“With a bum leg?” Simpson asked, looking confused.
“It’s my left leg, numbnuts.” He tapped the side of the thick knee brace that ran from the middle of his thigh down to the bottom of his calf. “I can drive with the right. I’ll be fine. No other choice, really. Tell me what’s going on with the games? I’m sorry I hurt our chances.” His dropping out of the competition left a gaping hole in their roster, and a lot of ground to make up.
“First, let’s just clear this up.” Coach Ace stood. “I trained you all to be warriors and fighters. Boxing is one way to showcase that, but it’s not the only way. I’m damn proud of you, Sweeney. You did what you were trained to do. Fight for the right side. You probably saved that woman’s life. So I don’t want to hear about letting anyone down, or being sorry. That’s damn stupid, and you’re not a stupid guy.”
Graham watched as Coach Ace sat back down with a decisive nod. “Uh . . . thank you, Coach. So . . . results?”
Brad had been knocked out of the running that afternoon. He was serious enough about the sport and the team, Graham expected to see more disappointment. Brad shrugged. “When you’ve seen a life-or-death situation not long before, it suddenly puts things into perspective.”
Greg was in the finals for his weight class, as was Tressler and several others. It looked as though their chances of bringing home a team win were almost nil. But their spirits were high regardless.
Maybe Brad was right. Having watched one of their own—as Kara was certainly their own now—nearly die had given everyone a little perspective about the games themselves.
Team members slowly trickled out after shaking his hand. Many asked him to tell Kara they were thinking about her. They had come to consider her a member of the team, as she’d supported them, taught them, and come to be involved with one of them. She was family. That conclusion was cemented when Coach Willis walked past and dropped a small T-shirt in his lap. “For Kara,” he said in his gruff voice, beard shaking. “I really like that girl.”
Graham nodded, then looked at the shirt. Marine Corps Boxing Team, size medium. For her. He couldn’t talk around the lump in his throat, so he resorted to handshakes and head nods as the last of the team filed out. All but Greg and Brad.
He sat back, wishing he had one of those pain med IV drips like Kara did. “You’ll miss the bus.”
“They’re leaving us here. Reagan’s gonna take us home.” Sitting forward, Brad laced his fingers together beside his knee. “Marianne’s gotten some of the story from the MPs when they interviewed her, but not all of it. Apparently his older brother was in the Corps about four or five years ago. Ready to separate and move on, and he got recalled for one last deployment. Was killed in action in Afghanistan.”
Graham dug his thumbs in his eyes. It jived with what they’d told him thus far when they had come to take Kara’s statement.
“Levi and his brother were close, and he took it hard,” Greg went on. “Blamed the military, the government, and anyone else he could for his brother’s death. His parents thought, when he accepted the internship with Marianne, that he’d gotten over it.”
“Apparently not,” Graham said dryly.
“Apparently not,” Brad echoed. “So he’s been looking for ways to ‘punish’ Marines. Little ways here and there. I think they believe him when he says he never wanted to hurt anyone. Not really. Just embarrass us, inconvenience us, and eventually make it so we couldn’t compete.”
“Hurting us, just in a different way. Because from his fucked-up viewpoint, if he didn’t physically hurt us, he was better than the Marines, who killed his brother.” Graham had seen enough trials with nut jobs to know how they rationalized anything and everything.
“Exactly. The current theory is the fire was meant to stay contained, just to get rid of the uniforms. He has a thing for fire,” Brad added with a roll of his eyes. “But nobody thinks he honestly meant for it to get as out of hand as it did. Or to hurt anyone.”
Graham’s hands tightened around the chair. Whether he’d meant it or not, Kara’s life had been well and truly in danger thanks to that fuckhead’s actions.
“But he’s not getting out of jail for a long time. Well, hospital first, because he got burned worse than Kara. I’m guessing they’ll do a psych eval while he’s here. Hopefully he gets the help he needs far, far away from Lejeune, but either way, he won’t be bothering us.”
Greg yawned and stretched out his legs in a way that made Graham long to do the same. Reading his mind, his friend asked, “What’s the prognosis on the knee?”
“Fractured patella, but the best kind of fracture, if such a thing exists. Not displaced, so should heal without surgery as long as I stay off it. Six to eight weeks.”
“You’ll be back up in six.”