Chapter 46

“I’m not sure Mac’s gonna make it,” Sheriff Walton says down the phone. “I’m sorry to call you, Michael, but I thought you’d want to know.”

Michael gets a lump in his throat, holds back tears. It’s hard to believe that after clearing IEDs and VS-500 mines and pressure plates, investigating car bombings, and kicking down doors to find bomb makers, it was cancer that might take out Mac.

Ken sounds tired on the other end of the line.

“I’m glad you called,” Michael says, looking out his window of his modest home. A bicyclist pedals down the street, a little girl bouncing in the plastic child’s seat mounted to the back. The girl is clutching a brown bag with a baguette sticking out of it. “You’re using the burner?”

They’ve kept communications to a minimum over the past five years. To protect them both.

Ken confirms he’s using the disposable phone. He’s in his car, about to leave the hospital shortly after midnight in Kansas.

“I wish I could be there,” Michael says. He means it. Life was good in Leavenworth until someone on O’Leary’s payroll saw the viral video of his daughter taking down those high-school bullies and things spiraled.

“How’s Nan?” Michael asks. He always liked Ken’s wife.

“She’s doing as well as can be expected. The nurses and doctors at the new facility are first-rate. She even recognized me on my last visit.”

Nan’s dementia has gotten much worse since Michael left. He sometimes wonders if the three men are being punished for their roles in a pointless war: his own wife’s cancer, Mac’s wife’s stroke, and Nan’s dementia. He shakes it off.

“I’m glad the new facility is working out for her.”

“I wanted to thank you again for covering it. Our insurance company had her with a low-cost provider and it was terrible and—”

“You never have to thank me for anything, Ken. Ever.” He doesn’t need to say more. Beyond that godforsaken desert, Ken Walton saved Michael and his daughter two times: first helping them escape Philadelphia and start anew in Kansas, then four years later when O’Leary’s goons found them. No amount of money in the world could repay that.

“It’s so much money, I—”

“You’re forgetting, it’s not my money,” Michael says, if only to quell whatever guilt or pride is causing his old friend to raise the topic. In the years since he stole O’Leary’s $10 million, Michael made shrewd investments, doubling the amount. He’s thought of transferring the money back to O’Leary, buying his way out of this mess. But this is about more than money to Shane O’Leary.

Ken clears his throat. “Speaking of our friends from Philadelphia, I think it’s only a matter of time until they find you again. That guy who got away that night, the one with the missing fingers, called to warn me that someone’s found him.”

Michael’s mind loops back to that summer night. Him killing O’Leary’s two men. Ken and Mac running into the woods after the man who’d abducted Michael’s daughter, returning with him subdued. Michael shoving the man to his knees, putting the gun to his forehead. Mac and Ken intervening. Saying enough is enough. Michael remembers Ken crouching down to eye level to the man.

The guy was crying. “They made me,” the abductor said. “I owed O’Leary money. They’d already…” He’d held up his hands showing where they’d amputated his fingers. “They said they weren’t going to hurt her. They were just going to use her as leverage.” Leverage to get back the money Michael had stolen.

Ken had exhaled. “This is one of those moments in life, a crossroads of sorts, son.” He looked deep into the man’s eyes. “The question you have to ask is whether you’ll ever gamble again.”

The abductor mouthed the words, Never again, as he sobbed.

“And the next question is whether, if you had some money”—Ken had looked over at Michael, who’d reluctantly nodded—“you’d have somewhere you could start over as someone new? Because as far as O’Leary knows, you helped kill his men. You double-crossed him.”

Ken’s voice breaks through the memory. “You have to be ready in case they find you.”

“I’m so sorry I got you into this,” Michael says.

“Just like I never have to say thank you, you never have to say sorry. I wouldn’t have made it back home without you and Mac. And I’d do this all over again to protect you and your daughter.”

Michael feels that lump in his throat again. “You tell Mac that I’m ordering him to pull through this.”

Ken chuckles. “He’ll probably snap out of it just to remind you that you don’t outrank him and can’t order him to do squat.”

“I’m counting on it, my friend.”