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Afraid I won’t have the courage if I think about it any longer, I walk through the door the Sheriff is holding to enter his office. I get a quick look at Nathan as the door shuts and he looks worried, or maybe angry. I can tell that he doesn’t like this guy, and neither do I. I just want to get this over with.
He sits down roughly in his seat behind his desk. He doesn’t offer any direction, so I pick one of the two seats opposite of him and sit down. I shift nervously, feeling claustrophobic being sandwiched between the desk and the closed door behind me. Sheriff Donahue shuffles papers around on his desk. The entirety of it is incredibly messy.
The office itself is cluttered with boxes, papers, and mismatched furniture, not to mention the empty coffee cups scattered throughout. It is definitely not a welcoming environment. He finally stops what he was doing and leans back in his chair, resting his hands on his stomach, very casually. My initial thought is that he doesn’t know the extent of what happened to me. If he realized how serious the crime was, he would be behaving a lot more professionally.
“Go ahead and tell me what happened.” He prompts with a wave of his hand, so with no further instruction, I start from the beginning.
I give him the timeline of events as it happened, giving enough detail to explain what transpired, but leaving out the more emotional bits that I know would send me into a crying fit. Crying in front of this man would be pure misery, I just know it.
I finish my story on trembling lips, but he doesn’t say anything. He just sits in his chair, staring at me. I’m worried that I missed something, like he is waiting for me to say something else, but nothing comes to mind, so I stay silent. My anxiety is climbing, I can feel the sweat trickling down my spine, dampening my shirt.
“So let me get this straight. You were taken off the side of the road, thrown into the back of a van, driven into the middle of the woods where you escaped on your own, and then outran two grown men until you found help? Did I get that right?” He asks rhetorically, like he doesn’t actually care for clarification.
“I mean that’s the simplified version I guess,” I say defensively. My walls are going up, my senses telling me that he is going to try to discount everything that happened to me.
“Tell me what you know about the two men,” he grumbles, chewing on a toothpick he picked up off his desk like he couldn’t care less what I’m about to say.
“They were brothers I think, in their mid thirties maybe. One was tall and skinny, Tony was his name. He called the other one, Bub, he was shorter and fat.” He stops chewing on the tooth pick and leans forward on his desk, eyeing me harshly.
“You’re sure about this? I’d hate to see you ruin any lives if you’ve got this wrong,” he accuses, and I’m taken back by his lack of empathy.
“Of course I’m sure. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t,” I snap at him, my patience wearing thin.
“And just how did you end up escaping this Tony and Bub? I must’ve missed that part of the story.” He might as well have done finger quotes, clearly dismissing what I’ve already told him.
“I made it across the river and ran into Nathan,” I indicated over my shoulder towards where I know Nathan is waiting outside the office. “He shot at them, giving me cover so he could help me get away. He’s the only reason that I’m alive.”
“He shot them?” He sits up fully, like he’s finally taking this seriously.
“I think, but they got away. He was too far away to get a good shot,” under my breath I add, “Unfortunately.”
Chapter Twenty
Nathan
I feel like crawling out of my skin, being so close to Callie but not in the same room with her. My first impression of the Sheriff was not good. He’s an old school cop who thinks his badge makes him superior to everyone. I’ve dealt with shit like that before, but I don’t like the way he was talking to Callie either. He hardly acknowledged her existence.
I pace back and forth between the empty desks. There’s no one else here besides the secretary. She watches me over the rim of her glasses, the frames sitting on the tip of her nose absurdly. She’s older, probably close to the Sheriff’s age, her gray hair is pulled back in a tight bun. That paired with her outdated wardrobe and she looks more like a librarian. I can feel her unease about being left alone with me though. Normally I’d reign it in so I don’t startle her, but I just can’t seem to care enough.
I’m used to people being nervous around me, something about my ever present scowl probably. It didn’t always used to be like that, I remember being carefree once, never meeting a stranger. Chester used to joke that I only joined the Army to make friends. I wonder what he’d think of me now… Living in the mountains, utterly alone. At least, up until 24 hours ago.
Damn, I hope Callie’s doing okay in there. The thought of her breaking down while talking to that pea brain Sheriff makes my blood boil. I should be in there. I told her I’d help her through this, but I’m stuck out here not doing shit to help. I know what it feels like to relive a horrible experience over and over, how it chips away at your soul a little at a time, every time you have to relive it.
Chester’s death was the first for me. I sat in the police station that night and had to tell three different detectives what happened. I had to keep remembering how his blood soaked through my shirt as I held him, and how my friend, Robby, fell to the pavement sobbing. His cries sounded hollow, like they were coming from somewhere else, and not from right beside me. My own tears were silent, rolling down my face into Chester’s hair as I clutched his body to mine.
I think I ran out of tears that night. The grief I felt was the heaviest thing I’d ever experienced, his death was so sudden and unexpected. I told myself I’d never be caught off guard again. That’s when I started living with the mindset that the worst was always yet to come. I went into every mission thinking that if I didn’t die, someone on my team would die. That was just the price we paid.
My mom cried when I made her sign the papers explaining what would happen in the events of an untimely death. It was hard on her after losing my father only a few years prior. I focused on the splotches her tears left on the papers, wishing I felt a single drop of moisture roll down my own cheek. But, there was nothing left, I knew then that I’d never cry again. My heart was only an organ, not a vessel for emotions, my brain a steel trap, absorbing bad things with no way to escape.
Four years into Special Forces, I was used to the void left by my hardened perspective on life. By that time I had lost two teammates in the line of duty. I felt their loss, I grieved for them, but never shed a tear. I knew that I was broken beyond repair, so I continued doing the job. I continued risking my life for my country. Better for something to happen to me than someone else.
On multiple occasions injuries in the field left me hospitalized. Shrapnel, bullet wounds, torn muscles and tendons. But, I kept returning for duty. If it wasn’t me out there, they’d find a replacement, another guy who could lose his life too early. It’s a backwards way of thinking, rationally I knew I wasn’t actually saving anyone from their fate. The Army would simply assign them somewhere else, to another unit, and they could still die. Another life snuffed out before their time.
Worst cases in my eyes were the innocent lives lost. Like Callie, the ones who didn’t ask to be a part of a conflict or the ones who didn’t choose to be thrust into the middle of a war. The ones who still haunt me when I close my eyes.
The day that I came the closest to my emotional dam breaking was a few years back. My team and I were tasked to sneak into a small town in South America under the radar, extract a small group of American missionaries who were being held hostage by one of the drug cartels, and get them back to the States without a peep. Easy enough, a mission we’d done countless of times for varying reasons.
* * *
