So he found a blanket in a chest, put the SIG on the floor beside him where his hand would find it naturally, then laid his head down.
He knew what was coming.
He hadn’t felt like this since losing four members of his platoon to an ambush along the Tigris.
Despite the lack of coffee, he wouldn’t sleep, not yet.
Instead he closed his eyes and watched helplessly as Geoffrey Reed put his pistol to the underside of his chin and blew his own head off. Then he was at the motel, with KT crumpled on the floor, the back of her head missing. Then he had the screaming girl under his arm, racing past her mother’s dead body and out to the pizza car while Scott Enderby fired at them with purpose and deliberation. He felt the first thump of the little hatchback making contact, then the double thump as he ran the man over, going forward and again in reverse. Then he was in the tall corn beside the Tigris, looking at four dead Marines.
He took slow, deep breaths and let the memories cycle, again and again, with all their fear and anger and pain. Acknowledging it all, doing his best to accept it. He felt the wave of guilt wash across him,his responsibility for KT’s death and Ellie’s loss of her mother, and accepted that, too. From his years of dealing with his wars and their aftermath, he knew that pushing away emotions and memories only made them worse.
When they finally began to fade, he called up a mental picture of the long sandy beach where he and June had gone camping the summer before, walking barefoot in the warm, shallow water, hand in hand. He held that image in his mind’s eye as his breath filled his chest, again and again.
Eventually, he slept.
—
He startled awake in the dark, the pistol ready in his hand. A slim form stood swaying by his feet, backlit by the streetlight shining through the sheer curtains. He put the gun down and sat up. “Bad dream?”
Ellie nodded, her voice thick with sleep. “Can I stay down here?”
“Of course.” He looked at the clock. It was two in the morning. He stood. “You take the couch.”
She sank into the cushions and curled up on her side. “Where are you going to be?”
“I’ll be right here.” He draped the blanket over her shoulders, then sat cross-legged on the floor beside her, the gun in his lap.
She reached out and grabbed his arm with both hands. Then her breathing softened and she was asleep.
When he woke again, it was just beginning to get light. He lay on his back on the carpet with the pistol at his side. Above him, Ellie was snoring, tangled in the blanket, one arm hanging down with his shirtsleeve bunched in her small fist.
Gently, Peter detached her grip, then climbed to his feet and stareddown at her. Blinking in the new day, he realized he was entirely unequipped to give her what she really needed. He was no kind of parent. He was an uncle of sorts to Lewis’s two boys, but Ellie was a girl and she’d just lost her mother. Clearly, she needed more than Peter could provide. Especially if he was going to keep chasing this thing, whatever it was.
14
He figured she’d be asleep for a few hours yet, so he left a note saying he’d be back soon. He put Stella’s pistol in his belt and the foil brick of phones in his jacket pocket, then headed out the back door, locking it behind him. He considered driving, but didn’t want to wake the girl by starting the Tahoe’s big engine. Instead he walked down the block on foot, heading for a coffee shop he’d spotted last night. The clouds were low overhead, their hanging tendrils shrouding the houses in mist.
With a large coffee in hand and a bag of pastries tucked inside his jacket, he jogged across the busy street to a bank branch with a decent overhang. Then he set his coffee on the pavement and took his phone from the foil.
Once it found a signal, the notifications began to pile up. Captain Durant had called six times and left four voicemails suggesting with increasing urgency that Peter get in touch. June had sent eight texts, each more profane than the last.
He texted back, “Call when you can.” She’d have premium Wi-Fi on the plane and would use Signal to reach out.
Thirty seconds later, his phone rang. “Marine, where the motherfucking fuck have you been?”
June’s vocabulary would make a drill sergeant blush. Like KT, her first job as a journalist was on the police beat, and she claimed she’d learned to swear so both cops and fellow reporters would take her seriously. That might have been true, but mostly Peter thought June cursed for the sheer joy of it.
“Sorry,” he said. “I had to go dark for a while.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” she said.
“The cops were going to make Ellie go with someone from Child Protective Services. She really didn’t want to. And I was worried about her safety. So she went with me instead.”
“She went with you?” June groaned. “You mean you took her. Bad idea, Marine.”
“I know,” he said. “I just couldn’t leave her there. Her mom is dead. She’s all messed up. I couldn’t protect them. It’s all my fault.”
“CPS is set up for kids with trauma, Peter. You’re not. You have to take her back.”
