“It’s perfectly natural in our line of work to get scared shitless sometimes,” Crocker said.
“You ever think about the people you kill?” Davis asked.
Crocker didn’t like to admit it, and he never mentioned it to other members of his team, but sometimes he felt a kind of kinship and almost a little sympathy for the men he battled. Not sick bastards like Alizadeh, who terrorized, maimed, and murdered innocents, but common soldiers and guards like the two he and Tré had killed in the store in Juárez.
“Yeah,” Crocker said.
“Me, too.”
Alex Rinehart’s grandmother descended the basement steps of her brick colonial house and found her grandson seated at a desk in front of the window. His brow deeply furrowed in concentration, he studied an open book and scribbled something into a spiral notebook.
She set the tray with a glass of nonfat milk and a plate of freshly baked Toll House cookies beside him and read the title of the book—Advanced Quantum Physics Workbook.
“My,” she gushed. “Is this something you’re studying for school?”
Alex looked up at her and smiled with a look of pure love that touched her heart.
“Oh, Alex!” she exclaimed, ruffling his unruly dark hair and hugging him to her chest.
He squirmed free because he didn’t like to be touched, grabbed a cookie off the plate, then quickly looked up at his grandmother to see if she was okay.
She was. She’d grown used to his strange behavior, and understood that despite his unease around others, he had strong feelings and real affection for people. But she was worried. Recently his teachers and therapists had observed that he was withdrawing further. The drugs Dr. Struthers had prescribed hadn’t seemed to stem this process or even help. This was ominous, the doctor had warned, and could lead to Alex completely retreating into a world of his own.
He devoured a second cookie, gulped down half the milk, and returned to the book with an intensity that startled her.
“Alex, darling, is that something you’re studying at school?” his grandmother asked again.
Instead of answering, he turned to a clean page of the notebook and started writing furiously, covering the paper with notations and equations.
“Alex, can you hear me?”
He kept writing as though she wasn’t there, stopped, rubbed the top of his head vigorously, ripped the page out of the notebook, crumpled it, tossed it onto the floor, then resumed writing on a new sheet.
“Alex…” she whispered, picking up the balled paper and depositing it in the wire basket.
If he heard her, he didn’t stop or acknowledge her in any way. She literally felt heat rising from his head.
“I love you, Alex. I want you to know that. There are a lot of good people in the world. I’m sure there are some nice boys at your school who’d like to be your friends.”
His concentration was so intense that his grandmother couldn’t tell whether he was enjoying himself or in agony. The pace of his writing seemed to pick up. Alex was working himself into such a frenzy that his grandmother found it disturbing to watch.
Choking back a tear, she said, “I’ll be in the kitchen making dinner if you need me. Join me if you want to.” Then she quickly kissed him on the head and left.
Chapter Nineteen
The person with big dreams is more powerful than one with all the facts.
—Albert Einstein
Crocker was following the trail of water dripping from Mercedes’s body. She wore the red bathing suit he’d seen her in before. The hallways in the house were a labyrinth of circles. He was starting to feel dizzy. The only light came from candles in sconces on the walls.
He entered a big room and stopped. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was booming from speakers hung high in the corners. Wearing the wet red bikini was a little man seated at a long high table, hunched over a bucket of KFC chicken. Crocker thought he resembled Farhed Alizadeh, but he couldn’t see the man’s face.
A phone rang. He woke up.
“Crocker?” a familiar Kentucky voice asked. “It’s Captain Sutter. Stop by my office this afternoon at two.”
The clock by the phone read 7:46. It took him a second to get his bearings and answer, “Yes, sir.”
It was Wednesday, February 20. Holly had left him a note on the kitchen table. “I’ve got an appointment, then I’m going to the gym. I’ll meet you at home for dinner. Have a nice day.”
At HQ Captain Sutter reminded Crocker that he and his team had another week and a half of leave.
“I know that, sir.”
Sutter showed him a clipping from the Charlottesville Daily Progress with a picture of a horse his brother was training that he said might be running in the Kentucky Derby.