Chapter 14
Chapter 14
A t the academy, I had lived the life of a normal cadet. At least on the surface. Beneath the surface, I was anything but. Like Bones, I had learned to live a double life. When my class earned a forty-eight-hour pass, Bones would blindfold me, drive me hours into the mountains, drop me with what I carried in my pockets, and say, “Find your way home. And don’t ask for help.” Which of course I did. I’m no dummy.
Sometimes he’d wake me at 2:00 a.m., drive me to a truck stop, order eggs and coffee, and then ask me the color of the waitress’s eyes and what the tattoo on her ankle said. Then there were afternoons when he’d take me far into the dungeon that comprised his world, and he’d teach me weapons systems. Loading. Unloading. Aiming. Trigger reset. Malfunctions and how to fix them. If it breathed fire and went “boom,” he made me learn what allowed it to do that. Every piece. And how to make it work to my benefit.
One afternoon, he handed me a fifty-year-old rifle with ammunition that didn’t come close to fitting it and shut me in a supply closet, telling me, “You can come out when you fire that thing.” The lesson taught me to look outside the box and use what was available. Somewhere toward midnight, I shot a segment of copper tubing through the two-way glass through which he watched me.
And then in what was possibly the strangest turn of events, Bones walked into the weapons closet of the dungeon where I was cleaning a rifle and handed me a stack of strange-looking books. “Congratulations. You’ve been accepted. Class starts Monday. Tests every Friday. First two years are online. Get the requirements out of the way. Last two you attend on campus, which shouldn’t be a problem.”
I glanced at the titles. “What are you talking about?”
“Seminary.”
“You must be joking.”
Bones considered this. “I seldom joke and I never kid.” Both of which were lies.
“But I don’t want to—”
“And,” he said, cutting me off, “you can’t be enrolled there and here simultaneously, so I changed your name.”
“What?”
“To God, you’ll be known as Murphy Shepherd.”
“Stupid name.”
“Maybe, but it’s yours, so get used to it.”
“It’s still stupid.”
He didn’t let me finish, which was his way of saying I had no say in this matter. “One day soon, you’re going to encounter people in prison. Often the bars that hold them will be of their own making. It’s one thing to unlock someone’s prison door; it’s another thing entirely to loose the chains that bind their heart.” He tapped the barrel of the rifle. “To do that, you’re going to need to know how to do more than just poke holes in them.”
Thus began my first day of seminary.
Bones’s seminary was as much a mystery as he was. When given the obscure Greek name, Google produced a website and pictures of a campus in Spain with satellites in Italy, Austria, France, South Africa, and, you guessed it, Colorado. Having been founded or chartered by the Catholic Church nearly a millennium ago, the college—if you could call it that—didn’t follow standard academic protocol whatsoever. They had no desire at all to do anything that would keep or allow for accreditation of any kind. They couldn’t care less. Also unique to the school was the one-to-one professor-to-student ratio. Throughout the course of his study, each student worked with one professor. A priest. Don’t like your professor? Tough. Don’t like your course of study? Too bad. And while administrative offices with a physical address did exist in Spain, Italy, and France, the institution had no formal classrooms. Class location was determined by the priest.
About three months in, having not slept for much of that time, I asked him, “Just when am I supposed to sleep?”
He shrugged. “Beats me.”
“You do realize that the human body needs sleep.”
He shook his head. “Overrated.”
More often than not, our “classroom” was our lookout atop the mountain, which became a welcome break from the sterile mathematics of the academy. Strangely, and despite my initial protests, I enjoyed the seminary assignments and found myself engrossed in the writers, thinkers, and philosophers we read. What I noticed throughout my course of study was that, while the academy taught me to calculate—and to do so effectively, efficiently, and with relative speed—Bones was teaching me how to think outside that well-defined box. Both were needed but each was made stronger by the other. While my fellow cadets accepted deployments throughout their summers, I was attached at the hip to a riddle-speaking, wine-sipping, white-robed priest who was not so quietly disdained by his colleagues, more often rogue than team player, and—while older than me—the strongest human being I’d ever met.
The contradictions were glaring.
As was my continued lack of sleep. While my fellow classmates snored in their bunks up and down the hall, I slept, at best, one or two hours a night. Several nights a week I slept not at all. Meaning, I constantly bordered on sleep deprivation. Weeks felt like one long day. Much of my waking hours felt like an out-of-body experience and left me a little edgy.
A few months later, when the reality of my workload hit me, I threw one of the books at his head and asked him, “Why on earth do I need to know any of this?”
He looked at me as if the answer were self-explanatory. “Because you can’t fake it. ”
“Fake what?”
“Priesting.”
The fact that Bones used the word as a verb told me a lot about him. All told, 99 percent of my time and experience at the academy was dictated by Bones. When I asked him how he got away with such a singular existence amid such a military mindset, he just smiled. “I know people.”
Years would pass before he made the introductions. Those “people” were Aaron Ashley, his father, Esther, and his three daughters. Who had just been snatched out of their beds in the middle of the night and were currently flying naked, blindfolded, gagged, and zip-tied across the United States. An unspeakable horror.
The last time my heart felt this helpless, I was mourning the loss of Marie. Which was when Bones showed up at a bar in Key West and said, “Tell me what you know about sheep.”
So I had. I picked up my pen and vomited my pain across the page. Transforming pen to scalpel. Cutting out the gangrene. My own pen had probed the wound in me. But sitting in that SUV, having lost my captain, I doubted the power of that knife. And what was worse, I had no desire to pick it up. Why? Because I wasn’t sure I could handle the pain of what it might find or remember. I wanted nothing to do with the written word, because to write it out meant I had to hear my inner self say what my inner self didn’t want to hear. “I lost Bones.”
There it was. I said it. I had lost Bones. And when I said it, a spear entered my chest and exited my spine.
Camp’s phone flashed in front of me. I saw it. The flashing blue beacon. Indecision in these next few seconds could cost one of the girls her life. Time to make a decision. Made all the more difficult given Bones’s burial yesterday. My own girls were hurting and I was not there to comfort them. Protect them. Another spear that pierced me. If we had any chance at all of finding Aaron’s girls, we needed to move now. Not return to the hotel. Not detour for any reason. Nothing mattered more than that flashing beacon because it was all that connected us to the girls.
Bones echoed in my ear, Bishop, this is what we signed up for. This is what we do. It’s who we are. We go. We don’t count the cost. We go no matter the cost. The question you need to answer is, “Why?”
Bones had his answer. I was struggling with mine.
I spoke to the driver and sat back. Camp looked surprised. “What about the hotel? Summer? Don’t we need to...?”
I shook my head and didn’t answer. I didn’t have one.
Staring at my reflection in the glass, I could tell I was bleeding out and needed triage. I just didn’t know what to do about it or how to stop and get it. Nor did I have time to figure it out. Three young women were in a bad way, and Camp and I were their only hope. I leaned my head against the glass and knew one thing for certain.
Those girls needed me. And I needed Bones.