He looks through the windshield at the fall foliage and the azure pond water. The trees aren’t at their peak but they’re still beautiful. Fiery oranges and reds and crazy sunburned yellows. He relaxes and lets the heroin dissolve in his bloodstream.
He’s never looked at the statistics, so he has no idea how many veterans are opiate addicts of some sort, but he imagines the number is quite high. Especially for people who have done a couple of combat tours. During the ’08 surge, every single member of his company had been injured or wounded. After a while people just stopped reporting themselves to the medics. What was the point? Nothing they could do about a concussion or a broken rib or a sprained back. You were just taking up a bed when your buddies were out there clearing roads and removing explosive charges from bridges.
What these opiates do, what heroin does, is remove the pain from your body temporarily. All the accumulated pain of all those decades walking the Earth. Pain from the grinding of bone on bone, pain from falls, pain from people dropping girders on you, pain from the incompetent operation of machinery, pain from falling thirty feet into a wadi, pain from an overpressure shock wave from an IED thirty feet to your rear.
And that’s just the physical pain.
He tilts the car seat back and lets the heroin ease his burdens in a way that even sleep cannot. The μ-opioid receptors in his brain activate a cascade that leads to a release of dopamine and a rush of well-being.
His eyes flicker and he zoetropes the strange twiggy trees on the pond’s far shore, the falling leaves, and the thin-legged wading birds walking over the pond’s mercury surface. Memories and images flood his mind whenever he uses. Usually bad memories. Usually the war. Sometimes 9/11. He thinks about Cara and Blair. He’s just over forty, but he has been married and divorced twice. Nearly everybody he knows is in the same boat, of course, and it’s worse among the enlisted men. Sergeant McGrath, a guy on his last tour, had been divorced four times.
Cara was just a youthful mistake—they were married for only thirteen months—but Blair…oh boy, Blair was a Townes Van Zandt song. She had taken a big chunk of his heart, his life, and his money.
Money. Another worry. Seven more years in the Marines and he could have retired on half pay. But the truth was that he had just barely avoided court-martial for what had happened at Bastion in September 2012.
Women, money, the goddamn war…hell with it all, he thinks and closes his eyes and lets the heroin fix him.
The H fixes him.
Fixes him in spades.
He sleeps for about twenty minutes and wakes and drives to a 7-Eleven to buy a pack of Marlboros and a Gatorade. The worry about Rachel has temporarily slipped his mind.
He gets back in the cab and turns on the radio. They’re playing Springsteen. It’s new Springsteen and he doesn’t know new Springsteen but it’s all right. He lights himself a cigarette and sips the Gatorade and then drives to Holden, where he takes 122A into town.
He’s been back in Worcester about two months now. He doesn’t feel sentimental about the place. He has no family left here and very few friends from the old days.
The apartment is in an old mill that has been converted into condos. It’s only a flop to crash in and get mail.
He parks the car and goes inside.
He grabs a Sam Adams from the fridge and plugs the iPhone into the charger. When it comes back to life, he looks at a second text from Rachel.
They said it was OK for me to bring you in. Call me, please! it says.
He dials her number and she answers immediately. “Pete?” she asks.
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“Are you home?”
“Yeah. What’s going on?”
“I’ll call you right back,” she says.
The phone rings. It says Unknown Caller. “Rachel?”
“I’m calling you from a burner phone. Oh, Pete, I need to talk to somebody. I tried to talk to Marty but he’s in Georgia. Oh God,” she begins and dissolves into sobs.
“Have you been in an accident? What’s happening?” he asks.
“It’s Kylie. They’ve taken Kylie. They’ve kidnapped her.”
“What? Are you sure she’s not just—”
“They’ve taken her, Pete!”
“Have you called the police?”
“I can’t call the cops, Pete. I can’t call anybody.”
“Call the police, Rachel. Call them now!”
“I can’t, Pete, it’s complicated. It’s so much worse than you can imagine.”
20
Thursday, 6:00 p.m.
Pete has the same recurring thought as Rachel does: If they harm one hair on Kylie’s head, he will scorch their world and stamp on the smoldering ashes. He will spend the rest of his life hunting them down and killing them all.
No one is going to harm Kylie, and they are going to get her back.
Pete drives the Dodge Ram hard to the front gate of the self-storage yard on Route 9. He parks outside locker 33. It’s the biggest locker you can get, the size of a couple of garages. He had graduated from the small locker to the medium one and now to their “deluxe storage facility.” He opens the padlock, rolls up the metal door, finds the light switch, and pulls the door closed behind him.
When his mom sold the house and moved to that place near Scottsdale, Pete had just taken all his stuff and dumped it in here, adding to it over the years. Until he bought the apartment he’s in now, he had never really had a civilian house. He’d lived in the married quarters at Camp Lejeune and a succession of billets in Iraq, Qatar, Okinawa, and Afghanistan. This anonymous self-storage place between the road and the old ruined freight railway is the closest thing he’s got to a permanent home.
He can spend hours here going through his old crap but today he ignores the nostalgia boxes and goes straight to the gun cabinet on the wall at the back. Rachel was confused and unclear on the phone. Kylie had been kidnapped and at this stage Rachel didn’t want to go to the police. She wanted to cooperate with the kidnappers and do what they asked. If he can’t persuade her to bring in the FBI, the two of them will need to be well armed. He unlocks the gun cabinet and takes out both of his handguns—his grandfather’s navy-issue .45 ACP and his own Glock 19—and finally his Winchester twelve-gauge. His rifle is in the cab already.
He takes spare ammo for all the weapons and grabs a couple of flash-bang stun grenades he’d smuggled home. If this becomes a rescue mission, what else will he need? He gets his B-and-E equipment—lock-pick kit, sledgehammer, EM-alarm jammer, latex gloves, flashlight—and the bugging and anti-bugging gear he’d acquired for his post Corps corporate work.
He loads everything into the Dodge Ram and wonders, What else?
He takes the zip-lock bag containing his stash of heroin out of the glove compartment.
This would be the time to go cold turkey. To end it. Leave it here and drive away without it.
He has other priorities now.
Never going to get another opportunity like this one.
Torch it. Ride the pain. Get Kylie back.
Two roads. Yellow wood. All that shit.
He stands there.
Hesitating.
Thinking.
He shakes his head, puts the plastic bag in his jacket pocket, closes the locker, exits the storage yard, and heads for the highway.