Chapter 13
Chapter 13
T he black SUV passed beneath the streetlamps that shone down on us in DC’s pre-dawn darkness. Maybe it was the intermittent flash. Maybe it was the headlamps of oncoming cars. Whatever it was started the slideshow of Bones’s life and death across the back of my eyelids. Unwelcome and uninvited, it returned for the ten thousandth time, and I did not care to see it. But it didn’t care what I thought, so it kept rolling. Wave after towering wave. Shattering me on the rocks.
This one started a little earlier. My junior year at the academy. About the time I’d started to find a rhythm. One night we were rappelling in a sideways snow, several hundred feet of darkness below us, temperatures below zero, eighty pounds on my back, couldn’t feel my fingers, and he motioned to arrest my descent. Pointed to a ledge where I could rest my foot. Watching the stars above us, he wiped his forehead and waved his hand across Colorado spread out before us like a twinkling blanket. Tethered to the earth, suspended between heaven and hell, Bones spoke the words I’d never forgotten. I could recall them word for word.
In the years since, I’d come to look back on the “snow and granite speech” as one of the most important in my life. It was an inflection point. Something had changed in me. Bones had transferred something from his heart to mine. A knowingness. A grounding. Those words spoken would become my bedrock. My anchor. My tether to the universe. “People in darkness don’t know they’re in darkness because it’s all they’ve ever known. It’s their world. They navigate by bumping off things that are stronger. Immovable. We, those of us who walk up here, have a tendency to look down our noses at them, but the truth is this: they don’t know darkness is darkness until someone turns on a light...”
I shook my head and silenced the memory. I could not listen. As the city of DC passed beyond the windows of the SUV, I muted Bones’s voice. Hearing it hurt too much. My world had grown darker and the light dim. And I had no answer for the question that hounded me. Who would keep mine lit?
I had no answer. I also had no answer for this growing agitation. This sense of vengeance. A volcano simmering beneath a thin mantle. We had lost Bones and evil had won. Evil had taken Bones. Because of this, my mind spun. Turning one question over and over: Was I bent on rescuing the innocent or making the evil pay?
I knew the answer and it wasn’t good.
Bones’s last act on this earth, the last lesson he’d taught me, had been to walk back across a scorched battlefield, descend into hell, and rescue the one I’d not thought worthy of rescue. Proving Bones was motivated by something I didn’t possess. Didn’t understand. The closest word I had was love . The real kind. The kind that says me for you. Even when you don’t care. Don’t love me back. When your every intent toward me is evil. I had no words for that kind of love. It was otherworldly. And if I’m honest, I didn’t know it. Didn’t have it. And I was pretty sure I didn’t want it. Yet it was the very thing that had sent Bones back for Frank.
Camp touched my arm. “Hey, Boss. You in there?”
I nodded.
He tapped the flashing blue dot on his phone, indicating that he and Stackhouse had connected Camp’s phone with the phone used to take the pics of the girls. “Thirty-seven thousand feet. Flying west.” It made sense. Whoever it was would be moving. When Camp spoke next, he looked uncomfortable. “You want to sit this one out? Let me go it alone? I can recon, call you with updates. You can quarterback from here.”
I just looked at him. I’d never said no.
He pressed me, saying, “It’s just that I’ve been in some tight spots, and if your head’s not right, you’re a danger. Both to you... and to me.”
He was right, but what was I going to do? Sit on a park bench and talk with him through an AirPod?
Camp’s reaction told me he was picking up on body language I didn’t know I was sending. In my pain, I was unable to hide my emotions. An occupational hazard. Doubt consumed me, rage simmered below the surface, and a part of me was screaming “No!” at the top of my lungs. Despite my friendship with Aaron and the brutal fact that his innocent girls were being tormented and held against their will, I wasn’t sure I could handle what I might find. And I was pretty sure I didn’t want to. What if they were all dead? Or worse, abused by a hundred sick reprobates and then dumped overboard, leaving us with the video evidence of their abuse and torture? How would I tell Aaron? Esther? Just how could I break that news?
There was a lot I didn’t know, but I was pretty sure I didn’t have the stomach to know it all. I closed my eyes to a slideshow on loop. It doubled down, pressed me to the seatback, and would not let me go. I simply could not shut it off. It had become a roller coaster with no stop, no exit, slowly click-clacking its way back to the top before it plunged again.