Jack_ Secret Vengeance - F. Paul Wilson [10]
Maybe someday …
“Nuke ’em!” Mr. Bainbridge was saying as Jack ducked out the front door. “Kill ’em all and let Allah sort ’em out! Who’ll miss ’em?”
He’d really built up a head of steam. Dad was simply sitting there letting him blow it off.
He biked over to Weezy’s and was just setting his kickstand in the driveway when he heard a girl scream.
He froze and listened.
“No! I’m not going!”
Weezy …
“The hell you aren’t!” Her father’s voice.
And then her mother’s. “Weezy, you can’t just quit school. Did something happen?”
Weezy … screaming: “Nothing happened! I’m just never going to school again and no one can make me!”
Weezy never going to school again? He couldn’t imagine what it was like for a fifteen-year-old girl to be called “easy” by everyone. Bad enough if it was true, but when it wasn’t …
And worse, no one would believe it wasn’t. Jack had seen the Carson Toliver charisma running full throttle today and it was awesome. No way anyone would believe he’d force himself on Weezy Connell. He was too good a guy. And besides, why would he force himself on any girl when there were so many of them drooling over him?
Even so, it would all blow over eventually. But Weezy probably couldn’t see that. She was an all-or-nothing sort. No half measures for her. When she got into something, she was into it all the way. So from where she stood, everyone thought she was a slut and would think of her as a slut for the rest of her life. She couldn’t face that on a daily basis so she was never ever going back to school.
Sooner or later she’d come around, but her parents didn’t seem to see that. Her father kept yelling that she was going back to school tomorrow and she kept screaming that she wasn’t.
The screams bothered Jack. He’d never heard that tone from Weezy, hadn’t imagined she was even capable of it. She sounded totally out of control, maybe even a little crazy.
Crazy … she’d been on his case about calling her that, and he remembered her getting in Eddie’s face for it a few times.
A door slammed, and then her father’s voice again. “Weezy! Open up! You open this door this minute!”
Jack heard Mrs. Connell say, “All right, that does it! I’m calling Doctor Hamilton.”
“Not again!” Weezy wailed.
Something about the way she said it gave Jack an uneasy feeling. Dr. Hamilton? Who was Dr. Hamilton? Jack had never heard of him.
Sad and worried, he turned his bike around and headed home.
5
Mr. Bainbridge was just going out as Jack came in.
“He sure was mad earlier,” he said to his father when he was gone.
“Well, he has a right to be. We all do. But he’s mad at just the Arabs. It’s more complicated than that.”
“How? Those marines were there just to keep the peace, right? They shouldn’t have been killed.”
His expression turned bitter. “Murdered is more like it.” He sighed. “But that ‘keep the peace’ bit is a big part of the problem. I just don’t see why every time there’s a dustup somewhere in the world, we have to put our guys in harm’s way. Those boys died for nothing. Absolutely nothing. It’s the law of unintended consequences.”
“‘Law’?”
“Well, not a law, per se, but it happens enough that it’s seen that way.”
Confused, Jack shook his head. “I don’t get it.”
His father leaned forward. “Used to be, if you wanted to steal a car, you’d cross a few wires under the dashboard to get it started, then drive off. To prevent thefts, car makers installed safeguards against hot-wiring. So what are car thieves doing now? They’re waiting for drivers to get in and start the car, then attacking them and pulling them from the car, and driving off. So, measures to prevent hot-wiring had the unintended consequence of replacing simple theft with violent carjacking.”
Jack got it … sort of.
“But Beirut?”
“The peacekeeping force had the best intentions: Calm the violence so cooler heads could prevail. But the fanatics saw it as an invasion. The result: An attempt to save Middle Eastern lives results in the slaughter of the U.S. peacekeepers. An unintended consequence.