He was only twenty-five or so off.
The dull thud of crumpling metal followed the screech of brakes and tires too closely — at least one of the cars must have been traveling fast, Griffin thought. The sounds came from the street behind him, and he whipped his head around to see a black sedan, its left-front corner crumpled from the collision, back off from a crushed Audi and pick up speed as it drove unsteadily away. Griffin had been sitting on a park bench, waiting for Maggie. Now he dropped his coffee cup and, in a half-dozen strides, covered the twenty yards to the street. He was just in time to get the sedan’s plate number as it turned a comer. He moved quickly to the Audi.
The driver lay slumped over the wheel. Where the side of her head had struck the windshield, she was a gory mess of blood, bone, and hair. Griffin wrenched the sprung door open and felt her throat for a pulse. There was none. He noted that her lifeless body was contorted as if she’d been looking into the rear seat. Griffin’s mind raced. Why no seat belt? What could she have been looking at in the back? The child’s car seat is empty. Then, with the rising God-please-make-it-not-so terror of a man reliving a nightmare, Griffin grabbed the rear passenger door and wrenched it open.
The force of the sedan’s impact against the Audi’s right rear passenger door had bent the car, as if the sedan meant to break it in half. On the floor, a small boy in a bright blue windbreaker lay motionless. Griffin lifted the body. A miniature teddy bear fell from the boy’s grasp. Griffin pulled the boy from the car as gently as he could and cradled him in his arms. He can’t be more than three years old, Griffin thought as he lay the child on the ground.
A crowd gathered, mostly shoppers and mothers from the park. Griffin ignored them, putting his ear to the child’s mouth. Mark Junior had had good hands too, Griffin remembered as the tears came. He’d throw things on the floor and unbuckle his car seat to go after them. I used to turn around in the middle of traffic and see him romping around back there. Twice we nearly had an accident before I could get to the side of the road.
He put his head to the child’s chest and listened. Nothing.
He rocked back on his heels and looked. The boy’s neck was already slowly turning blackish blue. A woman screamed.
Polizei sirens warbled in the background. Griffin paled as he looked at what could have been his own son. He held the boy in his arms.
Dead. Broken neck. Whiplash.
Maggie arrived at the tail end of his report to the polizei. She took in the scene instantly and moved to stand by his side. Griffin was rendering the details flatly, without emotion.
“…and then your people arrived, Inspector.”
“But I still do not understand, Herr Colonel,” the man said, “why you held the child.”
Maggie interrupted, flashing her ID card in the inspector’s face. -Herr…”
“Lentz,” the inspector answered.
“Herr Lentz,” Maggie said. She spoke English, confident the inspector understood her. “The colonel's humanitarian action is quite explicable,” She motioned to her left. “If you will come with me.”
They left Griffin where he was, his eyes riveted on two sheet-draped bodies, one large and one quite small, which the polizei loaded into an ambulance. After a few steps she turned to the inspector.
“Herr Lentz,” said Maggie quietly and in near-perfect German, “the colonel lost a wife and son in much the same way.”
The polizei official nodded solemnly.
“Then you have your statements and will need nothing else from him?”
“There is only the matter of the license number that he believes he saw,” said Lentz. “I must ask him again, to be sure.” The inspector walked back to Griffin.
“Herr Colonel?” the inspector queried him cautiously. “The plate number of the other car? Are you quite sure you are correct?”
The ambulance doors were closed now, and as the vehicle moved away Griffin looked down at the inspector.
“I made no mistake,” Griffin said, the trace of anger in his voice unmistakable. “I saw what I saw.”
Seeing that Griffin would not change his story, the inspector pursed his lips and lowered his head, as if weighing the cost of pursuing the matter. He looked again at Griffin, who maintained the same hard face. Lentz frowned and went to his car to make a radio call. Maggie took her place at Griffin’s side.
“Why the hassle about the plate, do you think?” Griffin asked.
“What was the number?”
Griffin told her.
Her brow furrowed as she looked at the crumpled Audi. “Mark, a plate with a prefix like that belongs to a VIP car. Special Security, I think. Looks like this hit and run was the work of either some high official or somebody working for one. Now what would they be doing in a little place like this?”
Griffin gave a start and turned to look back down the street. The road curved sharply as it came into town, but beyond the curve the autobahn exit was a straight shot, less than a mile away. He’d been sitting on the bench for no more than five minutes. Anyone coming into town would have seen his parked car — and him on the park bench— just as the car rounded the curve. I had to hit the brakes myself, he thought. I was flying to get here, passed everything on the road, even the ones who tried to keep up fell behind and stayed there.
They fell behind and stayed there.
The chill coursed up his spine, detonating dead center in his consciousness. He was suddenly alert, his self-preservation instincts packing the horror of the dead mother and child into a box in the basement of his mind.
“I am certain of the license number I gave you,” he said quietly. “You have your report. You should require nothing else from me.”
“No, Herr Colonel,” Lentz said, closing his notebook. “You may go.” He turned to look at the wrecked Audi. “Sad, isn’t it?”
“Who were the victims?” Maggie asked him.
“I cannot give you the names, of course,” replied the inspector. “We must first notify the husband. He is an officer, like you, a colonel, but in our army. The family arrived here only a few weeks ago.” He shook his head. “Very sad indeed.” Inspector Lentz walked away.
“Mark,” Maggie said. Griffin, holding the boy’s bear, was staring toward the curve into town. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
They walked in aimless silence through the narrow village streets for almost an hour. Griffin looked blankly into the shop windows, stopping unexpectedly now and then to look behind them. Maggie knew he was shaken up, but she sensed something else.
“Mark, it’s not just the accident, is it?”
He glanced down at her, then stared into the distance. The words came hard.
“When I was married — the first time,” he swallowed hard, “I was deployed on a jump into Honduras. I volunteered, I didn’t have to go.” They were holding hands. Maggie tightened her grip on his.
“We jumped back into Fort Bragg,” he continued. “The wives and families were supposed to meet us on the drop zone. My wife and son were on the way to the ceremony when some drunk hit them head-on. If they’d had the belts on they might have made it. She must have been looking in the back after him. The guy walked away unhurt.”
“Yes, Mark, you’ve told me,” Maggie said softly. In the short year they’d been together, she’d come to understand Griffin’s loss of his first wife and their son and his fiasco of a second failed marriage. Griffin kept his aches to himself, locking them away like demons, but sometimes those demons worked their way free and broke through Griffin’s steel exterior. Maggie could feel a break coming.