression remained
the same as he watched Eddie closely. Eventually Joshua tilted his
head toward the television set. “I’ve always liked that movie,
too.”
    Eddie rotated his chair slightly and saw that
the set had come on to a channel that was playing some old western
he didn’t recognize. A man dressed all in black was galloping on a
sleek white horse through the dusty streets of a small western town
while its awestruck residents gazed at him with a mixture of
respect and admiration.
    “I wasn’t watching—”
    “You know, Eddie, I’ve always thought that’s
what America is really all about,” Joshua interrupted, pointing his
forefinger at the television set.
    “About riding horses and