“Watch it, dipshit!” he said.
Hendricks sized him up. Eyes glazed from drink. Veins bulging. Fists the size of country hams. He was clearly spoiling for a fight. Hendricks wasn’t keen to give him one, so he kept walking.
“Hey!” He wrapped a hand around Hendricks’s upper arm and yanked. “I was talking to you, asshole.”
As Hendricks turned, his right hand lashed out and grabbed Meathead’s trachea in a pinch grip. The guy let out a pained cry, which dwindled to a gurgle as Hendricks applied pressure. Hendricks knew he could crush the asshole’s windpipe easily. Leave him to choke to death in the street, where he’d be mistaken for another weekend drunk until it was too late. And for a moment, he was tempted.
But Lester was in trouble, so Hendricks couldn’t afford any complications. By force of will, he released the man, who backed-bug-eyed and gasping-into the throng.
When Hendricks finally reached the Bait Shop, it was shuttered and dark, and its sign read Closed-unheard-of on a Saturday night. Ten agonizing minutes spent surveilling the place indicated no discernible activity inside. Once he’d satisfied himself that no one lay in wait for him, he ducked into the alley that ran alongside the bar and used his key to slip in via the service entrance.
The first thing he noticed was the scent. Sweat and pennies, and beneath them, something even less pleasant, like garbage left too long. Though the gloom of the bar was impenetrable, Hendricks knew precisely what that olfactory cocktail signified. He’d smelled it more times than he wished to recalclass="underline" sometimes on the field of battle, though more often in cold, gray, stone-walled basements-long shadows cast across the floor and walls by naked bulbs and naked zealots, strapped to chairs and taken apart piece by piece until they gave up either their secrets or their ghost. It was the scent of death drawn out-of a body letting go of blood and bile and bladder and bowels long before it’s granted the reprieve of death.
As Hendricks’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, the lifeless form of his only friend swam slowly into focus. He was in the center of the restaurant’s small dining room, slumped forward in his wheelchair. A bar rag dangled from between his swollen, bloodied lips. The only thing that held him upright were the zip ties that bound his forearms to the wheelchair’s armrests, looped through the spokes of his wheels to keep him from rolling off, and cinched so tight his pained struggles had stripped skin from sinew like insulation from a wire. Hendricks felt sick as he took in the grisly scene: a blasphemous Rodin’s Thinker, an ode to suffering rendered in bound and bloodied flesh.
Hendricks ran to his friend’s side, tears welling as proximity revealed fresh horrors. Lester’s shirt lay in tatters on the floor around him, cut from his body by his assailant so that he could better access his living canvas. Lester’s chest was marked with plier-bites as if snacked on at leisure by some kind of carrion feeder, plucking flesh from bone here and there at random. A series of inch-long slices-fine, as if made by razor blade or surgical scalpel-etched his muscled shoulder like a woodcut. What should have been blood-caked was instead glazed and sticky, with a residue whose scent suggested whiskey-poured onto these cuts to inflict maximum pain. One ear dangled loose. Three fingers on his left hand were missing; a length of rubber hose was tied tight around his left elbow to prevent him from bleeding out as they’d been taken one by one. The floor before him was littered with teeth, pinkish-white amid the puddling scarlet. His skin was gray. His chest was still. His eyes, mercifully, were closed.
Hendricks crouched before Lester and touched his forehead to the dead man’s. “I’m sorry, Les,” he said, tears falling as he clenched shut his eyes-a vain attempt to keep his grief at bay. “I’m so sorry.”
So this is what this life he’d chosen had come to. What his bullshit quest for atonement-for absolution-had wrought. He’d once believed that God and country were worth killing for. After, when that moral certainty abandoned him, he thought that balancing the scales might make things right again. But now-too late, perhaps-he knew, as he wept over his departed friend, that his new crusade was as delusive as his last. There was only one thing in this world worth killing for-worth dying for. The lives of those you love.
He wished that he were dead instead. That the man who did this to Lester had bested him at Pendleton’s- or that he’d died alongside the rest of his unit in the high desert of Afghanistan. Then the horrors of the past three days would have never happened.
Could he die? he wondered. Or was he too good at this? Too tough? Too stubborn?
Apparently, Lester was.
Because at that moment, the broken man opened his eyes, spit the filthy, blood-caked rag out of his mouth, and began to scream.
It was a noise unlike any Hendricks had ever heard. Every one of Lester’s muscles clenched as he expelled breath from his lungs, and he thrashed violently against his restraints, loosing fresh gouts of blood from his many wounds and rocking his wheelchair so hard it nearly toppled.
Hendricks had no idea how Lester had survived this long. Had no idea how anybody could have. But by the look of him, and the severity of his wounds, his vise-grip on life wouldn’t hold for much longer.
“Jesus, Lester-I thought you were a goner!” Hendricks exclaimed. “Just hang on, buddy,” he said, plucking his phone from his pocket. “We’re gonna get you to a hospital.”
But Lester grabbed his wrist and held him fast. Through gritted teeth-what few he had left, at least-he barked “NO!” his voice hoarse and weak, his neck bulging from the exertion required to speak. Blood trickled from the corners of his swollen, ruined mouth.
Hendricks mistook Lester’s gesture as protective of Hendricks. “Don’t worry about me. All I care about is getting you-”
“NO,” Lester once more insisted. He closed his eyes and focused. Then, calmer than he’d sounded prior, though thick and wrong from the trauma to his mouth, his face, he added, “Evie.”
Hendricks froze. Fear crawled up his spine like living ice.
“I’m sorry,” said Lester, tears streaking his blood-caked cheeks. “I tried to wait. I didn’t want to tell him…”
Hendricks touched his friend’s shoulder-gingerly, for he was loath to cause him further pain, and there was little undamaged flesh left on him-and said, “It’s all right. I understand.” And he meant it. He didn’t blame Lester for having told his assailant of Evie-he couldn’t. After all, it was Lester himself who insisted on safeguarding against knowing anything that, if disclosed, could compromise Hendricks’s safety. No one could hold out forever while tortured. All they could hope for was to bide their time until shock, unconsciousness, or death took over. It would seem Hendricks’s adversary was clever enough to stave off all three. And one look at Lester told Hendricks he’d resisted, valiantly, regardless.
“Tell me what happened,” said Hendricks.
Lester nodded, wincing at the effort. Both he and Hendricks knew that whenever help came, it would be too late. Lester was too far gone to save. Five minutes wouldn’t make any difference. The only thing that had kept him here this long was sheer force of will-he was determined to redeem himself for having given up Evie.
Lester told Hendricks everything he could-beginning with the fact that Engelmann had left no more than an hour prior, armed not only with the knowledge of Evie’s existence, but with her address as well. He spoke haltingly, struggling for every breath, growling his words out as fast as he could force them. Hendricks held his hand and listened, rapt, until finally one of Lester’s pauses stretched on forever, and Hendricks looked up to find two dull eyes staring back at him.