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CHAPTER
84
IT WAS THREE WEEKS LATER, at precisely 6:20 in the morning.
Devine, his arm in a sling, stepped onto the train. He was leaving the area the next day. But he wanted to take one more trip on the 6:20. He wasn’t sure why, but then again, maybe he was.
The train started to fill, station after station, with the young gladiators in their suits and skirts, their laptops and clouds fired up and gestating future wealth for those with already too much of it. Later, the train climbed the little knoll, slowed, and then stopped, like a thirsty animal does at creekside for a drink.
The Cowl palace was for sale. There was no Michelle Montgomery in her Morse code bikini. No swaggering billionaire in his natural habitat of unparalleled luxuriousness. Devine looked around the train car and saw all gazes stuck to computer screens.
He took out his laptop and looked over the email he had crafted along with a large attachment. It documented everything he had found out about Cowl and Comely. He hit the Send key, and off it flew to one Elaine Nestor, the tarred-and-feathered journalist.
Go and win a Pulitzer, Elaine. And screw the powers that be and the dark money they suck on.
Devine found himself staring out the window and conjuring up images that bordered partly on nostalgia and partly on necessity. His need to feel something. To regret things. To sense guilt and loss and other things he couldn’t readily identify right now. Figuring out the inexplicable was never easy.
Sara Ewes and Jenn Stamos dead. Jill Tapshaw, too. Three remarkable women who could have done a lot of good in the world, given the chance.
But Tapshaw hadn’t given the other two the opportunity. In her brilliant, twisted mind they needed to be punished and removed from the living.
And Will Valentine, his beer-guzzling friend with more optimism than any person Devine had ever met, and who loved his adopted country more than some native-born citizens, was also dead.
But Michelle Montgomery was still alive, though denied a place at whatever table Devine would be heading to, alone.
But I have her phone number. And a letter from her in which she says she’ll always love me. Right now that is enough.
The train started up again with a jolt.
He turned away from the glass and stared straight ahead.
The only direction he could now see himself heading.
What lay there for him could be bullets or bombs once more. Or the more subtle entanglements that happened all over the world outside combat zones.
He didn’t know which was more dangerous, or whether it would end up being a tie.
He only hoped that he was up to the task.
Ranger tabbed and Ranger scrolled. And a seasoned financial analyst to boot.
Devine would probably need all of it and a little bit more to survive. Along with luck.
A good soldier never discounted the intervention of well-timed luck.
Redemption, a second shot, a new lease on life.
Maybe this was all of those things.
You’ll never know until you try, soldier.
He sat back, closed his eyes, and let the 6:20 train take him somewhere, one more time.
