“And one more thing,” Carlisle said. “Don’t even think about asking for any of her money. You weren’t married. You don’t get a dime. Not one penny.”
“Do you really think I care about her money?”
“Well, you sure as hell didn’t care much about her safety, did you?” He began to cry. “I don’t ever want to talk to you again. Do you feel me, boy? Never!”
The line went dead.
I’ve lost comrades in combat, classmates, buddies I’ve flown with. At Alpha, I watched brother go-to guys die in action. But the sense of loss I suffered in their passing was little more than emotional potholes compared to the black hole of grief that threatened to consume me as a result of Savannah’s death.
I called Mrs. Schmulowitz to tell her the news because I knew she’d want to know. She listened solemnly and told me she wasn’t surprised. She’d had a dream the night before, she said, that Savannah was in heaven, sipping a martini and smiling.
“She’s OK, bubby. She’s in a better place.”
“I hope so, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”
I hung up the phone and wept. Somewhere in the night, as falling snow muffled the sound of passing cars and trucks, but not the rhythmic rooting and orgasmic moaning of the couple in the room above mine, I finally drifted off.
That’s when they came to me — the ravens I’d seen that morning in the trees high above the ditch where Savannah’s body was found. In subconscious revelation, I grasped what they’d been trying to tell me.
NINETEEN
In Greek and Egyptian legend, the presence of a raven portends bad weather. Some African and Asian cultures believe that the bird forecasts death. For Shakespeare, the raven was evil incarnate; for Poe, it was the embodiment of lost love and despair.
The only reason I knew all that was because of Lieutenant Commander Andy Ziegler.
Andy was a naval aviator with big teeth and a skull filled to overflowing with pointless trivia, which he was only happy to uncork with minimal provocation. He flew EA-18Gs off the USS Nimitz, with Electronic Attack Squadron 135—the “Black Ravens.” With his hunger for useless information, he’d gone out of his way to learn everything he could about the deviously intelligent birds whose likeness he and his squadron mates carried into battle on the empennages of their warplanes.
We’d met stateside during a debrief after a particularly sensitive snatch-and-grab in which Andy and his squadron mates jammed hostile radars to cover Alpha’s extraction by helicopter from a Middle Eastern nation that shall go nameless. We became friends after I mentioned to him that I’d flown A-10s during my air force days.
“Are you aware that the Gatling gun on the A-10 Warthog was developed by General Electric?” Andy asked me.
“I am aware.”
“And you don’t find that funny in an ironic way? I mean, c’mon, it’s GE.”
“I’m not getting it, Andy.”
“The ‘we bring good things to life’ company? Developing a weapon to end life?”
I had to admit, it was pretty ironic.
Andy invited me to spend Christmas at his parents’ 1,200-acre cattle ranch in eastern Montana after Savannah and I split. He was confident that big sky country and a break from greasing bad guys would do me good. We galloped Appaloosas across the frozen High Plains by day and chased local women by night in the saloons of Miles City. Two months later, on a routine night training hop, both of Andy’s engines inexplicably quit on approach to the carrier. He ejected, but his parachute failed to deploy. The navy never found his body.
It was a grinning Andy Ziegler who’d come to me that night in my dream. He was flying his jet upside down between clouds as red as strawberries, mouthing the same advice he’d given me after Savannah and I divorced:
“Have no regrets,” Andy said. “You can’t move on, you can’t think straight, can’t see straight, if you’re flying backward.”
I awoke in a sweat in my silent and dark room at the Econo Lodge before the dawn. Andy’s words reverberated on my tongue.
Have no regrets.
Regret and guilt consumed me after my divorce. Savannah had walked out, but not without cause. I’d grown brittle, short-tempered, and increasingly closed-off emotionally. I’d been unfaithful to her. I attributed my bad behavior to the stresses associated with the violent nature of what I did for a living, along with my inability to disassociate me, the covert operator, from me, the husband who could never tell his wife how he actually earned his living. At the same time, I blamed her, unfairly, for not understanding me better. I regretted my behavior and felt great guilt over the damage I’d wrought. All of that, along with anger, clouded my ability to function after we’d said our good-byes. I couldn’t see straight, couldn’t think straight. And, now, here I was, come full circle, seven years later, paralyzed by the same emotions.
For a full day and night, I had lain there in that cheap motel room, unable to sleep. I wept until I had no more tears left, my stomach aching from convulsive waves of grief that surged through me on a relentless, anguishing tide.
The next morning, I willed myself out of bed and into the bathroom. I tore the plastic wrapper off a plastic cup, filled it from the sink, and drank it down, then turned on the light. The eyes that stared back at me in the mirror seemed not my own, haggard and shot through with veins, older than when I’d seen them last.
Would Savannah still be alive, I asked myself, had I not caught that glint of sunlight from an all-but-forgotten airplane? Would she still be alive had I followed the instructions of her kidnapper? And there was Andy Ziegler, courtesy of those chattering ravens, still talking to me:
Have no regrets.
He was right. Was I really to blame for Savannah’s death? Any pilot would’ve done exactly as I had done — reporting what appeared to be a crash site in hopes of saving lives. And even if I had done what Crocodile wanted me to do, there was no assurance that he would’ve let Savannah live. The only thing I knew for sure was nothing was ever going to bring her back. The only task left unfulfilled was to take my pound of flesh from the man who had taken her from me. But that wouldn’t happen, I realized, so long as my mind remained a tormented mess.
I ran the shower as cold as it would go and stepped in. The stream of frigid water stung like needle pricks, robbing me of breath, but it forced me to focus.
At Alpha, we were taught that the most difficult question to answer is always the one to which the answer is obvious. Like peeling an onion, you start from the outside and work your way in. To me, standing there in that freezing shower, the obvious answer was either Gordon Priest or Preston Kavitch. Deputy Streeter had warned me about approaching Priest and interfering with his investigation. Fair enough. It was Kavitch I was more interested in, anyway.
My gut didn’t buy Streeter’s assertion that Kavitch was clean simply because the perverted little panty sniffer’s ankle monitor showed he hadn’t left his parents’ B&B the morning Savannah disappeared. Anything electronic can be manipulated. There were other ample reasons to suspect Kavitch. He was no stranger to the criminal justice system. He was on a first-name basis with the psychopharmacology industry, and probably needed a lot of cash to maintain that relationship. And, if that weren’t enough, he gave me the creeps every time we crossed paths.
From cold water to scalding hot, I soaped and scrubbed from my scalp to my toes, then rinsed off, my skin tingling, toweled dry, and lay back in bed, waiting for the sun to come up. I knew more ways to kill a man than I was willing to count. In Preston Kavitch’s case, if my investigation proved fruitful, all I’d need was one.