“John says his road crew will be filling potholes,” she explained, hoping to rouse his enthusiasm. “You can see some right up there. Whenever cars pull up, he’ll wave them through—all but Hendrix’s gold Taurus, which he’ll put behind a detour van. The van will lead him this way.” Accelerating, she turned left onto Rigby Road. “Then one of John’s trucks pulls out behind them and Hendrix is boxed in.”
Out the corner of her eye, she saw Tobias fold his arms across his chest. She thought he might finally say something, but he didn’t.
“I need you to tell me the best place to assault his vehicle,” she reminded him. She wasn’t the expert at ambushing; he was. And if he didn’t start contributing soon, her plans would never be realized.
Rigby Road, even more rural than Route 20, was barely wide enough for two cars to pass. Deep ditches hemmed them in on either side. “With Ackerman’s squad stopping traffic at the other end,” she rambled on, hinting at her desire for feedback, “there shouldn’t be any witnesses to what happens next. Very few people actually live down here.”
The road curved to the right.
“Here,” Tobias finally said, and she braked abruptly.
She described what would happen next. The assault team, wearing ski masks, would swarm out and surround Hendrix’s car with weapons drawn.
“What if his door is locked?” Tobias’s curt tone conveyed disapproval. “Then I’ll have to break his window.”
“Right.” She hadn’t thought of that.
“So much for no damaged property.”
Ignoring his cynicism, Dylan reviewed the way they would cover the target’s head with a sack, place him in the van, and drive him to Baker’s. “What should we do with his car?” she inquired. “Take it all the way to Baker’s place?”
“No. Park it somewhere out of sight, not far from here. You don’t want leave tire tracks from Hendrix’s car on Baker’s property.”
“True.”
They found a deserted hunting track just up the road. Tobias lapsed back into silence, making Dylan want to demand what the hell his problem was. Except she didn’t want to argue with him, not with her emotions so highly charged, her self-control so tenuous.
Two miles later, they turned down Baker’s driveway. The dairy farmer sat on his porch smoking a cigar. Coming out into the yard to greet them, he saluted Dylan and offered Tobias a handshake. Patting Milly on the head, he led them all toward his cellar, accessed via doors at the foundation of the house.
Milly refused to descend the narrow stairs. Wading into the cold, musty cellar, Dylan could see why Milly was too spooked. Even blindfolded, Hendrix would sense the creepy atmosphere. If any basement was haunted, this would be the one.
Baker snapped on a naked light bulb and gestured to the metal pillar supporting the home’s central crossbeam. “You can cuff him to that.”
Envisioning Hendrix bound and gagged and whimpering in fear, Dylan reckoned this wouldn’t be a lesson he would easily forget.
“Who’s going to talk to him?”
Tobias’s terse question canceled out her satisfaction.
“Obviously, you can’t do it,” he pointed out when she just looked at him. “He’ll recognize your voice.”
She had planned on letting Terrence have a go at him, since his voice was by far the most intimidating, but if Terrence wasn’t up to it, then who?
Hendrix could identify Morrison and Ackerman, both former patients of his. Lee’s voice was too soft-spoken. “I need you to do it,” she realized out loud. When his jaw hardened, she quickly added, “I’ll tell you exactly what to say. I’ll even write it down for you.”
Without another word, Tobias turned and exited the cellar, signaling his noncompliance. Mumbling an apology to Ron Baker, Dylan chased after him.
Tobias and Milly were both in the car by the time she jumped into the driver’s seat and hauled on her seatbelt. Too unsettled to speak, she started the engine, backed up, and drove off Baker’s property. At the first stop sign they approached, she braked abruptly and gripped the steering wheel, unable to withhold her thoughts. “If you have something to say to me, Sergeant Burke,” she bit out, “then why don’t you just say it?”
Milly whined. Toby opened his mouth to talk, snapped it shut again, and shook his head. “Not a good idea,” he said.
“What is it, exactly, that you object to? If it’s stamping out corruption, you joined the wrong militia.”
“It’s not that,” he said flatly.
“Oh, really? I’ve seen your expression when we recite the Defender’s Creed. What are you even doing here if you don’t ascribe to our beliefs?” With emotions that were already raw, she braced herself for his answer.
Please, don’t leave me.
“Look, I believe in a citizen’s militia,” he told her dully. “What you’ve done for the locals is all good. I’ve told you that.”
“Then what haven’t you told me?” He’d been holding something back. From the day they’d met, she’d sense that about him. The fear that he would abandon her now, with Terrence so ill, squeezed her chest making it hard to breathe. He’d been a breath of fresh air. How would she move forward without him?
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m just wondering if you’ve really thought this thing with Hendrix through, that’s all.”
She’d mulled it over for months. “Of course I have.”
“Have you?” He turned and frowned at her. “We’re talking about a forced abduction with the use of firearms. That’s two felonies, Dylan.”
This again? “Not if the police are in on it,” she reminded him. “Plus the weapons will be loaded with blanks. I told you, no one’s getting hurt.”
He gestured with a hand. “You can’t guarantee that. How do you know one of your civilian soldiers won’t bring his own ammo just for the thrill of it? How do you know Hendrix won’t have a heart attack? Hell, he could even die down in Baker’s basement, and then what?”
“That isn’t going to happen!” she protested. In an effort to rein in her runaway temper, she jammed down the accelerator and peeled out of the intersection, heading for Route 20.
“You’re a doctor,” Tobias persisted. Now that she’d pried him open, he wouldn’t shut up. “You know that stress can prompt a heart attack. Don’t you see how quickly this plan could blow up in your face? And where will you be, if and when it does? You’ll either be riddled with guilt for inadvertently killing him or sitting your ass in jail along with the rest of your followers.”
A vision of Wesley Hendrix having a heart attack speared her with sudden doubt. He was a middle–aged male, not in the best physical condition. Stranger things had happened. Damn it, why was Tobias undermining her confidence when she’d been so certain this was the way to go?
“Doesn’t that worry you?” he pressed.
Mostly it just pissed her off. She whipped her face in his direction. “You think I’m scared of going to jail?” she raged. “Do you really think I care about what happens to me?” The hoarse, stricken quality of her own voice made her clamp her mouth shut. She hadn’t meant to reveal how flat, how meaningless her life was without The Creed to give it purpose. All of her hope for the future had ended on the day her boys were taken away. She had no right to be happy when they were dead. The militia life was just a charade, a game she played to give her life direction.
Whether she was imprisoned in the end made no difference.
Well, hell, Toby thought, recoiling at Dylan’s words. If she held her freedom in such low regard, then maybe she had bombed Nolan’s car. The evidence certainly pointed to her guilt.
But his gut refused to believe she’d killed anyone. In the fractured starlight that illuminated his surroundings, he could see tears sparkling in her eyes, suggesting that she did, in fact, care.
“Where does it end, Dylan?” he demanded as she drove like a bat out of hell through the countryside. “What if Hendrix refuses to change his ways? What will you do to him then—kil
l him?”
She cast a horrified look at him. “Of course not!”
“Who’s next after Hendrix?” he persisted.
“I don’t know. Whoever betrays the people they’ve sworn to protect!”
“And would that include elected officials pushing us toward war with Syria?”
Her knuckles shone white against the steering wheel. “So, you’ve heard about the FBI’s suspicions. Is that what this is about? Why would I have bombed the Defense Secretary’s car? That’s ridiculous.”
“I’ve read one of your anti-war essays. I saw it online. It’s pretty obvious that you’d oppose a war with Syria.” There. He’d revealed that hand of cards, at last.
She cast him a baffled look. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said on a half-hysterical note. “I’ve never written any anti-war essays.”
“Find me a computer with Internet access and I’ll show them to you.”
“I’m telling you, I never wrote anything like that!” she shouted, losing her cool completely.
Milly barked, scolding her for shouting.
Struck by her vehemence, Toby filed away Dylan’s denial for later pondering. “Forget that. My point is where does this vigilante business end? How far up the food chain do you go?”
“What the hell does it matter?” Suddenly, the Suburban began to drift from one side of the road to the other, back and forth.
“Dylan, focus,” Toby warned, as they crossed the yellow line.
She didn’t even seem to notice that they were now driving in the oncoming lane.
With a quick push of his thumb, Toby shook off his seatbelt. But he was too slow. Even as he slid across the bench seat, the driver’s side tire dropped onto the opposite shoulder. He grabbed the wheel, fighting to pull the vehicle back onto the pavement, but the back tire followed suit, and the six thousand pound SUV lumbered down into a ditch. In the back, Milly lost her footing as it lurched up the other side, heading straight toward a line of sumac trees.
“Shit,” Toby cried, throwing a leg over Dylan’s to stamp down on the brakes. The SUV swerved to a shuddering halt, just yards short of plowing into the tree trunks standing in their path.
The dog bounced off the rear seat and recovered.
Dylan roused with a gasp. “Oh, God!” she cried, staring at the trees in shock.
“You almost killed us,” Toby stated, half angry with her, but mostly with himself.
She clapped both hands to her face. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!” she cried before bursting into tears.
“Shhh. It’s okay.” The excess of adrenaline dumped into his bloodstream left his extremities tingling. “Here, trade places with me,” he invited. Freeing her seatbelt, he hauled her up and over his lap before moving to take her place behind the wheel. Taking a moment to let his pulse settle, he threw an arm over Dylan’s shoulders and pulled her gently against him.
“I’m sorry,” she cried again.
“It’s not your fault.” He could see it clearly now. Once again, he’d pushed her too far.
For a long moment, they just sat there, breathing in and out and clearing their minds. Dylan finally wiped her face and sat up straight. “That’s what you call an episode,” she informed him.
“I know. I’ve been there, remember?” The words made him wince because they weren’t exactly true. He’d never had PTSD as bad as hers was. “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have grilled you like that. I just…I just want to know what makes you tick. What happened to you to make you think your future doesn’t matter?”
Maybe he was unwise to pry, having pushed her too far already. She went perfectly still at his question, so still that he could hear the crickets chirping in the grass outside. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” he quickly amended. “But if you think it would help to talk about it, I’d like to listen.”
A cold sweat still enveloped Dylan from head to toe. Nausea roiled in her as she pictured how close she’d come to killing both of them, and the dog, too. The last thing she wanted to do, on top of the stress she was already feeling, was to relive the past. But having nearly dragged Tobias down with her tonight, she owed him an explanation as to why she lost it sometimes.
“I used to collect the fallen,” she admitted, smoothing the tremor in her voice. “That was my job with the 54th Quartermaster Company, which consisted of me, the commander, and four enlisted men—Staff Sergeant Ruiz, Sergeants Shroeder and Mackenzie, and Private Victor Giglio. Those were my boys,” she explained, grief strangling her momentarily.
With dread, she peered into the past, praying it wouldn’t suck her in again. “On December 8th of last year, we flew out to Korengal Valley. Four Marines had been killed on reconnaissance there. Terrence Ashby was our pilot, along with a co-pilot named Griggs. There’d been reports of insurgents in the area, so we were eager to collect the Marines and get back to camp.”
She found her purse on the floor mat and set it on her lap. Pretending to fish out a tissue, she fingered her revolver to calm her jittering nerves. “Being protective of me, Staff Sergeant Ruiz told me to stay in the helicopter because of the threat. There were four of them and four fallen men; I wasn’t needed on the field. So, I started to prep the cabin while they headed out with body bags. That was when the first IED exploded.” She gasped as the memory of the percussion rippled through her.
Tobias squeezed her shoulder, keeping her in the present.
“I thought we were under attack, but we weren’t,” she continued. “The Taliban had rigged the bodies with explosives. When I looked outside, I saw that Mack and Schroeder were injured. The next thing I knew, I was outside, running through snow to get to them. It was Terrence who saved my life. He tackled me to the ground right as a second IED exploded, then a third and a fourth. The noise was deafening. Debris pummeled us. When I looked up, Giglio and Ruiz were dead. Terrence was writhing in pain, his anterior tibial artery severed by shrapnel, blood everywhere.
“Griggs helped us back into the chopper. We had orders to pull out at once. The insurgents had heard the explosions. They were coming back. We had to evacuate, leaving my boys behind.”
She pressed the tissue to her leaking eyes. She hadn’t shared so many details with anyone else—not the Army’s investigative team, not even Dr. Richardson. It came as an unexpected relief to bring Tobias into her nightmare. “Eighteen hours later, the area was deemed secure. I walked out of the infirmary to join the second recovery team.”
“Oh, Jesus,” he whispered. “You went back.”
She stiffened. “What was I supposed to do, let someone else pick them up?”
“No.” He rubbed her arm absently. “No, I understand your reasons.”
“I loved my boys. I should have died with them that night, but I didn’t.” There, she’d said it. “I brought them back to camp, and I fixed them up as best I could. Giglio and Ruiz had died right away—I could tell from their injuries. Mack and Shroeder might have lived if the Taliban hadn’t riddled them with bullets.”
“Fuckers,” Toby growled, giving voice to her own thoughts.
The memory of trying to dignify their disfigured bodies brought on another wave of nausea. “I tried to make them look nice.”
“Christ,” Toby whispered. Crushing her against him, he pressed his lips to her temple.
There was nothing sexual about his touch. It was solace in its purest form, a balm to her wounded soul.
“I accompanied them all home, drove across the country to attend four funerals, to meet the families, offer my regrets.”
He rocked her gently back and forth.
“That was it for me. I couldn’t go back after that.”
“Who the hell could have?” he countered.
“I never did fulfill my obligation to the Army for paying for medical school. But they agreed to forgive the debt, providing I worked at a VA Hospital after becoming a civilian.”
“So, Uncle Sam has a benevolent side,” he pointed out
.
An aching, honest silence filled the SUV, broken only by the soft panting of the dog in the back.
Tobias suddenly tipped his head forward, catching her eye in the shadows.
“You know, you’re story beats mine, hands down. It’s honest-to-God the worst war story I’ve ever heard,” he admitted.
She gave a humorless laugh.
“But, believe it or not, Dylan, your life is still worth living.”
She closed her eyes in protest.
“Do you think your boys wanted you to die like that with them? Hell, no. That’s why they left you in the chopper. They wanted you to be safe and live a long, happy life.”
Only when Tobias was with her did she even remember what happiness felt like.
He heaved a sigh. “Tell me more about these boys of yours. I want to see them in my head.”
Her eyes opened wide at the unexpected request. No one had ever asked her to talk about her boys—not even Dr. Richardson. With a poignant smile, she described each man’s idiosyncrasies, weaknesses, and special talents, wrapping it up with Schroeder. “He was the one who kept us laughing when things got so gruesome we couldn’t keep food down. He had a repertoire of gruesome jokes. Sometimes…without him around, I wonder if I’ve finally lost my mind,” she admitted, baring her greatest fear.
Tobias shook his head. “No, you haven’t.”
She slanted him a weak smile. “You sure about that?”
He kept silent a minute. “What do you think your boys want from you?”
The question left her disoriented. “What do you mean?”
“I’m just wondering if you feel like you have to do something for them.”
She searched his inscrutable expression. “Like what?”
“Well, like, do you head up the militia for them or for yourself?”
“For myself,” she said decisively. “It’s part of my therapy, learning to tolerate the sound of gunfire and to cope with stressful situations. It’s also a family tradition. My father commanded the SAM in the early 90s, my grandfather before that.”
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