Headlights(5)

The last tour. The cabin.

Today is the first—

Shit. Hot coffee on my hand. I shake it, bring it to my mouth.

I pour a new mug, holding my hands steady, and take it to my former boss and friend. The one who sits here, unexplained, a state over from where he should be. Not at work. Not at home. Not with his kids, who should be—are, I guess—maybe ten or eleven now.

“Jack,” I say, and I know there’s no answer I could want. “Why did you come here?”

He takes a long moment to drink the coffee. He stares at the empty bottom of it and then brings his eyes up to mine. New wrinkles, dark circles. Eyes a little bloodshot.

“I’m sorry, Dan.”

“Sorry for what?”

He stares at me, that Bad Feeling in my stomach growing, making itself known, and— “He’s back,” Jack says.

The birds outside fall silent.

Suspension, the second after a blown frag.

A cosmos and a planet and an aching, devastating pulse. I hear my own heart, feel it pounding through me, pushing against the apartment walls. Throbbing through the earth.

Today is—

“He’s back, Dan,” Jack Murphy says.

I am here and not here. I am a thousand places at once.

“No,” I say. I might say it more than once.

Jack exhales long and slow, stares out the window over the parking lot and the field, and eventually, carefully, sets the mug down on the floor. He shakes his head. Doesn’t stop shaking his head, rubs his face. “Could be a copycat. Could be multiple copycats. But…”

“Multiple?” I ask. It’s a plea. This apartment, too tight with the both of us here.

I’ve never had anyone in this room before. My brain brings this thought to the forefront, pushes everything else aside. The few women who’ve come go straight to the bedroom, slip out before morning. That I should share this space with another human one time before leaving, that Jack should show up today of all days.

Today is—

“Two,” Jack says. “Two, about a week apart. We’ve kept it out of the news so far, but—”

Two.

Tears burn the backs of my eyes. I don’t have it in me now to be embarrassed. There’s no need. Jack knows. We all know. Jack drove eight hours through the night to tell me.

No, he had to tell me, yeah. But Jack needed it, for him. He needed to remember that there is a world outside of Colorado, that there is a world untouched by these … What? Crimes has never done it justice. Atrocities, abominations? I felt the impulse myself, a hundred times during the investigation. So many aimless drives, so many nights spent drunk at the bar or on the floor of the house or in Jack’s garage chasing the moment of a blackout. Anything to drown out the details of the case, even for a second. Anything to solve any fucking part of it.

Jack drove eight hours to my packed-up apartment on the first day of the rest of my life because that’s what this case is. All of us, infected, poisoned, trying forever to get out from under this impossible weight. In our line of work, we’re supposed to be at least a little immune to the effects of violence. We’ve seen our share by now, have had to inflict it ourselves in our worst moments. How fucking stupid I was to think it could ever be over.

He’s back.

There’s no apartment. No La-Z-Boy.

It’s me and a highway. Me and a motel.

Me and a bathtub full of blood.

Jack is watching me.

“You’re sure?” I say. My voice, again, a plea. Again, if it were anyone else in front of me, I would be ashamed.

“DNA’s a match, the hair. If they’re copycats, they might be in league with him. Or at least know something we don’t. It’s happening again, Dan. It’s real.”

I look out over the parking lot and the field, the birds who’ve resumed their struggle, the packed book box sturdy beneath me. All I can do is breathe. All I can do is exist.

“You get a U-Haul already?” Jack asks.

“I’m, uh…” My eyes on the field.

Blood.

I clear my throat. Look back to Jack Murphy, can barely hear myself talking. “I’m leaving the furniture. Putting boxes in my car. But … I reactivated. I’m going to Pendleton.”

“What?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Going back on active duty. Do another tour.”

Jack stares at me. “Are you fucking kidding?” he asks.

He looks around. I come back to the room, try to. I feel him seeing it, a thirty-four-year-old failure desperate to get back to the front lines. To feel that my life is not being wasted. To feel I am worth anything at all.

“This is your case, Dan.”

Blood. Bathtub. Motel parking lot.

“We want you on it. You know it’s yours.”

Bodies, limbs, skins flayed off corpses.

This case conflating my memories, dragging the moments up out of order. Crowding my vision with so much red.

“I couldn’t solve it,” I say. “You could get anyone. After all the press, I mean…”

But I know. Others have tried, of course they have. It wasn’t their fault. Wasn’t their failure. It was my case. And now, because of me, because I couldn’t …

It’s here. Happening again. People are dying. People are being …