Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 72122 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 361(@200wpm)___ 288(@250wpm)___ 240(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 72122 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 361(@200wpm)___ 288(@250wpm)___ 240(@300wpm)
Tommy, the doctor of the club he was a member of, would not do that…especially with everything that’d happened to Truth over the last few weeks.
“I think he meant water, Truth,” I offered darkly. “Not whiskey.”
He shrugged.
“Semantics,” he rumbled, then pulled the bottle up to his lips and took another swig.
I gritted my teeth.
“I was a bad guy once,” he murmured into the darkness. “What my father says is true, but I’m not that man anymore.”
I froze where I was standing.
“Would you like to tell me about it?”
He laughed humorlessly.
“No,” he admitted. “But since you won’t go away, I guess I’ll have to share my sins with you.”
I walked slowly forward and took a seat on the opposite arm of the couch that he was leaning against, and waited.
He started slowly.
Then picked up speed until he spilled every single one of his sins.
“When I got hurt two weeks into my final deployment, they medically discharged me.”
“What happened? How did you get hurt?” I interrupted, suddenly concerned and unable to hide it.
His head rolled on the back of the couch, and he smiled in my direction.
“I burned my retina during a firefight and couldn’t see down the barrel of my gun for about three months,” he told me. “It was severe enough at the time to discharge me.”
I nodded my head.
“Okay,” I said, making a ‘go ahead’ motion with my hand. “What happened then?”
I felt like a freakin’ shrink with the way I was urging him to move forward.
“I couldn’t settle into civilian life, so my grandfather suggested that I go work for his best friend. He ran a rescue and recovery black ops organization, and I thought he was one of the good guys, in it for the right reasons.” He swallowed. “Turns out, I was wrong. He was only in it to make a buck, a whole lot of bucks, actually. He had his own agenda that he didn’t share with the rest of us grunts unless or until he felt like sharing it.”
I didn’t reply, waiting for him to continue. And he did.
Bitterly.
“One day, I was sent on a mission by Elais Beckett, the owner of the company and my grandfather’s friend, and it all went well. Intel was good. We found the kid. It was great, right up until it wasn’t.” He took another drink of his whiskey. “We were seconds away from making the recovery when the man came in, took hold of his son, and put a gun to his head.”
My stomach dropped.
“Then what?” I pushed.
I wasn’t sure whether I should urge him to continue talking or not, so I just did what I thought was best. Which was encourage, but not interrupt.
“Then I shot him. Shot right over that kid’s head. My bullet entered the man’s left eye, and expanded like it was supposed to do, which caused his brain to scramble and the bullet to leave out his left ear. Brains exploded, all over his son’s face and body,” he swallowed.
“I don’t see why that was bad,” I finally said. “I can see why it was ‘bad’ but not bad, bad. I mean, he was holding a gun to the child’s head, right?”
He nodded. “Right. But what I didn’t find out until moments later was that the gun the guy was holding was a plastic Airsoft gun, and it still had that stupid orange cap on the end of the barrel.”
I hummed in understanding.
“The guy was fucking crazy,” he said. “Probably would’ve killed the kid, but had I been paying better attention, we could’ve apprehended him and taken him in to get treatment, and that kid wouldn’t have had his father’s brain explode all over his face.”
I bit my lip. “I’m still not seeing why that’s so bad.”
His eyes broke from mine.
“I did research on that kid. Found out later on that the father had signs of PTSD, and reacted badly when startled. Which I’d done. Had I not entered the building like I was ready to storm the place, he would’ve likely answered the door just like any other normal human being.” I watched him swallow. “The mother, from reports I’d later read, had called it in not as an ‘emergency’ but as an ‘I want him back, get him here’ kind of call. Which Elais Becket had neglected to tell me about.”
My stomach was sick for him.
“What about the ‘killer’ part that your father was tossing at you?”
“I did research on the other ops we’d done, and apparently that one case wasn’t so isolated. I’d performed four ops that went sour. Four people were mentally impaired, sick, but generally good people.” I was sick to my stomach. “Two of them died. Two of them are paralyzed. I killed them, and didn’t even have any reason to, because they weren’t bad guys. They were just lost. Like I’d been at one point.”