Blood on the Tracks (Sydney Rose Parnell Series Book 1)

by Barbara Nickless

  His erect bearing—shoulders up, back straight—made me wonder if he’d passed into a stage of hypothermia where he no longer felt the cold.

  Silently, I downed Clyde so that he would make as low a profile as possible, dropped the flashlight, and fumbled for my Glock. I held it next to my leg, pointing down.

  “Tucker Rhodes,” I shouted. “Special Agent Parnell with the railway police. Show me your hands!”

  He didn’t move. Didn’t so much as twitch.

  “Rhodes!”

  He turned his head to the side and said, “She’s out there.”

  I risked a glance past him at the snow-studded darkness and suppressed a shiver. “Raise your hands, Rhodes.”

  “Elise.” Her name came out like a prayer. “Waiting for me.”

  I blinked snow from my eyes. “Sure you want that, Rhodes? She’s probably a little pissed at you right now.”

  “She understands.”

  “Really? She’s feeling okay that you killed her?”

  Another long silence. Then, “I’m pretty fucked up, aren’t I?”

  “We’re all pretty fucked up, Marine. But you may top the list.”

  “Ma’am, I know you have a gun. You could do me a right big favor by using it. ’Cause I’m not going back with you. I’m either gonna die right here in the middle of goddamn nowhere. Or I’m gonna get to Montana and die there. Way I feel, I’d just as soon make it now.”

  “I leave you here, you won’t make it to Montana or anywhere else. You want to see your dad again, right? And your mom? If you come with me, you’ll at least have that.”

  He shook his head. “Someone once told me that you can take the boy out of the war. But not the war out of the man. My dad gets that. I know he does. But maybe he don’t want to see it for himself.”

  “What about your mom? You want to see her, don’t you?”

  “My mom don’t understand any of the shit I brought back with me. She just wanted her beautiful boy back. But he’s dead. Elise understood. But now she’s dead, too.”

  “Because of you.”

  He didn’t answer. But I had my suspicions about what might have happened. Not the why of it. There is no why in killing someone you love. But sometimes the hurt rises up in you so hard you don’t see it coming. Rhodes had grown up a rancher’s boy, but war had forged him into someone else entirely. Lance Corporal Rhodes survived in Iraq by devouring Tucker Rhodes so completely that only a warrior remained. It happens to pretty much everyone who sees combat. It keeps you alive until you come home.

  Then suddenly the enemy is the person you became in order to survive.

  “Parnell,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Corporal Sydney Parnell? Of Mortuary Affairs?”

  The hair lifted on my neck. “Yes.”

  I brought the gun partway up, ready, as he turned and faced me. He had a bandana wrapped around the lower half of his face, but the beam of my flashlight caught his eyes, those beautiful jade-green eyes.

  Memory came like a blow.

  Though we’d never known each other officially, and though I’d never seen any part of his face except his eyes, Rhodes and I had met the night when everything I believed in, or thought I believed in, exploded, sending shards of betrayal and revenge into everyone around us.

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “Fuck all,” he agreed.

  The Sir had done everything he could to gather the shattered pieces and bury them. But as I stood with Rhodes in the middle of nowhere, I realized that if he went to trial for Elise’s murder, the spectacular details of her death would draw in curious journalists and hard-charging prosecutors, all eager to dig up everything they could about the wounded war hero turned killer. And the story they would eventually uncover, the story from Iraq, would destroy not only Rhodes, but every single person who’d been involved.

  “Habbaniyah,” Rhodes said. “It was you that night.”

  Fury roiled under my skin. A pure and sharpened rage that whittled me down to bone and white-hot steel. Because the man standing in front of me was the biggest threat I’d known since returning to the States. Tucker Rhodes could destroy me and everything that mattered to me.

  “You had no right,” I said.

  “No.”

  My body trembled, helpless against the rising tempest. Clyde came to his feet, barking. But I barely heard him. For a thought wailed in my brain like a siren.

  Rhodes was a threat only if he lived long enough for the jackals to catch his scent. If he died, he would end up a tragic two inches of space in the local section of the paper. Within a day or two, he wouldn’t even be that. He and Elise would disappear, another sad footnote to the war. Just another good vet gone bad, two more lives sacrificed to the cause.

  My vision narrowed until it held nothing but my hand with the gun. And Rhodes.

  The rage turned from heat to ice. I quieted Clyde.

  “You were there,” Rhodes said. “You know what bringing me back will cost you and the others. You’d do us all a favor if you’d use that gun.”

  The cold crept from my heart to my gun hand. “I’m not a killer,” I said, even though I knew I was.

  “You’re a Marine. And Marines do the right thing, no matter the cost, right?”

  “Except for Habbaniyah.”

  He dipped his head in acknowledgment.

  He stood silhouetted hard against the falling snow, a dark bulk I could not fail to hit if I raised the Glock. My finger slid toward the trigger, brushed against the edge.

  The cool, rational part of my brain egged me on. Shooting him would be something every other cop would understand. Some would even applaud. I would say I thought he had a weapon—and probably he did, hidden in the pocket of his coat. I would say I thought my life was in danger, and they would understand. I would tell them that he threatened to do to me what he’d done to Elise, and they would clap me on the back for my bravery.

  Hell, they’d probably give me a medal.

  My finger shook. But I kept the gun pointing somewhere near his feet. Had I really come out here thinking I would save him only to turn around and become his killer?

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Please,” he whispered. And I knew he was asking me, not to spare his life, but to end it.

  Killing him would be easier than many things I’d done. And kinder.

  “Shit,” I said again.

  “Do it,” he said. “I ruined your life. Do it.”

  My hand came up of its own volition.

  “Do it because it’s the right thing,” he said. “Please.”

  My finger slid through the trigger guard, bumped against the Glock’s safe-action trigger.

  Clyde barked.

  Rhodes fell to his knees with his eyes locked on mine, then tipped to the ground. He rolled down the slope and landed, face up, at my feet.

  The jade-green eyes looked at nothing for a long time, then closed.

  CHAPTER 8

  In war, you do things that people back home will never understand.

  —Sydney Parnell, ENGL 0208, Psychology of Combat

  Clyde sniffed at Rhodes’s still form.

  I’d spent two tours of duty—a lifetime—carrying bodies in Iraq. The work had broken something inside of me. But it had also made me strong. I figured Rhodes probably weighed two hundred pounds to my hundred and twenty-five.

  I could work with it.

  I didn’t bother checking for a pulse, because at this point it didn’t really matter if he was alive or dead. I was taking him back. And I was going to do it on my own. As the sheriff himself had said, no vehicle at his disposal would be able to navigate the terrain I’d crossed on my way here.

  I holstered my gun then searched his pockets for weapons. The only thing I found was a photo of him with Elise, snapped before the IED had done its dirty work; probably the one he’d taken from Elise’s bedroom. I slid it back into his pocket.

  He groaned when I rolled him onto his stomach.
<
br />   “Hang in there, Marine.”

  When he’d fallen down the hill, I’d thought maybe I’d actually shot him. That I, too, had been swallowed up by my war-self. I had to sniff the Glock’s barrel to be sure I hadn’t fired.

  I’d think later about whether I was glad about that.

  Now I straddled Rhodes from behind, grabbed him beneath his arms then pulled him up to his knees. I had to work to get him to his feet. He was dead weight, and the ground was slick. For a few bad moments, I thought I wasn’t going to make it and we’d have to ride out the storm here. But eventually we were both standing upright, Rhodes slumped against me.

  I rotated him, squatted, then pivoted as his weight fell across my shoulders. I had to lean on Clyde to get back to my feet.

  I staggered forward a few steps, then tried to orient myself with the compass. It took me way too long to read the dial in the thin beam of my flashlight. The compass face swam in front of my eyes, and I couldn’t focus.

  Hypothermia, settling in for the ride.

  Clyde gave an anxious whine. Now that he’d completed his mission, he looked miserable despite his fur coat.

  “This way, boy.”

  I talked to myself and Clyde as we stumbled forward, muttering old Marine cadences. When I ran out of the ones I knew, I made up my own. I never was much of a poet.

  “We are marching through the snow. Will we make it, I don’t know.”

  And a little later, “Rhodes, you know you weigh a ton. Carrying you ain’t any fun.”

  Leave him, whispered a voice in my ear. His life for everyone else’s. No one need know. He could have been dead when you found him.

  The snow grew coarse and hard and hot, whisking us to the other side of the world as it morphed to sand that glowed like brass under a brown Iraqi sky. A molten sun threatened to burn our skin black and peel it like an orange. My tongue grew thick in the dry paste of my mouth. If I’d had a free hand, I would have unzipped my coat, shrugged it off.

  “Any help is far away. We won’t live another day.”

  The boiling sun set, yielding to the silver knives of moonlight that carved up Camp Taqaddum, slicing through the barracks and the rec center and the motor pool. Outside the barricade, someone fired an AK-47, the rounds echoing in the empty desert around us. Insurgents. Or maybe just a member of the Iraqi Security Forces letting off steam on the base at Habbaniyah.

  I touched my sidearm in the thigh holster to make sure it was still there in case insurgents overran the barricades.

  “We’re safe,” said Corporal Tomitsch. We called him Conan, because that’s how he was built.

  “You think?”

  “Sure, Lady Hawk.” My own nickname.

  I bid him goodnight and ducked into my tent, curling into a fetal position on my cot and breathing in kerosene fumes from the canvas. I must have finally slept, because sometime later I was startled awake by the Sir, who knelt next to my bed, the red beam of his flashlight illuminating his face. He pressed his finger to his lips and tipped his head to indicate I should go with him. I reached for my uniform, but he handed me a pair of sweats and a hoodie, and I noticed that he was dressed in civvies. Uneasy, I pulled the sweats on over my T-shirt and shorts and followed him, weaving my way past my sleeping tent mates. Outside, the warm wind threw dust in our eyes while overhead, the Milky Way glittered like treasure from Ali Baba’s cave.

  The Sir said, “I’m going into Habbaniyah, Corporal Parnell, and I could use your help.”

  “This an order, sir?” Knowing something was off by his manner and our clothes.

  “No, Corporal. Your choice.”

  “I’ll come.”

  He knew damn well I would travel to Baghdad on my knees if that was what he needed me to do.

  “Should I get Ayers, sir?” I asked. “For security?”

  He regarded me with sudden alarm. I wondered if he’d just realized that because of Dougie, maybe I wasn’t the right person for the job. My heart tripped.

  “Doug Ayers? No,” the Sir said. “No one can know about this. Especially not—no. Do you understand, Corporal? You can’t tell Ayers.”

  “I won’t, sir. But, sir, you’re giving me a bad feeling.”

  “Good. Want to back out?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I trust you, Parnell. It’s why I chose you.”

  “Yes, sir. You can trust me.”

  “This way then, Corporal.”

  Clyde barked, and I jerked awake in the snow.

  We stood on the edge of an embankment. I would have tumbled in if Clyde hadn’t barked a warning. I backed away from the edge and took another reading on the compass. When it diverted from the path Clyde clearly wanted to take, I followed him.

  The Sir led me to the area on base where equipment was stored and maintained. An Iraqi man, one of our interpreters, met us there. Everyone called him Mohammed, though that wasn’t his name. Mohammed gassed up a dusty white van and drove us through the gate and out of the wire, down the plateau to the town of Habbaniyah, where someone had been firing a rifle earlier. After twenty minutes, he turned onto a narrow dirt street leading to a residential area in a part of town we wouldn’t normally venture into without an armored caravan. Four men with rifles stood outside a single-story mud house. Moonlight etched shadows on the dirt street and against the far wall of houses, shimmered in the battered leaves of a grove of palms. The men wore street clothes; keffiyehs covered their mouths and noses. I thought they were Iraqi until I heard them whispering.

  Americans.

  One of them turned toward me as I climbed out of the car. He watched in silence as I wrapped a hijab around my head and throat. All I could see of him were his eyes, which were a startling emerald green. They were wide with worry.

  The wind drove snow under my jacket, down the cuffs. Rhodes moaned. I had no idea how far we’d come, or how far we had left to go. Clyde was trying to push our pace; I hoped that meant that we were getting close. I clawed my phone free. No signal. I touched the radio. But I wasn’t going to call the sheriff.

  I followed the Sir and one of the Marines into the house.

  In a back bedroom were two bodies, both naked, dead a couple of hours. A male Marine, castrated and beheaded, his head propped next to the gaping wound near his crotch, his penis and testicles where his head should have been. Next to him lay a pregnant female Iraqi, her face destroyed, her body battered until the skin had split.

  In the front room was an Iraqi boy, ten or eleven, rocking and weeping on the floor.

  Nauseated, horrified, I clung to the wooden doorjamb for support. I couldn’t understand why the Sir had brought me to this place in the middle of the night. To these deaths and this weeping child. It wasn’t how we operated.

  “Let’s get them out of here, Corporal,” the Sir said to me.

  And because he was my CO, and because I trusted him, I did as he asked. We lifted the corpses into body bags, placed them into the back of the van, and took them away.

  I wondered—then and in the days that followed—why it was so important to hide the truth of how the Marine and the woman had died. But I never asked. The Sir said it was our job to protect everyone involved, and that had been enough for me. So I had covered up their murders, pretended that something altogether different had happened. The Sir told me it was better for everyone that way. And God knows, we meant well. But our actions—and those of the Marines involved—unleashed a fusillade of vengeance that spiraled out of control.

  We could be court-martialed if the truth came out. The dead man’s widow would learn she didn’t have sole occupancy of her husband’s heart, and the Sir’s family would have to wonder if he really was a hero. But there’d never been any reason for the truth to come out. The four Marines would never tell.

  And the little boy who was the real reason the Sir had brought me and not Tomitsch or Bailor, he had—

  The wind slammed us hard, and I went down to one knee. Labored back up again.

  Rhodes
said in a slurred voice, “You can put me down, Corporal. I can walk to the Humvee from here. I ain’t hurt that bad.”

  Three more steps, and I went down again. One knee, then the other. Rhodes slid off my shoulders onto the ground, and we lay together in a heap. I strung enough brain cells together to prop the flashlight so that the beam pointed eastward. Or maybe eastward. Clyde sat next to me and gave an anxious whine.

  “We’re still good, boy.”

  Some time passed. The victorious wind fell to a tuneless lullaby. My body grew heavy, sinking into the quiet earth as snow gentled a blanket over us. I stretched out, entangled with Clyde and Rhodes, and closed my eyes.

  The Sir shook me.

  Get up, Marine.

  Can’t, sir.

  NOW, Marine.

  No can do, sir.

  Clyde was on his feet, barking a volley of deep-chested warnings that startled me back from the twilight of my thoughts. I lifted my head.

  Nik. My flashlight had caught him, grim-faced and silent, in its beam. Snow swirled around him as if a flock of geese had exploded overhead.

  I grabbed Clyde’s lead, tried to find my voice.

  Nik stepped away from the light. His calm, quiet voice came out of the darkness. “Rhodes, get away from her and stand up. Do it now, you goddamned son of a bitch.”

  Half on top and half underneath me, Rhodes twitched and groaned. He flattened his hands and pushed his feet along the ground as if he meant to obey.

  I found my voice. “Nik, it’s okay. I’m okay.”

  “Sydney Rose?”

  “We’re good.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No.”

  Rhodes stopped trying to rise and crumpled back against me.

  The flashlight soared into the air as Nik picked it up and turned the beam on us. “Move away from him, Sydney Rose.”

  But when he’d lifted the light, I’d seen what was in his eyes. And in his hand. I wrapped my arms around Rhodes.

  “It’s okay,” Nik went on in the same gentle voice, as if he were approaching a trapped animal. “It’s all okay, Sydney Rose. Just move away. Let me do what needs to be done.”

  “No.” I struggled to gather my words. “Not up to us.”

  Sudden fury flashed in Nik’s voice. “This man tortured and killed Elise. He is a disgrace to the uniform he tried to burn. The media will turn him into a victim, spew all that PTSD crap. But Elise is the true victim. Now move away.”