Dying for Her: A Companion Novel (Dying for a Living Book 3) (2 page)

Friday, March 21, 2003

M
y head throbbed with a hangover. I’d already taken six aspirins and my gut was so full of rot I was starting to think the liver bleeding warnings on the label weren’t for shits and giggles.

When you walk into the St. Louis FBRD office on Figaro Ave, you’ll immediately see two long rows of desks—some immaculate, without a stray paperclip to be found, others looking more like the floorboard of my car. My own desk was somewhere in between the two extremes.

While most of the family men in our department were at church functions and family gatherings, heaping food onto paper plates, I spent my Good Friday at my desk, sorting through the case files I planned to follow-up that weekend.

I had two in particular. The missing girl had a depressingly thin file with only a picture, a few statements, interviews, and no leads. Then I had another file on Rachel Wright, also missing, twenty-four years old with a couple of interesting petty crimes to her credit. She stole a car when she was sixteen, a boat when she was eighteen, and was picked up for indecent exposure at twenty-two. The sooner I found both of these girls, the better.

If I had simply walked in, grabbed my folders and walked out, my life might have played out differently. If the aspirin bottle had come open on the first try, maybe I never would have met Jesse Sullivan at all—anything to take me away from my desk at that one pivotal moment.

“This is Mr. Memphis,” Charlie said. He took the bottle from me, opened it with a single twist, and tapped two white pills into my shaking palm.

Charlie’s eyes were puffy with dark rings beneath them and his chin shaggy with overgrowth. His beard was growing in white, adding to his Nordic appearance: bright blond hair, piercing blue, bird-like eyes, and pale skin that only made those dark circles more noticeable.

His expression wasn’t friendly, but I wasn’t entirely sure if it was about the hangover or something else. When Charlie heard that I left the service, he begged me to come help him build the FBRD, the Federal Bureau of Regenerative Death.
With your MP background you’ll be perfect
, he said.

But when I took the job he’d probably expected me to stay sober.

“Just Memphis,” the big guy beside Charlie said and extended his hand. I saw the deep line of a farmer’s tan cut across his bicep, the skin beneath almost as white as the shirt. It was strange to see a tan like that in March. We shook. He wore a plain white T-shirt and jeans, the shirt clean with just a hint of yellow in the pits.

I cracked the aspirin between my teeth. “Brinkley. What can I do for you?”

“He wants to file a missing persons report,” Charlie said.

They all want to file missing persons reports
, I thought. I worked a couple of years overseas, then came back, and it seemed like everyone and their goddamn mother was missing.

Charlie walked away without saying another word and I watched him leave with the sense that he still wanted to talk to me, but hadn’t decided what he wanted to say yet.

“It’s my buddy, Eric,” Memphis said and sat in the empty chair across from me. Memphis didn’t fit so well and was forced to perch at the edge of his seat due to his immense size. He swept his sun bleached hair back with a beefy hand. “He never contacted me when he got out of the camp. He swore he would.”

“All right. When did you last see him?”

“January 1, 1998. The day they released me from Jerome.”

When people started to die, but didn’t have the decency to stay dead, the public panicked. Riots, outrage and chaos ensued. So the government rounded up all the Necronites—those who were believed to be time-bombs—either sleeper cells or the result of some kind of deadly biological warfare—and sent them to detainment camps.

It wasn’t until science caught up that we realized it was just a neurological disorder, NRD, where brain tissue sends a pulse throughout the body, reactivating its systems and healing itself.

Most of the missing person cases that crossed my desk were Necronites who’d been sent to the camp but never returned home—the missing girl, Maisie and the young woman, Rachel, were exceptions. Necronites yes, but too young to end up in the camps themselves because the camps closed five years ago. My fear was something worse than a detainment camp had happened to them.

“Maybe he got home, got busy, and forgot to call,” I offered.

“No,” Memphis said. His thick brows were overgrown, jutting down toward dark eyes. “That place was hell. He would’ve made sure I was OK.”

“Maybe he decided he didn’t give a shit about you,” I said. It was a bastard thing to say, but every booming word out of this farmhand’s mouth tore my skull in half.

Memphis’s jaw tensed. He had an Eddie Thomas kind of face, a sort of smashed-in-with-fists look, and I could tell he was trying to control himself. I had a feeling he didn’t usually hold back.

“Eric is a man of his word,” he said, his gaze steady and jaw finally unclenching. “He promised to check up on me and I promised the same. Something must have happened to make him break that promise.”

“Why didn’t you file a report sooner?” I asked. “You’ve been released over five years.”

“I’ve been looking myself.”

I snorted. “You a cop?”

“No.” He clasped his hands together. “Just good at finding things.”

“A search dog then.”

The giant stood. “If you don’t want to help me, just say so.”

I nearly broke my neck trying to look up at him. “Relax. I’ll find your guy.” And when he looked unconvinced, I added. “Always do.”

“That’s what Lieutenant Swanson said.” Memphis sat back down and placed a saucer-sized hand on each of his scuffed knees. “What do you need from me? What can I tell you?”

I’d heard enough stories about the camps to know it wasn’t the Ritz, complete with room service. “Just tell me whatever you think I need to know about the guy and where he might’ve been going. If I have more questions, I’ll ask. All right?”

The man rubbed the back of his head. “His name is Eric Sullivan. We were detained at the Jerome center. That’s in Arkansas.”

“I know it.” I did. Mostly from its WWII history. When they’d moved out the Japanese-Americans, they moved in the German POWs. But it closed in ’44 before reopening in ’80 during the NRD scare, almost twenty years after they put Hoover in the ground.

My mind wandered away from the history as I realized Memphis was still talking.

“—picked up in 1996, about a year before Eric. I wasn’t adjusting well. I like to be outside. Been that way my whole life. On the day that Eric came, I hadn’t see the sky for 412 days. You know what he said to me? ”

My headache had edged away from my eyes a bit. I humored him. “What?”

“It’s been raining for 413 days. You haven’t missed anything.” Memphis grinned a big good ol’ boy grin. “A man is going through the worst time of his life and just arrived at the gates of Hell and here he was trying to cheer
me
up. But that’s Eric for you.”

I must not have looked enthusiastic enough because he added. “It was the first time I’d laughed since I’d got to Jerome. I don’t know, maybe you had to be there to understand.”

“How’d you die?” I asked.

“What?” The man’s face colored as if I’d asked him if he wore boxers or tighty-whities.

“If you went to the camp, it means you died, then woke up and some asshole turned you in to the feds. So how did you die?”

“A tractor rollover,” he said.

Of course you did
, I thought but didn’t say it. The aspirin must’ve kicked in.

“When did Eric get to the camp?”

“March 1997,” he said.

“So you were only friends for a few months before you were released.”

“About ten months. It was New Year’s Day when they released me. But Eric wasn’t with me.”

“Why not?”

“When they closed all the camps, they let us go in batches,” he said and laced his fingers.

It would have been impossible to release all the detainees at once. They’d be owed transportation at the very least. Compensation and a big fat fucking apology at best. They’d only be able to carry so many at a time, and for the sake of order they would let them go in groups. How’d you like to be the last bastard out of that shit hole?

I fumbled for a pen and found one. I tried to scrawl out the few details he’d given me so far, but the pen wouldn’t write. “If you were separated, how did you know to plan to contact each other on the outside?”

Memphis clasped his hands together, then shrugged. “Everyone knew for months we were getting out. They told us at the end of October when the election stuff was in full swing. But they kept pushing back the actual release date. First we heard it’d be November. Then it was December.”

“So you had time to kill. And he was released after you, but you didn’t hear from him like you were supposed to.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. The sir hackled me. “So I tracked down his wife and kid but they haven’t heard from him either.”

I lifted up the folders for the missing girls and found a blue pen that actually worked. “He’s got a wife and kid?”

“Not anymore. She remarried and popped out another. But they haven’t heard from him. Cute though.”

“Excuse me?” With a thick blue smear along the inside of my right thumb, I threw the leaky pen in the trash and resumed searching.

“His kid. Looks just like him. She’ll be fifteen this year.”

“A little young for you, don’t you think?”

“Christ,” he said. His jaw fell open and his brow furrowed. “It’s not like that. She was twelve or thirteen when I saw her. I was just saying she looks like him.”

“Mmhmm.” With a fresh black pen I scrawled just the essentials: the dates of their release and imprisonment, the location of the camp, and names.

“What are you writing?” he asked.

“What you’ve told me,” I said. “You don’t want me to forget, do you?”

“Well, no.” He frowned. “What else do you need to know?”

“That should do it,” I said. “But I need a way to get ahold of you in case I have more questions.”

“OK,” he said. He gave me a local number.

My head cleared just enough to ask a final question. “Before you go, I’ve got one more.”

“Yeah?”

“The wife and kid. What can you tell me there?”

44 Weeks

T
here isn’t a night I don’t dream about him.

Sometimes he will die in my arms, sometimes in the dirt. But however he dies, it is always some variation of this truth:

In the winter of 2002, I’d been asked to come to Afghanistan. Car bombs were going off every day and the higher-ups were looking for long-range solutions that would keep the casualties low. They liked one or two bodies to roll through the media every once in a while. It kept up the American spirit and fueled the anger and purpose for us being in that god forsaken place to begin with, but if our body counts got too high, well, that was bad for business.

So they’d called in snipers like me to sit in the hillsides which were more like mountainous mounds of dirt than any hills I’d seen back home, or anywhere else really, and shoot at anything that went where it wasn’t supposed to.

Look out for women and children, they told us, even dogs. Insurgents had been favoring them lately. Understanding a threat in your head is different than seeing it on the ground, less black and white. When I saw Aziz, a 13-year-old boy for the first time, it was a whole area of gray.

I was above the western gate of a military base on the north side of town. It was mostly an epicenter for supplies near Pakistan, which was easier to travel through than Afghanistan. Convoys would go in and out at all hours of the day, while I lay crouched on the mountain above with my scope trained on the entrance. You can imagine how much time I spent laying there, in the dirt, hiding behind large rocks with my scope sweeping the desert.

When it got really boring, I would imagine all the ways in which I would likely have to use the rifle. I’d practiced the scenarios in my head the way a politician might rehearse his speech before the big day. Running through my strategies over and over again would keep me ready, prepared, I thought. What a joke.

When Aziz died, it was late in the evening. The sun had just reached that unbearable position in the sky where it shined into my eyes for about an hour before finally lowering itself enough that I could see again. The sun had just dipped enough to clear my scope when I saw him. The boy.

He was small for his age, which I learned later, and the second youngest son of a herder who lived in Kunar. Small and thin-limbed, not like our beefy hams back home, fattened on fast food and soda. Just a scrawny thing walking toward the entrance of the base.

At first I assumed he was a lost. Why else was there a kid wandering around in the desert? Not just wandering. He swooped and staggered on those thin legs. I found out later it was the weight of the vest that made him walk that way. How far had he walked with it on his chest? We’d seen a few cars try pulling up to various American bases, before shoving women and children out their doors. They realized shoving people from vehicles put us on alert, and had switched to subtler approaches. Now they made them walk across the desert, arriving half-dead and delirious at our doorsteps.

“Hostile,” someone yelled into my earpiece. I had a direct line to the guard below.

It startled me. I’d been watching the boy stagger the way a man might watch a snake dance.

“Hostile,” a voice said again. “We can see a vest.”

I lifted the scope to my face and felt the hot rim of metal brush my brow. I focused on the boy, and saw him and the vest for myself. But there was something wrong about it. I wasn’t quite sure what it was that put me off, or what I saw that gave me pause, but I pressed the earpiece and said. “Are you sure it’s active?”

“I see a flashing red light, goddamnit,” the voice came clear and urgent. “Are you going to wait until he gets to the fucking door?”

I lifted the rifle again and found the boy in the scope, my crosshairs dissecting his skull. I was sure I couldn’t do it. It didn’t feel right. He was a kid. As I crouched there, watching the boy stagger, I gradually became aware of the growing chaos in my earpiece. Someone was yelling, barking an order. Voices grew and collided with one another.

The boy fell. He hit the dirt hard. No longer fighting against the vest, it brought him down. He wasn’t moving. Not a muscle twitched and the smallest echo of the shot rang off the mountain.

I didn’t realize I was the one who’d shot him until I eased my finger off the trigger.