The Edge

Devine knew he should have gone after her. But he didn’t. At least not right away. When the paralysis that had gripped him finally receded, he turned and raced back down the path. Once he reached the main street he gazed up and down it. He hadn’t heard a car start up, and then he recalled being told she had a bicycle.

He trudged off to his cottage, where he checked to make sure none of the traps he had laid had been disturbed. They were all still in place. He stripped down to his skivvies and stared into the bathroom mirror. Devine traced the graphic surgical scar along his shoulder where the Glock round had impacted.

He had a similar wound on his other shoulder from a sniper round fired at him in the Middle East that had penetrated a defect in his body armor. The Iraqi could have finished off the immobilized Devine with a head shot, but Devine supposed it had been his lucky day — though he hadn’t really felt all that lucky while he’d been airlifted out nearly unconscious and bleeding like a bitch.

He eyed his calf where the IED had said hello by leaving its bomb pattern forevermore on his flesh.

Will the fourth time punch your ticket for good, Devine? Maybe.

He stretched, and then grimaced as his limb ached from the effort. He lay down on yet another strange bed and stared up at the ceiling. He was most definitely a ceiling starer, where he could watch the imagined frames of his life and his myriad mistakes troop by. This was his version of very cheap therapy. Like many military folks he found it difficult to talk to people about anything, much less his inner feelings, whatever the hell those actually were.

The world used to be divided into black and white for Devine. Good guys versus bad guys. This demarcation used to be true and unassailable and easy to differentiate.

Now?

Now Devine relied on himself only. Thus his long-standing grueling early-morning workouts, and the ceiling analysis of his past actions. He needed to make sure that he could survive. Anything. He trusted only his finely honed military instincts that had told him to turn left instead of right, to duck at just the right time. To wait beside a door just a second longer so the shotgun blast could blow through it without killing him.

Two other faces appeared on the ceiling of his thoughts, as they often did.

Captain Kenneth Hawkins, and Lieutenant Roy Blankenship.

He had served with both men, who were also now both dead. Hawkins had murdered Blankenship and made it look like suicide. His motive was as old as time: he coveted Blankenship’s pretty wife, with whom he was having an affair.

Army CID had clusterfucked the case, hamstrung by military politics, and Hawkins had gotten away clean. That was until a suspicious Devine, who had previously learned of the affair from Blankenship, had tried his best to get CID to take another look. When he was stonewalled, Devine had resorted to a personal accounting. He had lured Hawkins out into the Afghanistan mountains, and a furious fight had ensued. Devine had not meant to kill the man. But he had died anyway.

And then Emerson Campbell had come along with all the evidence to put Devine away in the Army prison out in Leavenworth, Kansas. But the man had given Devine a choice.

Prison.

Or this.

His therapy session over, he closed his eyes and, like the Army had taught him, fell asleep within a minute.

Chapter 14

Devine’s phone alarm kicked off at five a.m.

He pulled on sweatpants, stout court shoes, and a thick hoodie, then jogged out onto the dark and empty main street and turned left.

He stopped at the harbor for a minute and watched some boats heading out. Men were lifting metal cages and large wooden boxes on the dock, and hefting some of them into boats cleated to slips. He also saw other men in small dinghies motoring or rowing out to the moored boats. The day apparently started early for those who labored on the waters. Under the lights that illuminated the area, he recognized the man who had confronted him outside the bar and Devine had falsely accused of being an informant. He was in the stern of a good-sized boat that was making its way out of the harbor. He looked like he was not yet over his boozing from the previous night.

Devine continued on. He had already noted the square of dormant grass and leafless trees about a quarter mile down where the small main business area ended. He reached it and did a quick twenty-minute HIIT, or high-intensity interval training routine, to get his heart pumping and his blood flowing. This was followed by push-ups, pull-ups on a tree limb, squats, lunges, jacks, and isometric holds, where his body shook from the effort of holding statue-like poses for less than a minute. This was followed by more core work, followed by even more intense lower-body exercises, which every Army grunt knew was where real strength came from.