Ripper Read Free

never before seen such a disfigured animal: the dog had scars everywhere, bald patches on its belly, and two metallic fangs worthy of Dracula in an otherwise toothless maw; one of its ears was missing, as though hacked off with scissors. She stroked the animal’s head gently and leaned down to kiss its snout, but Ryan quickly jerked her away.
    “Don’t get your face too close! Attila’s a war dog.”
    “What breed is he?”
    “Purebred Belgian Malinois. They’re smarter and stronger than German shepherds, and they keep their backs straight, so they don’t suffer from hip problems.”
    “What on earth happened to the poor thing?”
    “He survived a land-mine explosion,” Ryan said, dipping his handkerchief in the cold water of the river, where a week earlier he’d watched salmon leaping against the current in their arduous swim upstream to spawn. Miller handed Indiana the wet handkerchief to dab the grazes on her legs. He was wearing track pants, a sweatshirt, and something that looked like a bulletproof jacket—it weighed forty-five pounds, he explained, making it perfect for training because when he took it off to race, he felt like he was flying. They sat among the thick, tangled roots of a tree and talked, watched over by Attila, who studied Ryan’s every move as though waiting for an order and from time to time nuzzled Indiana and discreetly sniffed her. The warm afternoon, heady with the scent of pine needles and dead leaves, was lit by shafts of sunlight that pierced the treetops like spears; the air quivered with birdsong, the hum of mosquitoes, the lapping of the creek, and the wind in the leaves; it was the perfect setting for a meeting in a romantic novel.
    Ryan had been a Navy SEAL—a former member of SEAL Team Six, the unit that in May 2011 launched the assault on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. In fact, one of Ryan’s former teammates would be the one to kill the Al-Qaeda leader. When he and Indiana met, however, Ryan could not have known this would happen two years later; no one could, except perhaps Celeste Roko, by studying the movement of the planets. Ryan was granted an honorable discharge in 2007 after he lost a leg in combat—an injury that didn’t stop him continuing to compete as a triathlete, as he told Indiana. Up to this point she had scarcely looked at Ryan, focused as she was on the dog, but now she noticed that he wore only one shoe; his other leg ended in a curved blade.
    “It’s called a Flex-Foot Cheetah—they model it on the way big cats run in the wild,” he explained, showing her the prosthesis.
    “How does it fit?”
    He hiked up the leg of his pants, and she studied the contraption fastened to the stump.
    “It’s carbon fiber,” Ryan explained. “It’s so light and perfect that officials tried to stop Oscar Pistorius, a South African double amputee, from competing in the Olympics because they said his prostheses gave him an unfair advantage over other runners. This model is designed for running,” he went on, explaining with a certain pride that this was cutting-edge technology. “I’ve got other prosthetics for walking and cycling.”
    “Doesn’t it hurt?”
    “Sometimes. But there’s other stuff that hurts more.”
    “Like what?”
    “Things from my past. But that’s enough about me—tell me about you.”
    “Sorry, but I haven’t got anything as interesting as a bionic leg,” Indiana confessed, “and I’ve only got one scar, which I’m not going to show you. As a kid, I fell on my butt on some barbed wire.”
     
    Indiana and Ryan sat in the park, chatting about this and that under the watchful eye of Attila. She introduced herself—half joking, half serious—by telling him she was a Pisces, her ruling planet was Neptune, her lucky number 8, her element water, and her birthstones, silver-gray moonstone, which nurtures intuitive power, and aquamarine, which encourages visions, opens the mind, and promotes happiness. Indiana had no