Blind Fall Read Online Free Page A

loud the place was going to be, he might have begged off. But he had learned since coming home that it wasn’t a series of loud noises that got to him. It was a single unexpected one: a car backfiring, the deafening crash an empty automobile carrier truck made when it hit a bump in the highway. Sounds like these reminded him of the first gunshot, the first explosion, the first sign that your life was about to be altered irrevocably. These were the hardest for him. These were the sounds that reminded him that he’d had a life before Iraq, a life that had been altered by events not of his choosing, events not on anyone’s battle plan.
    Li’l D pushed his empty plate back without taking his eyes off the monsters onstage. He scanned them nervously, as if he thought they were about to jump down onto the floor and start for the table. John said, “How you doing there, big guy?”
    “I don’t like that dog,” he said, a low tremor of fear in his voice.
    “Me neither. What do you say we hit the play area?”
    Li’l D nodded emphatically, put their plates in the nearby trash can just as John instructed him to, and then led John right into the arcade, where John felt his wallet tense up in his back pocket. He handed the kid a dollar and told him to make it last as long as he could, then he found a spot in the corner of the room where it would be almost impossible for the kid to leave his sight.
    A little while later a hand came to rest on his shoulder, gently, as if whoever it was knew how he might react to a sudden touch. At first he didn’t recognize the woman standing next to him. She had gained almost twenty pounds, and her once shoulder-length brown hair had been chopped off. There were bags under her eyes and a fresh sunburn on her pale skin. The last time he had laid eyes on Trina Miller had been at a BBQ in Oceanside, after he came back from Fallujah and before he had made the indoc for First Recon, where she had cried a river as she thanked him for saving her husband’s life. Now she threw her arms around him with the same level of emotion, even though her fatigued appearance didn’t match up with this gesture.
    John hugged her right back. He assumed it was a coincidence, running into the wife of a Marine whose life he had saved, and his heart did a jump he hadn’t thought it to be capable of doing. Surely this was some sort of sign from an otherwise cruel universe that he was on the right path—that just bringing this kid to this pizza place was a good act. How many hours did he spend replaying what Bowers had done for him nine months earlier? And he spent almost no time acknowledging himself for the life he had saved.
    “What are you doing here?” John asked.
    “Looking for you,” she said. “We stopped by your…place, talked to some guy named Emilio.”
    “You and Charlie? Where is he?”
    “Outside. He needs to see you, John.”
    “How is he?”
    She nodded and looked at some spot over his shoulder, then glanced down at her feet as if she might find her next words there. But all she could manage was, “I don’t know. He just says he needs to see you.” John had no trouble believing it, given that they had driven all the way up to his trailer park, and then another twenty minutes south to find him.
    After he had introduced Li’l D to the woman who would be watching him for the next few minutes, John headed for the patio where Trina had told him he could find Charlie. It’s Bowers, he thought. Charlie knows why Bowers isn’t calling me back. Something’s happened to him and he’s here to tell me.
    After taking a couple of deep breaths, John realized how absurd this thought truly was. For all he knew, Bowers and Charlie Miller had never even met each other. The two men came from separate halves of John’s Marine Corps career—he’d met Charlie in boot camp, only to end up fighting next to him during the Battle of Fallujah years later. Bowers, on the other hand, had been the first captain John