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My mouth is dry and my heart pounds. No time for thinking or feeling. I’m a soldier. This is what we do. Aim and shoot. Protect and defend. Kill.
The car is almost on us when I pull the trigger. I aim for a tire. Shots ring out. The sound echoes as a child runs toward me. The scene has changed. I’m on a street in Kandahar, in the middle of a neighborhood in ruins. Hot as hell, positioned behind a fallen wall, laboring under the weight of pounds of gear not designed for my body, but rifle at the ready.
The child reaches me—a small boy. He’s crying. I give him a one-armed hug, checking to see if some joker has strapped a bomb to this kid. All good. When I return to my position, the boy’s tears have turned to blood. The boom of an explosion knocks me to the ground. Knocks the wind out of me. For a moment, I’m too dizzy to move.
When I look up, the boy still stands there. He’s stopped crying. But the blood is all over his face. Oozing from his pores like sweat.
I try to speak to him, but no words come. How can he still be standing, bleeding from every pore? I see it on his arms now.
I don’t understand. But the boy stares at me, without blinking. Then I realize he’s dead as another explosion topples him in front of me.
And, not for the first time, I realize that death is just inches away from me.
Now, I’m in the mine-resistant vehicle with Perkins. He drives. I’m beside him—M16 at the ready. An electric jolt runs up my back as the vehicle bounces down the dusty road. If you can dignify the narrow strip of ground as such. The strip of ground is packed sand, the same relentless dusty beige as its surroundings.
We’re on our way home. Then, an explosion, and everything turns black.
???
I jolt awake after the explosion. I am drenched in sweat. Gasping for air. My heart pounds to the same beat I feel in my head.
What I wouldn’t give for a single night of peaceful dreams. Reluctantly, I get out of bed and force myself to face another day.
Chapter Twenty
I toss my nightshirt aside and wander toward the bathroom like a zombie. Brush teeth, step into the shower. The water washes the sweat away, but my anxiety is still there.
As I go through the motions of making a minimal breakfast, my thoughts churn. The past few days’ events flash by in my head. I need to write them down—and use what I’ve learned to somehow connect the players on my flowchart.
I force myself to meditate for ten minutes, then do my yoga stretches. To my astonishment, it helps. A little.
I suddenly remember that I still haven’t heard back from Terry. Time to check up on him.
???
On the way to Terry’s apartment, I tried to figure out why he hadn’t returned my calls. Maybe he lost his phone or maybe it died, but I didn’t really believe either one. Of course, anything was possible, but there was only one way to find out.
I backed into a space outside Terry’s building and started to walk toward the entrance. His car was parked several spaces from mine. A glance at a small opening in his mailbox revealed that he hadn’t retrieved his mail. There were times when I could go for days without checking my own mail and not regret it, but I had to empty the box sooner or later. In any case, seeing a full mailbox was a little unnerving, considering that Terry had failed to return my calls or text me.
I climbed the steps and gave his door three sharp raps. No response. More rapping produced more nothing. I tried the knob. Locked. I sighed and dug through my shoulder bag for my handy-dandy bump key.
As I wrestled with the key, I kept my ears open and occasionally looked over my shoulder to make sure no one was sneaking up on me. The itchy feeling I had developed felt like a case of poison ivy—internal.
After what seemed like eons of whacking on the key with one hand and adjusting its placement with the other, the door lock finally gave way. I opened the door very slowly. My overly cautious entrée into Terry’s apartment was unrewarded. Not a soul in sight. No Terry. No strangers who might be disgruntled hackers or whatever else.
I eased inside and shut the door behind me. After the soft click of the door closing, I sensed an eerie hush about the place . . . not a sound from within or without. The neighbors must be at work. Then I heard a faint squeak squeak from above. The upstairs neighbor was home. Or being robbed by the world’s dumbest burglar. Not my business.
“Terry.” The word slipped out, not loudly, but loud enough to be heard in the unusual silence. Moving through the small apartment, I could see that nothing had been disturbed. The furniture, the closets, the kitchen, the bathroom—it all looked unmolested by intruders. Terry’s toothbrush was in its holder. Maybe he’d taken an impromptu trip and forgotten it.
I checked the fridge again. Nothing much in it, except for a few essentials. Condiments, jam, nothing that would spoil. Except for the take-out Chinese food shoved to the back. Thought about smelling it and changed my mind.
In the freezer, I found a stack of frozen foods. Those meal-in-a-box deals. This was Terry’s diet. Frozen dinners, take-out, and condiments. The booze was probably under the sink.
Now for a list of things I did not find. I did not find a flight itinerary, credit card statements, old letters, a note written in invisible ink, a message hastily scrawled on the wall in blood, or any of those other fool things that invariably make their way into detective stories.
I also didn’t find Terry’s dead body. That was the good news.
I took one last look beneath furniture, behind a calendar, inside drawers and in every other conceivable hiding place. Under the bed, I saw what seemed like a dark lump of some kind. A closer look revealed a rectangular shape. I swept an arm beneath the bed frame and managed to snag it.
