Code Name: Camelot (Noah Wolf #1)(31)
Roger shook his head. “No, I lucked out on that,” he said. “They tell me I’m just going to be somebody’s muscle, kind of a backup. I still have to have the training, just in case I ever have to, you know, complete a mission—but I hope I don’t. You know, sometimes you do what you gotta do, but that doesn’t always mean it’s easy to live with.”
Noah looked at this young man, and wondered what it would be like to feel remorse over someone you killed, or over anything you did. “Yeah,” he said, “I know just what you mean.”
TEN
Noah bit into the triple-decked burger, and moaned in epicurean delight. “Oh, man,” he said. “Oh, that’s delicious. Can’t you just taste all the triglycerides?”
Roger laughed and looked over at him. “Not me,” he said. “I can’t get past the flavor of the MSG. At least they don’t try to shove health food down our throats, here. If there’s anything in the world that truly signifies the American way, it’s just plain got to be the fast food burger. Let’s face it, all those soldiers over there in the war, that’s what they’re really fighting for. Burgers and fries, and I am not referring to the French variety.”
Noah shrugged, but he was chuckling at the same time. “Hey, I was over there,” he said. “Not all of us dreamed about burgers, there were some of us over there who thought about girls, instead.”
Roger looked at him sideways. “You’re gonna sit there and moan about how good that burger is, and try to tell me that wasn’t one of the things you thought about while you were in that desert?”
Noah winked at him. “Hey, I said some of us thought about girls. I didn’t say I was always one of them. A lot of times, I was focused on burgers and pizza. As far as I’m concerned, burgers and pizza are the two primary food groups, with fried chicken making a good show of coming in third.” Noah took another bite. “How old are you, Roger?”
Roger leaned his head back against the headrest, and grimaced. “I’ll be twenty in two weeks,” he said. “I confess this wasn’t how I planned on spending my twentieth birthday, but at least I’m getting to have one. The way things were going, I wasn’t likely to have had the chance.”
“Things moved that fast? I mean, I’d think it would take them a while to get around to a trial.”
Roger nodded. “It did,” he said. “I sat in the jail cells for three years, while my public defenders kept trying everything they could think of to stall.”
“Three years? Then, I take it you were only sixteen at the time of the murders?”
“Yep,” Roger said. “Because of the number of victims, and what the prosecutor called the ‘animal ferocity’ of the way I killed them, the judge decided that I should be tried as an adult. We tried every possible way to get that decision thrown out, but it didn’t work.”
Noah shook his head in sympathy. “Man, I’m sorry. Nobody should have to deal with things like that in their teens.”
“Oh, I did it to myself,” Roger said. “I told you I was a country boy, but I didn’t tell you that I had a cousin who was a drug dealer in the city. He came to me with this plan for us to make a bunch of money, by bringing some of his product to the little towns around where I lived. It sounded like fun, and quick bucks, so I went along with it. The trouble was, his end of the business wasn’t doing so well, and he was losing money. He was taking some of the money I was bringing in and covering his own ass with it, and then he pointed a finger at me when things came up short. His boss paid me a visit, and explained the situation. He made it clear that my mother and little sister would suffer if I didn’t come up with the money, and there was no way I could, so after he left, I stuck a gun in my cousin’s face and made him show me where to find him.” He took a bite of his burger, and chewed it up slowly before he went on. “Ten o’clock in the morning, I showed up at his front door and started blasting away with a 12-gauge and a Glock. Once I started, I just couldn’t stop, and I killed our supplier, his wife and all five of his kids.”
Noah saw the tears that were running down Roger’s face. “Well, I know how terrible that must look to other people, but from what I know about the drug business, it tends to run in families. You may have saved lives fifty years into the future, and it’s a safe bet that a lot of innocent people have already died because of that supplier. Your solution might not be the one that’s politically correct, but it’s probably the only one that could ever really eliminate the drug problem.” Noah paused for a moment. “It may be hard for you to understand that, because you’re looking at the deaths of those children as nothing but murder. The thing is, while it may be tragic that they had to die, if they carried on the family business then they would eventually be responsible for hundreds, possibly thousands more deaths. Sometimes you have to look at the greater good, no matter what the consequences to yourself might be.”
Roger quickly wiped away his tears and grinned sheepishly at Noah. “Yeah, well, other people told me that, too, even Doc Parker. That doesn’t make it any easier to live with, though.”
Noah thought quickly about the men he had killed, the ones that had led to the murder charges, and tried to feel any remorse, anything that might be considered sadness. With each one, though, all he could sense was the necessity of the shots that he fired. He had felt no desire to harm or kill those men, nor any hatred or animosity, not even anger; the situation had forced his hand, and he had done what had to be done. To Noah, everything came down to a simple black or white. In order to feel remorse, there had to be a gray area, some part of the situation that made you uncertain of your choices.