Nightfire Read Free

emptiness except for two six-packs of Anchor Steam, and had headed downtown. Looking for something to eat and something to fuck.
    Well, that’d turned out real well, hadn’t it?
    Mike had an excellent sense of direction. He’d been top in his class in Scout/Sniper training and he’d made Force Recon. The map in his head turned, he turned and started walking.
    Walking became a slow trot, because he wanted to escape from his thoughts. And he wanted to get away from this part of town. It was depressing, borderline dangerous. The streets were dark, filthy. Pathetic bundles of clothes covered in cardboard huddled hard between the sidewalk and the building walls, hoping for a little leaked heat.
    He ran past a rusted drum. Inside, a fire had been lit, rough hands warming themselves over the fire. The glow cast an orange light up grotesque, lumpy, misshapen faces, the faces of men who had abscessed teeth and cuts that were never treated. One man opened his mouth in a feral animal snarl, rotted teeth like black tree stumps in his mouth.
    A methhead, just like the one who beat Harry’s mom and his little sister to death. Harry was just now getting over that, thanks to a wonderful wife and a little girl, both of whom he desperately loved.
    Mike ran faster. He wanted to get away from here, away from everything that was here, from the darkness and the pain and the sorrow. He’d had so much of that in his life.
    Why could he never escape it?
    He was running flat out now, that pounding rhythm that took him out of himself, sweating out the toxins from tonight and the memories of all the nights he’d gone tomcatting in dives, waking up in snarled, sweaty sheets with the woman du jour, trying to remember her name even when his hangover was so catastrophic he could hardly remember his own.
    He wanted to forget all of that as he ran and ran and ran. It was more than fifteen miles to Coronado Shores, not counting the ferry, a distance he’d run daily in boot camp, carrying fifty pounds of gear. And when he seized up with stitches, that old bastard Ditty, his drill instructor, screamed right into his ear that pain was weakness leaving the body.
    Ditty was right, of course. D.I.s were always right. All Marine D.I.s were God.
    On and on and on. His head lifted when he reached the ocean, the clean briny smell of it in his lungs. He’d sweated out the stench of the woman’s room and their sick sex. Now the only thing he could smell was his own sweat and the sea. The sky over the city behind him was now a slightly lighter shade of black and, ahead of him, he could start to distinguish the line where sea met sky.
    He stopped at the ferry landing, running in place so he wouldn’t lose his rhythm and kept it up even when the ferry arrived and he boarded. It was so early there were few people to stare at the crazy guy hopping up and down. When they landed, he ran straight off.
    He was pouring with sweat by the time he ran down the sidewalk to his building, the last condo on Coronado Shores, fumbling in his pocket for the keys. Ruiz, one of the four night guards of the building, saw him and remotely unlocked the big two-story glass doors.
    Ruiz had been there a couple of years and he’d seen Mike come home in every single state there was—after nights of drunken sex and after nights of undercover work. Drenched in sweat from a long run in jeans, a tee and a bomber jacket was nothing. Ruiz simply nodded to Mike as he slowed to a walk and crossed the huge lobby.
    Upstairs, his apartment was exactly as he’d left it earlier tonight—no, last night—in a restless rush. Clean, because a cleaning lady came in once a week and because he was Marine-neat. He didn’t have too much stuff anyway. Bed and couch and entertainment center and a kitchen that he never used.
    Antiseptic and empty.
    He stripped out of his sweat-sodden clothes, dropped them in the laundry basket and headed for the shower. He stood under the big showerhead, leaning with both