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The first three houses she showed him were small and tucked away, respectively, under towering persimmon trees; palm trees; and what looked like a slide-prone hillside topped by much larger houses. The fourth house was smaller still – a living room, two miniscule bedrooms and a space off the kitchen the real estate agent, with a bright smile, called a breakfast room- and featured a front yard ringed in chain link fencing and filled by a cracked concrete slab. Unlike the other houses, it wasn’t near anything tall or convenient, unless you considered two gas stations, a decrepit bodega and a cemetery convenient.
Which John Sheppard mostly did.
The fence sagged when he swung the gate open, rustling the leafy vine that crowded toward its single hinge. John shook it, experimentally; if the concrete footings were bad, it would be easy to take the whole thing out. Then the concrete could go too. Or he could park his truck on it, turn the garage into a --
“Would you like to see the back yard?” the real estate agent asked, but before John could answer, the phone clipped to her belt chirped, and she held up a manicured finger.
John shook his head, dropped his sunglasses onto his nose and stepped into the road. From this angle, the roof shingles looked a lot like the road under his boots, its surface graveled and worn by the sun. In the back, where a pair of heavy trees would shade it in the afternoon, it was probably better, if not by much. An ice cream truck two streets over was grinding its way through Pop Goes the Weasel and John turned around slowly, searching the neighboring yards for signs of children. If there were any, he thought, they’d learned not to leave their toys in the yard.
Across the street, dark patches of painted-out graffiti marred the cemetery’s brick retaining wall. Behind it the headstones stretched up an uneven hill in rows broken by pyramids and small temples, and looking east, through tall shaggy trees, he could see downtown and its bright glass towers. The rest of the neighborhood was quiet, small stucco houses and overgrown orange trees drowsing in parched yards. Closer to Pico, the traffic noise intensified, and Pop Goes the Weasel gave way to the theme from The Sting.
He could live here, he thought, and headed back down the hill.
Still talking, the real estate agent had turned the roof of her BMW into an impromptu office, balancing an iPad on top of an open folder and tapping on it in an irritated fashion. Giving her the smile that had gotten him out of a wrongful death lawsuit – but not termination - when his weather chopper went down during L.A.’s last fire season, John stepped into her line of sight. Her eyes flicked up, meeting his over the rims of her sunglasses, but she shook her head and held up an index finger.
He smiled again, showing his teeth, and reached into his back pocket for his wallet. When he was sure he had her attention, he unfolded it and took out a check. “I’ll take it,” he said, pitching his voice to stop just short of rude, and dropped the check onto her iPad. She pressed a button on the device in her ear and its blue light winked out. “When can I move in?”
She glanced up at him, calculating. “The seller is prepared to do a thirty day escrow.” Her fingers twitched toward the check.
John kicked at the dirt in the parkway, where bits of glass glittered between dessicated dog turds. “See if he won’t do ten.”
“Two weeks and you’ve got a deal,” she said, and whisked the check into her purse. “Meet me at the office tomorrow. I’ll have a few papers for you to sign.” Tossing folder, iPad and purse into the car’s backseat, folded her long legs and extravagant heels into its low-slung front seat. “Get in – I’ll run you back to your apartment.”
The interior of the car smelled almost overpoweringly of leather, and while John was pretty sure he should be taking Jim Cramer’s stock-investing tips to heart, he’d just handed over a hefty chunk of the only money he was likely to see for a long while yet. He shook his head and hooked a thumb over his shoulder toward the intersection at the base of the hill. Gas stations occupied two of the four corners but, even though it was topped by a peeling billboard advertising a strip club, there seemed to be a market behind one of them.
“Gotta be a bus down there,” he said. “I should probably learn my way around.”
*
Three months later, the fence still hadn’t come down, although the rains had brought forth an array of weeds that John thought might, if left alone, do the job for him. One vine had staked out the section closest to the driveway, leaving the entire stretch of fencing north of the gate to a different vine. Professional courtesy or self-preservation, John wasn’t sure; the fleshy alien flowers on the north side’s inhabitant didn’t look like they’d tolerate much competition.
Maybe he should have taken both of them down before the late fall rains gave them a new lease on life. Hitching his backpack higher on his shoulder, he checked his pocket for his keys and closed the gate carefully. No point knocking the thing off its hinge when he had other things he needed to do on one of his rare ventures outside the house.
“They’re passion flowers,” said a voice behind him.
“Sorry?” John turned around.
The voice was coming from a man about John’s age dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, seated in a wheelchair in the driveway. His hands were gloved and rested on its gleaming steel wheels, and when he saw he had John’s attention he rolled forward, pulled off one glove and stuck out his hand. “Cameron Mitchell. I live behind you.”
John shook the proffered hand, noting muscular forearms and a calloused grip. “John Sheppard,” he said automatically, and then stopped. “Er…”
Cameron slipped his glove back on and propelled himself closer to the vine. “Passion flower. See?” He lifted a section of the plant, pointing toward a tangle of leaves and wilted flowers. Leaning closer, John could see – barely – a handful of velvety green nubs.
“It breeds?” He stepped back and pointed toward a heavy stump at the point where the fence and its coat of blue-flowered greenery angled back toward the house. “We’re all doomed.”
Cameron lifted an eyebrow and grinned. “Doom may be a little strong, but yeah, if it starts heading for occupied structures, you’ll probably want to call in an expert.”
“An expert in what, iced tea?”
The grin faltered for a moment and then Cameron Mitchell put his head back and laughed. “I told the kids you were a little out of your depth,” he said once he’d stopped. “They’ve been asking how long it would take before you started working on the yard.”
“Yeah.” The yard, such as it was. John shoved his hands into his pockets and lifted his head to gaze over the roof.
The plan had been to move in, get the concrete jack-hammered out, put in a lawn or some combination of rocks and spiky things or gnomes and banana trees, he hadn’t quite figured out which. For that matter, he’d planned to have something more than the previous owner’s vertical blinds up on the windows by now, and maybe buy furniture that wasn’t home to spiders that had long been extinct in Southern California.
All those plans had gotten shoved aside as John tried – and mostly failed – to get his license cleared so he could fly again. Maybe he should have worked on the yard. At least he’d have something to show for the last three months.
“Yeah,” he said again, and stuck out his hand, this time without meeting Cameron’s eyes. “Been nice meeting you, but I gotta get going.” He shifted the strap of his pack and waved a hand toward his truck.
John could see the thought - what the hell just happened? - cross Cameron’s handsome face, but he just tightened his smile and met John’s hand with his own.
“Likewise. Thought I’d come introduce myself. If you decide you want to look at something other than concrete, let me know – I got a crew, we can help.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a business card.
Without looking at it John slid the card into his pocket. “Maybe in a couple weeks, when things settle down at –“ he let his voice trail off as a helicopter came in from the west to hover over the freeway. Things went well, in a couple weeks he’d be even busier. In the meantime, someone in the neighborhood to drink a beer with might be a good idea.
Shit.
The first local he’d really talked to, and a nice-looking guy to boot. His last boss was right, he could really be an asshole sometimes.
Making up his mind, he grinned down at Cameron. “Bring your crew on Saturday, we’ll get started.”
Cameron looked dubious, but the grin, John saw, was back. “With what?”
“Fuck if I know,” John said. He reached back into the vine, snapped off the largest of the growing fruits, and turning toward the cemetery, threw the hard little bud in a long graceful arc that cleared the retaining wall facing them. “Rate this thing is growing, we could open a fruit stand.”
“Now there’s an idea. Saturday then. Early.”
“Saturday,” John agreed, and then Cameron was wheeling himself around and heading smoothly up the hill, hands gripping the wheels in perfect synchronized motion and his shoulders flexing under his shirt. As he reached the light, he turned and gave John a brief wave.
John raised one hand before realizing he was gesturing toward Cameron’s rapidly-disappearing back. Feeling faintly stupid, he shoved his hand back into his pocket, where his fingers encountered Cameron’s card. He ran his thumb over its raised printing before pulling it out.
L.A. Farmworks, it said, and there was an email address below Cameron’s name. He stared at the deep green letters. Someone had taken real time with the logo: the letters looked like vines, and the O held the rays of a rising sun. None of this artwork, though, told him what farming had to do with a neighborhood bounded by the freeway, a cemetery, and a flotilla of ice cream trucks.
What the hell had he gotten himself into?
*
By Saturday at eleven am he was no more enlightened, if a hell of a lot sweatier. L.A.’s mercurial winter skies, after dropping nearly three inches of rain on the city in as many days, had shifted to autumn mode, and the day had dawned cloudless and bright. And John knew that “dawned” was, in this case, not a figure of speech: Cameron Mitchell and his crew had been there long before that point, unloading tools and tarps from a battered white bread truck parked across the foot of John’s driveway.
“You’re blocking me in,” he’d said to the boy who’d pounded on the front door until John, yawning, pulled it open and peered out.
The boy, who John guessed was about 16, lean and handsome with tattoos snaking up the dark skin of his neck, just nodded. “Cam’s orders. This ain’t the west side,” he added, loping back down the stairs.
“The west side?” he asked, loudly enough to carry over the activity.
Cameron - Cam, apparently – glanced up and grinned at him. As the last kid, a girl of maybe thirteen or fourteen in black cargo pants, jumped down from the back of the van, he wheeled himself around to face John. “Do we look like Home Depot?”
His tone was light but there was apparently enough steel in his voice to draw the kids’ attention, and four pairs of eyes settled briefly on John before returning to the tools they were setting out against the vine-strewn fence.
They had a job ahead of them, no question about it: even though the rain had undoubtedly softened the dirt some, the parkways was mostly clay and trash. John didn’t know much about plants, but he figured the almost-complete absence of even weeds in the space between the curb and the sidewalk was a bad sign. And while the kids looked eager, none of them was much more than fifteen or so, and despite the rain the job was going to need a pickaxe, if he didn’t miss his guess. He gestured toward the sweats hanging off his hips and held up one bare foot.
“I’m just gonna change. I’ll be right there.”
Four hours later, they’d excavated a hundred (and thirty seven thousand, John added, flexing his right hand and wincing) square feet of parkway, carted off god only knew how many yards of clay, broken glass and dogshit and replaced it with an equally-unknown number of yards of the blackest compost John had ever seen. “Where’d you get this from?” he’d asked, but Cam had just grinned and winked at the kids, and they’d gone on with their digging-in, matching zipped lips on all of them.
John made a mental note to ask again, once he’d a gotten a beer or three into the man sitting next to him. Which reminded him.
“You want some lunch?” he asked, but Cam just looked at his watch in response.
“I need to get the kids back,” he said. “Next week, maybe?”
“Next week?” Had he missed something in all the activity?
Cam jerked his head toward the parkway. “What, you thought we were just here to give you prettier dirt? We have plans for this space.” Fishing the keys to his van out of his pocket, he tossed them toward one of the girls. “Get the sketch, Manuela, would you please?”
Bouncing to her feet and hitching up her shorts with one hand, Manuela caught the keys in the other and headed toward the van. Coming back with a piece of paper, she thrust it at John and said bluntly, “Corn. We figured you weren’t ready for anything hard yet, like peppers or tomatoes.”
John looked down at the sketch she’d handed him. Corn indeed: his house was there, and the cemetery, and between them, golden ears of corn blossomed from stalks higher than anything Jack or his giant could have dreamed up. Even the house next to his was in on the act, with a field of either strawberries or habaneros filling the now-bare space beside the road.
He looked up at Manuela, whose expression had tightened into something fierce as the moments stretched out. Cam was watching them carefully, wariness and something John thought looked breakable hovering around his eyes.
He cleared his throat. “I can do corn,” he said firmly. “Maybe we can throw a couple cows in the back yard, make quesadillas sometime this summer.”
Manuela smiled broadly.
“Thanks,” Cam said, under his breath, and the warmth the word kindled in John’s belly lasted long enough for him to get back inside the house, and start water for another cup of instant coffee.
*
“Instant? Seriously?”
Saturday again, dawn again, and this time there were only two kids, jumping in and out of Cam’s bread truck with a variety of containers they were setting along the sidewalk. Each container held a spindly corn plant, and the kids – Manuela again, and a boy he thought might be her brother, their shoulders identical under oversized Lakers jerseys – argued about their placement but handled them like glass.
“I just moved in!” John protested, but Cam continued to shake his head sadly at the cup John offered. “I don’t have a coffee maker. You can come in and check!” he added.
“Oh right.” Abruptly he wheeled himself up the sidewalk, pulling a tape measure out of the bag hanging off the back of the chair. “Manuela, Sammy, look: each plant needs to be eighteen inches away from its friends.” He pulled the steel tab out and clipped the tape measure in place, and handed it to Manuela. “Sammy, go get the trowels, and John here will help you dig the holes.”
John swirled the remains of the coffee in the cup he’d offered Cam, and frowned as small dark grains stuck to its side. Maybe Cam had a point. Tipping it out into the gutter, he headed back to the porch to set the cup on the steps and paused.
Four wide, shallow steps led up to the porch. When he’d bought the house, it had been the porch he’d mostly bought it for, framed as it was by a low railing held up by piles of river rocks and wide enough to set a couple of chairs on. The back deck was similar, wider still and six steps up from the garden.
Maybe Cam had more than one point.
John loped back down the walk and grabbed a trowel from Sammy. “How many holes we need to dig?” he asked Manuela, and with a quick glance at Cam, she pointed him toward the far end of the parkway.
“One per plant should do it,” she said, and if the noise John heard was a snort, he figured the best thing to do was just to start digging. And when they were done, to get that coffee maker he’d been looking at online ordered. Two day delivery, booyah, he thought, and bent down to his task.
Too bad they couldn’t ship him a –
He bit back a grin and moved to the next corn plant. Sure they could, he thought, and nodded, pleased. Only question was, could he get it done before Cam and the kids came back to check on the corn?
*
Long fucking day, John thought as he pulled his truck into the driveway and shut off the ignition. He had supper, a six-pack, and milk for breakfast in the morning. What he didn’t have, still, despite eight months, two lawyers, an NTSB investigation and more hours spent wearing a tie than anyone not getting paid six figures should have to put in, was his pilot’s license or a job.
He climbed out of the truck and closed the door with more force than necessary. Maybe he should have done the two-for-one special, gotten the twelve-pack.
“You’ve been watering it, right?”
And oh yeah, right, he had corn. He shifted the grocery bags into his left hand and turned around.
“Mitchell.” For once in their – John wasn’t even sure what to call it, this thing they were doing. Farming hookup? – it wasn’t Saturday, and it wasn’t dawn. And Cam was on wheels, no bread truck and no kids.
“Where’ve you been?” It had been a couple weeks since the planting, and John, who actually liked instant coffee, had been thinking about returning the expensive machine he’d only used once before going back to Trader Joe’s granules.
Cam didn’t answer, rolling himself back and forth in the driveway with quick sharp movements, in and out of the half-hearted pool of light shed by an antique streetlight.
Weighing his options, John watched him do a few more silent laps. It would be easy enough to hold up the grocery bags and make some kind of half-assed excuse. From what little John knew about Cam, that was certainly the avenue of least resistance: the Guy Code, to say nothing of what John suspected was some stretch of time in the military, dictated the immediate and unquestioning acceptance of any excuse designed to get the excuser out of talking. John could – and with some frequency, did – invoke the code these days, mostly around other pilots who wanted to know how things were going, with the result that he was coming home again to an unlit house with dinner in a plastic bag.
On the other hand, the dinner in the bag was a rotisserie chicken from Zankou up on Sunset. Making a quick decision, he lifted the bag and rattled it in Cam’s direction.
“I got extra garlic sauce ,” he said, waggling his eyebrows like Groucho to show they were still under Guy Code if Cam wanted to be. “Wanna help me kill this bird?”
The chair spun once and hissed to a stop. Cam’s face looked drawn in the harsh overhead light of the streetlamp, his normally bright blue eyes bleached to gray and ringed with shadows. One arm flew up in a sharp dismissive gesture. “For fuck’s sake, John, I can’t. I can’t dig a damn hole, I can’t plant the damn corn, I can’t visit anyone who doesn’t live in a damn old folks’ home–“
John got it. He did. And while there wasn’t much he could do about the holes or the corn, he was pretty sure he’d fixed a small part of the rest of it. “Yeah, you can,” he said, dropping the bag with the six-pack into Cam’s lap and stepping around him to open the gate.
“Turned out Amazon couldn’t ship me a ramp but the guy two doors down is a contractor – I saw him pulling in one afternoon and got him to give me a quote. He said he could pull the concrete, too, when I’m ready.” John slid a hand along the railing, pacing Cam as he rolled himself up its shallow grade. The ramp was beautiful, he had to admit; his neighbor had been right to build it out of clear redwood and stain it so it looked like an extension of the porch, not a grocery cart bay. “We were going to add the river rocks but that felt like overkill,” he added. “Besides, apparently the county frowns rock-napping – who knew?”
The contractor, a frustrated cabinet maker, had done a bang-up job on the woodwork, planing and sanding the planks and railings until they gleamed, and finishing the whole thing with, John had thought at the time, enough boat varnish to have kept the Titanic afloat. But what did he know? He was – or had been – a pilot, used mostly to things made from steel.
Had been being the operative word, and not one he was particularly interested in sharing. Wondering just how many beers it would take to keep Cam talking, he fished his keys out of his pocket and, opening the front door with a flourish of bagged chicken, gestured Cam into the house.
Instead of rolling across the threshold, though, Cam turned to face him. “When did you get this done?”
“Week or so back. Took a little longer than I thought – we had to pull permits, so I wasn’t sure – But you haven’t been around.” He heard the flat note in his own voice and shouldered his way through the door.
So much for his clever plan to not do any talking.
He tramped through the hall, heading for the kitchen and flipping on lights as he went. After a moment, he heard the door swing shut and the hiss of Cam’s wheels on the floor, and, dropping the bag of chicken onto the tiny table in the breakfast room, put a smile on his face. “You want one of those beers?” he called out.
Cam, wearing a matching and John was willing to bet, equally fake smile, pushed his way into the kitchen. One quick heave and the bag thunked onto the counter, and Cam crossed his arms and sat back. “You’re gonna need to feed me first,” he said. “Right after this happened –“ he waved at the chair and his legs-- “I’d have killed the first before before we got to the porch. Now, though…” he let his voice trail off, and as John watched, fascinated, the fake smile slid off his face, replaced by a grin that owed more to regret than amusement. “It wouldn’t have been pretty, I can tell you that.”
His eyes met John’s for a long moment, unflinching, before veering off toward the bag on the table. “Extra garlic sauce, did you say?” he added, so politely that John had to laugh.
“Make yourself comfortable, I’ll just grab a couple of plates. You want any water?”
Cameron nodded, and wheeled himself over to the table, settling into place across from its single chair. John pulled plates out of a cabinet and grabbed glasses, a water bottle, and the six-pack before following him over, dropping the lot of it into the middle of the table and pushing the bag with the food toward Cameron.
Cam shucked his gloves, shoving them into a pocket, and then tore into the bag as John filled their water glasses and popped the caps off the beers. Pita bread, plastic forks and a huge stack of napkins appeared before he got to the chicken and the containers of garlic sauce beneath it. Pausing before tearing open the bag, he looked up at John, and this time the grin was pure joy. “You are a prince among men,” he opined, and as the tiny room filled with fragrant steam, John grinned back, deeply satisfied.
“So what did happen?”
They were two beers down and John had shifted them into the living room with the excuse that he wanted to light a fire, leaving the remains of dinner on the table.
“Happen?” Cam asked, his eyes sharpening in the firelight.
“I was expecting you to come check on the corn.”
“How is the corn?”
“Corn-like,” John said briefly, swinging his legs down from the coffee table. He stood up and, side-stepping the table and Cam’s chair, moved over to crouch down by the fireplace. Poker in hand, he poked at it under the half-burnt log in the grate cracked with a shower of sparks.
Behind him, he could hear Cam sigh, and the movement of his wheels on the threadbare rug that covered the old oak floor. He reached for another log and paused with his hand on its rough bark, and finally Cameron spoke.
“Hospital,” he said, his voice low. “Couple days at Cedars, couple days in a… facility.”
“By yourself?” Surprised at the blaze of anger in his chest, John heaved the log into the fireplace and stood up. He thought – he didn’t know what he’d thought, given that he wasn’t even sure he had Cam’s phone number.
Cam was watching him, a faint frown between his brows. “Isn’t that how most people go to the hospital?”
“Not what I mean.” John crossed his arms high on his chest and held Cam’s gaze.
“I know.”
In the fireplace, the new log caught and blazed, throwing John’s shadow across the rug and up onto Cam’s legs. His hands twitched toward his wheels, and John realized he had to say something, do something, fast.
Unfolding his arms with no little effort, he crossed back over to the couch and reached for his beer. “Hospitals are boring,” he said mildly, taking a deep pull off the bottle before setting it back down. “Plus the food sucks. You shoulda said something – I’d have brought you a burrito or something from the Kogi truck.”
It took a couple of minutes longer – not that John was counting or anything – but Cam finally took his hands off the wheels of his chair and folded them into his lap. “You may regret that offer,” he murmured, and his fingers tightened briefly. “But I promise, next time I’ll call.”
“There’ll be a next time?”
“You ever crash a plane? There’s always a next time.”
At the bitterness underneath Cam’s affable drawl a deep shudder ran through John’s body, and he had to move –spin around and put the now-empty beer bottle into the fireplace or through the unscreened kitchen window into the yard. The front window, now, that cost too much the last time: not all of the glass in the parkway had come from the neighborhood kids. Walk away, he told himself, and headed back into the kitchen, but the scene he’d never forget replayed itself anyways: his best friend Holland’s chopper spinning into an updraft , finally righting itself only to get slammed by the winds John could feel buffeting his own bird, the cameraman screaming beside him as John followed Holland’s tail rotor straight down into the flames chewing their way through the canyons above La Canada.
He’d pulled out, of course. His payload was a professionally-grizzled traffic reporter and a would-be documentary filmmaker, not smoke jumpers or fire retardant, either of which might have helped save Holland and his crew. One guy with a thousand dollar haircut and another one with a DGA card? Not so much.
But he’d had to try.
Fists on the table, nails biting into his palms, he closed his eyes and sucked in the sharp pungent smell of garlic until the pulse stopped thudding in his fingertips.
This time, when he heard the hiss of wheels on the floor, he didn’t turn around. Cam could let himself out. The threshold was wheelchair-friendly, he’d made sure of that, and the ramp was --
A warm hand on his back interrupted his careening train of thought.
“Is that a coffee maker on your counter?” Cam’s voice was back to normal, John noted distractedly, all gravelly drawl and suppressed laughter. “You got any decaf stashed away?”
“In the cabinet over the sink.” The new machine only needed water and coffee pods, but by the time he pushed the less-chipped mug across the counter, John felt like he’d harvested the beans and carried them down the mountain himself. Quickly, he stuck another mug under the thing’s output tube and pressed a second pod into its mechanism. Once his nose, like Cam’s, was halfway to the bottom of the cup he looked up, and met a pair of very blue eyes.
“Sounds like we both have a few stories to tell,” Cam said, and feeling a bit like a dashboard dog, John nodded. “I’m thinking most of ‘em can wait until daylight.”
There was the barest hint of a question at the end of that statement, but before John could respond, Cam put a hand up, saying, “You can just nod, no need to say anything,” and John put his coffee cup down and started to laugh.
“So, will I see you in the morning?” John propped himself against the door frame, watching as Cam wheeled himself back and forth across the porch, checking out the river rock and hundred year old woodwork. Coming to an abrupt stop by the ramp, he leaned down to run a hand over its smooth boards.
“Your guy did a nice job on this. You should give me his number.” He glanced up and grinned. “And yeah, now that I know you won’t try to serve me instant I’ll be back.”
Their eyes met, and this time John waited a beat too long, letting the heat between them build, before grinning back. “Don’t make it too early. You wouldn’t want me to scare the kids.”
Cam spun himself around and took off down the ramp, laughing. When he reached the bottom he raised a hand and waved without turning back. “I wasn’t gonna tell you this, but I've been paying those kids to help me. No way you’d have let me redo your yard otherwise.”
“Wait a minute – you what?” John levered himself out of the doorway but Cam was halfway down the block, moving fast and still laughing. John glanced down at his bare feet and snorted a laugh in reply. “Good one, Mitchell,” he added, loud enough to carry, and Cam’s hand flew up again in a quick salute.
John pulled the door shut behind him and set the lock. The kitchen was more or less clean and the fire, safe behind its dense brass screen, would put itself out. John glanced around his little house, at the lights reflecting back from its blind windows, at the shadows gathering in the corners. He put his hand to his lower back, where’s Cam’s had rested not so long ago. He felt lighter than he had since he’d moved in, certainly lighter than he’d felt since the crash that took his best friend and his career. Doors close, doors open, he thought, and who’d ever have guessed that a door across the street from a cemetery could open onto anything good?
Switching off the last of the lamps, John Sheppard headed down the hallway to bed.
~*~ end ~*~