6

            After his visit to the cemetery, Anthony went home.

            They lived in an eighty-year-old, Queen Anne Victorian in Grant Park, a historic Atlanta neighborhood of Victorians, Craftsman bungalows, quaint red brick sidewalks, and stately elms, maples, and oaks.  The public park, the oldest in the city, was home to Zoo Atlanta and the Cyclorama, a popular Civil War exhibition.  Their house was located on a wooded, one-acre parcel around the corner from the park.  

            They’d moved into the place six months into their marriage, and they’d done extensive renovations to the exterior and interior.  The new fiberglass siding was hunter-green, with black trim.  A new spear point, wrought-iron fence enclosed the property.  They’d re-sodded the yard with Bermuda grass and installed mulch and flower beds, too; the impatiens Lisa had planted last month were looking good. 

            He pressed a remote control affixed to the sun visor.  The gate to the driveway swung inward. 

            The plan to purchase an old house and renovate it originally had been Lisa’s idea, but Anthony had quickly warmed to the possibilities.  He wasn’t a fan of the housing subdivisions that consumed Atlanta’s suburbs, with their tyrannical homeowners associations and cookie cutter floor plans.  They’d spent a bundle on the house and all the work, but he’d discovered an unexpected pleasure in restoring something from the past, in putting a shiny new gloss on history.  

            He parked in the three-car garage, another addition.  He flipped down the sun visor and unclipped the envelope. 

            The note had said to be online at eighteen hundred hours.  Less than two hours away.  He took the envelope inside with him.    

            The interior was an elegant blend of Victorian era charm and contemporary style.  Rich hardwood floors.  Traditional pocket windows, so long you could step out of them and onto the wrap-around veranda.  Vaulted ceilings.  Hand-carved crown molding, wainscoting, and intricate woodwork.  Comfortable modern furniture in soft tones, with gentle lines.  State-of-the art appliances, and wiring throughout the house for the stereo system.           

            He took the staircase off the main hallway to the basement.  The finished basement was comprised of a media room that contained their home theater set-up, an entertainment area with a billiards table and mini-bar, a fitness room full of free weights and a treadmill, storage space, and his office. 

            His office was almost pure Spartan: a large, windowless room with white walls and beige carpeting.  A simple desk stood in the center, and held his laptop computer and a laser-jet printer/scanner/fax machine.  A bookcase contained his most-frequently used reference texts, and a mini-refrigerator full of bottled water and snacks occupied a niche underneath the desk.

            The only photographs were Lisa’s bridal portrait, and a photo of his father at work in the newsroom.  The pictures stood on opposite corners of the desk.

            Many of his author colleagues adorned their work spaces with framed posters of their published books.  Anthony didn’t have any such posters.  In fact, the novels he’d written were mixed in with other volumes held in the library upstairs.

            There were two doors at the far end of the room.  One led to the half-bath, and hung partly open.  The other door was closed and secured with an electronic keypad lock, accessible via a code known only to him and Lisa.

            Settling into the desk chair, he powered on the computer.  The machine was connected to the Internet via a wireless modem, but he rarely took the laptop out of the office. 

            He checked his primary e-mail account, an AOL address he’d maintained for several years and which was listed on the “Contact Me” page of his author Web site.  In his inbox, he found a handful of complimentary remarks from readers about his novels, a few pieces of spam advertising penis enlargements and drugs for erectile dysfunction, and that was all.  Nothing from the mysterious messenger.

            So how was this guy going to get in touch with him online?  Should he expect an e-mail? A tweet on the Twitter account he rarely used?  A Facebook friend request?     

            He wasn’t sure, but it was only fifteen minutes to five o’clock, a little over an hour to go until the meeting.  He signed onto all of his social networking accounts and kept his e-mail inbox open.  Meanwhile, time crawled at an excruciatingly slow pace.

            He grabbed a bottle of water from the mini-frig, opened Microsoft Word, and brought up the file of his novel-in-progress, tentatively titled, The Darkness in the Ghost. 

            The book, as did the others in the series, chronicled the exploits of an urban mercenary known only as “Ghost.”  Ghost was a Marine veteran who had come home from work one evening to find his wife brutally raped and murdered.  The police apprehended a suspect, a serial rapist who confessed to the crime, but when the case reached trial, the killer wound up getting released on a technicality. 

            Disgusted and furious, Ghost tracked down the killer and held a trial of his own—the kind that ended not with the bang of a judge’s gavel, but with the lethal discharge of a 9mm pistol. 

            Thus, Ghost’s bloody vendetta against a corrupt society and inept legal system was born.  Ghost typically was moved to help those who had lost loved ones in terrible crimes and found no help from the law, and his style of street justice—basically blowing a hole through anyone who dared to stop him from finding the perpetrator and ultimately leaving the guilty party with a bullet in the head—had gained him a fanatical following amongst those readers who liked to read about their justice served straight, no chaser. 

            There must have been many such readers, as each new entry in the Ghost series hit bestseller lists in a dozen countries.  The surprising success was a blessing, but Anthony would have gone on writing the stories whether or not they had even been published.  He had been writing about Ghost, in various incarnations, for fifteen years.             

            So far, he’d completed over two hundred pages of the new novel, but as he hunched over the keyboard, he found it impossible to concentrate.  For once, real life had become more intriguing than fiction.

            Nevertheless, he toyed with the manuscript, changing a word here, rearranging a sentence there, just to pass the time.  Fortunately, a call on his cell saved him from a prolonged bout of writer’s block.

            “Yo, AT, what’s up, man?”

            It was Mike Alfaro.  Although he and Mike usually chatted about once a week, Mike never would have let that particular day pass without giving him a ring. 

            “I’m working,” Anthony said.  Although he and Mike went way back, he didn’t consider telling him about the message he’d received. Before he shared it with anyone he needed to prove that it was genuine.

            “Working, huh?”  Mike laughed.  “Better you than me.  I rolled out of bed like an hour ago.”

            “You’re a lazy slob.”

            “I was tired, man.  Had a lady friend over, she kept me up all night.  Girl wore me out as bad as our DI used to.”

            Both of them had served in the Marine Corps, had done boot together on Parris Island in South Carolina.  The hard-hat DI who’d led their platoon had been such a hard-driving maniac that he’d found his way into recruits’ nightmares.

            “You know I don’t believe that,” Anthony said.

            “True words.”

            “Where’d you meet this one?”

            “On Jarhead.  She liked my photo, sent me a private message.”

            Jarhead was a Web site devoted to Marine Corps veterans.  It offered a message board open to anyone, private e-mail, and news of interest to vets.  Although it wasn’t meant for dating per se, some of Anthony’s old Marine buddies had used it as a means of hooking up with members of the fairer sex, many of them groupies obsessed with bedding a devil dog.

            “She a Marine?” Anthony asked.  “Or just a groupie?”

            “A real Marine.  Discharged last year.  She told me she scored a perfect 300 on the PFT—the men’s one.”   

            The PFT was a Physical Fitness Test that challenged you with pull-ups, sit-ups, and a three-mile run.  Female recruits were subjected to a less-intense version, and for a woman to notch a perfect score on the men’s exam was impressive indeed—only three guys from their platoon had pulled it off during boot, including him and Mike. 

            “You gonna see her again?” Anthony asked.

            “Doubt it.  She lives in San Diego, she was only in ATL on business.”

            “You can try the long distance thing.”

            “Do I need to break this down to you, AT?  It was strictly a booty call.”

            “Oh, right.”  Anthony chuckled.  “I forgot about those.”    

            “Since you’ve been locked down—excuse me, married—you’re totally out of touch with the bachelor life, huh?”

            “I experience it vicariously through you,” Anthony said.  “What I wonder is when you plan to hang up the spurs?”

            “When I meet a woman who can tame me.  Ain’t met her yet.”

            “She’s out there somewhere.  Speaking from experience here.”

            “Don’t hold your breath.”  Mike hesitated, and when he spoke again, his voice was subdued.  “So.  Everything okay today?”

            Anthony paused, and thought: This is so sad.  On such a significant day in his life, he received a concerned call from his friend, while his own sister avoided him and his nephew didn’t even understand why the date was relevant.

            It was partly why he’d enlisted in the Marines straight out of high school.  With a broken family at home and little interest in college, he’d sought fellowship in a group with a purpose to which he could devote himself, and found the Marine discipline, ethos, and camaraderie to his liking.  He’d earned a reputation for being totally squared away, a hard-core grunt who’d eagerly fought on the front lines in the infantry, and in spite of the numerous combat missions in which he’d participated, he’d never sustained more than minor flesh wounds and trivial bruises, something that, in hindsight, was a bit of a miracle. 

            If his first novel had not found a publisher and sold for a healthy six-figure sum, he probably would have re-enlisted.  As it happened, he found himself plunged into a writing career, met and married Lisa, and spent his days spinning stories about a character who embodied more than a little wish fulfillment—and taking calls from war buddies who cared more about him than his own blood relatives.

            A hard lump of emotion formed in his throat.       

            “You there?” Mike asked.

            A familiar beep sounded from the computer.         Anthony bolted upright in his chair.

            A message had appeared in his e-mail inbox.  It was from “truthgiver15@hushmail.com,” an address Anthony had never seen before. 

            The subject line of the e-mail stated:

Click this link, but only if you’re ready

            It was precisely six o’clock.  Anthony found the stranger’s punctuality encouraging.

            He opened the message.  It contained no text, just a link, a long web address with a string of seemingly random characters—letters, numbers, and punctuation symbols—evidence of powerful encryption at work.

            Heart booming, Anthony said, “Sorry, Mike, gotta run.  I’ll holler at you later.”