Walt turned and felt his knees buckle when he saw Jason’s wife.
“Meghan,” Jason’s father said. “This is Walt Jenkins.”
Walt imagined the terrified look on Meghan’s face was a mirror image of his own. She stopped a couple of strides away from him, unblinking and unmoving, her mouth agape. It was obvious to everyone—Jason’s parents, Jim Oliver, and anyone else within eyeshot of Walt and Meghan—that they knew each other. That they had been sleeping together for the past year and were in love was less obvious, but only slightly.
“Have you met before?” Jason’s father asked in a credulous voice.
“Uh, no,” Walt managed in a strained voice on the brink of cracking. He held up his hand to wave, but it looked more like an act of surrender. “I’m . . .”
He placed a hand on his bandaged neck and felt the dampness of blood seeping through the gauze.
“. . . . . . . . . very sorry for your loss.”
It was all he could manage before he turned and walked quickly to the back of the room, through the atrium, and into the dark hallway. He pushed open the door and squinted against the sunlight as he sucked for air. His lungs hurt and his chest heaved. He stumbled to his car and fell behind the steering wheel. Starting the engine, he pulled away even before he had the door closed.
CHAPTER 33
Manhattan, NY Friday, July 2, 2021
“SHE WAS YOUR PARTNER’S WIFE?” AVERY ASKED, LEANING CLOSE TO Walt—a position she found herself in as she hung on every word of his story.
“My dead partner’s wife, yes,” Walt said, taking a needed swallow of rum. “That’s why she hadn’t returned my calls all week. She was busy dealing with her own tragedy—her husband’s death. She had no idea I was Jason’s partner or that I was the other agent who’d been shot. We were together for a year and she never told me she was married. She knew I worked in the New York field agency for the Bureau, but she never pressed me for details about my job. I always took it as sort of a separation of church and state. You know, let’s not talk about work. Let’s just enjoy each other’s company. But she didn’t want to know anything about my work because she didn’t want to know if I knew her husband.”
“What happened to you?” Avery asked in a hesitant voice. “What was your injury? It was the same thing that got your partner killed?”
“Jason and I were on a routine surveillance operation. We thought we were just in for another long night of taking photos and gathering intel on a suspected Al Qaeda cell. As we were watching the building across the street, a man in a ski mask approached the front of our van and opened fire. The bullets that found my body somehow managed to avoid all the important plumbing.”
“How close did they come?”
“Very. One pierced my heart.”
“My God, Walt. And Jason died?”
“He was gone before the ambulance arrived.”
“Who was the man? In the ski mask?”
“That’s the bitch of the story. He was an asterisk to the whole ordeal. The guy was a strung-out meth addict. We were watching the apartment building of a suspected Al Qaeda sympathizer, tracking his movements to see if we could link him to anyone important. The building across the street was running a meth lab. We had no idea, but the meth-heads caught wind of us and got nervous. So one of them walked outside and started shooting.”
Avery’s mouth hung open for a moment. “Absolutely nothing to do with the war on terror?”
“Nada.”
“Did you talk to her after the funeral? Meghan?”
“Once,” Walt said. “To tell her I was going away for a while. The story about the two of us broke soon after the funeral and spread like wildfire through the agency. Everyone assumed I’d been sneaking around behind Jason’s back and only when I got to the funeral did I finally crack. And when every one of your colleagues believes that you were knowingly sleeping with your partner’s wife, and then that partner is killed in the line of duty . . . Let’s just say there was not a lot of sympathy for me.”
“Did you try to explain the situation?”
“I never had a chance, and I don’t know that anyone would have believed me. I was politely asked to retire. They offered me my full pension and it was a now-or-never proposal. Take my retirement and disappear. The Bureau is extremely sensitive about its reputation. An agent being killed in the line of duty was a big enough scar for them. The scandal of an affair involving the fallen agent’s wife and his partner was something they wanted to avoid. They made their wishes very clear to me. I took the money and ran.”
“To Jamaica?”
Walt nodded and made it halfway through his drink.
“Whatever happened with Meghan?”
“I ended things.”
“Just like that?”
Walt pouted his lower lip and nodded. “Pretty much.”
“That sounds vague.”
“I see her once a year. I attend an annual survivors meeting here in the city.”
“Survivors meeting?”
“It turns out that surviving the night Jason and I were ambushed was a bit of a miracle. Others who have survived similar ordeals and beat similar odds get together each year and celebrate their miracles and the people who saved them. The doctors and nurses and first responders all receive invitations from the survivors. I invite my trauma surgeon each year. If your story deals with others who were not as fortunate, the family members of those who died are also invited. I see Meghan at this meeting once a year, every June.”
“And?”
“We hug, say very little, and then I get the hell out of there and find a bar that serves good rum.”
“You give her a hug and it’s over? You don’t talk with her?”
“Small talk, maybe. ‘It’s good to see you.’ ‘You look good.’ But that’s about it. There’s nothing else to say.”
Avery raised her eyebrows. “There’s a shitload to say!”
“It’s confusing. I loved her, she betrayed me, and there’s no possible way for us to be together. I should just leave it alone, but for some reason I go through this self-sabotage each year and, trust me, I’m no better for it.”