The Last Hour (26 page)

I sighed. Then I nodded. “Ray said one of the guys from his platoon said some things at Alexandra’s wedding. He didn’t know what to think.”

“Who specifically?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. They were a tight-knit group. And they all swore to keep what happened a secret. Ray broke that promise.”

Detective Johnson frowned, and I leaned forward and said, my tone sharp, “Don’t judge him, Detective. Ray did the right thing. Even if it cost him everything. Even if it cost
us
everything.”

Shit. My eyes were watering. I had to force down the emotion. I was not going to show weakness in front of them, no matter what.

“Sorry, Carrie. Don’t misunderstand me. If what I’m hearing here is all true, then yeah, I wouldn’t judge him, I’d admire him.” He turned to Major Smalls. “So, Major, did
you
think there was any risk to him?”

Smalls frowned. “We considered it a remote possibility.”

I interrupted. “I’ve got a question for you. You’re not telling me anything. Who was driving the other vehicle?”

Johnson looked at Smalls, and then said, “We can’t get into that just yet.”

“Why the hell not? I want to know who tried to kill my husband and my sister!”

Smalls said, “We can’t comment on an ongoing investigation.”

Disgust flooded me. “Of course you can. The President himself commented on
your
investigation. There were so many misinformed leaks and unnamed sources my head was spinning. We haven’t even been able to come and go out of our apartment in months without reporters sitting on the doorstep, thanks to you.”

Smalls sighed and said, “I’m sorry about that, Carrie. It was out of my hands.”

“Well, this isn’t. I don’t have any control over whether or not Sarah makes it. I don’t have any control over whether or not Ray lives. But I damn sure want to know who it was who did this.”

“I’m sorry, we can’t get into that yet.”

I slapped my hand on the table and said, “Then I guess we’re finished here.”

I stood up and said, “Come on, Alexandra.”

I walked out of the room, and then ran for the bathroom and shoved my way into a stall and fell to my knees and threw up again, the acrid smell of acid burning my nose.

“Damn it,” I muttered, squeezing my eyes shut.

“Carrie?” Alexandra asked in a hesitant voice.

“I’ll be all right,” I said, my voice broken. “Just give me a minute.”

“H
ello?” Alexandra said into her phone.
She listened for a couple moments and said, “We’re on the fourth floor, in the ICU waiting room. You’ll need to call me when you get up here so I can let you in.”

She paused a moment, listening, then said, “All right. We’ll see you in a few minutes.”

She hung up the phone and put it back in her purse. “That was Ray’s parents. They’re almost here, they drove down from New York.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

She was silent for a few moments and then said, “I’m not sure why they didn’t just fly down with us. I offered.”

I glanced over at her. “I’m not sure….” I paused, regrouped a little, then said, “More than likely they had to scramble a little to come up with cash. Ray’s parents are proud, and I’m not sure they’d be comfortable taking money from either of us for the flight. Even for something this urgent.”

She nodded.
 

For reasons I never understood, Ray’s parents never warmed to me. Maybe it was because I’m a little older than him, though that doesn’t really make sense. Or because he was planning on finishing college in Washington, DC instead of New York so he could be close. Or maybe just because they’d only gotten their son back from the war, and they felt like I was taking him away.

I didn’t know the answer. I’d wanted to have a good relationship with them, but right from the start his mother seemed hostile, and his father indifferent.

Which made it a very tough visit on New Year’s Day, when the Army called him back up to active duty.

After Major Smalls had left with him, I had sent him a couple text messages, but received no response. I then tried to call, but it went straight to voicemail. Either his battery was dead or his phone was off. Someone needed to tell his parents. Dylan had been pacing around my hotel room like a caged leopard, while Alexandra sat, dismay on her face, when I said, “I’m going to drive out to Glen Cove to let his parents know. Will you come with me, Dylan?”

He nodded. No hesitation.
 

“I’ll come with you,” Alexandra said.

Dylan shook his head. “I’d love for you too, Hun, but I think it’s better if it’s just the two of us. It’s going to be overwhelming enough for them.”

Alexandra didn’t look happy. But she could see the sense in what he was saying, so she agreed. “Okay. We’ll still have dinner with Julia tonight?”

He nodded, and I said, “I’ll drop him off on the way back, then I’m driving to Washington.”

Both of them went silent. Dylan looked troubled and said, “There’s not anything you’ll be able to do.”

I shrugged. “I can be there for him. I have to drive down day after tomorrow anyway, this is just moving it up a couple days.”

I still had the rental car, so I checked out of the hotel. We dropped Alexandra off at her dorm and then made the drive out to Glen Cove. It was still early, and New Year’s Day, so traffic wasn’t bad at all. The minute Alexandra was out of the car, I said to Dylan, “I’ve got questions.”

“Go for it,” he replied.

I took a breath, trying to gather my thoughts as we came to a stop at yet another red light. Then I said, “First ... is Major Smalls serious about Ray potentially being in danger?”

Dylan grunted. “I don’t know. A year ago I would have said no way would Colton ever shoot a civilian. That’s ... inconceivable to me. But he did. War does funny things to people’s heads.”

I took a deep breath. “What about Ray? Is he likely to end up on charges of some kind? I mean ... he reported it.”

Dylan shrugged. “No idea. Could be. From what I understand, the shooting happened in March, and he didn’t report it until November.”

“Damn it, why not?”

I couldn’t see his expression because the light turned green, and I had to stomp on the gas to get ahead of a cab so I could change lanes and then get on the ramp. But his voice cracked a little, and he said, “You don’t know what it’s like out there.”

“
Tell me
what it’s like out there. I can’t help Ray if I don’t have the information I need.”

“You can’t help Ray anyway. Not with this.”

“I refuse to accept that.”

He sighed. Then he said, “Any moment ... any second ... your life is in the hands of the guys in your platoon. You may not like all of them. In fact, you may hate some. But you love them all the same. Take Kowalski ... he was a complete fucking asshole. But he also watched out for all of us. He backed up Ray. He called us turds and fuckheads and dogshit, but then he took time out to make sure we were squared away, that we had everything we needed to eat, that we never went into the field unprepared.”

“Ray hasn’t really talked about him.”

“He threw himself on a grenade to save a little girl in Dega Payan,” Dylan said. “That was a fucking mess. Me and Ray had to bag up what was left of the body.”

My throat caught, and I couldn’t breathe. I literally couldn’t breathe. I tried to imagine that. What was happening in Ray’s head, what kind of emotions must run in him? It made me feel like I didn’t know him at all. Finally I gasped, and said, “Don’t they have ... people ... for that?”

He snorted. “Yeah. They do. They call those people the infantry.”

“I’m so sorry you guys had to go through all that.”

He waved a hand dismissively. “Forget it. This is now, and we’ve got to help Ray. So ask your questions.”

“All right. What happens next? They’re doing an investigation, and it sounds like they’re arresting people.”

He shrugged. “Not a clue. My only brush with military justice was what they call an Article 15. That’s nonjudicial punishment. Basically the company commander assigns extra duty, or takes away a stripe or something. Investigations and court-martials? Far beyond my experience. I’ll check it out and let you know what I learn. But I’m guessing they’ve got to question people, conduct their investigation. Activating Ray wasn’t really to protect him, it was convenient, and since he still has a reserve commitment, they could do it.”

“So what’s the worst case scenario?”

“Absolute worst? They decide Ray was an accessory and charge him, and he goes away for a bunch of years. I guess technically they could go for the death penalty, but I don’t think the Army’s done that in decades.”

I swallowed. That was worst case. It wasn’t likely.
 

“Seriously, though,” Dylan said, “I don’t think much of that is likely. They’ve got to recognize that he did the right thing, even if belatedly. It’s not like the civilian court system. You’re operating in a completely different world here.”

“So if we find him an attorney, it’s going to have to be someone who knows military law.”

“That’s right.”

“I wouldn’t know where to start,” I replied.
 

“Google, I guess,” he replied.
 

I snorted. “Well, Christ, Dylan. That was helpful.”

He shook his head in response to the sarcasm. “I don’t know where to start either, Carrie. We stick with him. We let him know we’re behind him. Listen to me on this one thing. I doubt there’s anything we can do on the legal side. But I can tell you this. Ray’s gonna be as alone as he’s ever been. I’d rather go through three fucking Afghanistans than go through what he’s about to. So ... we stick with him. We make sure he knows he’s got somebody backing him up all the way.”

I kept driving, and his words ran through my mind, over and over again. He was right. I didn’t know the first thing about the military courts, though I had to assume they were politically driven and probably not nearly as fair as the civilian courts. Of course, politics I knew about. And, I might be able to get some help from my father in that area. But letting Ray know I was behind him, all the way? That I could do.

I thought about what Dylan had said at the hotel earlier.
This is only going to get ... very ugly ... from here. It’s not too late for you to walk away.
I couldn’t help it. I didn’t understand why he even said it, but the more I ran them through my mind, the more I realized I was really angry about it. So, as I took the on-ramp to the Long Island Expressway, I said, “You know, I’m not the type of person to walk away from someone I love. It’s bothering me that you said that earlier. A lot.”

Dylan didn’t say anything at first. Instead, he sat there, the fingers of his right hand twirling an unlit cigarette as he looked out the window. Finally, he said, “Look, I didn’t mean to upset you. But I owe it to him to look out for him.”

“How is that looking out for him?”

“You guys have known each other all of what ... ten days? Where you were actually together?”

“About that,” I said. “Although it seems a lot longer. My phone bill says we’ve spent at least another ten days on the phone with each other.”

“Yeah, well ... that’s a really short time. Don’t get me wrong: I’m super happy for both of you. And from all Alexandra has told me about you, you’re right for him. You’re a great person. Under normal circumstances, I’d be behind you one hundred ten percent, okay? I just think ... if you’re gonna bail on him, it’s better to do it now. I’m not saying that you’re ... flighty or something. I’m saying this is going to get uglier than anything you can imagine. Ray’s probably gonna get crucified by the media. For all we know, the Army’s going to make a scapegoat of him. He might end up doing hard time. I don’t see, after just a few days knowing each other, how you can make that kind of commitment.”

With every word he spoke, I felt like I had lead forming a ball in my stomach, and I found myself clenching the steering wheel, my shoulders and back tensing up. I opened my mouth to answer, and he said, “Hold on.”

He took a deep breath, then said, “What I’m saying is this: if you’re in this, you’re in it for the long haul. Please don’t let Sherman lean on you, then disappear when the ugly really happens.”

I glanced over at Dylan. His jaw was set, and he’d crushed the cigarette in his hand. He’d switched from calling him Ray to calling him Sherman. And I think I understood. He thought of him as Ray when he talked about him as his friend. But when he called him by his last name, it had deeper meaning. Sherman had been his buddy in basic training, and in the Army. Sherman had been his Sergeant, his team leader. Sherman was the guy he owed everything.

I nodded, my eyes suddenly watering, and said, “I won’t do that. I promise. I know you think it’s a short time, but I’m going to repeat something Alexandra said about you last night. When you know, you know. What I know is that Ray is the first guy I’ve ever been with who treated me as a partner. He’s the first guy I’ve ever been with who I could see spending my life with. And I’d risk anything for that.”

“Even complete heartbreak? Because that may be what you’re headed for.”