“I had no personal relationship with Scott Billings. He was a nice guy in a blue tie, dress shoes, and dark suit who I said hello to in the West Wing.”
Bishop scrutinizes her face, boring in with his intense gaze. “What about Homer Stephens? Any contact with him?”
Hayley doesn’t flinch. “Who?”
Bishop lets it go, standing. The intern had failed to be flustered by his off-tempo questioning. “Of course, after we’ve had the opportunity to examine Mr. Billings’s phone, we’ll be able to gauge the veracity of your statements to me tonight.” He turns for the door.
“Is my life in danger, Agent Christie?”
He stops, looking back toward Hayley. “Any reason why you think it would be?”
Hayley shrugs, playing it noncommittal.
“Have a good night, Ms. Chill.”
In a few minutes, Bishop rejoins Sinatra in the SUV parked outside Hayley’s building. The cigarette smoke roils in a thick cloud inside the vehicle. Bishop waves his hand in front of his own face, repulsed.
“Jesus!”
Sinatra really couldn’t care less about his man’s discomfort. How many bodies has he piled up to earn the right to smoke in a mission vehicle if he wanted? It would be difficult to come up with an exact number. He should’ve put it all on QuickBooks a long time ago when he first started. Too late for that now. For these purposes, a ballpark figure will have to suffice. Twenty-two bodies, directly by his hand, is a good estimate. Surely twenty-two notches earns one the right to smoke when and where one pleases.
“Well?” he asks Bishop, gesturing with the crown of his head toward Hayley’s building.
Bishop makes a show of deliberation. This is his first job with Sinatra, and he’s been careful not to antagonize his unit leader. Everyone on the team agrees that Sinatra is odd stuff. His rampant Catholicism is the source of much speculation. Some of the guys wonder if he is a lapsed priest. Sinatra is certainly creepy enough to suggest such an irregular past. Special Operations draw the highly strung and hard-to-read from the military ranks. Not much different from serial killers, Bishop muses, we just like getting paid for it.
“She doesn’t know shit,” Bishop tells Sinatra, referring to Hayley.
“What makes you so sure?”
“I can just tell. Unless she’s a better covert operative than just about any I’ve met, this intern is a nonactor. She’s Walmart white trash desperately trying to claw her way out of Oxy-Appalachia.”
“You can just tell,” Sinatra murmurs dubiously.
Irritated and maybe a little frightened of Sinatra, Bishop again waves the cigarette smoke away from his face.
“Look, man, what did you send me in there for if you don’t trust my judgment?” Bishop jerks his thumb toward the building he had just exited. “She doesn’t know shit!”
Sinatra stares placidly at his man with an expression that is impossible to read. After a long moment of regarding an increasingly anxious Bishop, he touches the screen on his phone a few times and then lifts it to his head. He never takes his gaze off Bishop as he does so.
“It’s me,” Sinatra says into the phone. After a brief pause, “The intern isn’t involved.” Another pause. “Yes, we’re sure.”
He disconnects the call and lowers the phone. Eyes are still on Bishop.
“You know that I pray, correct?”
Bishop nods. “Yeah. I know you pray.”
“But do you know what I pray for, Bishop, or whatever your real name is?”
Bishop shakes his head. “Haven’t a clue.”
“I pray you’re right about the intern. I pray for that in the very worst possible way.”
Bishop says nothing. He’s having a difficult time meeting Sinatra’s gaze.
“Would you like to pray with me? Shall we do that together? Let’s pray that you’re right about this ‘Walmart white trash’ intern.”
Petrified, Bishop can barely nod his head okay. His eyes are like a steer’s before slaughter, peeled back and unseeing. Sinatra, without warmth, offers his hand. Bishop takes it, flinching slightly at the other man’s tight clasp.
Sinatra bows his head and closes his eyes. “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name …”
Bishop can scarcely believe this is happening. But, not wanting to take any chances, he bows his head and closes his eyes, too. With Sinatra, he joins in recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.”
* * *
HAYLEY’S ALARM GOES off at five a.m., waking her from a night of restless sleep. While showering after her usual workout, she finds herself recalling the Sunday afternoon her mother packed all six kids into the dilapidated Buick and drove up to Charleston for a visit with their grandmother. These trips were bright moments in an otherwise monochrome childhood, highly anticipated by Hayley and her siblings. Their grandma lived in a modest two-bedroom house on a tree-lined street. After a lunch of fried chicken and ice cream, Hayley and the other children would go outside to play while the women visited. Only many years later did Hayley realize the trips to Charleston were occasioned by her mother’s need for cash, grudgingly dispensed by a former public school teacher on a fixed income.
Their favorite game at the time was hide-and-seek. As the oldest, it was Hayley’s role to play referee. The middle girl, seven-year-old Sadie, had hidden behind bushes below the open window of a next-door neighbor but fled this perfect spot within seconds and approached Hayley with a frightening observation. Sadie reported hearing strange sounds coming from within the house. Hayley went to the window in order to investigate and, peering through a rip in the pulled window shade, saw something that both mystified and terrified her. Only after she joined the military did Hayley realize what the man was doing to his wife was a form of torture known popularly as “waterboarding.” Hayley, eleven years old, only recognized the intense terror of a middle-aged woman, sadistically abused by her husband.
Hayley’s siblings crowded around to look inside the house, and she silently shooed them off, not wishing to alert the man to their presence and incite his anger. Crouching down to their level, Hayley told her siblings to run back inside Grandma’s house and tell the adults to call the police. She told them to hurry and run as fast as possible. Not one of the kids ever disobeyed a direct order from their big sister, and within moments Hayley stood alone at the window.
Looking again inside the neighbor’s house, she saw the man continuing to torment his wife. Splayed on the dining room table, dish towel draped over her entire head, the woman choked and struggled against rope bonds as the man poured water from a glass pitcher over her covered face. Her frantic efforts to escape and grotesque choking suggested nothing short of imminent death. Hayley looked back over her shoulder at the house, where her siblings had disappeared. There was no sign of adult rescue. There was nothing, only the useless rhododendron bushes on either side of the back door exploding with blazing white blossoms. The agony of inaction was more than Hayley could bear. While she hesitated to act, the man was inflicting more and more pain on the woman, enough it seemed at the time to kill her.
Hayley squatted down below the window and picked up a jagged rock not much smaller than her hand. She clutched the rock as hard as she could, coerced by the sounds of struggle and choking filtering through the open window above her head. She squeezed and squeezed the rock, so hard that when she unfurled her fingers, Hayley saw blood welling up from several cuts in her palm. Emboldened by the sight of her own injury, the pain banishing all fear, she stood to her feet and threw that rock through the window of the neighbor’s house, startling the man. Hayley remained rooted in place just outside the window, even when the man came thundering over, boots cracking broken glass scattered across the wooden dining room floor, and spewed a stream of vile obscenities at her.