Like learning the CO my younger brothers served under, one Colonel Coltrane Cunningham, was a massive fuck-up. A man who, after three years in the desert, had racked up over two hundred personnel KIA under his command—the highest fatality rate of any active-duty unit—and had finally been transferred back to riding a desk in Germany, where at the time I thought he could do minimal damage. The only reason he hadn’t been booted was because apparently he held a lot of dirt on other people. I wasn’t able to get much farther than that in my quest because of his rank and status and mine.
Meanwhile, I seethed.
My eyes snap open in the dark and I listen for a moment, my hand already wrapped around the Glock.
No sounds from the bathroom.
Just to make sure, I get up and listen at the door. After a moment, I hear a soft, even rattle of breath that’s not quite a snore from the other side, meaning Fowler’s still unconscious.
Returning to the bed, I lie on top of the covers again and stare at the ceiling. Cunningham is another reason I remained in Europe for so long. I knew if I followed him to the States immediately after he retired to Florida, I would kill him.
There were three times I almost did it in Germany, and he had no clue I was even there. One time, he was leaving a private house sex party of some sort, but someone else exited after him and would have seen me had I scooped him up then.
Despite my thirst for vengeance, I was smart enough to know when to walk away because I didn’t have a plan for any contingency.
To be honest, back then at least I was smart enough to know not to be hasty and stupid. To carefully plan. And even then to pull back if in doubt because no plan survives contact with the enemy.
Case in point is lying on the bathroom floor behind the flimsy wooden door just off the end of my bed.
I don’t know what I’ll do with him if he refuses to give me what I want, or if I don’t like his answers.
I guess I can always bury him in the root cellar and hang on to this house for a while longer before burning it to the ground at some future point. It’s not traceable to me.
But the more I think about it, the more I wonder about the possibilities.
It would be really shitty of me to play off my resemblance to my little brother to worm my way into Fowler’s mind, wouldn’t it?
Yeah, it totally would.
Which is why that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
If I’m lucky, Fowler will crumble, and I’ll not only have a chance for revenge but a permanent playtoy in my bed. Fowler doesn’t have anyone in this world, so it’s not like I’m taking him away from a family.
Yeah, I’m a bastard. I admit it.
What’s your point?
* * * *
A little before dawn, I give up trying to sleep. When I get up, I hurt like a motherfucker, just as I expected. After downing a power bar to settle my growling stomach and swallowing a couple of Tylenol, I open the bathroom door to check on Fowler, gently prodding him with my foot.
Fowler’s still out of it. He also fucking stinks, but I’m not doing anything about that right now.
I retrieve a bag of IV saline and the required supplies from my kit and prep a bolus of sedation to keep him out while I run my errands. It takes me a minute to find a vein on him, because he’s so dehydrated and my field medic skills are damned rusty, but after three tries I finally get it started, tape it into place, use a bungee cord to hang the bag from the shower curtain rod, set it to a slow drip to help rehydrate him, and then push the sedation dose.
I wait about ten minutes, checking his pulse to make sure I haven’t put him too deep and need to reverse the effects, but apparently I guessed right. Hopefully he’ll still be alive when I return.
After killing the bathroom light, I lock him in the bathroom again and wedge the door in place with the chair. I also move one of my interior cameras to focus on the bathroom door. It has a built-in mic, so I can listen in while I’m out and about.
It’s not much, but it’s something.
It takes me three hours to run my errands in the SUV—which now doesn’t stink of shit and piss, fortunately—and return to the house.
First thing, I check on him, and he’s still asleep and snoring.
Well, if the poor bastard was sleep deprived, this’ll give him a good chance to catch up, I guess.
Once he gets over the K-hole he’ll likely be dealing with on the other end of things, from the first dose I gave him when I moved him.
