Abuse of Power - Michael Savage [48]
Then there was the set of encyclopedias that his mother had scrimped and saved to purchase for him when he was ten years old. The track and football trophies from high school. His college diplomas. His journalism and broadcasting awards.
And, of course, the battered helmet he’d worn on assignment in Iraq, reminding him just how close he had come to dying there.
He kept them all neatly on display, for his eyes only. Because when it came down to it, who else really cared? Rachel hadn’t. His parents were no longer alive. And while Tony and Maxine had turned out to be great friends, Jack wasn’t yet ready to share this part of his life with them.
The truth was, Jack Hatfield was something of a loner. He missed some of the friends he’d made at GNT—friends who had largely abandoned him out of concern for their own careers—but he had never had much trouble spending time with himself.
Just as Tony Antiniori hid his limp, for fear it might signify weakness, Jack did his best to disguise what really amounted to a mild case of Asperger’s syndrome—an aversion to social interaction. He craved order in the world. Anyone with a keen eye would notice this.
When he was a child he would line his shoes up under his bed, only to become upset if he ever found them out of place. He kept weekly journals of his activities, developing skills that served him well in his older years as a reporter. And taking on a career as a war correspondent was his own personal version of therapy, plunging him into a world of chaos in hopes that he might somehow make sense of it and find a way to rid himself of this demon.
Over the years this desire for order had dissipated somewhat, but every so often it flared up again, as it had tonight when he thought Eddie was missing, or a week ago when Tom Drabinsky met his fate, or two years ago when the life he’d built came crashing down around him. Jack’s orderly world had been disturbed, and Tony had been right when he’d suggested that he get away from the boat for the night.
Because here, in his Fortress of Solitude, surrounded by the comforts of his past, he could shut out the noise and finally breathe free. He had often felt Isaiah applied to his life as it did to so much else: “He was despised, and forsaken of men, a man of pains, and acquainted with disease, and as one from whom men hide their face; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”
* * *
Across from Jack’s bedroom was the room in which he kept his gun collection. He locked them in a huge gun safe that had taken four men to muscle into his apartment.
He preferred weapons that were precise and reliable, like the Colt Combat Commander .45 automatic, with its sheer stopping power and deadly accuracy at short range; the SIG-Sauer .380, a precisely machined German pistol known for its smoothness of operation; and, as a final back-up “shoe gun,” he relied on his Kel-Tec Crimson Trace, which was the size of a pack of cigarettes and weighed only a few ounces. This little tiger held a six-round clip and fired a .380 round. Big enough to save your life, small enough to slip into a shirt pocket.
Then there were the rifles and shotguns. A 12-gauge Model 870 Remington Express Magnum; a Colt AR-15, which shot the .223 rounds first deployed in Vietnam as a fully automatic; and a Ruger Mini 14, .223.
Next to the display case was his father’s old worktable. His old man had been an horologist who made a living fixing rich men’s watches, and had passed much of his knowledge on to Jack. The hours spent learning about winding wheels and barrel bridges and balance screws and regulators had been some of the best of