Turn or Burn

by Boo Walker

  The woman didn’t have time to pull the trigger again. I placed a bullet at center mass and her chest exploded. Her gun flew into the air as she dropped back against the table and slid to the ground.

  “Stay down!” I yelled to the doctor, who was only a few feet away from me, lying on his stomach.

  “Francesca! Where the hell are you?”

  “Coming!”

  Still holding the first attacker by the throat, I raised my head and looked around. Francesca was working her way through the last of the crowd as everyone fought to get out the door.

  “Clear the room!” I yelled to her.

  “On it.” She began to move from row to row, ensuring there was no one else waiting for the right time to take a shot.

  That’s when I felt something wet dripping onto my arm, and the woman I was holding went limp. I looked down. She was drooling white foam. I felt for a pulse in her neck. There wasn’t one. She was dead.

  “Ted,” I said, “you with me?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Ted, you okay?” Keeping my eyes peeled for more trouble, I moved on my knees toward him.

  Half his face was missing. No, he wasn’t with me, and he wasn’t okay. One of my oldest and dearest friends was lying flat on his back, unrecognizable, blood flowing out of his dead body. I’d seen his brother the exact same way, and I could have prevented both of them from dying. I could have fucking stopped it!

  A waterfall of rage and confusion and delirium dumped on top of me, and it was almost too hard to handle. My hearing and vision went first. Then the muscles in my shoulders turned to rocks, and my fingers locked into the shape of claws. God help anyone or anything that was close by, because I wanted to break and throw and kick and punch and destroy it all.

  I finally let out a yell that shook the building. That release led me to black out.

  When I came to seconds later, I was rocking back and forth. No, I told myself. No, no, no. You get your act together. You are a soldier, Knox.

  Finding strength, I dug deep down and brought myself back. The body obeys the mind. The body obeys the mind. And it did.

  I took Ted’s hand and put my face up to what was left of his. “Say hello to your brother for me,” I uttered. “I’m sorry. I’m so damn sorry.”

  CHAPTER 11

  I returned to reality with sharpened focus. A soldier’s focus. We had to get the doctor out of there. That’s all that mattered at the moment. That was the mission. Ted was gone, and there was no bringing him back.

  As cops poured into the room, the three of us worked our way out the door. Holding Dr. Sebastian’s arm, I screamed, “Private security! Two female shooters down. There may be more. They’re after the doctor here. I have to get him out.”

  Dr. Sebastian was in terrible shock, as anyone not accustomed to violence would have been. We had Ted’s blood splattered all over our bodies. But once we were out of the room and working our way toward an exit, he said, “My family…please make sure they are okay.”

  “I’ll call them,” Francesca said, walking next to us. She dug the phone out of her pocket and dialed. “Dervitz, evacuate the family. Someone went after Sebastian. We will reconnect soon.” She hung up.

  We found a set of stairs on the other side of the floor and were able to disappear before too many cops got involved. We knew it was only a matter of time before someone stopped us and kept us from leaving. I couldn’t have that. We weren’t going to lose anyone else.

  Breaking out the door into the parking garage, we found more chaos. A line of cars was trying to work its way to the exit as people ran by them, desperately searching for safety.

  Francesca and Dr. Sebastian piled into the car. I checked underneath and made one circle around just to make sure we didn’t have any surprises waiting on us. I was at about 60 percent of my old self, but my survival instincts were helping fight the PTSD. We had to get out of there.

  I hopped into the driver’s seat and got us moving. The cars were backed up trying to make their way out. I took a left and drove under the sign that said Wrong Way, and it worked. I noticed some other cars following me as I began to circle around the ramp.

  “I need you to take care of my family,” Dr. Sebastian said again from the backseat.

  Francesca turned around to face him. “They’re okay,” she said. “Will is moving them, and we’ll have you guys together very soon.” He thanked her.

  Francesca turned back around. In times like these, you don’t notice the beauty. You notice the strength. No tears. No wailing. No confusion. No shock. A strong woman paid to protect. Francesca Daly was one hell of a woman, and I needed to put a little effort into respecting her. She was a soldier, and she was on my side, and I was thankful for it.

  “What do you think?” I asked her, inching further into the traffic. “Probably need to get out of town.”

  “Assuming they’re after the doctor, which we really can’t be sure about, I agree with you. Where do you want to meet the others?”

  “Get them on I-5 North. We’ll figure it out from there.”

  As she called Dervitz again, I spun through the radio stations trying to get a little more color on what had happened. I found a local station talking about the scene and let it play. They didn’t know much. The first shot had been fired less than fifteen minutes ago.

  We finally made it out of the garage and onto the main street. It appeared that most of the protesters had no idea what had happened. They were still everywhere, marching and shouting and holding up their signs. Truthfully, I wanted to shoot them all. A bunch of damn clueless, clock-punching commoners. They were no different than the two women back there. Ted was dead because of them.

  Ten blocks away, we finally reached clear streets, and I steered toward I-5. My mind went to what had happened. Two female shooters. Were they after the doctor? Had to be. How had they gotten weapons into the building? And more importantly, why? This would be an FBI profiler’s wet dream. Two young white females teaming up on an organized assassination.

  ***

  Dr. Sebastian’s children came barreling out of the other SUV as we pulled into the lot of a Safeway grocery store off an exit twenty minutes north of Seattle.

  “Daddy, daddy!” they said, running toward our SUV. Luan Sebastian and Dervitz were right behind them.

  At that point, I decided to call the FBI and ask them to take over. The taxpayers would foot the bill now. Not our job anymore. The Sebastians would pay us for services rendered, and the contract would be terminated. Free of the deep ties Francesca and I shared with Ted, Dervitz hit the road, off to work his next gig. Bon voyage, dude. We don’t need you anyway.

  I wasn’t going anywhere.

  CHAPTER 12

  “I’m sorry about your cousin,” I offered, as we got onto the highway headed back toward the Convention Center. I knew the lead detective wanted us back there immediately.

  “He was your friend, too,” Francesca said. I could hear the pain in her voice.

  “Yes, he was. More than that. I owe him way more than that.”

  “You were the one who said it from the moment you showed up. We shouldn’t have let the doctor go in there.”

  I nodded. “We shouldn’t have let him.”

  “Probably. But we took the risk. Ted knew what he was signing up for. We all did. Casualties are always a possibility. I want to know what happened, though. I feel like we owe it to Ted to find out.”

  I was half-listening, lost in my own thoughts, thinking about my friend. When you’re out on the battlefield, you’re there for a reason. Something leads you there. Some people fight for their country, their honor, or their pride. Some fight because they find happiness in chaos; they need war. That one probably fit me best. That’s why I’d signed up. Didn’t have anywhere else to turn. Some are in it for the money, or sometimes it’s just the only thing one knows. But once the weapons are firing and you’re watching people die in front of you, only one thought is on your mind.

&nbs
p; Survival.

  If you’re a good warrior, I believe it’s not just your survival, but that of your comrades, too. That’s all that matters. You and your team making it out alive. There’s a connection beyond family. It’s the comrades you’re sharing a foxhole with that remind you that you’re human, that you’re not alone going through the darkness, the nightmare. That’s a connection so much deeper than anyone else could ever know.

  I remember times—countless times—when Ted and I worked reconnaissance missions in the desert, getting dropped behind enemy lines in the middle of the night and racing to dig hide sites seven-feet deep in the sand before the sun came up. The hide sites could barely hold two or three of us, and we’d build a canopy and let the wind cover it with sand, making us virtually undetectable, save the little air hole we’d cover up with a branch or whatever we could find. We’d spend three or four days together trapped in there in one hundred-plus heat, not showering, shitting into bags, collecting information on the enemy, and hoping they wouldn’t discover us. You learn a lot about people when you go through that kind of hardship. Bonds develop.

  Yeah, when Francesca Daly was telling me that Ted meant a great deal to her, I did know exactly what she meant. I was going to have to face his mother and father and tell them for the second time in my life that their son was dead. So I wanted to know what happened to him, too. How had two women gotten weapons past security and, more importantly, why? Why did they come into that building on a suicide mission to kill Dr. Sebastian? Why were they so against the Singularity or the doctor’s research? Were there others involved? If so, I wanted them to pay. Ted would have done the same for me. He would have felt the same guilt that I did.

  Why did Ted have to die today?

  We parked a few blocks away this time and began to weave through the dispersing crowd. The protesters had lost their momentum and many of them were headed home. As we’d heard on the radio, they’d already cancelled the entire Singularity Summit. The streets were littered with signs and handouts and other waste. The police were doing their best to bring an end to the day’s disaster before anyone else was hurt.

  ***

  “Why the hell did you leave the scene?”

  “I had a man to protect,” I said. “What would you have done?”

  “Don’t test me.” Detective Coleman Jacobs did not frequent the gym unless the steam room was his only stop, and he proved that with a belly that had to be contained by a belt I felt sorry for. I’d never sympathized with leather until that day. A black man with freckles up high on his cheeks, he wasn’t that tall, probably five-ten. His pants were cut extremely wide, all the way to his ankles, to the point where they nearly covered up the toes of his shoes. And his tucked-in shirt showed the perfect curvature of his stomach. He was standing there, his hands planted on his hips, on the fourth floor of the Convention Center, very near the room where everything had gone down. Where Ted had been murdered.

  Detective Jacobs and I had to establish ourselves right out of the gate because I think we both had the feeling we’d see each other more than we wanted to over the next few days.

  “Test you?” I replied. “I was acting in the best interest of the doctor, who I was paid to protect.” I looked at Francesca, remembering my manners. “Who we were paid to protect, who was most likely the intended target. We had no idea what else to expect, so we made the decision to evacuate the doctor.”

  “All right, all right. I’ll let it slide. I don’t have time to play Whose Dick is Bigger? right now, Mr. Knox. Though I’d probably win.” He winked at Francesca. “I’m going to need you both to go sit with my guys over there and answer some questions. I’ll be back with you in a little while.”

  “Sure,” I said, deciding to warm up to him. He wasn’t as much of an idiot as I’d thought. Maybe a jackass, but not an idiot. “Sorry for the hostility. It’s been a long day.”

  “Well, I’m sorry about your friend.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In a van on the way to the morgue.”

  I nodded. “With the two women?”

  “Yep.”

  “How’d the other one die? Do you know?”

  “Looks like she ate a pill of some sort, cyanide maybe, but we’re not sure yet. She wasn’t shot.”

  “No, she wasn’t. How’d they get the guns in here?”

  “Look, I’ve got a lot of work to do. Let me worry about the details on my own.” He waved over one of his cronies, and he began to walk away. “And Mr. Knox,” he said. “Ms. Daly.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You two don’t go playing cowboy and cowgirl. I know about you both. I know who you are.”

  “Don’t worry about us. Just find out why this happened to our friend…please.”

  “That’s why they pay me.”

  The uniformed cops separated us. I took a seat at a wooden table in the main lobby next to a younger cop dressed in a crisp blue uniform. He should have just worn a sign that said Impressionable. I was about to eat this poor boy up.

  “Your name’s Harper Knox?” he asked me.

  “Yes.”

  “Jacobs said you’re a Green Beret?”

  “I was,” I replied.

  “Hats off to you, sir. I had a dream of heading in that direction, but it never panned out.”

  I looked him in the eyes. “Any idea what happened in there? Who they were?”

  “Oh, I’m not really supposed to talk about it.”

  “C’mon, now. I’m just curious. Ted Simpson was a good friend. And the finest soldier I’ve ever known.”

  “I believe you, but…”

  “So I’m asking you to give me a few details to tell his parents over on Bainbridge Island when I go see them later today. I was there when his brother was killed, too. The information will not go beyond that. What happened in there?”

  “I really don’t know much,” he replied.

  I leaned in closer. “Anything will help. They will want to know.”

  “Don’t get me in trouble.”

  “I will not.”

  He sighed, giving in. “I don’t know their names. But I saw the bodies. The medical examiner found the same branding on both of them. Not sure what it was. No one is.”

  I had a quick flashback of seeing that mark on the woman’s stomach. “Yeah,” I said. “I saw it on one of them. You got a picture of it you could send me?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Don’t call me ‘sir.’ ”

  “Okay. One of them had a piece of paper in her pocket, too. You didn’t hear it from me, but it said Forgive me.”

  “Whose pocket did they find that in?”

  “No idea.”

  “How’d they get the guns in there?”

  “C’mon. I can’t tell you this stuff.”

  “Just tell me how they got the guns in there. I want to know how my friend died. If you can’t trust a Special Forces soldier, then we should all give up now. Give me a break. Your leader over there will never know.”

  The officer looked around, making sure his superiors weren’t nearby. “One of the guys working the security line helped them out. I don’t know the details…they’re holding him now. But it sounds like someone took his family hostage and forced him to get a bag to the two girls. That’s really all I know. We just got word about this a few minutes ago.”

  That caught me off guard.

  “That’s all I can tell you,” he finished. “Now, I really need for you to tell me what happened.”

  I spent the next ten minutes giving the young officer the details. Francesca was waiting for me when we finished, and we found Detective Jacobs on the way out. “We’re going to take off,” I told him.

  “All right. Don’t go too far. I may want to talk to you again.”

  “We’ll be in town. In the state, at least. Has anyone gotten ahold of Ted Simpson’s family yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “We’re going to see them now. We’ll take care of it. Please keep his
name out of the news for the rest of the afternoon.”

  “10-4.”

  CHAPTER 13

  We barely made the 5 p.m. ferry to Bainbridge Island. I drove the SUV on board, pulled the emergency brake, cut the engine, and rolled down the windows. The air was chilly. We were near the front of the boat on the starboard side, and we both watched the water and mountains beyond as the ferry pulled away from downtown. The sun was resting just above the sharp peaks of the Olympics that rose from the horizon like jagged walls protecting the Puget Sound.

  But I didn’t feel protected. Out of nowhere, the realization of Ted Simpson’s death hit me like a club to the face. Any feelings of loss I had experienced before that moment were completely superficial. What started to come over me was horrifying. My stomach and chest cinched up, like someone had their hands inside of me, squeezing and twisting. I couldn’t even take a breath. Images of his dead body permeated my visual cortex. With what little air I had, I said, “I’ll be right back,” and got out of the car.

  Bent over, my hand gripping my chest, I made my way down the length of cars. I was light-headed and dizzy, and the cars around me began to spin. I started to fall, but I caught myself, placing my hand on a car hood.

  The driver poked his head out the window. “Hey, man. You all right?”

  I focused long enough to say, “Yes. Just feeling a little seasick.” Then I kept moving, making sure I was far enough from the SUV. Once I knew Francesca wouldn’t be able to see me, I went to the rail, nearly collapsing. It didn’t matter if my eyes were open or closed. All I could see were the dead faces of Ted and his brother, Jay, morphing into one another. Even in death, they looked so much alike. And I’d been there to see them both take their last breaths.

  As the Bay breeze cooled me down, I began to get a grip. I emptied my mind and let all my thoughts and all those images drop into the cold water below. Let go. Let go. Let go.

  The tightness in my body disappeared. Wiping the sweat from my face, I put my hands on the rail and looked out toward Mt. Rainier for a while. More than anything, I felt shame. I know I should have felt overwhelming regret or sadness, and I did, but more than those, I felt shame. Nothing worse than feeling like you’ve lost what makes you a man.