The Goodbye Man
- Автор: Дивер Джеффри
- Серия: Colter Shaw #2
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: G. P. Putnam’s Sons
- ISBN: 978-0-525-53597-3
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Goodbye Man». Краткое содержание книги:
“I get it.”
She eyed him carefully.
“Then, yeah, the IED. That’s a—”
His nod told her he was familiar with the unfortunately sanitized name for bomb. Improvised explosive device. In fact one of his reward assignments had been to find one that had gone missing.
“What’s the difference between a cannon in World War One and a B-17 dropping a five-hundred-pound bomb in Germany? Probably none. But an IED? No cannon you hear on the horizon lobbing things at you. No air raid sirens. Just a stretch of asphalt, a trashcan, a phone card kiosk, children playing, goats. Those fucking IEDs could be anywhere. A baby buggy missing a wheel. That’s what got Gretta and her team. Three dead. She survived. She said it was like God punched her. Everything moved, the whole world moved. I’m getting boring now.”
“No.”
“Gretta came back. VA, private docs, therapy. The treatment did what it could. One of the things she tried was the Foundation. I was discharged and moved to where she was living.
“I had dinner with her maybe two months ago. She was in a great mood. She said everything was going to be fine. She’d be forgiven for fucking up, or getting careless, or whatever the hell she thought she’d done over there. Maybe looked away, missed the buggy, maybe texting. Who knows? I guarantee there’s nothing to be forgiven for. There’s no fucking handbook. There is only how to kill and not get killed, how to get intel, how to refuel vehicles, how to boil drinking water. But not on how to live that kind of life.
“At the end of the dinner, she hugged me and said, ‘Goodbye, until tomorrow’ and did that salute.”
Victoria’s eyes swung slowly from Shaw to the sky. Maybe looking for the eagle.
“She went home and shot herself. So happy, so content one minute. Then dead an hour later. I had to figure out what’d happened.” She looked his way. “Like you had to with Adam.”
She continued, “I helped her brother clean out her apartment and I found her notebooks from the Foundation. All her writing about the Minuses, Pluses. The regrets. The notes about how in the next life she’d be fine. She’d ‘advance.’ She’d be with her buddies who’d died. Her mother, her nephew. And me.”
Victoria was silent for a moment, the breeze hissing through the leaves, clicking branches. She pulled the vest closer around her.
“Annual suicides among civilian women is about five per hundred thousand. For women in active duty or veterans, it’s twenty-nine. You’re a mother and you go to the Whole Foods after soccer practice in Omaha and the newsstand next to the door blows up, killing four. You’re a businesswoman just shooting the shit with your buddy, having crabs at a restaurant in Baltimore, and your friend gets hit by a sniper shot you don’t even hear until he’s a pile of clothes on the ground.
“If that happens to you, you’re never the same again. Ever. But we put on a uniform and so people think we must be different, we must be immune. We’re not. It’s just as bad for us. And the worst thing that somebody can say to you is, oh, let it go. The next life, you’ll be fine. Eli had to be stopped.”
After a moment, she put the darkness away. Smiling, she said, “Do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
She handed him her phone. “Get a picture of me here.”
Victoria walked out onto the grassy field and turned to face him. He lifted the phone. He took several shots. The lighting was good and with the resplendent mountains as a backdrop, he thought she’d be pleased.
Turning away, Victoria gazed skyward. “You see the eagle? I’d love to get him in the shot too.”
Shaw was scanning the sky. “No bird.”
“Call his agent,” she said, laughing. “Have him set it up.”
As he aimed the lens once more, Shaw heard the sound of brush rustling. He turned to see someone sprinting quickly through the woods toward the clearing. A heavyset man in a Foundation uniform burst from the foliage, red faced, sweating. He was gasping from the exertion. The climb up here from the camp was steep.
It was Journeyman Samuel. He glanced from Shaw to Victoria, who was closest to him. He sprinted toward her.
“Victoria!” Shaw shouted. “To your right!”
She turned.
It was too late. She had no time to strike a defensive posture. The big man’s bulk and speed slammed her flat to the ground. She lay stunned and breathless.
Shaw dropped the phone and started running. “No, Samuel! No!”
The man gripped Victoria by the sweater, dragged her to the edge of the cliff and without a moment’s hesitation pushed her over. Shaw heard her piercing cry as she fell the hundred or so feet.
Samuel rose and looked at Shaw, his tear-filled eyes revealing both sorrow and anger. He whispered, “Goodbye... until tomorrow,” and leapt after her into the emptiness.
Three: Echo Ridge
72
June 20
This time the rattlesnake was real, unlike the imaginary serpent Dalton Crowe had used as an excuse to shoot a hole in his rental car’s Michelin a week or so ago.
Colter Shaw was hiking up a narrow trail of rock and dirt and gravel in a remote corner of his family’s property in eastern California. The snake, a big one, was smack in his route, in its coiled state, lazy, probably full of a tasty rodent lunch. Still it was ready for a defensive strike, which would be fast and accurate. They are, after all, pure muscle.
Shaw had spotted it and paused at the same time as the urgent rattle from the tail began. Amazing how creatures come to be, he was thinking. It would have taken hundreds of thousands of years to develop this curious feature, which said, in effect, Stop or I’ll shoot.
Shaw was not alone on his trek. He was accompanied by a solidly built black-and-brown Rottweiler. Another canine might have instinctively charged — not having learned from YouTube or 1960 TV Western reruns what the rattle meant. Chase tensed but Shaw’s command, “Wait,” froze him in position.
There aren’t many defenses against a rattlesnake, other than gaiters — leg guards. Pepper spray is useless. Their eyes are protected with an impervious shield, and the capsicum that blinds us is like water to them. And, as many a person who’s ever tried to Mace a snake can attest, if you’re close enough to hit them, they’re probably close enough to hit you.
As for Chase, the dog, a canine’s physiology is less susceptible to snake toxins than a human’s. But as an added precaution for this outing, Shaw had administered snakebite vaccine. He recalled, from years ago, his father’s question to the youngest of the Shaw children: “So, Button, the odds of a vaccinated dog surviving a rattler strike are what?”
Nine-year-old Dorion had squinted, considering. “Depending on size — of the dog and the snake — and where it strikes, maybe around eighty percent.”
“Yep, good. And the odds of a vaccinated dog surviving a dead rattler?”
“Pretty much a hundred.”
“You’ve got it.”
“But I don’t want to shoot a snake, Daddy.”
“Who does? But sometimes it’s a question of you or them, Button. And the answer is always: you.”
Shaw was wearing a hip holster in which sat his Colt .357 Magnum revolver (a model ironically named after another snake, a Python). But he didn’t want to shoot a snake either. His thinking was that he and Chase were in its backyard, not their own — and, truth be told, the creature wasn’t behaving badly at all; it was simply being a snake.
So he chose another option. Detour.
Shaw found a fairly straight branch, about four feet long, and trimmed it with his Ka-Bar knife.