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But still, I couldn’t sleep.
FOUR
EZRA
My patience was starting to wear thin.
I knew solving this mystery wasn’t going to be an easy task, but I at least thought it would be quick. In and out, straightforward. The first step was finding out what happened to Max, one of my closest friends and former vet. I already knew he was dead. A few weeks ago, I received a letter Max set to be mailed to me upon his death. He told me that he was proud to serve under me and a whole bunch of other stuff that wasn’t important. But he didn’t tell me the circumstances leading to his death, and the letter had no point of contact. No one to ask to find out what happened to him.
Max was one of my recruits who had served under me in the Navy SEAL. He’d been part of Team Alpha, a covert operations unit that carried out impossible missions and took out dangerous men who couldn’t be touched by the law. We were playfully dubbed the suicide squad by the rest of the teams. Only those who were insane or suicidal joined up. Or those who had a crazy hero complex.
I didn’t think I fit into any of that. I simply did it because it was what needed to be done. A spot needed to be filled, and when I was recommended for the job, that was that.
Team Alpha had a crazy high mortality rate, and those who survived tended to face emotional and psychological problems for the rest of their life. Max was one of them. It was why I made sure I kept in contact with him after his discharge, reaching out to see if he needed anything. At first, he indulged me with the weekly emails. But then they became more and more infrequent. And eventually, they just stopped. I let it be because I at least knew he was collecting daily checks from the account I opened for him, which meant he was alive.
Until now.
And the idea that I’d just lost another of my men was like a stab in the gut. It never got easier.
Discovering what happened to Max was one part of what I had to do. The next was to find the man’s family and take care of them. It was what I did with the families of all the other dead recruits. I knew Max had a wife and a daughter because he frequently mentioned that the two of them were the only things that mattered in his life. He was pretty secretive about most things, but he used to brag about them all the time at the base and in his emails.
“Stacey’s talking about going back to school,”one of his last emails read.“Says she wants to improve herself. Told her I could open up a salon for her or something since she likes to do hair, but she won’t hear of it. Wants to do it all on her own. My stubborn, independent wife. She likes to not need me.”
I remembered smiling at the email. It wasn’t the first story I’d heard about Max’s headstrong wife, and I didn’t yet know it would be the last. The man had gone on and on about her when we’d been stuck in the jungle sweating blood through our ass cheeks, every inch of our body screaming with pain from bugs, knife wounds, and occasionally bullets. That was when Max turned into the resident talkative. The man never quite knew how to shut up for a long time, and the pain made him worse. When most of the men were too depressed to do much more than breathe and eat, he would still talk about that wife of his, about how he couldn’t wait to go back and see her, how he regretted enlisting and leaving her, and how he would give her the world she deserved.
After Max’s discharge, I was glad to know his wife was still around and waiting for him when he got out. He was one of the few lucky ones. When his daughter, May, came into the picture, I added a little more to the residual checks I sent him every month.
It was something to the tune of a hundred thousand dollars a year. My accountant thought I was ridiculous for taking that amount of money every month per family of a soldier, but I knew it wasn’t enough. The men I served with sold their souls for me. They followed me into death and destruction of their bodies and mind. I led them through hell and back. I couldn’t just abandon them like that.
And to my mind, the little they received from the Navy—a mere pittance above the rest—was nothing.
This was a small price to pay, and it wouldn’t even touch the dark guilt I carried every day. But that was okay. I’d stopped seeking penance a long time ago because I knew I deserved none. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t bring the dead back. Money couldn’t. All I could do was live with myself and impart justice. Set things right.
And in my opinion, that was the only thing money was good for.
Max, like most of my men, refused to take the money at first, but I didn’t give a fuck. I sent it in any way I could to get it to him, even opening an account, dumping all the cash there, and sending him the details. After about a year of trying, I finally got word that the account was in use and confirmed that Max was taking the money out, which was great. As Max’s and my conversation became less and less frequent—we hadn’t spoken for years now—I didn’t pay much attention to the account anymore.
Until I found out about Max’s death.
There wasn’t much else to go with, detail-wise. The bank didn’t know much about his death, but they did tell me that they’d sent over a checkbook to a PO Box in Denton, Louisiana, where he lived. That was why I was in Denton now, to figure out what had happened to him.
It was proving harder than I expected. Max had no social media presence, and there was no announcement of any death on the town’s social pages that fit his description. My PI came down with nothing much on Max, either, which was strange.
I thought it could probably be due to the man’s aversion to technology, but no. I’d asked a few people, including the landlady, about Max at length, and she’d had no clue who I was talking about. Maybe he was just a private man, but surely in a smallish town like this, it would be difficult to hide that kind of information. His wife would probably be throwing him a funeral, people would know what happened, and being the life of the party that Max was, he would have some friends and mourners posting about him.
But on the surface, there was nothing there.
I figured I should do some groundwork, and the best place to start my search was the bar in the center of town. While driving around that first couple of nights, I noticed that the bar got a lot of traffic, particularly in the evening. Just about everyone in town seemed to stop there then. A prime place for late-night gossip. They would definitely know something about Max.
At least, that was what I thought.
When I walked in at first, all eyes were on me. I didn’t care. I was used to the attention of me being a big scary-looking motherfucker. That wasn’t the issue. People usually stare and then keep their distance, which is the way I prefer it.
But unfortunately, not everyone was suitably spooked.
I’d barely sat down at the bar when the wizened old man sitting next to me turned in his seat. He peered at me for a few seconds, scratching his beard, and then said, “You look mighty familiar, young buck.”
I turned to regard him. I hadn’t been a young buck for many years, and the gray in my beard was a testament to that. But this guy looked to be about seventy, so I decided to let it go, turning back to my drink.
