“You’re willing to get shot over this?”

“I hate that guy,” Caleb said. “I hate what he did to that driver. That’s just not right.”

What was it about the Emerson clan, McCrea wondered, that made them so difficult to say no to? Whatever it was, it clearly was passed from one generation to the next. “Suit yourself,” McCrea said. “Just remember I warned you that if this turns hot, killing a man is a hard thing to live with.”

“Not that one,” Caleb said.

They started walking.

“Hey, I got a question,” Joey said. “How do we know we’re not marching right into a trap? How many people did you say the Grubbs guy has?”

“I saw four,” McCrea replied. “But he said he had a bunch more. He could have been bluffing, he could have been telling the truth. As for the trap, that seems unlikely to me. He won’t be expecting us to come at him. Certainly not this soon.”

“What if he hears us coming?” a Foster asked.

“Which one are you?” McCrea asked.

“Kyle.”

“If he sees us, he’ll open fire, Kyle. He’s already told me that, and I believe him one hundred percent. So the smart move is to walk quietly.”

This perpetual twilight had derailed McCrea’s sense of time. It felt far later than 1400 hours. Stress and the lack of sleep didn’t help at all. The images of his daughters, Tina and Toni, kept trying to penetrate the mental armor he’d erected to keep them out. Intellectually, he knew that they had to be dead, but emotionally—in his heart—he couldn’t accept it. Wouldn’t accept it. Maybe he just wouldn’t let it in.

And Julia. He wasn’t sure how a marriage could have gone so sideways after nineteen years, but he’d long ago faced the fact that life presents challenges that simply are not to be understood. Julia had tried to blame it on him and his career ambitions. His deployments to the world’s worst shitholes. But McCrea didn’t buy it.

Something had switched in Julia in the two years before they’d finally called it quits. She’d decided that his ongoing fight for God and country was a personal affront to her. She couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that his pursuit of a silver maple leaf for his epaulette, with the ultimate goal of pinning a silver eagle, was as much about the family as it was about him.

Military careers fizzled fast in the absence of continued promotions. That shoulder hardware made millions of dollars’ difference over the years that would follow his final salute, and with a gold watch at the end of the private-sector postgame show.

It hurt him in his gut to embrace the reality of how little any of that sacrifice mattered to the world now. How little any of the past mattered.