Daylight (Atlee Pine #3)(61)

She took the card. “I know what you must think of me.”

“It doesn’t matter what I think of you. It’s far more important what you think of yourself.”

Holden-Bryant pulled a tissue from a box on the nightstand and sniffled into it. “Well, right now, I don’t think much of myself at all.”

“Okay.”

“Will Jack be all right?”

“It seems that he will, yes. He’s lucky to be alive, actually. As am I.”

“You really just found out about his being your father?”

“Yes.”

“It must have been a shock.”

“Everything about this has been a shock.”

“I hope you find your sister.”

Pine didn’t respond to this.

“Will . . . will you tell Jack about what I did?”

“Not unless I have to, no.”

“I appreciate that.”

Pine didn’t answer. She was already headed to the door. A moment later she was gone.

Holden-Bryant looked at Blum, who still stood next to the bed. “I guess love makes fools of us all,” she said.

“Oh, I think we do a pretty good job of that all by ourselves,” said Blum. She looked around. “Well, at least you have all this . . . to keep you happy. Aren’t you lucky?”

She walked out and closed the door softly behind her.





CHAPTER





39





PULLER HAD JUST FINISHED a six-mile run at Quantico, keeping pace with a couple of long-legged Marine recruits still in their teens. He returned to his “new” apartment, since the other one was still a crime scene, took a shower, and was about to put on civilian clothes when his phone buzzed.

It was a text from his brother.

Tonight twenty hundred, ANC, Remember the Maine. Salt. Four bars and a star.

Anyone not knowing the brothers, or the military in general, would be hard-pressed to decipher this message. But it made perfect sense to Puller, up to a point.

He checked his watch. He would have just enough time because he needed to make a stop first. He went to his closet and pulled out his set of dress blues. It was for the meeting tonight, though it wasn’t exactly required. But it was also for where he was going right now.

For a long time the Army had stuck with dress greens and dress whites. But now blue was the thing. It was the color of America’s two greatest military home-turf victories. The bluecoats against the redcoats in the Revolutionary War. And the Union blue against the Confederate gray in the Civil War.

Why mess with success?

He checked his row of ribbons to make sure they were all where they were supposed to be—the military allowed no margin for error there—picked up his dress cap and headed out after allowing AWOL to give him the once-over and purr his approval.

He drove to the VA hospital and was escorted to the memory care unit. Along the way he saw and saluted soldiers sitting in wheelchairs, lying on gurneys, and roaming the halls using walkers. They had all served their country well and honorably. Now they were here, the last deployment of their careers: a nursing home provided by Uncle Sam.

The escort left him, and Puller tapped on the door to the room. He waited for a moment and then entered.

The space was small, and held very few things, chief among them a bed with an old man in it. That old man was Puller’s father and namesake. John Puller Sr.

It used to be that his father, upon seeing Puller, would bark out, “XO, what are you doing here?”

Puller was not his father’s executive officer, or XO, but he had played along with it because the doctors said it was probably for the best.

That was then.

That was no longer the case. Now was very different from then.

His father lay curled in the bed. Once six three, he had been robbed of several inches by age and bad health. He was bald except for small pockets of hair the color of clouds strewn around his scalp. His clothes these days were not combat fatigues or dress blues. They were hospital scrub pants and a white T-shirt, where curly white chest hair poked out from the front.

Puller came around to the side of the bed so he could face his father. He stood there flagpole straight and looked down at the man who had helped create him, giving him half his DNA and other attributes, some good, some not so good.

“Reporting in, sir,” said Puller, a bit half-heartedly. He did not expect an answer. The last five times he had come to visit his father, the man had never even woken up.

Alzheimer’s was the worst thing that could happen to a person, Puller thought. It eventually killed you, like other bad diseases. But before it did that, it took away the one thing that made a person a person, leaving their physical husk reasonably intact. And that wasn’t much of a comfort, not for the family and friends. It just made one wonder how a person could look normal, and yet no longer be anywhere close to who they had been.

To his surprise, his father stirred. The eyes blinked open for a moment before closing again. Puller thought that would be the end of it. But the eyes came open a second time and stayed that way.

Puller leaned down and decided to forego the subterfuge. “Dad?”

“Bobby?” he said gruffly.

His father now often got the brothers mixed up.

Puller Senior had endured his oldest son going to military prison for a crime that he didn’t commit. He had seen Robert Puller freed and fully exonerated. He had also endured learning what had happened to his wife, Puller’s mother, who had vanished decades before. That had been the hardest for the old man, Puller knew. Nothing could be worse than that. But at least he had closure on that.