Against All Enemies (46 page)

“So, let’s talk about what this is really about,” Dom said.

“I did.”

“Sure you did.” Dom crossed his legs and sipped at his coffee. They said nothing as they stared out at the beauty.

Jonathan had spent a lifetime keeping the emotional doors of his mind closed. Locked. Hermetically sealed. He didn’t like where his head was taking him because it made no sense to go there. What was done was indelible. The only option was to suck it up and move on. Young people died by the thousands in every war the world has ever fought. Over the years, Jonathan had lost track of the number of young men he had killed. He’d never tried to keep a count. They were the enemy, the force that had to be vanquished in order for larger goals to be met. He offered no apology because there was nothing to apologize for.

So why, today, was he worried that his voice would not work if he tried to talk? Why had he felt this way since hours after they’d returned from West Virginia?

“Did I ever tell you about my observations about stupidity?” Dom asked. He didn’t turn his head away from the view. Jonathan didn’t answer.

“It goes like this,” Dom said. “
Stupid
is a word we throw around with abandon. Stupid is as stupid does, right? You watch Internet videos, and you wonder what went wrong with the gene pool. People make stupid mistakes, and when they get hurt—or worse than hurt—we say, ‘yeah, well, duh.’ I know you’ve seen a lot of stupid in your line of work, and the price can be ridiculously high.

“But there’s a special breed of stupid that has always tugged at me. Call it gullibility. People get talked into doing stupidly wrong things for all the right reasons. There’s usually a powerful demagogue in the mix somewhere. The gullible hear what they want to hear, and then they dedicate themselves to that cause. Heavens, some might say that such is the case with every person I serve at Mass. People who think that way would be wrong, of course.”

Jonathan let him talk. Dom wasn’t given to empty pontification. He had a point to make and he’d make it soon.

“I think it hurts to hurt the gullible. I think it must feel like punishing gullibility with the death penalty.”

And there it was. Jonathan felt as if he’d executed the gullible. He clamped his jaws tight and stared even more intently at the tree line. What was done was done.

“Tell you what,” Dom said, rising to his feet. “You stay put. I’m going to go get my stole, and you and I are going to talk.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’ve been writing novels now for twenty years. In a very real way, each book represents in my mind a chronicle of my family’s journey. Looking back, life’s ebbs and flows are inexorably tied in my head to what I was writing when the big events transpired. The deaths and the births, the frustrations and elations. Life is, after all, an emotional sine curve—the thrill ride of a lifetime. Through it all, the one constant—my rock and my best friend—has been the ever-loving, ever-beautiful Joy. She continues to be my everything.

As does Chris. There is no more profound testament to the passage of time than the series of photos shot over the years of my writing, where the early ones show him barely coming up to my shoulders, and the recent ones show me barely coming up to his. No prouder father walks the earth than I.

As I write this, I am one the cusp of a huge new change. After ten and a half years of holding down a Big Boy Job by day and writing my novels in the off-hours, I will be leaving the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, effective January 1, 2015, making the New Year a new year indeed. A decade is a long time, and during those years I’ve made some friendships among the staff and our members that I truly hope will endure. Against advice of counsel (see the first paragraph of this section), who fears that I will offend through omission, I choose to throw caution to the wind and name some of the people whose company I have particularly enjoyed, and whose counsel I would particularly miss if we fell out of contact. In no particular order: Ed Szrom, John Geiger, Anne Marie Horvath, Kent Kiser, Joe Pickard, Tom Crane, Chuck Carr, David Taylor, David Wagger, Doug Kramer, Cap Grossman, Veronica Costanza, Jerry Sjogren, Lee Twitchell, Bill Rouse, Anatoly Mendelsohn, George Adams, Rick Hare, Kendig Kneen, Randy Goodman, Debbie Hayes, and Tamara Deiro. And yes, I’m sure there are a few whose names I have neglected to include here, but please know that I meant no offense by doing so.

Jonathan Grave knows a lot about weaponry, explosives, and tactics. He’d know a lot less if I wasn’t allowed to pick the brains of some very smart people. At the top of the list are Chris Grall and Lee Lofland, the former for things military and the latter for things police-related. I can’t thank you guys enough for your willingness to keep me from screwing things up. Then there are the folks who I believe would prefer to remain anonymous. Thanks to you folks, too.

My appreciation for all that the Kensington team has done to make my books better than they could ever have been otherwise, and then to support them in the marketplace, deepens and grows with every day. Steve Zacharias sits in the big chair, and Michaela Hamilton makes sure that my plots make sense, that the characters come alive, and that I stay below my quota of adverbs (I wrote smilingly). Special thanks to Vida Engstrand, Alexandra Nicolajsen, Karen Auerbach, and the rest of the outstanding Kensington marketing team.

And Anne Hawkins. Goodness gracious, nothing would be possible without my wonderful friend and agent, Anne Hawkins.

Turn the page to read an exciting teaser excerpt from the next Jonathan Grave thriller by John Gilstrap . . .

FRIENDLY FIRE

Coming from Pinnacle in 2016!

E
than Falk recognized the monster’s voice before he saw his face. The voice pierced the white noise of chatting patrons at the Caf-Fiend Coffee House and froze Ethan in place, any thought of the relative cleanliness of the milk steamer forgotten. Perhaps the voice by itself wouldn’t have done it. It was the voice in combination with the words. “Be quick about it, if you don’t mind.”

Be quick about it.

With the lightning speed of imagination Ethan was once again eleven years old, his ankles shackled by a chain that barely allowed for a full step, that prevented him from climbing stairs without crawling. The pain was all there. The humiliation and the fear were
all there.

Without the voice, he doubted that he would have recognized the face. It had been eleven years, after all. The monster’s hair had turned gray at the temples and hugged his head more closely. The features had sagged some and his jaw had softened, but the hook in the nose was the same, as was the slightly cross-toothed overbite. There was a way he carried himself, too—a square set to his shoulders that a decade had done nothing to diminish—even as he stood waiting for his order.

Ethan felt his face flush as something horrible stirred deep in his gut, a putrid, malignant stew of bile and hate and shame. “Look at me,” he whispered. He needed the confirmation.

The old woman directly in front of Ethan snapped, “Are you even listening to me, young man?”

Her voice startled him. No, he wasn’t listening to her. She stood there, a silver thermos extended in the air, dangling from two fingers. “You’re out of half-and-half,” she said. Her clipped tone told him that she’d said it before. The heat in her eyes told him that she’d said it maybe five or six times.

Reality had morphed into the past with such violence that her request registered as a non sequitur. “Huh?”

“My God, are you deaf? I said—”

The monster turned. Raven, Ethan’s nominal girlfriend and fellow barista, handed the monster his drip coffee, and as he turned, Ethan caught a glimpse of him full-face. Ethan’s heart skipped. It might have stopped.

The lady with the thermos continued to yammer about something.

Please need cream or sugar,
Ethan pleaded silently. That would put him face to face with the man who’d ruined so much. The man who’d beaten him, torn him.

But apparently the monster preferred his coffee black. He headed straight to the door, not casting a look toward anyone. Whatever his thoughts, they had nothing to do with the sins of his past.

Perhaps they had only to do with the sins of his future.

“. . . speak to your supervisor. I have never—”

“No,” Ethan said aloud. The monster could not be allowed to leave. He could not be allowed to torture others.

He could not be allowed to dominate Ethan’s life anymore with recalled horrors.

Another customer said something to him, but the words—if they were words at all—could not penetrate the wall of rage.

Ethan needed to stop him. Stop the monster. Kill the monster.

He dropped the stuff he’d been holding—a tiny pitcher for the steamed milk and the spoon through which to sift it—and was deaf to the sound of them hitting the floor. People looked at him, though. Raven at first looked confused, and then she looked frightened.

“My God, Ethan, what’s wrong?”

Ethan said nothing. There wasn’t time. The monster was on the loose, out in the world, preying on other people. On other children.

Raven tried to step in front of him to stop him—
how could she know?
—but he shouldered past her. He moved fast, not quite a run, but close to it. Fast enough to catch every pair of eyes in the shop.

As he passed the pastry case, he snagged the knife they used to cut bagels. It had always been the wrong style for slicing bread, with a straight edge instead of a serrated one, but they’d learned as a crew that if you kept a straight-edged knife sharp enough, it will cut anything.

The whole rhythm of the shop changed as he emerged from behind the counter with the knife. The old lady with the thermos put it down on the counter and collapsed into a fetal ball on the floor, covering her head and yelling, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”

In a distant part of his brain, Ethan felt bad that he’d inflicted fear on the poor lady—all she’d wanted was a little customer service—but in the readily accessible portion of his brain, he didn’t give a shit. Closer still was the thought that maybe next time she wouldn’t be such a bitch.

The crowd parted as Ethan approached the exit with his knife. He didn’t slow as he reached the glass door, choosing instead to power through it as if it weren’t there. The blast of autumn air felt refreshing after the stuffiness of the coffee shop. Invigorating. Head-clearing.

Where is he?

The shop lay in a suburban strip mall in the suburbs of Washington, DC. There weren’t many people milling about, but this was lunch time, so there were more than a few. The monster could have gone only so far. He had to be here somewhere. He had to still be within view.

Ethan saw a guy from a Subway sandwich shop chatting on the corner with a hot girl from the quick-quack medical place next store. She wore checkerboard scrubs that strained in all the right places. Ahead and to the left, a lady in a red jacket carried a take-out order from the ribs joint. (“You bring your appetite, we’ll supply the bib.”) Beyond that lady, taillights flashed on the back end of a pickup truck, followed by the backup lights.

“Shit, he’s getting away.”

He stopped himself from chasing, though, because he knew that the monster wouldn’t be in the pickup. It was too far away. Not enough time had passed to get that far.

Ethan pivoted on his own axis to look the other way. He stepped around the corner of the coffee shop to look past the drive-through traffic. To scan the parking lot.

There he was.

The monster walked easily, as if he had not a care in the world, on his way to the rest of his day.

Ethan moved without thinking, taking off at a run. He’d changed a lot, too, in the past eleven years. His shoulders had broadened, and he’d grown to six-two. The monster no longer had a chance of holding him down with a hand on his chest and a knee in his belly.

The monster had no chance of winning this fight.

Ethan ran at a full sprint, closing the distance in just a few seconds. When he was only ten or fifteen feet away, the monster seemed to awaken to the danger and he turned.

Good,
Ethan thought.
Get a good look at me, you son of a—

The monster led with a punch that came from nowhere and caught Ethan with withering force just in front of his ear. Light flashed behind his eyes.

But Ethan still had the momentum, and the collision took both of them to the ground between parked cars. The monster’s head sheared a side view mirror from its mount, and then pounded hard against the pavement.

They landed in a tangle, with Ethan on top, in the command position. As his vision swam from the punch and the fall, he knew that survival meant fast action. The monster bucked beneath him, trying to throw him off. The guy didn’t seem scared at all. He seemed angry. If he got free—

Be quick about it.

Despite all the squirming and writhing on the ground Ethan’s right hand was still free, and it still grasped the knife. He raised it high and hesitated.

In that instant, the monster seemed to understand what was going to happen.

“All units in the vicinity of the Antebellum Shopping Center, respond to the report of an assault in progress. Code three.”

Officer Pam Hastings pulled her microphone from its clamp on the dash and brought it to her lips, keying the mike. “One-four-three responding.” With the white mike still in her grasp, she used the first three fingers of her right hand on the rocker switches to light up the roof bar and the front and rear emergency lights. She cranked the siren switch all the way to the right—to the Wail setting.

Known throughout the Braddock County Police Department as a lead-foot (with the Internal Affairs reports in her record to show it), she didn’t even think about the future paperwork as she mashed the accelerator to the floor and let herself be thrown into her seat back as the 305-horsepower Ford Police Interceptor accelerated from cruising to holy-shit-fast in zero-point-few seconds. In that same amount of time, at least four other units likewise marked responding. Nothing drew a crowd of cops quite like violence in progress.