An hour past midnight Simon had called, and his last hope for sleep was gone. Tony Callison had killed again.
A little girl. Thirteen, pretty, quiet. A dedicated student, a long-distance runner training for varsity track. A child much loved, with a lot to live for. Julie, who was never late. Julie, the paradigm of dependability. Julie, too kindhearted to worry her disabled father. He reported her missing at eight o’clock in the evening, two hours after she should have returned from her daily run.
An hour later a local deputy found her.
Julie Brown was dead.
Word spread. Telephones rang. Julie Brown was news.
Before the avid eyes of the world, tragedy visited the rural midwestern community. Needless tragedy, savage, cruel, the likes of which it had never known. And, if God were kind, would never know again.
Thirteen! The number echoed in Jeb’s mind. A knell of sadness for a life hardly begun, ended on a hot summer evening in a shriveling cornfield. A sweet child, tossed aside like a cast-off rag doll, with a cheap, gaudy sun-face medallion draped over a naked, pubescent breast.
The face of the sun. A celestial icon, once the cachet embraced by a close-knit band of surfers. Spoiled and arrogant college kids fancying themselves unique, the self-appointed sons of Apollo, wearing the medallion to prove it.
A symbol of self-centered indulgence and childish narcissism.
Jeb’s lay tarnishing in some forgotten box in a dusty attic.
...when I became a man, I put away childish things.
But one had not. For Tony Callison this symbol of foolish young men had become a signature for murder.
“Hurts, doesn’t it?”
“What?” Jeb jerked back from the black maw of memory.
Mitch glanced at Jeb’s clenched hands. “To lose a friend.”
“I lost him a long time ago.”
“I know.” Mitch ignored the bitterness. “But for a while, he was more than just a friend. He was a good friend.”
Jeb hesitated, then agreed. “The best.” The admission rose out of regret.
“What was he like?”
The sloop rocked with the lazy undulations of the water, a rope scrubbed against a cleat, and Jeb pondered. How did he explain Tony? Could he?
He began with the truth, as he knew it. “Tony could have been any of us, yet, at the same time he was different, one of a kind. He was wild, funny, nearly as intelligent as his sister, and a charming rogue in the bargain. Whatever he did was always on a grander scale. He was the ‘baddest’ boy, flirting with danger. Skirting the edge, closer than any of the rest of us dared, yet he was never beyond redemption. At least not until the last.
“He had the charisma bad boys do. Women and men were drawn to him. Young, old and in between, they loved him.” Jeb flexed his fingers, then closed them again into a fist. “I loved him. We were rivals and friends, and brothers. The sons of Apollo.”
A wry smile jerked his lips in a grim twist. “Sounds ludicrous now, but then, when we lived to surf and play, the one thing that was as important was our brotherhood.”
Mitch rumbled a wordless communion of empathy. The bond and trust of friendships were rare as he’d fought and clawed to survive the streets of the underbelly of New Orleans. But now he understood. The Watch had taught him. “You never saw anything?”
“To indicate what he really was?” Jeb looked down at the teakwood deck where shadows danced. “No.” With an abrupt shrug that conveyed an absolute contempt he amended, “Nothing that concerned me as much as it should have. I was too busy raising hell to be clever.”
“But there was something,” Mitch persisted. There had to be. Something to explain this self-directed guilt.
“Maybe. If you call a look or the lack of reaction something. Nicole nearly drowned trying to do something he goaded her into, and it didn’t upset him. I don’t think he cared at all. After that, when he didn’t know anyone was looking, his eyes would go flat, totally empty. Then he would laugh.”
“As if he were putting you on. Fooling the world.”
“He was. But we all thought we were. There were six of us, surfers first, thrill-seekers second. Anything else dead last. What we did was stupid, and, for the most part, innocuous. But I suppose it was inevitable there would be trouble.”
“Drugs.”
“By the grace of God, not my great common sense, I was involved only by association.”
“The rest was by the grace of Simon,” Mitch interjected.
The grace of Simon. Jeb hadn’t heard it put quite like that before. But as rough and gruff and unrelenting as Simon could be, the analogy described, perfectly, an element common to most of the stories of the men of The Black Watch.
“Tony and I were already drifting apart,” Jeb continued, and realized it was as much catharsis for himself as response to Mitch. “I can’t give a specific reason. Yet, for the first time, I wasn’t really sure of him. He was exonerated on the drug charge, but I wondered.”
A shrug pulled his denim shirt close over the muscles of his shoulders and chest. A gold bracelet flashed on his wrist as he tugged a button free. “Maybe it was just happening. The natural progression of finally growing up. Who can say? Whatever the reason, graduation and Simon delivered the coup de grace.”
Mitch chuckled, a sound at odds with the tone of their conversation. “I know the drill. He dragged you out of trouble by the scruff of your neck, damned you for a fool, slapped your wrist, then, before you knew it you were signed, sealed, recruited and committed.”
“Something like that.”
“Then The Watch became your life. No friends beyond its ranks. No lovers as important.” Mitch waved an arm toward shore. “Just this.”
He left Jeb to consider for himself the hours of work, the study, the subterfuge. A killer who had been a friend. An intriguing woman who might, or might not, be as innocent as she seemed.
Discovering there was no more to say, they sat in silence, each bound in his own thoughts of children and killers of children. Jeb knew rage seethed beneath Mitch’s laconic comment. Someone had hurt a child—no, not someone, Tony had hurt a child. Another child.
Mitch would remember, and Tony wouldn’t forget.
A trill of laughter rose from some faraway deck. The lantern gutted and died. Mitch stretched, yawned and rubbed his hand over his jaw. A gesture infinitely weary. Lurching to his feet, he yawned again. “I think I better get some shut-eye before I relieve the medicine man of his duty at the lady’s house.”
The medicine man, Matthew Sky. With his phenomenal night vision, it was without fail a foregone assumption he would take the night watch. Matthew never complained and, like Mitch, slept little.
“You gonna hang around?”
Not for the first time since he’d arrived bearing the news of Julie Brown, and battling his own sleeplessness, Jeb saw the toll the long hours had taken on his friend and colleague. Sliding back his chair, he stood, as well. “I’m heading back to the house.”
“To get some sleep?”
“Maybe.”
Mitch was too tired to argue. Three men, four if Bishop were included, made for a wretchedly small unit, spreading the duties heavily among them. It was Simon’s call. Callison was smart, as intuitive as a cat. One man too many would flag his suspicions, and they could lose him completely.
They weren’t the first of The Black