Near Dark (Scot Harvath #19)(51)

Airplanes were weird spaces. Private planes were even weirder—especially if you were traveling alone. Perhaps it was the quiet speed with which they moved, or maybe the soft cocoon of luxury that gave them an unusual, contemplative pull. You couldn’t help but be sucked in, to be lulled by the steady hum of the engines, into an almost trancelike state. Alone, tens of thousands of feet up in the air, knifing through the sky, your mind could open and swallow you alive.

Harvath wasn’t ready for his mind to open. He wanted it to remain closed. And the only way to guarantee that was to drink. Because if he allowed himself to feel the true degree of his pain—how bitter and deep and raw it was, he would have to face it, deal with it. He wasn’t ready for that. Not now. Maybe not ever. And so, he drank.

The drinking allowed him to be a bystander, to stand on the rim of his soul and peer over the edge. The alcohol allowed him to take measure of his personal landscape, to stare at it good and long and unflinchingly. It was as if he was sitting on a jury, visiting dispassionate judgment on a total stranger. The verdict—guilty.

Guilty of every sin imaginable. His list of offenses was long and, in some cases, quite shocking. While the worst had been visited upon him, so too had he visited the worst upon others.

Of course, he had justified those actions by blaming the conduct of his victims. They were “bad men”—his shorthand for those who had earned the retribution he had meted out to them. He had accepted every one of his assignments willingly and, more often than not, had been the chief architect of the punishments that had been delivered.

He had taken more than a professional interest in the details. His desire to see justice done had usually bordered on the obsessive. Good didn’t need to just triumph over evil in his mind, it needed to make evil pay—dearly. That was the crux of his job and who he was. That was why he had continued to go into the field, had continued to take the most dangerous assignments.

Evil so offended him that he didn’t trust anyone else to teach it the lesson it so rightly deserved. No one was willing to inflict the pain that he was more than capable of delivering. Maybe that was why he was so screwed up. The most incredible evil possible had been done to him and despite the vengeance he had wreaked, he still didn’t feel like the debt had been fully paid.

Maybe that was why he had agreed to leave the bars of Key West and hunt down Carl Pedersen’s killer. It certainly wasn’t out of self-preservation. They could send an army of assassins after him. He didn’t care. It was when people harmed others—those he saw as innocents, or those undeserving of their fates, that he was most offended by and most wanted to make evil pay the steepest price he could exact.

He could sense that he had tipped over the rim, that he was falling into the blackness of the abyss.

When the flight attendant arrived with his meal, it was a welcome and much needed interruption, a respite from the storm-tossed sea of his unchecked thoughts.

He switched from bourbon to red wine and tried to focus on the flavors of the food. It had been a while since he had eaten this well. There was a tender, lean filet of beef, roasted potatoes, and thin, sautéed French green beans. The roll was crispy and warm. The butter soft, salty. Even the salad was exceptional.

The only other time he had eaten this well on a government aircraft was aboard Air Force One. Considering the level of passengers who were flown on C-37Bs, he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the same culinary team was involved in planning the dishes.

But as much as he enjoyed the food, his mind was eventually pulled back to the same place it always was—Lara.

Part of the curse of being a detail guy was that he could remember everything about her. He remembered the beautiful way she had smelled. He remembered the way her body had felt in his arms. He remembered the sensation of her hair brushing across his chest and the sensation of her lips on his mouth. He remembered all of it and it drove him crazy.

Signaling the flight attendant for another glass of wine, he tried to think of something less devastating. Something good. Something pure.

His mind went to Lara’s beautiful son, Marco. They would have made such a wonderful family together.

They had all needed each other. But when Lara had been taken, it had all fallen apart.

The last time Harvath had seen Marco was the day of Lara’s funeral. He had taken the little boy out to eat, then to the Lego store, and finally to a spot on the Charles River in Boston where he liked to feed the ducks.

It had been heart-wrenching for him, but also heartwarming as there was a wonderful spark of Lara that lived on inside Marco. Lara’s aging parents were taking care of him.

During a couple of alcohol-fueled episodes, Harvath had reached for his phone, intending to call his in-laws and tell them that he wanted to adopt Marco and raise him himself.

It was, of course, totally insane. Harvath couldn’t even take care of himself, much less a four-year-old boy. Nevertheless, it had felt like the right thing to do and something he wanted.

As the flight attendant refilled his glass and cleared the dishes, he settled back in his seat and closed his eyes. He was remembering the first vacation he and Lara and Marco had taken together. It had been to Cape Cod and they had spent every waking hour on the beach, riding bikes, or eating ice cream.

The trip had been cut short by work. A crisis had popped up and Harvath had to leave. Lara, though, had understood. She had been grateful for their time together and she had assured him that there’d be many more vacations to come. And he, because he loved her and her little boy so much, had believed her. If only, somehow, he could go back in time and warn himself.