The Perfect Husband - Lisa Gardner [3]
By the end of day one J.T. had been beyond conscious thought. The ceiling fan had become a prehistoric bird, his wicker sofa a tiger lying in wait. The toughest, meanest marine in the world had developed a bad case of the giggles. When he closed his eyes, the world had spun sickeningly, so he’d spent his first night with his eyelids propped open by his fingers, staring at the ceiling hour after hour after hour.
Now, on his fourth day of straight tequila, he’d gone beyond thought and surrendered most of his body. His face had gone first. He’d been sitting by his pool, swigging some great Cuervo Gold, and abruptly he’d realized he could no longer feel his nose. He tried to find it with his fingers—no dice. His nose was gone. An hour later his cheeks disappeared as well. No rasp of whiskers, no sting of sweat. He had no cheeks. Finally, not that long ago, he’d lost his lips. He’d tried to open them and they hadn’t been there anymore. No lips.
It made it damn hard to drink, and he had twenty-four hours of serious boozing left.
He rolled slowly onto his side, discovering he still had arms and a remnant of a pickled brain. He squeezed his eyes shut and hazy images clustered behind his eyelids. He’d been a champion swimmer and percussion rifle shooter once. He remembered the welcoming smell of chlorine and the heavy weight of his black walnut rifle. He’d been a marine with “raw talent, lots of potential” before he’d been asked to leave.
After the marines had come the stint as a mercenary, doing work he never told anyone about because then he’d have to kill them. The next image was more hesitant, still raw around the edges, as if it understood that even after four days of straight tequila, it had the power to bruise. He was back in the States. Rachel stood beside him. He was a husband. His gaze dropped to the little boy squeezing his hand. He was a father.
Now he was a drunk.
His manservant Freddie arrived, taking the silver-framed portrait from J.T.’s hands and replacing it in the safe where it would remain until next September.
“How are you doing, sir?”
“Uh.”
His iguana crawled into the room, its four-foot tail slithering across the red-tiled floor. The tequila screamed, “Red alert! Godzilla attacks!” The sane part of him whispered through parched, rubbery lips, “Glug, go away. I mean it.”
Glug pointedly ignored him, settling his plump body in a sunbeam that had sneaked through the venetian blinds and making himself comfortable. J.T. liked Glug.
“Water, sir?” Freddie inquired patiently.
“What day is it?”
“The thirteenth, sir.”
“Then gimme another margarita.”
In the distance a phone rang. The sound made J.T. groan, and when the noise had the audacity to repeat itself, he crawled painfully toward his patio to escape.
The sun promptly nailed him like a ball peen hammer. He swayed onto his feet, squinted his eyes from long practice, and oozed straight tequila from his pores.
Dry heat, they’d told him when he first moved to Arizona. Sure it’s hot, but it’s dry heat. Bullshit. One hundred and twenty was one hundred and twenty. No sane man lived in these kinds of temperatures.
He’d spent enough time in jungles, pretending he didn’t notice the water steaming off his skin or his own pungent odor. He’d learned to block out some of it. He’d simply inhaled the rest. The jungle lived inside him now. Sometimes, if he remembered Virginia plantations and the way his father had sat at the head of the table, clad in his full Green Beret uniform, his trousers bloused into glossy black Corcoran jump boots, his shirt pressed into razor-sharp creases and ribbons pinned ostentatiously to his chest, the jungle took up its beat in his veins.
Then J.T. would laugh. It was the one valuable lesson he’d learned from his father. Women cry. Men laugh. Whiners moan. Men laugh. Wimps complain. Men laugh.
When Marion had called to tell him the colonel was dying of prostate cancer, J.T. had laughed so damn hard, he’d dropped the phone.
Freddie emerged on the porch, austere in his neatly pressed linen suit. “Telephone, sir.