Officer out of Uniform (Lock and Key Book 2) (28 page)

6 Years Ago

Helmand Province, Afghanistan: though Henry had been there for months, it was far from a temporary home. It was too hostile for that, merely the place where his boots touched the ground and he laid his head down – warily – at night. He was always grateful for that: the chance to lie down, mark off another day of his deployment. He tried not to think about it too much though, because that only made it seem longer.

For now, the scorching heat and familiar stretches of boredom punctuated by bursts of adrenaline were his life. It was his second deployment, and he handled it all right, most days.

Today was different. He had a bad feeling, an uneasiness churning in his gut, an itch between his shoulder blades. He felt like a target, out here sandwiched between dry earth and an endless, barely-blue sky. The muted shade was almost white, like the sun shone so hard here that it had bleached the color from everything, even the air.

Maybe it was that they’d been here before and had exchanged fire just yards from where he stood now. Maybe it was the fact that the compound they were approaching could hold anything. That was what people feared the most, wasn’t it? The unknown. Things they couldn’t see, but felt in their bones.

He was no different – he was only human. In this place, he’d learned to anticipate the possibilities, as awful and infinite as they sometimes seemed. The compound might be the mother of hidden surprises, deathtraps contained within walls that had hidden the truth from their view as they’d laid all their careful plans.

He breathed in the dust stirred up by Addison and Rafferty’s boots. They were two members of the four-man fire team he led. Today they’d been grouped together with two other teams to form a squad, and someone else was in charge. Henry wasn’t calling the shots, and so he did his best to tune out the inexplicable uneasiness that had his skin crawling.

Rafferty turned and shot Henry a brief look, half frown and half grin. Henry recognized the expression as an admission that the situation sucked, but forging on was inevitable.

Did Rafferty have the same feeling Henry did? And what about Addison and Garrow, his rifleman?

He was gripped by the urge to ask them, to know whether they felt it too. Because if they didn’t, and it was just him, it was probably nothing to worry about. But he knew these men better than he knew anyone else. They relied on each other in a way most people outside the Marine Corps had never experienced, would never experience. So if they felt it too…

He opened his mouth to speak, but a sound in the distance distracted him. It had the ring of a powerful noise heard from far away, and he turned, took an instinctive step toward it as he squinted against the inescapable glare of the noon sun.

The next sound came from behind him. Much louder, much closer. It was accompanied by an impact, one that slammed up against the back of him. There was no real pain, just force, and he got the feeling that the prickling between his shoulder blades was real now – something was sticking in him.

He turned in time to see Addison on the ground, and Rafferty falling. The scene in front of him seemed scrambled, like he was trying to watch TV and the image was fucked-up, blurred lines that didn’t quite make a clear picture.

And then he realized what he was looking at. Addison’s legs were gone below the knees, and though Rafferty looked whole, he was lying on the ground in a way that made it clear he was worse off than he looked. Another split second of staring revealed that he was bleeding from the neck.

The smell of burning flesh filled the air, mixed with the scent of homemade explosives.

Henry cradled his weapon as he got down on his knees, tried to see whether his friends were still alive.

Other Marines gathered too, and the corpsman pushed through. Tried to stop the blood from flowing from what was left of Addison’s legs with tourniquets, shot him up with morphine and wrote a big letter M on his forehead in black marker.

Rafferty never got the morphine; whatever had cut him had gone through the jugular. Most of his blood seemed to have gone into the ground already. The dry soil soaked it right up, drew it deep into the bloodthirsty earth.

By the time the helicopter came, Henry could feel the blood running down the crack of his ass, down his legs. Redness blotted the desert camo pattern. Still, he wasn’t lying on the ground like Rafferty, or Addison, whose eyes looked glassy now.

They still made him get in the helicopter. He got the feeling that he must look worse than he felt, though he couldn’t see his own back, just the stains spreading over the legs of his pants.

The helicopter climbed higher and higher above the place where blood marked the ground like a sloppy X. He stared, then watched as everyone inside the helicopter gave up on Addison.

Both of his dead friends were so close he could’ve reached out and touched them, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d left them both behind on the ground, back where they’d last stood together.

* * * * *

Henry crossed the creek and got back to the plantation house’s grounds in time to see smoke billowing from a window near the foundation. Two guys in work boots and grass-stained pants burst out of the open basement door. They were carrying someone between them – a woman. Her clothes were filthy, but her hair was blonde and her bright red shoes were unmistakable.

They laid her on the grass, and a loud noise sounded from somewhere in the distance – a siren. Henry didn’t turn toward it, couldn’t look away. He was frozen on the near side of the creek, fifty yards from where Kerry and a woman with short silver hair were now kneeling beside Sasha.

Henry heard Kerry’s sobbing from where he stood, loud and clear.

Kerry and Sasha had been best friends for years. An intense tightness worked its way through Henry’s chest, and a wrenching feeling beneath his breastbone made him weak as he stared. The tiny brunette’s shoulders shook, and her dark hair hung in front of her face like a veil. Henry was momentarily mesmerized by her grief, by an empathy that ran deep, rooted in his past.

And then any ability he had to empathize was swallowed up by a sense of déjà vu that crushed him. A part of him wanted to go to Sasha, no matter what, but his guilt was an unbearable burden, too heavy to allow him to walk. Her mother was approaching now, running out of the restaurant building and toward her daughter.

That broke him, destroyed any thoughts he’d had of intruding on the scene. Instead, he forced himself to watch from a distance, where he belonged. He wished for Brutus to crawl out of the creek and swallow him whole, but it didn’t happen.

This was his fault. He’d been so focused on redeeming himself that he’d turned his back on the woman he loved in her time of desperate need. He’d as good as killed her. He’d taken her mother’s only child, Kerry’s closest friend. He’d inflicted the pain he’d been carrying around all these years on other people, and he’d torn himself in half in the process.

Flashbacks hit his consciousness in rapid fire fashion, disjointed and fleeting. He tried to hold onto them, tried to lose himself in the memories and be anywhere but here, anyone but the man who’d abandoned Sasha to die. It didn’t work, though: the memories flashed like flickering lights, then died, leaving him alone in the stark darkness of his current reality.

Jesus, he’d fucked up. He’d put it all on the line, loving her. And it’d all blown up again. The agony of knowing what he’d done – of seeing her laid out in the grass like Rafferty or Addison in the sand – raged around him, an inferno of unbearable guilt that burnt away his naïve hopes that he could make up for his old failures, get past them. Every fiber of his being screamed for an escape, for anything to make it stop.

Moments ago, he’d shoved his gun back into his duty belt holster as he’d sprinted toward the house. It seemed incredibly heavy on his hip, but when he drew it and lifted it to his head, it was the lightest thing in the world.

* * * * *

6 Years Ago

Life was no longer simple. Before, each day of Henry’s deployment had been defined by the fact that he was still alive. Now, he was a little banged up and heavily bandaged, but still overwhelmingly fine. The gashes that’d been carved into the skin and muscle of his back by pieces of shrapnel the day before were deep, but they’d heal. He wasn’t missing any body parts – not so much as a pinky finger.

There was no question that he was missing something else, though. It’d been 36 hours since he’d been air lifted away from the scene of the explosion, and Rafferty and Addison’s deaths had turned out to be the beginnings of a ripple effect. The mission had gone on without him, and ended without him.

There’d been another fire fight at the compound today. Garrow was a casualty, as were several more Marines from the squad. Back at the base with his flesh wounds, Henry was the only member of his fire team left. His unremarkable injuries had saved him.

He couldn’t define the success of a day based on his own survival anymore. The victory of living to see another day felt hollow, now. Thousands of miles from home, he felt truly alone for the first time. Like he’d abandoned the path that had been meant for him, and now his punishment was to wander uncharted territory alone.

* * * * *

“What the fuck!”

The sounds of an explosion and a descending helicopter roared in Henry’s ears, as real as the earth beneath his feet. He’d been pulled into a riptide current of memory like he’d wished for, and hadn’t heard anyone approach. Now, he felt an impact in his gut as the air was knocked out of him. There was a wrenching in his arm, and the gun slipped from his hand.

He lashed out instinctively, hit his attacker with an elbow to the chest, turned and swung.

He punched Grey square in the jaw.

His friend blinked, stared for half a second and then threw himself at Henry, knocking him to the ground.

They landed on the grass in a tangle, and Henry struggled to breathe. Grey was heavy as hell and the grass was wet from that afternoon’s rain shower, which made it hard to gain traction. For a few seconds they wrestled, and Grey returned the blow Henry had dealt him.

Henry saw stars, and then Grey stood, breathing hard and glaring down at him. “What the hell was that for?”

Blood trickled from Henry’s lip and down his chin, warm and metallic-tasting.

Grey had his gun.

“I’d ask you what the hell you were about to do just now,” Grey continued, “but it seemed pretty fucking obvious! Jesus, what were you thinking?”

Henry stared at where Sasha was lying motionless in the grass, surrounded by her friends and family.

“What are you doing here?” was all Henry could say. This conversation didn’t seem real. Grey didn’t even seem real. Just a mirage that had knocked him to the ground, someone who couldn’t possibly be here, intruding on the worst moments of Henry’s life and somehow fucking them up even worse.

“Alicia invited me and Liam for dinner. She said everyone would be here. I just got here.”

Sirens screamed and lights flashed as emergency vehicles came tearing down Wisteria’s driveway. An ambulance first, then the police, a fire truck and more ambulances. They invaded the lawn, tore up the grass. Soon the place was swarming. Henry felt a million miles away from all the lights and desperate action.