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(and thus her) favorite comic book hero.
    EVAC: Charlotte was nine when the Pentagon Military Intelligence Unit where Middleton spent most of his career ran an evacuation drill. She adopted the word EVAC as a mantra, with significant shifts in irony as she roared through her teenage years.
    SCOTLAND: When Charlotte got married, Middleton let her use his suburban house for the wedding’s staging ground while he rented another lonely room in a hotel near the Capital Hill garden for the marriage ceremony. Two nights before the wedding, father and daughter got drunk in the hotel bar as she introduced him to a hip single-malt Scotch. From then on, they called that hotel “Scotland.”
    Told her what to do, thought Middleton. Where to go. That it’s really me.
    If she got the message.
    The seatbelt “ding!” launched Middleton into the plane’s aisle. Looping the shoulder strap on his soft black briefcase across his sports jacket kept his hands free. He didn’t know where the rest of his luggage was; didn’t care. His briefcase held his work, his laptop, iPod and toiletries airport security let him take onto an airplane, plus a paperback copy of Albert Camus’s The Stranger .
    As Middleton was about to reach the plane’s door, a couple from first class barged in front of him. The woman, who may have looked great 10 years and a million scowls ago, clutched a battered jewel case to suspiciously firm breasts as she and her sad-eyed husband shuffled up the jet way ahead of Middleton.
    Middleton heard the wife huff, “I still can’t believe that sister of yours thought she could keep your mother’s jewels from me just by going to Europe!”
    The husband’s flat voice knew its own irrelevance. “We all make mistakes.”
    They bumbled ahead to Customs, where a surgical-gloved guard carefully examined the jewel box’s glittering necklaces, bracelets and earrings, comparing them to a transit document the wife kept tapping with her crimson fingernails. When he was through, the first class couple trudged ahead of Middleton through the terminal.
    Middleton’s jagged nerves keyed him into a detached hyper-vigilance he’d not felt since returning to the Balkans’ slaughterhouse. There, all he had to fear were the ghosts of strangers. Now he felt his own life crawl along the edge of a straight razor.
    He smelled his fellow travelers. Damp wool scent of lived-in clothes. Deodorants’ metallic perfumes. Stale beer from the Englishman who’d tried to drown his fear of flying.
    Middleton heard a child whine, and sobs from a Spec 4 soldier, who was all of 20 years old, as he marched toward a flight to Germany with connections to Iraq. An unseen CD blasted drums and crashing guitars: Middleton recognized Springsteen, and then remembered that expanding his range of classic rock music was the only debt besides Charlotte he owed his ex.
    Night filled the terminal windows. Ads landscaped its walls. The musician in Middleton found melody in crowd movements synced with his rhythmic march to a bus for the main terminal. From there, he’d find his car in Long Term Parking, race to Scotland, working his cell phone the whole way. He saw all that with the absolute clarity of what is and what would be.
    Looming beyond the shuffling first-class couple, Middleton saw a cop hurrying toward him. Saw the cop’s blue uniform. Saw his shoulder-holstered black automatic. Saw a second pistol on the cop’s black-leather belt along with handcuffs, ammo pouches, an empty loop for a radio.
    They were 10 steps apart when Middleton matched the cop’s face to photos he’d seen in Poland of a murderer.
    The fake cop unsnapped his hip holster.
    Middleton shoved the first-class woman into the pistol-drawing cop.
    The fragile jewel case popped out of her grasp and flew toward the cop, who knocked it away. The case burst open. Glittering objects rained on the airport crowd.
    First-class woman clawed at the cop: “Mine! Mine!”
    Her bumped husband fell into