Afraid of the Dark Read Free

police backup. If only he had checked those text messages twenty minutes sooner.
    I was too late.
    Then he heard a noise downstairs.
    Jamal?
    He kissed McKenna’s forehead, quickly pulled the blanket up over her face, and jumped to his feet. In a matter of seconds he was down the hall and at the top of the stairs. The sirens were getting closer. There was another noise. It was coming from the garage.
    He’s still here!
    Vince flew down the stairs, ran through the living room, and stopped at the kitchen counter. He’d visited the Mays house many times before, and he knew that the pockmarked, pecky-cypress door on the other side of the kitchen led to the three-car garage.
    The sirens were loud now, just outside the house. Vince could have—should have—waited for backup. But a complicated mix of emotions took over. Anger. Guilt. Grief. More anger. His pistol firmly in hand, he hurried across the kitchen and pushed open the door.
    “Freeze!” he shouted, but even he couldn’t hear his command. The mere act of opening the door had triggered a noise that was deafening. The heat overwhelmed him. The flash blinded him. For a split second—it seemed much longer—it felt as if someone were pushing his eyes out the back of his skull, as his head snapped back with the force of a mule kick.
    And then all was black.

Chapter Two
    I t was Jack Swyteck’s second trip to Cuba in the past three weeks. He had yet to meet a Cuban.
    Miami was his home, and while it was true that Miami was closer to Havana than to Orlando, Jack’s flight to the Oriente Province at the southeastern tip of the island was over four hundred air miles. His personal escorts from the naval airstrip to the detention facility were two U.S. marines, a blue-eyed farm boy from Kansas and a first-generation Mexican-American from Los Angeles. His co-counsel, a JAG lawyer assigned to the case despite her client’s obvious discomfort with a female attorney, was from the South Side of Chicago. The civilian translator from Mogadishu was delivering Jack’s words in Somali and, occasionally, Arabic. Jack’s client was from East Africa. A spinmaster might have made the argument that the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo was just as much a melting pot as the nation that ran it. To Jack, the whole place felt more like a ticking time bomb.
    “I’m not a government interrogator,” said Jack, but he was essentially talking to the walls. Four of them, to be exact, an eight-by-ten steel-and-concrete shed, with a separate holding cell and bunk to the left.
    Jack’s client said nothing. It was playing out exactly the way Jack’s first visit to Guantánamo had—the lawyer talking, the client too distrustful to acknowledge his existence.
    The briefing material estimated that Prisoner No. 977 was in his mid-twenties, but three years of confinement and various forms of government “enhanced interrogation” tactics had aged him beyond his years. His thin, dark face was dull and weary. His long black beard was gnarled, his fingernails brittle and yellowed. His first language was officially listed as Somali, but no one seemed to know for certain. There were no confirmed reports of his ever having uttered a word to anyone at Gitmo.
    “Maybe he speaks Pashto or Farsi,” said Jack. “Can we try another language?”
    “Only if you get another translator,” the interpreter said.
    There was no time for that. In sixteen hours Jack was scheduled to be in federal court in Washington arguing for the prisoner’s release. As habeas corpus proceedings went, this one was in a class by itself, but Jack had the pedigree to handle it. Some fifteen years ago, a four-year stint with the Freedom Institute had been Jack’s first job out of law school. His father was the governor of Florida at the time, a man who’d campaigned on a strong pro–death-penalty platform. Jack was hardly the perfect fit for a ragtag group of former hippies who worked only capital cases, but he and his old boss Neil