Free Blind Fall by Christopher Rice

the evening. John’s plan had been to drive to Phoenix and try to confront Mike’s parents face-to-face, but exhaustion had overtaken him, and he woke up to the orange light of dusk framing the shade over his tiny bedroom window.
    As soon as John answered, Alex Martin said, “He said you were a good Marine but you had all kinds of shit in the way.”
    “Like what?” John asked as he sat up straight.
    “Like you drove yourself nuts ’cause you couldn’t live up to your sister and you never wanted to admit to any of the other guys that you were living in the shadow of a woman.” Alex let this hang. There was a ragged edge to his voice that suggested tears or alcohol or both. John thanked God he hadn’t confided in Mike what had been done to his brother; he doubted he could have kept his cool if Alex had thrown that at him in this moment.
    “He never said one word about you,” John said carefully.
    “He didn’t need to. He was going to spend the rest of his life with me. You? He only had to lie to you for six months.”
    He could hear the fear in Alex’s voice, the fear that John hadn’t been hallucinating the night before, so he ignored his insults and said, “I called the house.”
    “I’m not staying there,” Alex said. “I can’t stay there right now. I’m at a motel.”
    “Has he come back yet?”
    A long silence, and then Alex said, “You know he asked me if he should tell you. He thought maybe you would understand. Or try to, at least. He was thinking about inviting you up here.”
    “And what did you say? When he asked you?”
    “I told him based on what he’d said about you I thought you would spit in the one eye he had left.”
    John’s anger got the best of him and he sat up quickly on the side of the bed, as if Alex were standing against the wall in front of him. “Then why the hell are you talking to me right now?”
    Alex went so silent John thought the connection between them had broken. Then, in a quiet voice he said, “The flat sheet’s gone.” John didn’t catch his meaning at first, but Alex gave him some time to. “Last night, when I got back to the house, I went to unmake the bed, and the flat sheet was missing. There was just the comforter and the pillows. So I checked the mattress, and there’s a stain. It could be any—”
    “Have you told Duncan?”
    His answer was implicit in his silence. John felt his hand tense around the receiver. “Something else was going on in that house last night that you don’t want Duncan to know about.”
    “We ass-raped some choirboys as soon as we got done designing a nice dress for your sister. Fuck you, asshole. It was our home . You want to get to me? Then go back to treating me like a killer.”
    “No.”
    “Something changed your mind?”
    “Yeah. You’re not strong enough to do what I saw.” Only after he hung up did John feel a startling urge to apologize. Sure, he didn’t like being called an asshole, but he had not intended the words to wound, even though he was sure they were God’s truth.

5
    After he hung up on Alex, John wrote out a list of possible courses of action, all of which seemed insane as soon as he put them to paper. Contacting some of the men who had served with him and Bowers on their last tour so they might put some heat on the Hanrock County Sheriff’s Department would require him to try to convince each one that he hadn’t gone off the rails, had truly seen Bowers with his chest cut open. The idea made his palms sweat. Maybe it didn’t matter—the guys who hadn’t been deployed again were scattered to the four winds.
    There was no other choice but to drive to Phoenix himself and confront Mike’s parents face-to-face, and he was getting ready to pack an overnight bag when something slammed into the side wall of his trailer, right below his window. Having forgotten that he had lost the Sig the night before, he reached for the holster behind the headboard and broke into a cold sweat when his