Grab some toys
All my personal shit’s back in Paris in my flat there, including my toybag. The kitchen here is bare-bones in the way of cookware and pervertibles, like silicone spatulas and wooden spoons. I’ll pick up a few things I can use.
Lube and condoms.
I’m not an animal, after all. Might not end up needing them, but why not be prepared?
Pulling out my phone, I look up several items. Amazon reaches even this little Slovakian mud puddle not too far east of Bratislava. There’s a small post office in town with delivery lockers, and I order a few things to have sent there.
Once I finish eating, I’ll retrieve my kit from the SUV and haul it upstairs. I have several bags of IV fluids I can push into him to help with the dehydration, and enough sedatives to keep him pliant for a week or more before I’ll need to venture out for those kinds of supplies.
Hardware store.
Feed store, if it’s not the hardware store.
Large-animal vet.
They’re easily bribed to provide drugs that can be used on a human. Like Ketamine and other sedatives.
I set my phone aside and ponder my options.
The more I think about this entire assignment, now that I have a moment to think, the more it stinks of desperation and cleaning house. I didn’t like the feeling this assignment gave me from the start but I’m not usually one to question orders.
It is ironic that the man I’ve been hunting from afar for years and looking for an opportunity to take down—literally, or metaphorically with his career and reputation—might be even closer now because he possibly had a hand in trying to erase his own history.
Hopefully Carter is safe because of his visibility. I doubt the general is stupid enough to go after him when Carter is currently the governor’s chief of staff and about to transition into being Florida’s First Gentleman. Besides, Carter will have a security detail he might not otherwise have had because of the kids. And Carter is semi-famous after Susa’s miraculous rescue. The whole world saw him on TV, played on a grief-porn loop, after her plane went down. At the time, I stayed incognito and didn’t take any assignments until she was found and that resulting chaos died down.
Fowler has to be kept alive. If I can gain his trust—which might be difficult after beating the crap out of him while interrogating him—I might be able to find out what’s really going on here and win him over into helping me.
One way or another, I want to learn everything about Carter’s connection to Fowler, why someone might really want Fowler dead instead of prosecuted, and ascertain if Carter’s in any danger as a result.
If it means I can finally take out retired General Coltrane Cunningham for good in the process, all the better.
Chapter Nine
I’d rather sleep naked but I should be prepared in case Fowler wakes up earlier than I planned. After removing his hood and making sure he’s still breathing, I wedge a solid wooden chair from the kitchen under the doorknob of the master bathroom, check the doors and windows all around the house one last time, and settle in to sleep on top of the covers with my Glock right beside me on the bed.
I’m fucking exhausted. I don’t sleep well to start with, obviously, given my line of work. Haven’t in too many years to remember.
Only when I’m securely locked inside my flat in Paris do I actually sleep halfway decently. What I guess could be called my personal baseline of “sleeping well.” Even then, sleeping “well” means I only wake up a few times during the night instead of sitting up over every single sound I hear, and my dreams aren’t nightmares that sit me bolt upright and drench me in cold sweat.
Tonight, I dream about Pete and Tom. About standing there in Dover on the tarmac in my dress uniform, next to my other brothers, my father, and my mother, as we all watch the C-130 Hercules touch down.
It was only coincidence I was in the States at that time. Just a six-month stint there in DC for training before I was slated to return to Germany and my next assignment.
I remember the feel of the weight of their coffins as we carried them, one at a time, my brothers and my father, along with one of the soldiers supposed to be doing this duty.
But Dad had laid down an order we would unload them as part of the honor guard, and the unit’s CO was a friend of his and approved it.
All of us silently crying, we carried them to the hearses awaiting to ferry them to Port Mortuary for official processing before they would be returned to us.
There wasn’t a way to have any kind of viewing for either of them, and Dad wouldn’t let Mom or any of us even ask to see their bodies, even after they’d been…processed.
Even though it angered me at the time, in retrospect, I’m reasonably sure that was for the best. Losing both of them nearly killed Mom. Seeing them in “disassociated” pieces might have been too much for her to bear. None of us needed to remember them like that. It was better we had the memory of the last time we were all together strong in our minds, a snapshot taken to forever cement their smiling faces in our hearts.
It wasn’t until two weeks later, after we’d buried them both in Arlington, next to each other, that I was able to drag myself out of my grief enough to start looking into the circumstances surrounding their deaths. I didn’t tell anyone else that, either. I had a feeling Dad would shut me down, if he knew.
Except I guess I’m not a great soldier after all. I don’t blindly accept orders without sometimes digging deeper into them.
