Pines (14 page)

Unstable on his feet.

A deep blossom of nausea spreading in the pit of his stomach.

Blood poured down his face, dripping off his chin into a tiny pool on the concrete.

“I’m leaving,” Ethan said, motioning to the door behind the sheriff. “Open it.”

Pope didn’t move. Said, “You go on and sit back down now before you get yourself really hurt.” Said it with the confidence of a man who had many times done the thing he was threatening, who would gladly do it again.

Ethan stepped around the table, moving past the sheriff to the door.

Tugged on the handle.

Locked.

“Sit your ass back down. We ain’t even started yet.”

“Open the door.”

Pope rose slowly to his feet, turned, and crowded into Ethan’s airspace. Close enough now to smell the coffee on his breath. See the stains on his teeth. He had four inches on Ethan and probably forty pounds.

“Do you think I
can’t
make you sit down, Ethan? That it’s beyond my ability to do such a thing?”

“This is an illegal detainment.”

Pope smiled. “You’re thinking all wrong, boy. There’s no such thing as law or government inside this room. It’s just you and me. I am the one and only authority in your little world, whose borders are these walls. I could kill you right now if I wanted to.”

Ethan let the tension knots in his shoulders relax, lifting both hands, palms open, in what he hoped Pope would mistake for a sign of deference and defeat.

He drew his head back, dipped his chin, said, “OK, you’re right. We should keep talk—”

—and came off the balls of his feet like they’d been spring-loaded, driving the plate of his forehead straight into Pope’s nose.

Cartilage crunched, and Ethan felt blood gushing down into his hair as he scooped Pope by his cedar-plank thighs, lifting with his legs, the sheriff struggling to catch Ethan’s neck between his biceps and forearm, but too late.

The heels of Pope’s boots slipped out from under him, greased with some blood that had slicked the floor, and Ethan felt the man’s substantial weight go airborne.

He dug his shoulder into the man’s stomach and drove him down hard onto the concrete.

A burst of air exploded out of Pope’s lungs, and Ethan sat up, straddling the sheriff as he cocked back his right arm for a palm-heel strike.

Pope torqued his hips and drove Ethan’s face into the leg of the wooden table with enough velocity to split open his cheek.

Ethan fought to get up amid the motes of excruciating light that starred his vision, but as he got his legs underneath him and struggled to stand, he saw that he’d righted himself a second too late.

Ethan might’ve parried the haymaker if his head was clear, his reflexes primed, but in his current state, he reacted at half speed.

The force behind the blow made Ethan’s head swivel far enough that he felt his thoracic spine pop.

Found himself dazed and prone on the surface of that wooden table, staring up through his one good eye at the maniacal sheriff descending for another blow, his broken nose mushroomed across his face like something that had detonated.

Ethan raised his arms in an effort to protect his face, but the sheriff’s fist ripped easily through his hands and crashed into Ethan’s nose.

Tears streamed out of his eyes, blood into Ethan’s mouth.

“Who are you?”
the sheriff roared.

Ethan couldn’t have answered if he’d wanted to, his consciousness slipping, what he could see of the interrogation room beginning to spin, interspersed with snapshots of another...

He is back in that brown-walled room with a dirt floor in the Golan slum, watching a bare lightbulb swinging over his head as Aashif stares at him through a hood of black cloth that reveals only a pair of brown, malevolent eyes and a mouthful
of smiling teeth too white and perfect to be a product of any fourth-world, Middle-Eastern shithole.

Ethan dangles by his wrists from a chain bolted into the ceiling, his feet just close enough to the floor to ease the circulation-destroying pressure by rising up on his big toes. But he can manage this for only seconds at a time before his phalanges collapse under his weight. When they finally break, he will have no means by which to stop the loss of blood flow to his hands.

Aashif stands inches from Ethan’s face, their noses almost touching.

“Let’s try a question you should have no problem answering...What part of America are you from, Chief Warrant Officer Ethan Burke?” the man asks in excellent English that is tinged with a UK accent.

“Washington.”

“Your capital?”

“No, the state.”

“Ah. You have children?”

“No.”

“But you are married.”

“Yes.”

“What is your wife’s name?”

Ethan doesn’t respond, just braces for another blow.

Aashif smiles. “Relax. No more punches for now. You are familiar with the saying ‘a death of a thousand cuts’?” Aashif holds up a single razor blade that gleams under the lightbulb. “It comes from a Chinese execution method, abolished in 1905, called lingchi, translated also as ‘slow slicing’ or ‘the lingering death.’”

Aashif motions to the briefcase sitting open on a nearby table, lined with hard, black foam and upon which rests a terrifying collection of cutlery that Ethan has been trying to ignore for the last two hours.

Pope struck Ethan again, and along with the smell of his own blood, the blow jarred loose the memory of the smell of old, rotted blood on the floor of that torture house in Fallujah...

“You will now be taken to a room, given a pen, a piece of paper, and one hour. You know what I want,” Aashif says.

“I don’t.”

Aashif punches Ethan in the gut.

Pope punched Ethan in the face.

“I’m growing tired of beating you. You know what I want. How could you not? I’ve asked you twenty times now. Tell me you know. Just tell me that.”

“Who are you?” Pope yelled.

“I know,” Ethan gasps.

“One hour, and if what you write down does not make me happy, you will die by lingchi.”

Aashif takes a Polaroid out of his black dishdasha.

Ethan shuts his eyes but opens them again when Aashif says, “Look at this or I’ll trim away your eyelids.”

It is a photo of a man in this very room, also hanging from the ceiling by his wrists.

American. Probably a soldier, though impossible to know.

Three months of combat, and Ethan has never seen mutilation approaching this.

“Your countryman is alive in this photograph,” his torturer says, a hint of pride creeping into his voice.

Ethan tried to open his eyes to see Pope. He felt himself on the brink of losing consciousness, wanting it both for the
alleviation of his current pain, but also to block the perfect image his mind had conjured of Aashif, of that torture room.

“The next person who hangs from this ceiling will see a similar Polaroid of you,” Aashif says. “Do you understand? I have your name. I also have a website. I will post pictures of what I do to you for the world to see. Maybe your wife will see them too. You write down everything I want to know, which up until now, you have held inside.”

“Who are you?” Pope asked.

Ethan let his arms fall to the side.

“Who are you?”

No longer even trying to defend himself, thinking,
There is a part of me that never left that room in Fallujah that smelled like rancid blood.

Willing the coup de grâce from Pope that would mercifully knock him unconscious, kill the old memories, kill his present agony.

Two seconds later, it came—a blow that connected with his chin and brought a burst of white-hot light like a flashbulb going off.

The dishwasher was loaded and groaning through its wash cycle, and Theresa, well past the point of total exhaustion, stood at the sink drying the last serving dish. She returned it to the cabinet, hung the towel on the fridge door, and hit the light.

Moving through the dark living room toward the staircase, she felt something latch onto her far worse than the emotional fallout of this long, long day.

A swallowing emptiness.

In a few short hours, the sun would rise, and in many ways, it would be the first morning of the rest of her life without him. This past day had been about saying good-bye, about scavenging what little peace she could find in a world without Ethan. Their friends had mourned him, would certainly always miss him, but they would move on—were already moving on—and would inevitably forget.

She couldn’t shake the sense that beginning tomorrow, she would be alone.

In her grief.

Her love.

Her loss.

There was something so devastatingly lonely at the thought of it that she had to stop at the foot of the steps, put her hand on the banister, and catch her breath.

The knock startled her, kicked her heart rate up a notch.

Theresa turned and stared at the door, the thought crossing her mind that she’d imagined the sound.

It was 4:50 a.m.

What could anyone possibly want—

Another knock. Harder than the first.

She crossed the foyer in bare feet and stood on her tiptoes to see through the peephole.

Under the illumination of the porch light, she glimpsed a man standing on her stoop under an umbrella.

He was short. Completely bald. Face an expressionless shadow under the dripping canopy. He wore a black suit that made something catch inside her chest—a federal agent with news of Ethan? What other reason could there possibly be for someone to knock on her front door at this hour?

But the tie was all wrong.

Striped blue and yellow—too much style and flash for a fed.

Through the peephole, she watched the man’s hand reach out and knock once more.

“Mrs. Burke,” he said. “I know I’m not waking you. I saw you at the kitchen sink just a few minutes ago.”

“What do you want?” she said through the door.

“I need to speak with you.”

“About what?”

“Your husband.”

She shut her eyes, opened them again.

The man was still there, and she was wide awake now.

“What about him?” she asked.

“It would be simpler if we could just sit down and talk face-to-face.”

“It’s the middle of the night and I have no idea who you are. There’s no way I’m letting you in my house.”

“You will want to hear what I have to say.”

“Tell me through the door.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Then come back in the morning. I’ll speak with you then.”

“If I leave, Mrs. Burke, you will never see me again, and trust me, that would be a tragedy for you and for Ben. I swear to you...I intend you no harm.”

“Get off my property or I’ll call the police.”

The man reached into his coat and took out a Polaroid.

As he held it up to the peephole, Theresa felt something break inside her.

It was a photo of Ethan lying on a steel operating table, naked under clinical blue light. The left side of his face looked deeply bruised, and she couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead. Before she knew what she was doing, her hand was reaching for the chain and turning back the dead bolt.

Theresa pulled the door open as the man collapsed his umbrella and leaned it against the brick. Behind him, a cold steady rain laid down an undercurrent of white noise on the sleeping city. A dark-colored Mercedes Sprinter was parked a few houses down. Not a fixture on her street. She wondered if the van was his.

“David Pilcher,” the man said, extending his hand.

“What have you done to him?” Theresa asked, not taking it. “Is he dead?”

“May I come in?”

She moved back as Pilcher stepped over the threshold, his black wingtips glistening with beads of rainwater.

“I can take these off,” he said, gesturing to his shoes.

“Don’t worry about it.”

She led him into the living room and they sat down across from one another, Theresa on the couch, Pilcher on a wooden, straight-backed chair she’d dragged over from the dining room table.

“You hosted a party here tonight?” he asked.

“A celebration of my husband’s life.”

“Sounds lovely.”

She suddenly felt very tired, the lightbulb over her head almost too much for her retinas to bear.

“Why do you have a picture of my husband, Mr. Pilcher?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“It does to me.”

“What if I were to tell you that your husband is alive?”

For ten seconds, Theresa didn’t breathe.

There was the noise of the dishwasher, of rain falling on the roof, of her throbbing heart, and nothing else.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Then how can I trust—”

He held up a hand, his black eyes crinkling. “Better to listen right now.”

“Are you with the government?”

“No, but again, who I am isn’t important. It’s what I have to offer you.”

“Ethan is alive?”

“Yes.”

Her throat tightened, but she held herself together.

“Where is he?” She could only whisper.

Pilcher shook his head. “I could sit here and tell you everything, but you wouldn’t believe me.”

“How do you know?”

“Experience.”

“You won’t tell me where my husband is?”

“No, and if you ask me again, I’ll get up, walk out that door, and you’ll never see me again, which means you’ll never see Ethan again.”

“Is he hurt?” She could feel a compacted mass of emotion beginning to loosen behind her sternum.

“He’s fine.”

“Do you want money? I can—”

“Ethan isn’t being ransomed. This has nothing to do with money, Theresa.” Pilcher scooted forward, now sitting on the edge of the chair and staring at her through those piercing black eyes whose intensity suggested a massive intellect behind them. “I am extending to you and your son a one-time offer.”