Page 17 of Don't Let Go

“The problem is, I don’t know who he is. I can’t even describe him. It’s like this deep, dark living shadow. All I know is it terrifies me and I don’t want to be scared.”

Of course she didn’t.

“Okay, what story would you like to hear?” Mission accepted.

“Um… you mentioned something once about target shooting?” She didn’t sound quite so certain about it. “It’s when you headed into Libya for that quiet extraction. I said it was probably going to be like shooting fish in a barrel. You said to remind me sometime to tell you how not easy that is…”

I turned the request over in my head and then chuckled. It took me a minute to even remember what she referred to, but then I had it.

“Ahh,” I said. “Right. Fish in a barrel. It was during some specialized training when I was in the army. We were being tested for combat technique and thinking outside the box. It doesn’t really matter what they had us doing, but the live fire range covered about five acres. You had to make entry at one point, locate the hostages, mark them for pickup and eliminate all the enemies along the way.”

“Sounds tough,” she murmured, she was drawing little circles with her finger against my chest.

“Eh,” I said with a half-shrug. “I loved live fire exercises. It gets the blood pumping. The thing was, our trainer had a real whacked sense of humor.” A chuckle worked its way free. I hadn’t thought about Sergeant Billy in a long time. What a dick. “He always set traps so if you had a misfire or hit the wrong target, you paid for it in the moment and not just points docked.”

“What happened?” Her voice was far more alert. Maybe I should have picked a different story.

“Well, I took out one of the enemies but the bullet passed through him and right into one of the hostages. Winged the guy, so at least I didn’t kill him. Then a barrel of fish water soaked me from above.”

“Fish water?”

“Yep,” I said. “It sounds about as rancid as it was. Itreeked. It also cost me points in stealth because there was no way to not smell me coming.”

“Oh my god…” She pulled her hand from my chest and pressed it to her lips.

“Yep. Got to spend the next four hours stinking of three-day old fish and briny water. By the time the day was done, I couldn’t smell it anymore, but my team didn’t want to be anywhere near me.”

Her shoulders were shaking.

“So yes, shooting fish in a barrel is very easy until the barrel gets you back.”

Her giggles surfaced then and I grinned. She was going to wake herself up, but it was better than the nightmares.

“Enjoying my misery?” I asked and she snorted, but couldn’t quite contain her giggles.

“Yes,” she admitted. “Should I apologize?’

“Nah. Want to hear another?”

“Yes, please.”

The dark of the night wrapped around us and I glanced at the camera angles on my phone. Still all clear…

“Well, it all started when I had to steal an airboat…”

Chapter

Five

PATCH

After a third night in a row of dark dreams where the shadows writhed around me, inflicting pain via a thousand cuts, I abandoned trying to sleep the first time I jerked awake. I half-expected to see McQuade right there. To my surprise, he was absent.

Frowning, I glanced from the empty space next to the bed to the window. The black out curtains made it impossible to tell the time of day. I was not supposed to open them either. No lines of sight into the house.

Shoving the blankets back, I climbed out of the bed. Everything was stiff and sore. My neck cracked as I stretched and then my right shoulder popped. The relief spreading in the wake of the stretching and crackling was enormous. With a twist, I added popping my lower back to the list before I headed into the bathroom.

Trying to smother the yawns assaulting me, I emptied my bladder before washing my hands and my face. The cold water chased away the cobwebs and the exhaustion left in the face of more nebulous nightmares.

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