“I don’t remember saying that.”
“Are you done with this foolishness or not? Because you need to be. And you need to look at me, too. Look at me, and tell me that you’re done trying to play detective. I want to hear it. No more bullshit for your brother. Tell me it’s over.”
I clenched my jaw, as stubborn as I’d ever been. “I went to see him at Lanesworth.”
His eyes narrowed before he got control of his anger. “When?”
“This morning.”
“Son, that was an incredibly stupid thing to do. You don’t think Martinez can make hay with your visit? He’s already thinking, Conspiracy. We need to worry about you, your future.”
“What about Jason?” I asked.
“What about your mother?”
He raised his voice, probably from long habit. My mother was the lever that had always worked. “I’m not a kid anymore.”
“From where I sit, you are.”
“I understand that you feel that way. Let me tell you the problem from where I sit.” I stared him down, as cold as the bottom of a cave. “From the time I could speak, what I heard from you was family first. Family first, and then faith and trust and love and everything else. Those were good years and good lessons.”
I stood, and looked down, flush with all the things I wanted to say: that my father lived on the fence, and my mother on the wrong side of everything, that trust was not built into the bones of this house. There were other things to say, too, like Jason’s warning about dangerous people, and what I’d learned about his time in Vietnam, that it explained who he was, and why he was. I wanted to say, too, that Jason knew who’d killed Tyra, that he was protecting me, and that he knew more than the cops, who thought they were so smart. I should have told my father all of those things, but did not.
He should have believed in Jason.
He should have believed from the very start.
In my room, I locked the door. The place was not that big, but I paced it, thinking of Vietnam, Jason, and my father, the thoughts like a dog chasing its tail. Throwing myself on the bed, I pictured Robert’s dive from Devil’s Ledge, the cross of his body nailed to that high, pale sky. He’d been too soft for war.
Jason, though …
His first year in Vietnam had been raw combat from day one: deep-cover recon, search and destroy, cross-border infiltration. In that first year, Jason won a field promotion, two Purple Hearts, and a Silver Star. Darzell’s feelings about it had been pretty plain.
People talked about him even then …
We never heard a thing about it.
Jason must have impressed some important people, though, because when he re-upped for another tour, he was seconded to a Navy SEAL master chief and an ARVN colonel in command of three South Vietnamese rangers, the six of them tasked to run disguised gunboats into the DMZ to rescue downed aviators. In the first six months, they saved eleven Americans, including a marine lieutenant with a bullet in his lung, and two shattered legs. Under heavy fire, Jason dragged him from a crumpled jet, and carried him four miles through dense jungle, getting shot twice for the trouble. That earned him another Purple Heart and, this time, the Navy Cross. None of us knew about that, either, but Darzell had nursed the bitterness for a while.
Should have been the Medal of Honor.
Ask any marine.
No one could doubt my brother’s willingness or courage. He’d won other commendations. Darzell had other stories.
But the rest of it …
What came last …
I rose from the bed, too keyed up to have my head on a pillow. The room was still a box, but I paced it, anyway.
What else could I do?
Seriously.
31
X had Jason brought to the subbasement, and his eyes were keen as the young man entered the cell. It was the last cell in the row, and the one he used to store his completed paintings. Dozens hung at eye level; hundreds more leaned in stacks against the walls.
“Ah, Jason. Good. I want to show you something.” He took a canvas from a stack of others. It was a portrait of Jason, his eyes intent behind strands of dark hair, his face battered and bruised, but set in determined lines. “I call it The Unconquerable Soul. It’s what I see in you when we fight.”
Jason struggled with a sudden surge of unexpected emotion. The painting was … intimate.
“It’s in the eyes,” X said.
For Jason, looking into those painted eyes was like staring into something at once familiar, terrible, and strange, a part of himself he preferred to keep hidden and dark. That a man like X could capture it so perfectly …
“Put it away, please.”
“You don’t like it?”
“Please. If you would.” X seemed surprised and hurt, but Jason didn’t care about that. “When I finished my sentence, you said I was free, that you would stay out of my life.”
“I did say that, yes.” X propped the painting against the wall. “But I have so little time in the world.”
“I don’t understand what that has to do with me.”
“Hours, Jason, a few days at the end of this life. Is it so hard to imagine that I’d wish to spend that time with a man I admire? There’s no need to respond, of course. I see how angry I’ve made you—it is a selfish desire, but you should be flattered. I say flattered because what I see in you, I see in me. I’m a sociopath, of course, and you are not; but as the world forgets, you will remember.”
“And that’s what you want?”
“As epitaphs go, it’s better than most.”
“An epitaph.” Jason could not conceal the anger.
X didn’t care. “An epitaph. A marker.” He shrugged languidly. “When the time comes, I want you there, an admirable man to bear witness. I’ve asked Warden Wilson to make the arrangements.”
“You did all of this so I could bear witness?”
“I won’t leave this world surrounded by sheep, alone. The last thing I wish to see is your face. As I said, you should be flattered.”
X smiled as if the matter were settled, but that’s not what Jason felt. Rage. Loss. He was a blind man. “I should have killed you when I had the chance.”
“Perhaps you should have.”
“I should kill you right now.”
“As always, in this place…” X showed his palms, no smile left. “You are very welcome to try.”
* * *
Twenty minutes later, guards dropped Jason onto a table under bright lights, leaving the room as a weary doctor snapped on latex gloves, and cut away Jason’s clothing.
“Can you roll for me?” Jason shifted so the clothing could be removed and discarded. “Now back.”
Jason could recall no conscious decision to try, but staring past the doctor’s shoulder, he remembered X at the end, the last man standing but almost as bloody and almost as broken.
You must understand, Jason. It’s not the dying that bothers me but the idea of doing it front of these people. I know you find me horrible, but tell me you see that …
He’d collapsed into a chair, almost begging.
Tell me you understand …
The troubling thing was that Jason did understand. In three years of war, he’d been shot, stabbed, and burned, and come back to fight so many times that even hardened marines thought him charmed or blessed. And maybe that was true. All Jason knew for sure was that strength mattered, and that he respected it.