Thankfully, the windows were open. Also thankfully, Ben hadn’t been hunkered down on the floor of the back seat for too long before the older boy came out of his house dressed in jeans and a dry shirt. As Wade headed for his car, Ben curled up tight and pulled a nasty-ass raincoat over himself.
It smelled worse than wet dog. Like wet llama, or maybe wet yak. Assuming yaks shat where they slept in the pouring rain.
The door to the front opened and the bench seat sagged and groaned as Wade threw himself behind the wheel. The powerful engine started with a roar as the seatbelt clicked and the car surged forward.
Music came on—ancient Southern rock, maybe the Allman Brothers. It was a bit underwhelming and trebly with the car’s original AM-era speakers. But some previous owner, certainly long before Wade, had installed a cheap cassette tape player, so at least it wasn’t the radio.
Ben shifted the wet yak off his head as Wade braked to a stop at the end of his street. The music also stopped abruptly and he heard the tape ejected with a click and a clatter as Wade tossed it down, probably onto the passenger side floor.
The car pulled out onto the main road, and Ben was just about to sit up and announce his status as a stowaway when Wade popped another tape into the player.
The new music came on mid-song—it was a solo male voice accompanied by beach-strumming-style acoustic guitar. It was stark in its simplicity, and it might not have worked with a different singer. But this voice was both roughly textured and pitch perfect—shades of a young Bruce Springsteen—and holy shit, as the chorus kicked in, Ben realized that it was Wade.
In the front seat, Wade screamed. “Oh my God!”
Ben had not only said that holy shit aloud, he’d also sat up, suddenly appearing to Wade in his rear view mirror.
Wade slapped off the music even as he spun the wheel hard and gunned his car into a strip mall’s gravel parking lot, slamming on the brakes. A cloud of dust surrounded them as the car skidded to a stop.
“What the goddamn fuck?” Wade turned to glare at Ben, who had been thrown and was now sprawled across the back.
“Was that you?” Ben asked, sitting up, leaning forward. “Singing?”
“What? No!” Wade said, but the panicked look in his eyes said otherwise.
Ben repeated the first line of the chorus. “Ryan, I’m crying, for you…?”
“It’s Angel’s tape,” Wade said quickly. “Some folksinger she knew from when she lived in Arizona.”
“Man, you can really sing.”
“It wasn’t me,” Wade insisted.
“Did you write it, too? I mean, of course you did. Ryan? Come on.”
Now the look in Wade’s eyes was all about figuring out where he could dump Ben’s body after killing him.
“It was really good,” Ben said.
Wade closed his eyes. “Get the fuck out of my car.”
Ben fastened his seat belt. This car was so old, it was a lap belt only. Pre-shoulder straps. “How can love be a bad thing?” he asked.
“Love sucks,” Wade said. “It’s a motherfucking shit-show. Get out of my goddamn car. Seriously, Gillman, I’m running out of time.”
“That’s funny, because seeing as how I’m suspended, I’ve got all the time in the world,” Ben said, fishing his phone out of the front pocket of his jeans. “And I’m thinking you’re either going to tell me what’s going on, or I’m going to give Ryan a call and sing him a few lines of Ryan, I’m crying—”
“And I’ll tell him you’re fucking lying!”
“Ooh, I think the rhyme works just a little better if you leave out the word fucking—”
Wade cut him off. “If you tell him, he’ll never let it go. He’ll show up at my house, knock on my door, and then Cody will kill us both. And it’ll be on you, asshole.”
Ben could see that he was serious. Wade really believed his older brother was capable of that kind of hatred-fueled violence.
“My brother’s going to kill me,” Wade said, almost completely conversationally. “You want to know what’s going on? Here’s what’s going on, ass-face. I’ve decided to come out, and when I do, Cody’s going to end me. I’ve come to terms with that. So do me a favor, please, and give me a few days. That’s all I need. After that, I’ll be dead, and I really won’t give a shit what you do. But I’d appreciate it, Ben, if you’d hold off ’til then, so your goddamned meddling doesn’t get Ryan killed, too!” His voice rose until he shouted those last words.
Ben looked down at his phone. If there ever was a time to text the word pterodactyl to Izzy and Eden and Danny and Jenn, it was right freaking now.
“Get out of the car,” Wade said again. “Get out of the car get out of the car getfuckingoutofthegoddamnfuckingcar!”
Ben didn’t move. “Man, I hate your guts, but I kinda can’t walk away and just leave you here to commit suicide-by-homophobic-asshole-of-a-brother.”
“Fine,” Wade said, jerking the car into gear and peeling out of the parking lot. Ben bounced as Wade didn’t even bother to find the driveway, he just went off the curb and into the street. Fortunately the only other car on the road braked and swerved and didn’t hit them. “I have to pick up Angel, and she’s going to be so freaked out when she sees you, I’m not sure what she’ll do. But since I also hate your guts, I guess I really don’t give a good goddamn if you die, too.”
* * *
The wind had seemingly come out of nowhere—which was the standard MO for most ocean breezes.
But it wasn’t the sudden gust that capsized Boat Squad John’s IBS. It was, without the slightest doubt in Izzy’s mind, a solid side effect of some major hallucinatory drama.
From his perch on the stern of the Zodiac he was sharing with fellow instructors Tony Vlachic and Mark Jenkins, Izzy heard a variety of voices shouting, using a variety of different nouns, verbs, and adjectives, but the general meaning was all the same: SEAL candidate Jake Harris was not now, nor had he recently been, in danger of going up in flames.
Despite the reassurances, dude was swinging his paddle over his head like a weapon, narrowly missing the two giant Johns’ own vulnerable noggins. He swung again, lower this time, and both Schlossman and Jackson went into the ocean to avoid a skull fracture, tipping the duck and throwing Jake and the rest of their squad into the slushee-cold water as well.
“That’s gotta hurt,” Tony V. observed as he nudged open the throttle and aimed their motorized rubber skiff at the capsized and much smaller duck. He gave Squad John plenty of space, circling just close enough so they’d know help was at hand, should they need it.
“Bring ’er closer, V,” Marky-Mark Jenkins said as he caught what Izzy saw maybe a quarter-of-a-heartbeat later.
Timebomb Jackson, in the water holding onto the side of Squad John’s duck, vigorously doing the universal high-over-his-head, come-help wave with his free arm and hand.
But the help needed wasn’t for him. “Gull followed Jake!” he shouted, pointing out toward the open ocean. “They went that way, moving fast!”
Tony was on it, sliding the Zodiac around as he gunned the motor. Jenk grabbed for the radio to let Big Mac know WTF, over. Lieutenant MacInnough was in the much larger Mark V with the medical team.
Izzy already had his binoculars out, scanning the surface of the water in the direction Jackson had pointed. But the chop was making it hard to see. Amazing how whitecaps could look exactly like human heads, and… “There!” He spotted the familiar bright color of the life vests the tadpoles always bitched and moaned about having to wear.
But when Tony expertly slid the Zodiac up alongside of it, they all immediately saw that it had been abandoned and was fully SEAL-candidate free.
“Somehow Jake got out of his vest, over,” Jenk grimly reported to Big Mac as Izzy again used the glasses to scan. “Or maybe it was Seagull who ditched—”
“It wasn’t Seagull,” Izzy said, certain of that.
Sometimes, despite everyone’s best intentions, SEAL candidates died du
ring training. It sucked when it happened. Royally. Still, Izzy wasn’t worried—not today—because wherever Jake was, the Seagull was with him. And the Gull would never-in-a-million-years ditch his vest.
And bingo, there he was. Little Livingston Seagull. He had Jake in a modified lifeguard hold, arm locked around the bigger man’s neck. He was pulling Jake back, but not toward the Zodiac. No, it was clear that he’d seen them but that he was choosing to take his wayward squad-mate all the way back to their rubber duck instead.
Which would’ve been okay, if Jake hadn’t shed his vest. Hell, it even would’ve been okay if Jake had un-vested during a brief period of hallucinations, provided the period had truly been brief.
But as Tony gently brought the Zodiac closer to Seagull and his unsung He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother rendition, they all could see that Jake had checked out. His eyes were open but no one was home, even as the Seagull reached the duck.
“Help me get him aboard,” Gull commanded the rest of his squad—Jackson, Schlossman, and the two other random Johns nicknamed Q and Doe, both of whom were probably only still here because of Seagull’s quiet, bedrock-style, of course you can leadership.
All of Boat Squad John leaped to help, but even with the jostling and the change from wet to dry and cold to colder, Jake didn’t come out of his not-quite-here state. He was alive and breathing, but otherwise nonresponsive.
“We’re gonna need a hospital corpsman, over,” Jenk was already saying into the radio.
Seagull heard him as he swung himself up and into the duck. “Please,” he said. “No. Please.” He looked directly at Izzy. “Give us five minutes. Please.”
He was going to try to bring Jake back—not just wake him up but make him want to stay.
“Gullll,” Izzy said, drawing the man’s name out, “this is one even you can’t fix. But you’ve got about forty-five seconds before the LT gets here, so…”
The Seagull didn’t quit. He tried damn near everything to get through to Jake, even as boat squad after boat squad went paddling past, leaving BS John in their wake.
A fact that Schlossman kept pointing out to him. “We’re now dead last,” Hans tightly informed Seagull. “We’re a fucking floating turd bucket! Just let Jake go, man! He doesn’t want to be here! He’s made that fucking clear!”
But Seagull just ignored him and he was still trying—“Come on, Jake! Don’t give up like this!”—as the medical team moved the man onto the Mark V.
And when the Mark V pulled away, it was Timebomb who lit into Schlossman. “Yo asshole! You don’t just abandon your swim buddy!”
Schlossman immediately started to sputter. “Whoa, DB! I didn’t—”
“Fuck yeah, you did!” Timebomb lashed out.
Of course it was Seagull who leaped to Schloss’s defense. “He didn’t abandon Jake, Deeb. I’m the stronger swimmer, it made sense, squad-wise, for me to go after him.”
But Timebomb continued to glare at Schloss. “Maybe so, but you sure as hell don’t say good riddance to a teammate who’s having a medical emergency! Or Maybe if we’re lucky they’ll both drown? What the fuck was that, Hans?”
“Bro, come on, I didn’t mean that!” Schloss sounded like a petulant child. He also sounded like he was lying his ass off. “Seriously, DB, I was going for a little levity in a bad situation’s all…”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t funny,” Timebomb shot back. “You’re an asshole.”
Seagull spoke up. He didn’t look surprised or dismayed or even the least little bit hurt by Schlossman’s so-called joke. “Hey, guys, look, let’s just move on. We’ve all said things in duress that we didn’t mean—things we wish we could take back. So, come on.” He picked up his paddle. “Let’s get this, what’d you call it, Hansie? Floating turd bucket—let’s get this FTB moving.”
And with that, the five remaining Jo(h)ns paddled off, their FTB slowly picking up speed.
“Fuck you, asshole, I’m drown-proof. You’re never getting rid of me,” Izzy muttered the words that he knew the mighty, mighty Seagull had been thinking but hadn’t said aloud to John Schlossman.
Who needed abuse from the instructors when you could get it directly from a teammate?
But he’d also seen the look on Schlossman’s face. He was not happy to be filed under Asshole in Timebomb’s contact list. And what would happen when he recognized—and he was gonna get there eventually—that it was Seagull who was leading them directly to success and graduation?
The squad dynamic would change. Drastically.
“So this is gonna be interesting,” Tony mildly said the words they all were thinking.
There were forty-eight hours still left in Hell Week. Anything could—and would—happen. Interesting was an understatement.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Still Relentlessly Wednesday
Pterodactyl.
Ben had typed the word and his finger hovered over the send-all button for his text.
But to his surprise, Wade turned and pulled down the long driveway that led to the women’s health facility.
Picking up Angel, he’d said.
Ben must’ve made an Ah sound, because Wade glanced at him in the rearview.
“She’s not here for that, fuckwad,” Wade told him. “That’s only a tiny fraction of the women’s health shit they do here. Although, you know what? I’d help her do that, too, if she asked me. Because not only is it her motherfucking constitutional right, but we both know that if Cody gets her pregnant, she’ll never get away from him. And if she doesn’t get away, he’s gonna kill her. It’s just a matter of time. God, I hope she’s finally starting to believe that.”
Ben put down his phone. “Your brother… hits Angel?”
“He’d deny it, because it’s usually not a clean hit, you know, with a fist,” Wade said. “But he shoves her or hip-checks her—he’s twice her size, what the goddamn fuck does he think’s gonna happen? But then if she falls, when she falls because she always falls—it’s her fault for being clumsy. He trips her—and she’s the idiot for not getting out of the way of his foot. So does he hit her? Rarely. Does he send her to the ER? Constantly. She comes here, a lot, too, like after he found her birth control pills and flushed ’em—and then nearly killed her for using them. She was showing up here so often, requesting the morning-after pill, that the staff marked her as a suspected victim of, you know. That kind of abuse. Violence from someone who’s supposed to love and protect her. No shit, Sherlock, right? But the last doctor who saw her talked her into making an appointment with a counselor, and that’s why she’s here today.”
Wade glared at Ben in the rearview with eyes that were suspiciously red as he continued. “Is that enough of an explanation for you, dickhead? I needed an excuse for not being in school so I could drive her over here and then pick her back up—without Cody knowing about it. Because I knew if I didn’t help her, she wouldn’t go. And because just maybe that counselor got through to her, and she’ll finally agree to leave him, so then I won’t have to do what I goddamn well know that I’m going to have to do, because the reality is that she’s never gonna leave him.”
Ben had been thinking about that—what Wade thought he was going to have to do—pretty much nonstop as they’d driven here. “How does you getting beaten or even killed by your brother help Angel?” But even as he asked the question, he realized the answer. “Because you think Cody’ll go to jail?” He reached out to touch Wade’s shoulder. “Wade, you really need to—”
“Don’t you goddamn touch me!”
Ben pulled his hand back. “Seriously, though. It’s not like after he hurts you or even maybe kills you, that the police magically, immediately appear and boom, he’s locked up for the rest of his life. There’s an investigation, there’s a hearing, there’s a trial, and it all takes time and there’re lots of opportunities for him to make bail. You could do this, sacrifice yourself like this, and he could kill Angel anyway, and you won’t be there to stop him.”
Wad
e pulled up in front of the main entrance. “Then I guess I’m going to have to kill him.”
“Yeah, I’m not liking that plan, either,” Ben said. “How about we go inside and talk to that counselor, too?”
“All the talking in the world doesn’t do shit,” Wade said, “if Angel keeps going back to him. And she does. He’s got her so completely mind-fucked.”
“And your parents can’t help?” Ben asked.
Wade laughed, and the sound was hollow and hopeless. He pitched his voice higher. “They get like that sometimes, honey. I heard my mother telling Angel that, when Cody was stomping around, giving her the silent treatment because she’d, I don’t know, burned his grilled cheese sandwich or something equally stupid. Do your best not to cause any trouble. God, how many times has my mom said that to me, too, starting when I was, I don’t know? Two? But with my dad, the same thing that got me a high-five one day is causing trouble the next which means I’m going to get pounded, so how the hell do I know if it’s a good day or a bad day, and my mother just does what she always does, and goes upstairs and closes the door. Same way she goes upstairs when Cody does what he does to Angel.”
Ben nodded. He knew how shitty that felt. His mother, too, had made herself scarce when his stepfather, Greg, had gotten rough with him.
“Or I should say, she went upstairs,” Wade continued. “My mother hasn’t been home in a while. Day after Christmas, she went to visit my aunt in Pasadena, and just never came back. I mean, she calls, so we know that she’s not dead, but… I guess she just gave up.”
“I’m sorry,” Ben said as Wade’s sister-in-law, Angel, came out of the building. She was slender and pale, and her glasses made her eyes look gigantic in her gaunt face. She hurried over to Wade’s car but then stopped after opening the door and seeing Ben sitting in the back.
“What is he doing here?”
“It’s okay,” Wade reassured her, his voice unusually gentle. “He won’t tell Cody you were here.”
She was terrified, Ben realized. And her terror made her anger spark.
“If Cody finds out,” she started as she climbed in, her movements clipped. But she never finished her sentence, maybe because she didn’t want to say the words he’ll kill me out loud. Instead she shot another look at Ben’s face. “What truck hit you?”
Ready to Roll Page 8
