Chapter Text
John McClane flies into Chicago on a Monday to attend a conference. He finds the experience appropriately humiliating: there is, he believes, nothing less respectable or more abstractly unmanly than writing your name on a sticker in Sharpie and then walking around shaking hands.
This conference is being put on by some sort of media conglomerate, whose business model of acquiring and then demolishing news organizations John does not fully understand. It’s held in a not-so-slick hotel downtown, an unglamorous but big and blocky building. Cynthia the conference organizer had asked John over the phone whether he had a problem with buildings in general. He never would have gone, except some of the LA boys who were in good with Public Affairs let him know that if he declined, Cynthia the organizer was going to let Dick Thornburg onstage to say his piece.
Dick Thornburg’s unhappiness is, to John, the same thing as his own happiness. If necessary, he would have been willing to use his paid time off to fly to Chicago, sit himself and his restraining order down by the entrance, and prevent Dick Thornburg from getting within one hundred yards of either the venue or a professional opportunity related to the Nakatomi incident. As it is, he got it funded by the NYPD as work-related travel.
The downside of work-related travel is it incurs an obligation to work. These days, it’s rare John works at something he doesn’t personally want to do. Since the Nakatomi incident, his captain seems to have judged him spontaneously qualified to supervise his own goings-on. His clearance rate has held steady. The complaints from the DA’s office have increased.
In this case, responsible stewardship of public funds involves John sitting on a panel about coverage standards for emergent crises of national interest. Read: ongoing life-destroying events that viewers on another coast will tune into. John sweats under the stage lights and listens to the audience shuffle and cough, running through prepared statements in his mind and worrying about what the national distributors, high-profile guest columnists, and executive producers sitting in the audience are going to ask him, what questions every journalist in the country except the ones with real beats to cover might dream up.
The only other person on the panel that John recognizes is Jack Traven, who’s sitting one horrible too-high stool over. His face had gotten blurred in John’s mind with the actor playing him in the movie adaptation, but John recognizes him from newsstand magazines as the LA bus cop. His story is the only one in years that’s had John buying papers to read about. If even ten percent of what got reported on happened in real life, then he and Traven have more in common than John has with anyone else here, or maybe anywhere. There’s an innate urge to get to know him, stifled by the format.
It turns out that John and Jack aren’t the only game in town, or the most titillating. The decade’s been a boom time for high-profile violent crime: kidnappings, car chases, cults, bombings, weird shit put in the mail. John’s shirt is sticking to his back under his polyester suit jacket by the time the moderator wraps up her dialogue with a TV reporter from a local station in Waco. They started late and ran long, so there’s only time for two audience questions before the room turns over to the next group. Neither one is for John. He feels cheated out of time to sit and stare at the blank wall of his hotel room, despite having no desire to engage in public speaking.
Traven gets one of the audience questions, which is more of a self-congratulatory statement from a guy in a shiny suit with two pagers on his belt. John learned from sitting on his own panel that news exec types love the LA bus incident. If you ask them, the problem with most hostage situations is that the outside of a building is too boring to look at for hours on end. The bus might have just been a city bus, but at least it moved.
John gets lost in his head for a moment, working himself up into a rage at Dick Thornberg and TV news in general, so he misses most of Traven’s answer, which the guy delivers without use of the microphone, leaning forward and looking straight into the audience like he can even see their faces through the damn lights. He does notice when it gets a warm laugh—the audience seems to think of Traven as their guy, since one time an intrepid broadcaster helped him out a bit. John considers this an embarrassingly fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between any cop and any journalist.
Traven concludes his answer with, “All this to say, there are more people I am grateful to every day than I can count.” Then, after a pause: “Not that I can count that high.”
John thinks there might be implied ingratitude to some uncounted number of people, but he’s not sure—minus the red sweater and plus a Gold’s Gym membership, Officer Traven seems to be channeling Mister Rogers. The man looks realer than he does onscreen or in the glossy pages, bigger, with a softer jaw. He talks slowly and uses small words. He has a dumb man’s affect, but John doesn’t believe for a moment that he’s stupid.
When Traven is finished talking, John is thanked for his non-contribution and finally permitted to slide off his stool. The audience applauds their exit. In the hallway outside the room, a heavy hand lands on his shoulder.
“Hey,” says Traven. He’s standing close in the crush of people going to and from panels. John has always had a good nose, and under the crowd sweat he can smell on Jack a familiar eucalyptus soap.
“Hey,” John says, and deliberately loosens up. He offers a hand. “John, McClane. We didn’t get introduced like civilized people.”
“Zoo animals,” says Traven. “I’m Jack.” He has a firm grip and a younger man’s easy smile.
“Nice meeting you, Jack.”
“You too. Listen, you want to get out of here? They only asked me to do the one panel, and I could use a drink that isn’t served out of a plastic cup in the lobby.”
Easy, John tells himself. You could be easygoing. “Way craft services’ been, you’d think a glass bottle was a weapons charge waiting to happen,” he says, and Jack laughs.
John thinks about Jack’s soap as he follows him out the door. It’s from the cheaper hotel a block over, he realizes. He’d used the same stuff on himself the night before.
Jack takes him to a cop bar one of his buddies who moved from Chicago to LA told him about. The bar has not only glass bottles, but low tables and associated chairs—two improvements on the hotel lobby.
“So,” John says amiably, having waited a collegial three drinks to ask about it. “The bus thing.”
Jack takes a pull from his beer, his mouth shining. “So,” he says, raising his eyebrows. “Nakatomi Towers.”
John laughs. Three beers and some distance from the venue have much improved his mood, and he removes his tie, coiling it around his hand to stick in his pocket. Jack’s eyes tick down to track the motion, then up to his now-open collar, then back to his face. A mysterious, confessional mood rises up in John, takes him over.
“The last good thing that ever happened to my marriage,” he says. “The adrenaline, something. I don’t know.”
“Yeah?” Jack asks. He was never wearing a tie. California guy, through and through.
“The sex was, whoo,” John says, and makes a vague hand motion, like an airplane taking off. “But later, it was.” He realizes he’s not saying much of anything and resolves to apply another beer to the problem. “Is that how it was for you?”
Jack takes the inane question seriously, turning his beer around and around in his hands. “Part of it,” he says. “Part of it wasn’t.”
“What was all of it like?” John asks. A big, unanswerable question he’s spent very little time trying to answer, the way he spends little time thinking about the sensation of falling.
Jack thinks about it. John suspects he spends more time thinking than most people would guess. “It’s like all this time I was stuck to the pavement with chewing gum,” he says eventually, nudging John’s foot with his own, the tacky friction of the bar floor a demonstration. “And then one day something happened that was so important that I just walked out of my shoes.”
“And now you can’t find them again,” John says in a bloom of recognition, and Jack smiles, fingers around the neck of a green glass bottle brought halfway to his mouth.
“I’m still working on it.”
Jack walks John back to the hotel and up to the door of his room. They are staying in the same place—after John showers, they’ll smell the same. They talk the whole way, Jack dropping to a hushed whisper and John following him down when a woman looks sideways at but says nothing about big, drunk male voices in the hallway. The last time John looked at his watch it was past midnight; he’s been too afraid to look at it since. His 7 a.m. flight is going to be hell, but he doesn’t regret any of the drinks he bought or accepted except the last one. He wants to remember clearly some of the things Jack said.
Jack leans on the wall next to the door while John opens it with the keycard. Their faces are closer together than they were sitting in the bar with the little table enforcing distance. John watches the door handle’s light change from red to green and hears the click of the lock. He puts his hand on the doorknob and unlatches it but doesn’t go inside. He wants to say one last thing to Jack, but he doesn’t know what it is.
There’s a beat of silence that goes on for too long, and Jack pushes off the wall. “Good night, John.”
“Good night,” John says. He can speak now that Jack is an arm’s length away.
“Look me up when you’re next in LA.” Jack reaches out and slides something into John’s shirt pocket, his knuckles brushing John’s chest and gone again before he can startle.
“Okay,” John says.
“I mean it.”
“Okay, I will.”
Jack smiles at him. It’s less easy than it was when they met, but sincere. He turns and leaves. John goes inside and sits on the tightly made hotel bed. He removes the item from his pocket. It’s a napkin from the conference venue, faintly damp with Jack’s sweat, ten digits written on the back.
His flight is hell, early and then massively delayed, turbulence bouncing the plane around the whole length of Pennsylvania. He doesn’t think about the napkin until he’s back in his apartment emptying out his pockets for the night. He lays it on his dresser beside his wallet and keys so he can forget about it until morning, then stares at the ceiling after he goes to bed thinking about it anyway.
Jack knows John flies into LAX regularly; they’d spent an amiable five minutes complaining about how long it takes to get out of airport parking. Jack knows why he flies into LAX. He knows he has kids he doesn’t see as much as you’re supposed to see your kids, even as a man. He knows he pays child support. He knows what he did to Tony Vreski and he didn’t think it was funny at all.
Jack, when John really thinks about it, doesn’t know any of the things John would want someone to know about him. He doesn’t know how he was as a new cop on his old beat, when he had all his hair and was just getting married to a great woman. He doesn’t know how promising he was, how he’d walk into a room and someone would point at him and say McClane, one of our best. Keep an eye on him. He doesn’t know how he moved before he needed special orthopedic inserts. But Jack does know what it is to be needed for something raw and violent—to scrape off the insecurities and accommodations that attach themselves to a man over the course of his life and do what needs to be done.
“Chewing gum,” John says to himself, to the water-stained ceiling of his studio apartment.
John wants to open the front of Jack’s shirt, ruck up whatever he wears underneath it, and see how their shared capacity for action sits differently underneath Jack’s skin. It’s a hard impulse to formulate in concrete terms, written in bone and muscle rather than in words. Rough air six miles over Lancaster County was almost enough to knock it out of his mind completely. Still, he’s fairly certain Jack knows about it too.
The napkin sits on John’s dresser for weeks, then months, the basis for a new pile of bills and business cards and grocery store mailers he never gets around to clipping coupons from. John applies to it one of the earliest forms of logic: he can’t see it, so it isn’t real. John goes to work, he comes back. He meets a woman at the grocery store. He stops smoking and starts again. Life goes on like this for a while until, one day, he calls.