I leaned close to his ear anyway, because Marines talked to their dead.We talked to them like they could still hear us.
“I should’ve turned around,” I admitted, the confession tasting like blood.“I should’ve—” My throat tightened.I squeezed his hand once, a final squeeze, the way you squeezed a friend’s hand before you kicked in a door.“I’m sorry,” I whispered.“I’m sorry I left you to fight him.”
Time passed, I didn’t know how much.I said what I needed and Nita had her own goodbyes.We stood with him in silence both wishing we had a way to change the outcome.A nurse cleared her throat at the door.Time.
I didn’t let go of Lamonte right away.Then I did.And it felt like betrayal to walk away.
When I stepped back into the waiting area, the captain was there, eyes red.A lieutenant, too, and a chaplain from the hospital.Paperwork materialized like ghosts.A statement needed.Notifications.Chain of command.
Everyone spoke, words floating around me without meaning.Nita stood off to the side, face in her hands.I walked to her.
She looked up at me, eyes shattered.“No,” she whispered.“No, Dante.”
I nodded once.And for a second I saw something in her expression change—from grief to fear.Because she saw what I felt: that I didn’t look like a man who was going to cry.I looked like a man who was going to go numb as vengeance ate me alive inside.
Chapter10
Loco
The days after that passed like film burned too fast.Time became a series of tasks.Paperwork.Interviews.Internal Affairs.Detectives.A dozen retellings of the same hallway, the same powder cloud, the same gunshot.
I went back to the apartment once, with a specialty crime scene team.
Char’s living room had been turned into a laboratory of evidence markers and flash photography.The carpet still held dark stains where Lamonte’s blood had soaked through.I stood there for two minutes and then I walked out before I threw up.
The suspect wasn’t caught.
Not that day.Not the next.
A citywide BOLO (be on the lookout) went out.Warrants.Pings.Tips.Units posted on Char and Nita.Patrols doubled.Detectives didn’t sleep.
He stayed a ghost.And ghosts were dangerous because you could never tell where they would appear next.
Char woke up fully alert on day two after the overdose—after the injection, after the choking, after the code blue and the shock that hauled her back from the edge.That was the official diagnosis or determination they came to as to why her heart stopped.She was weak, hoarse, bruised.Furious in a quiet way that looked like shame.The tox report came back and it was fentanyl as suspected.
I saw her once, from the doorway, while a nurse adjusted her IV.She turned her head and her eyes met mine.She tried to sit up and failed.I didn’t go in.I couldn’t explain it to her.But grief had changed the shape of me.I didn’t trust what would come out of my mouth if I sat next to her.Not because I blamed her, but because I couldn’t fix her.I couldn’t save her from her own pain.
Nita stayed with her as much as the hospital allowed.She slept in chairs.She fought nurses.She ate vending machine food and spit it out.She cried where Char couldn’t see.
I kept my distance, not from Char’s pain, but from my own.Because if I got close, I might fall.
And I didn’t have time to fall.I had to bury my closest friend.
Lamonte’s funeral came a week later.Lamonte didn’t have family.He grew up in foster care, joined the Marines right out of high school and our unit was his family.I understood it.My parents had me later in life.Mom died when I was twenty-eight and dad died at thirty-two.I was an only child.Being left to handle his affairs I had to make decisions I had never made before.
Hard ones.
I called some of the guys we were close with from the unit.Gonzo, Gabriel Gonzales hit the road right after my call.We were the three amigos in the unit.Battle buddies that knew what it was to have someone’s back.He would be beside me as we laid our brother to rest.
The city was gray that morning, the sky low and heavy like it wanted to press us all into the dirt early.I stood in my uniform in front of the church and watched squad cars line up like soldiers.He would have both honors today, his Marine Corps military honors and the blue line brothers holding court too.
Cops poured in from every precinct.State.Federal.Guys Lamonte had trained with.Marines in dress blues who’d flown in from across the country, faces carved from stone, eyes reflecting that same kind of loss that never softened.
The bagpipes started up and my stomach twisted.
There was a thing about bagpipes—something primal in the sound.It didn’t let you lie to yourself.It screamed loudly into the air, someone was gone and they weren’t coming back.
The casket was draped in a flag.
