Chương 2
“Dad, I can’t feel my feet right.”
“I know.”
“What if I can’t play anymore?”
Sarah began crying behind me.
Tyler looked toward the blankets.
“What if I can’t walk?”
I had given men answers in burning vehicles, in ruined buildings, in places where dawn seemed impossibly far away.
Some of those answers had been lies because fear sometimes needed a lie long enough for daylight to arrive.
I could not lie to my son.
“We don’t know yet.”
His eyes filled.
“That’s not what I asked.”
“No.”
“Am I going to walk?”
“I don’t know.”
He turned his face toward the wall.
The nurse touched my arm.
“We need to take him now.”
Sarah kissed him three times.
I managed one.
When the doors closed behind his bed, she slapped me across the face.
The sound startled both of us.
“Don’t you dare,” she said.
I tasted blood where my tooth had caught my cheek.
“Don’t I dare what?”
“Become him again.”
There were people in the hallway.
A respiratory therapist pushed an oxygen cylinder past us without looking over.
I wiped my mouth with my thumb.
“You don’t even know what happened.”
“I know your face.”
“My son was shot.”
“My son too.”
Her voice cracked on the last word.
She covered her mouth.
I reached for her.
She backed away.
“You promised me.”
“I haven’t done anything.”
“You’re already doing it.”
She walked toward the surgical waiting room before I could answer.
For seventeen years, I had cleaned the same courthouse where Rick Barnes walked through security without emptying his pockets.
He called me Denny even after I corrected him.
He left coffee cups on windowsills.
Once, during a snowstorm, he watched me carry salt bags from the loading dock and told another deputy that old men ought to learn when to retire.
I had smiled.
That smile had been deliberate.
There was a time when men learned my name before entering rooms because knowing who commanded the operation could keep them alive.
There were places where I had carried weapons that never appeared on inventories and crossed borders under names that were not mine.
None of that mattered while I stood beneath fluorescent hospital lights with my son’s blood drying on my wife’s sleeve.
What mattered was that Barnes had shot a seventeen-year-old boy twice after the boy was already under his authority.
What mattered was the person Tyler said he had seen inside Barnes’s truck.
And what mattered was that frightened deputy repeating a justification nobody had requested.
I went downstairs.
Outside, the night air smelled faintly of exhaust and cut grass.
Someone had parked a minivan beside my truck, forcing me to squeeze sideways between the vehicles.
I sat behind the wheel without starting the engine.
My hands rested on my thighs.
They were shaking.
That surprised me.
I watched them until they stopped.
Then I took out my phone.
There were numbers I had never deleted because deleting them would have felt theatrical.
One belonged to Marcus Vale.
The last time we had spoken, Tyler had been learning to ride a bicycle.
Marcus had sent a Christmas card two years later.
I never answered it.
I pressed the number.
He answered after one ring.
Nobody said anything for several seconds.
Then Marcus spoke.
“Reaper?”
I had not heard that name aloud in seventeen years.
“Don’t call me that.”
A pause followed.
“All right.”
“I need help.”
Another pause, shorter this time.
“Where are you?”
“Colorado.”
“I know that much.”
“Livingston County.”
“What happened?”
“My son was shot tonight.”
Marcus’s breathing changed.
“Alive?”
“Surgery.”
“Who shot him?”
“The county sheriff.”
This time the silence lasted long enough for me to hear a car horn from the hospital entrance.
“Dennis,” Marcus said carefully, “what kind of help are you asking for?”
The question irritated me because it was the correct one.
“I need to know what happened before Barnes stopped Tyler.”
“That isn’t what you called us for twenty years ago.”
“It is what I’m calling you for now.”
“Us?”
“Marcus.”
“Say it.”
I leaned my head against the seat.
“I need people I trust.”
“You have police.”
“The sheriff shot him.”
“State police?”
“I haven’t spoken to them yet.”
“Then speak to them.”
“Before you do anything stupid.”
I almost laughed.
Marcus had once driven a burning vehicle through a concrete checkpoint because reversing seemed inconvenient.
“You giving me lectures now?”
“I have grandchildren.”
That shut me up.
He continued more quietly.
“If you want records, witnesses, timelines, people who can ask questions without kicking doors in, I can make calls.”
“That’s what I want.”
“Is it?”
I looked through the windshield at the hospital.
“No weapons.”
“Good.”
“No threats.”
“Better.”
“No one touches Barnes.”
Marcus exhaled.
“Now I believe you’re scared.”
“I’m not scared of him.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
I closed my eyes.
“Get the team together.”
“Not the team.”
“What?”
“The people they became.”
I said nothing.
“We’re not twenty-eight anymore, Dennis.”
“I noticed.”
“Luis teaches emergency management in Arizona.”
“Still talks too much?”
“More.”
Despite myself, I smiled.
“Cal?”
“Runs a machine shop outside Boise.”
“And Bishop?”
Marcus went quiet.
“What?”
“Bishop died three years ago.”
The smile disappeared.
“Cancer.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t ask.”
That one landed where Marcus intended it to.
A woman pushing an empty wheelchair crossed in front of my truck.
One wheel squeaked every revolution.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“So was I.”
“Marcus—”
“I’ll make calls.”
“Thank you.”
“Dennis.”
“Yeah?”
“Do not turn your son’s hospital room into an excuse to become someone you spent seventeen years trying not to be.”
I stared at my courthouse identification badge lying on the passenger seat.
“You don’t know what I’ve been trying to be.”
“No.”
Marcus’s voice softened.
“But I know what you were.”
The call ended.
When I returned upstairs, two uniformed state investigators were waiting outside the surgical unit.
May you like
Sarah sat between them with a paper cup clenched in both hands.
One investigator rose.
