He stared at him for a moment with empty, unfocused eyes, then looked around the room nervously. “Here and there. I’ve been on the move since Mexico, had to jump the border.”
How far could this go?
“What happened in Mexico?”
He shook his head. “Gotta stay on the move, and you do, too. They almost got me a few times, they’re shape-shifters, you’ve gotta watch out for that. I told you, they’re trying to kill us.”
“Who’s trying to kill us?”
“You know who. The Army. Greer.”
Sam didn’t recognize the soft rasp that came from his own mouth. “Captain Greer?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think so. Why would he want to do that?”
Rondo slammed the bottle down on the coffee table and started pacing tight circles. “You know why!”
Sam had more than a passing acquaintance with mental illness, and he knew about delusions. They were flimsily constructed things, absent of logic, and held together solely by a sick mind—his own sick mind, he reminded himself. Inserting rationality into the discussion appeared to be a potent trigger for agitation, and the image of the Colt to his head terrified him.
“Have you talked to the colonel about this?”
Rondo’s face contorted in an ugly sneer. “Colonel Doerr is in on it. My own father. My own fucking father!”
“Okay, Rondo, it’s just me and you then. Tell me why you think Greer wants to kill us and we’ll figure this out together. Come up with a plan.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.” He squatted down on his haunches and for a brief moment, Sam was afraid he was going to shit on his rug. But he just balanced there like a deranged yogi. “You remember what he did. We saw it.”
What did you see? What do you remember?
Sam shook his head, dispelling the voice Dr. Frolich had told him to ignore. “I don’t remember much these days, Rondo.”
“The kids. The kids, the little boys! Bacha bazi, boy play. Christ, we could hear them screaming all night, you’re goddamned lucky if you don’t remember that.” Rondo put his head in his hands and started sobbing. “Greer said we couldn’t do anything about it.”
A dark, malevolent veil settled over Sam, coming from nowhere and going nowhere. But he could hear a child screaming. “I don’t understand.”
Rondo looked up, his ravaged face illuminated by the afternoon sun that filtered in through the slats in the front window shades. His tears had drawn meandering runnels through the grime on his cheeks. Some of the grime looked rusty, like dried blood, and his flesh was pocked and scabbed, as if he’d been picking at it. “The Afghan commander, Raziq, that sick fuck, you remember him, you remember the kid he had chained up? His eight-year-old sex slave? Greer said to ignore it, the Army wouldn’t touch it because he was on our side.”
Sam shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about—”
“But Greer did do something about it! He shot him and we saw it! And he saw us. Good for him, I say, kill a pedophile, the world’s a better place. But he doesn’t see it that way, no, he only sees a court martial and the death penalty or life in Leavenworth if one of us goes public. You think it’s a coincidence that the next day, he put us on that unscheduled convoy and KABOOM!” Rondo screamed, jumping to his feet. “He had to shut us up. But we lived.”
The tableau around Sam suddenly froze as incipient wakefulness and reality seeped into the fringes of his mind. With that single falsehood, the Rondo hologram split apart into meat and bone and blood, and the apparition melted away.
Sam jolted awake on the sofa, his shirt wringing wet, his heart flailing like it was trying to free itself from his chest. There was no bottle of water on the coffee table, no upturned chair, no lingering smell of decay. Another nightmare, as twisted as all his other ones and wholly possessed by death, but so much worse than last night because Melody hadn’t been here to interrupt it.
The canker of PTSD was obviously accelerating its feast on his brain, and now it was planting false memories in his mind because he knew damn well Rondo was dead; Greer hadn’t shot anybody or set up a roadside bomb attack to kill his own men; and Raziq never had children chained up in his barracks. Dr. Frolich had been right, warning him not to focus too much on the details of his dreams. Or maybe her warning had done just the opposite, planted the seed and he’d nurtured it during his blackout.
With a convulsive shiver, he recalled his hallucination of suicide, another warped mirage to add to his mounting catalog of psychotic symptoms. He was the man on fire. He was in trouble. And Yuki was still dead.
He fumbled his phone out of his pocket when it started buzzing and squinted at the caller ID. Dr. Frolich. What perfect timing. He took deep breaths in an attempt to calm his heart, but the effort was wasted. He answered anyhow.
“Hi, Doc.”
“Sam? Are you all right? You sound … you don’t sound like yourself.”
“I’m really not myself.”
“Listen, I just spoke with a police officer, a homicide detective Crawford. He was asking if you were at your appointment yesterday. Tell me what’s happening.”
She had no idea how much was happening, what had happened, but it was surprisingly easy to condense it down into a handful of simple, straightforward sentences. “I’m a person of interest in two murders I didn’t commit. One of the victims was Yuki. She’s dead. And I’m having blackouts and hallucinations like I did with Katy Villa, but they’re escalating. They’re bad. I’m in trouble.”
No pause, no sharp intake of shocked breath. “Have you taken your meds today?”
Had he? “I’m not sure. I think so.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Sam listened to the fast beep-beep-beep of the disconnection. It was a steady, regular sound, unchanging and imperturbable. Preposterously, he wondered if his veteran’s medical benefits would cover the house call.
Chapter Forty-nine
MELODY JUMPED OUT OF THE CAR the moment Nolan pulled up to the curb and jogged up Sam’s front walk, but she checked herself before she mounted the steps to the porch. However bad her situation was, his was much, much worse, and he deserved a strong, calm, caring friend right now, not a hyperventilating basket case. And what was she thinking? That she’d find a blubbering pool of human jelly on the floor? That her very presence would transform Sam’s collapsing life and save the day?
“Dumb ass,” she mumbled, knocking on the door.
His brows lifted in surprise when he opened it. He was holding a glass of rye. “Melody. Why aren’t you at work?”
“Because I heard about Yuki. I’m so sorry, Sam.” She wanted to wrap her arms around him, but she resisted the urge because she sensed it would be exactly the wrong thing to do.
“How did you hear about…” He looked over her shoulder and frowned. “Nolan?”
“Yes.”
“Why is she here?”
“It’s a long story. Are you okay?”
“I don’t really know, but Dr. Frolich is on her way here, so I’ll be getting a professional opinion.”