In their place came steel. Cold, sharpened, ready for use. Emily looked at me with her one open eye and whispered, “Ethan, don’t. Please don’t.”
“You just got out. They’ll kill you. Or send you back. Please.”
I leaned down and kissed her fingers. Then I said quietly, evenly, without drama: “Emmy, I promised Mom I’d protect you. I failed.”
“For seven years I failed. I’m done failing.” She started crying.
I stood up, walked out of the room, down the hall, down the stairs, out the hospital doors, and stopped on the front steps. I took a cigarette from the pack the trucker had given me, lit it, took a drag, and said out loud to the gray sky over that gray town: “They’re going to pay. Every one of them.”
The city had changed a lot while I was gone. I was born there 36 years earlier. Regular kid from a working-class neighborhood.
Yard ball, public school, boxing gym, first cigarette at thirteen, first real fight at fourteen. I don’t remember my father. My mother worked from dawn to dark. When Emily was born, I was thirteen, and I became a second parent overnight.
Changed diapers, warmed bottles, walked her to preschool. Mom got home at ten at night and dropped into bed exhausted. I’m not complaining. That’s how a lot of families around us lived.
After high school I joined the Army, ended up in airborne infantry, then special operations. Twelve years in uniform. Four combat deployments. Assault team leader over eight men.
We did the kind of work that doesn’t make the papers and doesn’t get discussed at church suppers. We went where sane people were trying to get out. We took people who weren’t supposed to be taken.
And we came back—not always all of us, but enough. I earned two medals and three commendations. I had four shrapnel scars and one knife scar.
I knew twelve ways to kill a man without a weapon and thirty with one. I knew how to survive in woods, mountains, desert. I knew reconnaissance, planning, command under fire.
What I didn’t know was how to live an ordinary life. When you spend years at war, ordinary life starts to feel like a foreign country. I came back from my last deployment with a concussion and what doctors call post-traumatic stress disorder, and what guys back home call something simpler.
They say your wiring got crossed. I couldn’t sleep. Loud noises made me jump.
I had nightmares every night. I drank to quiet them. Drank hard.
One night I was in a bar with Mike, my oldest friend. Four men came over. They didn’t like the way Mike looked at them.
One thing led to another, and one of them hit Mike in the head with a bottle. Mike went down. Blood.
I saw my friend’s blood and switched over. Not blacked out. Switched over. Combat autopilot.
I beat the man who hit Mike and couldn’t stop. By the time they pulled me off him, he was on the floor not breathing. Basilar skull fracture.
He died before the ambulance got there. Trial. Public defender.
Eight years in a maximum-security prison for aggravated assault resulting in death. The fact that they hit first, that I was defending a friend, that I had combat decorations and a head injury—all of that counted as mitigation, but I still got the sentence. Eight years.
Emily was sixteen. She was left alone. Prison.
State Correctional Facility Six. Hard place. Administration ran the place with an iron hand.
The first year was hell. They tested me, tried to break me, tried to put me in my place. The scar through my eyebrow came in the first week when three men decided a former operator ought to learn humility.
I didn’t learn it. Two of them ended up in the infirmary, the third lost four teeth. After that, they left me alone.
I did my time straight. No write-ups, no extra trouble. Worked in the prison shop, lifted weights, read books, counted days. Seven years and parole for good behavior. Model inmate.
Then I walked out into a city I barely recognized. In seven years everything had shifted.
The factory that used to employ half the town had gone bankrupt and shut down. People lost their jobs. Those who could leave, left.
Those who couldn’t, drank or got hooked. Into that vacuum stepped Russell Kane, known as Cat. He showed up five years earlier, after I’d already gone away.
Young, 32, ambitious. Started with the markets. Put his people in place, shook down vendors.
Then expanded. Car washes, tire shops, convenience stores, diners. If you paid, you stayed open.
If you didn’t pay, they explained the arrangement. Hard. Arson, beatings.
In one case they cut off a man’s finger. After that, nobody argued. Then Cat moved into bigger business.
Drugs moved through his channels. Several spots around town working like storefronts. Walk in, pay, get your package.
Brothels opened in the old warehouse district, in former factory buildings. So-called massage parlors where girls worked off fake debts, just like my Emily was supposed to. Illegal gaming rooms, sports betting operations.
All under Cat. The police? The police were part of the system.
The chief of police got an envelope every month. Two detectives who buried cases involving Cat’s men were on the payroll. The patrol officer assigned to Emily’s neighborhood got his own $350 a month for staying blind…
