chapter 10
FOR JAKE, THE past eighteen months had been difficult, to say the least. He kept his worries, fears, and anxieties bottled up. He never shared any of it with anyone—not the multitude of counselors, therapists, and doctors—not even Morgan. It was ten hours of hell. Jake had tried to avoid a confrontation, but when cornered, he had killed a man to start a night of terror and then killed another to finish it. Jake had done what was necessary to survive and to protect the lives of Katy and Elizabeth Beasley, a young woman who also happened to be in the wrong place at the worst possible time.
The night’s aftermath could have easily broken Jake and Morgan’s already strained marriage; however, their relationship became noticeably stronger. The episode served to bring them together and make each appreciate the other more.
Jake maintained to Morgan, and to anyone else who asked, that he was doing fine and suffering no ill effects. But he was slowly deteriorating from boredom. Every day he went to work, watched computer screens, and held the hands of his clients, who expected him to see into the future. He was in the rat race, chasing cheese, and he cared nothing about it.
The events of that night in an Alabama swamp—being stalked, lying in wait to kill a man, running for his life in the inky darkness, and being responsible for other lives—had purged Jake of normalcy. He now needed more from his life and out of it; but at forty, with a huge mortgage, two car payments, and private-school tuition, a career change was not in the cards. He had no financial reserves or assets to sustain any deviation from his current path.
He missed the rush he experienced in those deadly encounters, and he had begun dreaming that he worked as a federal game warden, tasting the adrenaline.
For the past eighteen months, almost every morning before work, he had eaten breakfast with a group of older men—in their seventies and eighties—all veterans, at a gas station diner. They noticed the change in Jake but didn’t discuss it in front of him. Jake could sense that they knew, and he felt at peace in their company. The only thing that appeared to matter to the old men was their newfound respect for him—for his character and what he had been willing to do when faced with evil. Jake was beginning to feel as though they now considered him a peer.
He poured himself into a career that he didn’t love and strove to be a better husband. He paid more attention to Morgan, he began teaching a young-adult Sunday-school class, and he went to a Southern Baptist couples’ retreat where he badly wanted to fish in the scenic mountain lake but didn’t, which killed him; he knew it had to be the most underfished lake on the entire North American continent.