Page 74 of Nightfire

“Yes,” Chloe whispered. “I know.” Her hand lingered over his naked shoulder, then landed, lightly. She could feel him quivering under her hand, as if his very flesh couldn’t stand to contain his thoughts. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Mike stared at the ground for so long she decided to get up, give him some space. His hand caught hers. “Don’t go.”

She settled back down, waited.

They sat there like that, Mike staring at the ground, for almost an hour. Chloe didn’t mind. She was used to waiting. Sometimes it seemed that her entire life had been waiting. And, in a way, it had. She’d been waiting for this.

She could wait for as long as it took.

Finally, the tension left his body in an enormous sigh. “I never talk about it. Never. Sam and Harry just know the bare bones. When we first got together at Old Man Hughes’s, I was a wild child. I’d been kicked out of four foster homes. I couldn’t talk about it at all. Just didn’t have the words. And even if I wanted to, Sam and Harry wouldn’t have understood, not really. Sam’s mom threw him away in a Dumpster when he was just a baby. Harry’s mom? She was an addict with a thing for druggie scumbags.”

He stopped suddenly, looking at her. Realizing. “Oh God, it was your mom, too, honey. I’m so sorry.”

Chloe nodded. However unpalatable, it was the truth. What she knew of her biological mother was that she was a druggie with a thing for other druggies. Preferably violent ones.

“What could I say to them?” Mike shuddered. “The thing was, both of them grew up in squalor, completely unloved. How could I talk about my family? The family I’d lost? My dad and my mom, they were…they were the greatest. Just great parents. I didn’t know that as a kid, of course. What do kids know? They think their world is the only world there is. So in my world, every husband loved his wife and every wife loved her husband. And they both loved their kids. Dad was an engineer with a company that designed avionics for Boeing. Mom taught high school. There were five of us. I had two brothers, both older than me. Eddie and Jeff. Twelve and fourteen. I was the youngest, the runt. I was small for my age. Got teased a lot, but no one outside the family ever messed with me because Eddie and Jeff had my back, always. If I ever got picked on, Eddie and Jeff made sure it never happened again. The Keillors. Don’t mess with them because you’re gonna regret it.” He gave a half laugh and shook his head. “I thought we were just this average family but we weren’t. We were something rare and special. Five people who loved each other. That doesn’t often happen in this world.”

It didn’t. Chloe tried to imagine it, imagine being in the loving embrace of a tight-knit family. She’d had a taste of it, albeit on the margins, these past six months and it was wonderful. But to have had this as a child, to know nothing else…and then have it taken away. That would mess with anyone’s head.

Mike went back to staring at the ground.

“Do you want to tell me what happened?”

Her words seemed to shake him out of a reverie. He looked at her, just a quick sideways flash, like a blue bolt of lightning. Chloe kept her face blank, as she knew how to do. But it was hard not to react to the raw pain on his face.

“Okay. I’ll tell you. I’ve never really told anyone the whole story.“ He blew out a shaky breath, stared at his knees. “June twenty-sixth. A month after my eleventh birthday. It’s Saturday, and we’re headed for the beach. Dad stops at a gas station. You know one of those places with a little mart attached?”

She nodded, though he wasn’t looking at her.

“Mom forgot the volleyball at home. It was old anyway, she said. Might as well buy a new one. So we went in, bought the volleyball, bought a cheap beach ping pong set and five cokes. I wanted some Snickers bars but mom drew the line at that. She’d packed sandwiches and didn’t like us eating junk food. I looked up at Eddie and Jeff, expecting them to make signs that they’d buy them without mom knowing and sneak them to me afterwards. But nada. No Snickers bar for me. I threw a fit and stomped off while she was paying. I was the baby of the family and pretty spoiled. I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I was thinking of shoplifting the Snickers, putting them in the pocket of my cut-offs, because I was a budding juvie. Whatever. I don’t remember. Mom and dad and my brothers were waiting for me. Mom called out, said it was time to go. I was at the other end of the store, eyeing the Snickers, when they—they came in.”

His family’s murderers. Chloe gripped his shoulder.

“There were two of them. I had a good view between the aisles. I stared because I’d never seen anyone like them before. Two guys, one tall, one short, both rail thin. Dreadlocks, pants down to their crotches, unlaced sneakers. Back then, it was a new look, this was before it went mainstream and every kid tried to look like a convict. They were like aliens to me, red-faced, snot running from their noses. They giggled crazily, barely made sense when they talked. Eyes rolling around in their heads like ponies’ eyes. Stoked to the gills. Couple of years ago, when I was still in SWAT, I accessed the files of the case. Perps were higher than a kite on coke. And both had BALs of over 1.02%. It is entirely possible they had no idea what they were doing, operating purely on animal instinct.”

He sat there on the side of the bed, knees open, hands clasped between them, head hung low. Watching the tragic past unfold.

“I read the transcript of the trial. One of the lawyers advanced the argument that Scumbag One was so mentally impaired by the drugs and alcohol he had no concept of what he was doing and was only following what Scumbag Two told him to do.”

“Did it fly?” Chloe’s heart already ached.

“No, thank God. Judge had a lot of sense. Put them away for forty years. Threw the book at them.”

“Good,” she said and he gave a faint smile. “So…these two delinquents walk into the mart. And?”

“And demand that the cashier open up the cash register. I figured this out later. Personally, I wrote them off as weirdos and went back to staring at the candy counter at the other end of the shop.” His voice was dark, bitter. He spat the words out one by one as if they were made of poison. “My family was under threat and I was contemplating shoplifting two Snickers bars.”

Chloe took a chance and rubbed between his shoulder blades. The tension felt bone-deep. It came off him in waves. “You were a young boy,” she said gently. “And it wasn’t your world.”

Mike shook his head as if ridding it of dark thoughts. “The cashier was no dope. He emptied the register. There was $137.32. The price of my family. Not even a hundred forty bucks. About twenty-eight bucks a head for their lives, including the cashier. When they saw the amount, the scumbags went wild, started screaming. The tall one pulled out a pistol. The guy behind the cash register—a kid, really, 19 years old. He looked twelve on the tape. This kid at the register is shaking, pulls out what’s in his pockets. Not even ten bucks. Both scumbags scream even harder. By this time, I figure something is up and I walk up the aisle toward where all the commotion is. My dad sees me and shakes his head, motions me away. The fuckhead—sorry.” This with a narrow-eyed glance at her.

Chloe nodded. Fuckhead sounded about right.

“Scumbag with the gun is waving it in the air, partially covering my family. Dad’s in front, arms out, Mom and Ed and Jeff behind him.”

Mike stopped, breathing heavily. Chloe continued to rest her hand against the deep, solid dip between his shoulder blades and waited.

“At the time it seemed to stretch out forever, everything in slow motion, but the clock on the security camera says the whole thing—from the time the two entered the mart to when they ran away leaving five corpses behind—clocked in at two minutes forty seconds.”