Final Crossing: A Novel of Suspense Read Free Page B

the news yet.”
    Ear
    The word stabbed at Jonas.
    “I’ve actually seen that before, you know.” The Senator continued to look through Jonas. “In Vietnam. It happened to one of ours. No one I knew, but we found the body. Both ears cut off. VC used it as a scare tactic. Like the Indians did with scalping. Goddamn brutal practice, but effective. Scared the living shit out of me, tell you that. Makes me sick to think something like that happened to Michael.”
    “You never told me that before.”
    “There are a lot of things I don’t tell people about that time. I tell you more than most. You can understand.”
    The horrors of men slaughtering men.
    “You ever see that kind of thing? In Somalia?”
    The Senator would occasionally bring up Jonas’s time in the service, and he knew Jonas received an honorable discharge after coming home wounded from Somalia in ninety-three. Jonas never told him exactly what had happened. Sidams had undoubtedly read his military record, but Jonas knew it could never capture the evil of what had really happened. He had thought he’d purged the memories of what he saw that day, but just an hour ago he was back there. Something about Jonas’s accident on the Beltway must have jarred loose the collection of horrors wedged in the depths of his mind.
    “I don’t know,” Jonas answered. “There’s a lot I don’t remember.”
    Sidams finally focused his gaze on Jonas’s face. “Well, you’re one of the lucky ones, then.”

4
    CLEVELAND APRIL 6
    RUDIGER STANDS outside the grocery store in the cold, smoking a butt. Frozen air on his freshly shaven face. There’s a cut on his chin. Doesn’t remember getting it. The sting of it makes him happy, makes him feel a little more alive. He wonders how much pain it takes before you start feeling less alive than more.
    The wind jolts him, gets him thinking. Back, way back. Back to boyhood.
    Thinks about the Preacherman, like he does every day. Remembers the dirty room. Sheets stained with blood and dirt, never saw a washing. Smell of air that never did nothing but sit in the same place, months on end. The three locks on the basement door. Preacherman would open those locks, one at a time, and Rudiger would press himself deeper into the saggy bed, hoping to disappear, knowing only bad things were comin’ through that door, bad things wrapped in promises of salvation. But salvation wasn’t real, not like that.
    Just a twelve year-old boy at the time. Hadn’t done nothing but take the long way home on his bike that one day. That was the day he met the Preacherman. The day after which he didn’t see his family for nearly two months.
    Rudiger pushes the memories from his mind, knowing they will hover close by, just like they always do. Preacherman is dead now, but never far away.
    Rudiger drops the butt in the dirty snow of the parking lot and watches it die. He’s in a Cleveland suburb. Long drive from Philly.
    Philly was a mistake.
    The man— Michael, not Mike —was the wrong person. He was not the One . All that work done for nothing. Rudiger had watched as the man, naked and bleeding in the nearfreezing night air, asphyxiated to death, his body going limp and straining under its own weight. Another hour getting him down and burying him in the makeshift cave.
    Then came the day and a half of waiting, with Rudiger sitting next to the body. In the cold. Watching. Wondering. Rudiger, at first so convinced it would happen, finally understood it would not. Not with that one. Not with Michael.
    Had to keep looking.
    Before Rudiger left the body to the animals, before he covered up the tracks he cared about covering, he’d done one last thing. Cut off Michael’s ear.
    Rudiger lifts his hand and feels the hardened scar tissue circling his own left ear. Another gift from the Preacherman.
    He walks inside the grocery store and grabs a cart, then slowly trolls the aisles. The items he places in the cart are simple and healthy. Enough to last a few