Chương 2
Something worse.
Disappointed.
It was the expression Marcus had used when Nate was seventeen and had wrapped their father’s truck around a mailbox after three beers. The look he had given him when Nate nearly quit flight school. The look from a thousand moments in which Marcus had stood on the side of responsibility and Nate had stood on the other.
You are making a mistake.
Nate had seen the sentence in his brother’s face all his life.
For the first time, he did not follow it.
“Keep him away from my son,” Nate said.
Marcus stopped walking.
One security officer touched his arm.
Marcus allowed himself to be moved again.
A nurse lifted the IV bag from its hook without disconnecting it and examined the label.
“That’s not the bag I hung,” Celia said.
The physician glanced at her.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“You need treatment.”
“I’m sure.”
The physician looked toward the older nurse.
“Doris, stay with her.”
Celia pushed away from the wall. “The other one is in the trash.”
“What other one?”
“The bag I removed. He tried to take it.”
The physician’s face tightened.
“Where?”
“Medication room trash. I put it on top. I didn’t want to leave Ben alone.”
Doris swore quietly.
Celia’s eyes found Nate.
“There was a syringe in his hand.”
Marcus heard her from the hallway.
“That is a lie.”
Celia jerked toward the door.
“You shoved me into a cabinet.”
“You grabbed me.”
“Because you were standing over a child’s IV with a syringe.”
“I was trying to stop the pump alarm.”
“With a syringe?”
Security ordered both of them to stop talking.
Nate leaned against the wall because the room had tilted slightly.
He had eaten half a bagel fourteen hours earlier. He could remember that with perfect clarity. Cream cheese on one side only because he had dropped the other half on the base parking lot while answering Leah’s call.
Leah.
At 7:14 that morning, she had called him three times.
He had been inside an auditorium waiting to give remarks at a retirement ceremony. His phone was on silent.
At 7:22, she had texted him.
Call me when you can. It matters.
At 7:36, her car had entered the intersection at Route 18 and Calder Street.
At 7:36 and some number of seconds that police had not yet established, a black SUV had hit the passenger side.
The driver had left before emergency responders arrived.
Leah had not.
Ben had been pulled from the back seat by a delivery driver who burned both hands opening the damaged door.
Nate had finally looked at his phone at 7:51.
Marcus had been standing beside him when the hospital called.
Marcus had driven him part of the way because Nate could not keep the car in one lane.
Marcus had sat with him while a surgeon explained injuries in sentences Nate could hear but not hold onto.
Marcus had handled calls.
Marcus had found Nate’s mother.
Marcus had called Leah’s sister.
Marcus had signed for coffee nobody drank.
Marcus had stood two feet away when a physician told Nate that Leah had died before he reached the hospital.
And sometime after that, while Nate had been downstairs identifying his wife’s body, Marcus had entered Ben’s room.
Nate slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor.
Nobody stopped him.
His dress jacket bunched beneath his arms.
One of his medals pressed painfully into his ribs.
He left it there.
Doris crouched near Celia and pressed gauze to the cut on her forehead.
“You might need stitches.”
“I need you to tell them what you saw.”
“I saw you slap a colonel.”
“Before that.”
Doris’s eyes moved toward Nate.
“I saw him come out of this room.”
Celia shook her head. “Earlier.”
“I saw you arguing.”
“He had the line in his hand.”
“I didn’t see his hand.”
Celia stared at her.
Doris did not apologize.
“I’m not saying I don’t believe you. I’m saying what I saw.”
That mattered.
Nate understood that even through the roaring in his ears.
People would have to say only what they knew.
Not what he needed them to know.
Police arrived eighteen minutes later.
By then Nate’s handgun was locked in a hospital security box, the axe had been taken away, Celia had six stitches above her temple, and Marcus was sitting in a private waiting room with two security officers outside the door.
The discarded IV bag had been recovered.
So had the bag currently connected to Ben.
Hospital staff sealed both according to procedures Nate did not understand and did not ask them to explain twice.
A detective named Lena Ortiz interviewed him in an empty family consultation room.
She was somewhere in her forties, with tired eyes and a legal pad that had been folded backward so many times the cardboard cover had softened at the corners.
“Start from when you entered the room.”
“My son was in bed.”
“I know.”
“The nurse had an axe.”
Ortiz waited.
Nate rubbed both hands over his face.
“She slapped my brother.”
“Your brother is Colonel Marcus Foster?”
“Half brother.”
“Does that distinction matter?”
“No.”
“Then why did you make it?”
Nate looked at her.
She did not look back. She was writing.
“I don’t know.”
“Okay.”
She waited again.
Nate understood the trick, if it was a trick. Silence made people fill space.
Marcus used it too.
Nate decided not to.
Ortiz finally looked up.
“Why did you have a firearm?”
“I came straight from base.”
“Was it issued?”
“Yes.”
“Were you authorized to carry it here?”
“No.”
“Why was it in your hand?”
Nate looked at the small black recorder on the table.
“I heard yelling before I got to the room. I saw the nurse holding an axe. I drew.”
“Did you point it at anyone?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so.”
“It was down.”
“Did it ever come up?”
May you like
Nate remembered Marcus moving after Ben spoke.
“Yes.”
