Mercy Kill_ A Mystery - Lori Armstrong [13]
Why don’t you just blurt it out for the whole damn world to hear, Sergeant Major?
J-Hawk placed his hand on my knee. “I know what you are.”
Took a second to gather my thoughts. Seemed pathetic to admit to a superior officer that I needed a crutch to handle my demons. “It got to the point I ended up drunk-dialing an old family friend. He knows what it’s like.”
“He’s been in the war machine?”
“Not ours. Vietnam. Rollie put the screws to me, and I listened. John-John had an opening at the bar, which sounds like putting a fat kid in a candy store. But most nights I’m so sick of dealing with booze I don’t bother with it when I get home.” I swallowed another drink. “But I’m also too tired to figure out what the hell I want to do now. Bartending ain’t it, that’s for damn sure.”
The silence between us stretched into night sounds of crickets. Rustling grass reeds. The occasional yip of a coyote.
Finally J-Hawk spoke. “Could you ever see yourself doing what Anna does?”
“Hiring myself out as a merc?” I shook my head. “To be honest, I’d rather bartend.”
“Do you talk to Anna often?”
“Jason—”
“I know, I ended it like a total asshole.”
“No argument from me.”
“What Anna never understood was it wasn’t my choice.”
“It was your choice to get involved with her when you were already married.”
J-Hawk flicked the metal tab on the top of the can. “True. Look, you don’t know the whole story, no one does, but if it wasn’t for . . .”
I waited for him to finish his train of thought. When he didn’t, I prompted, “If it wasn’t for . . . what?”
“Never mind.”
“You wouldn’t have brought it up if you didn’t want to talk about it.”
He struggled.
I let him.
“I do want to talk about it, but swear this won’t go any further than us. Ever. No one can know.”
“Not Anna?”
“Especially not Anna.”
A feeling of trepidation crept in, but I ignored it and said, “Fine.”
“About the same time our unit got new orders, my wife found out I’d been involved with another woman.”
“How she’d find out?”
“At first I suspected Anna told her to force my hand into choosing between them.” He met my gaze. “But it didn’t matter after that, because once the wheels were set in motion, everything careened out of control.”
I stared at him, totally confused. “You wanna drop the clichés and get beyond the truth-is-out-there bullshit?”
“I see you still prefer taking the easiest shot,” he said wryly. “So yeah, it’s totally clichéd, the whole ‘my wife doesn’t understand me’ bit, but it’s the God’s honest truth. Melinda and I had one drunken weekend at a friend’s wedding when I was home on leave, and she ended up pregnant. We got married, because that’s what people in our neck of the woods do, right? I was headed overseas, so I understood why she wanted to stay in Minot by her family until after the baby was born. But when I returned from deployment twelve months later, she refused to move to where I was stationed. By then, she’d gotten knocked up again.”
“She’d gotten knocked up again?” I asked tightly. “All by her little herself ?”
He scowled. “No. I’d gone twelve months without sex. And she was on me the instant we were alone. Took me three pregnancies before I realized she wasn’t a nympho and didn’t like sex as much as she liked having babies. So yeah, we have ‘deployment’ kids. Between kids two and three, I grew a set and demanded she get her ass to Fort Benning because I was sick of living like a single guy in the goddamn barracks.”
“So she moved to Georgia and made your life hell?”
“No. She threatened to kill herself if I forced her away from family. When I basically laughed and called her a drama queen, she attempted it.”
I shuddered. “Shit. Jason, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, welcome to my life. From there on out, any time I brought up our problems, she whipped out the suicide card, and I knew she’d play it.”
“What did you do?”
“What could I do? I focused on being a soldier. I kept my name on the top of the volunteer list for overseas instruction ops and deployment. I made a point