Beneath the Winslow Stars

By Renee Palmer

Myra Helm is the adopted daughter of a small town judge, saved from a frozen fate in infancy under mysterious circumstances. She grows into a striking young
woman who clings to anonymity after her rescue but is thrust unwillingly back into the world spotlight when she meets Jake Navarro, dashing retired Navy
SEAL and fledgling major league baseball player. Together they discover long-lost young children who appear within a tiny church in rural Arizona to
which they are both bound by faith and family.

Jake is faced with agonizing choices between his dreams of a career that sustained him and remaining to protect Myra as their love blossoms into an explosively controversial union while the stars and heavens align above them. Scrutiny over the recovered children and their saviors' complicity bears down upon them as a pilgrimage of humanity moves toward their church seeking contemporary answers to ancient questions of faith, fiction and redemption. Renee Palmer weaves a sweeping tale for the ages of love and drama with mankind's curiosity that will push the boundaries of every reader’s expectations and rekindle the debate about what we believe and why we choose to believe it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Borderline Publishing
• Release date: Jan 16, 2015

Book preview

PROLOGUE

The Fish

The silly fish just wouldn’t move. Its gills, once rhythmically fanning open and closed like lazy butterflies beneath the water, were now tightly adhered to the torso, crusty and motionless. The child tentatively poked the dried, scaly flesh near where the rainbow seemed vaguely luminous in the hot August sun. Still, it wouldn’t move. Puzzling. He so desperately wanted to watch the pretty fish swim away, but it wouldn’t even try. It was sleeping. Napping, maybe.

As the boy squatted in the gently swaying grass by the murmuring creek, intently analyzing his discovery, the steady hum of flies and a mournful rasping of cicadas artfully hidden nearby filled the muggy atmosphere. The laces of his shoes were clogged with seed pods, carpet lint, and grass from hours of rolling and tumbling while doing battle with imaginary villains. His beloved Yankees jersey, so tattered by near-constant wear, had long ago lost its deep color from many wash and dry cycles. But his denim shorts were brand new and still a little itchy above his underpants waistline. Size ‘4T’ it said right on the scratchy tag. Proudly, he could read the tag and knew that it goes in the back when pulling up his pants.

A cool breeze swelled through the towering pine branches and aspen groves beyond the river bank, whispering his name conspiratorially. He could hear them thinking about him. Observing him wordlessly like a stoic, hung jury. The woods and its inhabitants were waiting and observing his deeds. He paid them no mind.

The boy, transfixed by the beauty of the sparkling fish scales, was reminded of the stars at night. Yes, that was it, just like the stars at night. He loved to gaze at them before bedtime and wondered why they couldn’t be a little bit closer so he could actually touch them and see what they were made of. His father had helped him catch fireflies in a mayonnaise jar, and to the boy stars and fireflies held much in common. They were whimsical, magical creatures that captured his imagination through phosphorescence and mysterious super powers.

Airplanes were fascinating as well. They were easy to identify because they blinked red and green and moved predictably. But the stars were something altogether different. They were special and called out to him. Sometimes, after being dutifully tucked in for the night he would crawl out of bed and search for his favorites in the nighttime sky. He could overhear their musings and then dive under the bedcovers upon the approach of parental voices in the hallway. His stars faithfully appeared almost every night unless there was a rare cloud-filled sky above his home. Some of the stars were, according to his father, part of a ‘dipper’ but he couldn’t see this dipper even though he allowed that he could. He didn’t honestly know what a dipper was, anyway. There were so many similar twinkling stars on the motionless fish’s skin capturing his attention that he tried to count them.

One, two, tree, four, six, seben, nine, ten! he proclaimed in triumph, smiling brightly. The boy could only count in groups of ten at a time before needing to start over again at ‘one’, and he patiently did so several times. And then, he suddenly had an inspired idea. He could make the fishy swim again if he really tried. Yes, he was sure of it! It was easy if you only knew how. He prodded the dried fish once again and with a heavy sigh of resignation, bent slowly toward the fish. Their eyes met, or so he thought. The fish remained steadfastly staring out of one blackened, exposed eye into the blistering sky.

The boy commanded sternly, Mister Fishy, can you hear me? Wake up and swim now. You can do it!

Nothing from the fish. He leaned all the way down to the ground using his hands for support on the soft, fertile riverbank mud. Inhaling the putrid aroma emanating from the fish, he was unaffected by the growing stench that attracted all manner of insect scavengers. He was annoyed by an intrusive fleet of opportunistic flies circling nearby in a holding pattern, awaiting a clear return to their feast.

Gingerly at first, the boy grasped the fish in both hands, pulling it away from its resting place, taking much of the solidly attached surrounding dirt and grass with it. The turf crackled its firm release. He was surprised at how rough the fish felt within his hands. Not at all slippery and pliable as he expected a fish would be; like his orange baseball in the bathtub when it was soapy and wet. He stood cradling the fish to his chest, walked to the creek’s bank, and returned to a crouching position near a point where he could reach a minor inlet in the stream.

OK, Mister Fishy…time to swim now! Try really hard and I’ll help you, he declared, slowly raising the fish’s head to his own at eye level. Curiously, a long string protruded from the corner of the fish’s mouth, looking rather like a length of dental floss his mother used every morning and evening in the bathroom. The boy wondered why a fish needed dental floss. Did he have a mirror at home, too? Did his mommy make him floss? Their faces aligned for a brief moment, but still sensing no cooperation on the fish’s part, the boy lowered the fish to his mouth. He placed the trout’s hardened lips upon his pink and supple mouth, all the while grinning happily at his perfectly crafted plan to enable it to swim once again. Now breathe, Mister Fishy. Do like this… Forming his mouth into a puckered whistle, the boy first inhaled deeply and then blew softly into the fish’s stiffened, gaping mouth in one long, steady motion. Fooooph! He waited expectantly for a reaction. The blowing sensation reminded him of being in Miss Angela’s music class in Sunday school and of the wonderful flute recorders that could turn a boy’s breath into a musical note.

Just blow your breath out, and magic will happen, she said, and he believed her.

The boy waited impatiently for the fish to breathe on its own. He repeated the process one more time but with more gusto, deciding that he simply had not breathed hard enough the first time to fully awaken the fish. He must be sleeping very soundly, he thought. The boy closed his eyes and again blew his breath into the fish, this time with all of his might, until his cheeks and lungs felt tingly.

The fish’s eyes furtively rolled upward and then back down again. He was sure of it. Yes, they did! The fishy can see me now!

The boy smiled radiantly into the fish’s rigid face. The tiny fish shuddered in the boy’s hands and its tail lurched dramatically to the left and right like an intermittent windshield wiper in a morning mist. There came a snappy, fracturing sound of dried fish scales rubbing together in sideways friction. Its gaping mouth began to form silent ‘wow, wow, wow’ syllables, clearly expressing the creature’s utter confusion at the unexpected turn of events. Its gills burst open in a frantic, instinctual search for liquid salvation. The boy squealed with delight. Yes! He knew he could do it! The fishy could swim home now!

Here you go, fishy, here’s your water! See? He lovingly consoled the thrashing fish and replaced it in the silted water of the lively creek behind his home. The fish instantly sank face-down in a shallow, muddy hole created from his father’s boot the day before, when he had unsuccessfully attempted the removal of a hook from the fish’s gullet.

It’s no use, the father had thought. The fish swallowed the hook completely and couldn’t be released without tearing the fish inside-out, guts and all. Damn. The father hated to waste a good hand-tied fly, but the baby rainbow trout was too small to bother with cleaning and cooking. He was an eager one, this fish, and he’d paid the price. Not even a half-pounder yet…he mused. The father took pity upon the fish’s contortions and bashed its head two, three, four times on a nearby rock to put it out of its misery. He cut the fishing line with his pocket knife and discarded the fish in the grass, wiping his sticky hands on his Levi’s. At least the birds’ll get some dinner tonight…

The boy righted the fish into a position more befitting a swimming animal and gently petted its dorsal fin through the murky, standing water, peeling away the adhered debris and grass. "Come on, you know how to do it," he coaxed the groggy fish awake from its sound sleep of the day and night before. Disoriented, the trout rolled to one side, fanned its gills, and ingested laborious breaths of water into quivering, membranous tissue. Its reddened eyes darted from side to side and suddenly, registering the looming figure of a human boy just inches above the creek’s surface, it splashed a startled, reflexive escape in a movement so fluid it took the boy by surprise. The fish blasted its way to freedom straight into the chattering water that reflected the sky like sapphires on liquid silver. One big splash and it was gone. Home.

The boy lost his balance and toppled onto his backside, firmly planting his bottom upon the loamy river mud. Oh no! My jersey will get dirty! Mama will take it from me and wash it again. He would need to stand guard aside the dryer until the cycle ended and the machine buzzed to promptly retrieve it. But despite his folly, he laughed aloud. He produced a crystalline, delighted yelp of glee at his latest salubrious accomplishment. His giggles were so joyously pure that the song birds in the surrounding forest called out to him in return. They had seen the fish shooting downstream away from his hands and knew what had transpired. They chirped and sang out for all to hear. A bellow of wind gathered from the west, rustling millions of yellow aspen leaves in unison as if offering a vast, quaking standing ovation for the boy’s sensational performance. Millions of shimmering, golden leaves applauded the spectacle in a choreographed symphony that only they, the forest, and the young boy could hear. The towering pines, the kings of the land that grew densely along the meandering riverbank, hummed a contented, susurrus ‘’Hush!" that reverberated throughout the valley. Neighboring groves of smaller trees gracefully bowed their heads each in turn on the mounting gust of warm wind that caressed the innocent boy.

Hearing the child’s eruption of cries and unsure if he was in peril, his mother stood immediately from her rocking chair on the porch where she had been observing him play by the creek several yards away. She wondered what he had been looking at in the grass all that time. He was such a curious boy. Always finding something fascinating in the most mundane, everyday objects. At peace within his world. Talking to himself constantly. Tentatively moving toward him the mother called to him with concern, Baby, are you OK?

The boy turned expectantly toward her voice, and through his laughter replied with unconcealed exuberance,

"Mama! The fishy’s swimming! It’s swimming again now!"

His mother’s long hair caught the afternoon sun as she leaned over the railing and it gave her head a glowing aura of sienna warmth. The corners of her shapely mouth turned upward and she tipped her head to the side, eyeing him with amusement and answered, "Of course it is, honey, that’s what fish do, silly. Now, come on inside before you fall in that creek. You’re all covered with mud again. She really didn’t mind the mud. And besides, the game’s about to start and the cookies are cool."

With that irresistible invitation, the boy scampered toward his mother’s waiting arms, filled with the invigorating knowledge that he had kissed a fish and made it all better. It didn’t even need a Band-aid.

The boy was reminded of what he had done the week before with the yellow and brown birdy his rotund cat, Diego, had brought into the house that blustery Sunday afternoon. Its neck looked funny and its head wobbled crazily from side to side, a faraway stare in its glazed eyes. Diego was loath to part with his treasure, but the boy had reasoned with him to surrender it from within his sanctuary beneath the dining room table. Diego twitched his left ear, the one with the chunk torn out from losing a tomcat fight years ago, grudgingly relinquishing the stilled Meadowlark into the boy’s gentle hands. Diego lurked hopefully nearby in case the tasty plaything would be returned, but it was not.

Much like the fish, the bird had flown away home via the boy’s hand from the back porch amid a burst of loosened under-feathers and frenzied flapping toward a receptive patch of sunflowers. Well out of reach of Diego’s watchful eyes and stealthy pounce, she would live again to enthusiastically sing her trilling melody of gratitude to the boy on subsequent mornings from a much safer distance in the woods henceforth. Lesson learned, stay away from the cat.

Silent witnesses of ancient ponderosa and pinion pines, cottonwoods and ash trees saw the boy wave ‘bye-bye’ to the panicked bird that summer afternoon, and nodded knowingly in his direction. Imperial branches rose and fell aloft rippling breezes, set against a cobalt sky while their shadows danced lovingly across the boy’s porcelain face. Stroking his cheeks. Committing his features to memory. My liege.

Yes. This one….This is the boy of the prophecy. He will be worth our long wait, the wise pines concluded, whispering such to the woodland thicket and other attentive inhabitants of the curious, expectant forest who awaited their verdict.

He is the One.

PART ONE

Fate drives a hard bargain. Either you accept it and resign your free will, or you deny it and betray your destiny.

Chapter One

The call came into the station at precisely 6:53 p.m., December 24th, 1989, while The Stevens Show aired on an old black and white television set on the kitchen counter. The volume was turned up high and the Huxtable family squabbled over the merits of embarking upon a family shopping excursion into the city. No one was watching the television.

Instead, five men of varying ages and sizes stood nearby around an 18-inch high silver Christmas tree leaning precariously to one side on the only coffee table in the Humphrey’s Peak Fire Station in Flagstaff. They were hanging handfuls of tinsel on the tree in clumps and knots without a shred of artistic design, but with genuine enthusiasm for the task, laughing and joking as always. Their spirits were high. It was Christmas Eve, and while many of them quietly wished they were at home with their families, this was their second family and they loved each other as much as a group of unrelated men could. A Santa-shaped plate that once held homemade cookies from the ladies VFW auxiliary lay at the base of the tree. Crumbs and colorful sprinkles were all that was left. An empty gallon jug of eggnog sat nearby.

The heavily burdened tree was drenched in tinsel when the red phone rang, alerting them to a house fire on Willowbrook Lane. Probably another Christmas tree fire, the third one of the season. Send both engines, the dispatcher advised. The men dropped their holiday decorations and immediately prepared for the call-out; a precise operation that was drilled and drilled to perfection, and within the prescribed 90 seconds they were hopping from one foot to the other toward their respective ladder trucks while simultaneously applying boots, coats, and hats. No more laughter. It was all business. The television remained unnoticed and the program changed to How the Grinch Stole Christmas at 7:00 p.m.

The trucks were loaded and ready; the flashing lights from both engines created a dizzying strobe effect within the garage. Automatic stoplight sensors outside the station were activated and traffic inched to a stop at the busy main intersection of 4th Street and Goldwater Avenue. It was only in the last second that Captain Stephen Thorne noticed something was amiss when the garage door was fully raised. Driver Nathan Collings was in the process of moving his foot from the brake to the gas pedal when Captain Thorne threw his hand on the dashboard and yelled, Stop!

In the headlights was a narrow, elongated shadow of something in front of the truck, but too low to identify its source from inside the elevated cab of the massive truck. The darkness outside was punctuated with snowflakes wafting lazily in front of the high beam headlights. They settled down into drifts that had accumulated throughout the afternoon against the garage door.

"What? What’s wrong? We gotta go! What is it? Geez, man, it’s just a snow drift!" yelled Collings, looking at Thorne with a puzzled expression.

Thorne shook his head quickly. He saw something else in the shapes and patterns. No. It’s, I don’t know. Something’s in front of the truck. I’ll check it out. Hold on a sec.

Thorne threw open the passenger door and slid out the side, his boots making a loud thud when they struck the concrete garage floor. The readied men in both trucks watched him in stunned silence as he wasted precious response time to jog around the front of the truck instead of pulling forward as he should have. Cars were stopped at the light awaiting the truck’s entry into the intersection.

When he rounded the corner of Ladder Truck One, there she was. Right in front of the garage door and so close that if she had lifted her arms from her side she could have touched the massive steel grill on the truck that bore down upon her tiny frame. Her body cast a curiously long shadow for one so small. Maybe a year, maybe 18 months old, at most, Thorne guessed. At only 27 years himself, Thorne had no children to compare her to. She was merely a little baby; he knew that much. The girl was naked except for a haphazardly applied diaper that fell from her left hip like a sash. She stood absolutely still, staring straight into the steely truck as if expecting a quick, merciful death which would certainly have been her fate if not for Thorne’s intuition. The snow buried her plump legs up to her thighs. She had obviously been there awhile.

Millions of heavily sodden snowflakes pierced the truck’s halogen beams on their downward spiral as though a celestial pillow fight had erupted far above. A blanket of crisp snow on the roads reflected the blinking red traffic signal and the kaleidoscopic play of lights from the twirling emergency beacons within the station. A dozen more cars slowly crept to a stop at the emergency light, their wheels crunching and squeaking on the ice-packed street.

The snowfall had gradually settled upon the head, hair, and torso of the child in mounds bolstered by ice shelves formed against her alabaster skin. Icicles clung to her delicate chin and fingertips. Her eyelashes, long and dark, supported impossibly thick wedges of snow that resembled marshmallows floating in cocoa. She stared into the truck’s bumper, oblivious to her impending fate through eyes that defied her peril with unwavering clarity. The baby suddenly locked her eyes on Thorne’s face and studied him with detached curiosity. He couldn’t break her gaze and felt as though he was the one frozen in place, instead of her.

Her eyes shone with an iridescent glow behind them: Lit from within, warm and welcoming. Her irises were rimmed with flecks of gold and streaks of bright green. The effect of the baby’s eyes was surreal and it set him back a step to embrace her stare. He had never seen eyes like that on anyone before. Never.

Thorne would later recall the oddest fact of the girl’s rescue when he recounted the story first to the Division Chief, then the police, followed immediately by the nationwide media; as if any of the facts of this case weren’t odd, there were no tracks in the firehouse driveway. It was pristinely untouched. No footprints, no car tracks, nothing at all when they lifted the garage door. Everything was undisturbed. Not even the usual rabbit tracks that often crisscrossed the station’s grounds during the winter were visible. There were so many rabbits in the field behind the fire house that the men often joked of making rabbit-kabobs for dinner on slow evenings.

Not on this night, however. It was a beautifully composed, silent Christmas Eve and not a creature had stirred during the snowfall except for a tiny child who had appeared in front of the station as if deposited there by an errant stork that had flapped away unseen toward the heavens. How had she been placed there without leaving any tracks behind? Thorne wondered. The baby certainly had not walked there herself. No, she had been deliberately abandoned and left to die on a frigid night without even a pair of shoes to protect her feet in the snow.

Thorne snatched her from the drift and screamed to his team for help. Uniformed men erupted from the trucks, rushing to his aid. The skin on her torso was as blue as the Arizona sky, but her feet looked frighteningly gray and lifeless. Perhaps it was already too late to save them. Doug Carnahan, Chief Medic, called out that her respirations were slow and shallow; her BP was at 32/20. He yelled frantically at everyone and no one in particular, "For God’s sake! Get a chopper here, now! Wrap her feet! No direct heat on the skin, just wrap ‘em up! Shit, we’re losing her!"

Yet, through it all, she never made a sound or even appeared to be distressed. She seemed transfixed by Thorne and heard the soothing words that he whispered so gently into her perishing ears, "Just hang on, baby, don’t give up now. We’re here with you…please, stay with us…please, baby."

Captain Thorne was initially reluctant to allow even his own paramedics to remove her from his large, strong arms where he protectively cradled her in those first few moments, but he hesitantly gave her to the medics and remained by her side as long as he could until more help could be summoned. He knocked the ice from her face, stroked her fine, fairy-like hair, and gazed into her untroubled eyes while his team of professionals worked frantically to save the toddler’s life. The girl was transferred that first night by Flight For Life from the remote station to the Children’s Hospital of Phoenix where she would ultimately undergo intensive and painful treatments for hypothermia and third degree frostbite in her feet and hands.

How long she had remained stoically immobile in that position would later become a critical question at the heart of the investigation that invoked the local meteorologists and the Doppler radar database at NAU to determine the precise moment when the snow began to fall and how much accumulation had occurred by the time of her rescue. Seconds mattered. Evidence was quickly lost in the mounting storm. Tire tracks or footprints that could have remained visible in the driveway for up to 90 minutes, depending upon ground temperature and wind speed, had disappeared beneath the snow. Compounding the chaos at the station, subsequent EMT and police in heavy equipment and boots trampled the scene upon arrival. Curious bystanders emerged from their cars dressed in holiday sweaters, some wearing Santa hats and whimsical antlers, and ran to the scene thereby quashing any tracks that might have otherwise been viable.

As a result, no trace of her parents was ever found at the station or even upon her body. The adhesive tabs on her Pampers yielded not a single fingerprint or hair fiber. It was as though someone had shaken a magical snow globe containing her soul and identity and delicately placed her under the Yuletide tree for a new, unknown family to enjoy.

The temperature hovered at 20 degrees and continued to snow all that night until morning when the depth topped out at three feet in Flagstaff, Arizona. It was a gloriously white Christmas, one for the record books, and children with new sleds and winter toys rejoiced in the bountiful gift of shimmering Christmas snowdrifts to dive into and play upon until called back inside their homes for loving, family feasts. The surrounding pine forest boughs drooped lethargically under the weight of the wet snow and occasionally sprang free of their burden, releasing masses of snow from branches above causing an avalanche of white, winter wonder.

And so the Miracle of Baby Eve, a moniker quickly adopted by the Arizona Republic due to the Christmas Eve connection, became a world-wide sensational story. News of Baby Eve’s cruel abandonment and subsequent health challenges facing her lengthy recovery dominated the headlines for weeks. Her photo was as familiar to most Americans as that of newly elected President George Bush, probably more so to be accurate. Even People magazine featured her angelic face on the cover for three weeks in a row, which is an unheard of attention span in tabloid journalism.

But every media outlet posited the same questions: Who is this stunningly beautiful child? What kind of monster would do such a thing to her? Who are her parents? The public demanded answers and more so, the public demanded swift justice upon her perpetrators. The Eve story was on every newscast, headline, and talk show, and speculation ran rampant around dinner tables and water coolers across the country. Days turned to weeks and weeks into months without a solid lead in the case.

No one, certainly not her parents, was ultimately identified nor charged in Baby Eve’s abandonment, primarily because her identity could not be positively determined. In order to match a DNA sample, more than one individual is required for an equation to balance: One cannot solve for X if there is no Y component. Several people quickly claimed to be her biological parent, but were readily dismissed as opportunistic publicity seekers or merely overly sympathetic to the beautiful child. Of the hundreds of voluntary DNA samples gathered, none was a match to hers.

Then the crazies really came out of the woodwork, as one exhausted Arizona detective bluntly stated after pursuing her case non-stop for months without a solid lead. Baby Eve attracted an unusually high volume of public curiosity and doggedly annoying interference, causing the investigation to be even more complicated and lengthy than necessary. But despite the flurry of attention given to her case, Baby Eve’s true identity remained a mystery to her and the world for the rest of her life. Little Baby Eve was truly all alone.

Although it seemed logical that her life’s course could not travel on a stranger, more convoluted path than it had already traversed, it in fact did just that. Her journey unfolded within a few short years into a wondrously peculiar and unexpected tale that would be permanently chiseled into the tablets of human spirituality and sociologic discourse.

For years afterward, Captain Thorne felt an overwhelming connection to Eve–as if he had known her before and had only recently rediscovered her. But of course that couldn’t be the case. It was probably just a paternal instinct to protect a child, he reasoned. As the helicopter finally lifted off that strange night into the white blizzard created by the downward blast of the rotors, he shielded his face with his helmet and waved goodbye toward the baby girl as though she could see him and would somehow know that he wished her well.

Please, God, let her be alright… he said aloud to himself in that open field of whirling, bitterly cold whiteness. Slowly, the whump, whump, whump of the copter’s blades were swallowed by the night and she was gone into the darkness.

Thorne’s crew never responded to the house fire on Willowbrook Lane. The call was diverted to station 17 on the west side of the district. It turned out to be a crank call to a fictitious address and was written off as likely having originated from a bored adolescent. Some idiot kid home on school break with nothing better to do. And what a stroke of luck it was that the call came in when it did, the media repeatedly pointed out. Things might well have turned out very differently if that call had not come into that particular station, at that particular time. What a blessing in disguise.

Though Thorne obsessively followed every news story about Eve in the ensuing weeks and months until eventually the news cycle shifted to new and equally horrific acts of human atrocity, she always remained a part of him for having irreparably changed his life. There was a nagging tug in his heart toward something he could never fully explain. It was an inexplicable emptiness when she left him and he thought of her often. That was his impression, that she had left him. He could only hope she would be loved wherever she was and whoever she became. He could not have begun to imagine how her life would unfold and when he saw her again, some twenty years later, it would be under even more unusual circumstances.

When Thorne later married and became the proud father of a baby daughter he could not help but compare those vibrant eyes of Eve’s, so stunning and full of unblemished trust, to those of his own beautiful newborn girl when he held her close. He would never forget the luminously brilliant, golden-green eyes that had looked into his soul on Christmas Eve, 1989. The image was permanently embossed upon his brain. He named his beautiful daughter Evelyn Claire so there would remain a tiny part of Baby Eve in his life forever, and he vowed to protect his precious new baby girl to his dying day. He promised her the moment she was born, even before she had taken her first breath of oxygen. Evelyn Claire shared his sparkling, humorous blue eyes and she instinctively knew that she was safe, protected, and cherished within her father’s loving arms.

Chapter Two

A spiral of steely smoke drifted through the shaft of sunlight piercing the otherwise unlit room. The atmosphere was foggy and full of earthy aromas: a fine Cuban, seasoned leather, naugahyde upholstery, and a half-eaten Big Mac on the big man’s desk. The man rumbled from across the massive, ornate mahogany desk at his elbows, with sleeves rolled half-way up, "So, what you’re telling me, son, is that you’re gonna need a little ‘break’ from our team to go home and play nursemaid to your