Primary Valor Page 2

  Luke glanced around the room. There seemed to be corpses everywhere.

  Luke went to one man in particular, a huge lump of a man. It was Hendricks. Wayne.

  WAYNE.

  He was still moving.

  Luke kneeled by him and pulled off his helmet.

  Wayne’s arms and legs were moving slowly, almost like he was treading water.

  “Wayne! Where are you hit?”

  Wayne’s eyes rolled. They found Luke. He shook his head. He began to cry. He was breathing heavily, almost gasping for air.

  “Oh, buddy…” Wayne said.

  “Wayne! Talk to me.”

  Feverishly, Luke began to unfasten Wayne’s ballistic vest.

  “Medic!” he screamed. “Medic!”

  Wayne was hit in the chest. Somehow shrapnel had gotten under his vest. Luke’s hands searched him. He was also shot high in the leg. That was worse than the chest, by a lot. His pants were saturated with blood. His femoral artery must be hit. Luke’s hand came away dripping red. There was blood everywhere. There was a lake of it under Wayne’s body. It was a miracle he was still alive.

  “Tell Katie,” Wayne said.

  “Shut up!” Luke said. “You’re going to tell her yourself.”

  Wayne’s voice was barely above a whisper.

  “Tell her…”

  Wayne seemed to be looking at something far away. He gazed, and then did a double take, as if confused by what he was seeing. An instant later, his eyes became still.

  He stared at Luke. His mouth was slack. Nobody was home.

  Just like that, Wayne was dead. Luke’s blood brother. The godfather of Luke’s unborn son. A long, helpless breath went out of Luke.

  Luke shook his head to clear it. Now, he kneeled over Ed. For a moment, Ed didn’t move at all. His eyes were closed.

  “Come on!”

  Luke felt for a pulse at Ed’s neck. It was strong. Fast. Ed’s heart was pounding, probably from all the excitement.

  Ed opened his eyes.

  “How you feeling?” Luke said.

  Ed stared at Luke. For a moment, he didn’t say anything. Harsh breaths escaped him. He struggled to speak.

  “The kid?” he said finally.

  Luke looked across the room. The kid was a bloody wreck on the mattress. The DEA agent was pumping the kid’s chest. Another agent came storming in, helmet off, and kneeled next to the first one.

  Luke shook his head. “Doesn’t look good.”

  Ed made a sound like a groan.

  Luke paused, then started again. “You hurt?”

  Ed touched his chest where the round had hit him. He pulled the smashed bullet out of the front mesh of his vest. “Only my feelings.”

  “He’s gone,” one of the agents across the room said.

  Ed closed his eyes for a long moment, then opened them again. He shook his head. “God,” he said. “He was only a child.”

  * * *

  “I thought I lost you there for a second,” Luke said.

  It was later that day, early afternoon. They drove south on the New Jersey Turnpike in a nondescript government sedan, Luke at the wheel. They were dressed in white shirts and ties. Their sports jackets were draped over the back seat. In a few miles, they would reach the Delaware Memorial Bridge. Ed stared out at the passing woods.

  Traffic wasn’t bad. It was a sunny day in early spring.

  Ed nodded. “Me too.”

  “I think there’s an important point to realize here,” Luke said.

  Ed shrugged his big shoulders. He seemed noncommittal.

  “Do tell.”

  “You can’t control what people do,” Luke said. “You can’t control if a kid is going to get mixed up in drug dealing at an early age. You can’t control if a kid is going to pick up a gun. But given your skills, to a large degree you CAN control whether that kid gets a chance to shoot you or not.”

  “That kid should have been in school,” Ed said. “In a just world, he would have been.”

  Luke shrugged. “In a perfect world, anyway.”

  “It doesn’t take a perfect world to put sixteen-year-old kids in school,” Ed said.

  “I joined the Army at seventeen,” Luke said.

  Ed shook his head. “In any case, whether the kid is in school or is in a drug house with a gun, I don’t want to be the man who pulls that trigger. I do not envy that DEA guy. He’s got years of thinking ahead of him.”

  The kid in question was Shavod Michael Holmes. He went by the street nickname Ice Cold. He had turned sixteen two months ago. He had grown up in foster care, had a list of prior arrests as long as his own arm, including crimes that would be felonies if he were an adult, and he had been in and out of juvenile detention facilities since the age of thirteen. He had died at the scene.

  The house had about $151,000 in cash inside of it, cocaine with a street value of nearly $2 million, and a dozen guns of various calibers. All of this was left in the custody of three individuals, the eldest of whom turned out to be twenty, not quite old enough to legally buy himself a beer.

  Ed had gotten lucky. He was going to be sore for several days. Probably have a funny lump on his chest tomorrow.

  “Yeah,” Luke said. “He probably has a lot of thinking to do.”

  You could tell yourself anything you wanted. The kid had a gun. I had to kill him. But at night, lying in bed with his eyes open and staring at the ceiling, that guy was liable to play the scene over in his head ten thousand times. And he was liable to weigh everything that happened against the fact that it was a kid.

  A kid has his whole life ahead of him. A kid is not set in stone. A kid can change, no matter what has come before. A kid, even a kid in a drug house with a gun in his hands, to some extent is innocent.

  Ed hadn’t wanted to kill that kid, but the kid was fine with killing Ed. Now Ed was lucky to be alive. And the kid was dead.

  Luke drove onto the massive bridge. It rose ahead of them, seemingly straight up, high into the air above the Delaware River. Ed stared out his window, seemingly fascinated by the oil storage tanks along the river banks.

  “What are you thinking about?” Luke said.

  “Cassandra’s pregnant,” Ed said.

  Luke smiled. “Yes. I’m well aware of that.”

  Cassandra was now LARGE with child. That baby was going to come bounding out of there any time now. Ed and Cassandra didn’t know what sex it was. They had chosen to go old school, get the ultrasounds to ensure the baby’s health, but decline to know whether it was a boy or a girl. They were going to find out on the day the baby was born.

  Given the sheer size of Cassandra’s belly, and the sheer force of Ed’s vitality, Luke was willing to bet that it was a boy coming, a very large boy.

  “So I’m thinking about my child,” Ed said. “And I’m thinking about this world my child is coming into.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Time Unknown

  Place Unknown

  Charlotte was tired. Very, very tired.

  She could barely open her eyes. At first, she didn’t know why she was even awake. After a moment, she understood. A sound was waking her up. And the sound was still happening.

  CLAP! CLAP!

  She looked up. A woman was standing several feet across the room from her. The woman was pretty, with dark hair. She was older, maybe what they called middle-aged. She wore a green turtleneck sweater and green pants. The clothes were nice, and fit the woman very well. You would say the clothes looked expensive, as if they were designer made. The woman was staring down at Charlotte and clapping her hands.

  CLAP! CLAP!

  “Wake up, girl. Are you awake?”

  Charlotte nodded. She didn’t see any point in pretending otherwise. She and the woman had already made eye contact.

  “Then sit up, if you’re awake.”

  Slowly, Charlotte pushed herself into a cross-legged sitting position. It took a lot of effort, and she almost lost her balance. She could barely keep her chin u
p. She looked at the spot where she had just been curled up. There were a couple of pillows there. She looked down at herself, and where she was sitting.

  She was on a large, soft cushion, like something a dog would sleep on, only bigger. She was wearing a light blue sweater and dark blue jeans. The sweater said something on it, but she couldn’t seem to make out the words. She stared and stared. The word was upside down from her. It was a long word. She remembered it from another time. It had some meaning.

  Nantucket.

  This was not her sweater. Nantucket was a place, and she had never been there.

  She was also wearing soft pink socks. They were very nice, comfortable and warm. Someone had put clothes on her. The last thing she remembered, she had been wearing a bikini on the beach. It was cold out. She had been on the beach with…

  “Rob?” she said out loud.

  The woman shook her head and came closer.

  “Don’t worry about that. That’s all over now.”

  The woman stood over her, and for the first time, Charlotte realized there were bars between them. The bars were not thick. They were thin, like the bars of a cage that you would put a large dog in. She looked around again.

  She was inside exactly that kind of cage. The top of the cage was just above her head. She couldn’t stand up, even if she wasn’t so dizzy. She reached out and touched one of the bars with her fingers.

  “Yes,” the woman said. “You’re in a cage, for now. It’s for your own safety.”

  “Where am I?”

  The woman crouched down until she was on Charlotte’s level. They faced each other through the bars.

  “You’re on your way to your new home.”

  The woman had green eyes. They were very green. You might call them emerald eyes. There was no kindness in those eyes. They were hard eyes.

  “We’re in an airplane, if you hadn’t noticed.”

  Charlotte hadn’t noticed. She looked around the room again. It was small, like a storage room. There were no windows. There was nothing to give away the fact that this was an airplane.

  But now she realized the room was vibrating. There was that faint vibration, like a plane flying across the sky. Every now and then, there was a lurch as the plane hit a spot of turbulence. And there was that sound, the loud background hum of the engines.

  “Have you been on an airplane before?”

  Charlotte nodded. “Yes.”

  Of course she had. She had flown to New York and Boston with her mom. She went to California once, with her dad. They went to San Francisco and also saw giant redwood trees. She had flown down to Disney World three times when she was a kid. She had been on planes a lot.

  “And yet, you didn’t notice you were on one now, did you?”

  Charlotte felt something she didn’t remember feeling before. It seemed to take a long time to put a name on it. The name was helpless. She was inside a cage. Everything had to be pointed out to her. Things that should be obvious, she did not notice. She couldn’t remember… anything. She had no idea who this woman was. She had no idea where she was. And that made her sad. She felt like she might start crying at any second.

  “I want to see my mother,” she said.

  The woman shook her head. “I’m your mother now.”

  Charlotte stared at her.

  “It’s okay,” the woman said. “You’ll understand everything in time. Are you hungry?”

  Charlotte realized, only after the woman asked, that she was hungry. She had no idea what time it was, or when she last ate. She had no idea if it was night or day. She didn’t know anything. Except that she was on a plane, and she was very, very hungry.

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “My name is Elaine,” the woman said. “At first, you will call me Mistress Elaine, or even Mistress. That’s my title. You’ll never just call me Elaine, not for a while, anyway. Do you understand?”

  Charlotte stared at her. She did not understand. It sounded like crazy talk.

  “What’s your name?” the woman said.

  “Charlotte.”

  “Charlotte what?”

  Charlotte thought for a moment. Her brain wasn’t working. Then she remembered the strong hand pushing the scented cloth in her face. They had drugged her. That’s why she couldn’t think.

  “Charlotte Richmond.”

  Now the woman shook her head. It wasn’t a sad shake. It was the simple head shake of someone refuting false information.

  “That’s not your name, not anymore. It was never really your name. They lied to you. The truth is you don’t have a name. Maybe one day you will have a name, if you’re good and you learn to obey. We may send you out into the world with a name. But if that happens, it will be in the future. Right now, you don’t have a name. You’re just a number. Not a name. Do you understand? You’re number 21.”

  Charlotte mouthed the number, without saying it aloud. 21.

  “Do you see what I have here?” the woman said. She gestured on the floor next to her. It was a plate, covered by a glass top. Steam rose inside of it, obscuring the contents.

  “It’s a hamburger. It’s very good. We only have the best food. Do you like hamburgers?”

  Charlotte nodded.

  “I will give you this hamburger to eat. But first I need you to answer a question. It’s an easy question, and I want you to answer to the best of your ability. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Charlotte said.

  The woman looked at her intently. There were those green eyes again. Charlotte got the sense of a bird of prey, a hawk, circling high above a small rodent skittering on the ground and trying to hide.

  “What’s your name?”

  She had just told this woman her name. Did she not understand it the first time? Did she not believe it?

  “Charlotte.”

  The woman shook her head again.

  “It was a trick question. The right answer is you don’t have a name. You have a number. It’s 21. That’s your number. 21. It has always been your number.”

  Charlotte stared at her.

  “Please stick your right hand through the bars,” the woman said.

  Without thinking, Charlotte did as she was told. She didn’t know why. It seemed important right now that she obey. Her hand was just small enough to fit through the bars if she held her fingers tightly together.

  The woman grabbed the hand. Charlotte tried to pull it back, but it was too late. The woman’s grip was too strong.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Char…”

  A long thin reed of some kind had materialized in the woman’s other hand. She brought it down hard across the back of Charlotte’s hand. It stung.

  “Ow!”

  “You don’t have a name. What’s your number?”

  “Wait!”

  The woman brought the reed down again. Charlotte stared at the spot. Instantly, a red welt appeared there.

  “What’s your number, girl?”

  Charlotte hesitated.

  The switch came down again.

  “What is it? What’s your number?”

  “I don’t remember!”

  The switch came down again. It hurt. It hurt a lot. But Charlotte could not pull her hand away from this woman. Why was she doing this?

  “Stop!”

  “Your number is 21.”

  The switch came down again.

  “Ow! Stop! Please stop. You’re hurting me.”

  Charlotte’s hand was turning bright red. It looked like any second it would start to bleed.

  “What’s your number?”

  “It’s 21,” Charlotte said. She burst into tears. “Please.”

  “Tell me. Say, my number is 21.”

  Charlotte closed her eyes. “My number is 21.”

  She felt the tears welling under her closed eyelids.

  The woman’s strong grip released. Charlotte opened her eyes and guided the abused hand back inside her cage. She had to squeeze it tight to get it through the bars.
Even doing that much hurt. It hurt as her skin scraped against the metal.

  Now the tears began to stream down her face.

  “Good girl, 21. Please try to remember that. Your number is 21.”

  “I want to go home.”

  The woman stared at her for a long moment. There was no kindness in those eyes at all. It was like looking into the eyes of a shark.

  The woman’s mouth made a thin line. It was something like a smile. Any second, she could open that mouth wide, and there would be rows of serrated teeth, like a shark, or a monster.

  “We decide when you go home,” that mouth said. “We even decide where your home is. You see, you belong to us now. You were given away, like a bag of used clothes. Like trash. No one wanted you anymore. So now we decide how much value you have.”

  They stared across the bars at each other for another long moment.

  What could this possibly mean? She wasn’t trash. No one wanted to throw her away. Her mother loved her. Her father had loved her.

  She hadn’t seen her father in a long time. He had died and now he was gone. But that didn’t mean… anything.

  Charlotte held her sore right hand with her left. As she watched, the woman opened a slot at the bottom of the cage and slid the plate inside. Now the hamburger was inside the cage.

  “Enjoy that burger, 21. It really is very good. I had one earlier. Eat it all, if you can. There’s something inside it to help you get back to sleep. This is a long trip we’re on. We’ve only just gotten started, and I imagine you would like to escape from this for a little while. The burger will help you, and it won’t hurt you a bit.”

  She stood and looked down at Charlotte again.

  “It’s been a pleasure to meet you, 21.”

  * * *

  She woke some time later, but it was different this time.

  She couldn’t make her eyes focus. She had emerged from a deep darkness, and now there was light all around, but none of it made sense. She couldn’t force it to resolve into anything.