It had happened again, leaving another layer of terror in his mind. By day, his memories and emotions were usually bottled up, as he managed to avoid any deep thoughts about his life and the war that had threatened to consume him. But at night his defenses weakened. And when he was asleep, they broke down entirely. He prayed and pleaded after each such dream that it would be the last, but he had concluded long ago that no one was listening.
Each time the scene was slightly different—just enough to give him a moment of hope until the nightmarish finale. Sometimes it was the light, or maybe the noise, or maybe something else. Some nights the rifle was out of reach; other times it was close at hand, allowing him to rise to a heroic defense. All those versions probably existed somewhere in a parallel universe. But when the reality of this world inevitably broke through, nothing had changed. His subconscious mind might wind its way through as many wormholes as it could, trying every possible outcome, but in the end things were always what they were and what they always would be. Their position that night had been overrun, and they’d been unable to fight back. The medevac teams had flown him out of there and patched up his wounds. But they missed the biggest wounds buried inside him. Those wounds were still there. And Jimmy was still dead.
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It had been a mistake to try to see Robin at work. It was a Saturday night, and she was busy behind the bar at the Hyatt Regency, scooping ice cubes into the glasses and tossing off shots from the bottles in the well. The bar was a little short-handed, but that fact hadn’t registered when he walked in. There was an empty stool near her workstation. She gave him a surprised look and in the next breath told him she was busy and couldn’t talk. But he needed to talk to someone. If it wasn’t her, he didn’t know who it would be.
The pressure had built up in him unbearably on the anniversary of that day in Vietnam. It was the same every year: he needed to talk, but no one wanted to listen. Some years he found his eyes moistening, as he embarrassed himself with his tears. There were times when he was dating Robin that she would let him get things off his chest. But even then there was a hint of impatience in her voice. It’s ancient history, Davey. It’s time to get over it. He could see people’s eyes glaze over when he mentioned the war. There were many—even those in their fifties—who barely knew what he was talking about. A woman he once met wanted to know if the Vietnam War came before or after World War II. But even people who knew about the war had put it out of their mind. They didn’t want to remember it. That didn’t surprise him. No one cared about the veterans when they came home after the war, so why should they give a shit now?
Last night was worse—it had been exactly forty-five years since the attack. A round number like that unleashed a scourge of memories. He had to try to put it to rest—if only for a few moments. He thought of Robin, because he couldn’t think of anyone else he could talk to.
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“If you were going to come into the bar where I was working, couldn’t you at least have behaved yourself?” Robin shoved at him, trying to get him in the passenger door as they left the hotel.
He tried to tell her he was more sick than drunk, but there was no convincing her.
“Jesus, Davey, try and act your age! You’re going to be seventy in a few weeks.”
He didn’t need to be reminded of that.
“One more scene like that, and I’ll probably lose my job. As it is, I might anyway.”
Robin was fuming when she demanded that he get into her car after her shift ended. She told him she was taking him to her apartment for the night, because he was too drunk to drive.
“Couldn’t you have just sat at the bar and watched the Pacers game like everyone else?”
When he told her he didn’t like to watch sports on TV, she jumped at him.
“Davey, did you have to bring the damn gun?”
“I have a permit…”
“That’s not the point!” she screamed. “How many times have we had this argument? I don’t care what your legal rights are—you’re a fanatic! And if you start quoting the Second Amendment at me, I’m going to stop the car right here and throw you into the street.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Well, someone thought you did. You were drunker than you think, so you’re not a very reliable witness, are you? You got into an argument with the guy sitting next to you—I know he was talking about the war and got you all pissed off—but don’t say you didn’t get into an argument with that guy, because I saw you. He got agitated. Then you opened your coat, and it looked like you were reaching for your holster. He started to yell—I saw the whole thing.”
“Robin, I wasn’t going to pull the gun on…”
“What difference does it make what you thought you were going to do? Another guy saw you and dialed nine-one-one on his cell phone—oh, you didn’t know that, did you? Well, he did, and the next thing I know the cops are there in the bar. And then the management—my boss—comes over and wants to know what’s going on. You tried to charm the cops by telling them that you used to be on the police force. But the more you babbled on about it, the angrier they got. Then you capped off your little performance by slurring out a speech, saying that you were a friend of mine and that you just came in there to see me.”
He looked over and saw she was sobbing.
“I’m so sorry.”
She sniffed a couple of times and kept driving.
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A headache had erupted between his ears, and it trailed down in spasms from the base of his skull to his lower back. Any quick movement was painful. He had painkillers—in fact, it was probably the combination of the pain pills and the scotch the night before that sent him off the rails. But the bottle with the pills was back in his own apartment, along with the daily heart medication that he’d been taking since his coronary a couple of years earlier.
Robin’s apartment was starting to get brighter, and the clock on the coffee table said it was almost 7:00 a.m. He needed to find his clothes and then circle back to his own apartment before heading off to work. But he didn’t know where anything was. He didn’t even know where to find Robin, since the apartment seemed to be empty.
The mental energy to get up wasn’t there. He couldn’t find any reason to move—or to do anything at all. He sifted through his thoughts, trying to find one thing—anything—that he could look forward to. But he came up blank. The feeling of emptiness had started before he left the police force, but it was stronger now. It had carved out a huge hole inside him that was getting harder and harder to fill. He didn’t know if he could hold things off much longer. The beast of nothingness was prowling around inside him.
He found his car keys in a small dish on the coffee table. Next to them was a note from Robin.
“I’m spending the night at my boyfriend’s apartment. Try not to fuck things up any worse.”
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He pulled into the parking lot and found his space. The God’s Children Foundation didn’t have many cars there on a Sunday morning. But it shared the parking lot with the Church of the Kindly Shepherd, and within the hour it would be filled up with Sunday churchgoers. The sign on his parking space in front of the foundation read: “David Fallon, Security Director.” That lofty title might have impressed someone, but it didn’t impress him—not considering the routine crap-work he did from day to day.
He slapped his security card against the electronic pad at the main door, and as he did so he saw John Blaiseck, the director of the foundation, standing on the second-floor balcony outside his office, a cigarette hanging from his lips. He watched as Blaiseck let out a quick puff before tossing the butt down and grinding it out with his foot. He’d been forced outdoors by the anti-smoking ordinance in Indianapolis, and he wasn’t happy about it. He figured Blaiseck to be in his late fifties, but he guessed that he’d been acting in that imperious way all his life. He had what seem
ed to be a Russian accent, but he didn’t really talk all that much. Mostly he just glared, which was even more unnerving because of his mismatched eyes. Blaiseck was a bit of an asshole—but so what? He wasn’t the first one he’d worked for.
This was nothing like the work he had done with the police force. There, he did real detective work—not the kind of button-pushing he did now. He missed his days as a cop. He could sink his teeth into a case and blot out everything else. It was probably the only thing in life he ever looked forward to doing. But when he was forced into early retirement, someone in the department arranged for him to get this job. So he was in no position to complain about it.
His first stop—like every morning—was a cup of coffee to get him going. From then on, it was just a matter of getting through the day without thinking too much. He had surveillance logs and monitors to check, as he followed the path of the cameras around the church and the foundation offices, hoping to get from point A to point B to point C without stirring up anything unexpected. Sunday mornings were a little different because of the big gathering at the church next door, but after a while even that fit into a pattern.
He wasn’t sure what the relationship was between the foundation and the church, but he thought it must be pretty close, since he spent most of his time in one building while keeping tabs on the other one. His paycheck came from the foundation, but he wasn’t sure where one organization ended and the other one began. The Church of the Kindly Shepherd appeared to be the moneymaker. The Reverend Allen Wilder was a media star in certain circles, and his sermons were broadcast throughout a network of churches. There were plenty of places on the web where you could buy his podcasts and copies of his books.
The God’s Family Foundation was a little harder to pin down. According to the literature, it was doing some important work on behalf of orphaned children worldwide. Blaiseck ran the day-to-day operations of the foundation, but he stayed out of the limelight. The Reverend Wilder seemed to be the face of things, serving as chairman of the board and an occasional spokesman. It was Wilder’s media savvy that probably brought in most of the contributions. He’d been featured in an interview on Fox News a week earlier, and the phones started ringing off the hook. Wilder and Blaiseck between them had convinced several national figures, including at least five congressmen, to serve on their International Orphanage Advisory Committee.
He never saw anyone in the foundation offices that really looked like an orphan. Mostly, it was just secretaries and administrative staff who did the paperwork. On Sunday mornings, there was often an odd collection of people hanging around. He knew that Curly and Slim were already there, which seemed a little early in the day for that pair. He hadn’t gone three steps past the coffee machine before he ran into Slim. And if Slim was there, Curly was certain to be nearby. Sure enough, he saw him farther down the hallway outside the door to the executive offices, probably waiting for Blaiseck to get back to his desk after his smoke break. He gave a brief hello to both of them as he walked past, and he got a couple of nods in return. Maybe he was just imagining things, but they seemed to be a little more surly than usual.
Curly and Slim weren’t their real names. Someone in the secretarial staff had come up with those two nicknames in an inspired moment. It was a bit of a cliché, but the names stuck. By the time he’d been introduced to Jerome—the one with the thin face and shaved head—and Edgar—the short, heavy one with the barrel chest—the nicknames were already lodged in his head. Like a lot of cops, he assigned names to people to match their stereotype. It was a bad habit, because it could cloud his judgment. But in this case the names seemed to fit. Curly and Slim looked like they belonged somewhere in a lineup.
He activated his computer along with the bank of monitors and then began the ritual of looking at the active footage. There were security cameras in both of the buildings and around the perimeter, but he didn’t see anything unusual on any of them. A few people were walking through the hallways of the foundation office at the moment, but the meeting areas were empty. There wasn’t much going on in the church either, but it would be bursting with activity as they got closer to the Sunday services.
He ran through the log for the previous day and didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. There was a video image of Allen Wilder in one of the side-chapels from late in the afternoon. It looked at first like he was speaking to another person, but then it appeared that he was in the room by himself, probably practicing his sermon for the next morning. Wilder’s style was way overdone for his taste. But what did he know? He didn’t care about sermons one way or another—as long as they weren’t directed at him. The reverend’s wife, Susan, showed up briefly on the screen, as she walked around the sanctuary, fluffing up the flowers, making sure nothing was amiss. The janitors were following their usual schedule, moving from room to room in predictable fashion. The last screen had a feed from later in the evening. He saw the back of a teenage girl hurrying down the hall, pushing against the crash-bar doors, and running out of the building. He backed up the image until he reached the point a few moments earlier where she had left the reverend’s office and had begun running down the hallway. It was Allen and Susan Wilder’s daughter, Alexi.
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There was a light knock on the door. He turned and saw Reverend Wilder and his wife, Susan, standing in his office doorway. Allen Wilder didn’t wait to be invited but instead strode through the half-open door, moving toward the desk with his hand outstretched. He had a smooth, practiced glide and a smile that spread across his face.
Wilder’s blue eyes were topped by a full head of blonde hair and a few softening strands of brown in the combed-back layers. Although he was in his fifties, there was no hint of gray. He appeared to be dressed and ready to stand in front of his congregation, wearing a pair of sharply-creased tan slacks, a deep powder-blue sport coat, and a black silk shirt. Instead of a clerical collar, he wore a gold chain that looped under the shirt collar and came to rest just below the open top button. At the end of the chain was a large gold crucifix that swayed back and forth across his chest as he moved.
“Good morning, Mr. Fallon.”
He stood to greet him, running his hand instinctively through his own tousled mixture of grey swirls and bald spots. Then he tried to straighten his jacket. Wilder grabbed at his hand and gripped it between both of his own two hands with a firm shaking motion.
“How are you?” Wilder stared into his eyes, squeezing them with the same intensity as the grip on his hand.
“I think I see a little distress on your face—like you could use a little bit of God’s good news this morning. I hope you’re coming over to the church for the services.”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to be right here, watching the services on the monitor.”
Wilder’s eyes hadn’t moved, but a half grin curled up from his mouth. “Of course, we need you up here to keep everyone safe.”
“Please, have a seat.”
“No, I’m afraid I can’t sit down, Mr. Fallon. There’s a meeting right now in Mr. Blaiseck’s office with some out-of-town people from the foundation, and I told him I would drop in for a few minutes.”
He brightened up his smile a bit, showing a few more teeth. “I suppose he feels more comfortable with the chairman of the board in the meeting, perhaps to give things a little spiritual perspective.”
“What can I do for you?”
Wilder gave a slight shrug. “Mr. Blaiseck thought you might be able to assist us with a few security issues—nothing too serious, I would think. But it’s good to plan these things. Has he mentioned that we’re having a meeting with some important folks next month?”
“We’ve talked about it.”
“We’re hosting a reception at our home a few blocks from here. There’ll be some congressmen there and a few other dignitaries. You know how that can get. They could draw some demonstrators and other troublemakers. I want to mak
e sure that the missus here has nothing to worry about.”
He gestured toward his wife. Up to that point, Susan Wilder had said nothing.
“Maybe you two could get together next week and go over the plans.”
“I’d be happy to work with you.”
Susan Wilder gave him a friendly nod, and he returned the smile.
“Good. I just want to make sure that my wife and daughter have nothing to worry about. You’ve met my daughter, Alexi, have you not?”
He told Wilder that he had. “Coincidently, I saw her on last night’s security video running out of the church. I hope everything is okay.”
He knew the minute he said it that it was a mistake. If there had been an altercation in the church the night before, he would have heard about it by now. But what he said appeared to have touched a nerve with Reverend Wilder. He could almost feel a chill in the room.
A few seconds slipped past as Wilder said nothing. His smile was still as rigid as before, but something had changed. What was it—maybe a slight twitch of the lip or some other movement? Wilder’s attention seemed to have shifted to a point somewhere behind his own eyes.
“The Lord has blessed us with a beautiful daughter.”
His eyes held steady as his focus drifted more and more inward.
“Do any of us really understand the nature of temptation and the continual presence of sin? Do you, Mr. Fallon?”
It was framed as a question, but he didn’t seem to be looking for any kind of an answer.
“You used to be a policeman, so you probably know as much as anyone how we all live our days on the edge of perdition. It can destroy us. We’re really only sustained by God’s willingness to forgive us again and again and welcome us back.”
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