Blood on the Tracks (Sydney Rose Parnell Series Book 1)

by Barbara Nickless

  “Not our call. Please, Nik.” I panted with the effort of speaking. “No . . . gun.”

  Nik took two steps toward us, and Clyde darted in front of me. The beam of the Maglite swung toward him, followed by Nik’s gun.

  Terror clawed up my throat. “Nik, no!” My worthless hands scrabbled to find my own gun. “Clyde, come!”

  Behind Nik, a pair of lights flared, and an engine revved as a vehicle labored up the rise. I tried to find my knees, floundered like a landed fish. Doors opened. Voices spilled out.

  “Nik!” I pleaded. “Don’t. Think of Ellen Ann and Gentry. They need you. You can’t sacrifice them to kill Rhodes.”

  Backlit by the headlights, Nik shuddered.

  “Don’t take away your son’s father,” I said.

  “Ah, shit.” Nik lowered his gun. Sank to his knees. “Ah, Jesus. Elise. Oh, Elise.”

  More voices. The silhouettes of people climbing toward us. A sound that might have been Nik, weeping.

  Clyde crouched next to me, head thrust forward as he snarled a warning to anyone who tried to approach.

  “Somebody get the dog away from her,” one of the voices said.

  Nik’s voice then, trying to call Clyde away. But Clyde dug in. I fumbled for his lead, ordered him down, curled into myself. I just wanted to sleep.

  “Get a muzzle on him.”

  Clyde snarled as someone pulled him away.

  Hands grabbed me, rolled me onto my back. Nik’s face came into view, then the face of Deputy O’Malley. O’Malley pushed the hair back from my face and grinned at me.

  “Fucking Marines,” he said.

  Doors opened and closed again and someone shouted for a stretcher, and then O’Malley had me in his arms and someone gripped my wrist and someone else asked if Rhodes was alive.

  A woman said, “Doesn’t look good.”

  “Alive,” I whispered to whoever could hear me. “He’s alive.”

  I was down again, but not on the ground. Someone placed a mask over my mouth and nose and warm air flooded my lungs and the Sir was there, saying we’re all good, we’re all good, and finally, with my hand in Nik’s and the salt of his tears on my skin, they let me sleep.

  CHAPTER 9

  - I see dead people. Like in that movie. Ghosts that no one else can see. Except my dog. I think he sees them, too.

  - Do these ghosts threaten you?

  - No. It’s not like that. They’re just . . . sad. I’m sad. We’re all sad together. Like something has broken, and none of us knows how to fix it.

  - Corporal Parnell, do you believe these ghosts are real?

  - Yes. PAUSE. No. PAUSE. I don’t know if they’re real. If I were still in Iraq, I’d say yes. They seem real. I mean, one of them sits at my kitchen table pretty much every morning. But here? I just don’t know. Does this mean I’m crazy?

  - I’m going to write you a prescription for alprazolam. It will calm you down, let you sleep. It will let your ghosts sleep, too. Maybe they won’t bother you so much.

  - What if they’re trying to say something important? Not just to me but to everyone. I mean, maybe they haven’t figured it out exactly, either, so they’re just kind of . . . waiting. Maybe there’s something we’re all supposed to learn.

  - Here’s the scrip, Corporal Parnell. You can get it filled before you leave today. I’m going to be out of town next month, but we’ll talk when I get back.

  —Interview Transcript, VA Assistance Office, Camp Pendleton

  Elise rode home with me.

  In the back of the deputy’s car, I sat slumped against the driver’s-side door, one of the EMTs’ blankets still wrapped around my shoulders. Next to me, Clyde took up most of the backseat, his head in my lap. I stroked his fur and whispered apologies. I know he too had nightmares of Iraq.

  Iraq. Habbaniyah. A house of mud and stone.

  Elise sat on the floor on the passenger side, her head in her hands, able to slide into that small space because, of course, she wasn’t really there.

  Clyde was careful not to let his paws dangle.

  Nik rode up front with the deputy, Brad Perkins. I hadn’t met Perkins before—he’d been part of the search teams on the back end of the train. Decent guy for hanging around and then driving us through this mess. Beyond decent. I heard Nik offer Perkins his spare bedroom if they closed the highway.

  “Got a sister lives nearby,” Perkins answered. “Appreciate it, though.”

  Nik turned in his seat.

  “You still cold?” he asked.

  I nodded. My teeth had finally quit chattering, but the cold went deeper than blankets or a car heater could cure.

  “Should have let them take you to the hospital.”

  “I’ll be fine.” My voice sounded like Velcro ripping. “They sure Rhodes is going to make it?”

  “Yeah. You want that coffee now?”

  I nodded again. Nik passed a paper cup with a lid through the opening in the safety screen that divided the front seat from the back. My frozen fingers still weren’t working, so I held the cup with my palms.

  “I want you to stay with me and Ellen Ann,” he said. “Grams is there now. You shouldn’t be alone.”

  I could not bear Ellen Ann’s grief. “The EMTs checked me out. I’m good.”

  “That’s not what I mean. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  I barked a little laugh.

  “I have Clyde,” I said.

  “Clyde looks a little the worse for wear, too.” Nik dropped his fist lightly on the seat back. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this.”

  I couldn’t say what I wanted to say in front of the deputy. About how I understood what he’d done and why, and that it was okay. That I’d been that crazy before, too. That I totally got the rage and the helplessness, which were really two sides of the same coin.

  I glanced over at Elise. “No Weight, Nik.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” He cleared his throat. “We can talk more later.”

  “Sure.”

  “Tomorrow, maybe.”

  I turned toward the window and closed my eyes against his voice, slipping away again.

  In the days after we’d taken away the bodies of the Marine and the interpreter, the dead Marine’s buddies had made it their mission to hunt down his killers. The insurgents had responded with increased sniper fire and IEDs.

  Before long, everything had gone to shit.

  “What are we going to do about this, Sir?” I’d asked.

  “It’s a mess, Parnell. Jesus Christ. Wish I hadn’t dragged you into it.”

  “I’m good, sir. But I’m wondering what we’re going to do.”

  “You mean, like, are we going to tell everyone about how the insurgents killed Haifa and Resenko? And how after that some of our Marines went bat-shit crazy and decided to play Charles Bronson? And that now we’re getting a taste of our own payback?”

  “Bronson, sir?”

  “Never mind.”

  He looked at me, eyes grim in his calm, soldier-leader face, a face I’d grown to love and trust. “You expect me to have the answers, Parnell. And you should. That’s your right. But it’s a gaggle fuck. The whole damn thing is a gaggle fuck. And there isn’t a damn thing we can do except keep using our shovels to try and dig our way out.” He raised his voice so everyone could hear. “Load ’em up and let’s hit the road, Marines. We got bodies.”

  “Ah, Christ.” Bailor. “Why so many bodies all the sudden? Damn ragheads got some real hate on us.”

  “No worries,” Tomitsch said. “We’ll kill every last one of them.”

  The sheriff’s car swayed side-to-side as we hit traffic, and I jerked awake. Clyde lifted his head. The snow had stopped, and only a thin layer of white covered the ground. Maybe the storm hadn’t hit very hard this far south. The blue-white glow of the city’s mercury lights fractured on the car’s ice-streaked windows.

  Elise was gone.

  “We left our duty ve
hicle right down here,” Nik was saying to the deputy. “There it is.”

  The car eased to a stop, and Clyde and I had to wait for the deputy to open the back door—the backseat was meant for perps, so there were no inside handles. I tumbled out, still weak, and Perkins caught me.

  “Easy there,” he said in a big, gentle voice, his breath like smoke in the cold. “Ain’t easy being a hero.”

  I tried to laugh off my embarrassment. “Right.”

  He set me upright. “You take care of yourself, okay?”

  “Sure. Thanks for the ride.”

  “Anytime.”

  I felt Perkins’s eyes on me as Nik came around. The men shook hands, then Nik took my arm and led me to the Explorer. When I was settled in the passenger seat, he let Clyde into the back, started the engine, and stepped back out to clear the windows. Perkins turned his duty vehicle around and headed north. He waved before he left.

  Down near the creek, the hobo camp looked deserted in the cloud-reflected city shine. Tents and tarps were gone, the fire pit empty. Hopefully that meant everyone had managed to find beds at Saint Joseph’s or Step 13 or another shelter.

  Nik got back into the vehicle, put the engine in gear, and climbed the embankment toward the street.

  “Sydney Rose—”

  “I’m too tired, Nik.”

  “Just let me say my piece.”

  I stayed silent.

  “I went a little crazy up there. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have shot Clyde. You know that.”

  “You don’t have to explain.”

  “I just—” His jaw knotted beneath his skin. “I didn’t know I could hurt so much. Thought I was too strong to hurt like this.”

  “It’s not about strength, Nik. Jesus. It’s about love.”

  “Love.” A quiet, rueful snort. “Gives us feet of clay.”

  “And makes us strong.”

  He glanced at me, looked away. “Could be.”

  We stared out the windshield and waited for traffic to clear. Headlights from a passing truck carved Nik’s face into arcs of bright and dark.

  “I wish you had left him out there,” he said.

  “That so?” Anger sparked through the exhaustion. “I thought letting him freeze to death wasn’t hands-on enough for you. Got the feeling you wanted something more personal.”

  He laid his eyes on me. “That were so, Sydney Rose, I wouldn’t have told you to give up the search and come back.”

  “You knew damn well I wouldn’t come back. Not without him. So don’t give me that bullshit. I was your one shot at Rhodes. So you came after me, made sure you caught up to us where there weren’t any witnesses. You’d of killed him if the deputies hadn’t arrived when they did.”

  A long silence. Then, “Why’d you go after him?”

  “You’re asking me that? Jesus, Nik, you were the one taught me to never leave a fallen soldier behind.”

  I yanked open the glove box and rifled past sunscreen and lip balm and pills for a stray cigarette, desperate for the burn in my lungs to mask my sudden wounding. My heart hurt with what I didn’t want him to say, with the fear that I was right about him.

  He was so still and so quiet. It was as if he’d traveled to a place that didn’t reside in the same dimension as the rest of the world. Some place so completely apart I couldn’t follow him.

  “Unless they’ve gone bad,” he said.

  “What?”

  He returned with a start, suddenly back in the truck with me.

  “Always my belief that if they’ve gone bad,” he said, “you leave them.”

  He pulled onto the street, corrected the car when it fish-tailed on the ice, then eased into late-evening traffic. “My fault for not teaching you that.”

  At Nik’s house, he pulled to the curb.

  “You sure you’re good to drive?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Nik got out, and I climbed over behind the steering wheel. Ellen Ann stood in the sallow light just inside the front door, wrapped in an old gray sweater and staring out through the screen, arms crossed over her chest. Her face was ashen, her hair in disarray. I gave her a small wave, and she raised a single, listless hand to show she’d seen me.

  Nik leaned back into the truck, laid his hand on mine for a moment, then closed the door and walked up the drive, a man yoked to his grief like a single ox pulling for six. I left him to his wife and their anguish and drove home, steering along the icy streets with my wrists. A few blocks from the house, I pulled into the drive-through of a twenty-four-hour McDonald’s and ordered ten cheeseburgers.

  Only the porch light and a single, dim lamp in the living room pushed back the darkness when I pulled into the driveway. I let Clyde out and waited while he did his business. Something rustling in the deep shadows of the neighbor’s trees caught his attention, a squirrel probably, but I called him back, and together we walked like ninety-year-olds to the house.

  Inside, I shrugged out of my coat, tugged off my boots in the hallway, then closed and locked the front door. Clyde hurried down the hall ahead of me, his nails clicking on the linoleum. I heard him drink from his bowl. In the kitchen, I found a note on the table: “Gone to Nik and Ellen Ann’s. Probably stay a few days. You need me, you call me. Love, Grams.”

  I turned on all the lights in the house, chasing away shadows and ghosts alike. I rinsed and cleaned Clyde’s water bowl and refilled it, then dug out his cheeseburgers and placed them on the floor, buns and all.

  I found a yogurt in the refrigerator and opened a can of peaches.

  Clyde wolfed down his burgers, then came over to the kitchen table to see if I was eating anything interesting. I let him sniff the yogurt, and to my surprise, he scooped out a big dollop with his tongue. I placed the yogurt on the floor and watched him eat.

  I picked up the phone and called my boss, Captain Mauer, at his home. I filled him in on the day—he already knew most of it from dispatch.

  “The sheriff called to lodge a complaint about you, said you disobeyed orders and endangered his men.”

  I said nothing.

  “He said women had no business playing at being cops.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “I told him if he wanted to whine about you saving his ass, he ought to take his complaint to the media, see what they make of the story.”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  “Take tomorrow off, Parnell.”

  “Thank you, sir. But if it’s all the same, I’d just as soon get back on schedule.”

  “Not this time. What you did today finishes off your shift. We’ll see you back here next week. From what I’ve heard, your body’s gonna need the rest.”

  “Sir—”

  “That’s an order, Parnell.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You did good today,” he said and hung up.

  I pulled off my headset and leaned my forehead against the plaster. After a minute of trying to talk myself out of it, I pulled the whiskey down from the cupboard, poured two fingers into a glass and drained it. Then I poured some more and lit a cigarette. I took the pain meds the EMTs had given me from my pocket and set them on the counter. I looked at them for a long time before turning away.

  I watched the news while I finished the cigarette and the whiskey. Nothing about Elise.

  The memory of Tucker Rhodes’s jade-green eyes stayed with me as I grabbed sweats and a T-shirt from my bedroom and, trailed by Clyde, went down the hallway toward the bathroom where I hoped a hot shower would wash everything away. Elise’s brutalized body. Nik’s Weight. Rhodes’s pain and grief. And his jade-green eyes, once arrogant, now lost.

  Clyde trotted into the bathroom then whimpered and came back out.

  I reached in through the doorway and flipped on the light.

  Elise stood in the center of the tiled floor. Behind her, a naked man, headless and still, his body burned.

  “Survivor’s guilt,” I said to Clyde. “That’s all.”

  Gently, I waved
Elise and Resenko into the hallway, a breath of chill air kissing my cheeks as they passed by. Clyde and I tumbled into the bathroom, and I closed the door, leaned against it. Clyde sniffed at the gap between the door and the tiles.

  Only silence from the hallway. I turned the lock.

  “We’re still good,” I told Clyde.

  I set the whiskey on the sink and ordered him to lie down.

  “Roll over, boy.”

  With meticulous attention, I went over every inch of his body, looking for any injuries, paying special attention to his paws. When I was sure he was clear, I gave him a good belly rub, then turned my attention to my own weary body.

  I stripped off my uniform and dropped it on the floor. In a drawer, I found a pair of tweezers, closed the toilet lid, and propped my left foot on it. It took me half an hour to pull out all the spines. Clyde watched at first, then settled himself with a yawn against the bathroom door. The skin on my leg was angry and red, and I set out the bottle of hydrogen peroxide to use after I showered.

  I unwrapped the bandages on my hands, decided the scrapes weren’t too bad. My face was another matter. From my jump onto the train and subsequent slide across the platform, I looked exactly like someone who’d taken on a freight train and lost. The cut on my cheek was larger than I’d realized, offset by a bruise that grew as I watched. Both my eyes were puffy, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they were black by morning.

  Well, it wasn’t as if I had anyone to impress.

  In the shower, I wielded the washcloth fiercely, ignoring the pain from my bruised back and shoulders as I scrubbed my body then rubbed shampoo into my scalp. I didn’t want to think about Iraq. I didn’t want to think about dead people and wounded people and sad and guilty people. I didn’t want nightmares or ghosts or flashbacks to bodies torn apart by IEDs. I didn’t want Tucker Rhodes. I didn’t want to think about my parents. I just wanted to be a regular twenty-seven-year-old woman, holding down a decent job, enrolled at the community college and studying whatever caught my interest while I tried to figure out my life. Maybe later I’d want something more, but all I cared about right now were the simple things—my grandmother and my dog and a roof over our heads and not losing all of that because of something that went down in another life on the other side of the world.