I stared out at the room and behind me, Venuti’s voice was low and hard. “End it.”
On the ride back to the field office, Venuti said, “You’re going to get extended leave and you’re not to do any interviews. Zero. No reporters. Not the one that calls you from LA or that cute TV reporter here, none of them. Talk to them and you’re fired. As it is, you may want to clear out your desk so it isn’t done for you. Throw it all in a box and show it to me and I’ll walk you to the door.”
“So I’m gone?”
Venuti wouldn’t answer.
“When does this leave start?”
“It starts when you drive off the lot. Don’t show up tomorrow thinking you’re needed for something. You’re not. You were way over the line there. As a matter of fact, you’ve always been over the line. You’re a street agent who has always had one foot out the door. You flout the rules. You—”
“Out there is where it all happens, Dan.”
“We all make choices. You made another today, same as you chose to go to Iraq and defuse bombs. What you can get away with in our office is different than what you get away with in a national press conference. You directly contradicted a Bureau position in an ongoing investigation.”
“The Bureau is investigating. It doesn’t have a position yet.”
“Okay, Grale, whatever you say.”
Venuti exhaled hard but said nothing as we pulled into the field office garage. Upstairs, he left me alone at my desk. There were only a few photos, but they mattered. I found a small box and put the photos and an ancient leather-bound notebook and a camera I liked in it. There were other smaller tokens and talismans that I sorted and dropped in. I put the electronic devices the Bureau would want to wipe clean in an upper drawer. Into my box, I put the small wooden plaque my nephew, Nate, had made. It carried the Bureau motto, “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.” For now, I kept my badge and gun.
Downstairs, Venuti caught me walking toward the door and walked with me. He commented on the box tucked under my left arm.
“That’s all you’re taking? If I were you I’d clear everything and turn in my badge and gun.”
“I’ll turn them in after I’m fired.”
“Save yourself a trip.”
I stopped at the door and Venuti took a step back and put his hands on his hips.
“You’re as good an investigator and bomb tech as I’ve ever met, Grale, but you’ve never been enough of a team player. If you’d done it right, you could have gotten yourself promoted today.”
“And who would have spoken up for Beatty?”
“Beatty was a head case. He had trouble defining reality. Who quits one short of a thousand enemy kills? No one would, but your friend Beatty did.”
I tried to understand where he was coming from with that. Why say it? I stood quiet a moment and thought about Jeremy. Among the definitions of a signature wound is moral injury. Grief plays in. Guilt. But not necessarily fear. Maybe I understood Beatty better than Dan. Maybe I shared something with him. Then I had another thought.
“He never really quit,” I said.
“That’s right, I forgot. He was medically discharged. They got rid of him.”
“You still don’t get it. He never quit. He crossed over a thousand kills yesterday protecting Creech Air Force Base. See you later, Dan.”
That afternoon Julia and I put together her new bedroom and we picked a date for the memorial. Jo called to say her colleagues would cover her rounds for ten days, and the next morning the three of us packed and climbed into my old Jeep with Coal to start the long drive to Colorado and the little cabin Jim and I bought together so many years ago. Julia would get to see and stay in the cabin she’d heard about all her life but never been to.
Melissa wouldn’t go there because the cabin needed so much work, but it would be fine for a week in July. It was outside of Ouray, not far from Telluride. It would be new country for Julia but connected to everything before. I watched Jo put on a baseball cap and glasses, and just before pulling away I turned and looked at Julia in the backseat with Coal leaning against her. She knew I was checking on her. She knew I knew how hard it was.
“You ready, Julia?”
“I’m ready.”
“Then let’s go.”
Acknowledgments
Heartfelt thanks to my agent, Philip Spitzer, and to Lukas Ortiz, of the Spitzer Literary Agency. Concentration vanished after the death of my wife, Judy, in 2013. Philip’s enthusiasm and confidence that he would sell this novel did much for me when I returned to writing and sent him this story. Thanks as well to former FBI agent and crime writer George Fong, and to John Tanza, also career FBI, now retired from the Las Vegas Field Office. Acquiring editor Jacquelyn Ben-Zekry of Thomas & Mercer hooked into the novel, bought it, and made it better, as did Peggy Hageman’s knowing and insightful editing. Thank you Kevin Smith, and a nod to an old friend, fellow writer Tony Broadbent for those conversations long ago.