Every face at the table stared at him. He felt the weight of their eyes.
He wasn’t crazy. He wasn’t. He was just a man who lived in two realities, one of which they couldn’t see. He spun away and stumbled across the room, escaping through the front door.
Silence magnified the echo the screen door made as it banged shut behind Rocco. Mandy looked at her plate, saw it waver in front of her eyes. Her mind replayed the fear she’d seen in his eyes. What the heck had just happened? She looked around the table, trying to see what Rocco might have seen, but nothing looked out of the ordinary.
“Shit,” Kit growled. He shoved a hand through his hair. “How often does that happen, Em?”
“It’s happened a few times since he got here. I don’t know what set him off this time.”
Kit picked up Rocco’s chair and sat in it next to Mandy. Reaching an arm around her, he pulled her close. “Don’t worry, sis. It’s not something you did. His brain is haywire right now. He’s been to hell and back, more than once. He needs time to heal.”
“I told you that. He’s not ready for this. I’ll go talk to him.” Mandy swiped the tears from her face and set her napkin on the table.
“No. I will,” Ty said. “Stay put. And eat up. Don’t waste this food, but it would be best if it weren’t here when he comes back. I’ll get him something else to eat after he calms down.”
“You think the food triggered this?” Mandy asked, frowning.
“Kit burned the hotdogs.” Ty threaded his fingers together over his head. “You know what he looked like when we found him,” he said to Kit. “Somebody had friggin’ exploded all over him.”
Mandy lurched to her feet and ran to her room.
“Well fucking done, my man,” Kit complained as he stood up.
“He’s not going for the phone tonight,” Owen said.
“Oh, he’s going. We need his head back in the game. The only way that’ll happen is to give him work to focus on.” Kit met Owen’s implacable stare.
“There’s too much at stake in this operation to use it as a therapy session. I don’t want to endanger a valuable operative by using him when he isn’t at full capacity.”
“I know my boy, Owen. I know how to pull him through his hell. I’ve done it for seven years.”
Owen leaned back in his chair and studied Kit through narrowed eyes. “You burned the dogs on purpose.”
Kit sat down and filled a roll with a burned hotdog. He slathered it with mustard and ketchup, then took a bite. “Like I said, I know my boy.”
Ty shook his head and went out after Rocco. He paused at the top step of Mandy’s front porch, trying to get a read on which direction Rocco might have taken. He wasn’t down in the construction area or outside the bunkhouse. Ty walked across the drive so that he could see the ridge behind the house-that’s where he would have gone for some alone time. No one stood silhouetted there.
He checked inside the toolshed, then the bunkhouse. Nada. He walked out behind the collapsing barn, wondering if Rocco was making a tour of the back trails, and found him sitting in the dirt at Kitano’s corral. He was leaning back against a support beam, his legs bent, arms propped on his knees. He held a long blade of grass that he was dismembering, inch by inch.
Ty eased himself down next to Rocco, his wounded thigh protesting the movement.
“You pull the short straw?” Rocco asked.
“I volunteered.”
“Lucky you.”
Ty made a dismissive gesture. “Whatever. I didn’t come to talk about your little freak show. We need to talk about me. I went home today.”
“I know.”
“I goddamn hate that place. I think I’m going to burn it down.”
Rocco looked over at him. “You’re an idiot.”
Ty shrugged. “I don’t want it. I won’t ever live there. And I’d love to send my father a message in hell that he can’t fail to interpret correctly.”
Rocco lowered his legs and leaned back. “So sell below market value. Hell, give it to Kit. If you believe that the spirits of the deceased watch us, seeing you give the house to the town’s most hated kid will have your father spinning in his grave.”
“I like that.” Ty slowly smiled. “I like it a lot. Kit won’t take it as a gift, but I could sell it to him for half the going price. Then he’d have a home here near his sister.” He considered that a moment. “What about you? You want it?”
Rocco looked off to where the trails began. “Honestly, I don’t know that I’m going to make it back. I prefer knowing Kit would settle near Mandy, eventually-if you do finally decide the house isn’t for you.” He looked at his friend. “When I go back, you’ll go with me?”
Ty met Rocco’s eyes. “Count on it.” He extended his fist and Rocco bumped it with his. Silence settled between them, filled only by crickets and birds noisily chattering as they settled for the night. “What happened tonight?” Ty asked.
Rocco sighed. “I lost my fucking mind.”
“Yeah, that part I got. But why? What kicked it off?”
“I don’t know. The smoke. The burned dogs.”
“I told Kit not to over-cook them,” Blade interrupted.
“It was like a worm hole right back to the explosion.”
“Did you see anything new while you were checked out?”
Rocco leaned his head back against the post behind him. He shut his eyes. Drawing a deep, slow breath to fight off the panic, he opened his mind to the memories triggered at supper.
“Kadisha was handing Zavi to me. She was going back in the compound for her mother. I grabbed her, tried to stop her. She said that I had done this, that I had killed them. She ran back inside, and the whole thing blew.”
He looked at Blade. “Did I do it? Was there an order to level the compound? Did I have you or Kit call for an airstrike?”
“No. We got the kill order to take out her father, but without you, we didn’t know where he’d holed up. And there were too many civilians living there for the whole village to be a target. It wasn’t our side that blew the compound.”
“Kadisha was pregnant with our second kid.”
“Christ.” Blade drew a long breath and slowly released it. “I’m sorry, bro. I didn’t know.”
“I would have loved that baby. I would have brought Kadisha and the kids here. And though we wouldn’t have stayed married, I would have taken care of them, all of them.”
“I know you would have, my friend. Wouldn’t have expected anything less from you.” He massaged his thigh. They sat in silence for a little while, listening to the sounds of birds settling in for the evening.
“So for the real reason I came down to talk to you-Kit brought back some interesting security footage from the diner. We noticed Mandy’s plumber had an extreme reaction to the team when they stopped for supper. He texted someone, only it wasn’t via his cell phone account-he used some other online account.” He looked at Rocco. “Didn’t you say he was in the diner the day you felt an enemy there?”
“He was there.”
“Kit wants you and Kelan to go to his house tonight and retrieve his phone so that we can see who the hell he messaged and how.”
Rocco looked at him and slowly grinned, feeling he was getting back in the game. “Sure, I’ll go get it.”
Alan made his routine circuit around the house, checking the lock in the front shop, locking the door between his apartment and the shop, then locking the back door. The whole action was preposterous, as if a locked door could keep him safe. It was an illusion of safety, nothing more.
And yet, house-by-house, his neighbors did the same safety checks he’d just completed, locking all the doors, shutting off the lights, slipping into their comfortable beds-ignorant of the fact that he had enough C-4 in his van to blow half the block.
