Wade pushed the tray across to his son, Kyle, at the VA hospital in Denver. Three years earlier, Marine Specialist Kyle Dunn’s supply truck had driven over an IED in the Helmand Province in Afghanistan, blowing off his right leg and arm, rupturing his spleen, puncturing his kidney, and rattling his brain against the sides of his skull like ice in a blender. A diffuse axonal trauma in the brain forced him to have to relearn everything from taking a step, to feeding himself, reciting the alphabet again, or even taking a piss. Pretty much everything he knew how to do as a five-year-old.
He was doing well, the doctors claimed. He could now speak sentences and align numbered blocks in order and pick up a fork, a huge step from where he was a couple of years ago. But, truth was, he might require care for the rest of his life. Wade generally made the drive down on Sundays to visit. He and Kyle’s mother were long divorced and she sent him money whenever she could, off in Florida and working on a cruise ship somewhere.
“C’mon,” Wade said, “take some of this soup. You best eat something, son.”
Kyle shook his head and pushed Wade’s arm aside. “Not now. Not hungry, Dad.”
“Okay, okay. Maybe the nurse will have some better sway with you,” Wade said.
Once, Kyle had been a handsome, athletic boy, all-state in wrestling and head of the Why Not? Society, a volunteer group in Pitkin County, who won a full ride to CU in Boulder. But he dropped out after his freshman year to sign up with the Marines. His own little Pat Tillman.
But like with Tillman, who put his NFL career aside to sign up with his brother, it all came crashing down. Though Kyle managed to survive.
The prognosis was hopeful, but slow. Agonizingly so. And costly. The VA paid for most of it. But what if he was never able to walk or live alone again for the rest of his life? Or if he couldn’t hold a real job ever again, which seemed likely?
Then there would be all the supplemental things. Like an aide to live with him when he got home. Wade surely couldn’t. And a customized van to drive, so he could get around. And a home that was retrofitted for his needs. And people to continue to help him speak; and head doctors so he could tell them about the horrible images swirling around in his brain that caused him to just turn away in midsentence and stare into space for hours.
Who’d cover that?
Wade knew that, he’d lived his life in the wrong. He’d crossed the line. Not once. Many times. The Watkins boy was just one example. He was a lot like Kyle. Athletic. In the prime of his life. And then there were those people up there in that balloon—the terror they must have felt as it burned up around them and all came crashing down. He never really actually knew what was going to happen to them; he was only told to look the other way and handed a big, fat envelope of cash. When he looked at Kyle, sometimes it made it all seem okay. The things he’d done. Easier to swallow.
“Come on, what do you say we check out the Rockies …” Wade picked up the remote clicker. Kyle liked watching baseball. He could watch anything he didn’t once play, which caused him too much pain. Wade flicked on the TV and found the channel. “Look, De La Rosa’s pitching. He’s good. You like him, right?”
Kyle nodded, the inkling of a smile. “Good r-run,” he said, then stared vacantly.
“Run?” Wade questioned.
Kyle thought about it a little longer, screwing up his brow, then turned to Wade. “E-R-A.”
“That’s good, Kyle. Good. Yes, he’s got a mighty fine earned run average. He does.”
Wade’s cell phone chimed. He pulled it out and took a look at who it was. There was no one he really cared to hear from these days.
His stomach dropped. He’d prayed he’d never hear from this person again. But inwardly he always knew it never was over, once you stepped over that line. He let it ring several times, and thought about just letting it go to his voice mail and pretending he had gone away somewhere. For good. Like maybe Africa.
“I’ll be back in a second, son,” he said to Kyle, and stepped out into the hall. He put his back against the wall and answered. “Chief Dunn here.”
“Bet I’m the last person in the world you were hoping to hear from,” the caller said, with a smirk in his voice that cut through Wade like a knife through butter.
“Yes, you could say that’s true. What do you want?”
“We need you to do something. And you’re still on the payroll, Chief.”
“You already made me do something,” Wade said. “And I did it. You’ve got no cause to keep calling me.”
“You think you got all that money just to look the other way like some mall cop. Or put a few photos under lock and key in your desk drawer? You know more than anyone how your son has that private room and all that fancy attention up there. And you better not forget why.”
“I can’t talk. Not here,” Wade spat back under his breath, smiling briefly and waving familiarly to one of the doctors as he passed by.
He wished he had the balls to just hang up and tell them to go fuck themselves. That the debt was paid. But he knew very well that the debt was only beginning, and that, down the line, he would need all they promised him. And anyway, these weren’t exactly the kind of people you said those kinds of words to and hung the phone up on.
“Go ahead, hang up if you want … It can all go away in an instant. All the specialists, that fancy van you got lined up for you. Poof! Gone. Is that what you want to happen, Chief?”
Wade squeezed his fist into a ball, but didn’t say a word.
“Didn’t think so. So if I were you I’d put away the big, brash attitude that doesn’t get you anywhere, and just listen. Comprende …?”
“What is it you need? I destroyed those photos like you asked.”
“That was only Part One, Chief. Part Two is that I hear your stepdaughter’s come back home …”
“Is she? I didn’t know.” Just the sound of Dani’s name sent a spasm through his bowels. He flashed back to what Hauck had warned him. And he didn’t seem like a man to be trifled with either. “I haven’t spoken with her. She doesn’t check in with me.”
“She knows things, Wade. Things that could be very problematic for us. Problematic for us all. Because if we go down, you go as well. Just as hard. You know that, right? In fact, they might be more interested in you than any of us. Greedy small-town cop who had to sell himself and his office out.”