Blood on the Tracks (8 page)

I downed him then looped his lead around my wrist. I played the beam of the Maglite along the ankle-high grasses. About three or four inches’ worth of snow had fallen, but the wind had whirled a lot of it away before it could settle. Still, bent grass and faint impressions showed what might be footprints heading west. Running perpendicular to them was a set of rabbit tracks, explaining Clyde’s momentary loss of the scent cone.

The orange glow faded to lavender, and the snow now came at us so hard and fast that it was like looking down the hyperdrive tunnel in a science fiction movie. The temperature plummeted. The only sound was the wind, filled with teeth.

“Sad place to die, Rhodes. If you’re out there.”

I shone the beam along the ground again. Already the tracing of footprints had vanished.

A phantom. Chasing ghosts in winter’s gloom.

But ghosts were one thing I got.

I keyed the radio.

The sheriff sounded plenty pissed off. “Agent Parnell, why haven’t you returned to the factory as ordered?”

“Sir, can you call me on my cell, please?” I didn’t want to have this conversation in front of dispatch and any of the deputies who might still be monitoring transmissions.

But he ignored my request. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Sir, I’m approximately a mile and a half west of the tracks and a quarter mile south of the bridge. My dog appears to have a lead on Rhodes.”

“Fort Collins PD spotted Rhodes more than an hour ago. Or did you somehow miss that, Agent Parnell?”

“Can you ask them to check, sir?”

“What?”

“Can you verify with them that the man they’re tracking is Tucker Rhodes? Do they know he’s burned over thirty percent of his body and that he’s almost certainly dressed in civvies? Or did someone pass along his Marine induction photo and now they’re chasing some train bum in camo? A lot of the hobos wear old military uniforms. Sir.”

“Jesus.”

I waited.

“Oh, Christ. Of all the—” Another pause. “How sure is your dog?”

“Very, sir.”

He dropped his voice as if that would keep dispatch from hearing. “If you make me look like an ass, Parnell, I swear you will never play with real police again. You got me?”

I remained silent. I’d already told him once that looking like an ass came naturally to him.

A muttered curse. Then, “Stop your pursuit and stay where you are. Sheriff out.”

The radio went dead.

I crouched next to Clyde, ducking my head against the wind and pressing my body to his reassuring heat. Several minutes ticked by before the sheriff’s voice again crackled over the radio.

“They’re still in pursuit, Parnell. I passed on what you said. About his injuries and his being in civvies.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I need you to come back in. Even if it
is
Rhodes, I’m not sending men out in this.”

“The snow and wind’ll take away his scent by morning, sir.”

“Then we’ll find it again.”

“Also, sir, because of his injuries, Rhodes has no way to regulate his internal temperature. We don’t bring him in, he’ll die.”

Another pause. I could imagine the sheriff’s jaw working as he tried not to say what he no doubt wanted to say. “God’s truth, Parnell, you know the rules. My responsibility is to you, and to my men, who are mostly all home by now. I intend to leave them there. I will not risk their lives to search for some deranged nutcase wandering around with his dick in his hand. Not in this kind of visibility and with these temps. I can’t get a vehicle out there, anyway. Terrain’s too rough. Highway’s already closed at the Wyoming border. Find something to mark your place so we can restart our search in the morning. Then turn around and get back here.”

“I can bring him in on my own, sir.”

“Goddammit, girl, listen to me. Never mind the weather, do you
know
what this guy did to the last little lady who crossed his path? Get back to the factory. That’s an order.”

The radio went dead.

“Yes, sir,” I said to the silence.

Stiffly, I got back to my feet. I stomped in place and opened and closed my fists, trying to bring back the feeling.

In my mind’s eye, I could see my living room. The worn, sagging couch, Grams’s yellow and orange crocheted afghan. Clyde’s bed in front of the fireplace. And the ancient coffee table with its burn marks from cigarettes years—decades—past. In my mental picture, a glass sat on that table, a tumbler filled with two fingers of whiskey, poured neat.

After watching what booze had done to my mother, I had not allowed alcohol to pass my lips until I went to war. In Iraq, I started sharing the airplane-size bottles of booze smuggled in by my fellow Marines. When I realized how good it was to be numb, I couldn’t get enough.

Now, in the snowstorm, I swallowed hard at how much I wanted that drink.

But none of that mattered. I could not live with myself if I left Tucker Rhodes out here to die. Not even if he’d killed Elise. Not even if he’d run out here for the sole purpose of dying. He was a fellow Marine who’d given everything for his country and, whatever had happened since, I could not let him go.

I moved the phone around in my hand until I managed to get a signal and called Nik.

“Is the ambulance still there?”

“Just left. Where are you? You okay?”

“I’m fine. Ask them to come back, would you?”

“I can do that. You sure you’re fine?”

“We’re all good. Clyde and I will be there before you know it.”

I hung up and tightened Clyde’s lead.

“Let’s go, boy. Seek!”

As Clyde and I staggered through the storm, heads lowered against the wind, I ran down a mental list of where my path might have crossed with Tucker Rhodes, who had served as a gunner. Kuwait, which had been our introduction to the Middle East; Al-Taqaddum, where we’d set up Mortuary Affairs; and all the sites in Anbar Province where the Mortuary Affairs platoon had gone to gather the bodies of the dead—Habbaniyah, Fallujah, Ramadi.

But of Tucker Rhodes, and who he might have been to me, I could pull up nothing.

My mind scrolled through the list again, the names rolling unspoken along my tongue with the rich, heady taste of olives and the acrid bite of sand.

When I’d first heard of places like Baghdad and Samarra, I’d imagined fantastic scenes from
Lawrence of Arabia
—Bedouins riding camelback across oceans of sand and a blazing sun pulled to earth by the muezzin’s haunting call to prayer. As a child, I’d loved
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
and other stories from
The Arabian Nights
. I’d spent evenings on the couch with Grams watching silly musicals like
The Desert Song
and
Kismet
, pretending I would grow up to be one of those beautiful women, singing of love.

But Iraq—with its dead Marines, butchered civilians, and murdered idealism—the real Iraq with its twenty-first-century war, ground those youthful fantasies to dust.

As Clyde and I hunted through the storm, I pulled the distant warmth of the desert around me, repeating the romantic names like a talisman. If Iraq hadn’t killed me, I reasoned, neither would a snowstorm.

With the descent of night, the storm worsened. I gave it the finger, then turned my radio off so it couldn’t squawk and warn Rhodes of our approach. And so the sheriff couldn’t again order me to return. I took another heading on the compass, wrapped Clyde’s lead around my waist and looped it again around my wrist.

If I collapsed, Clyde would get me home. He would drag me there if he had to.

I fell the first time when we were climbing out of a shallow ditch, and my numb toes caught a rock. Clyde waited while I hauled myself back up and stumbled forward, only vaguely aware that I had fallen and that my pants were now soaked through. I fell again maybe fifty yards on. This time it took me longer to get back up.

Once, through the darkness, I glimpsed the Sir. My flashlight flitted across his grave face. But when I called out to him, he only shook his head and turned away. The dead private made an appearance, followed by Gonzo and a parade of some of the other Marines I’d processed in the bunker at Camp Taqaddum. I caught a glimpse of Elise, her hair like a light.

When Rhodes finally appeared, I thought he, too, was a ghost.

The wind had shifted to blow out of the east, carrying his scent away from us, and I think Clyde saw him at the same moment I did. Rhodes stood on a slight rise, his back to us, looking west. He wore jeans and sneakers, a watch cap, and a medium-weight parka.

I played the flashlight briefly over him, but I couldn’t see his hands.

His erect bearing—shoulders up, back straight—made me wonder if he’d passed into a stage of hypothermia where he no longer felt the cold.

Silently, I downed Clyde so that he would make as low a profile as possible, dropped the flashlight, and fumbled for my Glock. I held it next to my leg, pointing down.

“Tucker Rhodes,” I shouted. “Special Agent Parnell with the railway police. Show me your hands!”

He didn’t move. Didn’t so much as twitch.

“Rhodes!”

He turned his head to the side and said, “She’s out there.”

I risked a glance past him at the snow-studded darkness and suppressed a shiver. “Raise your hands, Rhodes.”

“Elise.” Her name came out like a prayer. “Waiting for me.”

I blinked snow from my eyes. “Sure you want that, Rhodes? She’s probably a little pissed at you right now.”

“She understands.”

“Really? She’s feeling okay that you killed her?”

Another long silence. Then, “I’m pretty fucked up, aren’t I?”

“We’re all pretty fucked up, Marine. But you may top the list.”

“Ma’am, I know you have a gun. You could do me a right big favor by using it. ’Cause I’m not going back with you. I’m either gonna die right here in the middle of goddamn nowhere. Or I’m gonna get to Montana and die there. Way I feel, I’d just as soon make it now.”

“I leave you here, you won’t make it to Montana or anywhere else. You want to see your dad again, right? And your mom? If you come with me, you’ll at least have that.”

He shook his head. “Someone once told me that you can take the boy out of the war. But not the war out of the man. My dad gets that. I know he does. But maybe he don’t want to see it for himself.”

“What about your mom? You want to see her, don’t you?”

“My mom don’t understand any of the shit I brought back with me. She just wanted her beautiful boy back. But he’s dead. Elise understood. But now she’s dead, too.”

“Because of you.”

He didn’t answer. But I had my suspicions about what might have happened. Not the why of it. There is no why in killing someone you love. But sometimes the hurt rises up in you so hard you don’t see it coming. Rhodes had grown up a rancher’s boy, but war had forged him into someone else entirely. Lance Corporal Rhodes survived in Iraq by devouring Tucker Rhodes so completely that only a warrior remained. It happens to pretty much everyone who sees combat. It keeps you alive until you come home.

Then suddenly the enemy is the person you became in order to survive.

“Parnell,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Corporal Sydney Parnell? Of Mortuary Affairs?”

The hair lifted on my neck. “Yes.”

I brought the gun partway up, ready, as he turned and faced me. He had a bandana wrapped around the lower half of his face, but the beam of my flashlight caught his eyes, those beautiful jade-green eyes.

Memory came like a blow.

Though we’d never known each other officially, and though I’d never seen any part of his face except his eyes, Rhodes and I had met the night when everything I believed in, or thought I believed in, exploded, sending shards of betrayal and revenge into everyone around us.

“Fuck,” I said.

“Fuck all,” he agreed.

The Sir had done everything he could to gather the shattered pieces and bury them. But as I stood with Rhodes in the middle of nowhere, I realized that if he went to trial for Elise’s murder, the spectacular details of her death would draw in curious journalists and hard-charging prosecutors, all eager to dig up everything they could about the wounded war hero turned killer. And the story they would eventually uncover, the story from Iraq, would destroy not only Rhodes, but every single person who’d been involved.