“Works for me.” Once the coffee finished brewing, he poured two cups. “Any particular one you’d like to start with?” he asked as he handed Joe a cup.
“Thanks.” Joe said. “I think maybe the retired guy. From what Pixel said, he’s pretty well-off. Sounds like he’d have the time to be a criminal mastermind.”
“Okay, we’ll start with him.” Drew watched Joe over the rim of his cup, debating whether to ask the question that was poised on his tongue. He risked alienating or pissing off Joe by asking, but he suspected the answer factored into what was bothering Joe above and beyond his relationship issues. “Do you remember shooting the son?” he asked in as gentle a tone as he could muster.
He deliberately avoiding using language that alluded to the son’s age. Abassi’s son might have been only eighteen, but that was old enough to know the difference between right and wrong. He was no seven-year-old loaded down with C-4 and ordered to walk into a mercenary camp.
“Yeah.” Joe put down the coffee cup, his lips twisting into a pained grimace. His face seemed to go paler, too, as though the memory was deeply disturbing. “I didn’t know he was barely more than a kid himself. I came upon him beating the shit out of a little girl who couldn’t have been more than eight or nine, and I have my suspicions he’d been raping her, too, because she was naked and covered in blood. I didn’t ask questions, I didn’t eventhink. I just shot him, one burst right through the head. I don’t know if he was armed, and he probably never even saw me coming. I didn’t give him a chance to surrender. I just saw that he was about to kill the little girl, and I shot him.”
“Jesus….” Drew had assumed the son had been with a group of men who’d fired on Joe’s squad, and Joe had doubts about whether he’d done the right thing because maybe the son had been at the wrong place, at the wrong time. But no, the situation seemed pretty clear-cut to Drew. “I’d have done the same thing. Is the girl okay?”
“She’s alive, last I heard.” Joe scrubbed his face with his hands again. “As far as okay, who the fuck can say if she’ll ever be okay? Or any of the other victims, for that matter. And there are always more victims, because there are always more of the monsters who prey on the weak and innocent just because they can. And this is only one country, you know. This goes on all over the world. All we can do is fight it—we’ll just never be able to stop it, no matter what we do.”
“Yeah, but fighting it is better than just letting it happen,” Drew said. “You saved those people—thosekids—from a fate I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. That’s not pointless or useless. I’m pretty sure they’d agree.”
“Yeah. But it’ll break your heart. It almost broke me.” Joe shuddered. “You can only fight shit like that for so long before you start to lose yourself. I was in the thick of it for a month, in the filth and slime, and I sometimes I feel like I’ll never be clean again.”
Every caretaker instinct Drew possessed was screaming, and he wanted to do nothing more than hold Joe close and offer comfort, but he doubted Joe would accept it. Joe had probably come home in need of that comfort from Finn, only to experience another nasty shock. No wonder Joe had been wound up so tightly. He’d been denied a release valve when he needed it most.
“You don’t have any reason to feel dirty or stained,” Drew said, leaning forward. “You’re a good man, and you did the right thing. He was beating a child. Do you think he would’ve surrendered peacefully if you’d given him the chance? Do you think he would’ve felt an ounce of remorse? Hell, no. He was old enough to know what he was doing and how fucked up it was.”
“I know that, and that’s not what bothers me most.” Joe glanced at Drew. “He should have known better, but what was he taught, growing up in an environment like that? If you think about it, he was abused, being taught that he had the right and the power to victimize people. Did he ever have a chance to know right from wrong, when he was brought up to believe that the most heinous of wrongs was right and normal?”
Drew inclined his head to acknowledge the point. “Probably not, but you can’t beat yourself up over speculation. You saw a threat and eliminated it. That’s what you were there to do.”
“I did what I did. Right from my perspective, wrong from that of that boy and his father. We could argue semantics all day, but what it comes down to is that now this man wants to kill me and the people I love. So he has to be stopped by any means necessary.” Joe drew in a deep breath. “I will do this because it has to be done, but after that, I never want to set foot in this country again. Being here makes me feel like my own demons are too close to the surface.”
No doubt Joe was concerned about his killer instincts turning him into what he hated most about the traffickers, but Drew thought perhaps bad memories had something to do with it, too.
“I get it,” he said quietly. “I never want to go back to Iraq.”
“Something like that, yeah.” Joe shuddered. “I just want to get this done. All I care about is keeping Finn safe, no matter what I have to do to make sure he is.”
“And I’ll do whatever it takes to help you,” Drew said, although at this point, he meant far more than just protecting Finn, even if Joe didn’t realize it yet.
“Thanks.” Joe picked up his fork again, grimacing in distaste at his plate, as though his appetite was gone. Even so, he shoveled up a forkful of eggs. “And if we’re going to do that, we’d better eat. Guys like us need to make sure to eat. Going up against killers while your blood sugar is fucked up isn’t good.”
Nodding, Drew picked up a piece of bacon and began to eat, his resolve to help Joe, and see him safely through this, growing even stronger. He’d be damned if he returned to Finn without Joe. Finn needed Joe, and Joe…. Well, Drew was becoming more and more convinced that Joe neededhim.
