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But breaking that Delta guy got Ice a new reputation and a new gig.
And the Delta trainers took Ice’s interrogation skills to the next level.
Showed him how toreallyget someone to open up.
Open up wide.
So he could get all the way inside.
Ice was about to pop open the Jeep door but the damn phone kept buzzing. He answered just to get rid of Jack’s annoying grin from the phone screen.
“Can’t talk about it and you know that,” Ice barked. Then, knowing that Jack would happily talk about himself until his battery died, Ice flipped the script. “What about you? What’s Benson got you doing for Darkwater?”
“We’re all hunting this guy Diego Vargas.” Jack exhaled noisily, taking heavy breaths, in deep and out hard, with grunts interspersed. “He’s still on the loose, gunning for Senator Robinson and Princess Delilah. Benson thinks Diego wants to take them out before the Presidential Primaries, before Robinson becomes the nominee.”
“You hunting for Diego at the gym?” Ice grinned when he heard the telltaleclangof the deadlift plates as Jack set the weights down hard. “I doubt he’s there. Not even a hardened torture artist like Diego could stand the smell of your armpits when you lift heavy.”
“Your sense of humor is getting worse with age,” Jack panted into the phone. He grunted, straining to lift what Ice figured was close to five hundred pounds on the deadlift. “Scratch that. You were always about as funny as a cancer diagnosis.”
Ice stiffened at the jab. It had been almost a year since Mom had died, going on seven months since Dad joined her in the great beyond. Cancer had taken them both, and it hadn’t been easy to watch it happen.
Especially because Mom and Dad had both refused treatment, choosing instead to follow some hokey new-age idea that you could simply “think” away the cancer, “desire” away the disease, use “intention” like a scalpel to purge yourself of the “bad vibrations” that were messing up your body.
Bullshit.
Mom and Dad were full of it.
Full of ideas that had no basis in science.
Beliefs that had no grounding in reality.
And they died because of those beliefs.
Holding on to those bullshit ideas until their last wheezing breaths, insisting that it was fate for them to end up this way, destiny for them to die like that.
Leaving Jack and Ice with a family album of memories poisoned by pain, stained with suffering, dark with despair.
But what still tore Ice up inside was knowing that modern medicine could have eased their pain and extended their lives, maybe even beaten the cancer into remission, kicked its ass and sent it back to hell where it damn well belonged.
Though in a way the cancer had brought Ice back home, hadn’t it? Forced him to forgive Mom and Dad for what they’d put him through that Thanksgiving day after his first deployment as a Delta, when he’d returned home after his first kill.
Though he hadn’t really forgiven them, Ice knew inside that dark section of his heart where he’d buried the memories of that Thanksgiving, that chilly November Thursday when he’d turned his back on Mom and Dad, stormed out of the house, out of their lives, swore never to return.
And then was pulled back by that disease.
The cancer which some part of Ice blamed himself for causing.
Even though science said that was impossible.
Emotions didn’t cause disease. No damn way.
“Damn it,” came Jack’s voice followed by a tremendousclangof metal weight-plates falling on the concrete floor of their garage-gym not far from the West Point campus.
They still had the old house, though Ice wanted to get rid of it, sell it for any damn price at which they could find a quick buyer.
Too many memories.
Too much baggage.
