Wait a minute, he tells himself. Hold on. I’m leaving tonight. Going back in there and finishing what I started.
Yet he does not get up. Nor does he even try.
It occurs to him, somewhere far back in his brain like a distant voice shouting for him to put it in gear and move, that he ought to get this wound bound up while he can still walk.
This is a weird world, he thinks. When you try to climb up a ladder, it breaks underneath you; but when you decide to jump off a cliff, a hook comes out of nowhere and grabs your miserable ass.
He doesn’t fully understand this song and video, or why the death angel wanted him to see it. Death angel? Whose death? His, or…
He thinks the song was about rich men who never go to war making money off war, or maybe even starting wars to make money. Duh. Who didn’t already know that? And nobody cared, even if they did know it. It was how the world worked, and so what? Like, maybe, it was news back in the days of the Civil War or ancient history. Yeah, and like that band wasn’t trying to make some money off the war, too? Make me laugh.
But that crap about the storm breaking, and somebody’s child and burying it and everything. Maybe that was talking about what was going to happen when the soldiers came home, and started thinking about…what? Doing the jobs we were trained to do?
Jeremy can feel the sweat rising from him like a hot mist. He feels sick to his stomach, he knows he’s going to have to puke here real soon, and it is going to be an effort to get to the bathroom before his own storm breaks.
You know how many kids have been killed by our so-called heroes?
“What do you know about it?” he asks the TV screen, which by now has gone into another segment in which Felix Gogo is behind his desk in the studio, chatting up some huge-boobed Hispanic actress who sits on a red sofa shaped like a pair of lips.
The thing is, the video didn’t actually show the soldier shoot the boy. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. All Jeremy knows is that every block was a battleground. Especially in Fallujah, after the Blackwater dudes got waxed. If Jeremy had been the soldier in that video, he would’ve shot the boy. Damn straight. You shoot at me, I take you down. Then again…where was the boy’s weapon? Maybe he’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It happened. A casualty of the mission, no big whoop. You just put your head down and kept going.
So you want to make people believe our soldiers are shooting kids over there? That for everything they’ve done for this country, every sacrifice they’ve made, you’re making them out to be child-killers?
We’re working on it, that punk had said.
Jeremy lowers his head and closes his eyes, very tightly. An old rage has begun to awaken, and he thinks that if he had those lying scummy pieces of shit right here, he would wax them all, one after the fucking other. Just to shut their lying mouths.
And someone standing behind his right shoulder leans forward and says, in a bitter whisper that conveys both sarcasm and challenge, Are you my pet?
Jeremy’s head comes up and he looks around, but no one else is there. It was what his old Gunnery Sergeant used to say to him, when Jeremy’s lungs heaved from miles of uphill running, or when he was crawling through the mud in full gear, or doing the endless pushups, or whatever else the Gunny threw at him. Are you my pet? Translation: guy with a pussy last name ain’t gone be no pussy, not in this man’s Corps.
He can’t wait any longer. He hauls himself up, staggers, crabs sideways, collides with the TV, gets his knees turned the way he wants to go, and starts for the bathroom. The hallway becomes the twisting corridor of a carnival funhouse he thinks he remembers going to as a kid, but this is no fun. Another collision, this time with the wall, and then he gets into the bathroom and falls to his knees in time to throw up about eighty percent of his troubled freight into the toilet, the other twenty percent going onto the floor.
After it’s over and done and his retching has settled down, Jeremy struggles to focus on his wound. He is too tired to do much about it, and maybe he needs a few stitches but it looks to him as if the blood is crusting over. He can hear the old man in the apartment below knocking on the ceiling with what is likely a broom handle. Probably freaking about all the noise, thought his bathroom was about to cave in. The knocking stops after a few seconds, and Jeremy slowly gets up off the floor, turns on the sink tap and splashes cold water into his face. He wraps a towel around his left wrist. He blinks heavily, looking at the blood-stained water in the tub, the rivulets of blood on the white porcelain, the mess on the floor.
A job well screwed, he thinks grimly.
There will not be a journey to the Elysian Fields tonight. There are some things he has to think about, to get straight in his head. He takes the picture of Karen and Nick with him as he totters unsteadily to the bedroom. He flips on the overhead light. He places the picture on the bedside table, and then he takes his Remington 700 rifle with its attached Tasco scope from the closet and he lies in bed, staring blankly at the ceiling, with the weapon cradled across his chest.
This is my rifle, he thinks. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My rifle without me is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me.
Since his honorable discharge, Jeremy has been through the jobs of construction worker, roofing man, yard workman, building supply warehouse security guard, mall security guard, video store clerk, car wash attendant, 7-Eleven clerk, and for the last four months garbage man until he was laid off two weeks ago because of cutbacks in the city budget.
It has become clear to him, before this night, that the task he is best suited for involves the tool that lies against his chest. The question is: how does someone use that talent—his God-given talent as a Marine Corps sniper—in the world beyond the battlefield? But this night, and the appearance of the death angel wearing Chris Montalvo’s face, has made him think his task is not finished. And that video he saw has made him think he might have an answer to the question.
A hit man.
He could be a hit man.
People needed them, to get rid of their problems. Governments and corporations needed them, to make sure secrets stayed secure and enemies were silenced. Battered wives needed them, to get rid of abusive husbands. There were plenty of movies with hit men in them, doing the necessary thing. Where did they come from? The military, most likely. They were men just like him, trained to set up the target and send the bullet. One shot, one kill. Why not?
Maximus in Gladiator was a hit man, really. Trained for war, betrayed by his superiors, bloodied but unbowed, the man in the arena sent out to kill or perish.
That’s me, Jeremy thinks. I can do that.
He has his rifle and a .45 automatic he bought for personal protection. Plenty of ammo for both of them, right up there on the closet’s shelf. The Remington is not very different from the rifle he used in Iraq. The sight isn’t as powerful, but at the shooting range up north of Temple he could still hit a target at five hundred yards, on most days. He has some money, not a whole lot, but he has a valid credit card. He has his dark blue pickup truck, banged and dented and seven years old but it can still get him where he wants to go.