But it’s not—it’s not a leaf. I stare at it. It’s a fake leaf. I pick it up with my left hand. It’s made of fabric—a synthetic fabric—a synthetic leaf.
The thought appears in my mind not word by word, but wholly formed, like someone else had the thought and placed it there: This does not make sense.
Because I know what this is, this artificial leaf. It’s a piece from a ghillie suit, the full-body camouflage worn by professional snipers and police shooters, a costume of shrubbery worn so that they can wait unseen for long periods, buried in the scenery. I know what a ghillie suit is, not from my police training but from my grandfather, who took me hunting exactly three times, trying to cure me of my total disinterest in that pursuit. I remember he pointed out a fellow sportsman, crouched in a blind in a suit of leaves, and scorned the man: “Those are for hunting men, not rabbits.” I remember his caustic expression, and I remember the term, ghillie suit; it seemed such a comical name for something designed for the purpose of killing human beings.
The pain returns like an inrushing tide and I gasp, sink down farther into the gravel of the parking lot, still clutching the strange alien leaf. This does not make sense.
When the pain is gone—not gone, but dampened—I look past the stone wall, up onto the rise, try to pick out the spot where the shooter waited on the woody ridge between the road and the fort. I trace the bullet’s line in my mind, a bright red ribbon leaping from the gun muzzle and across the field. I eyeball it. I estimate. Three hundred yards. It was a sniper shot, no question about it, three hundred yards easy, through the barrier of my outstretched arm and right between Brett’s eyes. What I just witnessed was Brett’s assassination by a military sniper from the Coast Guard or the Navy. A professional killer who tracked him here and waited in his ghillie suit and fired from the woods between the road and the fort. A preemptive strike against his madman’s crusade.
So what is it? Why doesn’t it make sense?
I know the answer while I’m still formulating the question: because Brett said no. No one knew about it. He had told no one where he was. Just Julia, and Julia had told me.
How could the military have sent a sniper to take him out, before he carried out his raids, when no one knew that they were coming?
New pain. Worse. The worst. I throw my head back and howl. Nausea is rolling up in churning waves from my stomach and into my throat. The pain leaps out from the wound site in bursts. Spots buzz to life in front of my eyes and I hunch back over, count slowly to ten, dizziness seeping in around the back corners of my brain. Brett told me that nobody else knew. Brett had no reason to lie.
But what about the friend, from the troopers, the Coast Guard man who provided the blueprints? Did he suspect the full scope of what Brett was up to? Did he sound the alarm? Track him down?
There’s something else, something—I take a breath, try to remember—something in the blockhouse that didn’t belong there. The pain makes it hard to think. It makes it hard to move—to be, even. I sit down in the gravel of the parking lot, lean against the wall, try not to look at my arm.
A color.
A flash of pink from inside that trunk.
I get up and stumble back down to the gravel, where the killer disappeared onto the highway, on his own ten-speed.
Or hers, I remind myself, thinking of Julia Stone, thinking of Martha Cavatone—my mind suddenly racing, evaluating motives, performing a quick roll call of everyone I’ve met on my circuitous route to Fort Riley, thinking about all the guns I’ve seen: Julia’s M140s, Rocky’s paintball guns and target range, my little Ruger. Jeremy Canliss had a snub-nose pistol tucked up in his jacket when I met him outside the pizza place. No, no, he didn’t. I imagined that. Didn’t I?
It doesn’t matter. This is America in countdown time. Everybody has a gun.
“A hospital.” I find the words in my throat and pronounce them gravely, lecturing myself, stern. “Forget the guns. Forget about Brett. Get to a hospital.”
I look out at Route 103, where the asphalt is melting in the sun, letting off a blackish gummy steam. I’m swaying on my feet. The green pages of the stapled EMT booklet flutter in the wind before me, the all-caps text informing me that my dizziness will escalate from mild to extreme. In four hours the pain will begin to ease, as my soft tissue runs out of blood and the arm begins to die.
I’m staring vacantly at the bike and I realize that my decision has been made. It’s already too late. The idea of hopping on a bicycle right now and getting myself to a hospital, to any hospital, is ridiculous. It’s insane. It was already too late half an hour ago. I can’t ride a bike. I can barely walk. I laugh, say the words aloud:
“Henry, you can’t ride a bike.”
I look back over my shoulder. Brett’s corpse is still lying out there, facing up toward the sun. The missing-person case must be declared unsuccessful. I know why he left, yes, and even where he went, but he’s dead and I couldn’t protect him from dying.
I do, however, have some thoughts about who might have shot him, a few stray and feverish ideas on the subject.
It takes forty-five miserable and crawling minutes to retrace my steps—all the way down the length of the parking lot—through the stone archway back into the fort proper—across the spongy terrain to the foot of the blockhouse. The pain only gets worse now, never better, intensifying as it gains in territory, colonizing the farthest reaches of my body. By the time I reach the wavering shadow of the blockhouse I’m breathing unevenly, bent over, deteriorating in speeded-up motion like a man dying of old age in a cartoon. I collapse and land on my wounded right arm and shriek like a child from the electric pain and roll onto my back under the dangling rope ladder and the sheer wooden side of the building.
I stare up at that ladder. The thick hempen rungs I recently clambered down, just behind Brett, seemed like child’s play an hour ago, like one of the playground structures we used to tear around on in White Park. Now it’s a rock wall, a mountain’s face that I am somehow supposed to drag myself up, exhausted and one-handed.
I stand, slowly, look upward and squint. The sun is burning the top of my head.
“One,” I say, and take a deep breath and grunt and haul my entire weight with my one good arm, lift myself just enough to get my footing on the second rung of the ladder.
Then I wait there, gasping, barely three feet off ground level, with my head tilted up and my eyes closed, sweat pouring off of my scalp and pooling in my collar line. I wait for strength—for—I don’t know—a few minutes? Five minutes?
And then I say: “Two.”
Breathe—steady—grunt—heave. And then three—and then four—again and again, finding my footing on each new rung, humping myself laboriously upward and then exhaling—and waiting—panting—the sun baking me against the wall—sweat running down my spinal column and my arms, gathering in my waistband and swamping my armpits.
Halfway up the ladder, at rung number ten, I conclude that this is, in fact, impossible. I won’t get any farther. This is as good a place as any to die.
I am too tired and too hot and too thirsty—increasingly it is my thirst that is the main problem, superseding the exhaustion and the dizziness and even the nascent feverishness—superseding even the pain, heretofore the great champion among my tormentors. I have forgotten, at this point, just what I am hoping to find up there in the blockhouse, what if anything.