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My chest aches, so sharp and deep I have to struggle not to bring a hand up to it. “Cancer,” I rasp.
“What kind of cancer?” he sneers.
I shut my eyes. Even though I know I’m being fucked with, it still hurts to say it. “Breast cancer.” I force myself to look back up at him, trying to detach my feelings from this moment and place.
“Your dad’s a surgeon. What kind of piece of shit doctor can’t save his own wife? Tell me about your old man. He a fan of you?”
My stomach twists. My throat tightens.
“Does he like you? Your father. Does your father like you, Drake? It’s yes or no.”
I blow my breath out. Glare up at him. “No.”
“Were you a mama’s boy?”
I swallow. My throat actually aches, even though my heart is pounding and I’m getting more and more pissed off.
I grit my teeth. Test or not, this fucker needs to shut up.
“Oh, so a little mama’s boy. Mama died, so we want her to be proud, is that it?” I press my lips together. “The way you aborted your mission, got off-track and didn’t tell us. Mr. Good Samaritan, wanting to save everybody that he can save.”
I clamp my molars on the inside of my cheek. I didn’t abort my mission! I stopped for half an hour to help a guy who had a wreck. I grit my teeth again, and Wentworth again jumps subjects.
“We’ve seen you use restraint as a sniper. You’d never go on a rampage, that’s what our white coats tell us. But are you one who might get over-sympathetic? Say, if you were assigned a female target. Could you take a woman out?”
I frown, confused. “I have.”
“But she was old, probably toothless,” he crows. “She had also thrown a bomb that got someone you knew. What if she’d been hot? Someone who looked like Mama. And you watched her for a long time, a little Munich Olympics situation. You watched her shave her legs and watched her cry. You never saw her do anything bad.” He sneers. “Could you eliminate a target like that?” He shakes his head, continuing the theatrics. “We don’t know about you, Drake. Where your sympathies lie.”
“Sir, I’m a sniper for the Rangers.” It comes out before I realize I’ve spoken.
“Aww, so got a kill list. I hear that. I’ve seen it. Im-press-ive,” he says in his Southern drawl. “But only one woman scribbled down there. Not American—and not a sympathetic character. What if she was even hurt or…sick? Then what?”
Part Two
“There are a thousand things I want.
Each begins with going back in time.”
—Jill Alexander Essbaum, from The Devastation
ONE
Barrett
November 3, 2015
I do push-ups in the living room until I can’t feel my arms, and the fingers I can feel on my left hand are aching.
I’m interrupted by my phone flashing on the couch’s arm. Dove. I answer out of masochism.
“What the hell, dude? Haven’t heard from you in two days.”
“And?” My voice is tight with fury.
“And…you know. How are things?”
I grit my molars. Fucking Dove in his fucking compound out in nowhere Montana. Probably chopping wood and welding shit all day. Dancing on that peg leg like the happy fucker he’s always been.
